Beagle

The Android Developers Blog announces the availability of the M5-RC14 release of our SDK.As predicted, Senators McCain and Obama sweep the Potomac Primaries. And on the topic of prediction, in today's Times, David Leonhardt on prediction markets and ... [More] politics:Intrade has done an excellent job of predicting election results over the last few years. In 2004, President Bush won every state in which Intrade’s contracts—as of the night before Election Day—gave him a better than 50 percent chance of winning. He lost every state where the traders thought Mr. Kerry was the favorite. Late on election night in 2006, while the talking heads on CNN and MSNBC were still saying that the Republicans would hold onto the Senate, Intrade knew better.On the flip side, however:Mr. Ravitch has made a nice profit betting against Ron Paul, the libertarian who late last year was, amazingly, given almost a 10 percent chance of becoming the Republican nominee. "If you asked anyone in politics whether there was ever, at any point, a 10 percent chance of Ron Paul being the nominee," Mr. Ravitch said, without finishing the sentence. "That sort of makes my case for me."You can see this sort of negative bias in other prediction markets, too—including Google's internal market. Techie favorites, such as Senator Obama and Rep Paul, are overvalued. You could argue Paul never had even a one percent, let alone a ten percent, chance at the nomination, but the collective wisdom priced the event otherwise.Senator Obama to win the the Democratic party nominationDespite flaws, Mr Leonhardt concludes:I'll be back at Intrade to try to figure out what’s going on [with the 2008 election]. If you have any better ideas of where to look, let me know.I agree that prediction markets are the best prognosticators we have on the long-run, but their illiquidity means they fail to quickly capture short-run information such as, say, a recently released poll. I have written on this before. The lack of liquidity leads to, in Mr Leonhardt's words, a dearth of "smart money." The markets need more insiders: those on the ground, folks actually caucusing, or campaign staff. Otherwise you just get the miscellany of polls and buzz and hope we see now. [Less]

I realized that it is extremely easy to build searchhandlers for KHelpcenter. I have always wanted to use beagle for searching in KHelpcenter, so I quickly made a searchhandler in python. Screenshot below. To use it, put these files in the right ... [More] places, chmod khc_beagle.py to make it executable and restart KHelpcenter. This only searches the manpage index for now and can be easily extended to search docbook. And of course you have to remove /usr/share/apps/khelpcenter/searchhandlers/man.desktop. I would submit it to KDE bugzilla but I dont know if this works with KDE4 version of KHelpcenter./usr/share/apps/khelpcenter/searchhandlers/beagle.desktop/usr/bin/khc_beagle.py [Less]

Wired covers Android at the GSMA Congress:Several companies at GSMA are showing prototypes running the Google-backed open-source Android operating system (aka the "GooglePhone"), and judging by the crowd reaction, these "phones" are the hit of the ... [More] show.Elsewhere, Tyler Cowen and Ha-Joon Chang discuss via podcast the latter's latest book, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. Suffice to say, Cowen does not subscribe to the unorthodox "free trade is a myth" proposition.Un recordatorio: I am live-twittering tonight's primary results, per usual. Prediction? Senators McCain and Obama sweep all three contests. [Less]

I came across two helpful election web sites today. First, I had a hell of a time figuring out when polls closed on Super Tuesday before the date. Now it’s all over Google, but I couldn’t find out when the polls closed today on “Significant ... [More] Saturday” or whatever stupid name they’re giving it. I finally found it on Time’s The Page blog. Man, who knew that Time was all hip to the blogging? The other thing I found was this list of currently pledged superdelegates for the Democrats. The superdelegates have any time up to the convention to make (or change) their votes, but it seems unlikely that these early announcers will unless there is a clear leader. Speaking of which, Luis and I were chatting today and he made the point that right now both Democratic candidates have about 900 pledged delegates, with about another 1400 outstanding. You need about 2000 delegates to win the nomination, which means that an impossible landslide victory would be needed to get 1100 of 1400 delegates to win outright without the superdelegates. Either Clinton or Obama would have to sweep the big ones of Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania by huge (30 point) margins, not to mention Washington, Louisiana, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Indiana, Wisconsin, Puerto Rico, etc. etc. Seems pretty unlikely at this point. [Less]

There are about 3 billion nucleotides in the 23 chromosomes of human DNA. For each nucleotide, there are four different nucleic acids (G, C, T, and A) to choose from, so each nucleotide contains 2 bits of information, and the total (uncompressed) ... [More] data in the human DNA is about 715 Megabytes. Only about 3% of all human DNA actually codes for proteins, and the rest is ignored and generally referred to as “junk DNA.” So the total genetic information necessary to fully specify a human is about 25 Megabytes. That’s it! And that’s before compression. I definitely have tarballs of source code that are bigger than that.  You could fit your whole family and all of your friends on your iPod. Most non-junk DNA is identical across the human population. A protein-coding nucleotide which varies in more than 1% of the population is called a SNP, or Single Nucleotide Polymorphism. Of the 90 million protein-coding bases in our chromosomes, there are maybe 3 million SNPs coding for differences like eye color and sickle-cell anaemia. There are now a few companies offering low-cost partial sequencing of your DNA by mail. Mostly these companies act as front-ends to a couple labs (Illumina and Affymetrix) that use chip-based sequencing machines to sample between 500k and a million nucleotide variations (SNPs) from your chromosomes. You FedEx them a test tube full of your saliva, they send it off to a lab to get your cells cultured and your DNA sequenced, and then they put your genetic information online for you to view. Cool, right? The best-known of the personal genomics companies is 23andme, but there’s also DecodeMe and Navigenics. They charge about $1000 to decode 500k bases, which is about 120 kilobytes of genetic information. That’s a cost of about 0.2 cents per base or 0.8 cents per byte. That is a lot cheaper than it used to be, and the cost of decoding a nucleotide is dropping exponentially on curves reminiscent of Moore’s Law. The various personal genomics companies don’t let you donwload all your raw SNP data; they map the base pairs to a handful of genes and in the end you only get a few bytes of actual data. They also look at your mitochondrial DNA (which is passed to you from your mother directly in her egg cell that becomes you) and some little bits on the Y chromosome that don’t change between individuals to determine your likely ancestry. At least, that’s what I’ve gathered from their web sites. But I’ll let you know soon! My spit kit arrived from 23andme yesterday and they should have my DNA on-line for me to view in about 6 weeks. When you order the kit, you have to read through some pretty interesting disclaimers: You give permission to 23andMe, its contractors, and assignees to perform genotyping services on the DNA extracted from your saliva sample and to disclose the results of analyses performed on your DNA to you and others you specifically authorize. You are guaranteeing that the sample you provide is your saliva; if you are completing this consent form on behalf of a person for whom you have legal authorization, you are confirming that the sample provided will be the sample of that person. If you are a customer outside the U.S., by providing your sample, you confirm that this act is not subject to any export ban or restriction in the country in which you reside. You are warranting that you are not an insurance company or an employer attempting to obtain information about an insured person or an employee. You are aware that some of the information you receive may provoke strong emotion. Personally I think having more information about myself can only be a good thing. Because you can act on it. A gene coding for a prostate cancer predisposition isn’t a death sentence — it’s a call to action. Eat better, get exercise, get checked every year after you’re 40. That sort of thing. The New York Times has an article about these personal DNA services. [Less]

An interesting set of statistics I hadn’t yet seen today, from the Time Swampland blog, about the overall popular vote: TOTAL VOTES CAST Clinton: 50.2% (7,347,971) Obama: 49.8% (7,294,851) Clinton won the popular vote by only 0.4% — roughly 50,000 ... [More] votes out of 14.5 million cast. It also has a comparison of “get out the vote” numbers between the Democrats and the GOP in the 19 races that were equal for both parties: Obama/Clinton voters: 14,460,149 McCain/Romney/Huckabee voters: 8,367,694 Or, 73% more Democratic voters than Republican voters. It’ll be an interesting spring and summer, that’s for sure. While I am firmly in the Obama camp (for many of the same reasons Luis and Larry Lessig so eloquently articulated), I suspect this whole thing won’t be decided until the superdelegates make a decision at the convention in late August. And thank you Robert for live-micro-blogging the event on Twitter while I watched the Bruins get whipped by the Sabres. You are a wolf. [Less]

And the surprise is out — the wonderful folks at Cleartrip.com (especially Saurabh Nanda), in addition to being awesome and supporting sponsors, are going to be delivering two workshops.The workshops are on Ruby on Rails (a hackfest will follow the ... [More] workshop) and Common Lisp. I was around when these guys were planning out the workshops, and their energy and passion when it comes to RoR and CL is incredibly contagious.So not only are these guys making FOSSKriti possible, they’re helping us make it kick even more butt!(p.s.: more info on the CL workshop and RoR hackfest will be out soon) [Less]

I had fun live-twittering last night's election returns. At the peak, there were over 100 folks following vote2008 and untold number simply refreshing the webpage. The real-time sequential list of small updates works fairly well for Super Tuesday ... [More] given the abundance of information—24 states, two parties, five (née four) major candidates—and constant, rolling updates.In contrast, I was surprised just how bad was the presentation and UI of some of my sources. CNN.com is absurdly unusable, a unique vomitorium, offering a poor experience for both casual visitors wanting a one-time update and for junkies seeking a constant feed of information (although their HDTV station makes great use of the screen real estate with a heads-up display of election statistics). The best view I found was the Times, whose election coverage graphic would make Edward Tufte proud:Anyhow, I will continue to update @vote2008 with major election news and will likely live-twitter the general election.So where are we now?For the GOP, which is a clearer situation, Sen McCain is the frontrunner. The nomination is not yet a lock, but the senator is the obvious favorite. Gov Romney did surprisingly poor while Gov Huckabee did unexpectedly well. Did voters flee from Romney to Huckabee at the 11th hour? Neither have to drop out, given that Gov Romney is self-funding his campaign and has the means with which to continue and Gov Huckabee never really had any money (or a real campaign) to begin with.The Democratic side is more complicated. Sen Obama's campaign claims a projected delegate lead. He also did well in proportional delegate states where he did not win—why do the networks harp on who wins if its a close race and proportional?—and he has shown an awesome mastery of caucuses. On the flip side, Sen Clinton won both California and New York with impressive margins and, at least by my count, is winning in pledged delegates.What happens next—who wins the Democratic nomination—is going to depend on how the media frames the fight. If they label Sen Obama the Comeback Kid and play up his impressive performance, momentum will carry him to victory. The next few states are favorable to Obama, but Clinton also has an advantage with superdelegates and the party establishment, which you cannot play down once this brawl goes to convention. That advantage will subside if Obama rides a wave of popular support from today through to the convention. Conversely, if the media downplays Sen Obama's victory, I see Clinton maintaining her presumptive nominee title and winning the nomination. Unfortunate to place that power on the media, but an exciting race nonetheless. [Less]

So I've started following and using twitter far more than I was before. Its really a quite awesome and addictive service, and while I have noticed dozens of slick ways to update twitter, there aren't many easy ways to track your personal Timeline. I ... [More] decided I wanted a more notification oriented system, so I started to hack apart the gnome-blog applet, and make a little twitter daemon who checks for new updates and uses libnotify to show some lovely notifications. Now it really only monitors feeds now, but I'm planning on hacking up some basic posting abilities in the near future. Anyways, an obligitory screenshot is below:Anyways, I'd like to vent about 3 problems I see with the state of things at Gnome.1) Autotools! Blagh! NO ONE LIKES THEM! I honestly spent about 50% of my time getting the build to work right, it was painful and a major hurdle to getting started. I know we haven''t really found something that offers the same functionality, but seriously, can't we just beef up waf or something? Not saying I have a solution, just saying we need one if we are going to continue to attract new developers.2) Bonobo/Gnome-Panel/Applets API: Overly complicated, a pain to test/setup. What are we doing? When KDE4 just dropped the most intuitive widgeting system around on us (and Google Gadgest is popular on other platforms) why can't we take some hints from them? Don't get me wrong, some applets are best written in C and bound to a factory process. But really, for everyday hacks and widgets, we NEED a simple and powerful system, and soon. Webkit provides the perfect engine for us to work from, but we don't have to go with XHTML/CSS/JS. One of the new open Flash platforms is fine, or Moonlight could be awesome. Really, there are tons of options, the pyro desktop could be a start, I'm open to ideas.3) Project Space: This will probably never be an official Gnome desktop project, but its kinda cool and fun, and I had to host it at Google Code (My only other real option was launchpad) we should really set something up like what fdo has with some personal Git or Hg space to store relivent, but not-yet-ready projects. The wiki is enough for pages on theme, but we need some hosting. [Less]

Things are going well on the FOSSKriti front. We’ve got an awesome set of talks and workshops (but you’re going to have to wait to find out more here). We’ve got a great set of speakers who are not only good at what they do, but passionate to boot. ... [More] It’s going to be legen...<wait for it>...dary!What’s more, we’re having a Beagle Hackfest too! We’ve collected a set of easy-to-attack tasks that have cropped up on the mailing list and IRC in recent times. It’s been a long time since I was around a Beagle/Dashboard hackfest. I still remember the first time I got all excited about this stuff, back in the day. :-)The schedule’s out, with a couple of surprises still to be sprung. If you’re going to be dropping by, drop me a line here!More updates soon ... [Less]