PUBLIC MARKS with search systems

Trust is an essential building block of any economic and social system.  Systems that attempt to operate without it inevitably fail.  A loss of trust typically preceeds a collapse in legitimacy.

There has been a lot of frustration lately about layered systems in computer science and especially the Web.

Herd is a single-command Bittorrent-based file distribution system, based on Twitter's Murder. It was designed for pushing code out to a number of production systems. You can probably use it for other things. Herd requires no extra Python modules on the destination system as it ships around its own (lightly modified) copy of BitTornado.

AV is developing the Nano Air Vehicle (NAV) under a DARPA sponsored research contract to develop a new class of air vehicle systems capable of indoor and outdoor operation. Employing biological mimicry at an extremely small scale, this unconventional aircraft could someday provide new reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities in urban environments.

This tutorial discusses various techniques for using generator functions and generator expressions in the context of systems programming. This topic loosely includes files, file systems, text parsing, network programming, and programming with threads.

Jack explains his notion of the service: it’s a way to preserve the contents of your notebook as an archive, whilst keeping the book in use as an ongoing tool. When you get to the second fold of scrim, you should find a note telling you it’s time to send the book off to be dismantled. This needs to be a really fast process for the service to work well – overnight, ideally; whilst your notebook is away, you won’t be able to take notes, so we need to make sure it can be returned to you as fast as you can. Fortunately, rebinding the book is a very, very quick process, especially for a skilled binder. It is, after all, just glue.

The FSB has set new goals: the emphasis is now on identifying individuals and building up a database of high quality video images of Russian citizens. The new CCTV systems will incorporate digital cameras with facilities for ‘intelligent video’, in other words, where the video surveillance system automatically performs an analysis of the captured video and compares it with images held in a database.

How can we design systems when we don't know what we're doing?

This has prompted a great deal of innovation, but also a complexity, speed and capacity for amplification that makes the world a difficult and dangerous place for many organizations and human-made systems designed for a slower and simpler era.

Tarsnap is a secure online backup service for BSD, Linux, OS X, Solaris, Cygwin, and can probably be compiled on many other UNIX-like operating systems. The Tarsnap client code provides a flexible and powerful command-line interface which can be used directly or via shell scripts.

I think that this will cause a lot of pain to powerful institutions - some will be overthrown or crushed. However, I think that we can build institutions that are robust against transparency if we design them that way from the beginning.

use recycled shipping containers as "grow pods," which are outfitted with organic hydroponic nutrient solutions; computer-controlled environmental systems to regulate temperature, humidity, pH levels, and CO2; and lights that emit specific spectrums at different points in the day. The system provides the exact amount of water, lights, and nutrients that a crop requires--so there is no wasted energy (though the pods are still hooked up to the power grid). In a 320 square foot area, PodPonics can produce an acre's worth of produce. The pods can be stacked on top of each other for more efficient use of space.

develop the possibility of building a mobile web operating system for smartphones by investigating key areas of modern smartphones operating systems and, if necessary, develop new Application programming interfaces (APIs) for accessing phone resources from a web environment.

Frequency and Volume enables participants to tune into and listen to different radio frequencies by using their own bodies. A computerised tracking system detects participants' shadows, which are projected on a wall of the exhibition space. The shadows scan the radio waves with their presence and position, while their size controls the volume of the signal. The piece can tune into any frequency between 150 kHz and 1.5 GHz, including air traffic control, FM, AM, short wave, cellular, CB, satellite, wireless telecommunication systems and radio navigation.