Link Dump 5

• How to get free money by pretending to be a charity: The worst charity in America operates from a metal warehouse behind a gas station in Holiday. Every year, Kids Wish Network raises millions of dollars in donations in the name of dying children and their families. Every year, it spends less than 3 cents on the dollar helping kids. Most of the rest gets diverted to enrich the charity's operators and the for-profit companies Kids Wish hires to drum up donations. In the past decade alone, Kids Wish has channeled nearly $110 million donated for sick children to its corporate solicitors. An additional $4.8 million has gone to pay the charity's founder and his own consulting firms. No charity in the nation has siphoned more money away from the needy over a longer period of time. But Kids Wish is not an isolated case
• 'Washington Is a Cesspool of Faux-Experts Who Do Bad Research' by +Conor Friedersdorf: Sweet validation! I've often suspected that official Washington is populated by enough disingenuous, misinformation-spreading hucksters to fill an underground container of organic waste. No one has better standing to render this judgment than Klein, whose earnest, tireless embrace of deep-in-the-weeds wonkery is unsurpassed in his generation. He wouldn't assert a whole cesspool of intellectual waste product without having seen plenty of specific examples.
• How Gangs Took Over Prisons by +Graeme Wood: Originally formed for self-protection, prison gangs have become the unlikely custodians of order behind bars—and of crime on the streets.
• 3D Printed Peristaltic Pump by +Eric Evenchick: One nice thing about this design is that it is printed preassembled. Pop it out of the printer, add some tubing, and you’re ready to pump fluids. On top of the isolated fluid path, this pump gives accurate volume measurement.
• 3 keys to open source success by +Phil Johnson: A new study of GitHub data reveals characteristics of successful open source projects
• The Rise of Open Source Hardware by +Rachel Nuwer: Part of the reason software has led the open source charge is that it has the advantage of being “lightweight,” Petrone explains. “It’s a case of atoms versus bits.”
• Want to Reform the NSA? Give Edward Snowden Immunity by +Yochai Benkler: Edward Snowden's disclosures led to the introduction of dozens of bills in Congress, a judicial opinion, and two executive-branch independent reviews that demanded extensive reforms to surveillance programs...The single most important lesson of Snowden's disclosures is that even well-designed and well-intentioned systems of checks and balances become corroded and subverted over time...Because it is practically impossible for outsiders to check the national-security system, protecting insider whistleblowers is especially critical.
• Learnable Programming by + Bret Victor: Because my work was cited as an inspiration for the Khan system, I felt I should respond...How do we get people to understand programming? We change programming. We turn it into something that's understandable by people. This essay presents a set of design principles for an environment and language suitable for learning.
• The Future Could Work If We Let It by +Farhad Manjoo: One persistent criticism of the tech industry is that it no longer works on big ideas...Matt Rogers and Stefan Heck...put forward the ultimate optimist's case for why the tech industry might substantially improve most of our lives...With the right incentives, the future could be fantastic. Just beware of the pesky humans getting in the way.

Link Dump 4

• Open Source Ecology 4 Year Review: Efficiency is key to making open source technology viable. In December 2012, we have shown for the first time that one of our heavy machines, the Compressed Earth Block (CEB) Press, can be built in a single day. We combined modular design, digital fabrication, and swarm build techniques – for a rapid, parallel, Extreme Build. One Day.
• Gartner says lock-in technology will replace open source philosophy for 3D printers – and that should make everyone angry by +Adam Oxford: Gartner’s future is likely to pass if we don’t try and stop it now. In this future, big tech brands take over and fight to keep prices high by introducing new ‘features’ rather than continue to reduce the off-the-shelf cost of new printers. They lock people into artificially incompatible designs that are non-user serviceable. Even as raw feedstock prices drop due to demand, the move to proprietary cartridges that only fit one type of printer rather than generic spools of filament will keep end user costs high.
• How do you avoid being forked into oblivion? by +Stack Exchange: the founder of the project that was forked says: "The purpose of the MIT license is to unencumber your fair use. Not to encourage you to take software, rebrand it as your own, and then "take it in a new direction" as you say. While not illegal, it is unethical." It seems that the GitHub page of the new project doesn't even indicate that it's a fork in a typical GitHub manner...So my questions are: Was Xamarin's action and the way the action was done ethical or not? Is it possible to avoid such a situation if you are a single developer or a small unfunded group of developers?
• Investing in Junk Armies: Why US Efforts to Create Foreign Armies Fail by +William Astore: Bremer and his team vowed to create a new Iraqi military from scratch...Its main job would be to secure the country’s borders without posing a threat to Iraq’s neighbors or, it should be added, to U.S. interests...Despite years of work by U.S. military advisers and all those billions of dollars invested in training and equipment, the Iraqi army has not fought well, or often at all.  Nor, it seems, will it be ready to do so in the immediate future...The simple answer: for a foreign occupying force to create a unified and effective army from a disunified and disaffected populace was (and remains) a fool’s errand.  In reality, U.S. intervention, now as then, will serve only to aggravate that disunity
• New thoughts on capital in the twenty-first century by +Thomas Piketty's 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century': French economist Thomas Piketty caused a sensation in early 2014 with his book on a simple, brutal formula explaining economic inequality: r > g (meaning that return on capital is generally higher than economic growth). Here, he talks through the massive data set that led him to conclude: Economic inequality is not new, but it is getting worse, with radical possible impacts.
• Why Kids Sext by +Hanna Rosin: Usually Lowe can more or less classify types in his head—which kids from which families might end up in trouble after a drunken fight in the McDonald’s parking lot. But this time the cast of characters was baffling..."If she was a teenager with a phone, she was on there."...Lowe’s characterization of the girls on Instagram morphed from “victims” to “I guess I’ll call them victims” to “they just fell into this category where they victimized themselves.”...For the most part, the laws do not concern themselves with whether a sext was voluntarily shared between two people who had been dating for a year or was sent under pressure: a sext is a sext...Whether a sext qualifies as relatively safe sexual experimentation or a disaster often depends on who finds out about it.