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.
James Taylor, author of Smart (Enough) Systems and an expert on the analytics frontier of business decision management, shares a brief story on the growing role that deep data and business optimization can play in something as familiar and urban as package delivery services. You can follow him on Twitter @jamet123
Analytics Minutes is a new video series that is part of the IBM New Intelligence Video Studio. You can find more analytics-oriented content and clips there, as well on the New Intelligence channel of posts on Smater Planet | Tumblr.
New technology that makes it possible to assess the three-dimensional interactions among different parts of the genome has revealed how these molecules are packed into such a tiny space. The findings could also yield new clues to genome regulation—how specific genes are turned on and off.
