McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 30th Edition

• On Taxis and Rainbows. How not to anonymize data sets, in this case NYC taxi journeys.
• A protest bot is a bot so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit. Really tempted to write a bot to track the number of jobs lost/created according to estate agent/regeneration press releases. Think it'll have to wait until I've more time.
• The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% - ex CIA spy. I wonder if this provides at least one vision of an alternate future in a serendipitous response to last week's Maximum Happy Imagination?
• Of Moonshots and Slingshots: Bringing Policy and Technology into Planetary Alignment "It's been a long time since any nation staked its national pride on exploring space, or, frankly, doing much of anything useful at all"
• In Deep. A wonderfully written account of a deep cave exploration expedition.
• The Disruption Machine. Another long read (like the caving link), this time an interesting critique of innovation and disruption.
• The coolest culture hack of all is not hacking your culture. Culture is too important to hack.
• Corrupt Personalization. A great article, with good concrete examples (from Facebook in this case) of how personalization can be a bad thing.

And a video to watch this week. Vinay Gupta setting out some plausible utopias: