Category: rePosts

How a Custom Chip Creates a Cascade of Consequences
The even greater undertaking with the new Reader, however, was the development of a custom chip, built from the ground up. “It’s not typical for a startup to do that,” Dorogusker says. “It’s a little bit of upfront cost to build this from scratch.” But the benefits were huge. After all, this tiny fleck is the brains of the operation. And by building their own chip, Square was able to improve several aspects of the product–its performance, its size, and its overall reliability–in one stroke.
On one level, developing a custom chip gave Square total control over the processes at the heart of the product: Decoding the magnetic signal from the credit card, encoding the electrical signal being sent to the smartphone, and all the encryption that happens in between. “We take all of that very seriously,” Dorogusker says. “We know exactly what we need. Off the shelf solutions could do what we wanted but had a bunch of extra.”
In terms of the design of the internals, though, the chip offered another fantastic advantage: an opportunity to ditch the Reader’s battery. The old version relied on a coin cell, which added around two millimeters to the overall thickness of the device. With their own chip, though, Square was able to be much more efficient in their use of power, to the point that they could draw all they needed from the smartphone via the audio jack. As a result, the new Reader dropped the battery and two millimeters along with it. “For the nerds on the team, that is crazy awesome,” Dorogusker says.
via How Apple’s Lightning-Plug Guru Reinvented Square’s Card Reader | Wired Design | Wired.com.

It took a working class that had no discretionary income at the beginning of the century, which was working on subsistence wages. It turned it into a consumer class that not only had money to buy all the stuff that they needed to live but enough to buy a bunch of shit that they wanted but didn’t need, and that was the engine that drove us.
It wasn’t just that we could supply stuff, or that we had the factories or know-how or capital, it was that we created our own demand and started exporting that demand throughout the west. And the standard of living made it possible to manufacture stuff at an incredible rate and sell it.
And how did we do that? We did that by not giving in to either side. That was the new deal. That was the great society. That was all of that argument about collective bargaining and union wages and it was an argument that meant neither side gets to win.
Labour doesn’t get to win all its arguments, capital doesn’t get to. But it’s in the tension, it’s in the actual fight between the two, that capitalism actually becomes functional, that it becomes something that every stratum in society has a stake in, that they all share.
The unions actually mattered. The unions were part of the equation. It didn’t matter that they won all the time, it didn’t matter that they lost all the time, it just mattered that they had to win some of the time and they had to put up a fight and they had to argue for the demand and the equation and for the idea that workers were not worth less, they were worth more.
via David Simon: ‘There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show’ | World news | The Observer.

Jony Ive and his elite design team at Apple are coffee snobs. And rightfully so.
Coffee is the fuel that drives their brainstorming sessions, which are arguably the most important meetings in the design department. These sessions are where Apple has birthed some of the greatest products of all-time: the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.
In this guest post by Leander Kahney (author of Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products), you’ll learn the secret coffee ritual performed by Jony Ive’s design team.
Remember: Apple’s standards are notoriously high.  As is the case with their products, Apple’s coffee is not for those with meager budgets…or without Monk-ish tendencies.
HOWEVER, for almost every uber-expensive ideal, I’ve indicated the Poor Man’s alternative that I personally use.  It’s not hard to cheaply get it about 90% right.
Enjoy the obsessive detail…
via Jony Ive’s Secret Coffee Ritual.

Ross, the cult intervention specialist, agrees that the media has a responsibility to its viewers. Oprah brought James Arthur Ray into millions of homes, asking her audience to trust him. She made him wealthy and famous. When James Frey admitted to fabricating portions of his Oprah-endorsed memoir, she publicly chastised him for duping her. When three people died following a teacher Oprah endorsed, the Browns point out, she remained silent. According to Ross, she failed her viewers, and without apology continues to promote “these kind of fringe people that could do the public harm.”
And in the United States, it’s largely caveat emptor when it comes to choosing a teacher. As Ross points out, the $11 billion “self-improvement” industry is largely unregulated (which even market researchers admit is probably hampering it). First Amendment protections offer broad protection for self-help claims. Kevin Trudeau, a late-night infomercial pitchman who claimed mystical connections similar to James Arthur Ray’s, was recently jailed for contempt of court after the Federal Trade Commission accused him of false advertising — including the idea that “coral calcium” cured cancer. But he’s an exception. Most self-help promoters make claims so vague as to be beyond the reach of the FTC or fraud laws.
The Browns worry that their daughter’s death has changed nothing
That puts the burden of being informed on consumers, and the Browns worry that people will find it too easy to blame their daughter for her own death. They fear that people might consider her to be naive or gullible. “‘A middle-aged woman in Sedona, Arizona, who was an idiot, did this stupid thing and is dead,’” George Brown says. “We weren’t going to stand for that.” Kirby was curious, ambitious, and hardworking. As Ginny describes it, she was “drunk on life.” Like Ray, she was constantly reinventing herself. Those characteristics led her to James Arthur Ray.
via The Death Dealer | The Verge.

There are dragons that would likely make Tolkien despair that no glimpse of Fairie could be found in their multicolored hides. And that’s natural; those of us who grew up with Smaug and his increasingly numerous successors will inevitably twist and turn dragons into new forms. But it’s worthwhile to look back at that older version of the modern dragon and think about what we can learn about heroism from a potent, if fallible, foe. Perhaps Smaug’s most worthy successors can be found less among the population of dragons than among the wider spectrum of science fiction and fantasy antagonists. At first glance, for example, the xenomorphs from the Alien franchise could hardly be more different from Smaug; they lack his mythological heritage and his fondness for conversation. But they share that “bestial life” that Tolkien found so lacking in Beowulf, that sense that exist as more than mere antagonists and possess their own interior lives, even if those interior lives are completely foreign to us humans. And while they seem nearly impossible to kill, they can bring out hidden strengths in the right protagonist.
A dragon may be more of an idle fancy now than it was in Tolkien’s day, but that doesn’t detract from the magnificence of Smaug. Smaug doesn’t necessarily offer a template for dragons, but he does remind us to be thoughtful about our approach to monsters and to find worthy—and sometime unexpected—heroes to challenge them.
via Why Smaug Still Matters.

bamboo is an application that systematizes realtime data analysis. bamboo provides an interface for merging, aggregating and adding algebraic calculations to dynamic datasets. Clients can interact with bamboo through a REST web interface and through Python.
bamboo supports a simple querying language to build calculations (e.g. student teacher ratio) and aggregations (e.g. average number of students per district) from datasets. These are updated as new data is received.
bamboo uses pandas for data analysis, pyparsing to read formulas, and mongodb to serialize data.
bamboo is open source software released under the 3-clause BSD license, which is also known as the “Modified BSD License”.
via Welcome to the bamboo documentation! — bamboo 0.6.3 alpha documentation.

Overview
BayesDB, a Bayesian database table, lets users query the probable implications of their data as easily as a SQL database lets them query the data itself. Using the built-in Bayesian Query Language (BQL), users with no statistics training can solve basic data science problems, such as detecting predictive relationships between variables, inferring missing values, simulating probable observations, and identifying statistically similar database entries.
BayesDB is suitable for analyzing complex, heterogeneous data tables with up to tens of thousands of rows and hundreds of variables. No preprocessing or parameter adjustment is required, though experts can override BayesDB’s default assumptions when appropriate.
BayesDB’s inferences are based in part on CrossCat, a new, nonparametric Bayesian machine learning method, that automatically estimates the full joint distribution behind arbitrary data tables.
via BayesDB.

Unfortunately, the place where our first creative ideas go to die is the place that should be most open to them—school. Studies show that teachers overwhelmingly discriminate against creative students, favoring their satisfier classmates who more readily follow directions and do what they’re told.
Even if children are lucky enough to have a teacher receptive to their ideas, standardized testing and other programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top (a program whose very designation is opposed to nonlinear creative thinking) make sure children’s minds are not on the “wrong” path, even though adults’ accomplishments are linked far more strongly to their creativity than their IQ. It’s ironic that even as children are taught the accomplishments of the world’s most innovative minds, their own creativity is being squelched.
via Creativity is rejected: Teachers and bosses don’t value out-of-the-box thinking..

A guide to practical data mining, collective intelligence, and building recommendation systems by Ron Zacharski.
About This Book
Before you is a tool for learning basic data mining techniques. Most data mining textbooks focus on providing a theoretical foundation for data mining, and as result, may seem notoriously difficult to understand. Don’t get me wrong, the information in those books is extremely important. However, if you are a programmer interested in learning a bit about data mining you might be interested in a beginner’s hands-on guide as a first step. That’s what this book provides.
This guide follows a learn-by-doing approach. Instead of passively reading the book, I encourage you to work through the exercises and experiment with the Python code I provide. I hope you will be actively involved in trying out and programming data mining techniques. The textbook is laid out as a series of small steps that build on each other until, by the time you complete the book, you have laid the foundation for understanding data mining techniques. This book is available for download for free under a Creative Commons license (see link in footer). You are free to share the book, and remix it. Someday I may offer a paper copy, but the online version will always be free.
via A Programmer’s Guide to Data Mining | The Ancient Art of the Numerati.