Freebase.com is home to a global knowledge base: a structured, searchable, writeable and editable database built by a community of contributors, and open to everyone. It could be described as a data commons.

It's about film, sports, politics, music, science and everything else all connected together. Our contributors are collecting data from all over the internet to build a massive, collaboratively-edited database of cross-linked data. Its a big job and we're just getting started.

How is Freebase different than the Wikipedia?

It's an apple versus an orange: each is deliciously different. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with information arranged in the form of articles. Freebase is more of an almanac, organized like a database, and readable by people or software. Wikipedia and Freebase both appeal to people who love to use and organize information. In fact, many of the founding contributors to Freebase are also active in the Wikipedia community. Whenever Freebase and Wikipedia cover the same topic, Freebase will link to the Wikipedia article to make it easy for users to access the best of both sites.

Freebase

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to enhance the technological fluency of young people, helping them learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, and they gain a deeper understanding of the process of design.

Help a child get in touch with her strange loopiness.

Scratch

On March 28, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin gave the annual Boeing Lecture at Purdue.

Double Gold Star.

I will be frank. Educators, and I include myself, for I have spent many years as an adjunct professor at various institutions, are far less certain how to teach "generalship" than we are of how to teach the laws of thermodynamics.

And yet it is clear that an understanding of the broad issues, the big picture, is so much more influential in determining the ultimate success or failure of an enterprise than is the mastery of any given technical detail.

The understanding of the organizational and technical interactions in our systems, emphatically including the human beings who are a part of them, is the present-day frontier of both engineering education and practice.

Purdue offers a pre-formatted PDF of the lecture.

System Engineering and the Two Cultures of Engineering

Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by Newsvine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.

McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.

Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution.

John McCain’s MySpace Page “Enhanced”

This website makes available our most recent collection of forgotten communication and entertainment media, to anyone unable to attend the exhibition in December 2006.

These nine exhibits were donated by a group studying Interactive Media Design, who lovingly restored each to working order. Their discoveries were made whilst researching examples of interaction design that pre-dated digital technology. They also uncovered archive film, photography and packaging which places each artefact in its historical context.

I know that everyone involved has been affected by the surprising similarities and profound differences between these and contemporary designs, and of how interchangeable technologies often are but how much more important social change can be. This experience should make these young interaction designers both more inventive and more reflective when they come to create the interactions of our future.

We hope you find the collection equally informative and inspiring.

The Museum of Lost Interactions

Slides from the NSF PI Conference on the Science of Design, [2, 3], held March 1, 2007, in Alexandria, VA.

This connects to the recent Economist article on innovation, and how Vannevar Bush's ideas about innovation have run their course, and are now being supplanted.

Later this week, Humboldt State University is hosting a SoD symposium; the keynote speaker is Nigel Cross, author of Designerly Ways of Knowing. (See this paper for a sample.) In September, he'll be hosting DTRS7: Design Meeting Protocols, which looks at the design process and how it can be better understood and thus improved.

Steps Toward a Science of Design

Conference Keynote by Carliss Y. Baldwin of HBS.

Behind every innovation lies a new design. Large or complex designs, involving many people, require architectures that create a sensible subdivision of the design tasks.

Design architectures (and the systems built from them) may be "manageable" or "unmanageable." By manageable, I mean that the artifacts created within the architecture will stay within the boundaries of a single enterprise (or a supply chain controlled by a dominant firm). Windows and Office are manageable architectures by this definition, whereas Apache and Linux are coordinated but not manageable. "Manageable" architectures give rise to product lines and product families, while "unmanageable" architectures give rise to modular clusters and open source communities.

There are important technical properties of a design architecture that affect its manageability. In this speech, I will talk about how designs draw resources from the economy, and what technical properties make an architecture "manageable" or "unmanageable." These properties, I will argue, are not good or bad in themselves, but they affect economic incentives and patterns of competition over new products and designs. Thus design architecture is an important consideration in formulating a sound product line strategy.

Slides are available.

Unmanageable Design Architectures: What They Are and Their Financial Consequences

The latest debate in P2P and overlay multicast systems is whether or not to build trees. The main argument on the anti-tree side is that tree construction is complex, and that trees are fragile. The main counterargument is that non-tree systems have a lot of overhead. In this paper, we argue that you can have it both ways: that one can build multi-tree systems with simple and scalable algorithms, and can still yield fast convergence and robustness.

This paper presents Chunkyspread, a multi-tree, heterogeneous P2P multicast algorithm based on an unstructured overlay. Through simulation, we show that Chunkyspread can control load to within a few percent of a heterogeneous target load, and how this can be traded off for improvements in latency and tit-for-tat incentives.

Slides from a talk are also available.

Chunkyspread: Multi-tree Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Multicast [PDF]

Under [Vannevar] Bush's plan [of the 1940's], universities researched basic science and then industry developed these findings to the point where they could get to market. The idea of R&D as two distinct activities was born. Firms soon organized themselves along similar lines, keeping white-coated scientists safely apart from scruffy engineers.

This approach was a stunning success. AT&T's Bell Labs earned six Nobel prizes for inventions such as the laser and the transistor. IBM picked up three, two from its Zurich Research Laboratory alone. And Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) devised the personal computer's distinctive elements, including the mouse, the graphical user interface and the Ethernet protocol for computer networking (although it was criticized for failing to commercialize such leaps forward).

Now the big corporate laboratories are either gone or a shadow of what they were. Companies tinker with today's products rather than pay researchers to think big thoughts.

You tinkerer, you!

The "smart people on the hill" method no longer works, says Eric Schmidt. "This is getting to be a new kind of game," says John Seely Brown.

This reflects IBM's transition into "services science". The services business is becoming commoditized, as hardware did before it, and IBM knows it must add intellectual property to its offerings.

And not just IBM, of course. I argue that Cisco's moving in this direction, too.

The fusion of research and development is meant to solve the central shortcoming of Bush's plan: how to turn ideas into commercial innovations. Great ideas may moulder without a way to develop them.

Hmm, mmm.

Failure is an essential part of the process. "The way you say this is: 'Please fail very quickly -- so that you can try again'," says Mr Schmidt.

Yes, yes, yes!

Out of the Dusty Labs

CNET covers the start of TED.

It's not a circus. It was just the opening two-hour session of TED, the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference held here Wednesday at the Monterey Convention Center.

More: TED prize coverage in NYT.

In search of scientific inspiration at TED