Stupid user shouldn’t have installed that evil executable” does not translate well into “stupid user shouldn’t have visited that evil web page”. We’re going to have to find some way to consult the user; we won’t be able to brush the problem under the table as we have done in operating systems. - http://journal.billmill.org/post...
Networks, Crowds, and Markets combines different scientific perspectives in its approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected. The book is based on an inter-disciplinary course entitled Networks that we teach at Cornell. The book, like the course, is designed at the introductory undergraduate level with no formal prerequisites. To support deeper explorations, most of the chapters are supplemented with optional advanced sections.
- Bill Mill
the UK Metererology Office is to review 160 years of climate data and has asked a range of contributing organisations to allow it to make data public. The details of this are hazy but if the UK Met Office is really going to make the data public this is a massive shift. I might be expected to be happy about this but I’m actually profoundly... - http://journal.billmill.org/post...
As with many non-fiction works, the complete book is less powerful than the shorter New Yorker article. The magazine article followed Farmer to Haiti where he was making a huge difference in one region. The book has him bouncing around a dozen countries, each of which has seemingly intractable problems and people dying due to insufficient and/or... - http://journal.billmill.org/post...