Brilliant! A digital camera sends a picture to a crowdsourcing network to let someone describe what is on the picture, and it then prints out that description for you.
(via Descriptive Camera)
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20120613 i weeks-1-intro from Rolf Kleef
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20120613 i weeks-2-data from Rolf Kleef
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[slide] http://vimeo.com/21711338 [/slide]
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[slide] http://www.scribd.com/stef_grieken/d/56642060-Presentation-Open-For-Change-Event-may-13th-2011 [/slide]
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20120613 i weeks-3-howtoopen from Rolf Kleef
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20120613 i weeks-4-bbc from Rolf Kleef
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[slide]data.worldbank.org[/slide]
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After Accra:
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20120613 i weeks-5-iati from Rolf Kleef
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Google Fusion tables http://www.google.com/fusiontables/Home/
Google Refine
Scraperwiki
Impure
EDUCOEF data http://openforchange.info/oddc
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www.hackdeoverheid.nl
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We had some intermittent problems recently with a mail server not being available. As it turns out, I basically was doing a “denial of service” attack on my own mail server, thanks to some caveats in how IMAP, push notifications, and my mobile email client, K9 work together.
One of the mail servers we operate quite regularly became unavailable, apparently not accepting any connections. We managed to investigate the problem as it was happening, and found out all available connections for the IMAP server were in use, and nearly all of them originated from a familiar IP address: my home.
I disconnected the email clients on my devices (laptop, phone, tablet) and switched them on one by one. Clearly, my Android-based phone and tablet with the K9 mail client were causing the problem: they made dozens of connections. It turned out the problem was even worse: K9 reconnects several times.
Normally, an email client connects to the mail server to check if there is new mail in any of the folders, via IMAP. It would be nicer if the server just informs the client if there is a new mail available. The client will know immediately, and doesn’t have to poll the server so often, which reduces the load on the server too.
Such “push notifications” are not part of the original IMAP protocol. There are two ways in which IMAP tries to solve this:
Sadly, the second option is still under development, and clients and servers (such as Cyrus) haven’t really implemented it yet.
And even more sadly: with IDLE, you need an open connection for each folder that needs push notifications. If you only have push notifications enabled on one Inbox folder, that’s not such a big deal, but to have push notifications on a dozen folders or more, you need a dozen or more open connections between server and client.
Apparently, Thunderbird limits itself by default to five open connections to the server, no matter how many folders you have. As far as I found out, you’ll have push notifications on the last five folders you’ve looked at.
But K9 does not limit itself. In my case, with a few accounts on our server, and with “push” enabled on all my preferred (“First class”) folders, that resulted in a few dozen open connections.
To make things even worse, K9 quickly detects when I switch networks, for instance when going from Wifi to 3G, and establishes new connections for those folders over the new network. While the mail server still has the old connections open, waiting for them to time out before closing them.
On a regular day, I start at home, then go to my office, with all my devices.
That adds up pretty quickly: 2 * 20 * 3 = 120 connections. No wonder my colleague had trouble accessing email as soon as I started working.
Suffice to say: I switched off push notifications.
Extreme Poverty and Human Rights: A Case Study of the United States of America:
Interesting article. The “usual talk” about eradicating extreme poverty, but applied to an unusual suspect: the US.
Extreme poverty, defined as a composite of income poverty, human development poverty and social exclusion, is not only a problem of poor developing countries, but a phenomenon that is found in most countries in the world. But the fact that the United States, the wealthiest country in the world, also suffers from persistence of extreme poverty is a paradox.
There are no significant trends to indicate that extreme poverty is being reduced over time. In fact, there is qualitative and anecdotal evidence pointing towards a rise in extreme poverty.
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The international community should recognise the existence of conditions of extreme poverty in the United States as indications of the worst form of indignity inflicted upon human beings, which should be regarded as a denial of human rights. Once it is recognised as such, it would be possible for the United States government to adopt programmes based on human rights principles which would surely contribute to the eradication of extreme poverty.
Persistent myths about open access scientific publishing. Dr Mike Taylor in The Guardian:
For Elsevier, the biggest of the barrier-based publishers, we can calculate the total cost per article as £1,605m subscription revenue divided by 240,000 articles per year = £6,689 per article. By contrast, the cost of publishing an article with a flagship open access journal such as PLoS ONE is $1,350 (£850), about one eighth as much. No one expects open access to eliminate costs. But we can expect it to dramatically reduce them, as well as making research universally and freely available.
Pictures at a Revolution
Data visualization can offer some unique insights into social upheaval. But the data artists are just getting started.
The World Bank is taking next steps in making sharing and re-use of data and information easier, by adopting an open access policy (in July) and starting an Open Knowledge Repository
You’re enjoying a sunny day in the park with some friends. You get out your smart phone to find that piece of music your friends really should hear, and all of a sudden, a flock of colourful mini helicopters appears out of nowhere, and perform a gracious dance in the sky above you while the music plays. Then they disappear again.
Sounds futuristic? Yeah, even still looked futuristic when I saw this at the GLOW Festival in Eindhoven, last November:
Science fiction is quickly loosing its fiction part and is becoming reality. The Electronic Countermeasures installation was a proof of concept of the technology, but now the Pirate Bay is preparing for the next step: using these flying robots to build a “low orbit network of server drones”. Let the robots in the sky help you share, independent of providers and regulators.
The military are building drones for “ Non-cooperative, Biometric Tagging, Tracking “, facial recognition to follow people in a crowd, so why not use the same tools for to monitor police operations in demonstrations?
Although still relatively expensive, the drones are a nice addition to the $100 Satellites, using balloons and kites to make maps and asses situations, for instance in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, or working with communities in Peru:
Lets build Drones For Good!
A short excerpt from Professor Robert Chambers’ public lecture on 23 January 2012 in which he lists the words which can be found in the Paris Declaration and those that cannot.
Fundstücke published this week: