ggalaxy

"Data is missing at least five things, all of which be-come both necessary and possible in a world of globally distributed computing: 1) Ownership, 2) Error bars, 3) Sensitivity, 4) Dependency, 5) Semantics. ... Unfortunately, a lot of the major data movers benefit from not knowing how meaningful their numbers are. A credit bureau just reports the numbers it got from somewhere else; if it were easy to find out how those numbers were collected, then demands for quality control would increase."

Earlier tonight I briefly met Spencer Salazar from Smule, the makers of the iPhone Ocarina. They have a small suite of like Sonic Boom ("turns your phone into a virtual firecracker"), Sonic Vox ("the real-time voice shifter"), and Sonic Lighter ("Sonic Lighter is a lighter") that are mostly technology gimmicks. Spencer admitted as much but I'm still completely smitten with the fact that 75% of their applications have a simple globe view that uses the network features of the phone to show you what other people, all around the world, are doing with each app right now. You can hear other people's clumsy ocarina playing, watch little explosions when other people use Sonic Boom, and see who's using the lighter app with some sense of how those people are related to you based on flame-passing connections.

We've seen this all before, in Twittervision and other such globetrotting applications. These Smule globes seem strangely different and much more interesting, largely I think because you hold the phone in your hand instead of the laptop or monitor on your desk. It's a more personal, touched engagement with the screen that makes visualizing an earth-spanning army of phone lighters and flute blowers more physically personal. In particular, the Sonic Boom visualization is like watching television: no reading, no place names, just tiny explosions with audio all over the world with the same unmediated appearance as old top-down resource gathering games like War Craft I.

Having just read Teeming Void's Against Information (a critique of "data art"), I'm thinking about direct perception of data as a way of making it more visceral. The Golan Levin and Jonathan Harris pieces referenced in the paper all suffer from various forms of indirection: Levin makes breaking up look like math and physics, while Harris jumps to all sorts of crazy conclusions based on faulty language parsing and excessively abstract visual metaphor. How can a visual representation of data make itself felt right there, in your hand? Pictures help. Sound helps.

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I've been expanding the georeferenced collection of Oakland maps that Gem and I started back in May. Recently, I purchased a 1967 Standard Oil map of Oakland for a few bucks from EBay. I was looking for late 1960's / early 1970's, because that's when the freeway structure here really started to take shape. Previously, we looked at a switch from rail to roads. Through the 50's and 60's, the switch was accelerated with the construction of massive highways through what had formerly been residential neighbhorhoods.

Particularly interesting is the Cypress Viaduct, a raised connection between highways 880, 580 and 80 running through West Oakland. When built, it was sharply criticized for splitting the neighborhood and further isolating it from downtown Oakland. The current site of the viaduct was where I made some of my first edits to OpenStreetMap. The structure was destroyed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake shortly after my family moved to California, but on this map it's a fresh addition to the landscape:

The 19th anniversary of the quake was October 17th, one month ago.

The new 1967 map is a striking constrast to the previous 1952 map. The various freeways connected to Interstate 80 are one major difference, but the cartography is also a big contrast. This map is similar to the other Gousha-designed map from 1936 in its choice of bright colors, but it also features topographic shading up in the hills and orange highlights around freeway exits. A significant piece of infrastructure still under construction at this point is the 980 / 24 connector from downtown Oakland up into the hills toward the Caldecott Tunnel. The construction areas for the southern stretch are marked, while the northern route is still a whispy dotted line through miles of backyards.

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Elevation data for complete SF Bay Area.

"The paper develops the questions that I posted here a while ago, focusing on how artists construct a notion of data while they use it as a creative material. It especially considers the distinction between data and information, arguing that data art often works to defer, abstract or undermine information - in the sense of a formed or contextualised message - and instead offers us a more open or underdetermined experience of the data as abstract pattern and relation. The problem here is that we can't have unmediated access to the abstract data - it's always mapped to something, structured in ways extraneous to the dataset. And data itself is always extracted, made or constructed, not some kind of autonomous digital object." (Mitchell Whitelaw)

"But there was no use of it. I wasn't using any of the technologies for anything, except for things related to the technology itself. The Semantic Web is utterly inbred in that respect. The problem is in the model, that we create this metaformat, RDF, and then the use cases will come. But they haven't, and they won't. Even the genealogy use case turned out to be based on a fallacy."

"Yes, we need to fight crime. Yes, we need to strengthen our cities. But we also need to stop seeing our cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution. Because strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions, and strong regions are essential for a strong America."

"And just like the chess player solving a tactical puzzle, arm yourself! In chess, there are names for all of the common tactical patterns. Fork, pin, skewer. Discovered check, driving off, piling on. The list goes on a bit, but it's finite. In the same way, there is a jargon for describing code quality in much more concrete terms than the all-too-common (and uselessly vague) "bad smell". There are the basics: use meaningful names, keep it simple stupid (KISS), don't repeat yourself (DRY), be consistent, and so on. Then there are more complex quality issues like cohesion, coupling, information hiding, referential integrity and separation of concerns. Challenge yourself to use the correct terminology, both in describing problems and in suggesting improvements." (David Lowe)

"Thinking about the ignorant, angry atheists who infest the Guardian's comment pages I realised one thing they have in common with scriptural fundamentalists: they have no idea of history. They live in an eternally dazzling present and they can't imagine that there is anything outside it. Oh, sure, they have legends - the inquisition, the crusades, the middle ages - but within these legends the actors move, as they do in renaissance paintings, entirely in contemporary dress. There is no sense of the strangeness and difficulty of the past; no sense that many things have been tried and failed; no sense that words once meant things entirely different and possibly inexpressible now.... in part a simple reluctance to believe that history is about other people."

Flickr place info now includes shape data for many places. See the Flickr code blog for more.

We’ve correlated most of Dopplr’s places with Yahoo WOE IDs using Flickr’s reverse geocoder, so we can use this data too. As an experiment, I wrote some clientside code to overlay this shape data onto the maps we use on Dopplr. Help yourself to the code if you want it: gist.github.com/25502

Baumol's cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) is a phenomenon described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s. It involves a rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no increase of labor productivity in response to rising salaries in other jobs which did experience such labor productivity growth. This goes against the theory in classical economics that wages are always closely tied to labor productivity changes.

"An Information radiator is a display posted in a place where people can see it as they work or walk by. It shows readers information they care about without having to ask anyone a question. This means more communication with fewer interruptions. A good information radiator Is large and easily visible to the casual, interested observer, Is understood at a glance, changes periodically, so that it is worth visiting, is easily kept up to date."

"So the story of the manifesto is over, really. The time for marketing is past. Now what teams have to do is execute. Here, the news is not so good. A lot of teams execute poorly. Helping you avoid their fate is what this talk's about. ... Humans + running code are smarter than humans + time. ... Values: courage, ease, reactivity, naivete, visibility, joy." (Brian Marick)

"Heh heh heh, c'mon. We'd never do that, the trader started to say, but Moses was politely insistent: We both know that unadulterated good things like this trade don't just happen between little hedge funds and big Wall Street firms. I'll do it, but only after you explain to me how you are going to screw me. And the salesman explained how he was going to screw him. And Moses did the trade."

"Fortunately, Bart Weetjens is here to help, and he's got lots of backup: cages filled with African giant pouched rats. The rats have an amazing sense of smell, and Weetjens has trained rats to detect landmines by scent. The rats are too light to trigger the mines (though they look roughly as large as my cat), but they stand on the mine and dig until a handler picks them up, rewards them with food and removes the ordnance. The rats have already cleared 416,500 square meters of minefield, and can detect more mines in an hour than a professional human deminer can in a day."

"Bezier curves are widely used in modern 2D and 3D graphics. In most applications it's quite enough to use only quadric and cubic curves. There is a huge number of explanations in the Internet about Bezier curves and I believe if you read it you know the topic. The main question is is how we can actually draw the curve. It's a common practice that the curves are approximated with a number of short line segments and it's the only efficient way to draw them. In this article I will try to explain a method of almost perfect approximation keeping the minimal number of points."

UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis: "The Google Map Image Cutter is an application designed to take any image or digital photo and cut it into tiles which are displayed on a Google Map. Using this tool, large images can be published on the web in a format that allows the user to pan and zoom using the standard Google Maps interface. Although publishing large digital photos is the most obvious application, this technique can also be used for annotated maps of an area that are not to scale e.g. directions for how to get to the office."

Abe's new company: "Tailored performance clothing for cycling in the city."