…We’re talking about an actual (well, artificial) cloud that promises to be both a real structure and a massive digital display. That’s the bright idea of a team of researchers from MIT, anyway, and it’s now been shortlisted in a competition designed to find a new tourist attraction to be built in London for the 2012 Olympics. Dubbed simply “The Cloud,” the structure would consist of two 400-foot tall mesh towers that are linked by a series of interconnected plastic bubbles, which would themselves house an observation deck inside and be used to display everything from Olympic scores and highlights to a “barometer of the city’s interests and moods” outside (that latter bit comes courtesy of the group’s partnership with Google).
online searches for fertility rates in Europe or the gross domestic product of Somalia now trigger results pages topped with links to World Bank data presented in interactive charts for easy comparisons.
trillions of networked computers representing all scales of information and objects will make up the edgeless ecology of information that we’ll be floating in.
We all know nytimes.com is an innovative newsroom. A good example of that is this Twitter map of the Superbowl. The location of the tweets during the match showed very interesting. And now, these kind of solutions with Twitter can be found on Trendmaps, a trendtopics visualizator for this microblogging service.
“Specialists from scientists to accountants have been dealing with data for decades,” said Martin Wattenberg, a researcher at IBM’s Center for Social Software. “What’s new is that there’s a whole lot more data of relevance to consumers. “At the same time, people are generating a whole lot of data themselves.” There are several reasons why we’re seeing more data visualization in popular culture and why it’s becoming simpler and more innovative, experts say. Computers and software have gotten cheaper during the past few decades, and the technology needed to build applications is now in the hands of more people. Meanwhile, more data are becoming digital, making it easier to parse and catalog. “You have stuff available on government sites that would have only been available on paper a decade ago,” Wattenberg said. Finally, through the advent of social media applications like Facebook and Twitter, coupled with the rise of increasingly sophisticated mobile phones, a cultural shift is seemingly under way. “People are sort of happily defining their own social networks for other people to see, and that has led people to become interested in exploring data in ways they weren’t interested before,” Wattenberg said.
Scientists have placed high-tech “spiders” inside and around the mouth of Mount St. Helens, one of the most active volcanoes in the United States. Networks such as these could one day be used to respond rapidly to an impending eruption.
Can the analytic science that powers operations at Wal-Mart and Federal Express make inroads against terrorists? IBM (IBM) is going to give it a shot. Big Blue’s Global Services Div. just landed a five-year, $20 million contract to apply its analytical know-how to the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), the key military force in the battle against terrorism.
The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.
