A New Twist to Infoviz: iPad Magic and Card Tricks to Convey Positive Stats About Stockholm

I came across a new twist to information visualization, featuring the creativity of magicians.  They were called to create short videos to promote the city of Stockholm, Sweden.  The use of magicians to convey the "magic" of Stockholm and the economic climate in Sweden was brilliant!  

It might be difficult for "pure" capitalists to understand how Sweden, with such high taxes, can provide an economic environment that supports innovation, capitalistic ventures, and a high standard of living while maintaining an efficient "welfare state".   

For those who live in Sweden, it just might be to the "magic" of the Nordic Model, an economic approach that combines capitalism with social welfare and good stewardship among government officials.   

If everone is healthy, the economy is healthy, right?   Swedish citizens feel that their high tax dollars are well-spent, and also well-managed, which is not always the case in other countries, especially in highly populated regions.

Not all is rosy in Sweden - there were riots last by "disaffected" youth last year, as the youth unemployment rate is high.  Despite the problems, there are are a number of countries who are considering the adoption of the Nordic Model.   The Economist's special report about the Nordic model has an interesting quote:  

Goran Persson, a former Swedish prime minister, once compared Sweden's economy with a bumblebee---"with its overly heavy body and little wings, supposedly it should not be able to fly--but it does."

The following video features Charlie Caper and Erik Rosales, of D1Gits, using iPads and creative magic to convey the positive economic statistics related to doing business in Stockholm:




In their most recent video to promote Stockhomlm,Charlie and Erik take it one step further, by using visualizations that seamlessly interact between iPads and a whiteboard:


In the video below, a magician spouts out interesting facts about the multiple benefits of living in Stockholm, Sweden while performing a number of card tricks to illustrate his points.


When I think about information and data visualization and Sweden, the first person that comes to mind is Hans Rosling, of Gapminder, and his talent at telling stories through interactive, animated data visualization.  As you can see from the video, an entertaining, story-telling approach to information visualization is effective!


RELATED AND SOMEWHAT RELATED
The secret of their success:  The Nordic countries are probably the best-governed in the world     2/2/13, Special Report, The Economist
Practical lessons for business from the Nordic Model
Anne Lise Kjaer, Futurist - 9/2013, SME Magazine
The Nordic Model (pdf) 
2007 MIT Department of Economics
What Can the United States Learn from the Nordic Model?
Daniel J. Mitchell, 11/5/07, The CATO Institute
Charlie Caper and Erick Rosales: Using Magic to Introduce Stockholm
The World By Road Collective, 3/2012
Charlie Caper, Magician
Hans Rosling's TED-talk videos 
Gapminder

Librarians as Data Scientists: Data Science for All

Librarians as Data Scientists: Data Science for All

"The ability to take data - to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it - that's going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades. " - Hal Varian, McKinsey Quarterly

I came across the above quote from the Data Scientist Training for Librarians website.  It provides the motivation for librarians - and others- to consider learning more about data science - a field that applies to just about every field of study in some way, as well as most professions.

Credit: Dirk Tiede/DST4L

Librarians are in a good position to become early embracers of data science, as they are interested in information, understand a wide range of scholarly (and not-so scholarly) topics, and serve as the human interface bridging people and ideas. Wearing many hats, they provide resources for people from all walks of life, in community libraries, schools, universities, government, industry, and research centers.  With the power of today's computers and software tools, they have the potential to play an important role in the way we discover, curate, understand, and communicate knowledge. 

Chris Erdmann, the head librarian of the John G. Wolbach Library at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in collaboration with like-minded others, organized the first Data Scientist Training for Librarians (DST4L) course. The first round of the course included a number of noted speakers from a variety of disciplines, and covered a number of topics, as summarized  by Jennifer Prentice (Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science Tech Lab) on the course website.

The second DST4L course was opened to all librarians, with a solid list of topics outlined on the syllabus.   The course started with a 2-hour introduction to the course last July, captured in the video below: 



I'd like to share that Chris Erdmann is a member of the Seamless Astronomy Group, a multi-disciplinary collaboration of astronomers, computer scientists, librarians, visualization specialists, and information scientists.  The aim of this group is to research and develop systems that "seamlessly integrate scientific data and literature, the semantic interlinking and annotation of scientific resources, the study of the impact of social media and networking sites on scientific dissemination, and the analysis and visualization of astronomical data and research communities".  

As I looked at the info-graphic posted on the Seamless Astronomy website (below), it occurred to me that this conceptualization could apply to a number of disciplines.  I look forward to learning more about the tools, methods, and processes that this group generates!

Credit: Seamless Astronomy Group

One of the projects that interests me is the WorldWide Telescope, a collaboration between Microsoft Research and the Seamless Astronomy group. The WorldWide Telescope is a visualization software that enables people to explore data and high resolution images stored in the "cloud" through a web browser or computer application. According to Chris Endermann, a student project exploring the use of the new Oculus Rift virtual reality headset with the WorldWide Telescope is in the works.   

RELATED AND SOMEWHAT RELATED

Data Scientist Training for Librarians 
Data Scientist Training For Librarians Course Details

Data Science: What's in it for the New Librarian?
jmstanto, Information Space, 7/16/12

Cracking the Code: Librarians Acquiring Essential Coding Skills Matt Enis, The Digital Shift, 3/6/13 (Links to tutorials)

OpenRefine: Data Scientist Trainings for Librarians Presentation (SlideShare) 
Tom Morris, 3/28/13

Librarians Are Becoming Big Data Experts
John Edwards, BigData Republic, 8/9/13

Code {4}lib Issue 21

Prototyping as a Process for Improved User Experience with Library and Archives Websites
Shaun Ellis, Maureen Callahan, code{4}lib Journal, Issue 18, 10/3/12

Crafting Linked Open Data for Cultural Heritage:  Mapping and Curating Tools for the Linked Jazz Project M. Cristina Pattuelli, Matt Miller, Leanora Lange, Sean Fitzell, Carolyn Li-Madeo, code{4}lib Journal, 7/15/13

Collaborative Librarianship News

Confederation of Open Access Repositories

Public Libraries Add Multimedia Learning to Digital Mission
Nora Fleming, Education Week, 9/15/13

Life of an emerging technologies librarian in the health sciences (must-read)
Patricia F. Anderson, UMSI Monthly, 1/2013


Data and Coding for Journalists

Although journalists aren't librarians, the profession has expanded to include data journalism, a growing field fueled by the visual nature of the web and the increase in popularity of mobile devices in the form of smart phones and tablets. Books and newspapers are still with us, but technology has changed the way journalists do their jobs

I'm not sure if the journalists and librarians are collaborating with each other as they venture into coding and data analysis.   If not, they should!  The links below would be of interest to librarians, journalists, and other knowledge junkies.


Video: Journalism in the Age of Data

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

Coding for the Future: The Rise of Hacker Journalism
Maryanne Reed, Media Shift, 5/2/13
The above post includes a number of video and audio clips on the topic, plus a number of links, such as the following:

• The Census Bureau
• Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
• Sunlight Foundation
• National Institute on Money in State Politics

Data scraping tool for non-coding journalists launches     (Import.io)
Sarah Marshall, Journalism.Co.Uk, 9/9/13

Data Journalism Handbook: A Five Minute Field Guide
Data Journalism Handbook Chapter:  Getting Data

ODDS AND ENDS
A little history about the idea of seamlessness in computing:
The Computer for the 21st Century
Mark Weiser, Scientific American, September 1991 (online draft)


My thoughts on the need for data/information visualization not long after the world-wide financial crisis:
Reflections: Need for Interactive Infoviz for the Financial Biz, Business Leaders, Government Officials, Educators and the Rest of US... 
Lynn Marentette, Interactive Multimedia Technology, 2/1/09



Since I'm a school psychologist (in my day job), I thought I'd slip this in: 
Why every (psychology) student should learn to code 
Matt Wall, Computing for Psychologists, 1/13/13
Many of Matt Wall's links would be of interest to anyone thinking about learning more about technology, data analysis, and related coding.

Tips for Apps and the Web: Designing for Teens, Part I

Jakob Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, recently wrote an interesting post about designing website for teens. He provides good information for anyone considering this age group.  The study includes tips for designing for smaller screens such as laptops with track pads, touch-screen tablets, and smart phones.

Teenage Usability:  Designing Teen-Targeted Websites

Jakob Nielsen, Alertbox, 2/4/13

The research shared in Nielsen's post is important. The results of research conducted 8 years ago are compared with current findings.  Nielsen discusses some of the myths about teens and technology. As Nielsen points out, teens might appear to be tech-savvy in some ways, but they possess brains that are in the midst of cognitive development,  just one factor to consider when designing web experiences for this age group.

Nielsen Norman Group's related product, "Teenagers (Ages 13-17) on the Web" provides additional information on this topic. It includes 110 design guidelines informed by research conducted with teens.  Busy web developers might find the fee of $149.00 for this report appropriate.   

The information in this report would also be useful to design/development teams who aim to provide web-based educational content for this age group.

Pew Internet & American Life

Another good resource for designers/developers targeting applications or websites for teens is the Pew Research Center website.  The Pew Internet & American Life Project continues to investigate a wide range of topics related to the use of technology among people of all walks of life.  What I like about the Pew Research Center is that their reports are free, and include summaries as well as samples of interview questions.

Researchers from the Pew Internet and American Life Project share their knowledge in a variety of forms.  Data is available for download in SPSS and comma-delimited format, crosstab files and questionnaires.

The website also provides access to number of presentations, such as the one below:

Teens 2012: Truth, Trends, and Myths About Teen Online Behavior from Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

RELATED/SOMEWHAT RELATED

Nielson-Norman Group Research Reports

Children 3-12 on the Web

Teenagers (Ages 13-17) on the Web

College Students (Ages 18-24) on the Web

Pew Research Center Resources
Featured Research: Teens
Pew Research Center Trend Data (Teens)
In-store Mobile Commerce During the 2012 Holiday Shopping Season

Teens and Education Resources 
The following websites also provide resources for other age groups and related topics.
Edudemic
Edudemic Ed-Tech Tools 
Edutopia
Edutopia: 6-8 Grade Level Resources
Edutopia: 9-12 Grade Level Resources
Mind/Shift

Part II will focus on teens and considerations for educational technology.

Interactive Tablets and Learning: One Laptop Per Child now One Tablet Per Child in Ethiopia

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a philanthropic organization that focuses on learning technologies, distributing thousands of low-cost laptops to children in developing countries.  In most cases, children have been provided access to OLPC laptops within teachers within traditional school settings.  But what about children who live in remote areas, where there are no schools, teachers, or even access to electricity?  They now have the opportunity to learn, even without teachers, through a small experiment conceived by Nicholas Negroponte, of OLCP and other researchers.  In this experiement, each child was provided with a Motorola Xoom tablet.  No teachers were around, because the children lived in a remote village that had no teachers. 

The following video provides a brief overview of what happened over the course of a few weeks and months after the children received the tablets:

To learn more, I encourage you to follow the link to a video of Nicholas Negroponte's presentation at the October 2012 EmTech conference, held in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He discusses learning and how it can be supported through technology, anywhere.

EmTech Video: Nicholas Negroponte: Teaching Children to Learn

"Nicholas Negroponte, founder, One Laptop Per Child, on his latest experiment with the democratization of education - can children teach themselves to read?"

In his presentation, Negroponte discusses the differences between knowing and understanding, and the importance for teachers (or learning applications) to understand the learner.  He goes on to discuss the OLPC research project Ethiopia where children living in remote villages with no teachers, no exposure to print, illiterate communities, and no access to technology, learned to use tablets without instruction or guidance.  The village was provided with a solar panel and one village member was taught how to use it to supply power for the tablets.

Each tablet provided to the children had over 100 applications.  Within four minutes, one child open the box, turned on the on-off button. Within 5 days, each child was using an average of 47 applications.  Within five months, a child hacked the Android tablet to turn on the camera capability.  According to Negroponte, the children were each using different applications, but collaborated with one another.



Maryann Wolf, Director of  the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, has collaborated with with the "OTPC" project. Other collaborators include Cynthia Breazeal and team at the MIT Media Lab, and Sugata Mitra at Newcastle University, according to Chris Ball, lead software engineer at OLPC.

The tablets include software that tracks data from all of the interactions from the children.  What a goldmine for education and cognitive/developmental psychology researchers According to Negraponte, the data is free for analysis.   (I will update this post with additional information about how the data can be accessed as soon as I can find the link.)

Although the OTPC concept is a noble idea, it does not appear to address the fact the children and their families who live in remote villages do not have access to literacy support in their own language.  


RELATED

OLPC Literacy Project

Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves:  A bold experiment by the One Laptop Per Child organization has shown "encouraging" results.
David Tabolt,  MIT Technology Review, 10/29/12


OLPC Project Puts Tablets in the Hands of Formerly Illiterate Children with Amazing Results John Biggs, TechCrunch, 11/1/12

Motorola Xoom hacked by Ethiopian kids who can't read; with no instructions whatsoever.
Joe Hindy, 11/4/12
 


DIG DEEPER: SOMEWHAT RELATED
Hourcade, J.P., Beitler, D., Cormenzana, F. and Flores, P. (2009). Early OLPC Experiences in a Rural Uruguayan School. In A. Druin (Ed.), Mobile Technology for Children: Designing for Interaction and Learning. Boston: Morgan Kaufmann.

Growing Up With Nell:  A Narrative Interface for Literacy (pdf)
IDC 2012, June 12–15, 2012, Bremen, Germany
Authors: C. Scott Ananian, Chris J. Ball, Michael Stone
One Laptop Per Child Foundation, 222 Third Street, Cambridge, MA 02142

ABSTRACT
"Nell is a tablet-oriented education platform for children in the developing world.  A novel modular narrative system guides learning, even for children far from educational infrastructure, and provides personalized instruction which grows with the child.  Nell's design builds on experience with the Sugar Learning Platform, used by over two million children around the world"

Quote from above article:
"To further promote collaboration, Nell is free and opensource and implemented in standard web technologies (JavaScript, HTML5, and WebGL) with offline caching. Resources are named by URL, even when disconnected from the internet, which simplifies the distribution of updates to story modules and the Nell system. URL-based identifiers also allow third parties to manage their own namespaces when extending Nell."

TinkRBook
A. Chang and C. Breazeal. TinkRBook: Shared reading interfaces for storytelling. (pdf) In Proc. of the 10th Int’l Conf. on Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’11), pages 145–148. ACM, June 2011.
NOTE:  The above article provides good references about early language and literacy development.



Wilox, Bruce Beyond Facade: Pattern Matching for Natural Language Applications (pdf)
Telltale Games, Feb. 2011
Note:  This paper reviews the history of Natural Language Processing (NLP) as applied to games, and includes information about AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), Facade, and ChatScript.  The author explains how string matching is no longer simply a matching of words. It now focuses matching patterns of meaning.

ChatScript 
ChatScript Website

Note:  One of my assignments for a class in AI for Games, back in 2006, was to create a mini-game that involved the use of AIML.  I realized that a "smart" chat feature would be useful to incorporate in an educational game. In my opinion, it has the potential to support scaffolding of learning, based on the learner's responses, positive as well as errors.

EpiCollect: A mobile app, useful for photo + data-collection "in the wild".

EpiCollect is an open-source project developed at Imperial College London, funded by the Wellcome Trust.  According to information posted on the project's website, "EpiCollect is a generic data collection tool that allows you to collect and submit geotagged data forms (along with photos) to a central project website (hosted using Google's App Engine) from suitable mobile phones (Android or iPhone). For example, questionnaires, surveys, etc.  All data synchronised (ie a copy sent from the phone) from multiple phones can then be viewed/charted/filtered at the project website using Google Maps/Earth or downloaded. Furthermore, data can be requested and viewed/filtered from the project website directly on your phone using Google Maps." -EpiCollect


(Credit:  EpiCollect Website)

EpiCollect makes use of web API's such as Google Maps, Google Charts, Google Talk, and KML Specifiction, and JavaScript Libraries such as JQuery, script.aculo.us, ExtJS, and Mapstraction.  It runs on the Google AppEngine server, and is available for Android and iPhone.

I think that EpiCollect would be a useful interactive tool for use in education, K-12 and above.  It would be ideal for students working on group projects, such as environmental study.  For young children, a simple assignment might include taking pictures and data about  birds, animals, trees, cloud formations, or even litter, as part of a class project.  Since the data includes photographs, the students could create an end product in the form of an interactive multimedia presentation, available for other students - as well as parents- to view on the web, accessed from any web-enabled device.

HCI research teams could use these tools when observing people using various technologies in public spaces, such as malls, airports, special events, as well as in stores, eateries, and entertainment settings.  

I would be interested in learning more about the use of this application in HCI and K-12 education!

RELATED
EpiCollect Website
EpiCollect Instructions
EpiCollect Instructions (pdf)
The Sight of Road Kill Makes a Pretty, Data-Rich Picture (NPR All Tech Considered)
Note: Audio from the above December 2, 2012 episode can be found on the NPR Weekend Edition Sunday website after 12:00 PM ET on 12/2/12
Mobile app sees science go global  (BBC article)
App for Android Puts Laboratories on Your Phone (Tree Hugger article)
Scientific Data Collection Goes Mobile (Discovery News article)

Paper: EpiCollect: Linking Smartphones to Web Applications for Epidemiology, Ecology and Community Data Collection (PLos One 4(9), 2009)

David M. Aanensen, Derek M. Huntley, Edward J. Feil, Fada'a al-Own, Brian G. Spratt

Conclusion from the above paper:

"Data collection frameworks utilising mobile phones with data submission to and from central databases are widely applicable and can give a field worker similar display and analysis tools on their mobile phone that they would have if viewing the data in their laboratory via the web. We demonstrate their utility for epidemiological data collection and display, and briefly discuss their application in ecological and community data collection. Furthermore, such frameworks offer great potential for recruiting ‘citizen scientists’ to contribute data easily to central databases through their mobile phone."

Knight Digital Media Center: Election shows data illiteracy is a problem for journalist. I think this also applies to some corporate board directors, government leaders, politicians....

Here is the link:

Election shows data illiteracy is a problem for journalists
Amy Gahran, USC Annenberg Knight Digital Media Center, 11/7/12

FYI:
"In 2012, the Knight Foundation broaden the KDMC mission to include community foundations and other nonprofits who are seeking to engage and inform their communities on critical issues. The KDMC provides resources and training in variety of formats including self-directed, web-based learning modules, instructor-led virtual classes and workshops throughout the country. In addition the KDMC offers consulting services for organizations in strategies for engaging and informing communities in the digital age"  -Knight Digital Media Center

RELATED:

Pew research roundup: Digital media and election 2012

Checking out Recline js, an open-source, browser based HTML and JavaScript library for data: "Relax with your data"

"Recline.js - relax with your data"

"A simple but powerful library for building data applications in pure Javascript and HTML"

The diagram below was taken from the Recline.js website and provides a basic overview of how it works:

Good news for knowledge junkies! Data Journalism Handbook: How journalists can use data to improve the news- available online.

Data Journalism Handbook: How journalists can use data to improve the news
Jonathan Gray, Liliana Bounegru, and Lucy Chambers, Editors


The book is available for free online.  Below is a link to a useful chapter:


Data visualization DIY:  Our Top Tools



RELATED
Open Knowledge Foundation

Intel's 'Museum of Me': Moving 3D visualizations of your Facebook life.

(I missed this one when the buzz started. Thanks to Liz Dorland for the link.)


Museum of Me is a website created by Intel that provides a variety of interesting information visualizations of your photos and other information from Facebook.  Below is a video from Intel that gives a preview of what Museum of Me is about.  Better yet, take a look at all of the 'Museum of Me' videos posted on YouTube.

Video Demo: Museum of Me


RELATED
Intel's 'Museum of Me' is Cool, Creepy Facebook Fun
Sarah Jacobsson Purewal, PCWorld, 6/1/11


Intel's Facebook 'Museum of Me' is a Must-Try
Don  Reisinger, CNET News, The Digital Home 6/2/11

Intel on Facebook

Tools for Knowledge Junkies: Document Cloud, CALAIS , Linked Data

For all of the knowledge junkies out there, here are a few things that might fuel your passion for interactive information exploration and consumption. Although the tools below were adopted by people in journalism/news related fields, I think that they have potential for use in education and other fields. I'm interested in learning more about how people from different disciplines currently use these tools, and I'd also like more to this list.

CALAIS: "We want to make all the world's content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais. Calais is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application." CALAIS is published by Thomson Reuters
MORE ABOUT CALAIS
PR Video for CALAIS:

How CALAIS Works:

CALAIS for Publishers
CALAIS for Bloggers
CALAIS for Software Providers
CALAIS for Content Managers
CALAIS for Developers
Open CALAIS Content Maps by Jer Thorp

"Jer Thorp is a software artist, writer, and educator. He is a contributing editor for Wired UK. He is currently Data Artist in Residence at the New York Times."

DOCUMENTCLOUD
"DocumentCloud runs every document you upload through OpenCalais, giving you access to extensive information about the people, places and organizations mentioned in each."

DocumentCloud Blog from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.
MORE ABOUT DOCUMENT CLOUD
DocumentCloud Merging with IRE 
Amanda Hickman, DocumentCloud, 6/9/11 (Note:  IRE = Investigative Reporters and Editors)
Newsrooms using Document Cloud
Document Cloud: Not Just For Journalists?  (Excellent article!) Konrad Lawson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/8/11 (Konrad is a Ph.D student in the history department at Harvard University.)
For Techies:  Document Cloud's VisualSearch.js | Autocomplete Faceted Search Queries
Losterium Posterious, 7/9/11


LINKED DATA

-linkeddata.org
"Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn't previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods. More specifically, Wikipedia defines Linked Data as "a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF.""

Tim Berners-Lee: The Year Open Data Went Worldwide

"....Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together." At TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee called for "raw data now" -- for governments, scientists and institutions to make their data openly available on the web. At TED University in 2010, he shows a few of the interesting results when the data gets linked up."-TED

LDOW2011: Linked Data on the Web workshop


COMMENT
I plan to share more information related to this topic in future posts.  I welcome input and links from my readers!

"Visualize This": Nathan Yau's (FlowingData) book about information and data visualization

I've been following Nathan Yau's FlowingData blog for several years.  It is one of my favorites. His new book,  Visualize This : The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization and Statistics, will be out in July 2011, and is available for  pre-order on-line on Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and Wiley.  


I love Nathan's editor's comment about his latest chapter: "Thanks for yet another very enjoyable chapter.  If I had known statistics would be like this, I would have actually taken classes"





Here is the plug for Visualize This, from the Wiley website:


"Data doesn't decrease; it is ever-increasing and can be overwhelming to organize in a way that makes sense to its intended audience. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could actually visualize data in such a way that we could maximize its potential and tell a story in a clear, concise manner? Thanks to the creative genius of Nathan Yau, we can. With this full-color book, data visualization guru and author Nathan Yau uses step-by-step tutorials to show you how to visualize and tell stories with data. He explains how to gather, parse, and format data and then design high quality graphics that help you explore and present patterns, outliers, and relationships.

• Presents a unique approach to visualizing and telling stories with data, from a data visualization expert and the creator of flowingdata.com, Nathan Yau
• Offers step-by-step tutorials and practical design tips for creating statistical graphics, geographical maps, and information design to find meaning in the numbers
• Details tools that can be used to visualize data-native graphics for the Web, such as ActionScript, Flash libraries, PHP, and JavaScript and tools to design graphics for print, such as R and Illustrator
• Contains numerous examples and descriptions of patterns and outliers and explains how to show them

Visualize This demonstrates how to explain data visually so that you can present your information in a way that is easy to understand and appealing."

Interactive Display with 4,500 Streaming Videos, Powered by a NAND flashcard by Fusion-io

The video wall below streams 4,500 videos through Fusion-io's NAND flash card. It can take care of 1 million transactions per second, the equivalent of 6 gigabytes of throughput per second, according to a recent Computerworld post by Lucas Mearian.


Wow.




FYI:  Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, serves as Fusion-io's chief scientist.
RELATED
What a wall of 4,500 video streams looks like
Lucas Mearian, Computerworld 4/12/11
Fusion-IO Jobs (Colorado)
SIGGRAPH 2009 Version of Fusion-io's Streaming Video Wall:






SOMEWHAT RELATED
Driving Data Warehousing with ioMemory
Fusion-io Whitepaper 1/11/11
Transcription:  Fusion-io CEO David Flynn on Enabling a New Class of Cloud Computing Apps
Bert Latamore, Wikibon, 4/8/11
"We're talking about a fundamental new building-block. So it impacts and will impact everything in the entire data center. In the database world it typically means that a database server can do about 10X the throughput, for the same server. And those queries are answered 30%-40% faster. So it means faster page loads, more throughput per server. So Answers.com retrofitted their MySQL scale-out database tier and saw 9X the throughput per server. What they chose to do was to shrink the database farm four-to-one. So they got a 75% consolidation, and with that remaining one-out-of-four servers they were still getting more than twice the throughput they had before." - David Flynn

Post from TechPsych blog: How about some iPad 2 apps for school psychology and related fields?

The video provides a recap of the iPad and highlights how it can be used in education, for students with special needs, in aviation, in doctor's offices, in the board room, in an art studio, in the kitchen - just about anywhere.


I wonder how an iPad could transform the work of a school psychologist!   I have a plenty of ideas, now that the iPad2 is out.  How can it help with RTI?  Progress monitoring?  Digital social stories?   Social skills activities?  Counseling? Behavior intervention?   Transition planning?  Assessment?  Communication? Productivity?  IEP collaboration and development?   


Wouldn't it be nice if there were a few iPad apps that could effectively support the work of school psychologists and those who work in similar fields? 

So much of what we use in our productivity work as school psychologists was built upon applications first developed in the mid-to-late 1990's,  at best.   There must be more efficient and effective solutions out there.     What can be done to move us forward?

Psychological and educational test publishers, can you hear me now?   


I have some ideas.

Quick Links: Reasons why we need effective, efficient methods of info and data visualization: "In New Military, Data Overload Can Be Deadly" (NYT article)

Reasons why we need effective, efficient methods information and data visualization:


In New Military, Data Overload Can Be Deadly
Thom Shanker, Matt Richtel, New York Times, 1/16/11

Military Struggles to Channel Flood of Data

Thom Shanker, Matt Richtel, New York Times,   via the Charlotte Observer 1/17/11

End of GOOG-411, Google's "phoneme harvesting operation" - via Pogue's Posts

Here's a quick link to a recent "Pogue's Post":


Farewell, GOOG-411
NYT 10/14/10


Google:  In Service of Data


"On Nov. 12, Google will turn of 800-GOOG-411 forever...It was one of the best, juiciest, most useful services in all phonedom...In case you missed it, GOOG-411 is a free, voice-activated directory assistance service..."


Pogue goes on to quote Google's Marissa Mayer, from a 2007 InfoWorld presentation:
"If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation.  So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so we can ultimately train off of that.  So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that:  Getting a bunch of different speech samples."




RELATED
Comments to Pogue's Post, Farewell, GOOG-411


Schalkwyk, J., Beeferman, D. Beaufays, F., Byrne B., Chelba, C., Cohen, M., Garret, M., Strope, B. (Google, Inc.)  Google Search by Voice: A case study (pdf)




Google Shuts Down GOOG-411
Google Operating System Blog


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Information Visualization for the People: The End of Swivel & Lessons Learned - a great post by Robert Kosara (Eager Eyes)

The following post is worth reading:

The Rise and Fall of Swivel.com
Robert Kosara,  Eager Eyes 10/12/10


Swivel.com is (was) a web-based information visualization company that incorporated the concept of "social visualization" by providing a means for people to explore and interact with large data sets, and then share their insights with others.  Robert Kosara's recent blog post about the demise of the company sheds some light on how a company with a great concept withered away.


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Why Swivel Shut Down 
Nathan Yau, Flowing Data 10/19/10



(Image taken from Robert Kosara's Eager Eyes blog)


Review:  Swivel vs. Many Eyes (Robert Kosara, 2/18/07, Eager Eyes)

Many Eyes 
"The site will be down from 10 a.m. EST until the move is complete, which should take a day or two if all goes well. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this causes, but it will ensure a more reliable service in the long run."  10/19/10-Many Eyes Blog


About Robert Kosara - from eagereyes.org

"Robert Kosara is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UNC Charlotte. His main research interests are information visualization for visual communication and theoretical foundations of visualization. Robert received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Vienna University of Technology (Vienna, Austria). His list of publications can be found online on his vanity website.

Robert can be found on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Xing. You can use this site's contact form to send him an email."

About Nathan Yau & Flowing Data - from flowingdata.com

"FlowingData explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better - mainly through data visualization. Money spent, reps at the gym, time you waste, and personal information you enter online are all forms of data. How can we understand these data flows? Data visualization lets non-experts make sense of it all...As for me, I'm a PhD candidate in statistics. I live and breathe data. I also have a background in computer science and design. I do some freelancing from time to time, but mostly I'm just trying to work on my dissertation. You can find more about me here."

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