Credibility Ranking of Tweets During High Impact Events (PDF) — interesting research. Situational awareness information is information that leads to gain in the knowledge or update about details of the event, like the location, people aff*ected, causes, etc. We found that on average, 30% content about an event, provides situational awareness information about the event, while 14% was spam. (via BoingBoing)
The Commodore 64 — interesting that Chuck Peddle (who designed the 6502) and Bob Yannes (who designed the SID chip) are still alive. This article safely qualifies as Far More Than You Ever Thought You Wanted To Know About The C64 but it is fascinating. The BASIC housed in its ROM (“BASIC 2.0″) was painfully antiquated. It was actually the same BASIC that Tramiel had bought from Microsoft for the original PET back in 1977. Bill Gates, in a rare display of naivete, sold him the software outright for a flat fee of $10,000, figuring Commodore would have to come back soon for another, better version. He obviously didn’t know Jack Tramiel very well. Ironically, Commodore did have on hand a better BASIC 4.0 they had used in some of the later PET models, but Tramiel nixed using it in the Commodore 64 because it would require a more expensive 16 K rather than 8 K of ROM chips to house.
Google+ Is Going to Mess Up The Internet (ReadWriteWeb) -- Google thought I would prefer to click through Google+ to find my article than to go straight to it. Severe rip of the negative effects G+ has on the search experience. (via Hacker News)
Results of a QR Trial (Brooklyn Museum) -- At first glance this looks like a win, right? Well, that’s true until you compare pre and post QR code use. These numbers are a little tricky for various reasons, but when looking at Gallery Tag as an example we saw a five-fold drop in use….and five-fold is a very conservative extrapolation from the stats. Cold water in the face to wake you up from those dreams of 2d-barcode glory.
E-Referral Evaluation Interim Findings -- in general good, but note this: The outstanding system issues are an ongoing source of frustration and concern, including [...] automated data uptake from the GP [General Practitioner=family doctor] PMS [Patient Management System], that sometimes has clearly inaccurate or contradictory information. When you connect systems, you realize the limitations of the data in them.
c64iphone (GitHub) -- the source to an iPhone/iPad app from the store, released under GPLv3. It incorporates the Frodo emulator. Sweet Freedom.
mlpy -- machine learning Python library, a high-performance Python package for predictive modeling. It makes extensive use of NumPy to provide fast N-dimensional array manipulation and easy integration of C code. (via Joshua Schachter)
What is The Truth Behind 9 Out of 10 Startups Fail? (Quora) -- some very interesting pointers and statistics, such as Hall and Woodward (2007) analyze a dataset of all VC-backed firms and show the highly skewed distribution of outcomes. VC revenue averages $5 million per VC-backed company. Founding team averages $9 million per VC-backed company (most from small probability of great success). The economically rational founding team would sell at time of VC funding for $900,000 to avoid the undiversified risk. (via Hacker News)