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Biomedical initiatives at Microsoft Research

In this week’s installment of my Perspectives series I spoke with Kristin Tolle about a couple of important biomedical initiatives ongoing at MSR. One is a program with the daunting title Computational Challenges of Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS). These studies entail scanning individual human genomes to look for genes implicated in diseases, or to [...]

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19.09.2008 19:50:10 - Jon Udell

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Why didn’t phonetic audio indexing prevail?

Hugh McGuire notes that Google Labs has expanded the audio indexing and search of political videos on YouTube. I checked out the examples, and guessed that this system works by doing speech-to-text conversion, then conventional indexing and search of the text. That’s feasible because even an imperfect conversion yields plenty of recognizable words for search [...]

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19.09.2008 17:01:01 - Jon Udell

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Jock Gill on energy, information, technology, networks, markets, and society (part 1)

Here is the first part of a two-part interview with Jock Gill, whom I can only partly describe as a technologist, philosopher, humanist, media hacker, and alternative energy entrepeneur. We met in a wonderfully serendipitous way. I was on a bicycle tour through the White Mountain National Forest last month, staying overnight with a friend [...]

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16.09.2008 20:49:10 - Jon Udell

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Swim-lane visualization of security protocols

Reacting to this report about a flaw in the single signon protocol for Google Apps (via ZDNet and heise Security), Kim Cameron writes: As an industry we shouldn’t be making the kinds of mistakes we made 15 or 20 years ago. There must be better processes in place. I hope we’ll get to the point where [...]

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15.09.2008 19:30:08 - Jon Udell

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That first step can be a doozy

Andy Baio has done a tour de force analysis of Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals, a musical mashup made from hundreds of samples. From Wikipedia, he extracted data about the samples: the artist, title, and start time of each sample. Then, remarkably, he used Mechanical Turk to crowdsource the lookup of a missing fact: the [...]

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11.09.2008 18:43:53 - Jon Udell

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A conversation with the founders of Princeton’s Center for Information Techology Policy

As information technologies weave their way into every aspect of our personal, professional, and civic lives, there’s a growing need for informed public discussion of their public policy implications. Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) is one emerging forum for that discussion. My guests on this week’s Innovators show are Ed Felten [...]

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10.09.2008 22:43:06 - Jon Udell

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Silicon-based flow control for smarter/cheaper air conditioning and refrigeration

One of the key themes in Amory Lovins’ series of talks on energy efficiency in buildings is the energy lost when pumping fluids. At DEMO today, a company called Microstaq showed a silicon-based valve that promises to dramatically reduce the power required to move fluids through air conditioning and refrigeration systems. Current refrigerant expansion valves, [...]

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09.09.2008 21:25:36 - Jon Udell

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Annotating DNS with personal information

I’ve always had a fondness for solutions that scribble in the margins of the Domain Name System. Today I saw a new one at the DEMO conference: Telnic, a service you can use to store basic personal or business information directly in the DNS. The service is associated with the .tel top-level domain. If you [...]

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08.09.2008 23:58:13 - Jon Udell

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21st century Yankee ingenuity

Serendipity brought me a copy of this article on Jock Gill’s vision of small-scale grass farming operations. He thinks they’ll be able to produce biomass fuel, in a sustainable and decentralized way, for local production of heat and power. We had a long talk about this, and related themes, which will appear in two upcoming [...]

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08.09.2008 07:22:01 - Jon Udell

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The World Bank’s web of data could be webbier

As Stefan Tilkov notes tearfully, the REST API for the World Bank data leaves something to be desired. The URI to fetch the list of countries looks like this: http://open.worldbank.org/rest.php?method=wb.countries.get In my review of the Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby book RESTful Web Services I summarized their best practices for making a service “look like the web”: Data [...]

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05.09.2008 14:12:40 - Jon Udell

Jon Udell

Biomedical initiatives at Microsoft Research

Why didn’t phonetic audio indexing prevail?

Jock Gill on energy, information, technology, networks, markets, and society (part 1)

Swim-lane visualization of security protocols

That first step can be a doozy

A conversation with the founders of Princeton’s Center for Information Techology Policy

Silicon-based flow control for smarter/cheaper air conditioning and refrigeration

Annotating DNS with personal information

21st century Yankee ingenuity

The World Bank’s web of data could be webbier

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