Just Bad

Now and again I stumble on things which are just so bad they kind of illustrate a point: proof of the uselessness of 3D: just try to a) navigate and b) read anything. Compelling, it isn't.

Zoomify

Zoomify could be fun to play with, or this tool from Derek is even slicker...

WebOSes

Interesting, in an 'art of the possible' way, is the WebOS idea, covered elsewhere but reviewed well here. Playing with YouOS has certainly been fun. I guess Microsoft's best answer for revenues may not be Live, but Remote Desktop, which is just great to use. Google obviously may find it more attractive, though arguably their recent strategy of consolidation of services (docs, spreadsheets, gmail, all in one place), plus an open API for gadgets for Google Desktop and one's home page, might mean the OS metaphor just becomes irrelevant, given the prediction that the boundaries of what a developer can do in that environment will keep receding....

Grokker

It has been around a while, but I thought I'd mention Grokker, being kind of interesting & having some visualization aspects too.

Design for a change

About time I put up a few links on design!

So here's a podcast by design guru Alan Cooper & an accessible book on designing interfaces.

Complexification & Processing

Complexification has some fascinating combination of some maths and some visualization using the increasingly popular java based processing library.

Using processing one can package the drawings in a java applet, or there are ways to keep java at the back end while using Flash at the browser end. Interesting.

We Feel Fine

More exploration of blog content in real time: We Feel Fine.

Travel-time maps

Compelling travel time maps (with peculiar focus on Cambridge!)

Swivel

This past month, the swivel phenomenon seems to be growing. The idea: people upload their spreadsheets, graph the data, and share it in a Web 2.0 kinda way.

See for example violent crime versus wine consumption.

Interesting things: no XML in sight - swivel imports .CSV files. Users search by the column headers (no semantics, etc.) See the caveats page for guidelines on importing.

See the video on this page for a more complex variant on the same theme.

If our data format was as simple could we do the same with ELP?

Amazon Browsers for Derek

A couple of entity/link amazon browsers:

http://www.pmbrowser.info/amazon.html
http://www.flowser.com/jp/flowserST.html

The second one is better 'cos it has pretty pictures. Plus I always think Japanese looks good when on ELP diagrams :-)

Practical Tip

Visualize your hard-drive usage.

Cabs in San Francisco

Amazing real time map display of cab journeys in San Francisco.

Visualization of Uncertain Information

I found a seminar series on visualizing uncertain information: http://www7.nationalacademies.org/bms/visualization_title_page.html

The slides by David Harris were slanted at large quantities of unstructured data, although no solution seems in sight.

intelligence analysis background

This document http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/humancapital.pdf includes comments on the generation gap, courses on critical thinking, etc. It also suggests on page 12 that there will be quality standards for analytic products.

I think I've traced the course to http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2006hls/noftsinger.pdf.

These slides mention a web based tool (http://www.ai.sri.com/~seas/index.html) which is

... developed for intelligence analysts that records analytic reasoning and methods, supports collaborative analysis across contemporary and historical situations and analysts...

Some fun: what the world might look like in 2020 from a US intelligence persepective: http://www.foia.cia.gov/2020/2020.pdf

Musicovery

No idea what the chart means but it is easy on the eye and comes with a soundtrack...
http://www.musicovery.com/

Friday afternoon links

Simple but very effective data exploration
http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/zipdecode/

Getting dumped
http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/thedumpster/interface.html

Flags with messages
http://www.brazilianartists.net/home/flags/

Some old links

3D Visualization that actually works
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

Describing a set of tools, uses and roles:
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=58299511&context=photostream&size=l

Search Flickr images by drawing
http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/

Optical Illusion
http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkershadow_illusion.html

Sculptures
http://www.bathsheba.com/sculpt/

A mind-boggling timeline
http://www.futureswatch.org/Timeline.htm

Historical timeline
http://www.adept-plm.com/Newsletter/napoleon.gif

About Me

For the last nine years I've worked for i2. During that time I've seen the company grow from around 30 people to about 200 or so. Initially I worked as software developer and architect on their flagship product - the i2 Analyst's Notebook. Now I'm an architect/technology specialist across the all the company's products, but I also have a research and development role.

In my previous life I was a researcher in cosmology, collaborating with John Stewart and Dave Salopek in the General Relativity group in the Department of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University. My main paper was "Solving the Hamilton-Jacobi equation for general relativity". I collaborated on a fair number of other papers too (1, 2, 3).

I then re-trained in computing, doing a masters at Imperial College. There I worked with Abbas Edalat on fractals: "An Algorithm to Estimate the Hausdorff Dimension of Self-Affine Sets".

My first proper job was at Metron Technology, where I collaborated with Professor Peter Harrison at Imperial on performance models for ethernet networks. We wrote a couple of papers together: "Response Times in Client-Server Systems", "The Ethernet and its Modelling", and one I did myself: "Two Models of Ethernet Networks".

Click here for my full CV (pdf).

Joe Parry