Why is StackOverflow So Negative of Late? — my current theory is that social activities (sites, events, etc.) are journeys for cohorts. Newcomers don’t get as much from it, and the original cohort don’t enjoy newcomers. Social sites tend to rock at first until They arrive and ruin it for all. cf Burning Man. Newcomers will have to start their own site/event, but if they never get critical mass of the A-grade people who joined the first wave, their own event may fail.
Behavioural Economics and Public Policy (Financial Times) — interesting how A/B trials revealed that implementations of Cialdini’s social proof didn’t test as well as non-social-proof persuasive techniques. More useful than something that claims to be the right answer is knowing when you’re closer to the right answer. (via Mind Hacks)
Halide Language — open source programming language designed to make it easier to write high-performance image processing code on modern machines. Its current front end is embedded in C++. Compiler targets include x86/SSE, ARM v7/NEON, CUDA, Native Client, and OpenCL.
Scientists Need to Learn to Share — despite science’s reputation for rigor, sloppiness is a substantial problem in some fields. You’re much more likely to check your work and follow best data-handling practices when you know someone is going to run your code and parse your data.
METRICS — Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford. John Ioannidis has a posse: connecting researchers into weak science, running conferences, creating a “journal watch”, and engaging policy makers. (says The Economist)
Grafana — elegant dashboard for graphite (the realtime data graphing engine).
Algorithms and Accountability — Thus, the appearance of an autocompletion suggestion during the search process might make people decide to search for this suggestion although they didn’t have the intention to. A recent paper by Baker and Potts (2013) consequently questions “the extent to which such algorithms inadvertently help to perpetuate negative stereotypes”. (via New Aesthetic Tumblr)
South Korean Kinect+RFID Augmented Reality Theme Park — Sixty-five attractions over seven thematic stages contribute to the experience, which uses 3D video, holograms and augmented reality to immerse guests. As visitors and their avatars move through the park, they interact with the attractions using RFID wristbands, while Kinect sensors recognize their gestures, voices and faces. (via Seb Chan)
Digital Citizenship — computers in schools should be about more than teaching more than just typing to kids, they should know how to intelligently surf, to assess the quality of their sources, to stay safe from scammers and bullies, to have all the training they need to be citizens in an age when life is increasingly lived online. (via Pia Waugh)