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Jul. 19th, 2009
09:00 am - The iPhone app I saw at WWDC but still can't show you: Bon App
Filed under: Software, WWDC, iPhone, iPod touch
I guess you could say I'm an armchair foodie. Strangely enough, once I started working at home I rarely got the chance to cook a proper meal. It doesn't help that my kids have typical kid palates, and attempts to "get fancy" with the ingredients are met with wrinkled noses and frowning faces. So when I see an app that looks like it'll make my cooking life simpler and better I'm very, very excited.Bon App looks to do just that -- it simplifies the entire cooking process, from planning to shopping to cooking. All on the iPhone (or iPod touch). What really has me excited is the way it does this. Any blunt object can bash a nail. I mean, there's a reason Mac users have higher standards, right? I like to think we appreciate ease-of-use and quality design. Bon App has an extensive feature list, yes, but it looks darn good doing what it does, and the developer spent serious time thinking about how you interact with the app.
While I can't show you any screens (the developer was adamant that I not record video), I tell you about a few things I saw. One nice touch: when selecting a particular dish to cook, an icon of the recipe bounces down into a menu bar, indicating where to go next (shopping list, if I recall correctly). I don't remember the shopping list feature well, but the cooking features are exceptional. The app shows you a visual indication of how long each dish will take along a bar graph. This helps you plan what to cook and when. As anyone who has played Hell's Kitchen will tell you, timing is critical. You don't want hot side dishes and a cold entree. It was the first time I'd seen that on an app, and was indicative of the thought put into the app's flow.
The final pieces hadn't been put together when I had a look at the demo. The developer was still thinking through the last phase (cooking, which can be tricky, as trying to prep a meal isn't as straightforward as you might think) and tweaking the interaction. I'm also not sure how recipes get into the app. If you're looking for a desktop cooking app that syncs with the iPhone, about the best I've found so far is Avenio's MacGourmet. But I will certainly be keeping an eye out for Bon App. Even though I'm very happy with Sous Chef, the detail and design of Bon App has me wishing I could pre-order now.
TUAWThe iPhone app I saw at WWDC but still can't show you: Bon App originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 19 Jul 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
12:29 pm - Party Politics: Twittering towards Palin 2012?
Following former American vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s announcement that she would resign as governor of Alaska, Palin-related sites have strongly increased in traffic and membership. Amid speculations about her reasons for resigning in the middle of her term of office, and a vagueness about her future plans on her main site, supporters advance Palin as a candidate for the 2012 presidential elections.
Tools: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Ning groups, blogs, Wordpress
How the tools are being used:
Palin-related digital outreach stretches back to Republican Presidential candidate John McCain choosing her as his running mate in the 2008 election. Since then, online tools have been used to communicate messages more directly to supporters, to acquire funds for both her political action committee (PAC) and for her legal defense fund, and to shape the beginnings of a movement towards advancing her for candidacy for the Presidency.
With over 442 updates and over 102,000 followers (increasing even at time of press), Palin’s Twitter usage (via Twitterberry and the web) and style mirrors the strategic rhetoric of her speech as voiced in her resignation announcement. Recent tweets promise
“I’ll stay in touch w/whomever wants via personal twtr site;launch July 26;in meantime it’s pleasure to update interested folks on State biz!” and
“elected is replaceable;Ak WILL progress! + side benefit=10 dys til less politically correct twitters fly frm my fingertps outside State site.”
Her current handle, “AKGOVSarahPalin,” whose profile links to the Alaskan state government website, will be retired once she steps down. As part of a movement-building strategy, using Twitter builds community by creating a feeling of immediacy and fostering a sense of insider knowledge. This contributes towards preparing the way for whatever steps she chooses to take next.
Through social networks such as Team Sarah (almost 72,000 members) and blogs like Conservatives4Palin the movement has increased membership and raised funds in actions such as a week-long WebaThon carried out in June to raise money for the Sarah Palin Legal Defense Fund. 
Palin and her team created The Alaska Fund Trust to help allay legal expenses incurred defending herself from a series of ethics charges. While legal defense funds are nothing new, Palin’s fund differs from those of other political candidates in having an online presence. The fund’s site lists PDFs of legal documents on six other political defense funds for comparison. Whatever their other similarities or differences, none of the others had the backing of an online presence or community. Putting all activities online makes it easier for other online groups to organize activities in support of them.
For example, Conservatives4Palin.com’s attempt to raise the entire $500,000 requested by the defense fund was also its first attempt at grassroots political fundraising. Daily updates on the main site, viral video that attracted some news attention, emails and blog-postings, along with some limited support from well-known radio personalities who posted links, all helped to create momentum for the week-long effort. The campaign successfully increased traffic to the Conservatives4Palin site, leading to a high of over 495,000 pageviews for June, ’09 and nearly doubled the number of site visits from the previous month.
(Courtesy of Alexa)
However, the site was ultimately unsuccessful in raising the full amount. The comments section mentions raising $109,620 over six days. Ultimately, lack of coordination with other prominent and well-organized sites such as Team Sarah, was cited in the comments section as one reason for not raising more money. Attention expected from prominent supportive journalists either did not come or arrived too late.”
With so many different Palin-related social networks, blogs, and websites, as well as conversations about Palin on other conservative sites, Sarah Palin Web Brigade, formerly the Sarah Palin Internet Coalition, was established “to facilitate communication and coordinate efforts between the many Internet-based groups that support Sarah Palin.” Currently, the site has 17 groups, most of which are dedicated to Internet communications strategies, but only one group has seen traffic within the last month.
Members are highly interactive, and Team Sarah has a specific group whose mission is to post immediate greetings on new members pages in an effort to retain membership and encourage participation. Currently, the social network has 71,870 members and 764 groups on its network, of which the featured 30 groups show activity within the last two weeks.
Some groups post discrete actions members can perform online, such as making donations, signing petitions, or offering videos or banners that they can watch or post on their personal sites. Forums post information on the latest online as well as offline activities such as rallies, parties and marches.
Analysis:
According to one Pew Internet & American Life Report, during the election cycle Obama supporters had a higher level of engagement in online digital media. Following the election, however, recognizing that difference groups in support of Palin are experimenting with ways of communicating about the issues. In contrast, as recently as a February post announcing the GOP Tech Summit, commenters on the Republican Party’s site expressed their dissatisfaction with the site’s failure to provide information on important political issues.
At the same time that Democrats were ultimately more successful in using digital tools for advocacy McCain supporters were more likely to use the Internet in general. Now however, when people search for political information online they look for opinions and views similar to their own, rather than alternative or challenging ones.
(Courtesy of Pew Internet & American Life Project)
This provides Palin supporters with a clear opportunity to begin their efforts early, with a limited message, i.e. one person, rather than an entire party and to be able to stay relatively on message while refining their methodology in the process. This contrasts sharply versus the efforts of the Republican Party, which must promote a multitude of messages while battling the digital activism learning curve.
Based upon an exploration of the different groups and the activity within them, the nascent Palin campaign is quickly accelerating in confidence and skill at using digital media. Its offline strength has been its ability to reach people individually, and on an emotional level. Online, it seeks to do the same. Certainly, as a non-organized group without a real platform, the Palin campaign is freer than the Republican Party to make mistakes. However, because of its lack of organization it is also gaining valuable experience in how to build traction online. As it gets closer to 2012 this could make a vital distinction in who becomes the next President of the United States, not just who becomes the leading Conservative voice.
01:15 pm - Google Removes Triforce From Logos
As it fits a good conspiracy, Google now removed the triforce from the logo doodles (I did not check for every logo, but it’s gone for at least the two which I did check). I wonder why?
For instance, here’s the old Tesla logo, and the new one:
The triforce can be seen to the right of the “l”, near the bottom. (See Search Engine Roundtable’s July 10 post, they made a copy of the logo.)
And now it’s gone. (See Google’s live version of the logo, and hit refresh if you got the old version cached.)
The triforce is also gone from Susie Sahim’s showcase of the logos – she was suspected to be behind this (I don’t know for sure), and can be seen posing dressed as Link from the game Zelda in different photos*. (At least she says it’s her. Susannah was not available for other comments, and the only thing Google told me in regards to the logos was “Users can infer any one Link or another in our doodles.”)
Please comment in the existing thread.
[Thanks Hebbet!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Removes Triforce From Logos]
[Advertisement] Google books on Amazon
11:36 am - Sewers, Start-ups, and Thinking Long-term
Lawrence Wilkinson posted a nice piece about infrastructure, software, and thinking long-term, where he pulls from a few sources including Pete Warden and Matt Mullenweg:
What’s true of sewers and software is true of most infrastructure: finding the balance between lean expediency and investment in future capacity is a real trick. Quoting his friend Matt Mullenweg, Pete observes,
“When you’re in the red, time is working against you. Once you’re profitable, time is on your side“. Getting to even Ramen profitability changes everything, and gives you the ability to build for the long term.
12:25 pm - Fanfic: Fable 2 - Tell Me A Fable
OK I think I've gone slightly bonkers!!!
Title: Tell Me A Fable
Rating: 15 (seeing as the game is!)
Warnings: femslash, bigamy, prostitution (all the things in the game!)
Word Count: 420
Fandom: Fable 2
Pairing: Female Hero / women of Albion
Spoilers: I've tried not to give too much away about the game (and have played with the order of things ever so slightly).
Disclaimer: Not my characters, they belong to Lionhead Studios and Microsoft Game Studios!
Summary: A hero’s tale.
AN: This is the result of spending the whole of the International Day of Femslash doing nothing but reading femslash and playing Fable 2! It was written at 2am!
AN2: Helps if you've played the game as then you can imagine Zoe Wanamaker reading the first line! (And you might understand some of the humour!)
( Our hero's life had been a hard one... )
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creative08:00 am - AI predicts poker bets to three decimals places
Poker is considered one of the most skillful of betting games, but a new study published in the Journal of Gambling Studies reports on an artificial neural network that predicts gambler's bets to three decimals places.
The system was built by researcher Victor Chan who created a relatively simply backpropogation neural network to predict future plays.
Backprop networks take a bunch of inputs, feed them through layers of loose mathematical simulations of neurons which then make a guess at an output.
Crucially, the network is initially given a set of training data on which it can modify its 'guesses' based on how wrong its initial estimation was. The amount of error is fed back through the network and each 'neuron' adjusts the strengths of its connections to other neurons to minimise the error next time round.
Chan used the playing patterns of six online Texas Hold 'em players each of whom played more than 100 games each. He entered just an initial series of games for each player to train the network and then asked it to predict how the following plays would go.
...it was to the author’s surprise that the neural network for M1 upon training turned out to be able to predict a gambler’s bet amounts in successive games accurately to more than three decimal places of the dollar on average for each of the six gamblers in our data sample across the board.
More importantly, the neural network for M2 upon training was also able to track the temporal trajectory of a gambler’s cumulative winnings/losses, i.e., successively predict the gambler’s cumulative winnings/losses, with a similar accuracy again for each of the six gamblers in our data sample across the board.
...the influence of a gambler’s skills, strategies, and personality on his/her cumulative winnings/losses is almost totally reflected by the pattern(s) of his/her cumulative winnings/losses in the several immediately preceding games.
In other words, from a sample of initial plays, each gambler's behaviour was almost completely mathematically predictable in the same way across all six people.
Now, if they could only get a neural network to predict plays in strip poker, I think they'd be onto something.
09:20 am - Comment by on '...Abolish all gun control laws in the UK' -- Kris Seunarine
1984, Animal Farm
12:00 am - Henri-Fr�d�ric Amiel
"Charm is the quality in others that makes us more satisfied with ourselves."
12:00 am - Sam Brown
"Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance."
12:00 am - Abraham Lincoln
"People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like."
12:00 am - M. Cartmill
"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls."
11:06 pm - Captchas vs. Robots
In this old Apokalips webcomic, the convergence of captchas, robots, and tragic dodgy tattoos.
11:03 pm - Howard Rheingold explains 21st Century Literacies
Howard Rheingold sez, "I spoke about 21st century literacies at the Reboot Britain event in London, July, 2009. (About 40 minutes)"
21st Century Literacies
(Thanks, Howard!)
06:30 am - 19.7.39.
Foreign & General
1. Gov.t advising all householders to lay in supply of non-perishable food. Leaflet on the subject to be issued shortly. Daily Telegraph [a]
2. D. Tel. Gives over 2 pages to scale picture of entire British battle fleet. Daily Telegraph [b]
3. German economic mission in Moscow said to be making no more progress than Anglo-Russian pact, with implication that 3-cornered bargaining is going on. [No reference]
Party Politics
1. First appearance of People’s Party in Hythe by-election. Daily Telegraph [c]
2. Appears that Lidell° Hart’s book “Defence of Britain” boosts Hore Belisha.° Daily Telegraph, 18.7.39 [d]
Miscellaneous
1. General estimation that harvest this year will be good, & not (as last year) wheat only. [No reference]
[a]
[b]
[c]
[d]
06:30 am - 19.7.39.
Showers, but mostly fine. Everything now growing very fast. Many peas. A few tomatoes about the size of marbles. One or two marrows about size of peanuts.
Not certain whether a pullet has started laying prematurely or whether the mother hen which is still in the youngster’s run (& which lays a small egg) had laid out, but found an egg in that run today.
Sowed Canterbury bells (prob. Too late, but they do very well if treated as terrentials.)
13 eggs (2 very small). Sold 35 for 4/3 (2/6 a score – should have been 4/41/2).
Jul. 18th, 2009
10:27 pm - Burk Uzzle's photos of Woodstock
In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, New York's Laurence Miller Gallery is hosting an exhibition of Burk Uzzle's magnificent photographs of the event. The iconic images can also be seen online. From the gallery site:
Burk Uzzle shot the festival from the vantage point of a participant. In one particularly telling photograph, a sea of humanity as dense as a carpet of wildflowers in a meadow spills over a hillside; in another, a young hippie couple standing in a tender embrace under a grandmother’s quilt became the icon of a generation. Rather than document the music, Uzzle chose to focus on details of living, existence, and enjoyment over that three day period. In so doing, he captured the spirit of the festival and ultimately an era.Burk Uzzle Woodstock: 40th Anniversary
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