Josh Birkholz
Posting on analytics, technology, visualizations, fundraising, and other unrelated things I find interesting like Doctor Who, sci fi wierdness, crazy new ideas, and interesting people.
Author of Fundraising Analytics
Principal at Bentz Whaley Flessner
Founder of the analytics group donorcast
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HAS EVERYONE SEEN THIS
NO
WELL THEN WATCH IT
#amymeetsabed -
This GameFly Commercial is too HILARIOUS!
A MUST WATCH!
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Game Of Thrones
i like games like this
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Scientists are developing a computer that can read vast amounts of scientific literature, make connections between facts and develop hypotheses.
To be useful, a computer would need to trawl through the literature in the same way that a scientist would: reading the literature to uncover new knowledge, evaluating the quality of the information, looking for patterns and connections between facts, and then generating hypotheses to test. Not only might such a program speed up the progress of scientific discovery but, with the capacity to consider vast numbers of factors, it might even discover information that could be missed by the human brain.
Excellent post by Justin Ware of BWF Social.
A relatively new iPhone application is building a somewhat cultish following of amateur photographers. It’s called “Instagram” and the number of dedicated users who have downloaded the app are growing at a rapid pace – the one-year-old Instagram now has more than 12 million users worldwide.
Instagram is as simple as an application gets. To use it, you create a profile, choose pictures to upload, add a filter (filters allow the user to easily adjust color settings, make a picture look like it’s 30 years old and other cool stuff), post a short caption and then share it with all your followers. It might sound like Facebook minus everything else Facebook does, but the growth suggests Instagram is on to something. (I count myself as one of those who’s joined the cult)
So the next question is, how can nonprofits get involved? It’s new, so this does represent a rare opportunity to lead in an uncluttered space …for now. Of course, there are a few early adopters in the Philanthropy world who’ve already jumped on board. Posted here you see a few examples of nonprofit organizations and how they’re using Instagram. The Philippine Improvement Group is using the photo network as both an awareness raising and a fundraising tool, while the Salvation Army is recognizing volunteers.
We are entering an era of personal analytics where we can take control of our own data, display it in a dashboard, and use it to inform better life decisions, according to Martin Blinder, founder and CEO of Tictrac, speaking at Intelligence Squared’s If Conference.
(via careeralchemist)
A quick look into augmented reality, and its applications for the future.
The integral cord - winner of FUJITSU design award 2011’ life-design category - very cool
www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/16/view/14763/integral-cord-fujitsu-design-award-2011-life-design-category.html
Need just another 10 minutes before stumbling out of bed? A new iOS app is turning those precious minutes into a chance to donate to charity. Snooze is an alarm clock app for your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad that pledges $0.25 of your own money to charity every time you hit the snooze button. U…
From Fast Company
Serial innovators like Google give employees time to explore ideas — even though some of those ideas turn into massive failures, writes Tim Harford in Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.
[This is the second in a three-part series of excerpts from Tim Harford’s new book. The first excerpt was “Why Do We Hold Fast To Losing Strategies?”]
Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt had a surprise when he walked into Larry Page’s office in 2002. Page is the co-creator of Google and the man who gave his name to the idea at the company’s foundation: its PageRank search algorithm. But Page had something rather different to show Schmidt: a machine he’d built himself which cut off the bindings of books and then scanned their pages into a digital format. Page had been trying to figure out whether it might be possible for Google to scan the world’s books into searchable form. Rather than instructing an intern to rig something up, or commissioning analysis from a consulting firm, he teamed up with Marissa Mayer, a Google vice president, to see how fast two people could produce an image of a 300-page book. Armed with a plywood frame, a pair of clamps, a metronome, and a digital camera, two of Google’s most senior staff tried out the project themselves. (The book went from paper to pixels in forty minutes.)
I want these for my living room*office*∑(my residence)
This is one of those things contributing toward our push to making our world look like “Minority Report”. I can guarantee airports, lounges and chic stores/venues will start (have started) incorporating these. After that, malls and other commercial areas. And after that - my home.
Ups to a co-worker who’s name I can’t recall for sharing this.
