CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-15 21:36:44 (21 comments, 29 reshares, 269 +1s)

There's an area of Killarney National Park, just in front of Muckross House, along the side of Muckross Lake, that is truly magical. It's a yew forest in shallow soil over limestone, which makes for a mossy wildness. (I believe parts of the movie Excalibur were filmed here.)

If the views of the lakes and mountains weren't enough, this enchanted wood should encourage you to visit Killarney.

2013-05-15 16:26:04 (16 comments, 3 reshares, 82 +1s)

The view from Aghadoe, where my father is buried. See http://travelerstales.com/carpet/000048.shtml

2013-05-14 20:38:10 (72 comments, 36 reshares, 112 +1s)

Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz rips bankers, for-profit schools, and the government over student loans that "crush the American dream."

2013-05-14 17:14:26 (11 comments, 18 reshares, 66 +1s)

Forget pellets. Just keep your garden stocked with worm warriors.

Slug species eat dramatically less plants within the presence of earthworms - keeping these pests at bay.

Read +The Telegraph's article covering this research here:  http://ow.ly/l0lGf

And, read the original research here: http://ow.ly/l0lE8

2013-05-14 17:09:06 (53 comments, 107 reshares, 300 +1s)

MV Blue Marlin. The giant ship that ships other ships. This is the biggest ship on the planet that can carry anything from a complete oil refinery to military warships and submarines! Photograph by Robert Smith.
15 largest cruise ships in the world ➜ www.goo.gl/3e3z0

2013-05-14 14:27:37 (22 comments, 53 reshares, 189 +1s)

The day before yesterday, on my Irish family holiday, my mother and daughter and I visited Fota House, an old estate near Cork. We only had time for the tour of the downstairs (though we did manage a peek into the dining room.) Note the hidden door from the dining room to the servants' corridor, complete with plaster.

The reason for sharing publicly is to correct some of the impressions from Downton Abbey.

First off - there are far too few servants at Downton. The staff at Fota, for a family of four, was about twenty, with another thirty or forty to handle the grounds.

The kitchen must have been terribly hot! There were four different ovens, a giant roasting spit, and three giant charcoal fired burners for pots.

There were separate staircases for the female staff and the male staff, so they wouldn't have occasion to fraternize on the stairs.
... more »

2013-05-13 21:32:06 (29 comments, 13 reshares, 153 +1s)

Giraffes at the Fota Wild Animal Park in Cork, where I went the other day with my grandson Huxley. Not exactly what I expected to see in Ireland!

2013-05-10 14:51:24 (9 comments, 44 reshares, 124 +1s)

When we get away from black-and-white, yes-or-no, mine-or-yours answers to difficult problems, we find not just solutions but new opportunities.

2013-05-09 21:37:25 (19 comments, 36 reshares, 125 +1s)

New Executive Order on Open Data Enables Government as a Platform

I've made the case that the history of technology adoption is really the history of platforms, which then enable big developer ecosystems. This was the story of the PC, of the web, and now of the smartphone era.  

Government too can act as a platform provider - but for society as a whole. Think the Interstate Highway System in the US, weather satellites, or the way the opening up of the GPS system for private use enabled everything from in-car navigation to Foursquare.

Open data is to the 21st century as the highway system was to the 20th. Today, President Obama issued an executive order that will put more fuel on the open data fire.

2013-05-09 04:53:09 (2 comments, 24 reshares, 57 +1s)

City Camp Palo Alto June 1 - check it out!

2013-05-09 04:36:06 (32 comments, 53 reshares, 144 +1s)

I love that Andy Grove has taken such an interest in healthcare, and has such an intelligent, principled point of view.  I hope that lawmakers take notice. The things he's looking for are eminently reasonable (healthcare cost transparency and comparative effectiveness of treatments), yet they are resisted tooth and nail by profiteers who have long gouged patients.

It's time for a change.

2013-05-08 20:36:32 (5 comments, 18 reshares, 57 +1s)

John Hagel and John Seely Brown write about a new hardware revolution at the heart of the "maker movement."   It's nice to see this kind of coverage in the business press.

2013-05-07 23:22:10 (78 comments, 43 reshares, 291 +1s)

When reading this article from the New York Times, please also look back at my very recent The Coming War Against Personal Photography and Video (http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001022.html). You will see that much that I suggested would occur is already occurring. Note how various issues are being conflated in the NYT piece -- including Eric's old out of context remark. I'll say again, if we do not engage early with critics, not only will Glass stand a good chance of being steamrolled by politicians, but a lot of other photography as well. - Lauren 

2013-05-07 13:10:03 (23 comments, 75 reshares, 162 +1s)

How could this device not remind you of the original Macintosh?

It's got that cute little shape, seems like a toy at first, but in so many ways is a turning point in the computer manufacturing revolution.  I'm really impressed not only with the device, but with the software Otherfab is developing seems really sweet.  And as with any revolution, you can be confident that this is not the last device you'll see from this team.  I'm even more excited about some of the other machines following along behind.

(I should disclose that Otherfab, the group that is kickstarting this device, is a unit inside Otherlab, my son-in-law +saul griffith's company.  I'm biased, and I've seen this under development for some time, but my judgment is not influenced by that fact.  Just watch me slag on Saul some time, and you'd realize I only praise stuff I like. :-)... more »

2013-05-06 15:55:07 (25 comments, 49 reshares, 178 +1s)

George Dyson's Definition of "Big Data"

Back on March 19, at George Dyson's Long Now talk, I tweeted:

"Big data is what happened when the cost of keeping information became less than the cost of throwing it away."  -George Dyson #longnow

The correct quote, per email from George Dyson to me the following day, was  actually:

"Big data is what happened when the cost of storing information became less than the cost of making the decision to throw it away." 

I lost George's precision of meaning, a very thoughtful nuance, and I'm sorry I did, because my heat-of-the-moment misquotation has apparently been retweeted 789 times (possibly more now), and was recently picked up by OpenTracker for their list of definitions of the term "BigDa... more »

2013-05-06 03:57:48 (29 comments, 16 reshares, 143 +1s)

The original Han Solo in Carbonite

 A reproduction of Able, one of the monkeys sent into space in 1959 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeys_in_space), is in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.  I wonder if this is where George Lucas got the idea for Han Solo trapped in Carbonite.

2013-05-05 14:17:03 (74 comments, 173 reshares, 394 +1s)

This piece brought tears to my eyes.  It is beautifully written, and oh so true. It's amazing how American good will can be so badly misspent by those in power.

This piece matches the stories I heard from Clare Lockhart, co-author with Ashraf Ghani, of the book Fixing Failed States, and founder of the Institute for State Effectiveness http://www.effectivestates.org/, which has a methodology for making sure that aid money goes to the people who actually need it.

But I digress. This piece is about the bundles of cash that go to Hamid Karzai, and how it ought to be spent.  If you read only one thing today, let it be this.

2013-05-04 00:28:57 (20 comments, 22 reshares, 62 +1s)

The State and the Innovation Economy

Bill Janeway's perspective on the relationship between government and technology innovation is far from mainstream these days, but despite all the horror stories about government we like to tell each other, it is largely correct.  In this interview, he responds to Peter Thiel on the subject. 

I'm a huge fan of Bill's book, Doing Capitalism In the Innovation Economy. You should read it. http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Capitalism-Innovation-Economy-Speculation/dp/1107031257

For additional perspective on how government investment created the entire computer industry, read George Dyson's Turing's Cathedral, and also contemplate such government boondoggles as weather satellites, TCP/IP, GPS, and the Human Genome Project, and ask yourself where we might be without those investments.

2013-05-03 18:06:06 (33 comments, 7 reshares, 62 +1s)

This painting of the US House of Representatives, by Samuel F.B. Morse, from 1823, now hanging in the Corcoran Gallery, emphasizes how much things have changed since the days when the House was a lot more like a town meeting than the travesty that it is today.

2013-05-03 12:59:51 (5 comments, 3 reshares, 57 +1s)

I'm presenting to the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) this morning, on the subject of technology and jobs, along with +Erik Brynjolfsson and +Dan Swinney.  There's a live stream, and opportunity to submit questions, at the URL below. The event starts at 9 am Eastern Time (just about now).

2013-05-03 12:51:55 (15 comments, 81 reshares, 150 +1s)

Celebrate the Day Against DRM

At O'Reilly Media, we've always published our ebooks DRM free, following the advice of Lao Tzu, who said, 2500 years ago, "Fail to honor people, they fail to honor you."

At first, it was pretty lonely out there, but as more and more of our competitors saw how well it was working for us, they agreed to join us, via our digital distribution services.

To make a long story short, in honor of the National day Against DRM, you can take 50% off on thousands of technical ebooks and videos from many top publishers, today only.

2013-05-02 15:14:45 (73 comments, 43 reshares, 125 +1s)

Sad.

2013-05-01 19:00:49 (19 comments, 38 reshares, 96 +1s)

This New York Times piece about the distance between activism and scientific reality in the "war on breast cancer" is a must-read, not just for women, but for anyone who wants to understand why public policy and public opinion get out of step with what's really good for society.  

2013-04-30 14:19:37 (47 comments, 21 reshares, 161 +1s)

Funny and spot-on.  Well done, +Barack Obama.  Nicely explained by +Jay Rosen.  Sorry I missed this one earlier.  ( I picked this up because Jay tweeted that this was his second most widely shared tumblr ever. That's a good lesson from Jay - when one of your pieces is widely shared on social media, announcing the fact is a good way to get people who missed it the first time another chance to see it.)

2013-04-29 04:32:04 (14 comments, 71 reshares, 183 +1s)

Saul Griffith's work on inflatable robots is really worth following.  For more amazing projects, see otherlab.com.

2013-04-25 14:46:16 (50 comments, 197 reshares, 360 +1s)

This is the best piece about privacy that I've read in a long time!  If it doesn't change how you think about the privacy issue, I'll be surprised.  It opens:

"Many governments (including our own, here in the US) would have its citizens believe that privacy is a switch (that is, you either reasonably expect it, or you don’t). This has been demonstrated in many legal tests, and abused in many circumstances ranging from spying on electronic mail, to drones in our airspace monitoring the movements of private citizens. But privacy doesn’t work like a switch – at least it shouldn’t for a country that recognizes that privacy is an inherent right. In fact, privacy, like other components to security, works in layers..."

Please read!

2013-04-24 18:05:54 (106 comments, 452 reshares, 724 +1s)

I just got my Google Glass last night, and it's been a long time since a tech gadget has had me grinning ear to ear so often. I was at the #tech4dem  event, and let +Marci Harris and +Macon Phillips try on my Glass. Both of them quickly got the same big grin!

It's not at all what people expect!  It's a magical experience.  I haven't yet been quite able to put my finger on why it feels that way, but I think it's the immediacy. Rather than fumbling for your phone, then opening the camera app, you can take a picture or a video with a touch, and share it with another touch. You can also talk to the device, taking pictures, doing google searches, getting directions, or sending emails or texts, without ever touching the devices. (You can wake it up with a touch or by tossing your head slightly.)

A couple of comments:

1. People have this notion thatit&#... more »

2013-04-23 17:59:23 (2 comments, 7 reshares, 38 +1s)

Tim O'Reilly has some big ideas about how to dramatically modernize government regulation, from "algorithmic regulation" that harnesses computer power much like top tech companies in Silicon Valley to peer-to-peer self-regulation, where citizens increasingly take over from government bureaucrats, like relying more on Yelp-like reviews to keep an eye on restaurants. For more on the frame of the conversation in this virtual roundtable as well as who will be participating, check out the dedicated page linked below. 

Reinventors is a series of virtual roundtables done over the new medium of group video about how to fundamentally reinvent many of our 20th-century systems to work in the new realities of our 21st-century world. Each week we take on a new topic in our inaugural project to Reinvent America. Check out www.reinventors.net to learn more.

2013-04-20 18:28:31 (9 comments, 6 reshares, 33 +1s)

"What the dead don't know piles up, though we don't notice it at first." Brilliant elegy for his wife by New Yorker writer Roger Angell.

Unfortunately, the so-called "digital edition" makes it almost impossible to read this online, at least on my laptop.  And it makes it even more difficult to share enough in the way of tidbits to encourage you to read it.

But trust me, it was a lovely piece, about how history passes the dead by, and how what "they don't know" puts them further and further away from us over time.  This is beautifully written, deeply moving, and expands how you see the world in the way that only the best writing can.

A good argument for subscribing to _The New Yorke_r in print, and keeping old copies around.  (This one was from last November.)

2013-04-21 11:21:15 (158 comments, 298 reshares, 908 +1s)

Retro tech that took us to the moon

I was at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum for the TEDMed dinner reception last week, and couldn't help but be struck by the crudity of the technology that took us to the moon and back.  This is the command console from the Apollo spacecraft .

Today, our computers are sleeker and more powerful, but our aim is set much lower.  What an inspiration the "Mercury 7" were when I was a child; as a teenager, how I thrilled to the grainy telecast of those first steps on the moon! I never dreamed it would take us so long to get back.

I'm really delighted by the initiative of entrepreneurs like +*** of SpaceX, and +Edward Lu of the B612 Foundation, who are taking us back to space with big dreams, but I also have to lament that we seem to have lost the shared will to greatness.

As I've often said(ec... more »

2013-04-20 04:20:05 (26 comments, 24 reshares, 423 +1s)

Randall Munroe of xkcd fame came by our office in Cambridge the other day for our party. I loved hearing his stories of how xkcd got started, and his creative process.  I hope to get him on stage at Oscon or another of our conferences to tell his story. I love his work.  xkcd.com

2013-04-18 13:23:21 (41 comments, 30 reshares, 90 +1s)

Crushing national debts, economic revolutions, and extraordinary popular delusions

I just came across this fabulous paper by Andrew Odlyzko, which opens as follows:

"A superpower with crippling debt, exorbitant taxes, glaring inequality, wages far exceeding those of competitors, high and persistent unemployment, lack of basic workplace skills, malnutrition, a rapidly growing rival across the ocean to the West, heated debates about the role of government in the economy, and widespread pessimism about the future. Could that be any country but the U.S. today, with China as the looming threat? Toss in costly military misadventures in the Middle East, Greece unable to pay its debts, a sclerotic domestic legal system clogging up the economy, and the rising competitor flouting copyright and other property rights and relying on slave labor, and the case seems clinched. Yet this isa... more »

2013-04-17 21:27:03 (204 comments, 118 reshares, 525 +1s)

This is a truly unfortunate piece of public art, which I saw last week in Atlanta. From one angle, you can convince yourself it looks a bit like a lion, but mostly it looks like a pile of you-know-what, even to the texture. I sometimes wonder who commissions buildings, and public art, and why they are allowed to foist their taste on an unsuspecting public.

2013-04-17 16:19:31 (40 comments, 70 reshares, 98 +1s)

Reinventing Regulation

I'm doing a Google+ Hangout next week (April 23, 11 am PT) on a subject that I've been thinking about for a while: how should government regulation be updated for the 21st century?  Regulation has a bad name, largely because it is so easy to think of so many examples where it's done badly. When regulatory systems work, we take them for granted.

For example, without the "regulation" imposed by anti-spam efforts on the net, email would be unusable, search results would be useless, and reasonable discussions on blogs and other online forums impossible. Without the regulatory efforts of credit card fraud detection, e-commerce would be impossible. Without the regulatory efforts of the fuel injection system in your car, the traffic control system on a subway system, or the autopilot in an aircraft, transportation would be reduced to a... more »

2013-04-16 22:33:07 (38 comments, 15 reshares, 71 +1s)

Despite claims of harm from piracy, employment in US movie and music industry appears to be at an all-time high, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Via +Peter Brantley 

2013-04-16 14:50:25 (14 comments, 58 reshares, 82 +1s)

My daughter introduced me to a very tasty kind of nut bread the other day.  She modified the recipe to make it completely gluten-free. She wrote:

"To make the loaf I made, I doubled the recipe and added 2 eggs. I also usually add a few more tablespoons of both psyllium husks and chia seeds (sometimes double what's called for) to make it more breadlike. I always substitute hazelnut flour for oats, but the loaf you ate today had half a cup of buckwheat flour to 2.5 cups of hazelnut flour. The fun thing is you can switch up whatever kinds of nuts and seeds you want as well."

I just set one going this morning.  I did use the oats, but did substitute some hazelnut flour.  I also added raisins and half a chopped orange (that trick from my old friend George Wright.)

This bread is fabulous toasted, with some home made jam.

2013-04-16 05:05:35 (126 comments, 265 reshares, 676 +1s)

This shouldn't need to be said, but... Bruce Schneier's piece in The Atlantic says what should have been said and acted on after 9/11, and needs saying again now.

2013-04-15 15:40:01 (55 comments, 16 reshares, 84 +1s)

What a great line from Ezra Klein:

"The federal government, as seen through the budget, is a massive insurance conglomerate with a large standing army."

A number of perspectives here on why US taxes aren't what they seem.

2013-04-12 13:39:43 (17 comments, 28 reshares, 72 +1s)

+Michael Bernstein alerted me to his project, which seems potentially interesting.  He wrote to me in email:

"I have been working on a project to create open data around plant
varieties, the first step of which is to build a universal seed
catalog. I am crowdfunding this work. You can find out more about the
project and the goal of the first phase here:

http://openfi.re/projects/urbsly
http://openfi.re/goals/a5fb2b5969be1bc9bb135ab8130393e1

In particular, this project would be interesting to anyone concerned
about large agribiotech companies like Monsanto, GMOs in food,
agricultural biodiversity, and the effects of global climate change on
agricultural productivity, with an interest in how open data could
help those problems."

The project is at 50% funding, and there are only a few more days left. I just backedi... more »

2013-04-10 13:01:05 (6 comments, 13 reshares, 35 +1s)

+John Battelle came up with a fascinating idea in OpenCo - to turn a city and its startup culture into an inside-out conference.  Now he wants to take it on the road (it started in San Francisco), and he's looking for help to crowdfund it.  This is a very cool idea.  Cities should be all over it, as it really is a great way to showcase and foster economic development and startup culture.

2013-04-09 14:40:30 (25 comments, 16 reshares, 204 +1s)

I was really impressed by the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial in Washington D.C. Falling water is so much more soothing than cold mausoleums. The inscriptions and statuary are inspiring. And right now, the walk from the Jefferson Memorial around to the Martin Luther King Memorial, passing through the FDR Memorial, is awash in blossoms.

The traffic, however, is arduous. Don't try to get to the normal parking near the Jefferson Memorial. Park on city streets over in Foggy Bottom if you can, and walk from there, starting at the MLK end. It's a longer walk, but less time overall.

2013-04-09 13:43:05 (21 comments, 26 reshares, 241 +1s)

I've never managed to be in DC for the cherry blossoms till now. What a glorious walk it is around the tidal basin!

2013-04-07 17:40:25 (94 comments, 167 reshares, 492 +1s)

I'm not surprised. When police wear cameras documenting their interactions with citizens, complaints go way down.

This is a nice confirmation of David Brin's Surveillance Society hypothesis, that if much broader surveillance by government and business is, as is likely, inevitable, one of the best things we can do is provide citizens with the ability to watch back.  Interesting, here, though, is that it's not citizens with cellphones, but cops wearing always-on cameras, that provide the check on police behavior.  From the article:

"The results from the first 12 months [of the study] are striking. Even with only half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers wearing cameras at any given time, the department over all had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers, compared with the 12 months before the study, to 3 from 24."
more »

2013-04-02 15:05:22 (33 comments, 35 reshares, 156 +1s)

Chesterton's Definition of Progressives and Conservatives

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

- from Illustrated London News, 1924-04-19, per Wikipedia

2013-04-01 16:25:25 (92 comments, 21 reshares, 93 +1s)

A Surprisingly Entertaining and Informative Hatchet Job

I read Evgeny Morozov's profile of me with a kind of bemused fascination. It's well researched and captures many of my ideas, but then twists each of them in order to serve Morozov's own ends. Truth and untruth are so cleverly mixed that I'm sure that someone unfamiliar with me and my work might come away convinced that I am indeed the "hustler" that Morozov depicts.

I suspect Morozov and I agree on many things about the Internet and its effect on society, though you'd never think so from what he's written.  We differ in our approach to ideas, though. Like Korzybski, a writer whom Morozov correctly identifies as one of the sources of my thinking, I believe that language and the ideas it reflects are a map that helps us to see the world more clearly and that can lead us to our destination... more »

2013-03-29 22:04:55 (26 comments, 34 reshares, 92 +1s)

I love what the +Code for America fellows are doing in Louisville to tackle the problem of jail overcrowding.  There's a team in NYC working on other aspects of the same problem.  This article gives a taste of their challenges, and the kind of impact that solutions can have.

What I particularly like about this work is that it shows how the open government movement can go beyond transparency and holding officials accountable to actually helping government agencies solve the problems they were created to fix.  After all, government is an institution for collective action.  Like all institutions, it needs renewal.  There's a lot to learn from technology, but there's a lot to learn from government too.  When the two come together, the results can be magical.

2013-03-29 19:56:32 (3 comments, 21 reshares, 70 +1s)

You might enjoy browsing through our latest Radar research report, this one
on the coming-together of software and big machines. +Jon Bruner, the author of the report, writes:

"The report covers several aspects of the 'industrial internet,' but the
most exciting one, I think, is that the physical world is becoming
accessible to people who don't necessarily have specialized training in
electrical/mechanical engineering. In the same way that Apache, WordPress,
and the Google Maps API make it possible to build a mapping Web site from
scratch without much specialized knowledge in cartography or the underlying
structure of the Internet, pervasive networks and standardized hardware
make it possible to write intelligent controls for big machines without
total expertise in the machines themselves."

The report is free and... more »

2013-03-27 22:32:52 (3 comments, 17 reshares, 63 +1s)

Nice! White House Hangout tomorrow at 3 PM ET: The Maker Movement 

2013-03-25 14:48:01 (22 comments, 51 reshares, 111 +1s)

What a brilliant idea!

2013-03-20 18:34:59 (19 comments, 30 reshares, 98 +1s)

Thoughts on Digital Preservation from my 2011 talk at the Library of Congress

Back in 2011, I gave a talk about digital preservation at the Library of Congress.  The LOC just made the video available now, several years later.

I start out by talking about some personal failures of digital preservation. First, I discuss our failure at O'Reilly Media to keep much in the way of records of GNN, the first web portal and the first web site to offer advertising; we just didn't given enough thought at the time to the importance of what we were doing.  In 1993, we were just a small company doing something we thought was interesting; we didn't realize how historic our work would be.

Later, realizing the importance, we made an attempt to keep records of the 1998 "open source summit" by assembling links to various published sources, only to find thoses... more »