The best iPad Notebook?

What are good iPad applications for taking notes?

Clockwork Notebook

Note Taker HD

Waiting for Amazon's Kindle Tablet

Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.;

Again, the device is a 7-inch tablet with a capacitive touch screen. It is multi-touch, but from what I saw, I believe the reports that it relies on a two-finger multi-touch (instead of 10-finger, like the iPad uses) are accurate. This will be the first Kindle with a full-color screen. And yes, it is back-lit. There is no e-ink to be found anywhere on this device.

Why Amazon's Kindle tablet can succeed where others have failed.

Bitcoinomics

Is gambling the future of Bitcoin- from the comments to James Surowiecki's column on Bitcoin;

I'm the CEO of StrikeSapphire.com, which is the only complete, legal Bitcoin casino. First off, Rob Lister's absolutely right, the difficulty of actually acquiring Bitcoins is partially responsible for the decline in trade, and partially responsible for propping up their value. That said, we view them as an almost-miraculous medium of exchange.

We're a legal casino, and we're not interested in trying to leverage Bitcoin's potential for conducting undesirable activities. That said, it's been our observation that a large majority of our signups (3/4ths or more) are Americans who can't gamble online, who've figured out the Bitcoin system and are trying to play. We have to turn them away to maintain our status...but plenty of other startup gaming houses don't. And it's only a matter of time before other casinos jump on this as a payment method that abstracts their legal liability in such a way that it can't be traced back to them. We don't, because we're paranoid.

But we do think that gaming is going to be huge for Bitcoin, for exactly the reasons you described in the article. It requires what Bitcoin provides: Anonymity, low transaction fees, rapid transactions. It also has the potential to move a huge amount of short-term trading through the market. We peg our deposits to USD, because we don't want to suffer the risk of doing everything in Bitcoin. When a majority of Bitcoin trades are happening to facilitate these types of transactions, they'll overwhelm the speculation in the market. The technologies to make it easier for the average Joe to buy Bitcoin are coming out right now, or in the works. What it will take to make the currency stable in the long term are businesses like ours that use it day in, day out for legal transactions just like we'd use PayPal or another e-wallet. We've already got depositors who figured out how to get Bitcoin just to play our games -- from countries where they don't absolutely have to go around the law to do so. The savings is so dramatic for us that I'd prefer to never use any other payment method. We're hedging our bets, but in the process we'll be opening the loop and providing yet another method for entry in and out of Bitcoin, by taking deposits in other currencies and allowing withdrawals to BTC. Points of entry right now are multiplying logarithmically and I don't see a reason why -- regardless of whether the current value of BTC holds or drops back to $0.01 -- it won't continue to be a viable payment method for us. At a baseline, it's at least as valuable as the 5-7% transaction fee we'd be paying with any other method.

Bitcoin vs PayPal

Paypal and other online payment services are reliant on existing financial institutions to work. Your account is generally tied to a credit card or a checking/savings account—meaning that whenever you spend money, you're subject to the same restrictions and limitations you would have for using those. So, let's say you had tied your PayPal account to Visa with a $2,000 credit limit. Before making an online purchase in excess of that amount, you'd have to arrange for a credit extension or make changes to the source PayPal was drawing from. Using bitcoins, users can spend as much as they want—as long as they have a sufficient number of coins to cover the charge.

At the same time, because there's no way for a bitcoin account to be frozen, users can transfer funds wherever they like. For example, last year PayPal (as well as Visa and MasterCard blocked users from donating funds to WikiLeaks. Bitcoin donations, however, went through without a hiccup.

Source

Should I wait for the Amazon Tablet

Publishing News: Amazon and the sub-$300 tablet

FT has lunch with Bill Bratton

In the case of the British police, he thinks reform needs to incorporate several strands. First, he believes that police forces need plenty of bodies: in LA, for example, he campaigned successfully to hire another 1,000 police, in the face of severe political opposition. Second, he is strongly committed to the so-called Compstat technique of policing, which he helped develop. This involves using intensive data collection and intelligence to track detailed movements of groups in small neighbourhoods, and then follow up repeatedly, with so-called “predictive policing”.

But, contrary to his “supercop” tag, he also believes in community involvement: the police need to be constantly visible and accessible, and create community pride through small steps. This last policy is often referred as the “broken windows” policy, referring to the idea, put forward in the early 1980s by social scientists James Q Wilson and George L Kelling, that you must address minor offences on the street in order to build morale and uphold a sense of order. Or as he says, the police must “address the little things as well as the big things”; cutting the murder rate will not have impact if residents still see graffiti and prostitutes.

“American and British policing to this day tends to be very exclusive and exclusionary, but my style of policing has always been very inclusive – I bring a lot of people together from different backgrounds, who might not always want to work together. Being a successful police chief today is like being in a circus: a centre-ring with lions, tigers and bears – you have these animals which would normally kill each other, but through your control and influence they perform. A successful police chief has to work with the good, bad and ugly.” he explains. ...

Instead, he talks about poverty and social responsibility. “Policing and society in both your country and mine in the 1960s and 1970s excused a way of behaviour and created entitlement programmes around the idea that crime was caused by racism, poverty, demographics and so on.

“But as a policeman I always had a different perspective. Crime can be influenced by poverty but it’s always caused by human behaviour ... Police are charged with controlling that behaviour. It is crucial to maintain social order,” he argues. Similarly, he does not want to blame the gang culture just on economics; what is also going on is the “distintegration of the family ... Humans are social animals, they want to belong to something.”

Bill Bratton says he can lead police out of 'crisis' despite budget cuts
Bratton said US police chiefs had shown their British counterparts the way, securing large falls in crime despite facing falling budgets. In LA, where he stepped down as police chief in 2009, despite high unemployment and a 15% budget cut, crime is down by 10%.

Bratton said: "You can run around saying, 'The sky is falling in, the sky is falling in,' or you actually do something about it. You have to play the hand you're dealt. I've always dealt initially with budget cuts.

"Out of crisis come opportunities. If you want to speed up the process of change, nothing does it better than a good old crisis."

The Biggest Biometric Project in World

Massive Biometric Project Gives Millions of Indians an ID
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The unprecedented scale of Aadhaar’s data will make managing it extraordinarily difficult. One of Nadhamuni’s most important tasks is de-duplication, ensuring that each record in the database is matched to one and only one person. That’s crucial to keep scammers from enrolling multiple times under different names to double-dip on their benefits. To guard against that, the agency needs to check all 10 fingers and both irises of each person against those of everyone else. In a few years, when the database contains 600 million people and is taking in 1 million more per day, Nadhamuni says, they’ll need to run about 14 billion matches per second. “That’s enormous,” he says.

Coping with that load takes more than just adding extra servers. Even Nadhamuni isn’t sure how big the ultimate server farm will be. He isn’t even totally sure how to work it yet. “Technology doesn’t scale that elegantly,” he says. “The problems you have at 100 million are different from problems you have at 500 million.” And Aadhaar won’t know what those problems are until they show up. As the system grows, different components slow down in different ways. There might be programming flaws that delay each request by an amount too tiny to notice when you’re running a small number of queries—but when you get into the millions, those tiny delays add up to a major issue. When the system was first activated, Nadhamuni says, he and his team were querying their database, created with the ubiquitous software MySQL, about 5,000 times a day and getting answers back in a fraction of a second. But when they leaped up to 20,000 queries, the lag time rose dramatically. The engineers eventually figured out that they needed to run more copies of MySQL in parallel; software, not hardware, was the bottleneck. “It’s like you’ve got a car with a Hyundai engine, and up to 30 miles per hour it does fine,” Nadhamuni says. “But when you go faster, the nuts and bolts fall off and you go, whoa, I need a Ferrari engine. But for us, it’s not like there are a dozen engines and we can just pick the fastest one. We are building these engines as we go along.”

Using both fingerprints and irises, of course, makes the task tremendously more complex. But irises are useful to identify the millions of adult Indians whose finger pads have been worn smooth by years of manual labor, and for children under 16, whose fingerprints are still developing. Identifying someone by their fingerprints works only about 95 percent of the time, says R. S. Sharma, the agency’s director general. Using prints plus irises boosts the rate to 99 percent.

That 1 percent error rate sounds pretty good until you consider that in India it means 12 million people could end up with faulty records. And given the fallibility of little-educated technicians in a poor country, the number could be even higher. A small MIT study of data entry on electronic forms by Indian health care workers found an error rate of 4.2 percent. In fact, at one point during my visit to Gagenahalli, Nadhamuni shows me the receipt given to a woman after her enrollment; I point out that it lists her as a man. A tad flustered, Nadhamuni assures me that there are procedures for people to get their records corrected. “Perfect solutions don’t exist,” Nilekani says, “but this is a substantial improvement over the way things are now.”

When two mathematicians, an anthropologist and a criminologist meet

In July the Santa Cruz Police Department began experimenting with an interesting bit of software developed by scientists at Santa Clara University. The researchers behind the software are like an intellectual “Oceans Eleven” team of specialists: two mathematicians, an anthropologist and a criminologist. They’ve combined their cerebral forces to come up with a mathematical model that takes crime data from the past to forecast crimes in the future. The basic math is similar to that used by seismologists to predict aftershocks following an earthquake (also a handy bit of software in southern California).

Large earthquakes are unpredictable, but the aftershocks that follow are not and their occurrence can be predicted with mathematical models. It occurred to Dr. George Mohler, one of the Santa Clara mathematicians, that criminal activity might not be random and that, similar to aftershocks, some crimes might be predicted by other crimes that precede them. The reasoning is based on the assumption that crimes are clustered – it’s what police call ‘hotspots.’ Burglaries will occur in the same area and at the same houses because the vulnerabilities of that area will be known to the burglars. Gang violence is also clustered. A gang shooting will often trigger retaliatory shootings.

Using the aftershocks-inspired algorithms Dr. Mohler and his team came up with a model, then sought to test it. In collaboration with the LAPD they plugged in data on 2,803 residential burglaries occurring within a block of the San Fernando valley 11 miles by 11 miles throughout 2004. For a given day the software calculated the top 5 percent of city blocks most likely to be burglarized. The results convinced the LAPD that, had they been using the program, they could have prevented a quarter of burglaries across the entire test region for that day.

The current, real world test of the software involves generating a map of the city areas most likely to be burglarized, the time of day they are most likely to get hit, and deploying personnel accordingly. The software is recalibrated every day when burglaries from the previous day are added to the dataset. They don’t actually expect to catch people in the act, but to deter more crimes with more effective patrolling. The test that is underway will be evaluated at six months, but already the data is encouraging. Zach Friend, crime analyst for Santa Cruz police, confirmed to the New York Times that the program led to five arrests in July. Even more impressive, compared to July 2010 burglaries, the number of July 2011 burglaries are down 27 percent. Whether or not that trend holds remains to be seen, but so far it appears that being in the wrong place at the right time works.

-Pre-Cog Is Real – New Software Stops Crime Before It Happens

Honey, the Algorithm did it

And the thing is is that this isn't Google. This isn't information. These aren't financial stats; this is culture. And what you see here, or what you don't really see normally, is that these are the physics of culture. And if these algorithms, like the algorithms on Wall Street, just crashed one day and went awry, how would we know, what would it look like?

Cool i-phone Application

We think iPhone Applications deserve its own category on this blog.

Mindjet for iPhone from Mindjet on Vimeo.
Mindjet’s iPhone App

Cognitive Surplus

cshirky

A bug ate my Firefox?

My Firefox's execution file has disappeared and together with Chrome's execution file. It seems Explorer is the one that is working at the moment. Does any tech savvy person have an advice? Is it a bug? Or another Microsoft conspiracy? Anyway IE is really pathetic!

Unsolicited Advice to Amazon and Google book search team

One way to gauge a quality of a non-fiction book is the number of questions in a book. I'm not able to search 'question marks' under Amazon book search. It would be good to develop a visualization tool that allows you to see these sorts of things (eg. question marks, number of quotations included, etc).

21st Century Social Networking Tools- the basics

David Pogue gives a basics guide to social networking tools;

As a public service, therefore, I’m offering a handy clip-’n’-save guide to the social networking services you’re most likely to hear about at this summer’s barbecues.

Facebook- This is the biggest social networking service, with almost 500 million members — 22 percent of everyone on the Internet — and it’s growing by 5 percent a month. Similar to Facebook- Myspace, Bebo, Orkut

LINKEDIN - It’s Facebook for the professional set

TWITTER -This is the service that lets you send tweets — er, brief, 140-character updates that feel a lot like text messages. Using search.twitter.com, you can find out what the world is saying about you, your company or any topic that interests you. Similaar: Google Buzz,FriendFeed,


Others: FOURSQUARE, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, YELP, OpenTable,UrbanSpoon,

Co-founder of Twitter Biz Stone

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Biz Stone
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

Twitter's Business Model? Well, Ummmm...

The Obsession With Twitter’s Business Model;

Twitter’s venture capitalists say they are not worried about when the microblogging start-up will start making money. And why should they be? The techies in the blogosphere are taking care of that for them.

Twitter watchers are so obsessed with how the company will make a buck that they jump on every hint of a business plan and spread it across the Web.

Find a Toilet anywhere in the World

SitorSquat;

Sitorsquat.com is a site that is dedicated to telling you where the closest place to relieve yourself is and whether or not that place is worth even sitting or squatting (or standing) at. We all find ourselves needing a public restroom every once in a while, whether it's walking down a city block or driving on a highway with a few whining kids in the backseat. This application is designed to be viewed either on your computer or your mobile device.* It functions worldwide as it is based on Google Maps. The toilets on Sit or Squat are submitted by anyone The site can be personalized for each member based on their needs and preferences. A member is also able to create a list of their favorite toilets as well as share them with their friends. As time goes by and more data is recorded, the site will continue to get more accurate in ratings as well as more options in places to go. We all need to relieve ourselves everyday, so the chances of it being somewhere other than your home are pretty high. So for that reason alone, we bring you sitorsuat.com.

Mindmapping for Teaching

Top 100 sites by Country

Pakistan (includes pornhub and bollywoodhungama)

India (includes Pornhub, Indian Railways, Shaadi,)

Saudi Arabia

Australia

China (includes Craiglist, Blogger.com)

Russia

United States (includes pornhub, Fox News Channel, and NYT)

Nigeria (includes EBay, Alibaba.com, )

Tech Headline for the Day

iFart And Pull My Finger Battle To Stink Up The App Store. Please Keep These Under Control, Apple.

Cloud Computing

Use of Cloud Computing Applications and Services