- VizCities Dev Diary — step-by-step recount of how they brought London’s data to life, SimCity-style.
- Google Fibre Isn’t That Impressive — For [gigabit broadband] to become truly useful and necessary, we’ll need to see a long-term feedback loop of utility and acceptance. First, super-fast lines must allow us to do things that we can’t do with the pedestrian internet. This will prompt more people to demand gigabit lines, which will in turn invite developers to create more apps that require high speed, and so on. What I discovered in Kansas City is that this cycle has not yet begun. Or, as Ars Technica put it recently, “The rest of the internet is too slow for Google Fibre.”
- gov.uk Recommendations on Open Source — Use open source software in preference to proprietary or closed source alternatives, in particular for operating systems, networking software, Web servers, databases and programming languages.
- Internet Bad Neighbourhoods (PDF) — bilingual PhD thesis. The idea behind the Internet Bad Neighborhood concept is that the probability of a host in behaving badly increases if its neighboring hosts (i.e., hosts within the same subnetwork) also behave badly. This idea, in turn, can be exploited to improve current Internet security solutions, since it provides an indirect approach to predict new sources of attacks (neighboring hosts of malicious ones).
"visualization" entries
Four short links: 19 March 2013
Visualizing City Data, Gigabits Unrealized, Use Open Source, and Bad IPs Cluster
Four short links: 18 March 2013
Big Lit Data, 6502 Assembly, Small Startup Analytics, and Javascript Heatmaps
- A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method (PDF) — This project was simultaneously an experiment in developing quantitative and computational methods for tracing changes in literary language. We wanted to see how far quantifiable features such as word usage could be pushed toward the investigation of literary history. Could we leverage quantitative methods in ways that respect the nuance and complexity we value in the humanities? To this end, we present a second set of results, the techniques and methodological lessons gained in the course of designing and running this project. Even litcrit becoming a data game.
- Easy6502 — get started writing 6502 assembly language. Fun way to get started with low-level coding.
- How Analytics Really Work at a Small Startup (Pete Warden) — The key for us is that we’re using the information we get primarily for decision-making (should we build out feature X?) rather than optimization (how can we improve feature X?). Nice rundown of tools and systems he uses, with plug for KissMetrics.
- webgl-heatmap (GitHub) — a JavaScript library for high performance heatmap display.
Visualization of the Week: Tweet connections between Twitter employees
While developing his new networks visualization platform Newk, Santiago Ortiz took it for a test drive on Twitter's corporate structure.
Designer Santiago Ortiz is developing a browser-based networks visualization platform called Newk. He took the platform for a spin and visualized the network of Twitter conversations between Twitter employees for the week of February 15 to February 22.
Four short links: 13 March 2013
HTML DRM, Visualizing Medical Sciences, Lifelong Learning, and Hardware Hackery
- What Tim Berners-Lee Doesn’t Know About HTML DRM (Guardian) — Cory Doctorow lays it out straight. HTML DRM is a bad idea, no two ways. The future of the Web is the future of the world, because everything we do today involves the net and everything we’ll do tomorrow will require it. Now it proposes to sell out that trust, on the grounds that Big Content will lock up its “content” in Flash if it doesn’t get a veto over Web-innovation. […] The W3C has a duty to send the DRM-peddlers packing, just as the US courts did in the case of digital TV.
- Visualizing the Topical Structure of the Medical Sciences: A Self-Organizing Map Approach (PLOSone) — a high-resolution visualization of the medical knowledge domain using the self-organizing map (SOM) method, based on a corpus of over two million publications.
- What Teens Get About The Internet That Parents Don’t (The Atlantic) — the Internet has been a lifeline for self-directed learning and connection to peers. In our research, we found that parents more often than not have a negative view of the role of the Internet in learning, but young people almost always have a positive one. (via Clive Thompson)
- Portable C64 — beautiful piece of C64 hardware hacking to embed a screen and battery in it. (via Hackaday)
Visualization of the Week: Sequester cuts by state
Data journalist Ryan Murphy dug into the White House sequester cut data to create a visualization of the economic impact of the sequester.
The sequester went into effect in the U.S. on Friday, and media outlets are busy fleshing out practical consequences and looking for solutions. Ryan Murphy at The Texas Tribune dug into the state-level data released by the White House (in PDF files, no less), converted it into a more user-friendly format and created an interactive visualization detailing the economic effect of the sequester cuts on each state in nine categories.
Visualization of the Week: Mobile World Congress’ economic impact on Barcelona
A visualization shows credit and terminal transactions the week before and the week during Mobile World Congress 2012.
Mobile World Congress is going on this week in Barcelona. CartoDB and BBVA teamed up to visualize the economic impact one of the world’s largest tech conferences has on its host city. The team took the credit card transaction data from Mobile World Congress 2012, separated by visitors and locals, and compared it to transactions the week before the conference in a running timeline visualization:
Visualization of the Week: Every meteorite strike mapped
Vizzuality and CartoDB co-founder Javier de la Torre created a heatmap of meteorite impacts and produced a how-to video of the map's creation.
The meteorite that struck Chelyabinsk, Russia, last week — the largest reported since 1908, when a meteor hit Tunguska, Siberia — prompted the Guardian’s Datablog team to pull together data from the Meteorological Society, identifying all known meteorite impacts on Earth, some dating back to 2300 B.C. The initial map the team created with the data seems to be down, but their map inspired Vizzuality and CartoDB co-founder Javier de la Torre to produce a heat map using the same data, which Datablog editor Simon Rogers also highlights at The Guardian.
Four short links: 20 February 2013
Corporate Networks, SimCity Analysis, Monetizing Memes, and Javascript Autocomplete
- The Network of Global Control (PLoS One) — We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. […] From an empirical point of view, a bow-tie structure with a very small and influential core is a new observation in the study of complex networks. We conjecture that it may be present in other types of networks where “rich-get-richer” mechanisms are at work. (via The New Aesthetic)
- Using SimCity to Diagnose My Home Town’s Traffic Problems — no actual diagnosis performed, but the modeling and observations gave insight. I always feel that static visualizations (infographics) are far less useful than an interactive simulation that can give you an intuitive sense of relationships and behaviour. once I’d built East Didsbury, the strip of shops in Northenden stopped making as much money as they once were, and some were even beginning to close down as my time ran out. Walk along Northenden high street, and you’ll know that feeling.
- How the Harlem Shake Went from Viral Sideshow to Global Meme (The Verge) — interesting because again the musician is savvy enough (and has tools and connections) to monetize popularity without trying to own every transaction involving his idea. Baauer and Mad Decent have generally been happy to let a hundred flowers bloom, permitting over 4,000 videos to use an excerpt of the song but quietly adding each of them to YouTube’s Content ID database, asserting copyright over the fan videos and claiming a healthy chunk of the ad revenue for each of them.
- typeahead.js (GitHub) — Javascript library for fast autocomplete.
Visualization of the Week: How people commute
Two visualizations look at how commuters get to and from work.
The Datablog team at The Guardian dug into the recently released 2011 UK census data and mapped how people around the UK get to work — by car, bike, train or walking.
Four short links: 12 February 2013
Handmade Hardware, Tab Silencer, Surprise and Models, and Sciencey GIFs
- Your USB Sticks Are Made With Chopsticks (Bunnie Huang) — behind-the-scenes on how USB sticks are made.
- mutetab — find and kill the Chrome tab making all the damn noise! (via Nelson Minar)
- Visualization, Modeling, and Surprises (John D Cook) — paraphrases Hadley Wickham: Visualization can surprise you, but it doesn’t scale well. Modelling scales well, but it can’t surprise you.
- Head Like an Orange — science animated GIFs, assembled from nature documentaries. (via Ed Yong)