- Economic Stress Map Outlines Recession’s Stories (AP) — The Stress Index synthesizes three complex sets of ever-evolving data. By factoring in monthly numbers for foreclosure, bankruptcy and most painfully unemployment, the AP has assembled a numeral that reflects the comparative pain each American county is feeling during these dark economic days. Fascinating view of the country, and I wish I had one for New Zealand.
- Handed Keys to Kingdom, Gamers Race to Bottom (Wired) — Free to play the game as they like, players frequently make choices that ruin the fun. It’s an irony that can prove death to game publishers: Far from loving their liberty, players seem to quickly bore of the “ideal” games they’ve created for themselves and quit early. Not only a lesson for creators of user-generated content sites, but also for students of human nature: if you provide a number, some people will act to maximize that number come what may. See also friend counts on social networks. (via jasonwryan on Twitter)
- San Jose Mercury News to Charge For Online Content — congratulations to the SJMN for trying something, my regrets that it’s this. This business model didn’t fail in 1998 because there weren’t enough people on the Internet, it failed for the same reason it will fail now: you have a generic product and a cheaper substitute will win.
- Two Groundbreaking Open Source Projects — two open source projects that are developing software in very different ways (one with centralised authority, one more distributed), large (60k and 200k+ LOC), in some cases teaching people to code from scratch, with a wonderful vibe and solid outputs. I was stunned and delighted at the OTW’s process for choosing a programming language for the Archive. In the Livejournal post, Python vs Ruby deathmatch!, they asked non-programmers to read up on either language and then write a short “Choose your own adventure” program. {The trick is that we would like you to try writing this program with no help from any programmers or coders. DO feel free to help each other out in the comments, ask your flist for help (as long as you say “no coders answer!”), or to Google for other help or ideas-in fact, if you find a different tutorial or book out there which you think is better than the ones below, we really want to hear about it.} There were 74 comments in reply, and the results — 150 volunteers on the project, many of whom had never programmed before — speak for themselves. It makes me realize how much of the macho meritocracy “it’s just about how GOOD YOU ARE” individual-excellence cocks-out culture in programming in general and open source in particular isn’t about what’s necessary to make good programs and good programmers, it’s what’s necessary to make great egos feel good about themselves.
"map" entries
Interactive map: bike movements in New York City and Washington, D.C.
The cities appear to breathe as bicycles move into office districts in the morning and out in the evening.
From midnight to 7:30 A.M., New York is uncharacteristically quiet, its Citi Bikes — the city’s new shared bicycles — largely stationary and clustered in residential neighborhoods. Then things begin to move: commuters check out the bikes en masse in residential areas across Manhattan and, over the next two hours, relocate them to Midtown, the Flatiron district, SoHo, and Wall Street. There they remain concentrated, mostly used for local trips, until they start to move back outward around 5 P.M.
Washington, D.C.’s bike-share program exhibits a similar pattern, though, as you’d expect, the movement starts a little earlier in the morning. On my animated map, both cities look like they’re breathing — inhaling and then exhaling once over the course of 12 hours or so.
The map below shows availability at bike stations in New York City and the Washington, D.C. area across the course of the day. Read more…
Visualization of the Week: Mapping Mexico’s drug war
Diego Valle-Jones' interactive map illustrates the toll of Mexico's drug war.
This week's visualization comes from Diego Valle-Jones, who has created a powerful interactive map of the drug-related homicides in Mexico since 2004.
Visualization of the Week: Mapping Mexico's drug war
Diego Valle-Jones' interactive map illustrates the toll of Mexico's drug war.
This week's visualization comes from Diego Valle-Jones, who has created a powerful interactive map of the drug-related homicides in Mexico since 2004.
Visualization of the Week: Mapping traffic casualties
A BBC visualization maps every traffic casualty in the UK between 1999-2010.
More than a decade's worth of traffic accident data is plotted out in a BBC visualization. Locations with a history of accidents are hard to miss.
Visualization of the Week: Mapping U.S. Job Losses
The Geography of Jobs charts U.S. jobs gained and lost from 2004 to the present.
Geography of Jobs, an interactive visualization from TIP Strategies, illustrates the dramatic ebb and flow of U.S. jobs over the last seven years.
Strata Week: Hadoop adds security to its skill set
Hadoop and security, surprising results from a consumer data survey, and disconcerting data retention legislation.
In the latest Strata Week: Will big data offer us more security insights? Or will large data stores become targets for security threats? Plus: A very old map gets a digital upgrade.
Points of Control: The Web 2.0 Summit Map
Internet companies are jockeying for positions that will benefit them for years to come.
In our planning for this year’s Web 2.0 Summit, John Battelle and I have expanded on the metaphor of “the Great Game,” as we explore the many ways Internet companies at all levels of the stack are looking for points of control that will give them competitive advantage in the years to come.
Mapumental: Time & Scenicness in Maps
MySociety has given us a sneak peak at Mapumental, a map app that lets you pivot on travel-time, “scenicness”, and house-price in the London area. Just enter a postal code and if you’re looking for a home in the area Mapumental should be very helpful to you. It is an update to a previous foray into temporal maps (you can try it out on the embed in a Radar post of mine).
Four short links: 19 May 2009
Recession Map, Gaming Psychology, Charging For Unwanted Content, and Two Great Projects
Four short links: 12 May 2009
Storage Superfluity, Data-Driven Design, Twit-Mapping, and DIY Biohacking
- Lacie 10TB Storage — for what used to be the price of a good computer, you can now buy 10TB of storage. Storage on sale goes for less than $100 a terabyte. This obviously promotes collecting, hoarding, packratting, and the search technology necessary to find what you’ve stashed away. Analogies to be drawn between McMansions full of Chinese-made crap and terabyte drive full of downloaded crap. Do we need to keep it? Are there psychological consequences to clutter? (via gizmodo)
- In Defense of Data-Driven Design — a thoughtful response to the “Google hates design!” hashmob formed around designer Douglas Bowman’s departure from Google. When you’ve got the enormous traffic necessary to work out if miniscule changes have some minor, statistically significant effect, then sure, if you can do it quickly, why wouldn’t you? But that’s optimization that should happen at the very end of the design cycle. The cart goes after the horse. Put it the other way ‘round and you have a broken setup. It doesn’t mean horses suck. It doesn’t mean carts suck. Carts are not the enemy of horses. Optimization is not the enemy of design. Get them in the right order and you have something really useful. Get them the wrong way around and you have something broken.
- Just Landed: Processing + Twitter + Metacarta + Hidden Data — Jer searched Twitter for “just landed in”, used Metacarta to extract the locations mentioned, and then used Processing to build visualizations.
- Do It Yourself Genetic Sleuthing — MIT is starting a hotbed of DIY biologists. The 23-year-old MIT graduate uses tools that fit neatly next to her shoe rack. There is a vintage thermal cycler she uses to alternately heat and cool snippets of DNA, a high-voltage power supply scored on eBay, and chemicals stored in the freezer in a box that had once held vegan “bacon” strips. Aull is on a quirky journey of self-discovery for the genetics age, seeking the footprint of a disease that can be fatal but is easily treated if identified. But her quest also raises a broader question: If hobbyists working on computers in their garages can create companies such as Apple, could genetics follow suit? It’s unclear what those DIY-started “genetics” companies would look like–the potential is there, but it’s yet to met the right problem. (via Andy Oram)
Just Landed – 36 Hours from blprnt on Vimeo.