A Merry Christmas to those who celebrate, and a Happy New Year to all! Here's wishing you a productive and rewarding 2010. May you find the things you search for.
I was trying to come up with a clever New Year's wish, and that last sentence was the best I could conjure. Still, it has a nice (George) Lucasian ring to it.
Happy Holidays y'all.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
The Fourth Paradigm
There is a new collection of essays from Microsoft Research in honor of Jim Gray, the renowned researcher at Microsoft who was lost at sea in 2007. The collection is titled "The Fourth Paradigm: Data Intensive Scientific Discovery." According to an article by John Markoff of the New York Times, the book's essays are centered around the topic of how to deal with the explosion of data -- particularly scientific data -- in recent years. This particular topic has come up in this blog before -- read about it here.
Some sample essay titles: "Beyond the tsunami: developing the infrastructure
to deal with life sciences data," "Visualization for data-intensive science," and "From web 2.0 to the global database."
Access to this book is free -- it's available at the Microsoft research site at research.microsoft.com.
Some sample essay titles: "Beyond the tsunami: developing the infrastructure
to deal with life sciences data," "Visualization for data-intensive science," and "From web 2.0 to the global database."
Access to this book is free -- it's available at the Microsoft research site at research.microsoft.com.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Data.gov
After reading a mention of the data.gov site in a recent NY Times article about how programmers are using government data in new and interesting ways (including an mashup of maps and crime reports that will help a user navigate home from a pub using a path with the fewest reported crimes), I wanted to take a look.
Data.gov is a very well done site. The interface is very nicely designed, and a brief look at the available data makes we want to come up with an app myself. There is a load of raw data on this site -- weekly fatality reports, IRS immigration data, airport status data -- you name it.
Interestingly, two days after the article appeared, there was another article in the NY Times about how the White House is asking all agencies to get their data onto this site...perhaps someone in the White House read the initial article and got fired up with the coolness of the idea of citizens creating value from government data.
Data.gov is a very well done site. The interface is very nicely designed, and a brief look at the available data makes we want to come up with an app myself. There is a load of raw data on this site -- weekly fatality reports, IRS immigration data, airport status data -- you name it.
Interestingly, two days after the article appeared, there was another article in the NY Times about how the White House is asking all agencies to get their data onto this site...perhaps someone in the White House read the initial article and got fired up with the coolness of the idea of citizens creating value from government data.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Great article in the New York Times about the oddities and curiosities that reside in the main branch of the New York Public Library. Some highlights: the cane Virginia Woolf left on the riverbank the day she committed suicide, as well as William Blake's hand-engraved 1793 version of “The Songs of Innocence."
Check it out at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/nyregion/08libr.html
Check it out at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/nyregion/08libr.html
Monday, November 30, 2009
Got my Google Wave
Yipee! I just got my Google Wave account and activated it. I have been playing around with it when I have a few minutes. My initial impression is that it's going to take me a bit to get the feel of what I can do with a "wave."
I have seen web-based collaboration software before with some of the features (like real time messaging) that I see in Wave. However, Wave adds nifty new features like a playback mode where you can step through each individual contribution to the Wave (someone typed in, posted a video whatever) to get a sense of the history of what happened.
Wave is a work in progress -- when I tried to do playback and then fast forward to the last message of a large wave, Wave crashed. It recovered gracefully though, and did not crash my browser -- it just told me I needed to refresh the page.
I'll try to write up some more impressions when I get more familiar with the tool.
I have seen web-based collaboration software before with some of the features (like real time messaging) that I see in Wave. However, Wave adds nifty new features like a playback mode where you can step through each individual contribution to the Wave (someone typed in, posted a video whatever) to get a sense of the history of what happened.
Wave is a work in progress -- when I tried to do playback and then fast forward to the last message of a large wave, Wave crashed. It recovered gracefully though, and did not crash my browser -- it just told me I needed to refresh the page.
I'll try to write up some more impressions when I get more familiar with the tool.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Google Dashboard
Google now allows you to see some of the information they have collected on your from your various accounts (e.g., Gmail , Picasa, etc.). The announcement is available at: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/transparency-choice-and-control-now.html and the dashboard view is available at http://www/google.com/dashboard (you need to log in with your Google username and password to see your data.)
I took a look, and I have to say that I was expecting to see more. What I did see, and what the New York Times Bits blog also noted, is that most of the information that is listed on the dashboard is simply the kind of humdrum stuff you already know about your account. For example, how many pictures you have stored in your Picasa Web Album and how many emails you have stored in Gmail. I guess I was expecting something more along the lines of "this dude is 40, male, and here's the last web site he visited," but there is nothing like that to be found in Dashboard.
The Bits blog entry also quotes John Simpson of Consumer Watchdog who says essentially that the information in Dashboard is the info linked to your name, but the real dirt is in the information linked to your IP address, which Google is not revealing for now.
I took a look, and I have to say that I was expecting to see more. What I did see, and what the New York Times Bits blog also noted, is that most of the information that is listed on the dashboard is simply the kind of humdrum stuff you already know about your account. For example, how many pictures you have stored in your Picasa Web Album and how many emails you have stored in Gmail. I guess I was expecting something more along the lines of "this dude is 40, male, and here's the last web site he visited," but there is nothing like that to be found in Dashboard.
The Bits blog entry also quotes John Simpson of Consumer Watchdog who says essentially that the information in Dashboard is the info linked to your name, but the real dirt is in the information linked to your IP address, which Google is not revealing for now.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Munging mountains of data
An interesting New York Times piece this week on training today's young minds to comprehend and manipulate the huge (and growing) amount of data available for processing by computer.
IBM and Google are lending a hand to universities so that students can leverage the big processing power needed to even begin to deal with this scale of data.
The article is available at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/technology/12data.html
IBM and Google are lending a hand to universities so that students can leverage the big processing power needed to even begin to deal with this scale of data.
The article is available at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/technology/12data.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)