The Good Judgment Project - Almost all of us are terrible at making predictions, even professional pundits, and worse, we're unaware that we're so bad at it. That makes me excited to see this academic project to objectively analyze the techniques and people who make the most accurate forecasts. Even just a minor improvement in our prediction skills could make a world of difference in the quality of our decisions, so I'm looking forward to seeing what results come out of the study.
Thesis on phone geotag analysis – A strong overview from a UK undergraduate, covering a lot of different ways that location can be determined from iPhones and other smart phones.
Identifiability of de-identified data – Summary of a researcher whose work demonstrates how flawed most data anonymization is, even for sensitive medical information.
Shape optimization of gridded surfaces – I had a good conversation with Avik Das, the author of this work recently, and it made me nostalgic for my time in computer graphics. This video shows some of the research he's doing to 'relax' complex geometric shapes into a more natural arrangement, and is beautiful in a very geeky way.
Bulk loading in Cassandra – Yet more useful material from DataStax, on a problem I've been looking into a lot recently. Since I've had no luck getting Mumakil running, I'll see how this approach works.
Pete Warden's blog 