A perfect GPA isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Advancing an open source project. To help computer science students prepare for jobs (and boost its own recruiting efforts) Facebook today publicly launched Open Academy. The partnership with premier CS universities sets up a special class where students get college credit for contributing to open source projects.
Tag Archives: open source
Upstagram Is A Flying Raspberry Pi That Publishes Live Pictures On Instagram | TechCrunch
What do Instagram, the Raspberry Pi and the movie “Up” have in common? When you mash all these things together, you get Upstagram, a neat hack that the Hackerloop team just unveiled.
First, the team made a replica of the house in “Up” using paper and foam. It was just big enough to fit a Raspberry Pi and its camera, a battery and a 3G hotspot. The Raspberry Pi, an open source and very cheap mini-computer to tweak, experiment and try new things with, is a hacker’s dream.
Then, the team used about 90 helium balloons to make the house fly above Paris’ landscape. While Instagram is only available on iOS and Android, they reverse-engineered the posting process to transform the Raspberry Pi into an Instagram-taking machine.
Read more: Upstagram Is A Flying Raspberry Pi That Publishes Live Pictures On Instagram | TechCrunch.
Circle of Life: The Beautiful New Way to Visualize Biological Data | Wired Science
Krzywinski developed Circos, an open source visualization tool that arranges tabular data in circular form. It was a simple idea, but transformative: It’s since been used for thousands of visualizations, and its distinctive aesthetic is synonymous with the informational richness of our moment.
Read: Circle of Life: The Beautiful New Way to Visualize Biological Data | Wired Science
For more on Martin Krzywinski’s science art take a look at his website.
Life with Raspberry Pi: Sparking a School Coding Revolution | The Digital Shift
Our classroom glows with activity. One kid drafts a how-to article in which he explains the steps involved in wiring a cardboard Minecraft controller. Another writes a branching-path, choose-your-own-adventure story in Twine, a free, downloadable interactive fiction app. A student who’s claimed throughout his middle-school career that he isn’t a writer leans close to his laptop screen, finding and fixing coding errors. He composes, compiles, and debugs more than 100 lines of code to light up a three-by-three-light LED display plugged into his laptop.
A pair of especially curious students sits huddled around our newest computer, an exposed-faced circuit board smaller than a paperback book. It’s called a Raspberry Pi. They’re watching how the code they write in one window changes the course of a game in another. They may not know it yet, but these kids are playing with an open-source computing platform that just might change the way we teach young people how to interact with computers.
Read: Life with Raspberry Pi: Sparking a School Coding Revolution | The Digital Shift.
Open Source Solve[d] J.K. Rowling Mystery | The Official Rackspace Blog
The software…used—the Java Authorship Attribution Program—is open source and freely available on GitHub for download. The academics studied the machine-readable text of Cuckoo’s and compared it to Rowling’s previous novel. In the course of doing so, they discovered a number of linguistic signatures that pointed to the author of Harry Potter. The software is predicated on the analysis of syntax, style and punctuation, but just as importantly on the distinctive use of prepositions and articles. It turns out writers can change sentence length and rhythm and can cater to a new audience, but they’re unlikely to change how they use “around” and “at” and “on.”
Read the full story: Open Source Solve[d] J.K. Rowling Mystery – The Official Rackspace Blog.
Google Wants To Power The Online Learning Revolution With MOOC.org | Fast Company
EdX, the not-for-profit online learning initiative founded by Harvard and MIT, today announced a partnership with Google to jointly develop their open-source learning platform, known as Open EdX. The core edX offerings currently consist of a few dozen free “Massive Open Online Courses,” or MOOCs, from top-flight university partners like MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley–but the Open EdX vision goes far beyond that.
Google and edX will build out and operate MOOC.org, which will come online early next year. The site aims to be to online courses more or less what WordPress is to publishing: A free, open-source way for universities, institutions, businesses, and individuals to build and host courses in the cloud on any topic and in any format for a global audience.
Related:
From Collaborative Coding to Wedding Invitations: GitHub Is Going Mainstream | Wired.com
“The open, collaborative workflow we have created for software development is so appealing that it’s gaining traction for non-software projects that require significant collaboration,” says GitHub cofounder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner.
With 3.4 million users, the five-year-old site is a runaway hit in the hacker community, the go-to place for coders to show off pet projects and crowdsource any improvements. But the company has grander ambitions: It wants to change the way people work. It’s starting with software developers for sure, but maybe one day anyone who edits text in one form or another — lawyers, writers, and civil servants — will do it the GitHub way.
See the full story: From Collaborative Coding to Wedding Invitations: GitHub Is Going Mainstream | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.
Do-It-Yourself GIS: 20 Free Tools & Data Sources for Creating Data Maps | Ellyssa Kroski – OEDB.org
The world of mapping and presenting data sets through geographical representations is no longer relegated to GIS librarians and highly trained technologists. New free and open source applications now make it possible to create complex and robust data visualizations in the form of maps that display statistics and poll results. Here’s a guide to 20 free applications and data sources.
via Do-It-Yourself GIS: 20 Free Tools & Data Sources for Creating Data Maps | Ellyssa Kroski – OEDB.org.
There are 6 data visualization tools listed and 14 sources for GIS mapping data.
Also see my list of Interactive Mapping Resources on The Modern MLIS. I have categorized resources as either digital libraries, visualization tools or stargazing maps. There is only a little overlap with Ellyssa’s list.
You may also like: Ten Places to Find and Create Data Visualizations | FreeTech4Teachers
11 Amazing Historical Snapshots From One of the World’s Best Archives | Gizmodo
The J. Paul Getty Museum is home to troves of fascinating historical artifacts. And last week, the museum [announced] a project to give the public unfettered access to it. The Open Content Program makes 4,600 high-resolution images available for free and for any use whatsoever.
Unknown (photographer) , Moon Crater, late 1850s, Salted paper print from a Collodion negative.
See the full story: 11 Amazing Historical Snapshots From One of the World’s Best Archives | Gizmodo.
See also: Open Content, An Idea Whose Time Has Come | James Cuno | The Getty Iris
OpenDesk.cc Is Like Ikea For Open Source Zealots | TechCrunch
Furniture is probably the last thing on the mind of most open source proponents but now it doesn’t have to be. OpenDesk is a free, open source line of furniture that you can make yourself or order unassembled from a maker with a CNC machine. Not only is the furniture cheap – free if you have the wood and hardware – it’s actually cool-looking.
Created by Joni & David Steiner and Development 00, OpenDesk is the first project that is compatible with FabHub, a site that allows you to search for fabricators in your area. You could also find someone with a ShopBot to cut the pieces for you and drop them off at your domicile or office.
See the full story: OpenDesk.cc Is Like Ikea For Open Source Zealots | TechCrunch.
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