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"visualisations" entries
Malicious Traffic, Visual Analysis, C History, and Immersive Gaming
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Maltrail — a malicious traffic detection system, utilizing publicly available (black)lists containing malicious and/or generally suspicious trails, along with static trails compiled from various AV reports and custom user defined lists[…]. Also, it has (optional) advanced heuristic mechanisms that can help in discovery of unknown threats (e.g. new malware). (via Nick Galbreath)
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Vega-Lite — high-level grammar for visual analysis, built on top of Vega. (via Curran Kelleher)
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C History — Dennis Ritchie’s 1993 notes on the history of the C programming language explains the origins of a.out and arrays as pointers, and has a reminder of how tight those systems were: Of the 24K bytes of memory on the machine, the earliest PDP-11 Unix system used 12K bytes for the operating system, a tiny space for user programs, and the remainder as a RAM disk.
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Zero Latency — immersive gaming with Oculus headsets. Detailed and positive.
Open Source ZeroDB, HTTP Statuses, Project Activity, and Database Readings
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ZeroDB is Open Source — end-to-end encrypted database goes open source (AGPL, *ptui*).
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Choosing an HTTP Status Code — or “an alternative to engineers duelling.”
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Open Source Monthly — views of open source projects through their GitHub activity.
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Readings in Database Science (5ed) — HTML and PDF versions of the papers.
Radical Candour, Historical Social Network, Compliance Opportunities, and Mobile Numbers
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Radical Candour: The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss — this, every word, this. “Caring personally makes it much easier to do the next thing you have to do as a good boss, which is being willing to piss people off.”
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Six Degrees of Francis Bacon — recreates the British early modern social network to trace the personal relationships among figures like Bacon, Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and many others. (via CMU)
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Last Bus Startup Standing (TechCrunch) — Vahabzadeh stressed that a key point of Chariot’s survival has been that the company has been above-board with the law from day one. “They haven’t cowboy-ed it,” said San Francisco supervisor Scott Wiener, a mass transit advocate who recently pushed for a master subway plan for the city. “They’ve been good about taking feedback and making sure they’re complying with the law. I’m a fan and think that private transportation options and rideshares have a significant role to play in making us a transit-first city.”
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Mobile App Developers are Suffering — the top 20 app publishers, representing less than 0.005% of all apps, earn 60% of all app store revenue. The article posits causes of the particularly extreme power law.
System Intuition, Magic is Power, Predicting Behaviour, Payment Required
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Flux: New Approach to System Intuition (LinkedIn) — In general, we assume that if anything is best represented numerically, then we don’t need to visualize it. If the best representation is a numerical one, then a visualization could only obscure a quantifiable piece of information that can be measured, compared, and acted upon. Anything that we can wrap in alerts or some threshold boundary should kick off some automated process. No point in ruining a perfectly good system by introducing a human into the mix. Instead of numerical information, we want a tool that surfaces relevant information to a human, for situations that would be too onerous to create a heuristic. These situations require an intuition that we can’t codify.
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Jumping to the End: Practical Design Fiction (Vimeo) — “Magic is a power relationship” — Matt Jones on the flipside of hiding complex behaviours from users and making stuff “work like magic.” (via Richard Pope)
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Predicting Daily Activities from Egocentric Images Using Deep Learning — aka “people wear cameras and we can figure out what they’re going to do next.”
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402: Payment Required (David Humphrey) — The ad blocking discussion highlights our total lack of imagination, where a browser’s role is reduced to “render” or “don’t render.” There are a whole world of options in between that we should be exploring.
Go Examples, Penrose Map Hacks, Robotics Industry, and Archaeological Robotics
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Go By Example — a chance to replicate the experience of learning Perl or PHP, whereby you know nothing but copy and adapt other people’s code until it works and you’ve empirically acquired an intuition for what will trigger the compiler’s deathray and eventually someone points you to the docs that were opaque and suddenly a lightbulb goes off in your head and you shout “omigod I finally get it!” and the Real Engineer beside you rolls their eyes and gets back to genericising their containers for consensus or whatever it is that Real Engineers do now.
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Penrose Binning — entrancing visual hack for maps.
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Chinese Shopping for Robotic Ventures — Amazon has drones, Facebook has VR, Google and China are fighting it out for Robots. Meanwhile, Apple is curled up in a mountain filled with gold, their paws twitching and stroking their watches as they dream of battles to come.
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Robot Arm Brings Humanity Back to the Stone Age (IEEE) — Using robots to build a massive database of scrape/wear patterns for different stone-age tools. Currently, Iovita is experiencing some opposition from within his own profession. Some believe that manual experiments are closer to the past reality; others find that use-wear analysis in general does not advance archaeological theory. Iovita thinks this is mainly due to the fact that most archaeologists have a humanities background and are not familiar with the world of engineers. OH SNAP.
Occupation Changes, Country Data, Cultural Analytics, and Dysfunctional Software Engineering Organisations
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The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks (PDF) — The only difference with more conventional models of skill-biased technological change is our modelling of the fruits of cognitive employment as creating a stock instead of a pure flow. This slight change causes technological change to generate a boom and bust cycle, as is common in most investment models. We also incorporated into this model a standard selection process whereby individuals sort into occupations based on their comparative advantage. The selection process is the key mechanism that explains why a reduction in the demand for cognitive tasks, which are predominantly filled by higher educated workers, can result in a loss of employment concentrated among lower educated workers. While we do not claim that our model is the only structure that can explain the observations we present, we believe it gives a very simple and intuitive explanation to the changes pre- and post-2000.
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provinces — state and province lists for (some) countries.
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Cultural Analytics — the use of computational and visualization methods for the analysis of massive cultural data sets and flows. Interesting visualisations as well as automated understandings.
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The Code is Just the Symptom — The engineering culture was a three-layer cake of dysfunction, where everyone down the chain had to execute what they knew to be an impossible task, at impossible speeds, perfectly. It was like the games of Simon Says and Telephone combined to bad effect. Most engineers will have flashbacks at these descriptions. Trigger warning: candid descriptions of real immature software organisations.
Thinking Machines, Chemical Sensor, Share Containerised Apps, and Visualising the Net Neutrality Comments
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Viv — another step in the cognition race. Wolfram Alpha was first out the gate, but Watson, Viv, and others are hot on heels of being able to parse complex requests, then seek and use information to fulfil them.
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Universal Mobile Electrochemical Detector Designed for Use in Resource-limited Applications (PNAS) — $35 handheld sensor with mobile phone connection. The electrochemical methods that we demonstrate enable quantitative, broadly applicable, and inexpensive sensing with flexibility based on a wide variety of important electroanalytical techniques (chronoamperometry, cyclic voltammetry, differential pulse voltammetry, square wave voltammetry, and potentiometry), each with different uses. Four applications demonstrate the analytical performance of the device: these involve the detection of (i) glucose in the blood for personal health, (ii) trace heavy metals (lead, cadmium, and zinc) in water for in-field environmental monitoring, (iii) sodium in urine for clinical analysis, and (iv) a malarial antigen (Plasmodium falciparum histidine-rich protein 2) for clinical research. (via BoingBoing)
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panamax.io — containerized app creator with an open-source app marketplace hosted in GitHub. Panamax provides a friendly interface for users of Docker, Fleet & CoreOS. With Panamax, you can easily create, share and deploy any containerized app no matter how complex it might be.
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Quid Analysis of Comments to FCC on Net Neutrality (NPR) — visualising the themes and volume of the comments. Interesting factoid: only half the comments were derived from templates (cf 80% in submissions to some financial legislation).