Top Stories: May 14-18, 2012
This week on O'Reilly: Coding is tied to cultural competence, not just a profession; Jim Stogdill wondered if solution vendors are waiting for broad Hadoop adoption before jumping in; and we learned how Schoolers, Edupunks and Makers are reshaping education.
Visualization of the Week: Urban metabolism
This week's visualization is an interactive web-mapping tool that lets you explore energy usage, material intensity and the overall "urban metabolism" of major U.S. cities.
Why I haven’t caught ereader fever
Ereaders may have their place now, but shifts toward the web and HTML5 make the iPad a wiser and more enduring choice for digital reading.
Four short links: 18 May 2012
Overlapping S-Curves of Various Products (PNG) -- product adoption speed over time. (via Beta Knowledge) High School Makerspaces Q&A with Dale Dougherty (Radioshack) -- Experimentation is one of the things we’re trying to promote. If you do experiments, a number of them fail and you learn from that failure and say, “Gee, I could have...
Commerce Weekly: Another mobile wallet is on the way
Isis announces Mobile Wallet partners and a rollout plan, Rogers Communication and CIBC partner to bring a mobile wallet to Canada, and a look at the theoretical benefits of NFC. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)
Strata Week: Google unveils its Knowledge Graph
In this week's data news, Google updates its search features with a Knowledge Graph, while the U.S. House of Representatives de-funds surveys that helped businesses construct theirs.
Four short links: 17 May 2012
The Mythology of Big Data (PDF) -- slides from a Strata keynote by Mark R. Madsen. A lovely explanation of the social impediments to the rational use of data. (via Hamish MacEwan) Scamworld -- amazing deconstruction of the online "get rich quick" scam business. (via Andy Baio) Ceres: Solving Complex Problems with Computing Muscle --...
JavaScript and Dart: Can we do better?
O'Reilly editor Simon St. Laurent talked with Google's Seth Ladd about the challenges of improving the web. How can we build on JavaScript's ubiquity while addressing performance, team, and scale issues?
Velocity Profile: Justin Huff
A profile of web operations and performance expert Justin Huff, software engineer at PicMonkey and formerly of Google/Picnik.
A federal judge learned to code
The judge presiding over the Oracle/Google case learned Java, and that skill came in handy when coding specifics arose during the trial. It's proof that coding is a part of cultural competence, even if you never do it professionally.
How to start a successful business in health care at Health 2.0 conference
Great piles of cash are descending on entrepreneurs who develop health care apps, but that doesn't make it any easier to create a useful one that your audience will adopt. About the Spring Fling conference, enterpreneurship, and open data.
