Linked List: July 19, 2013

Friday, 19 July 2013

The New York Times on Nate Silver Leaving the New York Times ★

Spoiler: He’s going to ESPN next month.

The New UI Design Playground: Weather Apps ★

The chockablock “Weather” folder on my homescreen backs this premise up.

Google Results Show Struggle With Mobile ★

Claire Cain Miller, reporting for the NYT:

Google reported second-quarter results that missed analysts’ expectations for revenue and profit. They showed that its desktop search business continues to slow and ad prices continue to fall as it struggles to make as much money on mobile devices.

Revenue is up year-over-year, but profits are flat because the growth is in mobile, and mobile ads are (so far) less profitable.

Apple Acquires Location Data Startup Locationary ★

John Paczkowski:

Locationary is a sort of Wikipedia for local business listings. It uses crowdsourcing and a federated data exchange platform called Saturn to collect, merge and continuously verify a massive database of information on local businesses and points of interest around the world, solving one of location’s biggest problems: Out-of-date information.

Not only does Locationary ensure that business listing data is positionally accurate (i.e., the restaurant I searched for is where Apple said it would be), it ensures that it is temporally accurate as well (i.e., the restaurant I searched for is still open for business and not closed for renovation or shuttered entirely).

Counterterrorism Mission Creep ★

Good piece by Bruce Schneier on the growing surveillance state:

One of the assurances I keep hearing about the U.S. government’s spying on American citizens is that it’s only used in cases of terrorism. Terrorism is, of course, an extraordinary crime, and its horrific nature is supposed to justify permitting all sorts of excesses to prevent it. But there’s a problem with this line of reasoning: mission creep. The definitions of “terrorism” and “weapon of mass destruction” are broadening, and these extraordinary powers are being used, and will continue to be used, for crimes other than terrorism.

Patent Illustration Déjà Vu ★

The amazing coincidences continue to pile up this week.