Data Visualization
Valentine’s Day Infographic
By cdharris at February 14, 2012 | 11:35 am | 0 Comment
I love, love, love infographics. But I've never seen one developed with romantic intentions, nor one intended as a proposal of marriage. But that's just what Drake Martinet (associate editor of D: All Things Digital) had in mind for his one true love, Stacy Green (Mashable VP.) Drake, hope she said more...
Speech intention can be decoded from brainwaves
By cdharris at February 2, 2012 | 8:20 am | 0 Comment
UC Berkeley scientists have demonstrated a method to reconstruct words that a person may be thinking, by examining brainwaves using fMRI. The technique reported in PLoS Biology relies on gathering electrical signals directly from patients' brains, via implanted electrodes. Computer models reconstructed words/sounds from the signal patterns. Although the possible uses more...
Blog , Data Visualization , Emerging Science and Technology , Technology and Privacy
Physibles and the future of brands
By cdharris at February 1, 2012 | 9:57 am | 0 Comment
Brands have a psychological reality in that they provide differentiation for goods that might otherwise be seen as interchangeable commodities. I give you vodka, salt, and baking soda, as pertinent examples. The advent of 3-D printers in recent years, though, introduces a possibility that branded goods may have less utility in the future. The Pirate Bay, more...
Blog , Data Visualization , Emerging Science and Technology , Media and Markets
Augmented Reality Glasses
By cdharris at January 15, 2012 | 12:46 am | 0 Comment
Daily Mail: "Translucent TV: Lumus' PD-18-2 is a set of spectacles that can beam high-quality images directly into your eyes but allows the user to see through the images more...
Blog , Data Visualization , Emerging Science and Technology , Media and Markets
A Year in Snapshots: Photos around the World for each day of the year
By cdharris at January 3, 2012 | 11:11 am | 0 Comment
Mobile travel guide provider Triposo provides free travel guides, augmented by location based data. With the abundance of data from a variety of open datasets, Triposo has created a remarkable short video showing photos taken around the world, on each day of the year. On a world map, the relative density of the photo data is shown. Notice the brighter dots at more...
Scale wants to post weight chart to Facebook
By cdharris at September 2, 2011 | 8:47 pm | 0 Comment
My new scale at home -- a sleekly gorgeous black slab of glass -- asked me if I wanted to share my weight chart to my Facebook or Twitter friends.? Apart from that being a terrifying idea,? it also raises some interesting questions about the implications of widely sharing this kind of data online,? how wireless devices like this one will aggregate and store data, and more...
Bulletproof Human Skin
By cdharris at August 23, 2011 | 1:38 pm | 0 Comment
A Dutch artist and research team created a piece of "bulletproof" skin from spider silk and human skin cells and discovered that the new substance can withstand bullets, but only slow-moving ones. While not providing enough protection to classify as a material for use in bulletproof armor or vests, the new material is extremely strong and lightweight. Jalila more...
Cal-Adapt: Understanding California’s Climate Change Predictions
By cdharris at June 8, 2011 | 6:34 am | 0 Comment
UC Berkeley's Geospatial Innovation Facility -- with support from the Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) agency -- has developed a climate adaptation planning tool it is calling "Cal-Adapt" [cal-adapt.org.] The tool models climate change scenarios in a mapping format, including projections through 2099 for factors such as wildfire risk, sea-level rise more...
LinkedIn InMaps Reveals your Professional Network
By information aesthetics at January 24, 2011 | 11:13 pm | 0 Comment
INMAPS [linkedinlabs.com] is a new service that visualizes the collection of a LinkedIn 'connections' as a single network graph.? Each color corresponds to a different group within an individual's professional network and helps identify ways in which the LinkedIn member is connected to others in different categories (and areas where the connections may be more...
Visualizing Science Readers
By cdharris at December 8, 2010 | 2:25 pm | 0 Comment
Curious about what scientists might be reading?? Springer (noted publisher of more than 5 million scientific and academic titles) has launched a new analytics tool that reveals how its users and subscribers are downloading its content. There are a number of interactive visualization tools at the site,? including a world map illustrating the origin of download more...
Blog , Data Visualization , Datamining , Geolocation and Psychogeography , Media and Markets
When will your relationship break up? Facebook knows.
By cdharris at November 2, 2010 | 11:03 pm | 0 Comment
Facebook now has aggregated a huge dataset revealing patterns in relationship "status" changes.? Based on this, researcher and data visualization expert David McCandless created a predictive chart (shown) which he unveiled at the July 2010 TED conference in Oxford, England. According to McCandless the spikes in breakups on Facebook were: 1) immediately following more...
How news stories connect
By cdharris at October 20, 2010 | 3:32 pm | 0 Comment
News Dots [slate.com] is a tool that represents the most recent topics in the news as a social network. Subjects, shown as circles, are connected to one another if they appear together in at least two stories. The size of each dot is proportional to the total number of times the subject is mentioned, while its color reveals it stands for a person, a place, a group or more...
How To See If Political Candidates Agree With You
By cdharris at October 20, 2010 | 3:27 pm | 0 Comment
VoteEasy [votesmart.org] is a visually engaging interactive tool funded by Project Vote Smart and designed by Periscopic that allows the general public to quickly and easily see how closely political candidates align with their views on 12 different key more...
Comparing global digital behaviors
By cdharris at October 20, 2010 | 3:23 pm | 0 Comment
Discover Digital Life [discoverdigitallife.com] is based on a huge dataset gathered from interviews with almost 50,000 consumers across 46 countries, and purports to be the largest, most comprehensive study of the Global Digital Consumer.? The scope of the study certainly exceeds anything Jupiter, Forrester, etc., ever attempted.? The analytics tools include an more...
Visualizing Twitter
By cdharris at October 20, 2010 | 3:14 pm | 0 Comment
There are many tools that examine the "twitter stream" of information in various ways.? "Twittervision", for example,? plots tweets in real time to a world map to show their place of origin.?? A new tool,? named "truthy" and developed at Indiana University,? provides a way to visualize the "diffusion of information" on Twitter.? It basically tracks emerging topics as more...
