Interesting Snippets from 2012-04-16

• Smartphone Patents: The Never-Ending War - WSJ.com

  As competition in the more than $200 billion global smartphone industry becomes more cutthroat, Apple and its competitors argue that even the most minor unique features are crucial to getting an edge.

  They are engaged in a lawsuit-filing frenzy, asserting their rights to dozens of patents to block rival products.

  Their goal: to find a patent that sticks, and to force competitors to work around it or strike a licensing deal.

• rise4fun - from Microsoft Research

  software engineering tools from Microsoft Research

• Building and implementing a Single Sign-On solution | Matt Aimonetti

  Most modern web applications start as a monolithic code base and, as complexity increases, the once small app gets split apart into many “modules”. In other cases, engineers opt for a SOA design approach from the beginning. One way or another, we start running multiple separate applications that need to interact seamlessly. My goal will be to describe some of the high-level challenges and solutions found in implementing a Single-Sign-On service.

• Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 4 Notes Essay

  The usual narrative is that capitalism and perfect competition are synonyms. No one is a monopoly. Firms compete and profits are competed away. But that’s a curious narrative. A better one frames capitalism and perfect competition as opposites; capitalism is about the accumulation of capital, whereas the world of perfect competition is one in which you can’t make any money. Why people tend to view capitalism and perfect competition as interchangeable is thus an interesting question that’s worth exploring from several different angles.

• How Not To Sort By Average Rating

  CORRECT SOLUTION: Score = Lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter Say what: We need to balance the proportion of positive ratings with the uncertainty of a small number of observations. Fortunately, the math for this was worked out in 1927 by Edwin B. Wilson. What we want to ask is: Given the ratings I have, there is a 95% chance that the real fraction of positive ratings is at least what? Wilson gives the answer.

• Why all our kids should be taught how to code | Education | The Observer

  Kids need to know about: algorithms (the mathematical recipes that make up programs); cryptography (how confidential information is protected on the net); machine intelligence (how services such as YouTube, NetFlix, Google and Amazon predict your preferences); computational biology (how the genetic code works); search (how we find needles in a billion haystacks); recursion (a method where the solution to a problem depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem); and heuristics (experience-based techniques for problem-solving, learning, and discovery).

• About From Cave Paintings to the Internet

  From Cave Paintings to the Internet cannot save you from information overload and offers no panacea for information insufficiency. Using Internet technology, it is designed to help you follow the development of information and media, and attitudes about them, from the beginning of records to the present. Containing annotated references to discoveries, developments of a social, scientific, theoretical or technological nature, as well as references to physical books, documents, artifacts, art works, and to websites and other digital media, it arranges, both chronologically and thematically, selected historical examples and recent developments of the methods used to record, distribute, exchange, organize, store, and search information. The database is designed to allow you to approach the topics in a wide variety of ways.

• Numbers API

  NUMBERSAPI - An API for interesting facts about numbers

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