Archive for June, 2009
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
Since 2002, I have run a course at U of T in which teams of senior undergraduate students do projects for clients from local startups, non-profits, university departments, and the research hospitals. Last year, as an experiment, I took on students from other universities as well, including Waterloo, Lakehead, Alberta, ...
Posted in Student Projects, Teaching | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
The newly-launched Federal IT Dashboard shows where and how the US government is spending money on information technology. I want one for Canada---and for the City of Toronto.
Posted in Government 2.0 | No Comments »
Monday, June 29th, 2009
Congratulations to the whole Firefox team on the occasion of their latest release --- and double that for welcoming students with open arms. W00t!
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, June 29th, 2009
We get our electricity from Bullfrog, which supplies power from renewable sources. I recently found their "Bullfrog Powered" list and their Green Directory, both of which list Bullfrog's customers. It's cool, but what I really want is a downloadable list that I can throw onto a Google Map. Nice to ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, June 29th, 2009
For the duration of the garbage strike in Toronto, the staff of War Child Canada will be doing pickups at $10/bag or 6 for $50. All the proceeds go to helping young victims of war. Hard to think of a better cause...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, June 29th, 2009
Thought-provoking post from Dru Lavigne about the scarcity of women in open source:
To me, equating "code" with "open source" is so early 90s. The closest analogy I can think of is equating "doctors" with "health care". While doctors tend to get the glory, there is a whole ecosystem of paramedics, ...
Posted in Equity | 2 Comments »
Monday, June 29th, 2009
Useful summary from Steve Easterbrook of some recent Royal Society papers on the environmental e-science revolution. Lots more to read...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, June 29th, 2009
For a lot of geeks, the most interesting part of the British parliamentary expenses scandal has been the way people like Simon Willison have leveraged the web to dig up the truth. This recent post has a nice summary of lessons learned. As other people have found in other contexts, ...
Posted in Government 2.0 | No Comments »
Monday, June 29th, 2009
Interesting new paper titled "Tool-use induces morphological updating of the body schema", summarized in this Discover blog post: "using a tool for even a brief amount of time caused volunteers to update their body schema, and to consider the tool a part of their bodies." The effect is subtle, but ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
We have a green light! As I hinted back in May, I'm going to run my consulting course this fall (CSC490 for undergrads, CSC2125 for grad students), but with a twist: every project will involve doing something with the data that the City of Toronto is about to start making ...
Posted in Government 2.0 | 3 Comments »