Drewbot: Archive

“it would be very easy to get sucked into all of this because, you know, it makes for a great tabloid-type story,” she says. “Ivins was a bit peculiar. But one of our civil liberties is to be peculiar.” —

Clair Fraser-Liggett, who lead the genetics team charge with ‘fingerprinting’ the anthrax used in 2001’s mailed anthrax attacks.

Noah Shachtman has an excellent piece in this month’s Wired chronicling the investigation, the holes left in the case, and the awkward tension that occurs when a small community of experts have to assist an investigation that will probably finger one of them. (Read it all here)

Mar 31, 20116 notes

Play

0:48

Mar 31, 201120 notes

“Probability does pervade the universe—and in this sense, the old chestnut about baseball imitating life really has validity. The statistics of streaks and slumps, properly understood, do teach an important lesson about epistemology, and life in general. The history of a species, or any natural phenomenon that requires unbroken continuity in a world of trouble, works like a batting streak. All are games of a gambler playing with a limited stake against a house with infinite resources.” —Stephen Jay Gould, The Streak of Streaks (August 18, 1988)

Mar 31, 201110 notes

Mar 31, 20117 notes

#data #tech #privacy #visualization

Mar 30, 20115 notes

The FTC further solidifies its image as an overzealous dean.

Mar 30, 20115 notes

David Eckstein to Donate A Kidney

oldtimefamilybaseball:

(Photo by SD Dirk)

Eckstein would have donated a heart except that it’s too big for a normal human to accept.

In all seriousness, this is an amazingly selfless act that will put an emphatic end to Eckstein’s playing days. For as much as people stats people liked to make fun of Eckstein, he was actually a pretty good player who was a lot of fun to watch. The 36-year-old Eckstein finishes with a .280 average, 1,414 hits, and a career 7.6 GRIT/9 rating, third all time.

The Post Game has the full story.

Wow. Eckstein was a joy to watch at bat and in the field.

Mar 29, 201152 notes

Mar 28, 201115 notes

Shallow Water Blackout Loscil

Listening to Loscii while doing work is great, unless you also use Outlook 2011. In that case, all your notification alerts will blend in perfectly and you’ll miss every meeting.

Mar 28, 20113 notes

“Google Inc. is teaming up with MasterCard Inc. and Citigroup Inc. to embed technology in Android mobile devices that would allow consumers to make purchases by waving their smartphones in front of a small reader at the checkout counter, according to people familiar with the matter.” —

The WSJ.

Is there a pool going for when there’s an app to snatch accounts from the guy in front of you at the market? You know, the one that lets you listen to the scan and then immediately use the account afterwards?

Mar 28, 20116 notes

“The new guidelines reportedly have some developers and employees nervous about the future of their freedom to work on projects organically” —

VentureBeat, on Larry Page’s changes at Google. Managers will have to keep emails describing their current work to 60 words or less and top execs are being pulled into daily one-on-one status meetings.

If you really want to understand the difference between Apple and Google, pay attention to these changes. Googlers can quarantine pet projects away from the mothership, leading to oddball efforts (virtual worlds, Wave, self-driving cars.) At Apple, there’s no bandwidth for waste. If there’s an issue that you believe needs your time, you have to make a hell of a case for it. Because of this, Apple makes 28% more revenue per employee (~$1.5 million). Perhaps Page’s focus will shift that ratio.

Mar 27, 201124 notes

“Collectively, just eight of the 260 organizations accounted for more than half the citations for reporting. These consist of four wire services (two of which concentrate on financial news), two television networks (the BBC and CNN), and two newspapers, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, one of which already charges for digital access.” —Nate Silver runs the numbers by looking at citation instances in articles indexed by Google News. (Via NYTimes.com, of course)

Mar 26, 201111 notes

Mar 26, 201114 notes

“Here’s what you will need: a bunch of video-game platforms; DVDs of “Shutter Island,” “Kill Bill,” “Burlesque” and “Shrek”; some back issues of Maxim; a large bag of crystal meth; and around $100 million. Your imagination will take care of the rest.” —A. O. Scott’s recipe for making “Sucker Punch” yourself, in lieu of catching it this weekend. (Via NYTimes.com)

“The record companies suing Limewire were asked to estimate the damages that should be paid by the file-sharing service. Their estimate? $400 Billion on the low end, and at the high end — $75 trillion dollars. That’s more than the GDP of the entire world.” —CrunchGear

Mar 25, 201133 notes

“To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs. We didn’t want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones. It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable. So we took a shortcut.” —

Android head Andy Rubin on Honeycomb.

It’s looking like the Apple’s biggest advantage is that it caught everyone so unprepared. The pressure from the pundits, partners and Wall Street forced other companies to spend big and rush incomplete tablets to market to beat the iPad 2’s launch. This lead to empty promises and wonky builds: Honeycomb is half-baked*, the Xoom’s much touted Flash abilities arrived way after its ship date, and the Playbook is still just a claim. (Via GigaOm)

* And by half-baked I mean: it won’t run on many devices, it doesn’t support MicroSD, and Google just said it won’t release the source code. Between the Xoom not running Flash and Android’s source not being released, it seems the claimed differentiators of the iPad’s competition are iffy at best.

Mar 25, 2011

I’m very pleased to announce the launch of the Data Science Toolkit. It’s a collection of the most useful open source tools and data sets I’ve found, wrapped in an easy-to-use REST/JSON interface, and available for download as a turnkey virtual machine image.

This model is fantastic. Roll your own whatever.

Mar 24, 2011

“We were selling sugar water and fairy dust. And don’t forget the fairy dust.” —Jeff Dunn, former Coca-Cola executive, current carrot company CEO. (Via Fast Company)

Mar 24, 20111 note