Highlights of the July, 2013, NY Tech Meetup

At this evening's NY Tech Meetup there were a few items I think greatly worthy of propagation.

1. KeyMe. http://www.keyme.net/: Duplicate house-keys without a locksmith (kiosks are being set up in 7-Elevens); store house-keys in virtual form and then replicate them as needed (as when you've lost your last copy). Thumbprint is used as password; the founders claim to avoid storing any information that might compromise privacy. This seems to me a notably original use of technology in application to a practical problem, a great relief after the interminable social+commerce websites and apps I've seen in the past 18 months.
2. "Web Explorer" at Stuyvesant High School. http://ml7.stuycs.org:1999/: Turn any website into a computer game. The game is primitive right now, but the idea seems to me suitable for massive elaboration. This was a final project of the CS-major seniors at Stuyvesant High School, where Mike Zamansky has been building a curriculum for some decades. I was quite impressed at what this school program has managed to accomplish, based on the Zamansky's brief comments and my own tour of the website (http://www.stuycs.org/). Surely this is a part of our way forward in computing education.
3. Publishing on GitHub. https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic-Programming-and-Bayesian-Methods-for-Hackers: A full self-study textbook of Bayesian statistics, posted to GitHub as an Ipython notebook. Not only is the content of interest, but the idea of publishing this way, complete with running and modifiable code, is superb.
4. New York Times archive. http://beta620.nytimes.com/projects/the-new-timesmachine/: The New York Times has just (this evening) published the beta of a tool to allow readers to see whole issues from their vast archive, rather than scanned snippets out of context. For now, just six past issues are being made public in this form.

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