Entries tagged “geo”

Four short links: 18 April 2012

Four short links: 18 April 2012

Cartographic Data Tool, Astronomical Volumes of Astronomical Data, Faster Touch, and Why MS Open Source?

by  | @gnat  | +Nat Torkington | 18 April 2012

  1. CartoDB (GitHub) -- open source geospatial database, API, map tiler, and UI. For feature comparison, see Comparing Open Source CartoDB to Fusion Tables (via Nelson Minar).
  2. Future Telescope Array Drives Exabyte Processing (Ars Technica) -- Astronomical data is massive, and requires intense computation to analyze. If it works as planned, Square Kilometer Array will produce over one exabyte (260 bytes, or approximately 1 billion gigabytes) every day. This is roughly twice the global daily traffic of the entire Internet, and will require storage capacity at least 10 times that needed for the Large Hadron Collider. (via Greg Linden)
  3. Faster Touch Screens More Usable (Toms Hardware) -- check out that video! (via Greg Linden)
  4. Why Microsoft's New Open Source Division (Simon Phipps) -- The new "Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc." provides an ideal firewall to protect Microsoft from the risks it has been alleging exist in open source and open standards. As such, it will make it "easier and faster" for them to respond to the inevitability of open source in their market without constant push-back from cautious and reactionary corporate process.

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Four short links: 17 April 2012

Four short links: 17 April 2012

Animal Imagery, Infectious Ideas, Internet v Books, and Transparency Projects

by  | @gnat  | +Nat Torkington | 17 April 2012

  1. Penguins Counted From Space (Reuters) -- I love the unintended flow-on effects of technological progress. Nobody funded satellites because they'd help us get an accurate picture of wildlife in the Antarctic, but yet here we are. The street finds a use ...
  2. What Makes a Super-Spreader? -- A super-spreader is a person who transmits an infection to a significantly greater number of other people than the average infected person. The occurrence of a super spreader early in an outbreak can be the difference between a local outbreak that fizzles out and a regional epidemic. Cory, Waxy, Gruber, Ms BrainPickings Popova: I'm looking at you. (via BoingBoing)
  3. The Internet Did Not Kill Reading Books (The Atlantic) -- reading probably hasn't declined to the horrific levels of the 1950s.
  4. Data Transparency Hacks -- projects that came from the WSJ Data Transparency Codeathon.

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Four short links: 9 March 2012

Four short links: 9 March 2012

Real World User Experience, Biovis your Social Network, Analytics for Phone Sales, and Classy OpenStreetMap

by  | @gnat  | +Nat Torkington |  9 March 2012

  1. Why The Symphony Needs A Progress Bar (Elaine Wherry) -- an excellent interaction designer tackles the real world.
  2. Biologic -- view your social network as though looking at cells through a microscope. Gorgeous and different.
  3. The Cost of Cracking -- analysis of used phone listings to see what improves and decreases price yields some really interesting results. Phones described as “decent” are typically priced 23% below the median. Who would describe something they’re selling as "decent" and price it below market value unless something fishy was going on? [...] On average, cracking your phone destroys 30-50% of its value instantly. Particularly interesting to me since Ms 10 just brought home her phone with *cough* a new starburst screensaver.
  4. OpenStreetMap Welcomes Apple -- this is the classy way to deal with the world's richest company quietly and badly using your work without acknowledgement.

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Four short links: 5 December 2011

Four short links: 5 December 2011

Spatial Search, Exposing Your Phone's Perfidity, School Unconference, and Wikipedia Viz

by  | @gnat  | +Nat Torkington |  5 December 2011

  1. VP Trees -- a data structure for fast spatial searching. A form of nearest neighbour, useful for melodies (PDF) and image retrieval (PDF) and poetry. (via Reddit)
  2. iYou -- iTunes plugin to show you all the stuff your phone collects about you.
  3. Bar Camps in Primary Schools -- NZ teacher deploys bar camps among students. Great things happen.
  4. Realtime Wikipedia Edits -- fascinating and hypnotic and inspirational and appalling and irrelevant all at once.

Comments: 1 | 

ePayments Week: Financial Times bets on its web app

ePayments Week: Financial Times bets on its web app

Financial Times goes all-in on its web app, Flickr puts up fences, and daily deal fatigue sets in.

by  | @ndwoods  |  1 September 2011

The Financial Times says subscriber data trumps Apple's reach, Flickr introduces geofencing to keep things private, and the cracks in the daily deal world start to show.

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Snap to the graph, not the grid

Snap to the graph, not the grid

Location coordinate data lacks important context.

by  | @twbell  |  3 May 2011

Coordinate pairs are regular and orderly, but they are entirely ambiguous when used to represent more conceptual places like states, cities, stores and neighborhoods.

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Four short links: 8 April 2011

Four short links: 8 April 2011

Varnish Guide, Fields Revealed, Dev Leaderboard, and Map Documentary

by  | @gnat  | +Nat Torkington |  8 April 2011

  1. A Practical Guide to Varnish -- Varnish is the http accelerator used by the discerning devops.
  2. Ferrofluid Sculptures (New Scientist) -- hypnotic video of an iron-based fluid that is moulded by magnetic fields, which I include for no good reason than it is pretty pretty science. (via Courtney Johnston)
  3. Twisted Highscores List -- clever leaderboard for tickets, reviews, commits, and fixes. A fun retro presentation of the information, rather than a determined effort to jolly up the grim task of software development by spraying on a thin coat of gamejuice. (via Jacob Kaplan-Moss)
  4. Beauty of Maps (YouTube) -- BBC's "Beauty of Maps" tv show is available in full on YouTube. Aspects of visualization and design here, as well as practical cartography. (via Flowing Data)

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Four short links: 5 April 2011

Four short links: 5 April 2011

Big Maps, ssh VPN, Line Maps, and HTML5 Multiplayer Pacman

by  | @gnat  | +Nat Torkington |  5 April 2011

  1. The Big Map Blog -- awesome old maps, for the afficionado. (via Sacha Judd)
  2. sshuttle -- poor man's VPN built over ssh. (via Hacker News)
  3. Remembering LineDrive -- I, too, am bummed that LineDrive never became standard. And Maneesh, one of its cocreators. Check out his publications list!
  4. Websockets Pacman -- multiplayer Pacman, where players take the role of ghosts. All implemented with WebSockets in HTML5. (via Pete Warden)

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Four short links: 16 December 2010

Four short links: 16 December 2010

Compressing Graphs, Authentication Usability, Extreme Design, and Rails Geo

by  | @gnat  | +Nat Torkington | 16 December 2010

  1. On Compressing Social Networks (PDF) -- paper looking at the theory and practice of compressing social network graphs. Our main innovation here is to come up with a quick and useful method for generating an ordering on the social network nodes so that nodes with lots of common neighbors are near each other in the ordering, a property which is useful for compression (via My Biased Coin, via Matt Biddulph on Delicious)
  2. Requiring Email and Passwords for New Accounts (Instapaper blog) -- a list of reasons why the simple signup method of "pick a username, passwords are optional" turned out to be trouble in the long run. (via Courtney Johnston's Instapaper feed)
  3. Extreme Design -- building the amazing spacelog.org in an equally-amazing fashion. I want a fort.
  4. rgeo -- a new geo library for Rails. (via Daniel Azuma via Glen Barnes on Twitter)

Comments: 1 | 

Four short links: 25 November 2010

Four short links: 25 November 2010

Twitter Mapped, Bibliographic Data Released, Babies Engadgeted, and Nat's Christmas Present Sorted

by  | @gnat  | +Nat Torkington | 25 November 2010

  1. A Day in the Life of Twitter (Chris McDowall) -- all geo-tagged tweets from 24h of the Twitter firehose, displayed. Interesting things can be seen, such as Jakarta glowing as brightly as San Francisco. (via Chris's sciblogs post)
  2. British Library Release 3M Open Bibliographic Records) (OKFN) -- This dataset consists of the entire British National Bibliography, describing new books published in the UK since 1950; this represents about 20% of the total BL catalogue, and we are working to add further releases.
  3. Gadgets for Babies (NY Times) -- cry decoders, algorithmically enhanced rocking chairs, and (my favourite) "voice-activated crib light with womb sounds". I can't wait until babies can make womb sound playlists and share them on Twitter.
  4. GP2X Caanoo MAME/Console Emulator (ThinkGeek) -- perfect Christmas present for, well, me. Emulates classic arcade machines and microcomputers, including my nostalgia fetish object, the Commodore 64. (via BoingBoing's Gift Guide)

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Four short links: 24 November 2010

Four short links: 24 November 2010

Android, Cellphone Photos, Long-Exposure iPhone Apps, and Open Street Map

by  | @gnat  | +Nat Torkington | 24 November 2010

  1. What Android Is (Tim Bray) -- a good explanation of the different bits and their relationship.
  2. Cell Phone Photo Helped in Oil Spill (LA Times) -- a lone scientist working from a cell phone photo who saved the day by convincing the government that a cap it considered removing was actually working as designed. (via BoingBoing)
  3. Penki -- iPhone app that lets you paint 3D messages which are revealed in long-exposure photographs. (via Aaron Straup Cope on Delicious)
  4. I'm Working at Microsoft and We're Donating Imagery to OpenStreetMap! (Steve Coast) -- MSFT hired the creator of OSM and he says Microsoft is donating access to its global orthorectified aerial imagery to help OpenStreetMappers make the map even better than it already is.

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Four short links: 23 November 2010

Four short links: 23 November 2010

AppEngine Gripes, LIDAR Hacking, Web Stripping, and Map Storytelling

by  | @gnat  | +Nat Torkington | 23 November 2010

  1. Goodbye App Engine -- clear explanation of the reasons why Google AppEngine isn't the right thing to build your startup on. Don't read the comments unless you want to lose faith in humanity. (via Michael Koziarski on Twitter)
  2. Neato Robotics XV-11 Tear-down -- the start of hackable LIDAR, which would enable cheap and easy 3D mapping, via a Roomba-like robovacuum with a LIDAR module in it. (via Chris Anderson on Twitter)
  3. Boilerpipe -- code to remove boilerplate wrappers from a webpage, returning just the text you care about. (via Andy Baio)
  4. Visual Eyes -- web-based authoring tool developed at the University of Virginia to weave images, maps, charts, video and data into highly interactive and compelling dynamic visualizations. (via Courtney Johnston's Instapaper feed)

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Where the semantic web stumbled, linked data will succeed

Where the semantic web stumbled, linked data will succeed

Linked data allows for deep and serendipitous consumer experiences.

by  | @twbell  | 15 November 2010

Linked data can be realized without the purity of semantic annotation, but a focus on consumers gives it a better shot at adoption. It begs the question: Why invest in difficult technologies if consumer outcomes can be realized with current tools and knowledge?

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Four short links: 28 October 2010

Four short links: 28 October 2010

Computational Thinking, Timelines in Javascript, Info as Magazine, and Necessity Shortages

by  | @gnat  | +Nat Torkington | 28 October 2010

  1. Exploring Computational Thinking (Google) -- educational materials to help teachers get students thinking about recognizing patterns, decomposing problems, and so on.
  2. TimeMap -- Javascript library to display time series datasets on a map.
  3. Feedly -- RSS feeds + twitter + other sites into a single magazine format.
  4. Attention and Information -- what appears to us as “too much information” could just be the freedom from necessity. The biggest change ebooks have made in my life is that now book reading is as stressful and frenetic as RSS reading, because there's as much of an oversupply of books-I'd-like-to-read as there is of web-pages-I'd-like-to-read. My problem isn't over-supply of material, it's a shortage of urgency that would otherwise force me to make the hard decisions about "no, don't add this to the pile, it's not important enough to waste my time with". Instead, I have 1990s books on management that looked like maybe I might learn something .... (via Clay Shirky on Twitter)

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Four short links: 22 October 2010

Four short links: 22 October 2010

Image Remapping, Internet Futures, Ebook Reader, and Open Cloud Computing

by  | @gnat  | +Nat Torkington | 22 October 2010

  1. Historical Images Remapped -- Sydney's Powerhouse Museum released historical images from their collections, and a historical photo site Sepiatown geolocated and oriented them so they can be viewed side-by-side with current Google Street View images of the same place. And then contributed the refined metadata back to the museum. A great example of your users helping to improve your data.
  2. Future Internet Scenarios -- results of scenario planning by the Internet Society, some possible futures from open and competitive to anticompetitive centralised walled-gardens.
  3. OpenLibrary Bookreader -- the Internet Archive's book reader is (naturally) open source for you to reuse and improve. (via Kevin Marks on Twitter)
  4. OpenStack Austin Release -- code to compute controller and object storage released. Competition and interoperability require exactly this kind of open cloud environment.

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Welcome Laurel Ruma to Where 2.0

Welcome Laurel Ruma to Where 2.0

Where 2.0 2011 welcomes a new co-chair.

by  | @brady  | 21 October 2010

Laurel Ruma and Brady Forest will co-chair Where 2.0 2011, running April 19-21, 2011 in Santa Clara, Calif.

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Where 2.0 2011 call for proposals is open

Where 2.0 2011 call for proposals is open

A look at the topics, sessions and workshops planned for the next Where 2.0 conference.

by  | @brady  | 14 October 2010

Google and other companies are jockeying for position in the location space, which makes the next Where 2.0 particularly intriguing. Here's a look at the planned topics, sessions and workshops -- and a reminder to get your proposals in before the Oct. 25 deadline.

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Toward a local syzygy: aligning deals, check-ins and places

Toward a local syzygy: aligning deals, check-ins and places

Check-ins are only the beginning. Here's what lies ahead for local.

by  | @twbell  |  2 September 2010

The check-in is hardly the apogee of the local consumer experience. It works, for now, but it won't be the long-term solution for customer/business relationships and physical point of presence. So what will replace it? Here's a look at the local sector's near-term future.

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Four short links: 2 Sep 2010

Four short links: 2 Sep 2010

Science Blogs, AppEngine Community, Kickstarter for Good, Manmade Geography

by  | @gnat  | +Nat Torkington |  2 September 2010

  1. Guardian Science Blogs -- the latest in a series of science blog aggregators. Nobody is too sure what benefits a blog umbrella like Discovery or Nature (or the Guardian) offers bloggers. Regardless of this, the content is fantastic.
  2. v2ex: A Community Running on AppEngine -- no hosting costs, massive scalability.
  3. Raising Money for Vanuatu Arts Center -- a Kickstarter project to fund a 6-hectare/14.8-acre off-the-grid artists retreat, cultural preservation and technological education space in the remote Pacific island of Vanuatu. Kickstarter is incredible. (via BoingBoing)
  4. Orbiter (XKCD) -- names are human artifacts, as every Internet mapping company knows. I'm reminded of how Gracenote, who run CDDB, store every datum submitted to them, and consequently have nearly fifty spellings of Britney Spears.

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Four short links: 1 September 2010

Four short links: 1 September 2010

Faces in R, Open Source Web Analytics, Small File Store, Building Mapper

by  | @gnat  | +Nat Torkington |  1 September 2010

  1. R Library for Chernoff Faces -- faces represent the rows of a data matrix by faces. plot.faces plots faces into a scatterplot. Interesting emotional way to visualize data, which was used to good effect (though not with this library) by BERG in Schooloscope. (via the tutorial at Flowing Data)
  2. Piwik -- GPLed web analytics package.
  3. Pomegranate -- a data store for billions of tiny files. (via the High Scalability blog interview with the creator of Pomegranate)
  4. New Backpack Makes 3D Maps of Buildings -- the backpack indoor equivalent of the Google Maps cars, from Berkeley researchers.

Comments: 7 | 

                

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