"viz" entries

Four short links: 6 January 2016

Four short links: 6 January 2016

Spherical Projection, Sterling's Future, GNU Radio, and End-to-End Design

  1. Science on a Sphere — for when you want to see global data visualised without 2-D projection distortion.
  2. Lebowsky and Sterling’s 2016 State of the WorldThese physical barriers will suffer the “Fukushima effect:” the dikes you built to resist the tsunami only hold those catastrophic waters in, once the almighty wave comes over the top. Also, the industrial complex you are trying to protect from natural disaster becomes the source of a secondary, artificial disaster. (via BoingBoing)
  3. GNU Radio Tools for Radio Wrangling/Spectrum Domination (YouTube) — DEFCON talk.
  4. End-to-End Arguments in System Design (PDF) — End-to-end arguments are a kind of “Occam’s razor” when it comes to choosing the functions to be provided in a communication subsystem. Because the communication subsystem is frequently specified before applications that use the subsystem are known, the designer may be tempted to “help” the users by taking on more function than necessary. Awareness of end-to-end arguments can help to reduce such temptations.
Four short links: 24 December 2015

Four short links: 24 December 2015

Python Viz, Linux Scavenger Hunt, Sandbox Environment, and Car Code

  1. Foliummakes it easy to visualize data that’s been manipulated in Python on an interactive Leaflet map. It enables both the binding of data to a map for choropleth visualizations as well as passing Vincent/Vega visualizations as markers on the map.
  2. scavenger-huntA scavenger hunt to learn Linux commands.
  3. SEE — F-Secure’s open source Sandboxed Execution Environment (SEE) is a framework for building test automation in secured Environments.
  4. The Problem with Self-Driving Cars: Who Controls the Code? (Cory Doctorow) — Here’s a different way of thinking about this problem: if you wanted to design a car that intentionally murdered its driver under certain circumstances, how would you make sure that the driver never altered its programming so that they could be assured that their property would never intentionally murder them?
Four short links: 28 October 2015

Four short links: 28 October 2015

DRM-Breaking Broken, IT Failures, Social Graph Search, and Dataviz Interview

  1. Librarian of Congress Grants Limited DRM-Breaking Rights (Cory Doctorow) — The Copyright Office said you will be able to defeat locks on your car’s electronics, provided: You wait a year first (the power to impose waiting times on exemptions at these hearings is not anywhere in the statute, is without precedent, and has no basis in law); You only look at systems that do not interact with your car’s entertainment system (meaning that car makers can simply merge the CAN bus and the entertainment system and get around the rule altogether); Your mechanic does not break into your car — only you are allowed to do so. The whole analysis is worth reading—this is not a happy middle-ground; it’s a mess. And remember: there are plenty of countries without even these exemptions.
  2. Lessons from a Decade of IT Failures (IEEE Spectrum) — full of cautionary tales like, Note: No one has an authoritative set of financials on ECSS. That was made clear in the U.S. Senate investigation report, which expressed frustration and outrage that the Air Force couldn’t tell it what was spent on what, when it was spent, nor even what ECSS had planned to spend over time. Scary stories to tell children at night.
  3. Unicorn: A System for Searching the Social Graph (Facebook) — we describe the data model and query language supported by Unicorn, which is an online, in-memory social graph-aware indexing system designed to search trillions of edges between tens of billions of users and entities on thousands of commodity servers. Unicorn is based on standard concepts in information retrieval, but it includes features to promote results with good social proximity. It also supports queries that require multiple round-trips to leaves in order to retrieve objects that are more than one edge away from source nodes.
  4. Alberto Cairo InterviewSo, what really matters to me is not the intention of the visualization – whether you created it to deceive or with the best of intentions; what matters is the result: if the public is informed or the public is misled. In terms of ethics, I am a consequentialist – meaning that what matters to me ethically is the consequences of our actions, not so much the intentions of our actions.
Four short links: 6 October 2015

Four short links: 6 October 2015

System Intuition, Magic is Power, Predicting Behaviour, Payment Required

  1. 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.
  2. 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)
  3. 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.”
  4. 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.
Four short links: 26 May 2015

Four short links: 26 May 2015

Keyboard Programming, Oblique Strategies, Engineering Ethics, and Visualisation Gallery

  1. Introduction to Keyboard Programming — what happens when you press a key. (hint: a lot)
  2. Oblique Strategies: Prompts for ProgrammersDo it both ways. Very often doing it both ways is faster than analyzing which is best. Now you also have experimental data instead of just theoretical. Add a toggle if possible. This will let you choose later. Some mistakes are cheaper to make than to avoid.
  3. The Responsibility We Have as Software EngineersWhere’s our Hippocratic Oath, our “First, Do No Harm?” Remember that moment when Google went from “amazing wonderful thing we didn’t have before, which makes our lives so much better” to “another big scary company and holy shit it knows a lot about us!”? That’s coming for our industry and the software engineering profession in particular.
  4. Gallery of Concept Visualisation — plenty I hadn’t seen before.
Four short links: 29 April 2015

Four short links: 29 April 2015

Deceptive Visualisation, Small Robots, Managing Secrets, and Large Time Series

  1. Disinformation Visualisation: How to Lie with DatavisWe don’t spread visual lies by presenting false data. That would be lying. We lie by misrepresenting the data to tell the very specific story we’re interested in telling. If this is making you slightly uncomfortable, that’s a good thing; it should. If you’re concerned about adopting this new and scary habit, well, don’t worry; it’s not new. Just open your CV to be reminded you’ve lied with truthful data before. This time, however, it will be explicit and visual. (via Regine Debatty)
  2. Microtugsa new type of small robot that can apply orders of magnitude more force than it weighs. This is in stark contrast to previous small robots that have become progressively better at moving and sensing, but lacked the ability to change the world through the application of human-scale loads.
  3. Vaulta tool for securely managing secrets and encrypting data in-transit.
  4. iSAX: Indexing and Mining Terabyte Sized Time Series (PDF) — Our approach allows both fast exact search and ultra-fast approximate search. We show how to exploit the combination of both types of search as sub-routines in data mining algorithms, allowing for the exact mining of truly massive real-world data sets, containing millions of time series. (via Benjamin Black)
Four short links: 16 February 2015

Four short links: 16 February 2015

Grace Hopper, Car Dashboard UIs, DAO Governance, and Sahale.

  1. The Queen of Code — 12m documentary on Grace Hopper, produced by fivethirtyeight.com.
  2. Car Dashboard UI Collection — inspiration board for your (data) dashboards.
  3. Subjectivity-Exploitability TradeoffVoting-based DAOs, lacking an equivalent of shareholder regulation, are vulnerable to attacks where 51% of participants collude to take all of the DAO’s assets for themselves […] The example supplied here will define a new, third, hypothetical form of blockchain or DAO governance. Every day we’re closer to Stross’s Accelerando.
  4. Sahale — open source cascading workflow visualizer to help you make sense of tasks decomposed into Hadoop jobs. (via Code as Craft)
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

  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. Keysweepera 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: 26 December 2014

Four short links: 26 December 2014

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

  1. How Bad Software Leads to Bad Science — 21% of scientists who write software have never received training in software development.
  2. Roaring Bitmapscompressed 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

  1. Popular Chinese Android Smartphone Backdoored By ManufacturerCoolpad 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 Visualisationsa chronological list of physical visualizations and related artifacts. (via Flowing Data)
  4. Dissentan 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.