- Metrico — puzzle game for Playstation centered around infographics (charts and graphs). (via Flowing Data)
- The Lease They Can Do (Business Week) — excellent Paul Ford piece on money, law, and music streaming services. So this is not about technology. Nor is it really about music. This is about determining the optimal strategy for mass licensing of digital artifacts.
- How Effective Is a Humanoid Robot as a Tool for Interviewing Young Children? (PLosONE) — The results reveal that the children interacted with KASPAR very similar to how they interacted with a human interviewer. The quantitative behaviour analysis reveal that the most notable difference between the interviews with KASPAR and the human were the duration of the interviews, the eye gaze directed towards the different interviewers, and the response time of the interviewers. These results are discussed in light of future work towards developing KASPAR as an ‘interviewer’ for young children in application areas where a robot may have advantages over a human interviewer, e.g. in police, social services, or healthcare applications.
- Funding: Australia’s Grant System Wastes Time (Nature, paywalled) — We found that scientists in Australia spent more than five centuries’ worth of time preparing research-grant proposals for consideration by the largest funding scheme of 2012. Because just 20.5% of these applications were successful, the equivalent of some four centuries of effort returned no immediate benefit to researchers.
"visualization" entries
Four short links: 2 May 2013
Infographics Game, Streaming Money, Robot Interviews, and Inefficient Science Funding
Visualization of the Week: A DDoS attack on VideoLAN downloads infrastructure
Using Logstalgia, developer Ludovic Fauvet created a video visualization of a recent DDoS attack on VideoLAN.
In the wake of a recent DDoS attack on open source software distributor VideoLAN, developer Ludovic Fauvet created a video visualization to show what the attack looked like.
Visualization of the Week: Every recorded U.S terror attack 1970-2011
Using START Global Terrorism data, Simon Rogers mapped every U.S. terror attack recorded between 1970 and 2011.
The recent terror attack at the Boston Marathon prompted the Guardian’s Simon Rogers (who will soon be Twitter’s Simon Rogers) to look into the history of attacks on U.S. soil. Using data from the START Global Terrorism Database, Rogers mapped every recorded terrorist incident in the U.S. from 1970 to 2011.
Four short links: 10 April 2013
Street View Tiles Hacks, Policy Simulation, Map Tile Toolbox, and Connected Sensor Device HowTo
- HyperLapse — this won the Internet for April. Everyone else can go home. Check out this unbelievable video and source is available.
- Housing Simulator — NZ’s largest city is consulting on its growth plan, and includes a simulator so you can decide where the growth to house the hundreds of thousands of predicted residents will come from. Reminds me of NPR’s Budget Hero. Notice that none of the levers control immigration or city taxes to make different cities attractive or unattractive. Growth is a given and you’re left trying to figure out which green fields to pave.
- Converting To and From Google Map Tile Coordinates in PostGIS (Pete Warden) — Google Maps’ system of power-of-two tiles has become a defacto standard, widely used by all sorts of web mapping software. I’ve found it handy to use as a caching scheme for our data, but the PostGIS calls to use it were getting pretty messy, so I wrapped them up in a few functions. Code on github.
- So You Want to Build A Connected Sensor Device? (Google Doc) — The purpose of this document is to provide an overview of infrastructure, options, and tradeoffs for the parts of the data ecosystem that deal with generating, storing, transmitting, and sharing data. In addition to providing an overview, the goal is to learn what the pain points are, so we can address them. This is a collaborative document drafted for the purpose of discussion and contribution at Sensored Meetup #10. (via Rachel Kalmar)
Visualization of the Week: A day in the life of a bus line
Urban Data Challenge winners Adam Greenhall, Amelia Greenhall, and Jared McFarland visualized bus route activity for Zurich, San Francisco, and Geneva.
The Urban Data Challenge winners have been announced. The grand prize was awarded to the team behind the Dots on the Bus animated, interactive visualization — Adam Greenhall, Amelia Greenhall, and Jared McFarland.
The team culled public transportation data provided for the contest by Zurich, San Francisco, and Geneva from the week of October 1-7, 2012. According to the about pop-up on the visualization site, the data included “each bus, the time it arrived at each stop, and how many people got on and off (as counted by lasers), along with the lat/long of each stop and route.”
Visualization of the Week: Block-level electricity use in Los Angeles
CCSC researcher Jacki Murdock created an interactive map of electricity use in LA as part of her Master's Capstone project.
California Center for Sustainable Communities (CCSC) researcher Jacki Murdock, along with advisor Yoh Kawano, GIS Coordinator at the Institute for Digital Research and Education at UCLA, has developed an interactive map of electricity use in Los Angeles at the Census block group level.
Four short links: 3 April 2013
Binary Data Is Back, Scala Data, Visualization Grammar, and Pastebin Monitor
- Capn Proto — open source faster protocol buffers (binary data interchange format and RPC system).
- Saddle — a high performance data manipulation library for Scala.
- Vega — a visualization grammar, a declarative format for creating, saving and sharing visualization designs. (via Flowing Data)
- dumpmon — Twitter bot that monitors paste sites for password dumps and other sensitive information. Source on github, see the announcement for more.
Visualization of the Week: MOOC completion rates
Educational researcher Katy Jordan created an interactive visualization using completion and enrollment data from recent MOOCs.
Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, offered through platforms such as Coursera, EdX and Udacity, are arguably helping to fill higher education needs around the world. Educational researcher Katy Jordan noted in a post, however, that “although thousands enroll for courses, a very small proportion actually complete the course.” To take a closer look, she pulled together an interactive visualization to show enrollment numbers and completion rates from recent MOOCs.
Visualization of the Week: The USDA’s Food Access Research Atlas
New interactive maps from the USDA show "food deserts" across the United States.
The USDA has put together a new interactive Food Access Research Atlas to help locate “food deserts,” or places where people have limited access to grocery stores and other sources of healthy and affordable food. The map could be helpful for city planners looking to develop new grocery stores or locate good places for farmers’ markets.
Four short links: 20 March 2013
"Piracy" Good for Sales, Digital Humanities, Javascript Source Formatting, and Research by BotNet
- Digital Music Consumption on the Internet: Evidence from Clickstream Data (Scribd) — The goal of this paper is to analyze the behavior of digital music consumers on the Internet. Using clickstream data on a panel of more than 16,000 European consumers, we estimate the effects of illegal downloading and legal streaming on the legal purchases of digital music. Our results suggest that Internet users do not view illegal downloading as a substitute to legal digital music. Although positive and significant, our estimated elasticities are essentially zero: a 10% increase in clicks on illegal downloading websites leads to a 0.2% increase in clicks on legal purchases websites. Online music streaming services are found to have a somewhat larger (but still small) effect on the purchases of digital sound recordings, suggesting complementarities between these two modes of music consumption. According to our results, a 10% increase in clicks on legal streaming websites lead to up to a 0.7% increase in clicks on legal digital purchases websites. We find important cross country difference in these effects. A paper from the EU commission’s in-house science service. (via Don Christie)
- Six Degrees of Francis Bacon — data-driven research into “the early-modern social network”. (via Jonathan Gray)
- jsshaper — an extensible framework for JavaScript syntax tree shaping. Super-powerful source code reformatter & more for Javascript.
- Internet Census 2012 — scanning the net via botnet. Appalling how many unsecured devices are directly connected to the net. Also appalling how underused the address space is.