"dashboards" entries

Four short links: 19 March 2015

Four short links: 19 March 2015

Changing Behaviour, Building Filters, Public Access, and Working Capital

  1. Using Monitoring Dashboards to Change Behaviour[After years of neglect] One day we wrote some brittle Ruby scripts that polled various services. They collated the metrics into a simple database and we automated some email reports and built a dashboard showing key service metrics. We pinpointed issues that we wanted to show people. Things like the login times, how long it would take to search for certain keywords in the app, and how many users were actually using the service, along with costs and other interesting facts. We sent out the link to the dashboard at 9am on Monday morning, before the weekly management call. Within 2 weeks most problems were addressed. It is very difficult to combat data, especially when it is laid out in an easy to understand way.
  2. Quiet Mitsubishi Cars — noise-cancelling on phone calls by using machine learning to build the filters.
  3. NSF Requiring Public AccessNSF will require that articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and papers in juried conference proceedings or transactions be deposited in a public access compliant repository and be available for download, reading, and analysis within one year of publication.
  4. Filtered for Capital (Matt Webb) — It’s important to get a credit line [for hardware startups] because growing organically isn’t possible — even if half your sell-in price is margin, you can only afford to grow your batch size at 50% per cycle… and whether it’s credit or re-investing the margin, all that growth incurs risk, because the items aren’t pre-sold. There are double binds all over the place here.
Four short links: 17 February 2015

Four short links: 17 February 2015

Matthew Effects, Office Dashboards, Below the API, and Robot Economies

  1. Matthew Effects in Reading (PDF) — Walberg, following Merton, has dubbed those educational sequences where early achievement spawns faster rates of subsequent achievement “Matthew effects,” after the Gospel according to Matthew: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath” (XXV:29) (via 2015 Troubling Trends and Possibilities in K-12)
  2. Real Time Dashboard for Office Plumbing (Flowing Data) — this is awesome.
  3. Working Below the API is a Dead End (Forbes) — Drivers are opting into a dichotomous workforce: the worker bees below the software layer have no opportunity for on-the-job training that advances their career, and compassionate social connections don’t pierce the software layer either. The skills they develop in driving are not an investment in their future. Once you introduce the software layer between ‘management’ (Uber’s full-time employees building the app and computer systems) and the human workers below the software layer (Uber’s drivers, Instacart’s delivery people), there’s no obvious path upwards. In fact, there’s a massive gap and no systems in place to bridge it. (via John Robb)
  4. The Real Robot Economy and the Bus Ticket Inspector (Guardian) — None of the cinematic worries about machines that take decisions about healthcare or military action are at play here. Hidden in these everyday, mundane interactions are different moral or ethical questions about the future of AI: if a job is affected but not taken over by a robot, how and when does the new system interact with a consumer? Is it ok to turn human social intelligence – managing a difficult customer – into a commodity? Is it ok that a decision lies with a handheld device, while the human is just a mouthpiece? Where “robots” is the usual shorthand for technology that replaces manual work. (via Dan Hill)
Four short links: 16 February 2015

Four short links: 16 February 2015

Grace Hopper, Car Dashboard UIs, DAO Governance, and Sahale.

  1. The Queen of Code — 12m documentary on Grace Hopper, produced by fivethirtyeight.com.
  2. Car Dashboard UI Collection — inspiration board for your (data) dashboards.
  3. Subjectivity-Exploitability TradeoffVoting-based DAOs, lacking an equivalent of shareholder regulation, are vulnerable to attacks where 51% of participants collude to take all of the DAO’s assets for themselves […] The example supplied here will define a new, third, hypothetical form of blockchain or DAO governance. Every day we’re closer to Stross’s Accelerando.
  4. Sahale — open source cascading workflow visualizer to help you make sense of tasks decomposed into Hadoop jobs. (via Code as Craft)
Four short links: 15 September 2014

Four short links: 15 September 2014

Weird Machines, Libraries May Scan, Causal Effects, and Crappy Dashboards

  1. The Care and Feeding of Weird Machines Found in Executable Metadata (YouTube) — talk from 29th Chaos Communication Congress, on using tricking the ELF linker/loader into arbitrary computation from the metadata supplied. Yes, there’s a brainfuck compiler that turns code into metadata which is then, through a supernatural mix of pixies, steam engines, and binary, executed. This will make your brain leak. Weird machines are everywhere.
  2. European Libraries May Digitise Books Without Permission“The right of libraries to communicate, by dedicated terminals, the works they hold in their collections would risk being rendered largely meaningless, or indeed ineffective, if they did not have an ancillary right to digitize the works in question,” the court said. Even if the rights holder offers a library the possibility of licensing his works on appropriate terms, the library can use the exception to publish works on electronic terminals, the court ruled. “Otherwise, the library could not realize its core mission or promote the public interest in promoting research and private study,” it said.
  3. CausalImpact (GitHub) — Google’s R package for estimating the causal effect of a designed intervention on a time series. (via Google Open Source Blog)
  4. Laws of Crappy Dashboards — (caution, NSFW language … “crappy” is my paraphrase) so true. Not talking to users will result in a [crappy] dashboard. You don’t know if the dashboard is going to be useful. But you don’t talk to the users to figure it out. Or you just show it to them for a minute (with someone else’s data), never giving them a chance to figure out what the hell they could do with it if you gave it to them.
Four short links: 25 August 2014

Four short links: 25 August 2014

Digital Signs, Reverse Engineering Censorship, USB Protection, and Queue Software

  1. Greenscreen — Chromecast-based open source software for digital signs.
  2. Reverse Engineering Censorship in Chinese Cyberspace (PDF) — researchers create accounts and probe to see which things are blocked. Empirical transparency.
  3. USB CondomA protective barrier between your device and “juice-jacking” hackers.
  4. queues.io — long list of job queues, message queues, and other such implementations.
Four short links: 25 April 2014

Four short links: 25 April 2014

IoT UX, Tilty Library, Local Govt Dashboard, and SF Dreams

  1. UX of the Internet of Things — a Pinterest board of IoT designs and experience.
  2. parallax.js — Javascript library for tilt, shake, etc. interactivity on iPad. NICE demo.
  3. Gov.UK Local Government Dashboard Prototype is Live — not glorious, but making the move from central to local government is super-important. (via Steve Halliday)
  4. How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors are Shaping Your Future (Smithsonian) — SF writers create our dreams. “Techno-optimists have gone from thinking that cheap nuclear power would solve all our problems to thinking that unlimited computing power will solve all our problems,” says Ted Chiang, who has explored the nature of intelligence in works such as The Lifecycle of Software Objects. “But fiction about incredibly powerful computers doesn’t inspire people the same way that fiction about large-scale engineering did, because achievements in computing are both more abstract and more mundane.”
Four short links: 27 March 2014

Four short links: 27 March 2014

Understanding Image Processing, Sharing Data, Fixing Bad Science, and Delightful Dashboard

  1. 2D Image Post-Processing Techniques and Algorithms (DIY Drones) — understanding how automated image matching and processing tools work means you can also get a better understanding how to shoot your images and what to prevent to get good matches.
  2. Scientists Need to Learn to Sharedespite science’s reputation for rigor, sloppiness is a substantial problem in some fields. You’re much more likely to check your work and follow best data-handling practices when you know someone is going to run your code and parse your data.
  3. METRICSMeta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford. John Ioannidis has a posse: connecting researchers into weak science, running conferences, creating a “journal watch”, and engaging policy makers. (says The Economist)
  4. Grafana — elegant dashboard for graphite (the realtime data graphing engine).
Four short links: 21 January 2013

Four short links: 21 January 2013

School District Saves With Open Source, Apple ][ Presentation Tool, Tech Talks, and Realtime Dashboard

  1. School District Builds Own SoftwareBy taking a not-for-profit approach and using freely available open-source tools, Saanich officials expect to develop openStudent for under $5 million, with yearly maintenance pegged at less than $1 million. In contrast, the B.C. government says it spent $97 million over the past 10 years on the B.C. enterprise Student Information System — also known as BCeSIS — a provincewide system already slated for replacement.
  2. Giving a Presentation From an Apple ][A co-worker used an iPad to give a presentation. I thought: why take a machine as powerful as an early Cray to do something as low-overhead as display slides? Why not use something with much less computing power? From this asoft_presenter was born. The code is a series of C programs that read text files and generate a large Applesoft BASIC program that actually presents the slides. (via Jim Stogdill)
  3. AirBnB TechTalks — impressive collection of interesting talks, part of the AirBnB techtalks series.
  4. Gawker’s Realtime Dashboard — this is not just technically and visually cool, but also food for thought about what they’re choosing to measure and report on in real time (new vs returning split, social engagement, etc.). Does that mean they hope to be able to influence those variables in real time? (via Alex Howard)
Four short links: 29 November 2012

Four short links: 29 November 2012

Internet of Zings, Public Domain Alternate Universe, Web Engineers Tools, and Dashboards for All

  1. Is It The Internet of Things? — we’ve moved from “they ignore you” to “they laugh at you”. Next up, “they fight you”, then finally the earless RFID-enabled location-aware ambient-sensing Network of All wins. (via BERG London)
  2. The 2012 We Could Have Had — list of famous and interesting works which would have entered the public domain had we not had the 1976 extension of copyright law.
  3. Web Engineer’s Online Toolbox a list of online, Web-based tools that Web engineers can use for their work in development, testing, debugging and documentation.
  4. Indianapolis Museum of Art Dashboard — everyone should have a HUD showing the things they care about. (via Courtney Johnston)
Four short links: 19 April 2011

Four short links: 19 April 2011

Elegant Boxes, Dashboard in PHP, Management Theory Disparaged, and Obsolete Technology

  1. Lines (Mark Jason Dominus) — If you wanted to hear more about phylogeny, Java programming, or tree algorithms, you are about to be disappointed. The subject of my article today is those fat black lines. Anatomy of a clever piece of everyday programming. There is no part of this program of which I am proud. Rather, I am proud of the thing as a whole. It did the job I needed, and it did it by 5 PM. Larry Wall once said that “a Perl script is correct if it’s halfway readable and gets the job done before your boss fires you.” Thank you, Larry.
  2. PHP Clone of Panic Status Board (GitHub) — The Panic status board shows state of downloads, servers, countdown, etc. It’s a dashboard for the company. This PHP implementation lets you build your own. (via Hacker News)
  3. The Management Myth (The Atlantic) — a philosophy PhD gets an MBA, works as management consultant, then calls bullshit on the whole thing. Taylorism, like much of management theory to come, is at its core a collection of quasi-religious dicta on the virtue of being good at what you do, ensconced in a protective bubble of parables (otherwise known as case studies). (via BoingBoing)
  4. Obsolete Technology — or, as I like to think of it, post-Zombie-apocalypse technology. Bone up on your kilns if you want your earthen cookware once our undead overlords are running (or, at least, lurching) the country. (via Bruce Sterling)