Powerful data visualizations are like masterful paintings– through art and insight, they intimate broad ideas and usher in understanding.
I, however, am neither a master painter nor an expert data visualizer. Neither are many of my contemporaries in the “technically skilled and socially aware” demographic. Still, I believe that even mediocre pieces of art or analysis [...]
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I bet you can learn a lot about a company by taking a look and how, when, and how much they pay their employees. Naturally, to get the most out of this theoretical analysis, the data should be correlated with publicly accessible or easily determinable individual information like employee positions, job title progressions, and larger [...]
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People remember images more easily than they can remember complex strings of words. Furthermore, images can automatically evoke complex sets of associated thoughts and emotions. We should leverage the associative power of images to help sort through thick information sets.
I’m talking about web-searching with an unconventional “semantic” twist.
The tools to make this work are all [...]
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Posted in Computing, Devices, Quantification, tagged analysis, audio, class, course, easy, Education, learning, notes, recording, summarization on April 5, 2008 | No Comments »
How about an application that made reviewing what you learned in class easy?
People already record lectures for later review, but listening to a whole course worth of class might take way too long. Students need a way to summarize these audio recordings so that they can better focus their studies.
One technique would be to use [...]
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Posted in Business, Computing, Quantification, tagged autos, cars, driving, estimation, Geography, mapping, Maps, mashup, meteorology, Quantification, weather on March 28, 2008 | No Comments »
The weather affects how long it takes to travel from one place to the next, but I’m not aware of any mapping application that incorporates this fact. From what I can tell from a brief overview, the standard mapping applications seem to rely on relatively static estimations of expected speed limits and traffic for a [...]
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Posted in Art, Computing, Musing, Quantification, tagged Art, Innovation, Visualization, failure, brainstorm, graphing, knots, thought, problem solving, ideas on March 27, 2008 | No Comments »
It would be pretty interesting to visualize brainstorming sessions or problem-solving attempts that don’t quite get the job done.
There’s something oddly tragic and beautiful about the notion of a brain rustling around an issue, prodding it from many angles, and occasionally rebounding with an ache and a “THWRANG” after a head-long charge. If these thoughts [...]
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They say that history is written by the victors. Furthermore, I’d like to add that in the business world, history ends up being written primarily about the victors. For every 10 new books about Google coming out, you’d be hard pressed to find a single memorial to Altavista. To me, this seems to be a [...]
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Posted in Computing, Quantification, Science-ish, tagged classes, college, courses, Math, models, reviews, school, statistics on March 23, 2008 | No Comments »
A fair portion of schools have taken the effort to mandate/encourage course evaluations, most often submitted by students at the end of a given term. I’m aware that these reviews are used to help professors brush up on the places where they didn’t do so well, and also to given administrators some means of weeding [...]
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Using feeds for web-aggregation is handy, but over time, my news feed aggregator tends to fill up with stuff that I barely ever read. Sure, I’ll skim the title for just about anything that shows up, but at some point even the skimming takes up a considerable chunk of time.
To reduce clutter right now, I [...]
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Posted in Business, Computing, Quantification, Society & Politics, tagged Business, citizen, democracy, law, legal, Money, parse, Semantic Web, transparency on March 14, 2008 | No Comments »
Combing through legal documents can be a pain. General business contracts, policy documents, laws, you name it, they’re a pain. Lawyers in the crowd, you should rightly feel good about your skill with these arcane tools of modern society.
I’d like to make a simple system for speed-anotating legal documents to highlight the key points for [...]
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I bumped into a neat little iTunes add-on by the name of “Moody.” It helps users tag their songs with color-coded emotional tags that operate on two axes: “Happy/Sad” and “Calm/Intense.” A nifty way to sort your music, but what else could we do with this sort of technology?
How about an application that keeps a [...]
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A lot of politicians like to claim the title of “maverick” — implying that they are someone who is willing to step outside the bounds of business-as-usual politics to accomplish things according to their own principles. Self-marketing and image manipulation aside, there ought to be a way to test such a claim. I [...]
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Linguists have long since worked out smart ways to describe accents, dialects, and characteristic vocabularies, why not use some of that aggregated knowledge to build a robust word-flow-editing system for non-experts? There’s really only one major goal of flow-editing, and that is to improve the clarity and impact of communication. The advantages that [...]
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Language can have “natural flow” to it. Linguistic flow is a tough-to-describe quality that makes speeches interesting, books fascinating, and lectures bearable.
Good linguistic flow highlights the important parts of a message, keeps readers/listeners awake and engaged, and generally improves communication. Bad linguistic flow makes ordinary thoughts tough to understand, puts people to sleep [...]
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Let’s use microfluidics and vesicles to characterize temperatures on a very very tiny scale!
Vesicle membrane fluctuations are highly temperature dependent. Specialized microscopy systems can visualize vesicles, and image processing techniques can quantify the visualizations. Microfluidics can be used to carefully control the proximity of microscopic objects and global background temperature characteristics.
So, after proper calibration, one [...]
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