P r o f e s s o r H o l l a n ' s C o u r s e B l o g

Video: Free-Moving Kinect Used To Map Room And Objects In Detailed 3D | TechCrunch

2011-08-11T05:32:00.000-07:00

Video: Free-Moving Kinect Used To Map Room And Objects In Detailed 3D | TechCrunch: "We’ve seen hacks for the Kinect from the very start, and even some that suggested one like this might be possible: a Kinect being moved around like a camera, recording the depth of everything it sees and building up a full-3D map of the room and every object in it. They call it KinectFusion, and it’s really quite fascinating to watch. I’ve re-hosted the video here, since the original is a bit cramped and not everyone wants to download the whole thing."

MemoryMiner: Digital Storytelling for Macintosh & The Web

2011-06-28T20:38:00.000-07:00

MemoryMiner: Digital Storytelling for Macintosh & The Web: "MemoryMiner is the award-winning Digital Storytelling application used to discover the threads connecting peoples' lives across time and place. It lets you zero in on the stories depicted in your photos by linking them to each other based on people, places and time."

Looxcie Camcorder: Capture Unexpected Moments

2011-06-28T20:29:00.000-07:00

Looxcie Camcorder: Capture Unexpected Moments: "Announcing the Looxcie 2: 20% lighter & twice the storage capacity"

The Google project: real life sharing, rethought for the web.

2011-06-28T19:49:00.000-07:00

The Google project: real life sharing, rethought for the web.

Stanford's video processing in the cloud allows interactive streaming of online lectures

2011-06-28T19:11:00.000-07:00

Stanford's video processing in the cloud allows interactive streaming of online lectures: "Stanford's video processing in the cloud allows interactive streaming of online lectures Stanford researchers designed software that allows a viewer to zoom and pan while streaming online courses. They recently released the code to the public."

29 Ways To Stay Creative

2011-06-22T06:12:00.001-07:00

29 WAYS TO STAY CREATIVE from TO-FU on Vimeo.

Lytro’s Camera Lets You Shoot First and Focus Later - NYTimes.com

2011-06-22T05:44:00.000-07:00

Lytro’s Camera Lets You Shoot First and Focus Later - NYTimes.com

DeepShot - Migrating tasks across devices using mobile phone cameras

2011-06-21T06:14:00.000-07:00

Mondo Window

2011-03-13T06:32:00.000-07:00

Every seat is a window seat.

Kevin Slavin: Algorithms That Govern Our Luves

2011-03-08T07:01:00.000-08:00

MSR Demos

2011-03-01T07:35:00.000-08:00

Atrix 4G: Faux Laptop With a Phone For Brains

2011-02-18T07:03:00.000-08:00

Atrix 4G: Faux Laptop With a Phone For Brains: "

Today’s best smartphones are really hand-held computers. They run a vast variety of applications, from productivity programs to games, that mimic what laptops do. Their biggest limitations for serious work, gaming, Web surfing and multimedia are their small screens, cramped keyboards and tinny speakers.

[ See post to watch video ]

So, what if you could use the brains and connectivity of such a hand-held computer to drive a laptop-size screen, keyboard and speakers, thus overcoming these limitations? Well, Motorola Mobility has devised a new phone and accessory that aim to do just that: to make the phone the only computer you need.

I’ve been testing this new phone, the Atrix 4G, an Android device that will cost $200 with a two-year contract and will run on AT&T’s network. It’s slated to be available by March 6. I’ve also been testing its unusual and clever accessory called the laptop dock, which looks like a large netbook, with an 11.6-inch screen, full keyboard, touch pad, and stereo speakers. This dock, the price of which depends on when you buy it, has no processor, no file storage and no connectivity of its own. It’s dormant until you plug the Atrix into a slot behind the screen.

When you dock the phone, the faux laptop comes alive. It duplicates the phone’s screen on its larger display and lets you use its connectivity and apps. It also contains a battery that charges the phone. The image of the phone’s screen, and any of its apps you run, can be actual size or blown up to use the dock’s larger screen.

With Motorola’s Atrix 4G smartphone, the laptop is the accessory. The phone shown docked to the laptop dock.

Full-Screen Firefox

Even more interestingly, the dock gives you access to a full, and full-screen, PC version of the Firefox Web browser. Firefox is tucked away inside the Atrix but is available only when the phone is plugged into the laptop dock or a second, smaller dock that’s meant to connect to a TV or desktop monitor. The smaller dock lacks a built-in keyboard, battery or screen.

The laptop dock costs $500, but AT&T will knock the price down to $300, after rebates, if you buy it at the same time you buy the phone. That brings the combined price of both devices to $500—the same as the separate price for the dock. The smaller dock, called the multimedia dock, costs $190.

In my tests, the Atrix and the laptop dock performed mostly as advertised. The phone had no trouble driving the larger screen or the full Firefox browser.

I was even able to insert a flash drive into one of the dock’s two USB ports and copy songs, photos, videos and documents into the phone’s internal memory using the keyboard and touch pad. I edited and wrote text in an app called Quickoffice on the phone using the laptop dock’s keyboard, and ran various other apps, including the popular game Angry Birds, on the larger screen.

The Firefox browser worked as normal, using either the phone’s cellular or Wi-Fi connections to access the Internet. And both the phone itself and Firefox can run Flash videos, which mostly played fine.

But the combination of the phone and dock wasn’t as fast, smooth or versatile as having a real laptop, even though to use them you’re essentially carrying around a light laptop (the dock weighs 2.4 pounds). Many apps on the phone aren’t as polished or powerful as typical PC apps, and I found them clumsier to use with the keyboard and touch pad, as opposed to the touch screen for which they were designed.

Installation Issue

Also, other than Firefox, you can’t install PC programs. You can use Web apps inside Firefox, such as Google Docs or the stripped-down Web versions of Microsoft’s Office apps. For email, you can either use the program based in the phone or any Web-based program via the Firefox browser, such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail. But you can’t, say, install iTunes, or PC-based games, or the full versions of Outlook or Microsoft Word.

And there is only a primitive file system, limited to the capacity of the phone, which is just 16 gigabytes, with an option to expand to 48 gigabytes.

The dock’s screen required a lot of scrolling when using Firefox, partly because the browser has a lot of menus and toolbars. To address this, Motorola lets you convert Web pages to versions with the Firefox controls stripped out, so you just see the content.

There’s another problem with the laptop dock. When you make or receive a voice call while the phone is docked, you must rely on the phone’s microphone and speakers, hidden behind the screen of the dock. As a result, calls sounded muffled on both ends, even though the phone automatically switches into speakerphone mode. Motorola says it is working on this issue.

Despite the drawbacks, some folks will surely be attracted to this innovative combination.

If you mostly do your computing tasks on a phone or a PC Web browser, storing files in the cloud and using phone or Web-based apps, Motorola has you covered. And the fact that the dock can charge the phone is a big plus.

Motorola’s Atrix 4G

The Phone Side

What about the phone itself?

Well, it’s one of the nicest smartphones I’ve tested. Its processor makes it fast, and it has a 4-inch, high-resolution screen—almost as high as the iPhone 4′s, though not quite as sharp to my eye. It runs an older version of Android, but Motorola is promising an upgrade.

The phone also has good battery life. It lasted a full day while I was testing it and Motorola claims up to nine hours of talk time. Photos and videos I took with the phone were sharp, and it has a front camera for video calls.

The Atrix also has two other notable features. First, it can take advantage of AT&T’s souped-up 3G network, which the carrier calls 4G because it can supposedly achieve 4G data speeds.

In my tests, in the D.C. and New York areas, the speed wasn’t especially impressive, averaging just a bit better than 3G speeds on other AT&T phones I’d tested.

There is also a fingerprint sensor built into the phone, which you can use instead of a pass code to secure the phone. It worked fine for me.

Overall, this is a very nice Android phone that can imitate a limited version of a laptop. That may be enough for some folks, but fall short for others.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at walt.mossberg@wsj.com

NoteSlate

2011-02-18T06:21:00.001-08:00

NoteSlate: "

New digital sketchbook coming in June 2011…

NoteSlate is low cost tablet device with true one colour display, real paper look design, long life battery (180h !), together with very handy usage and very simple and helpful interface for pen and paper. This easy, compact and portable gadget is used anywhere you want to make any notes, drafts, sketches, any ideas for future reference. Paper for everyone! Write a note and check it later, save it, or delete it. Maybe send it after. Just one colour is enough to express the basics. Keep your life simple. You will love it. For $99.

via NoteSlate /// intuitively simple monochrome paper alike tablet device.

NoteSlate

2011-02-18T06:21:00.000-08:00

NoteSlate: "

New digital sketchbook coming in June 2011…

NoteSlate is low cost tablet device with true one colour display, real paper look design, long life battery (180h !), together with very handy usage and very simple and helpful interface for pen and paper. This easy, compact and portable gadget is used anywhere you want to make any notes, drafts, sketches, any ideas for future reference. Paper for everyone! Write a note and check it later, save it, or delete it. Maybe send it after. Just one colour is enough to express the basics. Keep your life simple. You will love it. For $99.

via NoteSlate /// intuitively simple monochrome paper alike tablet device.

Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data

2011-01-29T20:58:00.000-08:00

Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data

Edward Segel and Jeffrey Heer

Abstract—Data visualization is regularly promoted for its ability to reveal stories within data, yet these “data stories” differ in important ways from traditional forms of storytelling. Storytellers, especially online journalists, have increasingly been integrating visualizations into their narratives, in some cases allowing the visualization to function in place of a written story. In this paper, we systematically review the design space of this emerging class of visualizations. Drawing on case studies from news media to visualization research, we identify distinct genres of narrative visualization. We characterize these design differences, together with interactivity and messaging, in terms of the balance between the narrative ﬂow intended by the author (imposed by graphical elements and the interface) and story discovery on the part of the reader (often through interactive exploration). Our framework suggests design strategies for narrative visualization, including promising under-explored approaches to journalistic storytelling and educational media.

Journalism in the Age of Data: Visualization as a Storytelling Medium

2011-01-26T21:08:00.000-08:00

Journalism in the Age of Data: Visualization as a Storytelling Medium

Journalism in the Age of Data from Geoff McGhee on Vimeo.

"The Age of Fire" The Future?

2011-01-26T07:23:00.001-08:00

L'età del fuoco - The age of fire from mauro calvone on Vimeo.

Activity Design Contest

2011-01-19T19:12:00.000-08:00

Activity Design Contest: "The ubiquitous computing research group at the University of Toronto is conducting an application design contest as part of doctoral research. We have developed a Web-accessible Activity Service that can tell you: potential activities (e.g., drink coffee, ride bike, appreciate art) a person can perform in an environment specific places where a person can potentially perform an activity We want to find out what type of applications YOU would develop with the Activity Service! You do not have to build an application; just tell us about your novel and interesting design! The winning submission will receive $1000 USD; and up to two runners-up will receive $500 USD each. Please see rules and judging criteria for more details. Your design may be developed by our research team--or we could help you build it--to validate that the Activity Service can support its development. You retain the intellectual property of the design you submit; we will not commercialize your submission."

projects :: hijack

2011-01-14T13:44:00.000-08:00

hijack: "HiJack is a hardware/software platform for creating cubic-inch sensor peripherals for the mobile phone. HiJack devices harvest power and use bandwidth from the mobile phone's headset interface. The HiJack platform enables a new class of small and cheap phone-centric sensor peripherals that support plug-and-play operation."

Hans Rosling: The Joy of Stats

2011-01-03T14:16:00.000-08:00

My Blackberry is Not Working

2010-12-25T05:11:00.000-08:00

Edge: THE SECOND COMING — A MANIFESTO By David Gelernter

2010-12-10T06:13:00.000-08:00

Edge: THE SECOND COMING — A MANIFESTO By David Gelernter: "THE SECOND COMING — A MANIFESTO By David Gelernter"

Everything is up for grabs. Everything will change. There is a magnificent sweep of intellectual landscape right in front of us.

MSP-EXP430G2 - MSP430 LaunchPad Value Line Development kit

2010-11-22T19:32:00.000-08:00

MSP-EXP430G2 - MSP430 LaunchPad Value Line Development kit: "LaunchPad is an easy-to-use development tool intended for beginners and experienced users alike for creating microcontroller-based applications. At $4.30, the LaunchPad offers everything you need to get started with your projects. The LaunchPad development tool is a part of the MSP430 Value Line series. The integrated DIP target socket allows all 14 and 20-pin MSP430 Value Line devices to be dropped into the LaunchPad board for easy programming, debugging, and monitoring. Included are free unrestricted and downloadable software development environments for writing and debugging software. The LaunchPad can be used to create interactive solutions thanks to its integrated buttons, LEDs, and extra input/output pins for easy integration of external devices."

The Open Kinect project – THE OK PRIZE – get $2,000 bounty for Kinect for Xbox 360 open source drivers (now $2k)

2010-11-06T05:35:00.000-07:00

The Open Kinect project – THE OK PRIZE – get $2,000 bounty for Kinect for Xbox 360 open source drivers (now $2k)"

Augmented (hyper)Reality

2010-11-01T18:42:00.001-07:00

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Land of Lisp: http://landoflisp.com/

2010-11-01T18:35:00.000-07:00

HTML5Rocks - The Basics of Web Workers

2010-10-29T19:21:00.000-07:00

HTML5Rocks - The Basics of Web Workers: "Introducing Web Workers: Bring Threading to JavaScript"

2010-10-27T05:36:00.000-07:00

Super Microphone Can Listen To Any Conversation On the Court

2010-10-13T07:10:00.000-07:00

Super Microphone Can Listen To Any Conversation On the Court:

World Famous Design Junkies � wfdj_popchartlab_thegrandtaxonomyofrapnames

2010-10-10T17:55:00.000-07:00

World Famous Design Junkies � wfdj_popchartlab_thegrandtaxonomyofrapnames

Conference Search: About

2010-08-28T07:52:00.000-07:00

Conference Search: About: "ConfSearch is a search engine and conference calendar designed to search for scientific conferences in the computer science domain. It supports different search types (such as search by keyword, related conferences, or author) and provides additional meta-information about conferences (such as submission deadline or conference location). The core search functionality is based on data of DBLP and currently covers more than 2000 conferences. For the insertion of a conference's meta-data, confsearch makes use of the wiki-prinicple, i.e. it relies, similarly as Wikipedia, on the users to fill in the information. Please help by contributing the conference dates, website links, and so on using the modify button on the right!

The application was developed by members of the Distributed Computing Group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). Some background about the internals of ConfSearch can be found in the following publications:

The Layered World of Scientific Conferences, by Michael Kuhn and Roger Wattenhofer, 10th Asia Pacific Web Conference (APWeb), Shenyang, China, April 2008:
Contains information about the different search types (general, related conferences, keyword, author) as well as about the integrated conference rating methods.
The Theoretic Center of Computer Science, by Michael Kuhn and Roger Wattenhofer, SIGACT News Volume 38, Number 4, (Whole Number 145), December 2007:
Contains information about the author centrality lists."

Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

2010-08-27T19:30:00.000-07:00

Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking: "Modernist Cuisine is a six-volume, 2,400-page set that is destined to reinvent cooking. The lavishly illustrated books use thousands of original images to make the science and technology clear and engaging."

Announcing Polymaps

2010-08-20T16:27:00.000-07:00

Announcing Polymaps: "

I posted some early examples last week, and SimpleGeo announced this morning the result of our collaboration with them over the past few months: Polymaps.org.

We've been working with Stamen to provide visual analysis of the huge datasets that we're working with, and how people can communicate this data in sophisticated ways. A first step toward that goal is the release of a free and open-source set of tools and map engines allowing people to perform relatively sophisticated operations on their data in the browser. The project has been online for a while at http://github.com/simplegeo/polymaps, and you can download the source code there; what's new is the addition of a series of example maps so you can demonstrate what's going on, and human-readable documentation so you can use them for your own projects. Some of the examples are straightforward, letting you do things like group points into clusters and drop scaled gradients on to map locations. Others are more robust, letting you do things like change which direction is north by rotating the map and visualize the quality of street surfaces in San Francisco.

We've been lucky enough to work with Mike Bostock on these this summer, and he's really outdone himself. If I had doubts about the ability of non-flash browser-native tech like Canvas and SVG to do expressive and richly interactive mapping (and I did), consider me a convert.

Now about that easter egg...

Tab Candy: Making Firefox Tabs Sweet

2010-07-28T08:58:00.000-07:00

Tab Candy: Making Firefox Tabs Sweet: "

The power of the browser has grown substantially in the last ten years. We now use the Web to multi-task the activities we juggle every day, like vacation plans, purchases, sharing pictures, listening to music, reading email, and writing a blog post.
It’s hard to keep everything straight with dozens of tabs all crammed into a little strip along the top of your browser. Your tab with a search to find a pizza parlor gets mixed up with your tabs on your favorite band. Often, it’s easier to open a new tab than to try to find the open tab you already have. Worse, how many of us keep tabs open as reminders of something we want to do or read later? We’re all suffering from infoguilt.
We need a way to organize browsing, to see all of our tabs at once, and focus on the task at hand. In short, we need a way to get back control of our online lives.
Enter: Tab Candy.

With one keystroke Tab Candy shows an overview of all tabs to allow you to quickly locate and switch between them. Tab Candy also lets you group tabs to organize your work flow. You can create a group for your vacation, work, recipes, games and social sites, however it makes sense to you to group tabs. When you switch to a grouped tab only the relevant tabs are shown in the tab bar, which helps you focus on what you want.

Link to the video here or download the video here.
One more thing. Tab Candy is made entirely with HTML, Javascript, and CSS. There is no native code—just the open Web. That is how powerful the web has become.
Tab Candy is in early development. We’re at the point where we’d like more people to try it out and let us know what they think. There’s work to be done on some existing bugs and performance issues, and we’re building a motivated group to attack those issues head-on.

This is not an extension. This is a super-early build of Firefox with Tab Candy enabled.

A Walkthrough of Tab Candy’s Features

Instant Overview—Never lose a tab again

Tap Option-Space on the Mac or Control-Space on Windows to zoom out and see thumbnails of all open tabs. Click on one to zoom back in. It’s a quick visual way to search for that one tab you need with work research or directions to the restaurant.

Lightweight Grouping

Drag two tabs together to create a group to keep related tabs together. You can even name groups for all your videos, research, social sites or whatever you need. If need a group from one tab just click and drag to create one. You can easily rearrange tabs and drag them anywhere inside a group or between groups.
Right now there is no automatic grouping, but it is a feature we are working to deliver.

Only the Tabs You Want

When you go to a tab in a group, you’ll only see the tabs from that group in the tab strip. That means you can focus on the task you are doing. Work tabs stay separate from play tabs. Clean tab bar, clean mind.

Organize Your Space

Tab Candy is not just the ability to move tabs around, you can move groups so that they fit your needs. Make the group with your calendar and email bigger so that you can see what’s new just by zooming out to Tab Candy. Hide the group with distractions in a corner. Keep things to read in a long vertical list. Because Tab Candy is in early development, there are lots of user experience changes and bugs to fix. We want your feedback. While Tab Candy is fairly stable, it might still lose your groupings or cause Firefox to operate more slowly.

Next Steps

Our current goals are focused on overall and start-up performance, unit tests, code documentation and refactoring. Next, we will focus on user feedback and polishing the user experience.
The Tab Candy team is working to get Tab Candy into nightly development builds of Firefox. You can follow along as we work to improve the code.

Get Involved

Start by reading the Tab Candy FAQ.
* Visit the project page or the project wiki
* Give us feedback
* Submit a bug report and see what bugs need to be fixed
* Grab the source code and get a walkthrough of the code
* Download a Tab Candy-enabled build
Related posts:

Stanford 'Frankencamera' platform to be unveiled at graphics conference

2010-07-22T07:32:00.000-07:00

Stanford 'Frankencamera' platform to be unveiled at graphics conference: "Stanford Report, July 21, 2010 Stanford 'Frankencamera' platform available on Nokia N900 ahead of unveiling at graphics conference A Stanford photography research group will distribute fully programmable open-source cameras to researchers, thanks to a federal grant. Jack Hubbard Eddie Tavala holds the Frankencamera, programmed to individual needs of the photographer. It is part of an attempt by a team of Stanford researchers to build an open-source camera architecture. The group has just released a version of their software for Nokia smartphones. L.A. Cicero Marc Levoy, professor of computer science and of electrical engineering, holds a prototype of the open source, programmable Frankencamera. BY DAVID ORENSTEIN Stanford's open-source digital photography software platform, 'Frankencamera,' which allows users to create novel camera capabilities, is available as a free download for Nokia N900 'mobile computers' starting today. Next week at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles, the Frankencamera engineering team will describe the platform and several sample apps created with it."

LuminAR | Fluid Interfaces

2010-07-17T07:12:00.000-07:00

LuminAR | Fluid Interfaces: "LuminAR reinvents the traditional incandescent bulb and desk lamp, evolving them into a new category of robotic, digital information devices. The LuminAR Bulb combines a Pico-projector, camera, and wireless computer in a compact form factor. This self-contained system enables users with just-in-time projected information and a gestural user interface, and it can be screwed into standard light fixtures everywhere. The LuminAR Lamp is an articulated robotic arm, designed to interface with the LuminAR Bulb. Both LuminAR form factors dynamically augment their environments with media and information, while seamlessly connecting with laptops, mobile phones, and other electronic devices. LuminAR transforms surfaces and objects into interactive spaces that blend digital media and information with the physical space. The project radically rethinks the design of traditional lighting objects, and explores how we can endow them with novel augmented-reality interfaces."

Nate Bolt on Giving Great Talks: A Mashup

2010-06-25T07:05:00.000-07:00

Giving Great Talks: A Mashup [Bolt | Peters]

Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site | Royal Pingdom

2010-06-23T15:29:00.000-07:00

Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site | Royal Pingdom: "Facebook’s scaling challenge Before we get into the details, here are a few factoids to give you an idea of the scaling challenge that Facebook has to deal with: Facebook serves 570 billion page views per month (according to Google Ad Planner). There are more photos on Facebook than all other photo sites combined (including sites like Flickr). More than 3 billion photos are uploaded every month. Facebook’s systems serve 1.2 million photos per second. This doesn’t include the images served by Facebook’s CDN. More than 25 billion pieces of content (status updates, comments, etc) are shared every month. Facebook has more than 30,000 servers (and this number is from last year!)"

HTML5 Rocks!: A resource for open web developers

2010-06-22T21:13:00.000-07:00

HTML5 Rocks!: A resource for open web developers: "Because HTML5 and its related technologies cover so much ground, it can be a real challenge to get up to speed on them. That’s why today we're sharing HTML5 Rocks, a great new resource for developers and teams looking to put HTML5 to use today, including more information on specific features and when to use them in your apps. We're launching the site with nine tutorials on specific HTML5 features. For example, you can learn how to successfully take your application offline, access the user's location with Geolocation, and even read local files from within JavaScript. In the site, we’ve also included a number of APIs that are defined outside the W3C HTML5 Spec, but kept them within this site as next-generation web applications span many specs. Watch the site as we’ll soon be adding more guides. The Interactive Presentation, written in HTML5, demonstrates a number of features with examples you can toy with. You can use this presentation to learn more about HTML5, but also to conduct presentations with your team. Feel free to share it; all the content here is licensed Creative Commons Attribution. The code playground lets you take working examples and edit them live, so you can get a feel for how the browser reacts to these APIs. And after you’ve hacked with, for example, the Notifications API, you can explore handpicked resources that include reference guides, development tools, and other community sites. Send us a tweet at @ChromiumDev or post to the Chromium HTML5 group to let us know how we can improve the site for you. We look forward to seeing you experiment and build apps with these features!

Posted by Paul Irish, Google Chrome Developer Relations

Where the tourists really flock

2010-06-11T07:16:00.000-07:00

Where the tourists really flock: "

A couple of weeks ago you saw Eric Fischer's maps of Flickr photos in major cities. The inclination was to think of the maps as a representation of tourist hot spots. The more pictures taken in an area, the more people go there to visit. That's not necessarily the case though. Tourists might flock to an area and might completely neglect another, while locals might avoid the touristy areas.
In Fischer's second run of maps, he makes an educated guess about the splits between tourists and locals:

Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).
Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).
Yellow points are pictures where it can't be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven't taken pictures anywhere for over a month). They are probably tourists but might just not post many pictures at all.

See the full set on Flickr. It's even better than the first. [via | thanks, Joe]
--- Where the tourists really flock / Follow @flowingdata on Twitter or fan on Facebook for more data goodness.
"

Privacy Theater

2010-06-11T07:12:00.000-07:00

Privacy Theater: "
I have a piece in today's NY Times 'Room for Debate' feature, on whether the government should regulate Facebook. In writing the piece, I was looking for a pithy way to express the problems with today's notice-and-consent model for online privacy. After some thought, I settled on 'privacy theater'.
Bruce Schneier has popularized the term 'security theater,' denoting security measures that look impressive but don't actually protect us---they create the appearance of security but not the reality. When a security guard asks to see your ID but doesn't do more than glance at it, that's security theater. Much of what happens at airport checkpoints is security theater too.
Privacy theater is the same concept, applied to privacy. Facebook's privacy policy runs to almost 6000 words of dense legalese. We are all supposed to have read it and agreed to accept its terms. But that's just theater. Hardly any of us have actually read privacy policies, and even fewer consider carefully their provisions. As I wrote in the Times piece, we pretend to have read sites' privacy policies, and the sites pretend that we have understood and consented to all of their terms. It's privacy theater.
Worse yet. privacy policies are subject to change. When sites change their policies, we get another round of privacy theater, in which sites pretend to notify us of the changes, and we pretend to consider them before continuing our use of the site.
And yet, if we're going to replace the notice-and-consent model, we need something else to put in its place. At this point, It's hard to see what that might be. It might help to set up default rules, on the theory that a policy that states how it differs from the default might be shorter and simpler than a stand-alone policy, but that approach will only go so far.
In the end, we may be stuck with privacy theater, just as we're often stuck with security theater. If we can't provide the reality of privacy or security, we can settle for theater, which at least makes us feel a bit better about our vulnerability.
"

Download Tableau Public | Tableau Public

2010-06-07T07:07:00.000-07:00

Download Tableau Public | Tableau Public: "Tableau Public is a free application that brings data to life. Create and share interactive charts and graphs, stunning maps, live dashboards and fun applications in minutes then publish anywhere on the web. Anyone can do it, it’s that easy—and it’s free."

A Protovis Primer, Part 1

2010-06-05T20:43:00.000-07:00

A Protovis Primer, Part 1: "
Protovis is a very powerful visualization toolkit. Part of what makes it special is that it is written in JavaScript and runs in the browser without the need for any plugins. Its clever use of JavaScript's language features makes it very elegant, but it can also be confusing to people who are not familiar with functional programming concepts and the finer points of JavaScript. This multi-part tutorial shows how to create a visualization (my interactive Presidents Chart) in Protovis, and explains the concepts that are involved along the way. This introduction is based on my experiences with using Protovis in my Visualization and Visual Communication class earlier this spring. While the concepts involved are really not that difficult, they are rather foreign to students who have not been exposed to functional programming. And since that is also the case for a lot of hobbyists and people wanting to do visualization who do not have a computer science background, I imagine they run into the same problems.
This has grown from being a single article into several parts (and is still expanding). Let me know if there are things that you don't understand or that you think need to be covered in more detail, so I can tailor the next parts accordingly.
Protovis requires a modern browser, which means any recent version of Safari, Chrome, FireFox, or Opera. Internet Explorer does not work, because it does not support the HTML5 Canvas element. The visualizations in this article are all Protovis drawings (check out the source code!), with a fall-back to images for RSS readers and IE users. There is no real difference at this point, but once we get to interaction, you will want to read this in a supported browser.
A Simple Example
Let's start with a simple example, taken almost verbatim from the Protovis paper presented at InfoVis 2009 (PDF).

The following code creates this chart:

var vis = new pv.Panel().width(150).height(140)
   .add(pv.Bar)
       .data([1, 1.2, 1.7, 1.5, .7, .2])
       .bottom(0).width(20)
       .height(function(d) d * 80)
       .left(function() this.index * 25)
   .root.render();

Let's look at this line by line. The first line defines a new Panel, the base element for any Protovis chart. The panel is the canvas on which everything is drawn (in fact, it becomes an actual canvas element in the webpage). This line also defines its size by calling two functions that set its width and height.
Function Chaining
This brings us to the first bit of magic: Almost all functions in Protovis return the object they are called on. That makes it possible to chain function calls instead of having to repeat the variable name over and over. While this leads to more elegant, simpler code, it can make it a bit terse and more challenging to read. But consider the alternative:

var vis = new pv.Panel();
vis.width(150);
vis.height(140);
var bar = vis.add(pv.Bar)
etc ...

Function chaining lets you treat functions like statements: I want a panel, and I want its width to be 150 and its height to be 140; this translates very directly into function calls. While this is not all there is to what Bostock and Heer call a 'declarative style of programming,' it certainly is a big part of it.
Marks
But back to our example. The second line adds something to the panel by calling the add() function. What is added is called a mark, a graphical element that can represent data. Let's briefly skip over the details of that and look at the last line: here, we need to call the render function of the panel to tell it to create the necessary infrastructure and start rendering. Since at this point, the functions being called are called on the bar mark that was added in the second line, we need a way to go back to the panel. This could be done by assigning the panel to a variable vis and calling vis.render(). The way it is done here is using the special variable root, which exists in all marks. It returns the panel that the mark sits on, so we can add other marks to it or call its functions.
The following code snippet is identical to the above. I just showed the other one first because it is the style that the Protovis examples are written in, so it makes sense to get familiar with it.

var vis = new pv.Panel().width(150).height(140);
vis.add(pv.Bar)
   .data([1, 1.2, 1.7, 1.5, .7, .2])
   .bottom(0).width(20)
   .height(function(d) d * 80)
   .left(function() this.index * 25);
vis.render();

Using variables is a good idea in general, especially when creating more complex visualizations. But the clever design of Protovis' functions makes it possible to all but eliminate them in many cases (at least as far as Protovis objects are concerned).
Mark Properties
Now let's look at the definition of the bars, which is the same between both alternatives. The first statement defines an array of numbers, which are the data to be shown on the chart. We will later see data in variables and arrays of objects, not just numbers. But this kind of inline definition of the data is also possible. The square brackets delimit an array in JavaScript (and lots of other programming languages), numbers are listed with commas in between
The line after the data statement specifies two important but constant parts of the layout. Since we're using bars, we have to specify at least their position (x and y), their width, and height. For a bar chart, it makes sense to have all the bars have the same width, so it is set to a number here. And since we want all bars to sit on the same baseline, we specify their y position as 0. The terminology here, bottom, has to do with the way locations and sizes can be specified in Protovis. I'll cover more of that later.
More Fun With Functions
The next two lines is where it gets really interesting, and where a lot of confusion comes from. Remember that we are creating a bar chart here, but there is no loop to draw each of the bars. We specified the entire data array two lines earlier. Now how do we get Protovis to draw something?
The way Protovis works is that a definition like this tells it to iterate over the array of data it is given, instantiate a mark for each entry in the array, and evaluate all the information it is given about what to do with the mark. In the case of the width and bottom attributes, this is simple: we specified constants, so it just uses these same numbers for all of the bars it creates.
But we want the bars to represent the data by varying their height, how do we do that? The answer here is a function. Instead of specifying a number or variable, we assign a function to the height property. For every entry in the array, Protovis will call this function with the value, and use the result of the function as the height of the bar. The beauty of this approach is that JavaScript, unlike Java and most of the more common imperative languages, can use a function like a variable: you can pass it to another function, store it in a variable, and evaluate it by calling it.
As with the function chaining before, the particular style in which this is done in Protovis makes this a bit more difficult to understand. Here is the definition of the height again:

.height(function(d) d * 80)

And here is the same definition in a more verbose style that is actually correct JavaScript (Protovis does some magic with function parsing that allows the sloppy but more compact style above):

.height(function(d) {
   return d * 80;
})

Both statements do the exact same thing: they specify a function without a name (called an anonymous function) that takes one argument called d. The function returns the result of a simple computation, multiplying the value of that argument by 80. The unit here is pixels, which means that our highest bar will be 1.7 * 80 pixels high (1.7 is the maximum value in the data array).
Functions used in property definitions can do a lot more complex things. You can also assign functions to variables and reuse them in different definitions. But many functions used in visualization definitions in Protovis perform fairly straight-forward calculations or access data in more complex data structures (we'll get to that, too).
The last line in the bar definition works the same way as the height definition, with a small difference. We want our bars to be next to each other, not drawn on top of each other. Even though the mark is called bar, it is really more a general-purpose rectangle: it doesn't know anything about being a bar in a bar chart. That makes it very flexible and powerful, but it also means that you need to do a lot of things by hand that might seem obvious. Bar Layout
To move the bars, we specify their left property, which together with the bottom means we're specifying the lower left corner. Since this value will have to be different between the bars, we need to again specify a function. We are specifying everything at once, so there is no obvious way to order the bars and use that order to space them. Protovis therefore has a special variable that is available when it evaluates functions, which is called this.index. That variable's value is the index of the current value in the array, starting at 0 and going all the way to the size of the array minus 1.

.left(function() this.index * 25);

Remember that we set the width of the bars to 20. Putting the bars at multiples of 25 means that we're leaving five pixels of space between them. You can easily tweak any of these numbers to change spacing, scaling, etc. Just remember that when you increase the scale factor, you will have to also change the size of the panel, or your bars will be cut off!
Adding A Variable
The last step in this first part of this tutorial is simply to move the data into a variable. This is a simple but important step. To do this, we will define new variable numbers that contains the exact same numbers as above. The only other thing that changes is the data() function call that now uses the variable.

var numbers = [1, 1.2, 1.7, 1.5, .7, .2];

new pv.Panel().width(150).height(140)
   .add(pv.Bar)
       .data(numbers)
       .bottom(0).width(20)
       .height(function(d) d * 80)
       .left(function() this.index * 25)
   .root.render();

Running this does not actually make any difference, which is what we intended. But it opens the doors to some more flexibility. What if we wanted the bars to change size depending on how much data there is? Let's define another variable for the panel, panelWidth, and calculate the width of the bars, barWidth, from the size of the array.

var panelWidth = 150;

var barWidth = panelWidth/numbers.length;

The barWidth is the total space a bar takes up, including its spacing to the next bar. If we simply use this for our definition:

new pv.Panel().width(panelWidth).height(140)
   .add(pv.Bar)
       .data(numbers)
       .bottom(0).width(barWidth)
       .height(function(d) d * 80)
       .left(function() this.index * barWidth)
   .root.render();

We end up with something slightly unexpected:
We need to add some space between the bars again. Remember that we set the width to 20 earlier, but multiplied the index by 25. We need something similar here, so we'll introduce another variable, barSpacing. This will be subtracted from the barWidth in the width definition, so the bar does not use the entire width it got assigned.

var barSpacing = 5;

new pv.Panel().width(panelWidth).height(140)
   .add(pv.Bar)
       .data(numbers)
       .bottom(0).width(barWidth-barSpacing)
       .height(function(d) d * 80)
       .left(function() this.index * barWidth)
   .root.render();

The result is a readable chart that looks like before:
This may not look very exciting, but it gives us a lot of flexibility. Now we can change the width of the chart by simply changing the panelWidth, let's say to 250:
As you can see, the bars have adapted to the new width. The spacing looks a bit odd because barSpacing is still a constant, but that would be easy to change, too. But what happens if we add more data to our numbers array?

var numbers = [1, 1.2, 1.7, 1.5, .7, .2, .5, .9]

The bars adapt to the number of values, because the barWidth depends on the number of values in the numbers array, numbers.length. This only works to a certain point, because our spacing is still constant; but it's a start.
This concludes the first part of this tutorial. The next parts will cover more complex layouts, Protovis scales, other mark types, reading of complex data, labels, etc.
Start Playing!
If you want to play with Protovis, I am providing a ZIP file with two simple HTML files: one is the basic bar chart, the other one uses variables for the data and the widths.
I have also started a repository on github for people familiar with git.
"

Google Maps Envelopes | Incredible Things

2010-06-01T07:03:00.000-07:00

Google Maps Envelopes | Incredible Things: "Google Maps Envelopes Does your mail man ever get lost? Maybe he should switch from Mapquest to Google Maps. Or you could do it for him—sort of. Google Maps envelopes (only a concept at the moment) would let you send snail mail through an button right in gmail and print evelopes showing the route between the two addresses. The only flaw with the design is that the from address would have to be west of the to address, unless the envelope isn't strictly oriented with North facing up."

DataPrism

2010-05-31T13:33:00.000-07:00

DataPrism: "DataPrism is a tool to aid visualization and analysis of multimodal sets of time-coded information, with a focus on the analysis of video in combination with other data sources.

DataPrism is in active development by Adam Fouse, in the Distributed Cognition and Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego."

Mobile Printer

2010-05-31T05:09:00.000-07:00

PrintDreams

CNN: Home and Away

2010-05-26T07:10:00.000-07:00

CNN: Home and Away: "
We've been working with our friends at CNN for some time now on a few visualization and mapping projects. The first of these is live as of today; a mapping of coalition casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan called Home and Away and live on CNN.com.

The project is a sobering look at the human cost of America's two wars of occupation in the Middle East, and as such we've worked within a restrained and sober palette of blacks, whites and greys. CNN have hooked the maps up to their iReports project and we're hearing stories of people using the map to post memories and share stories about their lost loved ones. It's not been the easiest subject material to work on, but we've come away with a keen sense of the human face of these conflicts and hope you'll take the time to look around a bit at the stories that these kinds of maps can tell.
"

A Tour through the Visualization Zoo - ACM Queue

2010-05-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

A Tour through the Visualization Zoo - ACM Queue: "A Tour through the Visualization Zoo by Jeffrey Heer, Michael Bostock, Vadim Ogievetsky | May 13, 2010"

Web 3.0: The Movie

2010-05-10T13:48:00.001-07:00

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

Scribd in HTML5 | Scribd

2010-05-10T13:19:00.000-07:00

Scribd in HTML5 | Scribd

LukeW | Touch Gesture Reference Guide

2010-04-24T19:06:00.000-07:00

Touch Gesture Reference Guide: "The Touch Gesture Reference Guide is a unique set of resources for software designers and developers working on touch-based user interfaces."

Manual Desktarity

2010-04-21T06:53:00.001-07:00

Google Summer of Code

2010-04-06T18:19:00.000-07:00

Google Open Source Programs: "Welcome to the Google Summer of Code 2010 site! We are now accepting applications from students who wish to participate in Google Summer of Code. Full instructions for submitting your application can be found in our site User's Guide. Remember, your organization may have an application template that they would like you to use, so check out their home pages and Ideas Lists, all linked from the list of mentoring organizations for 2010. Also remember to take a look at our Frequently Asked Questions page for more information. We will accept student applications through April 9th at 19:00 UTC. Please make sure to review the program timeline for further granular details on deadlines."

2.5 Year Old and Ipad

2010-04-06T14:22:00.001-07:00

Predicting the Future with Social Media by Asur and Huberman

2010-04-04T18:46:00.000-07:00

"Abstract—In recent years, social media has become ubiquitous
and important for social networking and content sharing. And
yet, the content that is generated from these websites remains
largely untapped. In this paper, we demonstrate how social media
content can be used to predict real-world outcomes. In particular,
we use the chatter from Twitter.com to forecast box-office
revenues for movies. We show that a simple model built from
the rate at which tweets are created about particular topics can
outperform market-based predictors. We further demonstrate
how sentiments extracted from Twitter can be further utilized to
improve the forecasting power of social media."

Virtual Choir

2010-03-25T06:45:00.000-07:00

KK Lifestream: "This video is one of the loveliest things I've seen in the while. Many critics of web technology complain that there is nothing special enabled by social media which you could not do with traditional media. Yes, you could make a choir of 200, but it would probably not sing like this. Take a look at this virtual choir. It brings 185 voices, all recorded independently at home, and then combined into a virtual choir. Each voice (available on the side of the video) is expert, each face unique; combined they are heavenly. Could you do a choir of 1,000? Yes!"

Adobe Demonstrates Content-Aware Fill in Future Version of Photoshop - Mac Rumors

2010-03-24T13:19:00.000-07:00

Adobe Demonstrates Content-Aware Fill in Future Version of Photoshop - Mac Rumors: "Adobe Photoshop project manager John Nack yesterday pointed to a new demo video posted by a member of his team showing off an impressive new feature in Photoshop known as 'content-aware fill'. The feature utilizes complex mathematical algorithms to analyze digital images and assist users in filling in areas of complex scenes where undesired content has been removed."

orange balloon

2010-03-23T06:02:00.000-07:00

orange balloon:
"When you order something from Wickes, builders merchants, they send you an orange balloon and a piece of string. You tie the balloon to your gate, thus speeding up delivery and minimising missed deliveries. Nice."

PhoneGap | Cross platform mobile framework

2010-03-21T06:55:00.000-07:00

PhoneGap | Cross platform mobile framework: "PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you."

Seeing with the Tongue

2010-03-19T07:41:00.000-07:00

Future of Publishing

2010-03-17T15:13:00.000-07:00

Workshop on Intelligent Robotics

2010-03-05T08:05:00.001-08:00

Monday, March 8
Time: 3pm - 5pm
Location: CSE Auditorium, Room 1202, CSE Building, UCSD
Details: http://www.calit2.net/events/popup.php?id=1698

Speakers: Minoru Asada, Yasushi Mae and Ryoichi Kuboi, Osaka University

This workshop is hosted by Calit2 and organized by Osaka University to
showcase the institution's international program opportunities for
U.S. graduate students and undergraduates.

"We hope to attract as many students as possible to promote our
research collaboration and student exchange between Osaka University
and UC San Diego. In four talks, Osaka faculty led by Prof. Minoru
Asada will showcase research activity in intelligent robotics, and
they will also discuss proactive efforts funded by the Japanese
government to expand the number of U.S. and international students
studying at Osaka University."

UCSD graduate and undergraduate students from a variety of
disciplines, including electrical engineering, cognitive science,
computer science, mechanical engineering, neuroscience, biology and
psychology, will be exposed to Osaka University's program in
intelligent robotics, and to opportunities for research collaborations
and student exchanges as part of a funded Japanese government program
to boost the number of international students studying at Japanese
universities. The research talks will focus on cognitive developmental
robotics, membrane stress biotechnology for bio-sphere membrane, and
intelligent robotics research at Osaka University. The workshop is
free and open to the public.

[Workshop to be followed by a sushi reception]

YouTube Launches Auto-Captions For All Videos

2010-03-05T07:19:00.000-08:00

YouTube Launches Auto-Captions For All Videos: "In November of last year, the company began to roll out auto-captions on a limited scale, which use speech recognition to automatically transcribe what’s said in a video. And now, it’s going to enable the feature for all videos uploaded to YouTube where English is spoken."

Computational User Experiences: Muscle-Computer Interfaces

2010-03-03T07:29:00.000-08:00

Computational User Experiences: Muscle-Computer Interfaces: "Computational User Experiences Muscle-Computer Interfaces (muCIs) Many human-computer interaction technologies are currently mediated by physical transducers such as mice, keyboards, pens, dials, and touch-sensitive surfaces. While these transducers have enabled powerful interaction paradigms and leverage our human expertise in interacting with physical objects, they tether computation to a physical artifact that has to be within reach of the user. As computing and displays begin to integrate more seamlessly into our environment and are used in situations where the user is not always focused on the computing task, it is important to consider mechanisms for acquiring human input that may not necessarily require direct manipulation of a physical implement. We explore the feasibility of muscle-computer input: an interaction methodology that directly senses and decodes human muscular activity rather than relying on physical device actuation or user actions that are externally visible or audible."

Internet Statistics

2010-03-03T07:18:00.001-08:00

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

Jesse Schell’s mindblowing talk on the future of games (DICE 2010) � fox @ fury

2010-03-03T06:16:00.000-08:00

Jesse Schell’s mindblowing talk on the future of games (DICE 2010) fox @ fury: "Jesse Schell’s mindblowing talk on the future of games (DICE 2010) Friday, Feb 19, 2010 @ 3:25pm Jesse Schell’s talk about the future of game design as it invades the real world is just astounding. If you do experience design of any kind it’ll be the most valuable (and entertaining) 20 minutes you’ll spend all week."

Google Chrome Extensions

2010-03-01T15:06:00.000-08:00

Javascript: The Good Parts

2010-02-24T06:28:00.000-08:00

Inside Google's Secret Search Algorithm [Google]

2010-02-23T04:47:00.000-08:00

Inside Google's Secret Search Algorithm [Google]: "
Wired's Steven Levy takes us inside the 'algorithm that rules the web"—Google's search algorithm, of course—and if you use Google, it's kind of a must-read. PageRank? That's so 1997.
It's known that Google constantly updates the algorithm, with 550 improvements this year—to deliver smarter results and weed out the crap—but there are a few major updates in its history that have significantly altered Google's search, distilled in a helpful chart in the Wired piece. For instance, in 2001, they completely rewrote the algorithm; in 2003, they added local connectivity analysis; in 2005, results got personal; and most recently, they've added in real-time search for Twitter and blog posts.
The sum of everything Google's worked on—the quest to understand what you mean, not what you say—can be boiled down to this:

This is the hard-won realization from inside the Google search engine, culled from the data generated by billions of searches: a rock is a rock. It's also a stone, and it could be a boulder. Spell it 'rokc' and it's still a rock. But put 'little' in front of it and it's the capital of Arkansas. Which is not an ark. Unless Noah is around. 'The holy grail of search is to understand what the user wants,' Singhal says. 'Then you are not matching words; you are actually trying to match meaning.'

Oh, and by the way, you're a guinea pig every time you search for something, if you hadn't guessed as much already. Google engineer Patrick Riley tells Levy, "On most Google queries, you're actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously." It lets them constantly experiment on a smaller scale—even if they're only conducting a particular experiment on .001 percent of queries, that's a lot of data.
Be sure to check out the whole piece, it's ridiculously fascinating, and borders on self-knowledge, given how much we all use Google (sorry, Bing). [Wired, Sweet graphic by Wired's Mauricio Alejo]

iTunes Ten Billion Song Downloads Visualization

2010-02-17T05:46:00.000-08:00

iTunes Ten Billion Song Downloads Visualization: "

Apple's iTunes Store is counting down to the ten-billionth (10,000,000,000th) song download. As in previous cases when they were running a download counter on their website, I am harvesting the data and visualizing it below.

How to Read and Use

The bottom part of the visualization shows the number of downloads as a blue area, and the rate of downloads as a line. The pattern in the background has an edge every six hours, so two gray and two white stripes make up one day. The top view is a circular view, with one full round around the circle representing one day. The gray wedges correspond to the gray stripes in the bottom view, plus there are additional lines for each hour to make comparison easier. The lines are color-coded by the day, so the corresponding data in both views can be identified.
If you read this in your newsreader or in Internet Explorer, or have JavaScript turned off, you only see a static image above (which I will update a few times per day). In all other browsers, you are able to interact with the bottom view by moving your mouse over it. A small information window in the lower right of the view will show you the rate and total values of the hour your mouse is currently over, and the current hour and day will be highlighted in the circular view on top.
The visualization loads the data every time you refresh the page, but the underlying data only changes once per hour. It is also delayed by an hour, so any attempts at guessing the time of the 10,000,000,000th download (which will win a $10,000 iTunes gift card) is hopeless. All times are in Pacific Standard Time (PST).

Data

I am making the data available in two formats: JavaScript and CSV. The former is meant to be included as a script, and assigns the data (in inefficient but Protovis-friendly one-object-per-row format) to a variable named iTunes10billion. The latter is a classical plain-text CSV file. Both contain exactly the same data.
One convention is that the rate (which is per hour) gets a negative sign when no data is available for an hour. The total downloads and the rate are interpolated in this case. You can either skip those, or show them in a way that indicates missing data. The files also contain two different timestamps, one for easier parsing and one for direct display.
The data files are updated every five minutes, but the source data only changes once per hour. This usually happens a few minutes past the full hour, so the most up-to-date values are available around five to ten minutes past the full hour.

SMS Sligshot

2010-02-15T05:30:00.000-08:00

SMSSlingshot

Fujitsu's Air Command Plus

2010-02-14T06:31:00.000-08:00

Buzz kill

2010-02-13T06:42:00.000-08:00

Buzz kill: "
Google’s “buzz” is a wonderful feature, one that took me completely by surprise. Out of nowhere, right in the middle of my Gmail session, I found that I’m already enrolled in a Twitter-like social network. Not only that, but I also saw that Google had graciously provided me with people to follow my gTweets (buzzes?) and other people for me to follow, all culled from the people I email most often.
I love the boldness of this move. No longer will you need to decide whether you want to be in a Twitter-like social network. Google has already decided that you do. And they’ve even decided who your friends are. None of this old fashioned choosing your own friends nonsense. Such quaint notions are soooo 2009. The best part is that Google makes all of this information public, so that everyone in the world knows who you email regularly.
Some people might object that this is an invasion of privacy — that the entire point of email as a medium is that it is a kind of semi-private space, where you can have conversational exchanges without everyone in the world automatically knowing your business. But those people clearly haven’t gotten with the “buzz”.
I found myself excited by this freedom from having to think for myself, delighted to be rid of the intolerable burden of needing to choose my own lifestyle choices and my own friends. So I called up my friend George Fingler at Google Labs, and asked him if he could give me a sneak peak at what is coming next to our Gmail accounts.
George showed me some pretty cool things, and he told me that it would be ok for me to share them with you, my loyal readers. So let’s take a look at what’s coming next from the people who brought you “buzz”.
Have you ever wondered what happened to all of those embarrassing digital photos you decided not to upload to the Web? Like that one at the Christmas party where you got drunk and naked and somehow ended up in a compromising position with a rubber chicken? Well, it turns out that all of those pictures are still stored somewhere on your hard drive. In fact, thanks to an advanced disk crawler that you automatically downloaded with your last Gmail upgrade, they are now also sitting on Google servers. As part of its new free service, dubbed “say cheese!”, Google will soon be posting those images of you, at the rate of one a day, to popular social networking sites. Of course you can opt out of this free social networking service if you’d like. Unfortunately, due to the extra maintenance costs involved, the opt-out fee for this service is approximately $1000 per month.
Another cool feature that is soon going to show up soon in your Gmail is Google’s “Shared Telemedicine Database”. This is a feature that automatically displays your complete medical history for people in your extended “friend” network. The upside here is enormous. For example, have you ever wanted to date someone, but weren’t sure if they had genital herpes, or gonorrhea, or one of the various forms of syphilis? Well thanks to Google STD, you can rest easy — the complete medical history of everyone you’ve ever “friended” will show up on a convenient sidebar. And the best part is that every STD will be automatically loaded into your Gmail client when you log on. I have a feeling that this one will be going viral!
But the best feature George showed me was a little something Google calls “meta-search”. This one is pure genius. Basically, every search term you’ve ever typed into Google, from “drug dealers in the greater Seattle area” to “junior high hotties”, will now be available to your ever expanding network of Google friends. And the entire database of those terms is itself searchable (this is Google, after all!). Any time a new friend is added to your buzz or gChat list, a random set of your searches will automatically be forwarded to them. This can be great when you are first starting to work with a new colleague or supervisor, or when you’ve just gone on a first date with someone you really like. After all, isn’t that the perfect time for this person to learn about your interests in “sexy clown pictures” and “interspecies dating tips”?
I’m sure you are as excited by these new developments as I am. Luckily for you, while you were reading this blog post, a Google Ajax client has been loading and embedding these delightful features into your operating system’s kernel. Congratulations, you’ve already opted in. Feel the buzz!
"

[object HTMLImageElement]

2010-02-11T11:02:00.000-08:00

[object HTMLImageElement]: "iProcessing is an open programming framework to help people develop native iPhone applications using the Processing language. It is an integration of the Processing.js library and a Javascript application framework for iPhone. "

Displax multitouch film actually developed by Visual Planet, frowny faces all around

2010-02-09T19:56:00.000-08:00

Ready for another dustup in multitouch land? Turns out that cool Displax multitouch film we saw a few days ago is actually called ViP Interactive Foil, and was developed in 2004 by a company called Visual Planet -- Displax was just showing it off to promote their new touch controller, but didn't tell anyone about the source of the film when that's where all the interest was. Naturally that's got Visual Planet in a bit of a tizzy, especially since it's developing a touch controller of its own for release down the line; the two companies have been partners in the past but there's no agreement now. Displax says it's looking at several suppliers for the film as it rolls towards that promised July ship date -- we'll see if any of this gets sorted out by then.

Explorations in Statistics Research

2010-02-08T05:12:00.000-08:00

Explorations in Statistics Research

Explorations in Statistics Research:
An Undergraduate Summer Program

http://www.appcelerator.com/

2010-02-07T07:05:00.000-08:00

Light Blue Optics Video

2010-02-07T06:50:00.000-08:00

Light Touch - instantly turns any flat surface into a touch screen | Light Blue Optics

2010-02-07T06:42:00.000-08:00

Light Touch - instantly turns any flat surface into a touch screen | Light Blue Optics: "Light Touch™ is an interactive projector that instantly transforms any flat surface into a touch screen. It frees multimedia content from the confines of the small screen, allowing users to interact with that content just as they do on their hand held devices – using multi-touch technology. Light Touch™ has Holographic Laser Projection (HLP™) technology inside which creates bright, high-quality video images in WVGA resolution. Integrated infrared sensors detect motion and turn the projected image into a 10.1″ virtual touch screen, so the user can control the projector and interact with applications simply by touching the image."

The War on Interruptions, an Excerpt from “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard”

2010-02-07T06:25:00.000-08:00

The War on Interruptions, an Excerpt from “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard”: "
The following is an excerpt from Chip and Dan Heath’s new book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, which will be released on February 16.
One of the most consistent findings in psychology is that people behave differently when their environment changes. When we’re in a place where people are quiet (church), we’re quiet. When we’re in a place where people are loud (stadiums), we’re loud. When we’re driving and the lanes narrow, we slow down. When they widen, we speed up again. This may seem obvious, but when we try to make change at work, we often make the mistake of obsessing about the people involved rather than their environment. Often the easiest way to drive change is to shape the environment.
This environment-shaping strategy was used in 2006 by Becky Richards, the Adult Clinical Services Director at Kaiser South San Francisco hospital, who was determined to drive down medication errors. On average, nurses commit roughly 1 error per 1000 medications administered. That’s an impressive record of accuracy. Still, given the huge volume of medications delivered at Kaiser South, that error rate led to about 250 errors annually, and a single error can be harmful or even deadly. For instance, if a patient received too much Heparin, a blood thinner, the patient’s blood would no longer clot and the patient could hemorrhage. If a patient got too little Heparin, he could develop a blood clot that could lead to a stroke.
Richards believed that most errors happened when nurses were distracted. And it was all too easy to get distracted—most traditional hospitals put the medication administration areas right in the middle of the nursing units, which tended to be noisiest places on the floor. Tess Pape, a professor at the University of Texas who has studied medication errors, said, “Today we admire people for multitasking, we celebrate people who can accomplish many things at once. But when you’re giving out medications is the last time you should be multitasking.”
At Kaiser, no one thought twice about calling out to a nurse who was delivering medication. Worse, nurses felt an obligation to respond when others distracted them. They couldn’t very well tell a surgeon, “Sorry bud, can’t help right now, I’m dealing with medication”? And yet that’s exactly what would need to happen for errors to be reduced.
Ideally, when the nurses were administering medication, they’d work inside a soundproof bubble, like the “Cone of Silence” from Get Smart. With that solution being architecturally infeasible, Richards came up with the idea of using a visual symbol, something that could be worn by nurses, which would signal to other people, Hey, don’t interrupt me right now.
After considering armbands and aprons, she settled on vests. She called them “medication vests.” Richards scrambled to find someone who could supply her vests: “The first vest we ordered was off the internet. It was really cheesy. Cheap plastic. Bright orange. Be careful what you order off the internet.”
Later, with vests in hand, Richards unveiled the idea to her staff: When you’re administering medication, you’ll put on a medication vest. It’s bright enough that people can see it from down the hall. And all of us, including the doctors, will know that when someone is wearing one of these vests, we should leave them alone.
She selected two units at Kaiser South for a 6-month pilot study of the medication vests, and in July 2006, it began.
Richards quickly encountered a problem with her pilot: The nurses hated the vests. So did the doctors. “Nurses thought the vest was demeaning, and they couldn’t find it when they needed it,” said Richards. “They didn’t like the color. ‘How do you clean it?’ And physicians hated not being able to talk to their nurses when they passed them in the hall.”
The nurses’ written feedback about the pilot was scathing:
- “Oh, so you want to draw attention to the fact we can make a mistake…” - “You want people to think I have a dunce cap on, that I’m so stupid I can’t think on my feet.” - “Give me a hard hat and a cone and I can go work for Cal Trans [the state highway department].”
“They were pretty brutal,” said Richards. The reception was so universally poor that Richards was ready to write off the idea and try something else. Then the data came back.
In the 6-month pilot, errors had dropped 47% from the 6 months prior to the study. “It took our breath away,” said Richards.
Once the data was in, the hatred faded. Impressed by the results, the entire hospital adopted the medication vests, except for one unit that insisted they didn’t need them. Errors dropped by 20% in the first month of the hospital-wide adoption, except for one unit that actually saw an increase in errors. (Guess which one?)
You know you’ve got a smart solution when everyone hates it and it still works—and in fact it works so well that people’s hate turns to enthusiasm. Becky Richards had found a way to use the environment to change behavior. A similar practice has long been used by the airline industry. Because most aircraft accidents happen during takeoffs and landings—the most hectic and coordination-intensive parts of any flight—the industry has imposed a rule called the “sterile cockpit”. Anytime the aircraft is below 10,000 feet—whether on the way up or the way down—no conversation is permitted, except what’s directly relevant for flying. At 11,000 feet, you can talk about football, your kids, or the loathsome passengers. But not at 9,500 feet. In another organization, the IT group jointly agreed on a sterile cockpit for their software project. The group had embraced a substantial goal—to reduce new product development time from three years to nine months. In previous projects with tight deadlines, the work environment had become increasingly stressful, and as workers got behind schedule, they’d tend to start interrupting their colleagues for quick help. Managers would wander by regularly to be “statused” on the project. As a result, people were interrupted more and more, and work weeks expanded to 60 and 70 hours as people started showing up on the weekend, hoping to get some work done when they could focus.
The IT group decided to try an experiment—they established “quiet hours” on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings before noon. The goal was to give coders a sterile cockpit, allowing them to tackle more complex bits of coding without being derailed by periodic interruptions. Even the socially insensitive responded well to the change in the Path. One engineer, previously among the worst interrupters, said, “I always used to worry about my own quiet time and how to get more of it, but this experiment made me think about how I’m impacting others.”
In the end, the group managed to meet its stringent nine-month development goal. And the division VP attributed the success to the sterile cockpit quiet hours: “I do not think we could’ve made the deadline without it,” he said. “This is a new benchmark.”
In these disparate environments—cockpits and hospitals and IT workgroups—the right behaviors did not evolve naturally. Nurses weren’t “naturally” given enough space to work without distraction, and programmers weren’t “naturally” left alone to focus on coding. Instead, leaders had to reshape the environment consciously. With some simple tweaks to the environment, suddenly the right behaviors emerged. It wasn’t the people who changed, it was the situation. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

Chromium Blog: 40,000 More Extensions!

2010-02-01T14:56:00.000-08:00

Chromium Blog: 40,000 More Extensions!: "One thing that got lost in the commotion of the extensions launch is a feature that is near and dear to my heart: Google Chrome 4 now natively supports Greasemonkey user scripts. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension I wrote in 2004 that allows developers to customize web pages using simple JavaScript and it was the inspiration for some important parts of our extension system. Ever since the beginning of the Chromium project, friends and coworkers have been asking me to add support for user scripts in Google Chrome. I'm happy to report that as of the last Google Chrome release, you can install any user script with a single click. So, now you can use emoticons on blogger. Or, you can browse Google Image Search with a fancy lightbox. In fact, there's over 40,000 scripts on userscripts.org alone."

The Next Touchscreens Will Be Very Sensitive About How Hard You Poke Them [Touchscreens]

2010-01-29T06:37:00.000-08:00

The Next Touchscreens Will Be Very Sensitive About How Hard You Poke Them [Touchscreens]: "
We've made the leap from resistive to capacitive touchscreens that are more accurate—and multitouchy—so what's next? Screens that feel how hard you tickle them.
One of several approaches to making that happen uses a quantum tunneling composite—quantum tunneling happens when you bring two conductors close together, but with an insulating layer still between them, and electrons jump between the two conductors. Peratech's way to do this is with a polymer that changes resistance as you apply force for the insulating layer, so that bottom line, screens using this tech can tell how hard you pressing on the screen, since the sensors are able tell within two micrometers of how far in the screen's bending.
While there's other tech out there for pressure-sensing screens, Peratech says their tech uses less power and is more sensitive. The first gadgets with Peratech's sauce is coming out as early as April, so we'll able to poke things with that much more intent. Though, I have a hard enough time hitting the right stuff on screen—now I'm gonna have to keep track of how hard I press? Hrm. [MIT via Engadget]

Summer Research in China

2010-01-26T07:10:00.000-08:00

January 19, 2010

The 2010 International Research and Education in Engineering (IREE) Program, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and organized by Purdue University, is now accepting applications for the 2010 grant cycle. IREE 2010 awardees will receive a stipend (US$4,000 for graduate students and US$3,000 for undergraduate students) to conduct engineering-related research in China from May - August 2010 . Additionally, grant awardees will receive allowances for: an orientation program; travel to and housing/meals in China; plus a re-entry program. The 50 students (20 undergraduate and 30 graduate students) that receive the IREE award will spend 10-12 weeks working on frontier engineering research projects in university, industry, or government labs in China.

Applicants must be currently enrolled and in good academic standing as degree-seeking undergraduate OR graduate students at a U.S. institution of higher education. They must also be able to express both a demonstrated interest in a field of engineering related research, and a desire to work in China. Finally, strong preference will be given to United States citizens or nationals, or permanent residents of the United States. In addition, women, underrepresented groups, and students from schools with limited research opportunities are particularly encouraged to apply.

The IREE Program was initiated by the National Science Foundation (ENG/EEC) in 2006 to promote enhancement of global competency of 21st century engineering professionals, development of collaborations with engineering researchers abroad, and providing students with opportunities to experience the life and culture of a another country. It enables early-career researchers in the U.S. to gain international research experience and perspective. IREE also seeks to enhance U.S. innovation in both research and education, as well as enable connections between the research programs of NSF's divisions with the education of students.

Application deadline for IREE 2010 is FEBRUARY 15th, 2010. For eligibility and application, go to: http://www.globalhub.org/iree.

Power of Personal Projects

2010-01-24T06:32:00.000-08:00

The Apple Tablet Interface Must Be Like This [Apple]

2010-01-21T08:00:00.000-08:00

The Apple Tablet Interface Must Be Like This [Apple]: "
Some people want the Apple Tablet to run Mac OS X's user interface. Others think its UI will be something exotic. Both camps are wrong: The iPhone started a UI revolution, and the tablet is just step two. Here's why.
If you are talking hardware, you can speculate about many different features. But when it comes to the fabled Apple Tablet, there are basically three user interface camps at war. On one side there are the people who think that a traditional GUI—one built on windows, folders and the old desktop metaphor—is the only way to go for a tablet. You know, like with the Microsoft Windows-based tablets, and the new crop of touchscreen laptops.
In another camp, there are the ones who are dreaming about magic 3D interfaces and other experimental stuff, thinking that Apple would come up with a wondrous new interface that nobody can imagine now, one that will bring universal love, world peace and pancakes for everyone—even while Apple and thousands of experts have explored every UI option imaginable for decades.
And then there's the third camp, in which I have pitched my tent, who says that the interface will just be an evolution of an existing user interface, one without folders and windows, but with applications that take over the entire screen. A 'modal' user interface that has been proven in the market battlefield, and that has brought a new form of computing to every normal, non-computer-expert consumer.
Yes, people, I'm afraid that the tablet will just run a sightly modified version of the iPhone OS user interface. And you should be quite happy about it, as it's the culmination of a brilliant idea proposed by a slightly nutty visionary genius, who died in 2005 without ever seeing the rise of the JesusPhone.
This guy's name was Jef Raskin.

The incredible morphing computer

Raskin was the human interface expert who lead the Macintosh project until Steve Jobs—the only guy whose gigantic ego rivaled Raskin's—kicked him out. During his time at Apple, Raskin worked on a user interface idea called the "information appliance," a concept that was later bastardized by the Larry Ellisons and Ciscos of this world.
In Raskin's head, an information appliance would be a computing device with one single purpose—like a toaster makes toast, and a microwave oven heats up food. This gadget would be so easy to use that anyone would be able to grab it, and start playing with it right away, without any training whatsoever. It would have the right number of buttons, in the right position, with the right software. In fact, an information appliance—which was always networked—would be so easy to use that it would become invisible to the user, just part of his or her daily life.
Sound familiar? Not yet? Well, now consider this. Later in his life, Raskin realized that, while his idea was good, people couldn't carry around one perfectly designed information appliance for every single task they can think of. Most people were already carrying a phone, a camera, a music player, a GPS and a computer. They weren't going to carry any more gadgets with them.
He saw touch interfaces, however, and realized that maybe, if the buttons and information display were all in the software, he could create a morphing information appliance. Something that could do every single task imaginable perfectly, changing mode according to your objectives. Want to make a call? The whole screen would change to a phone, and buttons will appear to dial or select a contact. Want a music player or a GPS or a guitar tuner or a drawing pad or a camera or a calendar or a sound recorder or whatever task you can come up with? No problem: Just redraw the perfect interface on the screen, specially tailored for any of those tasks. So easy that people would instantly get it.
Now that sounds familiar. It's exactly what the iPhone and other similar devices do. And like Raskin predicted, everyone gets it, which is why Apple's gadget has experienced such a raging success. That's why thousands of applications—which perform very specialized tasks—get downloaded daily.

The impending death of the desktop computer

Back in the '80s, however, this wasn't possible. The computing power wasn't there, and touch technology as we know it didn't even exist.
During those years, Raskin wanted the information appliance concept to be the basis of the Mac but, as we know, the Macintosh evolved into a multiple purpose computer. It was a smart move, the only possible one. It would be able to perform different tasks, and the result was a lot simpler than the command-line based Apple II or IBM PC. It used the desktop metaphor, a desk with folders to organize your documents. That was a level of abstraction that was easier to understand than typing 'dir' or 'cd' or 'cls.'

However, the desktop metaphor still required training. It further democratized computing, but despite its ease of use, many people then and today still find computers difficult to use. In fact, now they are even harder to use than before, requiring a longer learning curve because the desktop metaphor user interface is now more complex (and abstract) than ever before. People 'in the know' don't appreciate the difficulty of managing Mac OS X or Windows, but watching some of my friends deal with their computers make it painfully obvious: Most people are still baffled with many of the conventions that some of us take for granted. Far from decreasing over time, the obstacles to learning the desktop metaphor user interface have increased.
What's worse, the ramping-up in storage capability and functionality has made the desktop metaphor a blunder more than an advantage: How could we manage the thousands of files that populate our digital lives using folders? Looking at my own folder organization, we can barely, if at all. Apple and Microsoft have tried to tackle this problem with database-driven software like iPhoto or iTunes. Instead of managing thousands of files 'by hand,' that kind of software turns the computer into an 'information appliance,' giving an specialized interface to organize your photos or music.
That's still imperfect, however, and—while easier than the navigate-through-a-zillion-folders alternative—we still have to live with conventions that are hard to understand for most people.

The failure of the Windows tablet

As desktop computing evolved and got more convoluted, other things were happening. The Newton came up, drawing from Raskin's information appliance concept. It had a conservative morphing interface, it was touch sensitive, but it ended being the first Personal Digital Assistant and died, killed by His Steveness.
Newton—and later the Palm series—also ran specialized applications, and could be considered the proto-iPhone or the proto-Tablet. But it failed to catch up thanks to a bad start, a monochrome screen, the lack of always-connected capabilities, and its speed. It was too early and the technology wasn't there yet.
When the technology arrived, someone else had a similar idea: Bill Gates thought the world would run on tablets one day, and he wanted them to run Microsoft software. The form may have been right, but the software concept was flawed from the start: He tried to adapt the desktop metaphor to the tablet format.
Instead of creating a completely new interface, closer to Raskin's ideas, Gates adapted Windows to the new format, adding some things here and there, like handwriting recognition, drawing and some gestures—which were pioneered by the Newton itself. That was basically it. The computer was just the same as any other laptop, except that people would be able to control it with a stylus or a single finger.
Microsoft Windows tablets were a failure, and they became a niche device for doctors and nurses. The concept never took off at the consumer level because people didn't see any advantage on using their good old desktop in a tablet format which even was more expensive than regular laptops.

The rise of the iPhone

So why would Apple create a tablet, anyway? The answer is in the iPhone.
While Bill Gates' idea of a tablet was a market failure, it achieved one significant success: It demonstrated that transferring a desktop user interface to a tablet format was a horrible idea, destined to fail. That's why Steve Jobs was never interested. Something very different was needed, and that came in the form of a phone.
The iPhone is the information appliance that Raskin imagined at the end of his life: A morphing machine that could do any task using any specialized interface. Every time you launch an app, the machine transforms into a new device, showing a graphical representation of its interface. There are specialized buttons for taking pictures, and gestures to navigate through them. Want to change a song? Just click the 'next' button. There are keys to press phone numbers, and software keyboards to type short messages, chat, email or tweet. The iPhone could take all these personalities, and be successful in all of them.
When it came out, people instantly got this concept. Clicking icons transformed their new gadget into a dozen different gadgets. Then, when the app store appeared, their device was able to morph into an unlimited number of devices, each serving one task.
In this new computing world there were no files or folders, either. Everything was database-driven. The information was there, in the device, or out there, floating in the cloud. You could access it all through all these virtual gadgets, at all times, because the iPhone is always connected.
I bet that Jobs and others at Apple saw the effect this had on the consumer market, and instantly thought: "Hey, this thing changes everything. It is like the new Mac after the Apple II." A new computing paradigm for normal consumers, from Wilson's Mac-and-PC-phobic step-mom to my most computer-illiterate friends. One that could be adopted massively if priced right. A new kind of computer that, like the iPhone, could make all the things that consumers—not professionals, or office people—do with a regular computers a lot easier.
This was the next step after the punching card, the command line, and the graphical desktop metaphor. It actually feels like something Captain Picard would use.
Or, at least, that's how the theory goes.

Stretching the envelope

For the tablet revolution to happen, however, the iPhone interface will need to stretch in a few new directions. Perhaps the most important and difficult user interface problem is the keyboard. Quite simply, how will we type on the thing? It's not as easy as making the iPhone keyboard bigger. You can read our analysis of the potential solutions here. The other issues involved are:
• How would Apple and the app developers deal with the increased resolution? • How would Apple deal with multitasking that, in theory, would be easier with the increased power of a tablet? • Where would Apple place the home button?

The resolution dilemma

The first question has an easy answer from a marketing and development perspective.
At the marketing level, it would be illogical to waste the power that the sheer number of iPhone/iPod Touch applications give to this platform. Does this mean that the Apple Tablet would run the same applications as the iPhone, just bigger, at full screen?
This is certainly a possibility if the application doesn't contain a version of its user interface specifically tailored for the increased screen real state. It's also the easiest one to implement. The other possibility is that, in the case the application is not ready for the extra pixel space, it may run alongside other applications running at 320 x 240 pixels.
Here is a totally made-up example of home-screen icons and apps running on a tablet at full screen:
However, this would complicate the user interface way too much. My logical guess is that, if the app interface is not Tablet-ready, it would run at full screen. That's the cheapest option for everyone, and it may not even be needed in most cases: If the rumors are true, there will be a gap between the announcement of the device and the actual release. This makes sense, as it will give developers time to scramble to get their apps ready for the new resolution.
Most developers will like to take advantage of the extra pixels that the screen offers, with user interfaces that put more information in one place. But the most important thing is that the JesusTablet-tailored apps represent an opportunity to increase their sales.
From a development point of view, this represents an easily solvable challenge. Are there going to be two applications, one for the iPhone/iPod touch, and another one for the tablet? Most likely, no. If Apple follows the logic of their Mac OS X's resolution-independent application guidelines—issued during the World Wide Developers Conference in June—the most reasonable option could be to pack the two user interfaces and associated art into a single fat application.

How to multitask

Most rumors are pointing at the possibility of multitasking in the tablet (and also on the iPhone OS 4.0). This will bring up the challenge of navigation through running apps that take all over the screen. Palm's Web OS solves this elegantly, but Apple has two good options in their arsenal, all present in Mac OS X.
The app switch bar or a dock They can implement a simple dock that is always present on the screen or is invoked using a gesture or clicking a button or on a screen icon. This is the simplest available method, and can also be made to be flashy and all eye candy.
Exposé This is one of those features that people love in Mac OS X, but that only a few discover on their own. Once you get it, you can't live without it. I can imagine a tablet-based Exposé as an application switcher. Make a gesture or click on a corner, and get all running applications to neatly appear in a mosaic, just like Mac OS X does except that they won't have multiple windows. The apps could be updated live, ready to be expanded when you touch one of them. Plenty of opportunity for sci-fi'ish eye candy here.
A gesture makes sense for implementing Exposé on the tablet—as you can do on the MacBook Pro—but they could also use their recently-patented proximity sensing technology. In fact, I love this idea: Make the four corners of the tablet hot, making icons appear every time you get a thumb near a corner. The icons—which could be user customizable—could bring four different functions. One of them would be closing the running application. The other, call Exposé and bring up the mosaic with all running applications. The other could invoke the home screen, with all the applications. And a fourth one, perhaps, could open the general preferences. Or bring a set of Dashboard widgets that will show instant information snippets, like in Mac OS X.
Here's an illustration—again, totally hypothetical—of what this sort of Exposé interface might look like:

The trouble with the home button

The physical home button in the iPhone and the touch plays a fundamental role, and it's one of the key parts of the interface. Simply put, without it, you can't exit applications and return to the home screen. On the small iPhone, it makes sense to have it where it is. On this larger format—check its size compared to the iPhone here—things are not so clear.
Would you have a single home button? If yes, would you place it on a corner, where it could be easily pressed by one of your thumbs, as you hold the tablet? On what corner? If you add two home buttons, for easier access, wouldn't that confuse consumers? Or not? And wouldn't placing a button affect the perception of the tablet as an horizontal or vertical device? This, for me, is one of the biggest—and silliest—mysteries of the tablet.
What about if Apple decides not to use a physical button? Like I point out in the idea about Exposé, the physical button could be easily replaced by a user definable hot corner.

Revolution Part Two

With these four key problems solved, whatever extra Apple adds—like extra gestures—is just icing on the iPhone user interface cake that so many consumers find so delicious. The important thing here is that the fabled Apple Tablet won't revolutionize the computing world on its own. It may become what the Mac was to the command-line computers, but the revolution already started with the iPhone.
If Apple has interpreted its indisputable success as an indication about what consumers want for the next computing era, the new device will be more of the same, but better and more capable.
Maybe Apple ignored this experience, and they have created a magical, wondrous, an unproven, completely new interface that nobody can imagine now. You know, the one that will bring universal love, world peace and pancakes for everyone. I'm all for pancakes.
Or perhaps Steve Jobs went nuts, and he decided to emulate el Sr. Gates with a desktop operating system.
The most logical step, however, is to follow the iPhone and the direction set by Raskin years ago. To me, the tablet will be the continuation of the end for the classic windowed environment and the desktop metaphor user interface. And good riddance, is all I can say.

Stanford's latest iPhone Apps course now available on iTunes U

2010-01-13T19:31:00.000-08:00

Stanford's latest iPhone Apps course now available on iTunes U: "As the popularity of cell phone apps has increased by leaps and bounds, so has a Stanford course that teaches students and the general public (via the Internet) how to create apps for Apple's iPhone."

Apple 2010: More of the Same and Blu-Ray, too

2010-01-13T09:58:00.000-08:00

Apple 2010: More of the Same and Blu-Ray, too: "
Back to my 2010 predictions, this time mainly about Apple, the PC company that fared best in 2009 and is likely to fare best in 2010, too. Though I also wonder at what point we take Apple’s hint and stop thinking of them so much as a computer company?
Over the past years Apple has brought out successively better and ever more solid versions of OS X. They’ve completed a transition from PowerPC to Intel processors that could have killed a lesser company. They’ve built a dominant line of professional apps and a competitive line of productivity apps, pricing them reasonably compared to Microsoft. They re-invented the media player and the smart phone. They revolutionized the record business. And having once vilified the very idea of Apple stores, they changed their minds and showed the world how stores ought to be run. The company is absolutely at the top of its game despite a CEO who was absent for months near death. How do you top that?
In 2010 you do so by entering new markets and turning on old friends, sometimes simultaneously. That’s likely to be the case with the coming iSlate tablet, or whatever it will be called, which definitely won’t be running exclusively on AT&T. You can see that from AT&T’s sudden embrace of Android, which never would have happened if Steve Jobs hadn’t first made a preemptive move of his own for the iSlate, probably to Verizon. The Apple/AT&T marriage is now one of convenience only.
The iSlate (or whatever) will be Steve’s idea of a new category of computing, or at least that’s the way he’ll spin it. Not an ebook reader, not a tablet computer, not a pen computer, not a handheld, not a smart phone, the iSlate will be something else and I’d say that something will depend on: a) the content deals Apple can announce, and; b) whatever Steve decides to claim for the product, whether actually true or not.
So expect lots of print deals for newspapers, magazines, and books. Expect, too, audio and video deals for the iSlate. Expect some major UI gimmick too, because that’s always at the heart of one of these advances. “It isn’t an MP3 player! It’s an AAC player with this tuning wheel thingee!! ” See what I mean?
Apple will under-promise and over-deliver for the iSlate. And if for some reason they don’t, then they’ll just declare it to be a hobby, like the AppleTV.
Apple as a content company will move into subscription music based on its recent Lala Media acquisition, but don’t think this embracing of streaming means Apple will be abandoning downloads, no sirree. Remember that while Hulu, for example, has been making a lot of news delivering streamed TV and movies, Apple has been making a lot of profit downloading both for sale and rental.
The downloading-streaming-downloading pendulum is about to turn direction, I think, with the advent of true 1080p video on the net. Years ago no network was fast enough for high fidelity streaming audio, much less streaming video, so everything was downloaded. Then networks got faster and people streamed. Then video came along (and Bit Torrent) and people downloaded again. That’s when iTunes rose to power for those of us who actually pay our bills. Then YouTube made streaming again popular. But now 1080p files are just so darned big that downloading is, again, where it’s at.
So what does that say about Apple’s vaunted rejection of Blu-Ray disks? I’ve maintained in the past that Apple refused to offer Blu-Ray as part of its agenda to take control of downloadable HD video standards. and I think I was right. But here’s news: Apple’s new line of iMacs were supposed to ship with Blu-Ray drives, but didn’t. What gives with that? Maybe it was a technical glitch, maybe a last minute pricing problem, maybe Steve didn’t get enough blood or flesh from some corporate partner (Sony). But I think it means that the fight over HD was won by Apple to the extent that they feel they can start listening again to their professional customers from the video industry who have been screaming for Blu-Ray.
So look for Blu-Ray drives to start appearing, shortly, in Apple computers along with Blu-Ray support in all of Apple’s professional applications. Look also for Apple to offer some higher level of HD download, probably with expanded device portability courtesy of Disney’s new KeyChest technology, which I am sure came from Apple.
And then there’s the iPhone. The iSlate will be a bigger iPhone, but in 2010 we’ll surely see at least two next-gen iPhones, too — a smaller form factor in the Nano tradition and a 1 GHz processor on something like the current model. Apple will remain atop the smart phone market, where Android may eventually threaten, but not yet. As we see from the first Nexus One reviews, Google has a lot to learn.
More about Google and the Nexus One tomorrow, as well as an interesting theory about Apple and Nokia.
"

hint.fm: The Joy of Revelation through Expressive Visualization

2010-01-11T05:47:00.000-08:00

hint.fm: The Joy of Revelation through Expressive Visualization: "
Two of the very best visualization designers and researchers around today, Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, have started a new website, titled Hint.fm [hint.fm] (or it exists much longer and I just didn't know). The website collects their past presentations, publications, exhibitions, press coverage, and all of their works, of which Many Eyes, FleshMap, and Phrase Nets are just a few. Most projects are remarkable in their apparent focus on combining the aspects of beauty and story-telling through the presentation data. As they state themselves in the colophon, 'Unlike ... traditional uses, we believe visualization to be an expressive medium that invites emotion.'
Two latest project stand out. 'Flickr Flow' is based on a large collection of photographs of the Boston Common taken from Flickr. A specifically design algorithm calculates the relative proportions of different colors seen in photos taken in each month of the year, and plotted them on a wheel. The resulting diagram picks up the ebb and flow of seasonal colors.
Web Seer' attempts to visualize people's innermost thoughts by using data originating from Google Suggest (the drop-down box that guesses your search query while you write). The interactive tool contrast two separate search queries, as it highlights the commonly shared and opposite suggestions proposed by the Google algorithm. The arrow thicknesses show the number of web pages for each question. Insightful examples include 'are Democrats' versus 'are Republicans', or 'shopping for men' versus 'shopping for women'. Both authors describe a qualitative analysis of the resulting graphs at a recent op-ed ('op-chart') in The New York Times.

The State of Information Visualization

2010-01-11T05:27:00.000-08:00

The State of Information Visualization: "

Information Visualization (InfoVis) is an exciting field to watch grow and expand into ever new areas. Last year brought some interesting developments that point towards changes in how we do and see visualization. What does 2010 hold in store? Here is a look back and some ideas where we're heading.

2009: What Was

Until May 2009, the biggest issue in visualization was access to good data. There were a few standard data sets, and when working with companies we would sometimes get some of their data (which we were not able to share, of course); but comparing visualizations without interesting test data was difficult. Data.gov (and similar websites in other countries) changed all of that. Suddenly, there is more data than we really know what to do with, and more is coming. There are some issues with inflated numbers of data sets (e.g., toxic release data has separate data sets for each state and year), but it's still a fantastic service and points into the right direction. The recent release of climate data (even if for the wrong reasons) also provided us with some interesting material to dig into. In my opinion, the availability of large amounts of new data was the biggest thing to happen for InfoVis in 2009.

With great data comes great responsibility. We need to figure out ways to do what InfoVis for the Masses has promised for a few years now: easy access to all the relevant data for everybody. Now that we finally have the data, we need to build more and better visualizations. A key event in that direction was the release of Protovis. It is billed as an easy way to build visualizations, and it is very powerful; but the key is that it runs directly in the browser, without the need for plugins. The only issue at the moment is that Internet Explorer does not support the canvas element that Protovis needs, but there are libraries that emulate that using the equivalent IE mechanism. Once this is solved, Protovis will be the way to go for web-based visualization of open data.

What makes Protovis (and also Tableau Public, see below) more interesting than Many Eyes and other visualization-as-a-service websites so far is the fact that you can create new visualizations for your data, and that you can combine and link several views. The up-front effort to build a visualization is certainly higher, but it also provides a lot more possibilities.

Protovis was presented at InfoVis/VisWeek 2009, and there were also two other papers that will prove to have a lasting effect: Tamara Munzner's A Nested Model for Visualization Design and Validation and Chris Weaver's Conjunctive Visual Forms (PDF). While very different, the two papers were similar in one respect: they were theory papers. There haven't been any theoretical papers in InfoVis recently, and I hope that this is a sign that this type of paper is becoming more acceptable again. The field certainly needs more of the digestion and deep thinking these two examples showed.

An event that involved yours truly was the release of the Parallel Sets program in early June. The tool is finding quite a few users, and we were able to submit an entry to the Discovery Exhibition (and win a prize there). While progress with updates hasn't been quite as fast as hoped, we have a lot more features planned and hope to release an updated version soon. What is more, we hope to inspire more InfoVis researchers to release their programs to get more tools into people's hands.

2010: What Will Be

Looking forward, what can we expect from the new year? One product that will have a big impact is Tableau Public. Currently in beta, it will be released in early 2010. It's a fully functioning version of Tableau Desktop, but it can only save its data to Tableau's public server (and there are limits on dataset size and data sources). Unlike Protovis, Tableau Public is server-based, with an embedding mechanism that only requires JavaScript. Like Protovis, Tableau offers the possibility to combine different visualizations into a view, with linking between them. The setup is much easier though, and requires no programming.

I will be writing more about JavaScript-based in-browser visualization soon, because I believe that this is the way to go for anything that is meant to be presented to the general public. JavaScript works everywhere, it's fast and flexible. There are already a number of visualization frameworks with varying levels of sophistication out there, though Protovis and Tableau Public are by far the most interesting. Together with the availability of lots of data, they will enable InfoVis for the Masses to make a big leap forward in 2010, and finally really reach the masses.

Data.gov et al. are a great start, but a lot more is needed. A lot of the data on data.gov is not of much interest to end users right now, and there hasn't been a lot of new material in a while. That will change this year. Obama's Open Government Directive has the potential of opening the floodgates on tons of data that is currently only kept secret because nobody is bothering to publish it. The promise of open data has also been so clear and so loud that a lot more action has to follow for people to really believe it. I am convinced that we will finally see the hundreds of thousands of data sets on data.gov that were rumored, and that many of those data sets will be of much greater interest than what we have seen so far.

In addition to the practical visualization uses, 2010 might be the year of visualization theory. While our field is certainly an applied one, we still need a much deeper understanding of how it works and how to build better tools. There is some existing work, but much of that is old (Bertin's work was published in the 1960s, Mackinlay's almost 25 years ago, Shneiderman's 13 years ago, Chi's taxonomy almost ten years ago). The field is progressing and we are developing new tools that do not always fit the old molds. We are also gaining a better understanding of how things work, and we are seeing interesting new concepts from other fields. So an update of our theoretical foundations is really overdue now, and this year will hopefully be when it happens.

Another trend that seems to be obvious is a continued interest in visualizing data from bioinformatics. There were seven papers at InfoVis and VAST last year (including the InfoVis Best Paper and an Honorable Mention), but there are still a lot of open problems and terribly unusable tools in bioinformatics. We can have a big impact there, and maybe influence the thinking there to become a lot more visual.

Beyond 2010: What Is to Come

In the longer term, the key will be to engage people's visual thinking skills. As long as visualization is mostly representation, it adds too little to what people can already do. Once we are able to not just show them the data, but stimulate them to think about (and with) it, they will realize the value of visualization. This is true for general audiences as well as very specialized uses: we need to move from visualization to visual analysis, and from representation to problem-solving.

Engaging people does not require interaction, but it will play a bigger role in the future. Interaction in visualization has been stagnant for a while, but I predict that a new class of interactions will be developed before too long. There are some obvious things (like touch interaction), but there has to be more than pointing at objects on the screen. How can we better support efficient visual work with complex data? How can we select in many dimensions at once? How can we specify complex filters and criteria without lots of tedious steps?

Bioinformatics will keep us busy for some time. There is a lot of data there, and more is generated all the time. There's almost any type of data you want to work with: unstructured, graphs, trees, temporal, etc. And there are lots of issues with uncertainty, data quality, data size, etc. that require new ideas and solutions. While I doubt that it will happen, we could do a lot worse than become a part of bioinformatics. The funding opportunities alone are mind-blowing.

Another very promising area is journalism. As it is increasingly based on data, InfoVis will play a bigger role in the analysis that leads to a story, as well as its presentation. At the moment, charts are only done to support a story and to give people something to play with. But why not make the visualization the central element, and only provide textual explanations as needed? To make that feasible, much better tools for creating visualizations will be needed that do not require programming but still enable the user to create new types of highly specific visualizations.

It's safe to say that we will not run out of interesting work anytime soon. We will need to break out of the ivory tower more if we want to stay relevant, though. Given the visual nature of our field, that should not be too difficult, though."

Pico Projector From Light Blue Optics Throws Up a 10-inch Touchscreen Laser Projection [Projector]

2010-01-05T19:05:00.000-08:00

Pico Projector From Light Blue Optics Throws Up a 10-inch Touchscreen Laser Projection [Projector]: "

Light Blue Optics has been showing off their cool projection wares since 2004, so it's great to hear they're close to turning that 'holographic laser projection technology' into a viable product, albeit as an OEM.

The Light Touch pico projector throws a laser WVGA image out to the size of 10-inches, turning any available surface into a touchscreen. The angle is a pretty decent wide throw, which means the projector can be quite close to the surface.

Running on Adobe Flash Lite 3.1, the Light Touch projector has 2GB of flash memory and a microSD card slot (with support up to 32GB) for storing media on, and also has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for hooking up with a laptop or device. It supposedly has a 2 hour battery life, which unfortunately seems to be the norm with these little projectors, though kudos to Light Blue Optics for throwing in a bunch of other features that could make this actually useful, for consumers as well as businesses (as the pic below shows). [Light Blue Optics via BusinessWire]

Speed Tracer - Google Web Toolkit - Google Code

2010-01-04T05:49:00.000-08:00

Speed Tracer - Google Web Toolkit - Google Code: "Speed Tracer is a tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications. It visualizes metrics that are taken from low level instrumentation points inside of the browser and analyzes them as your application runs. Speed Tracer is available as a Chrome extension and works on all platforms where extensions are currently supported (Windows and Linux). Using Speed Tracer you are able to get a better picture of where time is being spent in your application. This includes problems caused by JavaScript parsing and execution, layout, CSS style recalculation and selector matching, DOM event handling, network resource loading, timer fires, XMLHttpRequest callbacks, painting, and more."

Visualizing Empires Decline

2010-01-03T19:30:00.000-08:00

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

Interactively Explore Climate Data

2010-01-03T05:55:00.000-08:00

Interactively Explore Climate Data:

"The United Kingdom's Met Office recently released temperature data for about 1700 weather stations across the globe from 1701 to 2009. Here is an interactive visualization (built using Protovis) of that data for you to explore.

If you are reading this in your newsreader or using Internet Explorer, you will not see anything interesting below. Use a modern browser like Safari, FireFox, or Chrome. Internet Explorer is missing some crucial features that Protovis depends on.

I will post a more detailed analysis on Monday, but here are some quick facts: about 1.4 million data points from a varying number of stations (around 1700 at peak) over more than 300 years. The data points are monthly averages per station, which I aggregated into overall monthly and yearly averages and standard deviations.

The visualization consists of two views. The bottom view shows yearly averages (dark blue line) and standard deviation spread (light blue background) over about 270 years (no good reason for this choice other than to fit into my theme). Mouse over the view to see the detailed data (average, min/max, and standard deviation) displayed in the lower right.

The top view shows the monthly averages for the currently selected year (from the bottom view). The gray shape in the background gives you some context about the range of values over all years for each month, so you can see whether the current one is close to the top or bottom. Note how the winters are getting less cold and the curve across the year moves up and gets flatter as you move forward in time."

How to Make an Interactive Area Graph with Flare

2010-01-02T06:52:00.000-08:00

How to Make an Interactive Area Graph with Flare: "

You've seen the NameExplorer from the Baby Name Wizard by Martin Wattenberg. It's an interactive area chart that lets you explore the popularity of names over time. Search by clicking on names or typing in a name in the prompt. It's simple. It's sexy. Everybody loves it.

This is a step-by-step guide on how to make a similar visualization in Actionscript/Flash with your own data and how to customize the design for whatever you need. We're after last week's graphic on consumer spending:

The Universe as We Know It

2010-01-02T06:48:00.000-08:00

The Universe as We Know It: "

"The Known Universe from the American Museum of Natural History shows a view of the universe, starting from the Himalayas and quickly moving out to the edge where all is black and scary - made possible by the records in the Digital Universe Atlas."

Mag+ Prototype for Digital Magazine

2010-01-02T06:44:00.000-08:00

Mag+ (video prototype footage only) from Bonnier on Vimeo.

DEO's Human-Centered Design

2010-01-02T06:05:00.000-08:00

Readability - An Arc90 Lab Experiment

2009-12-31T04:09:00.000-08:00

Readability - An Arc90 Lab Experiment Readability eliminates everything from the web page you're reading except for the text and photos.

Gource software version control visualization - Git to v1.0

2009-12-30T19:33:00.000-08:00

40 Essential Tools and Resources to Visualize Data | FlowingData

2009-12-28T06:36:00.000-08:00

40 Essential Tools and Resources to Visualize Data | FlowingData: "40 Essential Tools and Resources to Visualize Data"