Flare is a collection of ActionScript 3 classes for building a wide variety of interactive visualizations. For example, flare can be used to build basic charts, complex animations, network diagrams, treemaps, and more. Flare is written in the ActionScript 3 programming language and can be used to build visualizations that run on the web in the Adobe Flash Player. Flare applications can be built using the free Adobe Flex SDK or Adobe's Flex Builder IDE. Flare is based on prefuse, a full-featured visualization toolkit written in Java.

flare | visualization on the web

“Sell Globally” and “Shop Globally” have been seen as a potential benefit of web-enabled electronic business. One important step toward realizing this benefit is to know how things are selling in various parts of the world. A global price comparison service would address this need. But there have not been many such services. In this paper, we use a case study of global price dispersion to illustrate the need and the value of a global price comparison service. Then we identify and discuss several technology challenges, including semantic heterogeneity, in providing a global price comparison service. We propose a mediation architecture to address the semantic heterogeneity problem, and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture by implementing a prototype that enables global price comparison using data from web sources in several countries.

Enabling Global Price Comparison through Semantic Integration of Web Data

Clay Shirky has a book coming out.

A revelatory examination of how the wildfirelike spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects-for good and for ill

A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each other online and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design in decades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blog after 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering the Iraq war. Activists use the Internet and e-mail to bring offensive comments made by Trent Lott and Don Imus to a wide public and hound them from their positions. A few people find that a world-class online encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers and open for editing by anyone, a wiki, is not an impractical idea. Jihadi groups trade inspiration and instruction and showcase terrorist atrocities to the world, entirely online. A wide group of unrelated people swarms to a Web site about the theft of a cell phone and ultimately goads the New York City police to take action, leading to the culprit's arrest.

With accelerating velocity, our age's new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing new things in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old things better and more easily. You don't have to have a MySpace page to know that the times they are a changin'. Hierarchical structures that exist to manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d'etre swiftly eroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are being destroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is profound.

One of the culture's wisest observers of the transformational power of the new forms of tech-enabled social interaction is Clay Shirky, and Here Comes Everybody is his marvelous reckoning with the ramifications of all this on what we do and who we are. Like Lawrence Lessig on the effect of new technology on regimes of cultural creation, Shirky's assessment of the impact of new technology on the nature and use of groups is marvelously broad minded, lucid, and penetrating; it integrates the views of a number of other thinkers across a broad range of disciplines with his own pioneering work to provide a holistic framework for understanding the opportunities and the threats to the existing order that these new, spontaneous networks of social interaction represent. Wikinomics, yes, but also wikigovernment, wikiculture, wikievery imaginable interest group, including the far from savory. A revolution in social organization has commenced, and Clay Shirky is its brilliant chronicler.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

It is our view that Computer Science (CS) education is neglecting basic skills, in particular in the areas of programming and formal methods. We consider that the general adoption of Java as a first programming language is in part responsible for this decline. We examine briefly the set of programming skills that should be part of every software professional’s repertoire.

Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?

Baby stepping toward the end of "cable", and bundles ...

HBO, cable’s most popular premium channel, is carefully entering the arena of Internet video.

The channel, a subsidiary of Time Warner, will introduce HBO on Broadband starting this week to subscribers in Green Bay and Milwaukee, Wis., then spread the service slowly to other parts of the country. The free service will allow access to about 400 hours of movies and original programming each month. It will be made available only to people already subscribing to HBO, and it will be marketed and delivered through cable operators.

HBO Putting Shows Online, at No Additional Charge

"I admit it does sound crazy," says Michael Wong of his idea to use gold to clean up toxic waste. Wong plans to combine gold with palladium—an even more precious metal—to treat polluted groundwater beneath waste dumps and contaminated factories and military sites. "It not only works faster [than current methods], but a hundred times faster," Wong says, "and I bet it will be cheaper too."

A golden detergent? Here is Wong's trick: he creates nanoparticles of gold. In his realm, the work product is measured not in carats but in atoms. A thimbleful of coffee-colored solution contains 100 trillion gold spheres—each only 15 atoms wide, or about the width of a virus. Upon every golden nanosphere, Wong and his team dust a dash of palladium atoms. Think of an infinitely small ice-cream scoop flecked with sprinkles.

Mmm, ice cream.

Midas Touch

Not only am I a huge fan of software design patterns, I'm also strongly supportive of process in software. Process makes us strong. Process enables us to achieve highly metric-driven quality levels. Process allows us to attend meetings throughout every day, ensuring that any coding time we get will be that much more intense because it is necessarily so short and focused. And finally, process allows us to draw pretty charts and graphs on endless presentations.

Or, as I like to say it every morning when I wake up, "Software Is Process." For without the process, where would software engineers be but in their offices, cranking away code, pretending to be productive?

Now that people have had time to understand and incorporate the important patterns I discussed in my earlier Male Pattern Boldness article, it seems high time to tackle the larger topic of Software Processeseses.

...

Testosterone-Driven Development:

Like its namesake Test-driven Development, which is known for the requirement of engineers writing tests before code, Testosterone-driven Development focuses on testing first. But it does so in an an extremely aggressive manner, requiring every engineer to produce entire test suites, test frameworks, and test scripting languages for every line of product code written, including whitespace and comments. Engineers violating this contract are taken out back where they have the crap kicked out of them. Any code found to have bugs not caught by tests results in the offending engineer having to go three rounds with the project manager (with the engineer being handcuffed and blindfolded during the match). Finally, any bug found in tests will result in the engineer's body never being found again.

Expectations are high from this newcomer to the field, although to date none of the products using this process has left any survivors.

Crystal Methodology

MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large datasets that is amenable to a broad variety of real-world tasks. Users specify the computation in terms of a map and a reduce function, and the underlying runtime system automatically parallelizes the computation across large-scale clusters of machines, handles machine failures, and schedules inter-machine communication to make efficient use of the network and disks. Programmers find the system easy to use: more than ten thousand distinct MapReduce programs have been implemented internally at Google over the past four years, and an average of one hundred thousand MapReduce jobs are executed on Google's clusters every day, processing a total of more than twenty petabytes of data per day.

MapReduce: simplified data processing on large clusters

Calling for a “new beginning” to reform the nation’s transportation programs, the bipartisan National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission today unveiled a comprehensive plan to increase investment, expand services, repair infrastructure, demand accountability, and refocus Federal transportation programs, while maintaining a strong Federal role in surface transportation. Policy changes, though necessary, will not be enough on their own to produce the transportation system the Nation needs in the 21st century. Significant new funding also will be needed.

Congress created the twelve-member, bipartisan Commission in 2005 and it not only was charged with examining the condition and operation of the surface transportation system, but also with developing a conceptual plan and specific recommendations to ensure that the surface transportation system serves the needs of the nation now and in the future.

Transportation for Tomorrow: Report of the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission

Tracking the location and availability of resources such as hospitals, transportation equipment and water during an emergency situation can be life-saving.

A collaborative mapping tool developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is helping emergency management officials better coordinate event and incident planning – and real-time response.

Mapping Tool Allows Emergency Management Personnel to Visually Track Resources