Mick Darling's posterousAll my blogging in one spot. (mostly)Callnote Records Skype Calls and Saves the Audio to Evernote Automatically [Downloads]
Win/Mac: We've discussed a few ways to record Skype calls in the past, but they tend to be pretty hit-or-miss. As long as the audio is the only part you're worried about, CallNote can record your calls and then save the audio file to your Evernote account immediately as soon as it's finished recording. More »
Notch Wants To Make a Firefly-Inspired Sandbox Space Game
silentbrad sends this snippet from PCGamer:
"After stepping back as lead designer of Minecraft earlier this year, Notch has been considering what to do next. ... While he's still deciding exactly what he wants to work on, he told us that he'd quite like to do a sandbox space trading game like Elite, 'except done right.' Notch is aiming for something with a bit more character than the classic trading sim. Instead of being the spaceship, you'd be a character inside the spaceship. 'I want the space game that's more like Firefly,' he said. 'I want to run around on my ship and have to put out a fire. Like, oh crap, the cooling system failed, I have to put out the fire here.' He hasn't decided to make the game yet, and doesn't mind if someone else takes up the reins. 'If someone steals the idea before me, that's totally fine. I just want to play that game,' he said."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Twitter Does Not Actually Predict Box Office Sales [STUDY]Twitter has developed the reputation of being able to predict the future — from box office sales to presidential primary results and even the stock market. But according to researchers at Princeton University, Twitter might not be able to foretell how well films will perform after all. A new report called “Why Watching Movie Tweets Won’t Tell the Whole Story” found that monitoring tweets related to movies is not a reliable source for what could actually happen at the box office. The news comes as analysts predict a record-breaking opening weekend for the movie The Hunger Games, based on active chatter about the book-to-film trilogy. “We found that data from Twitter — while valuable for the unprecedented access it provides into the public psyche — is not necessarily representative of the larger online population, as seen from the results of our studies on ratings computed from movie tweets compared to International Movie Database (IMDB) and Rotten Tomatoes ratings,” study co-author and professor of electrical engineering at Princeton University Mung Chiang told Mashable. Chiang, along with two postdoctoral research associates Soumya Sen and Felix Wong, analyzed about 10 million user tweets with movie keywords from Twitter between February and March 2012 (around Oscar season) and data using machine learning techniques to label tweets based on their temporal context (before, during and after watching a movie) and opinion (positive or negative reviews). “Twitter users tend to be much more positive in their reviews and comments for films overall,” Chiang said. “But they are less positive than IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes reviews for Oscar ‘Best film’ nominated movies.” In addition to sentiment analysis, it looked at how well certain films performed at the box office via data on IMDB. “We found that if a movie received high ratings in IMDB — by over 70% approval — and a lot of buzz on Twitter, then it usually does well at the box-office in the long run,” Sen added. “But otherwise, predicting box-office success is difficult. Movies with a lot of hype on Twitter and low IMDB ratings can be successful or unsuccessful at the box-office. It’s harder to predict.” Overall, the study found no clear evidence that shows a direct link between Twitter hype, ratings and box office sales. “The most surprising finding was that Twitter data may not be representative enough of the total population, so it is somewhat risky to use the site for forecasting,” Sen said. “More sophisticated techniques may be needed to understand the applicability of such data sets, such as the metrics we developed to understand the extent of the difference between Twitter users and other online rating side users.” Do you think Twitter can predict big trends? Let us know in the comments. More About: Social Media, Twitter For more Entertainment coverage:
Best Headset with Attached Microphone? [Hive Five Call For Contenders]
Whether you're getting your game on, hopping into a Google Hangout, or videoconferencing with friends or coworkers, you need a good headset to hear the action and be heard by other people listening. The trouble is, there are tons of great options. This week we want to know which headset (with an attached microphone) you think is the best all-around model for the job—one that offers great audio quality and voice clarity to the people on the other end. More »
Senate passes legislation to legalize crowdfundingThe US Senate passed amended legislation to allow legalized "crowdfunding" today. The CROWDFUND Act (Capital Raising Online While Deterring Fraud and Unethical Non-Disclosure) was approved by nearly a 3-to-1 ratio, 73-26. With the act's passage, companies would be required to use SEC-approved crowdfunding platforms that provide investor protection. This is an addition to the House of Representatives' JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act. Both bills have bipartisan support, with the main business concern being low investment barriers could encourage fraud. Hopefully, the Senate's amendments address that exact issue. Under the new legislation, yearly crowdfunding is capped at $1 million per year for businesses. Investors will also have their contributions capped based on income, with some people only allowed a maximum of $2,000. The House and Senate bills have yet to be reconciled and signed, but crowdfunding outlets like Crowdfunder already claim $13.55 million is waiting to be committed to more than 900 companies. Read the comments on this post from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/03/senate-passes-legislation-to-leg...Defaulting the WordPress Media Uploader to the browser uploader in WP 3.3Personally I love the new WP Media uploader, however it seems to have been creating trouble for a large number of our contributors. While there are no shortage of sites providing a simple code snippet to disable the old Flash based uploader in versions of WordPress prior to the 3.3 overhaul, we were unable to find any existing solutions to apply a similar tweak to the new media uploader released with WP Sonny. To resolve this, we added the below code snippet to our custom functions file, which forces the media uploader to default to the browser uploader in 3.3, while still allowing access to the new uploader on demand: add_action('pre-html-upload-ui', 'sw_switch_to_browser_uploader');
function sw_switch_to_browser_uploader()
{
?>
<script type="text/javascript">
(function($, exports) {
$('document').ready(function() {
var divs = $('#plupload-upload-ui, #html-upload-ui');
var links = $('a').filter(function() { return $(this).text() == 'Switch to the new uploader' || $(this).text() == 'browser uploader'});
links.click(function() {
divs.each(function() {
if ($(this).css('display') == 'none') $(this).show();
else $(this).hide();
});
});
$('#plupload-upload-ui').hide();
$('#html-upload-ui').show();
});
})(jQuery, window);
</script>
<?php
}Seeing as how this was a fairly popular topic pre-3.3, we’ve bundled this as a plugin for easy implementation and made it available here. If you’ve come up with your own interesting tweaks to the new media uploader in WP Sonny, we’d love to hear about it in the comments. from BostInno http://bostinno.com/all-series/defaulting-the-wordpress-media-uploader-to-the...Can Political Parties Survive The Social Media Age? #SXSW
Editor’s Note: Charlie Warzel is a Staff Writer for InTheCapital, a Streetwise Media Property covering SXSW. Follow him on twitter at @cwarzel So far one of our favorite panels here at SXSW has been today’s, “How Social Media Imperils Political Parties” panel with some serious DC stalwarts, including two amazing entrepreneurs with DC-based startups. Joining the New York Time Magazine’s Matt Bai were Mark McKinnon of Hill + Knowlton Strategies, Joe Trippi of Trippi & Associates, Nathan Daschle of Ruck.us, and Marci Harris of POPVox. The conversation veered in many directions tackling issues like how parties can adapt, how harmful social media actually is, and how the political environment is changing. The short answer: Political parties are losing steam fast and may find themselves arguing their way to their own irrelevance. The proof: of the panelists, only one (Trippi) is registered to this party. And all of them (excluding Bai) have worked heavily in politics and government. After the panel, we caught up with a few of the panelists and asked them the same question, ‘We’re going to see a generational transformation where more tech savvy people will be entering politics and important roles in government. Do you think this can save political parties?’ Here’s what they told us. Nathan Daschle of DC-based political startup, Ruck.us:
Matt Bai of the New York Times Magazine:
Joe Trippi, Founder & President, Joe Trippi & Associates: from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/03/12/can-political-parties-survive-the-social-media... Blackjack Player Breaks the Bank At Atlantic City
Hugh Pickens writes with a link to Atlantic writer Mark Bowden's account of how one gambler has cleaned up against casinos: "[B]lackjack player Don Johnson won nearly $6 million playing blackjack in one night, single-handedly decimating the monthly revenue of Atlantic City's Tropicana casino after previously taking the Borgata for $5 million and Caesars for $4 million. How did Johnson do it? For one thing, Johnson is an extraordinarily skilled blackjack player. 'He plays perfect cards,' says Tony Rodio. But that's not enough to beat the house edge. As good as Johnson is at playing cards, his advantage is that he's even better at playing the casinos. When revenues slump as they have for the last five years at Atlantic City, casinos must rely more heavily on their most prized customers, the high rollers who wager huge amounts and are willing to lessen its edge for them primarily by offering discounts, or 'loss rebates.' When a casino offers a discount of, say, 10 percent, that means if the player loses $100,000 at the blackjack table, he has to pay only $90,000."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Think Hiring a Ruby Developer is Hard? Try Staffing a Nuclear Reactor Startup
Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, both nuclear engineering PhD students at MIT, started working on Transatomic Power, a nuclear reactor design startup, back in 2010, and incorporated it last year. The company’s product is called the Waste-Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor (WAMSR) which they claim is not only safer than traditional nuclear reactors, but generates power using the radioactive waste of existing nuclear plants. That means the design addresses two of the big questions around nuclear power: waste disposal and safety (the third is cost). The business model is to license the design of reactors, not to build plants, which is an absurdly capital intensive endeavor. So a company like Transatomic can stay relatively lean. I spoke with Dewan, Transatomic’s CEO, about what it’s like to run a nuclear reactor startup, and why it’s actually a good time for the industry. “We were trying to figure out what we wanted to do after we graduated,” she tells me, noting that most nuclear engineering PhD’s go into academia or to work for a National Lab. “We wanted to do something exciting with nuclear, and we realized the only way we could do that is to have a startup of our own.” And, according to Lewan, it’s a great time to be running a nuclear startup. Despite last year’s Fukushima disaster, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently approved two new reactors, the first to receive licenses since 1978. And the environment abroad is better in many cases, she tells me. One of the things Dewan finds most exciting is how much more room for innovation still exists in the nuclear industry. “There’s so much more to be invented in it,” she says. “We’re kind of going into this uncharted space.” But they’re not alone. Nuclear startups including TerraPower, General Fusion and Hyperion have raised tens of millions, including from prominent investors like Khosla Ventures and Bill Gates. Though there are a handful of funded nuclear startups out there, startup culture remains somewhat foreign to the nuclear engineering community. “People in nuclear engineering PhD programs don’t think about nuclear startups as being a career path after graduation and that perception I believe is changing just because of the growing visibility of other nuclear startups that exist in the U.S.,” Dewan says. Nonetheless, she credits her department at MIT for being supportive of their effort. As with any startup, one of the biggest challenges Transatomic will face as it tries to grow will be hiring. But the crunch for nuclear engineers makes hiring a Ruby developer look easy. Most of the nuclear engineering talent is locked up in academia and labs, and the demographics of the industry skew older, a legacy Dewan attributes to Chernobyl and Three Mile Island that is only recently starting to change. Dewan admits that a startup in the nuclear industry faces extra challenges, but believes that the market is ripe for disruption. “Compared to other startups, especially computer science startups, this definitely requires more of an infrastructure,” Dewan admits. “Fukushima brought much greater focus on the safety problem with old conventional nuclear reactors,” she says. “I think that it might be the case that Fukushima will push the industry toward more innovative, safer designs.” See Dewan, Massie, and advisor and MIT professor Dr. Richard Lester present at TEDx: from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/03/22/think-hiring-a-ruby-developer-is-hard-try-staf...Autodesk Wants to Bring 3D Printing to Everyone With an iPad [VIDEO]Want your own copy of that beautiful statue in the park? If you have an iPad, you can start making your own right then and there with a little help from 3D printing and Autodesk, the company best known for making drafting software like AutoCAD. It works like this: You’re in the park with your iPad, and you see the statue. Using a free app called 123D Catch (available April) and the iPad’s camera, you snap photo after photo of it, adjusting your position slightly each time (Autodesk recommends taking between 50-70 shots, circling the subject twice at different angles). The software then assembles your 2D photos of the statue to create a 3D model. Once you’ve got your model, you can upload it to an online account at Autodesk’s 123D site, where you can tweak it, share it and even get it created via a 3D printer. Of course, if you have your own 3D printer (like a MakerBot), then you can “print” it on your own, though the size of the finished product will obviously be limited by your equipment. There are other issues as well. The kinds of things you’ll be able to capture and print is very limited: The object needs to be completely stationary, and you can’t change the lighting since the software uses parallax mapping to create the 3D model (so no flashes). You’ll also need to take some shots above the object to get a full rendering, so those taller statues are probably out. Then there’s the issue of copyrights and whether or not it’s even ethical to duplicate something like a sculpture via 3D printing. As a one-shot decoration for personal use, it’s probably OK, but if you were to print out several and start giving them away as gifts or selling them, it’s verging into a very gray area. Still, if you take a step back and see what this is — just take some photos of an object with an iPad and soon afterward you have your own near-identical copy — well, that’s about as close to a duplicator ray that you’re going to get in 2012. Do you think 3D printing is something you’d ever use? What for? Let us know in the comments. Halo ODST SoldierThis soldier from Halo was printed from a single piece of material on an Objet printer. Click here to view this gallery. More About: 3d printing, Autodesk, ipad, MakerBot |
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