Links last week - 080601

The following is a selection of links collected from 26th May to 1st June. Shared via Google Reader, FriendFeed and Twitter. Organised roughly by library (dot) category: Systems and the elements - People, Information and Technology:

Systems

• The Question of Global Warming by Freeman Dyson - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21494
• How to promote the spread of mobile phones among the world's poorest (curious to see which countries apply the highest taxes against mobile phones, can't imagine what the taxes help fund...) - http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displayStory.cfm?story_id=11465558&subjectID=894408&fsrc=nwl#
• 16 year-old student discovers way to rot plastic bags in 3 months - bacteria! (cue Jeff Wayne's musical version of War of the Worlds complete with Richard Burton voice over. If it's good enough to wipe out the Martians...) - http://news.therecord.com/article/354044
• JD post: Life, death and Twitter in Africa - http://www.joiningdots.net/blog/2008/05/life-death-and-twitter-in-africa.html
• A truly worrying imbalance on the horizon: the two upcoming largest economies - China and India - are also the most male-heavy societies in the world... http://culturaloffering.com/2008/05/31/war-on-women.aspx
• "One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real." - Rolling Stone interview with William Gibson: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/17227831/william_gibson_the_rolling_stone_40th_anniversary_interview
• "A studio declining to do business with YouTube would be like a cereal maker not dealing with Wal-Mart" - http://www.forbes.com/technology/forbes/2008/0616/050.html

People

• The neuroscience behind illusions - http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-neuroscience-of-illusion
• Who killed the marketing funnel? Accidental marketers (aka communities) - http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2008/05/who-killed-the.html
• Getting past the 'collaboration' buzz word - http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/26/getting-past-the-collaboration-buzz-word/
• Placebo is not what you think - http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/05/placebo_is_not_what_.html
• Thinking about Danny Devito: being at the edge usually pays off - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/05/thinking-about.html
• Conversational terrorism (some hilarious and quite scary examples - either watch out for them or try using them, depending on your goal and morals...) - http://www.vandruff.com/art_converse.html
• Freeman Dyson's Brain - http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.02/dyson_pr.html

Information

• Do Bayesian statistics rule the brain? - http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/05/do_bayesian_statisti.html
• The disruptive shipping database (how a startup collecting import/export information could help reinvent stock market predictions) - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/28/importgenius-the-disruptive-shipping-database/
• YouTomb: MIT project tracking videos removed from YouTube due to copyright complaints - http://youtomb.mit.edu/
• Novel idea: six degrees of Wikipedia, exploring the links between pages. Discovers that the United Kingdom is closest to the centre with an average of 3.56 clicks to anywhere else (well we could have told you that ;-) hanging on to the entrails of a dying empire) - http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/wiki/

Technology

• The beauty of bridges - http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2008/05/gallery_beauty_bridges
• Web 2.0 in Government - http://blogs.msdn.com/government/archive/2008/05/31/web-2-0-in-government.aspx
• As Microsoft goes from technology to advertising, Amazon goes from retail to technology (it's all about the margins) - http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/05/understanding_a.php
• Data mining epiphany (collection of useful links) - http://blogs.technet.com/andrew/archive/2008/05/29/data-mining-epiphany.aspx
• A premature word on artificial intelligence: accepting that achieving AI is incredibly difficult - http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/an-ai-new-timer.html
• Google spotlights data centre inner workings - http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9955184-7.html
• Miasma computing (is the cloud a virtual Venus flytrap?) - http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/05/miasma_computin.php
• Storm warning for cloud computing (created Miasma computing, see previous link) - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7421099.stm

Search

• Semantic Search: the myth and the reality (i.e. what problem are we trying to solve) - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_search_the_myth_and_reality.php
• Human hardware: the subconscious side of search (why it is hard to take market share away from Google) - http://searchengineland.com/080530-071553.php
• We're all guinea pigs in Google's search experiment (how Google uses split A/B testing to measure changes) - http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9954972-7.html
• Google Mini finally opens up a little and allows some relevance tweaking - http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-mini-gets-not-so-mini-upgrade.html

SharePoint

• Announcing release of Document and Filenet indexing connectors (for federated search using SharePoint or Search Server), free to download and install - http://blogs.msdn.com/enterprisesearch/archive/2008/05/27/announcing-release-to-web-of-documentum-and-filenet-indexing-connectors.aspx
• Nintex builds a way to monitor activity across SharePoint web farms (you would not believe how difficult that is to do in the current architecture) - http://mikefitzmaurice.wordpress.com/2008/05/30/holy-spit-they-actually-built-it/#comment-7
• Microsoft approach to large-scale SharePoint implementation - http://blogs.msdn.com/gregmcb/archive/2008/05/26/question-i-am-program-manager-charged-with-implementing-sharepoint.aspx

And finally, funny video of the week - a parody of Web 2.0. Be warned, includes a naked Robert Scoble and babies blogging in the womb!

Link to YouTube Video: Here Comes Another Bubble v1.1. - The Richter Scales

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