What is Gapminder?

Gapminder is a non-profit venture that develops information technology for provision of free statistics in new visual and animated ways. In short, it enables you to make sense of the world by having fun with statistics. Our method is to turn boring data into enjoyable interactive animations using Flash technology. Gapminder is a Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden. Funding has been mainly by grants from Swedish International Development co-operation Agency, Sida. In collaboration with United Nations Statistic Division we promote free access to searchable public data and our animations of different types of data are freely available.

The Gapminder World 2006, beta

NYT follows the Long Tail.

As a senior music analyst at Pandora Media, he spends roughly 25 hours a week wearing headphones in an office suite here, listening to songs by artists like Sonny Boy Williamson and Memphis Slim and dicing them into data points. Is the singer’s voice gravelly or silky? Is the scope of the song modest or epic? Does the electric guitar sound clean or distorted?

Bit by bit, Pandora’s music analysts have built a massive archive of data, cataloging the minute characteristics of more than 500,000 songs, from alt-country to bossa nova to metal to gospel, for what is known as the Music Genome Project. The site is adding about 15,000 new songs a month to the database.

The New Tastemakers

In a recent essay posted on the Web site Edge.org, Lanier disparages the recent spate of efforts that rely on conscious collaboration (like the anyone-can-participate online reference work Wikipedia) or passive polling (the so-called meta sites like Digg, which draw on user response to rank news articles and blog postings). To Lanier, these represent an alarming decision—rejecting individual expression and creativity to become part of a faceless mob. To emphasize the enormity of this movement, Lanier titled his essay with a fearsome moniker: "Digital Maoism."

Lanier has done us a service by warning that the pedestrian preferences of the hive mind all too often overwhelm the truly essential. But let's face it—Chairman Mao would have hated the Internet.

Poking a Stick Into The 'Hive Mind' | Steven Levy on Jaron Lanier

Three years ago, the artist Clifford Ross unveiled the R1, a still camera of his own design and construction—a Rube Goldberg assemblage of cadged and commissioned parts. Although it used film, it captured far more detail than any other camera, digital or not; the resolution was five hundred times as high as that of your run-of-the-mill digital point-and-click. In Ross's giant landscapes, you can make out the woodgrains on barn shingles thousands of feet away, and see mountain trails seven miles off. The pictures seem to be made not of pixels but of vision itself.

The subsequent curiosity and admiration of scientists turned Ross, who had previously made abstract paintings and photographs of ocean waves, into a congregator of technical minds—a high-res den leader—and before long he began conceiving a successor to the R1, which would draw on the expertise of his new genius friends, and, of course, enable him to make art.

Behold the R2.

Bad-Ass Camera

With synergy, all the computers on your desktop form a single virtual screen. You use the mouse and keyboard of only one of the computers while you use all of the monitors on all of the computers. You tell synergy how many screens you have and their positions relative to one another. Synergy then detects when the mouse moves off the edge of a screen and jumps it instantly to the neighboring screen. The keyboard works normally on each screen; input goes to whichever screen has the cursor.

In this example, the user is moving the mouse from left to right. When the cursor reaches the right edge of the left screen it jumps instantly to the left edge of the right screen.

You can arrange screens side-by-side, above and below one another, or any combination. You can even have a screen jump to the opposite edge of itself. Synergy also understands multiple screens attached to the same computer.

Running a game and don't want synergy to jump screens? No problem. Just toggle Scroll Lock. Synergy keeps the cursor on the same screen when Scroll Lock is on. (This can be configured to another hot key.)

Do you wish you could cut and paste between computers? Now you can! Just copy text, HTML, or an image as you normally would on one screen then switch to another screen and paste it. It's as if all your computers shared a single clipboard (and separate primary selection for you X11 users). It even converts newlines to each computer's native form so cut and paste between different operating systems works seamlessly. And it does it all in Unicode so any text can be copied.

Do you use a screen saver? With synergy all your screen savers act in concert. When one starts they all start. When one stops they all stop. And, if you require a password to unlock the screen, you'll only have to enter a password on one screen.

If you regularly use multiple computers on one desk, give synergy a try. You'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Synergy

possibly noteworthy wrote:

wiretapping ATMs?

Decius wrote:

That's a bunch of bullshit, btw. ... If one of those guys knew how to do that it wouldn't just be a rumor. It would be a much, much bigger story than Mike Lynn.

I wasn't there, so I defer to you on the DEFCON situation last year.

However, independent of anything having to do with DEFCON, and regardless of the situation with wiretapping an ATM, it is worth pointing out that false-front ATM fraud is very real. [more, and more]

Vendors recognize this as a problem and are taking [weak] countermeasures.

Here's what Diebold does to protect you:

Opteva’s advanced function dispenser has been designed to have a variety of different surfaces and protrusions to make it difficult to add any kind of trapping device.

RE: Hacker Pranks at Defcon and Black Hat in Las Vegas Emphasize Computer Security

At last year's Black Hat, Cisco Systems Inc. tried to stop researcher Michael Lynn from speaking about a vulnerability that he said could let hackers virtually shut down the Internet.

Cisco managed to get pages documenting the flaw torn out of all 2,000 conference binders, but ultimately the biggest maker of Internet routing and switching equipment was unable to squelch Lynn's talk.

Isn't it nice to be mentioned alongside purple dye in swimming pools, the "wall of sheep", pouring cement into toilets, stealing payphones, and wiretapping ATMs?

Hacker Pranks at Defcon and Black Hat in Las Vegas Emphasize Computer Security

Adaptive optics is a new and growing research area aimed at creating high-quality imagery by correcting aberrations in optical systems caused by turbulence in the earth s atmosphere. This paper concentrates on the basics of physical optics leading into the design of an adaptive optics test bed to study the correction of aberrations using optical beam control. Adaptive optics requires the use of sophisticated optical equipment such as deformable mirrors and wavefront sensors. The experimental portion of the work focuses on using a deformable mirror to control the aberrations in a system using laser light. By using a combination of lenses, deformable mirror, and wavefront sensor, the test bed will correct aberrations induced into a plane wave. In addition, the mechanics and function these components was be explored, setting the building blocks for future studies concerning optical beam control.

Could be interesting. I mentioned this technology to Decius recently.

Optical Beam Control Using Adaptive Optics

The authors reflect on a 1998 paper in First Monday.

Almost a decade later, the most glaring omission of our vision for a more trustworthy Web was ...

Click through ...

We captured what I believe today is the essential challenge: a plastic medium for presenting information is necessarily at odds with a static medium for memorializing trustworthy transactions. If anyone can whip up the look-and-feel of a banking site, nobody can.

And more:

A world in which the only alternative is to pay for an (expensive!) crawl of one’s own, with its attendant limitations on freshness and breadth suggest that there is still ample room for innovation, into event-driven (“push”) architectures, into reputation management by way of social network analysis, and other new technologies for safely harnessing the power of the Web, warts and all.

Reflections on: Trust management on the World Wide Web

This year's themes are:

The Rise of Intelligent Software Systems and Machines
Nano/Bio Interface
Engineering Personal Mobility for the 21st Century
Supply Chain Management

So what is this symposium?

U.S. Frontiers of Engineering is an annual three-day meeting that brings together 100 of the nation's outstanding young engineers (ages 30-45) from industry, academia, and government to discuss pioneering technical and leading-edge research in various engineering fields and industry sectors. Participation is by invitation following a competitive nomination and selection process.

The program provides an opportunity for top-notch engineers, early in their careers, to learn about cutting-edge developments in fields other than their own, thereby facilitating collaborative work and the transfer of new approaches and techniques across fields. Through both formal sessions and informal discussions, the meetings have proven an effective mechanism for the establishment of cross-disciplinary and cross-sector contacts among this country's future engineering leaders.

The slides (and more) from last year's symposium are available, when the themes were:

ID and Verification Technologies
Engineering for Developing Communities
Engineering Complex Systems
Energy Resources for the Future

Some readers may be interested in Alessandro Vespignani's Complex Networks: Ubiquity, importance, and implications.

2006 US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium