links
Recently-encountered interesting links.
This is the link-blog part of my usual website, tecznotes.
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Jul 2, 2009
Ant mega-colony takes over world
found: 08:39am
July 2, 2009
"But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends.
These ants rubbed antennae with one another and never became aggressive or tried to avoid one another.
In short, they acted as if they all belonged to the same colony, despite living on different continents separated by vast oceans."
Help me make your map better
found: 07:54am
July 2, 2009
Steve Coast:
"I'm trying an experiment with walking-papers. Get all my non-mapping friends to print out a map of their area, write on the print out the errors, house numbers etc and then I will do the rest.
...
You can too. Get your friends, family, even enemies involved. Re-tweet or facebook status update with that, or ask them to send you the paper yourself."
Jul 1, 2009
Oakland mappers improve the downtown map
found: 12:09am
July 1, 2009
Sarah Manley:
"This past weekend's Oakland Mapping Party showed what a difference a weekend of mapping can make!
On June 27th and 28th, OSM experts and newbies joined together at the Rock, Paper, Scissors Art Collective, to work together to improve the Oakland map. Mappers concentrated on adding details to the downtown map, showcasing where restaurants, galleries, bike parking are located, as well as many other amenities."
Jun 30, 2009
The EveryBlock source code
found: 07:03pm
June 30, 2009
"EveryBlock.com is an experimental news Web site that provides information at a "microlocal" level %u2014 by neighborhood or city block. It was funded by a grant from Knight Foundation, which requires the site's backend code to be open-sourced. Here is the code."
Jun 28, 2009
Walls Come Tumbling Down
found: 09:27pm
June 28, 2009
Andy Clarke on recessions and efficiency and web design:
"Letting go of the notion that we should spend hours of remedial development time in an impossible quest for cross-browser, pixel-perfection allows more time for the details in a design. It allows us time to design the different experiences that people using different software will always have, by designing around browser differences rather than attempting to hack around them."
Path Dependence
found: 11:06am
June 28, 2009
As distinct from skeuomorphism:
Path dependence explains how the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant.
The phrase is regularly used to mean one of two things (Pierson 2004):
1) Some authors use path dependence to mean simply "history matters" - a broad concept;
2) Others use it to mean that institutions are self reinforcing - a narrow concept.
Gentrification
found: 10:24am
June 28, 2009
"The middle of the market is a paradox because of the inherent contradiction between the ease of reaching the nerds and the geeks and the need to reach the middle. The solution, if there is one, is to enter a market to the enthusiastic cheers of those in search of the new, but to build a product/service that appeals to those in the middle. After the initial wave of enthusiasm, you hunker down and ignore those that first embraced you, obsessing instead on the needs and networks of the middle. It's a difficult balancing act, but it's the only one that works.
Ultimately, you end up disappointing the hard core that first found you, but because of their initial enthusiasm (and more important, because you designed your work for the masses in the first place), your product crosses the chasm and reaches a larger group."
Jun 27, 2009
"... and when the groove is dead and gone..."
found: 10:30pm
June 27, 2009
"'Billie Jean' is not only one of the best singles ever recorded, it is one of the greatest art works of the twentieth century, a multi-levelled sound sculpture whose slinky, synthetic-panther sheen still yields up previously unnoticed details and nuance nearly thirty years on.
...
Listening is like stepping onto a conveyor belt. And that's what it sounds like, as the implacable, undulating sinous cakewalk of the synthetic bass takes over the massive space opened up by the crunching snares Jones and Jackson insouciantly hijacked from hiphop. Check, if you can manage to keep focused as the track crawls up your spine and down to your feet, embodying the very compulsion the lyric warns against... check the way that the first sounds you hear from Jackson are not words but inhuman asignifying hiccups and yelps, as if he is gasping for air, or learning to speak English again after some aphasic episode."
100 Hours
found: 02:08pm
June 27, 2009
"Here's my challenge. Right now, put aside 100 hours over this summer. Do it right now, in your head. Put that time aside. 100 hours. 8 hours a week for the next 12 weeks. One hour a day, or one working day a week. It's one summer out of your entire life, it's nothing. Okay, you've got that 100 hours?
...
I guarantee that everyone in this room can produce something or has some special skill, and maybe they're not even aware of it.
...
Because when you contribute, when you participate in culture, when you're no longer solving problems, but inventing culture itself, that is when life starts getting interesting."
Berners-Lee: Talk at Bush Symposium
found: 08:04am
June 27, 2009
October 1995, the month I learned HTML:
"One of the reasons that the web spread was that the hypertext model does not constrain the information it represents. This has allowed people to represent topologies they need. We have found that people love to use trees, but like to have more than one, sometimes overlapping. We have found they need structure and involvement at all scales."
Jun 26, 2009
On The Sudden Passing Of Michael Jackson
found: 04:05pm
June 26, 2009
Raymond Q. Smuckles, (President, Prime Time Records):
"When I got the Celebrity Death Beep on my Blackberry, I blew it off as a dumb rumor. That service is good, but I can see it makin' mistakes. A false headline at, like, The Onion coulda triggered it.
...
Michael had more talent in his little finger than any act today has among four men. Try wakin' up tomorrow and writin' We Are The World. See what you come up with. See if you can get Stevie and Tina to come down to the studio, along with Bruce and Billy and twenty other people who cost a whole hell of a lotta money at the time."
Jun 25, 2009
data / maps / narrative / adventure
found: 11:23am
June 25, 2009
Russell Davies:
"...while points mean location, lines mean adventure..."
Never Intended To Be Useful
found: 11:18am
June 25, 2009
Twitter's Jack Dorsey:
"Twitter was intended to be a way for vacant, self-absorbed egotists to share their most banal and idiotic thoughts with anyone pathetic enough to read them. When I heard how Iranians were using my beloved creation for their own means - such as organizing a political movement and informing the outside world of the actions of a repressive regime - I couldn't believe they'd ruined something so beautiful, simple, and absolutely pointless."
Tank Man and Tank Commander
found: 12:15am
June 25, 2009
"The thing is, Tank Commander is far more dangerous than Tank Man. Tank Man can simply be shot; most seem to believe that Tank Man was later executed, far out of sight of the international media. The regime survives if Tank Man dies, even if the death of Tank Man isn't the optimal outcome. The regime dies, however, if Tank Commander refuses to run over Tank Man. ... While there's some mystery as to the fate of Tank Man, I don't doubt that the CCP found Tank Commander and put a bullet in the back of his head at the first opportunity."
Jun 24, 2009
Nate Silver On Health Care
found: 06:36pm
June 24, 2009
"What Will's position reflects instead is ideology: who cares that the federal government could build a better mousetrap? They're the government and that's bad. His argument is really no more sophisticated than that. If a libertarian conservative wants to make this argument, more power to them, but they absolutely should not be turning around and suggesting that a public option would raise health care costs. They're saying, rather, that they're morally opposed to the cost savings that would ensue."
Four lessons in journalism crowdsourcing
found: 09:16am
June 24, 2009
Simon Willison on the Guardian's MP expenses experiment:
"1) Your workers are unpaid, so make it fun.
2) Public attention is fickle, so launch immediately.
3) Speed is mandatory, so use a framework.
4) Participation will come in one big burst, so have servers ready."
Jun 23, 2009
POWERS OF KATSU
found: 11:23pm
June 23, 2009
Forget the skull, how about that sped-up aerial kite bit at the end that looks like it was shot through a prism?
Oak Land
found: 09:01am
June 23, 2009
A fabulous vacation wonderland awaits you on the other side of the Bay Bridge: "The east bay is more authentic because Oakland is crappier than San Francisco so it's more ironic that we live here. Plus, we're a lot poorer than you."
Jealous SF hipsters make video showing how insecure they are about Oakland's clear superiority.
Jun 22, 2009
The Internet's Payload
found: 11:57pm
June 22, 2009
"I am arguing that:
Words are more valuable than pictures.
Text is more valuable than audio or video.
Twitter is more valuable than FriendFeed.
...
For things that matter, written words are unambiguously better than speech. To start with, anything that matters isn't just written, it's usually rewritten repeatedly (and more important, condensed). Plus, it has hyperlinks. Plus, it's smaller and cheaper to ship around. Plus, it's searchable. Plus, it works on more devices."
The Politics of Small Things
found: 09:48pm
June 22, 2009
Jeffrey C. Goldfarb :
"Adam Michnik famously formulated the opposition's central organizing imperative in the late 1970s: to act as if one lived in a free society. Michnik realized that if people acted as if they lived in a free society, they would, in the process, constitute free public space. He drew out the theoretical implications of what was developing in the private spaces of family and friends. This strategy spread from a relatively small circle of opposition intellectuals to the broad societal movement of Solidarity."
Topographic Maps With SVG
found: 06:38pm
June 22, 2009
"United States Geological Survey (USGS) large scale topographic maps at a scale of 1:24,000 have been traditionally distributed in paper form. Scanned versions of these maps are now available through the Internet as raster representations. Instead of common raster format presentation, the solution presented here is based on a vector approach using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). SVG provides many advantages compared to the use of a raster-based presentation, such as the quality of the graphical representation, maintenance, actualization, interactivity, and extensibility through other Web programming languages. The purpose of this research is to propose an optimal and logical structure of a SVG document with a minimal file size that would be universally applicable for all USGS large scale topographic maps. This study shows that SVG is a promising technology for delivering high-quality, fully-vector topographic maps via the Internet, both in terms of graphic quality and interactivity."
Jun 19, 2009
Too complex to exist
found: 12:08pm
June 19, 2009
"Risk managers have started to pay more attention to systemic risk of late, but unfortunately they haven't made nearly enough progress. A 2006 report co-sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the National Academy of Sciences concluded that even defining systemic risk was beyond the scope of any existing economic theory. Actually managing such a thing would be harder still, if only because the number of contingencies that a systemic risk model must anticipate grows exponentially with the connectivity of the system."
Why 'variables' in CSS are harmful
found: 11:55am
June 19, 2009
"The value of the semantic Web isn't defined by how well structured the best documents are, but by how well structured the vast majority of documents is. There is no alternative to CSS when it comes to separating style and structure of HTML documents. XSL is only an alternative at the high end, for advanced users. Thus we need to take care that CSS remains usable for that majority of documents. At least until an alternative emerges."
Jun 18, 2009
Why Presentation Is Important
found: 11:25pm
June 18, 2009
"One of the execs threw out a tough question, designed to show how far over budget we were. Tom put down the joystick, and hit the 'cool cam' button. Then he turned around to answer the question. While he was answering the question, every eye in the room was on the screen as one amazing scene showed after another. I looked at the execs, and I swear, some of them were gaping. No one was listening to Tom as he answered the question, and when he finished, he picked up the joystick, and jumped back into the game. Every time they asked a question, he would switch to cool cam, and they would completely forget why they had asked.
I swear, that camera saved the project."
Is It Over?
found: 11:10pm
June 18, 2009
"It's just too big, it's going on for too many days, it's in too many cities, and it's too all-embracing. The regime has completely lost control of the space of public politics, and the opposition has been very skillful in taking it over. You can't allow your opposition to develop a message so simple that everyone can embrace it. When you have a situation where all anyone needs to do to signal they've joined the opposition is to step into the street and start walking, where all they have to do is cry 'Allahu Akbar' and it means they want the President to resign and cancel the elections, you've lost."
Jun 17, 2009
Port Covington: The Ghost of the Masterplan in Tinkerer's Paradise
found: 10:40pm
June 17, 2009
"Then, as now, the spaces on the ground between these lines of connection and transfer were largely forgotten and undeveloped. In the 19th century, this area was the backyard and back door to the city of Baltimore, and like any backyard, this was a place for recreation and storage, comingled with trash and half-completed projects.
...
The aesthetics of Baltimore's working harbor have evolved from this kind of 19th Century Steampunk Imaginary to the Romantic Decay of the present, but they've come here by way of the 1950s, the high water mark of the Industrial Sublime.
...
This is a site that is suspended somewhere between development and use, between stated intention, and actual condition. The gaps between overreach and underinvestment are filled in by the people on the ground."
The End of Fail
found: 03:42pm
June 17, 2009
Anil Dash, whose blog has a bunch of commenter name weirdness going on that I'm not sure how to express:
"FAIL is over. Fail is dead. Because it marks a lack of human empathy, and signifies an absence of intellectual curiosity, it is an unacceptable response to creative efforts in our culture. 'Fail!' is the cry of someone who doesn't create, doesn't ship, doesn't launch, who doesn't make things. And because these people don't make things, they don't understand the context of those who do. They can't understand that nobody is more self-critical or more aware of the shortcomings of a creation than the person or people who made it."
Two Steps Behind
found: 01:59pm
June 17, 2009
"I just wanted to point out that this has always been Obama's MO. He's always a step or two behind where his supporters want him to be, getting pulled along by their enthusiasm, rather than out ahead of them where he might get cut off. It's a community organizer's MO. You never get out ahead of your constituency. Instead you shape the playing field so that your constituency’s desires flow towards where you think they should go, and allow them to carry you along behind them."
Being Riveted Alone
found: 10:14am
June 17, 2009
"So, anywho, on the whole social media vis-a-vis Iran.....one thing that I've been thinking a lot about in recent days, on a meta-level, is how it's possible for me to be riveted by this, checking in with Andrew Sullivan and The Lede and the Huffington Post once an hour, for me to be loading up a twitter feed with a 1,000 updates every ten minutes, reading a student tweeting from the roof of a Theran University dorm, talking about the security forces forming a ring around the building....and at the same time it's entirely possible for my friends that I know in real life to know nothing about this. I feel like I'm experiencing a major news event, top 20 lifetime scale. And they feel nothing, or perhaps a mild interest. This is disturbing to me.....this fragmentation seems to change the nature of "news" in as much it destroys its universality."
iPhone twitter clients and Push
found: 10:09am
June 17, 2009
Tom Insam:
"The first person to launch this will get all the users (because shiny!!1), and their server will melt. Unless it's huge.
They will have to charge money for this service. Probably monthly.
The leap from 'I have written a pretty Twitter client' to 'I have to run infrastructure and bill monthly for it' is huge. Push isn't just a bullet point feature. It's almost a harder problem than writing the iPhone app in the first place."
Maps as service design: The Incidental
found: 10:05am
June 17, 2009
"Schulze & Webb worked as part of the team producing a unique service for the world's biggest furniture and design event: Salone di Mobile in Milan, this year.
The British Council usually maintains a presence there, promoting British design and designers through an exhibition. This year, they had decided they would rather present some kind of service offering rather than a physical exhibition in a single venue.
...
From the early brainstorms we came up with idea of a system for collecting the thoughts, recommendations, pirate maps and sketches of the attendees to republish and redistribute the next day in a printed, pocketable pamphlet, which, would build up over the four days of the event to be a unique palimpsest of the place and people's interactions with it, in it."
outbreaks of futurosity
found: 09:59am
June 17, 2009
Russell Davies:
"I've spotted three things recently that seem to have 'future of media' written all over them. Though that might rather damn them with faint praise.
...
3) The Incidental:
The Schulze & Webb & Jones crew are starting to talk about what they do (partly) as 'media design' and The Incidental is a perfect example; blending brochure, guide, map, chat room and pirate maps. ... Digital stuff is used for what it's good for; eradicating time and distance, sharing, all that. Analogue stuff is used for what it can do well; resilience, undestandability, encouraging simple, human contributions. ... It integrates media in the same way real people do; knowing what it's like to send a twitter and knowing what it's like to scribble a note on a beermat at 3 in the morning.
What's particularly impressive is the client's willingness to deal with chaos, mess and risk."
Jun 16, 2009
Connections Ep. 1: The Trigger Effect
found: 11:44pm
June 16, 2009
When I was 14 I didn't realize that James Burke's show was such an actor-network theory mindbomb.
Getting Up to Speed: High Speed Rail in California
found: 01:02am
June 16, 2009
"At one point Daniels took me down into what he calls his war room, a large space with huge maps on the wall and thousands of pages of regulatory documents piled on tables. One thing you notice if you spend time with rail planners is that it's difficult to separate engineering concerns from economic and political issues.
...
It seems to amuse Morshed that everyone sees his group as dreamers, whereas he sees them as realists. The fundamental case made by his rail authority is that the stupendous cost of the rail plan is still tens of billions of dollars lower than the other option - expanding the highways and airports to accommodate the state’s population growth."
Data Center Overload
found: 12:59am
June 16, 2009
"The containers - which are pre-equipped with racks of servers and thus are essentially what is known in the trade as plug-and-play - are shipped by truck direct from the original equipment manufacturer and attached to a central spine. 'You can literally walk into that building on the first floor and you'd be hard pressed to tell that building apart from a truck-logistics depot,' says Manos, who has since left Microsoft to join Digital Realty Trust. 'Once the containers get on site, we plug in power, water, network connectivity, and the boxes inside wake up, figure out which property group they belong to and start imaging themselves. There's very little need for people.'"
Now the Party's over
found: 12:56am
June 16, 2009
K-Punk:
"What is habitually underestimated - and this might be the defining illusion of all entryists, all would-be reformers who believe that they can change management from within - is the power of structure to generate subjectivity. If Callaghan could invariably, even in the most stressful moments of his immensely stressful premiership, come across as 'Sunny Jim', it was because he was never under many illusions. He was built for (and from) compromise. He accepted disappointment from the start - rather like the Freud who thought the point of psychoanalysis was to deliver patients from excruciating mental agony to 'ordinary misery', Callaghan believed that in politics there were only bad and worse decisions."
Jun 15, 2009
Marco Brambilla: Civilization
found: 11:57pm
June 15, 2009
Installation video mural for NYC Standard hotel. Borderline crazy stuff.
Jun 14, 2009
Immaculate Telegraphy
found: 11:13pm
June 14, 2009
"Could humans at any point in history, given the right information, construct an electronic communication network? To test this hypothesis, Substitute Materials will attempt to build a functional electric battery and telegraph switch from materials found in the wilderness, using no modern tools except information from the internet. The telegraph will be a first step towards an ahistorical internet.
Full-scale construction of the artifacts is currently underway in Mineral county, Montana."
ARhrrrr
found: 10:34pm
June 14, 2009
Via Andy Baio:
"Augmented reality first-person shooter on a handheld."
You use an NVidia camera that looks like an iPhone, which acts as a helicopter window onto a small town full of civilians and zombies. Skittle candies can be used as mines. Fascinating play dynamic, very much like how I used to play with legos.
Cartominutiae: Combined Symbols on Maps
found: 10:24pm
June 14, 2009
"The construction of symbols on maps requires the interaction of many elements. How these elements come together - literally the intersection of bits of points, lines, and areas - is the subject of a series of illustrations entitled 'The Drawing of Combined Symbols.' The majority of these guidelines focus on peculiar details that when done well, the typical map user won't even notice. They are among the fascinating hyper-minutiae of cartography.
Faces indicate the quality of the choices illustrated – good, ok, and poor.
Examples are illustrated by Prof. Kei Kanazawa (heading the Working Group of the Japan Cartographers Association) in a chapter entitled 'Techniques of Map Drawing and Lettering' in the out-of-print book Basic Cartography, Vol. 1 (International Cartographic Association, 1984, p. 45). These guidelines were developed for the pen and ink era of cartography, yet most are applicable to contemporary digital mapping."
Data matcher
found: 08:23am
June 14, 2009
Simon Willison's thing for finding close matches in a pair of lists, woud've come in handy just a few weeks ago.
Jun 13, 2009
Natural Earth Vector
found: 12:50am
June 13, 2009
"Tom Patterson and I collaborated on the precursor to his first Natural Earth Raster project several years ago and we now preview Natural Earth Raster + Vector, a new product due Fall 2009 that complements and expands on the previous work by providing detailed GIS linework at the 1:15,000,000 (1:15 million) scale and new versions of the raster product (including cross-blended hyspometric tints). The Washington Post, where I work, is contributing 2 more vector GIS base maps at the 1:50m and 1:110m scales and new versions of Natural Earth Raster will be released for those scales. This is a NACIS and mapgiving co-branded product with assistance from the University of Wisconson-Madison cartography lab, Florida State University, and others."
American Airlines Web Site, Design Process
found: 12:24am
June 13, 2009
I always find posts like these completely fascinating. The design intervention looks superficially superior (and all the commenters on this Fast Company article agree) yet completely fails to account for 90% of the information on the existing AA website. Ugly information, yet presumably there because someone, somewhere whose needs matter needed it to exist. Plus, who knows, maybe the "cluttered" one turns out to match the honest preferences of AA's customer base, as well as the needs of those visitors who are not there to book a flight.
Jun 12, 2009
Map the world with OpenStreetMap
found: 11:22am
June 12, 2009
Guardian Datablog:
"It helps to have a GPS, but it's not necessary. Guardian software architect Simon Willison just told me about a project created by Michal Migurski called Walking Papers. It allows you to add your handwritten notes to a printed map. Someone just added information about shops near East Putney station here in London. Go out and put your corner of the world on the map."
Jun 11, 2009
BIRDY NAM NAM - THE PARACHUTE ENDING
found: 11:29pm
June 11, 2009
Yow.
What are the core functions of a city?
found: 09:40am
June 11, 2009
"I think this is a really good way to look at the budget. Realizing that even if the economy improves over the next two years, the City of Oakland is not going to be flush with extra cash any time in the forseeable future, it's important that we identify what is absolutely necessary to provide, rather than simply making cuts willy-nilly.
I think it would be a good exercise for my readers as well. What do you view as the core functions of the City? What do you see as expendable? I'm not talking about employee pay - yes, compensation must be, and will be cut, but beyond that, we still don't have enough money to do everything we want to do. So what programs are absolutely vital to your experience of living somewhere, and what programs are simply nice to have when we can afford them?"
The Beginning Of The End For Oakland
found: 09:09am
June 11, 2009
"To give you a little more information on the roots of the problem, police and fire services comprise something like 75 percent of the city's budget.
...
We need a bankruptcy judge to come in not because we can't numerically make ends meet but because our leaders will not accomplish that without some kind of adult supervision. And, we're at the point now where if they sign another police and fire contract without making things reasonable, our city budget really will completely crumble."
Jun 10, 2009
DEADLINE
found: 09:31am
June 10, 2009
Awesome senior thesis video with mac-style post-it note animation on a wall:
"...when I am busy, I feel that I am not fighting with my works, I am fighting with those post-it notes and deadline."
Freie Strassenkarte ohne GPS aktualisieren
found: 08:57am
June 10, 2009
Austria's ORF news agency writes about Walking Papers, resulting in a flood of Austrian print activity. They've covered OpenStreetMap before.
Jun 9, 2009
S.F. BART interview: Making the web, social media, and the developer community work for transit
found: 06:33pm
June 9, 2009
"...to a certain extent I think BART works to set expectations in the market. We have a Palm application, an old pocket PC application, and an application for the iPod that we created that won a grand prize APTA award a couple of years ago. I think that these services set the bar for what customers expect, and gave an example of what could be done in these media, but with no in-house developers to create new applications for Android, Blackberry or other platforms, and in a time of limited budgets, sharing data is a great way to foster these new services that directly benefit customers. I think that's the key thing."
Newark Gateways
found: 06:29pm
June 9, 2009
Pentagram:
"How do you create an identifying landmark for a city that is chiefly known as a place to pass through? This spring Pentagram Architects was invited by the City of Newark, New Jersey Division of Planning & Community Development to submit a proposal for 'This Is Newark,' an initiative to create a series of 'gateways' for the city.
...
There are two parts to the design: the graphics applied to the street, and the signage explaining the graphics. The painted street graphics are, like any street striping, a simple and inexpensive technology that can be done by municipal agencies or by subcontracted works. Maintenance is a matter of scheduled repainting every few years.
Color is a matter of choice; we have used orange for its visibility, but red may resonate with the sports teams of Newark. The color is important for satellite visibility and for consistency."
Jen Bove interview Tom and Boris
found: 02:28pm
June 9, 2009
"I've been thinking a lot recently about the growing popularity and potential of interactive data visualizations as feedback mechanisms on the world around us. Over the past few weeks, I've had the pleasure of talking with Stamen Design's Tom Carden and Dopplr's Boris Anthony, two talented designers who are both well-steeped in the information visualization space, about why we're starting to see more of them and where they see it all going."
The New Negroponte Switch
found: 08:17am
June 9, 2009
Matt Jones on products-to-services and services-to-products: "Every thing that participates radiates infrastructure and service. Designing from the start so that as a far as possible, every thing in the system radiates infrastructure and service to every other thing."
Augmenting photos - with OSM!
found: 07:49am
June 9, 2009
"You climbed up a mountain and took a photo.
And that's very pretty. But it's 2009! Why doesn't it have all kind of magic over the top of it. Enter Marmota. You tell it where you took the photo (maybe your photo has a GPS attached anyway) and it generates a simulated panorama 360 degree wraparound of what the landscape looks like from height field data. It then matches your photo's pitch, yaw and roll and lens angle against this virtual panorama to figure out exactly where you were pointing it.
...
Finally because it knows the height and location of each pixel in the image, you can now in 3D overlay OSM data (such as rivers etc below) on to that picture."
Jun 8, 2009
Temporary Benefits of Slippery API
found: 09:31am
June 8, 2009
Tom Insam / Paul Mison:
"Sure, ignore the privacy angle.
I'm just wondering about clever things you can do with the twitter limited distribution thing.
Also, note that its utility would be _totally_ dependant on twitter not randomly changing things again.
You can design all sorts of clever things using conceptually very fragile bits of 'API',
which twitter can change at any moment.
TWITTER IS NOT INFRASTRUCTURE,
etc. etc."
Dangerous Mistakes In The Company Of Friends
found: 12:12am
June 8, 2009
Tom Armitage:
"I don't play videogames because I want to have competent, professional militaristic encounters with friends. I'd take Dangerous Mistakes In The Company Of Friends over competence any day. Sure, they may be mistakes, but they're dangerous! They're exciting! And sometimes, they make the game better than it ever could be when you play it 'right'. I wouldn't want it any other way."
Jun 7, 2009
News Flash From the Future: What Will Journalism Look Like?
found: 12:10pm
June 7, 2009
IDEO peers into their CNC-milled crystal ball, and discovers that the future of journalism will look a lot like the present of journalism, plus some tomfoolery about cafe-based point systems and touchscreens, the only two parts of this picture where IDEO could conceivably have anything of value to offer.
What the government doesn't understand about the Internet, and what to do about it
found: 12:06pm
June 7, 2009
Tom Steinberg:
"How the government can be on the side of the citizen in the midst of the great Internet disruption:
1) Accept that any state institution that says 'we control all the information about X' is going to look increasingly strange and frustrating to a public that's used to be able to do whatever they want with information about themselves, or about anything they care about (both private and public).
2) Seize the opportunity to bring people together. Millions of people visit public sector websites every day, often trying to achieve similar or identical ends.
3) Get a new cohort of civil servants who understand both the Internet and public policy, and end the era of signing huge technology contracts when the negotiators on the government's side have no idea how they systems they are paying for actually work.
4) ...
5) ..."
Do CEOs Matter?
found: 12:01pm
June 7, 2009
"Maybe that's the ultimate lesson here: CEOs can matter, but we all might be better off if they didn't. 'Good leaders can make a small positive difference; bad leaders can make a huge negative difference,' Stanford's Jeffrey Pfeffer told Fortune in 2006. Many Americans, surveying the aftermath of eight years with an Unconstrained Manager as their chief executive, might be tempted to agree."
Jun 5, 2009
Color Flip
found: 07:11pm
June 5, 2009
Strangely awesome.
Rafael Rozendaal, 2008, collection of Sebastien de Ganay.
Jon Udell on Crimespotting
found: 08:27am
June 5, 2009
"What you may not notice, as you navigate the new interface, is that every adjustment is reflected in an exquisitely detailed URL. It's not obvious because the URLs are really long, and the changes happen outside the visible part of the browser's location window. But watch..."
Jun 4, 2009
Quantumnik
found: 11:27pm
June 4, 2009
Dane makes QGIS look less assy:
"Mapnik integration with QGIS - Supports on-the-fly translation of QGIS layers and styles into Mapnik objects, ability to export a QGIS project to a Mapnik XML mapfile, and the loading of Mapnik XML or Cascadenik MML/CSS for dynamic rendering in QGIS."
Who Wants To Know?
found: 05:36pm
June 4, 2009
"This activity is referred to in several different contexts depending on how the messages are delivered, but it is most commonly known as 'logging'. It is critical to the operation of many, many different kinds of programs. Unfortunately, it is one of the most poorly-understood and poorly-implemented areas of software in general. Software is a veritable cornucopia of poorly-understood and poorly-implemented ideas, so that's really saying something.
...
The point that I hope to communicate here is that for every producer of information, there is a consumer. When most programmers need to produce a 'log message', however, they are thinking only of getting the information out of their program in some format, any format; not how that information is going to be used later."
GeoQR - Using QR Codes for Geotagging Video
found: 12:27am
June 4, 2009
"This could so easily have been a lazyweb post: 'Oh hai internets, you could encode a geotag in QR Code and then overlay it on video frames, making each frame uniquely tagged with its location, kthxbai' and left it at that. But instead, in the spirit of 'Get Excited and Make Things' I decided it was time to make something instead of just talking about it."
The Slow Inevitable Death Of American Muscle by Jonathan Schipper
found: 12:07am
June 4, 2009
"This sculpture is a machine that advances two full sized automobiles slowly into one another over a period of 6 days, simulating a head on automobile collision. Each car moves about three feet into the other. The movement is so slow as to be invisible.
It is almost impossible to watch a modern action film without at least one automobile wreck. Why do we find interest and excitement it new versions of the same event? Why are we not satisfied?"
Jun 3, 2009
Better
found: 10:36pm
June 3, 2009
For someone who complains about small-return bullshit and bad signal-to-noise ratios, Merlin Mann sure writes a lot of small-return noise like this.
The 360 C-suite
found: 05:20pm
June 3, 2009
I'm posting business crap this week I guess.
"This too is metaphorically useful. The current C-Suite is cumbersome in just the manner of these early computers. What is called for are streams of information that are so beautifully organized that their significance is visible at a glimpse. What we want is a visual array identifying opportunities and threats in real time, where to see the data is to know how to act upon the data. What we have instead is a place where the data is flawed, too often forced through the sieve called a spreadsheet, and the levers of action are limited and flawed."
New and improved Crimespotting
found: 03:37pm
June 3, 2009
In which V says really nice things about Crimespotting:
"Anyway, Crimespotting just got a whole lot cooler, with the addition of two new features. First, you can now view crime maps going back all the way to mid-2007, when the site launched. And you can now get crime data, by beat, in spreadsheet form, going back all that time. Which is just so, so, incredibly cool. Every so often, somebody asks me about getting recent historical crime numbers for their neighborhood or whatever, and I hate how I can never give them a good answer, just offer them a giant zip file of a zillion old weekly crimes reported by beat files and tell them they can sort it out if they really, really want to. So this is just super."
New Programs Put Crime Stats on the Map
found: 10:45am
June 3, 2009
"Linda Horensavitz, a property manager with Flower Hill Central Corp. in Gaithersburg, Md., says she checks CrimeReports.com every morning to help keep tabs on crime around the 2,000 apartment units, townhouses and single-family properties she manages.
When a crime appears on the site, Ms. Horensavitz sends out notifications to civic groups and homeowner associations at some of the properties. That helps prevent more break-ins, which leads to lower maintenance costs at the properties."
API Value Creation, Not Monetization
found: 10:40am
June 3, 2009
Laura Merling:
"The big mistake is that because the API is a whole new thing, companies expect something different than their current business. In reality companies need to start by looking at similarities to their existing business. The question that companies should be asking is 'What is the value created by launching an API?'
...
On the side of the unexpected but interesting outcomes, Kevin said they have seen a flurry of internally developed business applications. In the past many valuable, internal-facing projects were turned down because the programs had to meet strict top line to bottom line ratios. With the availability to data and services, many teams within the company now have access to things they didn’t in the past, and project costs have been minimized."
Jun 2, 2009
Contradictions of Reaganism
found: 10:59pm
June 2, 2009
"However, as even Republican strategists note, this exposes the real division in the Republican coalition, not between social and economic conservatives, but between exurbanites, and suburbanites. It is very easy to persuade exurbanites that they aren't socialists, even as they work on military bases, land leased at concessionary rates for mining, subsidized agriculture, waste facilities, and prisons. It is far harder to convince suburbanites of the evils of government, when they live in a place that is made safe by government, and whose value comes from subsidized education and transportation.
The internal contradiction of Reaganism, then, has produced a vast self-inflicted wound on the very people who mobilized for it."
Lessons from Target's ClearRx
found: 10:47pm
June 2, 2009
Peter Merholz on those Target pill bottles:
"Had Deborah Adler presented a business plan, with a set of bullet points in a PowerPoint deck outlining functional characteristics of a new pill bottle, she would gotten no traction. By manifesting her vision in a well-executed prototype, she appealed to an emotional and visceral sense of what the pill bottle could (and should) be. Good prototypes get people to rally around an idea.
They also serve as a beacon, a north star for the product development process.
...
You can't simply try to deliver any good customer experience. Because of the difficulty you'll face in getting any great new experience out into the world, you have to figure out the nature of a great experience that is appropriate to who you are."
Mapy.cz
found: 10:41pm
June 2, 2009
Beautiful Czech slippy map with hillshading.
The League of American Wheelmen and the Paving of America
found: 06:36pm
June 2, 2009
"The bicycle, quite literally, paved the road for automobiles. The explosive popularity of the human-powered, two-wheeled vehicle sparked road construction across the Western world's cities. The League of American Wheelmen was a major vector for the political will necessary to build better roads with more than one million members (out of a mere 75 million people) at its peak. Sure they engaged in silliness like racing and bicycle polo (!) but at heart, the group was a potent, progressive social force that inadvertently helped bring about its own end by getting roads paved, thus making long distance 'touring' possible in automobiles."
Don't make me search!
found: 12:18am
June 2, 2009
"Sure, it's obviously crucial to be able to search for what I'm looking for, but I'm not always looking for anything in particular. I want to explore or, to frame it (perhaps more accurately) in terms of mental lethargy, to avoid having to think of something to look for. ... It bugs the hell out of me whenever I go to check out the newest Coolest Web Tool or Visualization Ever, only to find that I must think of something to search for in order to see it in action.
So it goes especially with maps."
May 31, 2009
Whatever We Like
found: 01:51pm
May 31, 2009
Don Citarella:
"Truthfully, as judged by their own portfolio site, Stamen Design is more of a strategy and development studio. But if they continue to produce work such as ArtScope, they can call themselves whatever they like."
What is the Greatest Farming Innovation of the past 75 years?
found: 01:48pm
May 31, 2009
"Semi-dwarf wheat varieties transformed world wheat production. Without the semi-dwarf genes, originally bred into a Japanese wheat, Norin 10, in 1935, the green revolution that enabled the world to feed itself post-World War II wouldn’t have happened. An American wheat breeder, Orville Vogel, crossed Norin 10 with other wheat varieties to shorten wheat from 4ft tall to just 2ft. It allowed growers to use more fertiliser to increase yields without the crop becoming too top-heavy and falling over. Vogel shared his research with another breeder, Norman Borlaug in Mexico, who led the introduction of semi-dwarf wheats in that country and India and Pakistan. It led to a doubling of yields, greatly increasing food security. Borlaug is credited with saving a billion people from starvation"
Stewardship + Environmental Mapping
found: 01:45pm
May 31, 2009
"S+EM is an environmental mapping and social networking design project that links New York City trees with the people who care for them.
The tree is perhaps the most common emblematic figure of contemporary environmentalism and sustainability. Yet, despite our daily interactions with trees and their by-products, there remains undeveloped potential for the general public to engage the tree. In addition, there is an extremely limited awareness of the importance of street trees for public health and proper care for the ecological health of trees.
Our goal at S+EM is to re-connect people with trees by providing the database and networking software for tree stewards to record and track their work while linking to other tree stewardship initiatives at the individual or neighborhood level."
RoboCop
found: 01:38pm
May 31, 2009
"The film just happened to come along at a time when crime was becoming a big problem in America. People were, and still are, very frightened. I didn't realize that when I was writing this character; I thought I was making a satire about Reagan's America. But the audience locked on to it because RoboCop was a guy who was going to shoot down criminals in the street. Finally. Even my old Catholic aunt loved it."
Moldova
found: 01:18pm
May 31, 2009
Maciej Ceglowski:
"Moldova sits atop Romania like a liver sits atop a stomach. The relationship between the two countries has involved a certain amount of bile. You arrive in Moldova from Romania by crossing a little river called the Prut, without many outward signs that you are in a different country.
...
The province of Romania adjoining the country is also called 'Moldova', and the two Moldovas are the halves of what used to be an independent kingdom during the Middle Ages. In those times, anybody with a horse, a pointy stick in his hand, and a song in his heart would at some point try to invade the territory.
...
In rebuilding Chisinau, some anonymous genius had the good sense to order trees planted along every major road. There is nothing 1950's Soviet architects could throw at a city that a sufficient number of big trees haven't been able to neutralize."
May 30, 2009
Mutants and the Economy
found: 10:52am
May 30, 2009
"... comics are a period piece. The mutants aren't ever well known or common enough to be fully integrated. Consider Genesis or the 30th Century where they are fully integrated - a thriving, super-high tech civilization. We as a society in the past hundred years have undergone rapid change, and comic books are a fantasy representation of our society dealing with that change."
May 29, 2009
Sisyphus Office
found: 05:20pm
May 29, 2009
Maybe one for Pretend Office:
"The artists and offices involved in Sisyphus Office are working physically and conceptually with the notions of existentialism, capitalism, artistic romanticism and deadpan slapstickism as a means to examine the artifice that keeps us clinging to reality and distracted from the void. Sisyphus Office is about punching the clock, and then punching it again…but harder the second time."
Historical Hurricane Tracker
found: 11:32am
May 29, 2009
Some new shit has come to light: Stamen and MSNBC show hurricane data since 1850 with filters for names and dates and landfall locations and storm strength.
Matt Ericson, Where 2.0
found: 09:17am
May 29, 2009
Matt from the New York Times talked about election maps at Where 2.0 conference last week, and these are his slides and links.
May 28, 2009
Where 2.0, Making Maps, Stamen Design and Penn & Teller
found: 11:50pm
May 28, 2009
Revdancatt says some very nice things about our Where 2.0 session: "And yet, even knowing how it's all done, being able to watch it over and over again, it'll take a fair bit of practice before getting that good."
May 27, 2009
Enot
found: 11:51pm
May 27, 2009
Enot, thief of doormats.
Ironically, bike hater Rob Anderson advances cause of cycling in S.F.
found: 02:13pm
May 27, 2009
"it's beginning to seem that nobody will have done more to advance the 'juvenile vision' of giving more space to bicyclists than Anderson himself.
Bureaucrats, advocates, and local policy wonks say bicyclists' rights have progressed more thanks to Anderson's suit than they would have without it."
The Three Sexy Skills of Data Geeks
found: 09:02am
May 27, 2009
Mike Driscoll:
"1) Statistics (Studying). Statistics is perhaps the most important skill and the hardest to learn. It's a deep and rigorous discipline, and one that is actively progressing.
2) Data Munging (Suffering). Among data geek circles, this refers to the painful process of cleaning, parsing, and proofing one's data before it's suitable for analysis.
3) Visualization (Storytelling). Here it's worth making a distinction between two breeds of data visualizations, which differ in their audience and their goals. The first are exploratory data visualizations (as named by John Tukey), intended to facilitate a data analyst's understanding of the data. A second kind of data visualization are those intended to communicate to a wider audience, whose goal is to visually advocate for a hypothesis."
May 26, 2009
Mecca Redesign Leaked
found: 11:30pm
May 26, 2009
Holy cow.
"Mecca, the holiest city in Islam, is going to be redesigned, and a proposed master plan just leaked to YouTube.
Because of the extreme sensitivity of the project, details about the redesign have been sparse. Nonetheless, it seems destined to become one of the most high-profile architecture projects in a generation. Commissioned by the Saudi Royal Family, with an estimated budget of $13 billion, it would address massive overcrowding, which has led to thousands of trampling deaths during the yearly Hajj, which draws 1.7 million pilgrims.
News of the project broke last year, when several brand name architecture firms were approached about submitting ideas."
May 24, 2009
Who Says Innovation Belongs to the Small?
found: 08:17pm
May 24, 2009
New York Times argues that we're seeing a swing in innovation from small inventors to big systems, which isn't too different from something I've been sensing as well. New New Deal is at heart a massive, all-fronts realignment - where's the role for the small and the nimble in this universe?
May 23, 2009
Freeze Tag!
found: 09:51am
May 23, 2009
Brooklyn Museum:
"Today we are introducing a new game called Freeze Tag! which puts control of the tags back into the hands of our most valued community members. If you are a member of our Posse, you can delete tags from object pages - this is new, previously we were not allowing tag deletion except by system admins. For any tag that is deleted, it takes another two pairs of Posse eyes to 'agree' within Freeze Tag! before that tag's fate is sealed."
Don't Challenge My Assumptions!
found: 09:09am
May 23, 2009
Peter Merholz: "People in organizations are afraid of what their customers actually think. If they had to face this reality, it would call into question many assumptions. People don't want their assumptions challenged. So, they'd rather a) come up with excuses or b) use unhelpful 'market research' tools like surveys and focus groups, tools whose data is squishy enough that it can be interpreted to suit any beliefs."
May 21, 2009
JPL Solar System Dynamics
found: 05:03pm
May 21, 2009
Chris Spurgeon said write this down:
"Welcome to the JPL solar system dynamics web site. This site provides information related to the orbits, physical characteristics, and discovery circumstances for most known natural bodies in orbit around our sun."
May 19, 2009
TransCAD
found: 04:03pm
May 19, 2009
"TransCAD is the most comprehensive, flexible, and capable travel demand modeling software ever created. TransCAD supports all important styles of travel demand modeling including sketch planning methods, four-step demand models, activity models, and other advanced disaggregate modeling techniques, and comes with the most extensive set of traffic assignment models ever assembled for use by planners and traffic engineers."
May 18, 2009
Taking a New Look at Health
found: 11:51pm
May 18, 2009
Excellent new Ben Fry project, looking at GE health care data. Reactive interface moves little homunculi around if they're overweight or smokers or 18-35 or have diabetes or are men.
Long-Ago Rivalry Still Stirs Passion at the Giro d'Italia
found: 06:10pm
May 18, 2009
"Pictures of Coppi and Bartali are seen just as often. They hang in cycling shops, butcher shops, banks and shoe stores. The images and what they stood for have not been forgotten. The riders once divided the country, and they held social and political significance.
Bartali, a conservative man from Florence, represented the more rural, southern part of Italy. He was called Gino the Pious and had support of the Vatican. The secular Coppi was from outside of Turin and a symbol of the industrial north. His nickname became Fausto the Sinner."
Yes, Actually
found: 12:18am
May 18, 2009
Andrew Sullivan interviews the Pet Shop Boys:
"We've maintained that the Pet Shop Boys are always an alternative to what's going on. It's 1992, it's all about Nirvana, but there's still the Pet Shop Boys. It's 2009, it's all about the Pussycat Dolls or something, but there's still the Pet Shop Boys.
...
It's a way of not really competing -- and it's why I'm not really bothered about success in America because we really try to exist in our world. We do things our own way and, generally speaking, it's been the hard way.
Hard, but consistent.
...
We did this amazing performance in Dresden that was projected on this big communist apartment block. The orchestra sat in individual balconies around the screen. It was really amazing. We really like [to bring] the sense of an event to what we do. That's why we do the theatrical things onstage -- because we want to bring out the meaning of what we do, not disguise it."
May 16, 2009
LOGIN 2009 keynote: gaming in the world of 2030
found: 10:32am
May 16, 2009
Charles Stross:
"If I was speccing out a business plan for a new MMO in 2025, I'd want to make it appeal to these folks - call them codgergamers. They may be initially attracted by cute intro movies, but jerky camera angles are going to hurt their aging eyes. Their hand/eye coordination isn't what it used to be. And like sixty-somethings in the current and other cohorts they have a low tolerance for being expected to jump through arbitrary hoops for no reward. When you can feel grandfather time breathing down your neck, you tend to focus on the important stuff.
But the sixty-something gamers of 2020 are not the same as the sixty-somethings you know today. They're you, only twenty years older. By then, you'll have a forty year history of gaming; you won't take kindly to being patronised, or given in-game tasks calibrated for today's sixty-somethings. The codgergamers of 2030 will be comfortable with the narrative flow of games. They're much more likely to be bored by trite plotting and cliched dialog than todays gamers. They're going to need less twitchy user interfaces - ones compatible with aging reflexes and presbyopic eyes - but better plot, character, and narrative development. And they're going to be playing on these exotic gizmos descended from the iPhone and its clones: gadgets that don't so much provide access to the internet as smear the internet all over the meatspace world around their owners."
In Defense of Data-Driven Design
found: 10:27am
May 16, 2009
Luke Stevens on Doug Bowman and Google:
"It's the fault of a broken decision making culture.
The problem with testing 41 shades of blue isn't the testing. If you can, why not? A couple of hours of an engineer's time is a small price for the micro-improvement extrapolated across millions and millions of users. The problem is that two Google camps couldn't make a decision and Marissa Mayer, the VP of user experience had to get involved. A VP had to be called in to adjudicate on a shade of colour. The problem isn't the testing - testing actually is, in my opinion, quite a clever solution - the problem is that a Google VP is wasting her time on such a trivial thing because the other players couldn't sort it out. What kind of culture is that?"
May 14, 2009
Defeating Delmore
found: 05:08pm
May 14, 2009
"Astronomers know to look slightly away from the point at which they expect to locate a star. Analogously, when a person aims to most clearly articulate her own guiding goals, she would be more successful by calling to mind the values which are peripherally related and supportive of her complete self.
Instead of directly confronting the value of greatest import, a person can become more articulate about their central life goals by taking a slightly less direct approach."