"visualisation" entries

Four short links: 13 January 2015

Four short links: 13 January 2015

Slack Culture, Visualizations of Text Analysis, Wearables and Big Data, and Snooping on Keyboards

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 13, 2015
  1. Building the Workplace We Want (Slack) — culture is the manifestation of what your company values. What you reward, who you hire, how work is done, how decisions are made — all of these things are representations of the things you value and the culture you’ve wittingly or unwittingly created. Nice (in the sense of small, elegant) explanation of what they value at Slack.
  2. Interpretation and Trust: Designing Model-Driven Visualizations for Text Analysis (PDF) — Based on our experiences and a literature review, we distill a set of design recommendations and describe how they promote interpretable and trustworthy visual analysis tools.
  3. The Internet of Things Has Four Big Data Problems (Alistair Croll) — What the IoT needs is data. Big data and the IoT are two sides of the same coin. The IoT collects data from myriad sensors; that data is classified, organized, and used to make automated decisions; and the IoT, in turn, acts on it. It’s precisely this ever-accelerating feedback loop that makes the coin as a whole so compelling. Nowhere are the IoT’s data problems more obvious than with that darling of the connected tomorrow known as the wearable. Yet, few people seem to want to discuss these problems.
  4. Keysweeper — a stealthy Arduino-based device, camouflaged as a functioning USB wall charger, that wirelessly and passively sniffs, decrypts, logs, and reports back (over GSM) all keystrokes from any Microsoft wireless keyboard in the vicinity. Designs and demo videos included.
Four short links: 29 December 2014

Four short links: 29 December 2014

Open Source Submersible, Web Language, Cheap Robot Arm, and Visualisation Trends

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 29, 2014
  1. OpenROV — open source submersible, funded in 1 day on Kickstarter, now available for purchase.
  2. Ur/Web — web application language that’s functional, pure, statically typed, and strict. (via IT World)
  3. MeArm (Thingiverse) — a low cost robot arm. The meArm is designed to be light weight and inexpensive – to be the perfect introduction to robotics. Design on Thingiverse, kickstarting the controller.
  4. Eric Rodenbeck on Running a Studio (Flowing Data) — Stamen’s founder on the challenges of staying current. I hadn’t realised quite how quickly the visualisation field is changing.
Four short links: 26 December 2014

Four short links: 26 December 2014

Science Software, Better Bitmaps, Pushy Internet, and Graphical Perception

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 26, 2014
  1. How Bad Software Leads to Bad Science — 21% of scientists who write software have never received training in software development.
  2. Roaring Bitmaps — compressed bitmaps which tend to outperform conventional compressed bitmaps such as WAH, EWAH or Concise. In some instances, they can be hundreds of times faster and they often offer significantly better compression.
  3. Two Eras of the Internet: From Pull to Push (Chris Dixon) — in which the consumer becomes the infinite sink for an unending and constant stream of updates, media, and social mobile local offers to swipe right on brands near you.
  4. Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Methods (PDF) — research on how well people decode visual cues. In order: Position along a common scale e.g. scatter plot; Position on identical but nonaligned scales e.g. multiple scatter plots; Length e.g. bar chart; Angle & Slope (tie) e.g. pie chart; Area e.g. bubbles; Volume, density, and color saturation (tie) e.g. heatmap; Color hue e.g. newsmap. (via Flowing Data)
Four short links: 18 December 2014

Four short links: 18 December 2014

Manufacturer Rootkits, Dangerous Dongle, Physical Visualisation, and Cryptoed Comms

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 18, 2014
  1. Popular Chinese Android Smartphone Backdoored By Manufacturer — Coolpad is the third largest smartphone builder in China, and ranks sixth worldwide with 3.7 percent global market share. It trails only Lenovo and Xiaomi in China and is the leader of China’s 4G market with 16 percent market share. Coolpad outsells Samsung and Apple in China, and has said it plans to expand globally with a goal of 60 million phones worldwide. For now, its high-end Halo Dazen phones are the only ones containing the backdoor, Palo Alto said. Backdoor enabled installation of other apps, dial numbers, send messages, and report back to the mothership. The manufacturer even ran the command-and-control nodes for the malware.
  2. USB Driveby — dongle that plugs into USB, and tries to root the box. Specifically, when you normally plug in a mouse or keyboard into a machine, no authorization is required to begin using them. The devices can simply begin typing and clicking. We exploit this fact by sending arbitrary keystrokes meant to launch specific applications (via Spotlight/Alfred/Quicksilver), permanently evade a local firewall (Little Snitch), install a reverse shell in crontab, and even modify DNS settings without any additional permissions.
  3. Physical Data Visualisations — a chronological list of physical visualizations and related artifacts. (via Flowing Data)
  4. Dissent — an anonymous communication substrate intended primarily for applications built on a broadcast communication model: for example, bulletin boards, wikis, auctions, or voting. Users of an online group obtain cryptographic guarantees of sender and receiver anonymity, message integrity, disruption resistance, proportionality, and location hiding. And a pony.
Four short links: 1 August 2014

Four short links: 1 August 2014

Data Storytelling Tools, Massive Dataset Mining, Failed Crowdsourcing, and IoT Networking

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | August 1, 2014
  1. Miso — Dataset, a JavaScript client-side data management and transformation library, Storyboard, a state and flow-control management library & d3.chart, a framework for creating reusable charts with d3.js. Open source designed to expedite the creation of high-quality interactive storytelling and data visualisation content.
  2. Mining of Massive Datasets (PDF) — book by Stanford profs, focuses on data mining of very large amounts of data, that is, data so large it does not fit in main memory. Because of the emphasis on size, many of our examples are about the Web or data derived from the Web. Further, the book takes an algorithmic point of view: data mining is about applying algorithms to data, rather than using data to “train” a machine-learning engine of some sort.
  3. Lessons from Iceland’s Failed Crowdsourced Constitution (Slate) — Though the crowdsourcing moment could have led to a virtuous deliberative feedback loop between the crowd and the Constitutional Council, the latter did not seem to have the time, tools, or training necessary to process carefully the crowd’s input, explain its use of it, let alone return consistent feedback on it to the public.
  4. Thread a ZigBee Killer? — Thread is Nest’s home automation networking stack, which can use the same hardware components as ZigBee, but which is not compatible, also not open source. The Novell NetWare of Things. Nick Hunn makes argument that Google (via Nest) are taking aim at ZigBee: it’s Google and Nest saying “ZigBee doesn’t work”.
Four short links: 11 July 2014

Four short links: 11 July 2014

Curated Code, Hackable Browser, IoT Should Be Open, and Better Treemaps

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 11, 2014
  1. Awesome Awesomeness — list of curated collections of frameworks and libraries in various languages that do not suck. They solve the problem of “so, I’m new to (language) and don’t want to kiss a lot of frogs before I find the right tool for a particular task”.
  2. Breach — a hackable, modular web browser.
  3. The CompuServe of Things (Phil Windley) — How we build the Internet of Things has far-reaching consequences for the humans who will use—or be used by—it. Will we push forward, connecting things using forests of silos that are reminiscent the online services of the 1980’s, or will we learn the lessons of the Internet and build a true Internet of Things? (via Cory Doctorow)
  4. FoamTree — nifty treemap layouts and animations, in Javascript. (via Flowing Data)
Four short links: 19 February 2014

Four short links: 19 February 2014

Slippy History, TPP Comic, SynBio Barriers, and 3D City Viz

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 19, 2014
  1. 1746 Slippy Map of London — very nice use of Google Maps to recontextualise historic maps. (via USvTh3m)
  2. TPP Comic — the comic explaining TPP that you’ve been waiting for. (via BoingBoing)
  3. Synthetic Biology Investor’s Lament — some hypotheses about why synbio is so slow to fire.
  4. vizcities — open source 3D (OpenGL) city and data visualisation platform, using open data.

Four short links: 10 February 2014

Four short links: 10 February 2014

Sterling Zings, Android Swings, Data Blings, and Visualized Things.

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 10, 2014
  1. Bruce Sterling at transmediale 2014 (YouTube) — “if it works, it’s already obsolete.” Sterling does a great job of capturing the current time: spies in your Internet, lost trust with the BigCos, the impermanence of status quo, the need to create. (via BoingBoing)
  2. No-one Should Fork Android (Ars Technica) — this article is bang on. Google Mobile Services (the Play functionality) is closed-source, what makes Android more than a bare-metal OS, and is where G is focusing its development. Google’s Android team treats openness like a bug and routes around it.
  3. Data Pipelines (Hakkalabs) — interesting overview of the data pipelines of Stripe, Tapad, Etsy, and Square.
  4. Visualising Salesforce Data in Minecraft — would almost make me look forward to using Salesforce. Almost.
Four short links: 22 October 2013

Four short links: 22 October 2013

Rich Text Editing, Structural Visualisation, DDoS Protection, Realtime DDoS Map

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | October 22, 2013
  1. Sir Trevor — nice rich-text editing. Interesting how Markdown has become the way to store formatted text without storing HTML (and thus exposing the CSRF-inducing HTML-escaping stuckfastrophe).
  2. Slate for Excel — visualising spreadsheet structure. I’d be surprised if it took MSFT or Goog 30 days to acquire them.
  3. Project Shield — Google project to protect against DDoSes.
  4. Digital Attack Map — DDoS attacks going on around the world. (via Jim Stogdill)
Four short links: 25 December 2012

Four short links: 25 December 2012

Regressive Future, Data Viz, Sterile Pump, and Javascript App Kit

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 25, 2012
  1. RebelMouse — aggregates FB, Twitter, Instagram, G+ content w/Pinboard-like aesthetics. It’s like aggregators we’ve had since 2004, but in this Brave New World we have to authenticate to a blogging service to get our own public posts out in a machine-readable form. 2012: it’s like 2000 but now we have FOUR AOLs! We’ve traded paywalls for graywalls, but the walls are still there. (via Poynter)
  2. Data Visualization Course Wiki — wiki for Stanford course cs448b, covering visualization with examples and critiques.
  3. Peristaltic Pump — for your Arduino medical projects, a pump that doesn’t touch the liquid it moves so the liquid can stay sterile.
  4. Breeze — MIT-licensed Javascript framework for building rich web apps.