Eduardo Jezierski: Architecture, Mobiles, and Health: 10 pitfalls

Eduardo Jezierski: Architecture, Mobiles, and Health: 10 pitfalls: "Some of the confusion is –unwillingly- created and perpetuated by the same organizations that are trying to help in the space. This includes international organizations, academia, NGOs, funders, open technology groups, private tech vendors, etc. Types of issues I’ve run into first-hand include:

* Academic projects that collect data with preference towards information that will help to publish a paper rather than the information that will be the most actionable or help community health the most. The project rarely fits in with other technologies already deployed.
* Funders that sponsor the construction of specialized, one-off, disease-specific systems, that are built from scratch even if architecturally they are the same as other specialized, one-off, disease-specific projects."

The Future of the Forum: Internet Communities and the Public Interest

The Future of the Forum: Internet Communities and the Public Interest: "This one-day symposium will explore the questions: How are Internet communities re-configuring and re-constituting common conceptions of the public, the public good, the public interest, and civic responsibility? What new forms of dialogue are emerging with our new media? When do the pleasures of interacting with digital technologies coincide with, and facilitate, progressive social action?"

QuickCheck - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

QuickCheck - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "QuickCheck is a combinator library written in Haskell, designed to assist in software testing by generating test cases for test suites. It is compatible with the GHC compiler and the Hugs interpreter. The author of the program being tested makes certain assertions about logical properties that a function should fulfill; these tests are specifically generated to test and attempt to falsify these assertions. The project was started in 2000. Besides being used to test regular programs, QuickCheck is also useful for building up a functional specification, for documenting what functions should be doing, and for testing compiler implementations[1]."

Small change: Does ‘microlending’ actually fight poverty? - The Boston Globe

Small change: Does ‘microlending’ actually fight poverty? - The Boston Globe: "In the world of international aid, microcredit is a rock star. The practice of giving very poor people very small loans to start very small businesses has been hailed as one of the very few unambiguous success stories in the long, frustrating fight against Third World poverty. The pioneer of the practice, Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, has disbursed more than $8 billion in unsecured loans, usually in amounts under $100, to people traditional banks ignore. Along with a 98 percent"

Apache Thrift

Apache Thrift: "Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, Smalltalk, and OCaml.

Originally developed at Facebook, Thrift was open sourced in April 2007 and entered the Apache Incubator in May, 2008."

E4, HTML5 shift in platforms

A few years ago, web developers worked hard to make web pages more lively. Ajax became popular. At the same time, Eclipse was becoming widely used not simply as an IDE, but as a toolkit for building rich clients/applications.
Ajax is the tip of the iceberg. HTML5 is emerging as a cross platform (hardware/os) application platform. Not only are web pages becoming interactive, the browser is really replacing functions of a traditional os. [Chrome, Safari, Firefox].
Its becoming painfully obvious, that JavaScript (and or the ecosystem around it) is a great application development foundation.
Big changes are afoot at Eclipse, which is beginning to release a next generation version of eclipse which is  heavily influenced by dynamic languages, the structure of web applications, etc. As a result, its possible to start thinking of html5 as another native platform for Eclipse SWT. [Along side windows, os/x, linux, etc.]

To get a feel for all this...

• Explore the E4 whitepaper
• Dive into HTML 5 with Mark Pilgrim and/or get the view from Google developers.

One can think about the same issues apart from eclipse. Use of Osgi as a component model useful for building services and applications from parts written in various languages and running on various platforms. For a narrower view, think in terms of components running on the JVM -- java, scala, javascript, c++, python, etc.

Wolfram|Alpha Blog : The Secret behind the Computational Engine in Wolfram|Alpha

Why Wolfram|Alpha?

Wolfram|Alpha Blog : The Secret behind the Computational Engine in Wolfram|Alpha: "To give an amusing example, every school child has at one time or another written a report on the moon, and they probably included the wrong figure for how far the moon is from the earth. Why wrong? Because the distance from the earth to the moon is not constant: it changes by as much as a mile a minute. If you ask Wolfram|Alpha the distance to the moon, it tells you not only the conventionally quoted average distance, but also the actual distance right now, which can at times be well over ten thousand miles off the average. The actual distance is a figure that can be arrived at only by computation based on the moon’s known orbital parameters. It’s rocket science, if you will."

Sure, like many, I have great hopes, but probably too many.

Sustainable Design - School of Architecture - Carnegie Mellon University

Sustainable Design - School of Architecture - Carnegie Mellon University: "The School of Architecture is in the forefront of Carnegie Mellon's strategic commitment to environmental sustainability as an educational and organizational force.

In parallel, a number of programs have expanded their offerings and faculty numbers dedicated to environmental education and research—including Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering and Public Policy, and the Heinz School of Public Policy. The university is also committed to improving its physical facilities and its growth to meet the highest level of LEED and other sustainable goals for the built environment."