2013-05-14
post/50447416238
What if pixels weren’t necessarily supposed to look like little squares and sit in the so-called “right order”? What if what we call “real” or “true” images were not the only way the World around us can be represented? What if photographic data was just… data? What if it could be reinterpreted?
Free on the App Store. Images from Fast Co Design, via George Oates.
2013-03-20
Amazon and CIA ink cloud deal
From the newspaper Federal Computer Week:
In a move sure to send ripples through the federal IT community, FCW has learned that the CIA has agreed to a cloud computing contract with electronic commerce giant Amazon, worth up to $600 million over 10 years.
Amazon Web Services will help the intelligence agency build a private cloud infrastructure that helps the agency keep up with emerging technologies like big data in a cost-effective manner not possible under the CIA’s previous cloud efforts, sources told FCW.
via infoneer-pulse, notational
2013-02-19
post/43505029156
Every meteorite fall on earth mapped
It’s amazing how metorites seem attracted to centers of human population and never ever fall in the sea.
Of course, the name of the graphic should be “every recorded meteorite fall on earth, mapped”.
See also: Astronomers lose access to military data, Nature, June 2009:
The change is a blow to the astronomers and planetary scientists who used the information to track space rocks, especially those that burn up over the oceans or in other remote locations. “These systems are extremely useful,” says Peter Brown, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. “I think the scientific community benefited enormously.”
The USAF later said the data would be made available again, but I don’t know if that happened. If it did, it may well be a better source than the data the Guardian worked from.
2013-01-21
London Snow via the medium of Flickr
I wondered this morning how common snow’s been recently in London. After all, this year’s looking like having a week or so of snow, and I remember my last winter there, 2010, being fairly white too.
I was also reminded of this by Boris Johnson’s recent (generally awful) Telegraph column, where he says
By my calculations, this is now the fifth year in a row that we have had an unusual amount of snow; and by unusual I mean snow of a kind that I don’t remember from my childhood: snow that comes one day, and then sticks around for a couple of days, followed by more.
OK then. I suppose I could double check by looking at the Met Office’s UK climate summaries, but that would require some reading comprehension, and it’s a Sunday. Instead, I thought I’d do a tiny bit of data mining. (Actually this hardly qualifies, but what the hell, big data’s sexy, right?)
Flickr have an API, and one of the core methods is flickr.photos.search, and one of the parameters is the date taken. So it’s pretty trivial to write a small Python script that will do the search, return the total count for a search for, say, ‘snow london -ontario’, compare it with a baseline of ‘london -ontario’, and get this:
2001 34 20505 0.165813 2002 206 46747 0.440670 2003 419 90416 0.463414 2004 763 187478 0.406981 2005 1879 515875 0.364236 2006 2551 1130056 0.225741 2007 15227 1838767 0.828109 2008 12192 2027861 0.601225 2009 64871 2326955 2.787806 2010 34149 2305502 1.481196 2011 7429 2322795 0.319830 2012 14241 2449517 0.581380 2013 4872 63543 7.667249
Only three years reach over 1% of ‘snow’ photos, by this (admittedly handwaving) method: 2013, 2010, and 2009 (which was actually snowier, by this measure). By contrast, 2011 and 2012 look far less snowy.
(Of course, 2013 is pretty biased, because we haven’t had the non-snowy months that a full year has.)
Now I’ve produced this, I should actually go and do the hard work of comparing it to the aforementioned summaries to see if it’s actually worthwhile or not.
Edit: hugovk suggested looking for winters rather than years, so I changed the start/end of the timekeeping period to be in September of the year shown. Now the results look like:
2001 119 35647 0.333829 2002 443 73337 0.604061 2003 594 153578 0.386774 2004 1587 377460 0.420442 2005 2027 898777 0.225529 2006 15329 1671273 0.917205 2007 10903 1989473 0.548035 2008 60843 2250467 2.703572 2009 20579 2295751 0.896395 2010 25089 2316599 1.083010 2011 14916 2502527 0.596038 2012 6921 764047 0.905834
This looks better for the year starting in September 2012, and also makes 2006/2007 and 2009/2010 come up towards that 1% limit. Better.
2013-01-15
post/40580230772
Every time I see a ‘trig point’, I can’t resist the urge to photograph it.
Something about trig points makes me want to try and visit them all. This would probably be a ridiculously tall challenge. I bet someone’s done it though.
Geographical Magazine, March 2009:
Rob Woodall, 48, is attempting to become the first person to visit all 6,100 surviving Ordnance Survey triangulation pillars in Britain. For this exploratory challenge he now has fewer than 200 to visit.
2012-09-24
Gnip, Twitter, and Archives
Social Data Startup Gnip Goes Deeper Into Twitter’s Past, Offers Full Archive Of Public Tweets
I can’t download my historic posts beyond the most recent 3,200, but Gnip can (presumably with Twitter’s full blessing) sell access to people wanting to use sentiment analysis for stock trading.Gnip is announcing a new product today that provides access to the full database of public tweets from the beginning of time — or rather, the beginning of Twitter.
…The new product, called Historical PowerTrack for Twitter, has been in testing with customers including Esri, Brandwatch, PayPal, Brandwatch, Waggener Edstrom, Network Insights, Union Metrics. Moody says this data opens up a number of new use cases. For one thing, financial firms are developing trading algorithms that incorporate Twitter data, and they can now test those algorithms on data from the past — in other words, if they think they can use social network activity to predict of stock market activity, they now have a giant database for seeing whether that’s true. Moody says there are also academic researchers looking at the impact of Twitter activity on the Arab Spring.
“We fundamentally believe that social data is going to be in every application. We’re only at 1 percent of the journey.”
(via TechCrunch)
2012-04-28
post/21974340562
CityDashboard: London (via), by the CASA research lab at University College London.
There’s a fuller list of contributors and sources on the about page, along with this disclaimer:
CityDashboard is an early prototype and should be considered to be “alpha quality” - expect data feeds to break regularly. Please do not rely on information display in CityDashboard, as it may be erroneous. For example, if the CASA Geiger counter is showing a high reading, please do not panic! Somebody in the office might just have placed some Brazil nuts or another calibration source in front of the detector.
2012-04-24
post/21700701494
Four of the many, many different map overlays at the London Profiler site. Sadly the data is a little out of date (it looks like it hasn’t been updated since around 2008; I first saw it in 2009), but it’s still fun to play with for a while.
(The images are captioned, but if you’re really curious about what’s displayed, I’d urge you to check out the maps in full.)
2012-03-27
2012-03-23
post/19798053537
How Many Photos Do Americans Take a Year? on Hyperallergic, referencing the April edition of National Geographic.
My response to that is, “so few”? I can take 255 photos on a (very) good day out, but then, I suppose not everyone has a camera, nor do they photograph everything.
Also filed under “so few?”:
Last year, 37% of the images in the US were captured using camera phones, but by 2015, National Geographic writes, that number is expected to be 50%.
