Wednesday February 1, 2012
Hello.
While journalists all around the world are getting ready to put the finishing touches to their Facebook IPO story (will it be today? Will it be $5B?), I've got a nasty cold so I'm staying in bed and imbibing as much vitamin C as possible. Boo for poorly Roo but yay for an early edition of Roo's Letter so I can go back to sleep. I'm going to go out on a limb and say there are only two things you need to to know about today. Government websites and cute little helicopters.
GOV.UK, a prototype for a useful government website. It was an experimental alpha last summer and has just graduated to a rather nice beta
http://www.gov.uk/
It was announced yesterday by Tom Loosemore:
"We're using open software and tools as much as possible, and developing in the open. The site is hosted in the cloud. Our processes are iterative and agile, we have daily stand-ups and our walls are covered in whiteboards and post-it notes. Which is possibly just a lot of jargon to you. What it means is - we're building GOV.UK the way Google build Google and Amazon build Amazon."
http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/01/31/beta/
"With GOV.UK, British government redefines the online government platform"
http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/01/with-govuk-british-government.html
"Hundreds of millions of pounds could be saved if the new gov.uk can cut the 150m calls to government contact centres annually from people who fail to complete a transaction online, at an average cost of �6.28 each"
http://blogs.ft.com/fttechhub/2012/02/beta-gov-uk/
The code lives at https://github.com/alphagov and bugs can be reported at http://getsatisfaction.com/govuk
Quadrocopter special
"Experiments performed with a team of nano quadrotors at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania."
Yes yes yes yes yes!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4
It gets better. The little ones can rest on the big ones
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-dkonAXOlQ
And they can recover from being flung in the air, and even jump though hoops
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geqip_0Vjec
But don't worry. See the cameras all around the room? Not very practical in the real world, right? And look, they sometimes make mistakes too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVrxvqYlCDs
But do worry. What about this one from another team at Penn; its on board lidar makes it bulky but autonomous
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoMrPKCpWXw
Good grief. It can only be a matter of time before someone from Penn decides to team up with Google and start indexing the contents of our homes.
"Hi! I'm from Google. I'm a Googlebot! I will not kill you."
http://www.ftrain.com/robot_exclusion_protocol.html
Stay well.
Yours sincerely
Roo
http://twitter.com/rooreynolds
http://tinyletter.com/rooreynolds
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