Swine Flu Tracker

Rhiza Labs has launched Flu Tracker to enable people to clearly track the progress of H1N1 Swine Flu. On the site you can see news stories about the flu and maps based on the data of Henry L Niman. The maps show the number of Suspected, Confirmed and Fatal Cases by country:

They also show the data by state with the ability to drilldown to a city, like this map of the Seattle area shows:

You can interact with this map or add other data on their site. The data is available for download as RSS, KML, and other formats.

These maps are just snapshots of the current state. You'll have to watch them over the next couple of days to get your own feel for how fast the Swine Flu is spreading.

Four short links: 4 May 2009

Maps, Africa, Protein, and Rockets

1. Old Japanese Maps on Google Earth Unveil Secrets -- Google criticised for putting up map layers showing the towns where a discriminated-against class came from, because that class is still discriminated against and Google didn't put any "cultural context" around it. Google and their maps didn't make the underclass, Japanese society did. Because they're sensitive about having the problem, they redirect their embarrassment into anger at Google. You could make a long and profitable career in IT consulting simply by charging to say "it's not a technical problem" and you'd be right more times than wrong.
2. See Africa Differently -- using the Internet to reframe a continent. Videos, essays, and more, all designed to get you seeing the majority of Africa, which isn't defined by conflict and famine. (via NY Times book review)
3. Fold.it - Solve Puzzles for Science -- science harnesses our "cognitive surplus" by inviting us to help solve the problem of protein folding, one of the hardest in biology. (via auckland_museum on Twitter)
4. Arduino Telemetry Payload in Class C Rocket (Jon Oxer) -- Because class-C rockets are so small and light they can't lift much of a payload and I had to keep the mass of the electronics as small as possible. You can get a sense of scale from this photo which shows a small white bundle in the bottom of the nosecone. Inside that bundle is an Arduino Pro Mini 5V/16Mhz, a 433Mhz transmitter module, and a Lilypad 3-axis accelerometer. PCBs ... in ... Spaaaaace!

Big Data: SSD's, R, and Linked Data Streams

The Solid State Storage Revolution: If you haven't seen it, I recommend you watch Andy Bechtolsheim's keynote at the recent Mysqlconf. We covered SSD's in our just published report on Big Data management technologies. Since then, we've gotten additional signals from our network of alpha geeks and our interest in them remains high.

R and Linked Data Streams: I had a chance to visit with Dataspora founder and blogger Mike Driscoll, an enthusiastic advocate for the use of the open source statistical computing language, R. After founding and leading online retailer CustomInk.com, Mike went back to grad school and earned a doctorate in Bioinformatics. He has applied data analysis and programming in a variety of domains including retail, biotech, academia, and government projects.

Having been an avid user of S/S-Plus in the 1990's, I seamlessly switched over to R in the early 2000's. To this day, I consider the S/S-Plus user manuals to be the best reference and introductory books on the R programming language. (Mike wholeheartedly agrees.) R has been popular in the statistics community for many years, but I've been noticing that its visualization and analytic capabilities are attracting interest from developers. Moreover, recent efforts by the R community to improve its ability to scale large data sets (see brief update from Jay Emerson), will strengthen R's place in the Big Data stack.

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Four short links: 1 May 2009

Smart Grids, Open Source, Stuff That Matters, and Global Culture

1. A Little Give and Take On Electricity (NY Times) -- Dennis L. Arfmann, a lawyer at the Boulder office of Hogan & Hartson who specializes in environmental law, said he had no idea how much electricity he and his wife, Dr. Julie Brown, had used before he filled his roof with solar panels producing 4.5 kilowatts of power. During the day he sells power to Xcel and at night he buys it back; his goal is to cut his use so his net sales rise. All hardware networked, everywhere!
2. Open Source World Map (Red Hat) -- very nice map showing the intensity of open source use in countries around the world. (via Flowing Data)
3. Imagine Cup -- Microsoft's contest to get students working on stuff that matters. The winners of the New Zealand leg, Team Think, tackled literacy: they devised a program for tablets that provides both handwriting recognition and audio output, eliminating the need for basic literacy to understand lessons or instructions. They hope to take this prototype to developing countries that have underutilised computers due to literacy issues. (via Idealog newsletter and Scoop)
4. UGT -- It is always morning when person comes into a channel, and it is always late night when person leaves. [...] The idea behind establishing this convention was to eliminate noise generated almost every time someone comes in and greets using some form of day-time based greeting, and then channel members on the other side of the globe start pointing out that it's different time of the day for them. Now, instead of spending time figuring out what time of day is it for every member of the channel, we spend time explaining newcomers benefits of UGT. (via migurski on delicious).

The iTunes App Store and One-hit Wonders

Thousands of sellers created the 40,000 apps that have appeared in the U.S. iTunes app store. Measured in terms of apps per seller, developer and vendor engagement has gotten stronger over time:

The above average (mean) is somewhat misleading: 52% of sellers have produced just one app, and 80% have released 3 or fewer. Certain types of apps (e.g. electronic books) are easier to create, thus inflating the overall average app per seller. The disparity in complexity across categories is captured in the chart below. Aside from Books, Travel and Education apps also tend to be easy to develop and launch. (Note: Some apps are listed in more than one category.) The number of apps per seller also depends on whether one is interested in Paid or Free apps.

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Jack Dangermond Interview 3 of 3: The Geoweb

Jack Dangermond is the founder and CEO of ESRI. ESRI's software is used by every level of government around the world. You can see ESRI's influence in online mapping tools from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and FortiusOne. I had the opportunity to interview him over the phone on April 20, 2009. In this portion of the interview we discuss the history of GIS and online mapping.

Jack will be speaking at Where 2.0 on May 20th in San Jose. You can use whr09rdr for 20% off at registration.

Brady Forrest: What do you think will be coming in the next couple of years that will make the geoweb a reality?

Jack Dangermond: I think the geoweb is a reality. It's just a matter of how you define it I guess. There's just millions of pieces of content now available on the web for either FTP download and use in GIS or other analytic tools or as services that people are accessing by way of open systems. So I'd say maybe more analytic services that are available on the web or developers who take the foundations of technology as they exist today and build applications to them. But there's got to be motivation. There has to be a commercial incentive for people like young developers to build applications on the web with web services. And maybe there has to be a marketplace created. I'm speculating here. I don't have a clear answer for you on that.

Brady Forrest: You guys did have a marketplace for a little while, did you not?

Jack Dangermond: We do. We started with something called ArcWeb which was a little bit successful. It focused primarily on content and then developed an environment for people to build apps out of. But considering the cost of that compared to the kind of income that was coming in from it, it was not sustainable. Google and Microsoft's websites in some way displaced that because much of the content that was there was free and it was much bigger. From what I've been told, somewhere between $75 and $100 million a year is spent on that content basemap to maintain it and serve it. That's not sustainable if we're talking about small developers. So we sort of shut ArcWeb down effectively. I mean we still have a few users that are using it, but it's not something that sustains itself. If you have search and advertising revenue coming in, then you can afford to -- as Google and Microsoft do, you can then afford to subsidize a lot of that content. But you can't do it as an independent. So our second stage is --

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Where Week 2009

Where Week, five days when geohackers across the world descend on Silicon Valley, is coming up. WhereCamp, the unconference put on by Where 2.0 attendees has been scheduled. This year it will happen at SocialText in Palo Alto on Friday May 22nd and Saturday May 23rd 2009. There will be unconference sessions during the day and a hackfest in the evening. Here's how the organizers describe it:

WhereCamp2009 is the unconference for hackers, mappers, thinkers, artists and anybody who wants to know their place. Hot on the heels of Where 2.0 we bring together up to 300 enthusiasts for two days of in depth discussion and hacking. Last year we did this at Google - thanks Google! And the year before at Yahoo - thanks Yahoo! This year we're doing it at SocialText in Palo Alto on Friday May 22nd and Saturday May 23rd 2009.

We are self-organized in true bar-camp style. Bring your projects, work and ideas to get feedback from a group of the worlds most passionate social cartographers. Topics are whatever you want them to be. Over the last two years we've seen presentations ranging from emergency crisis response such as the work Ushahidi is doing, to local food such as Serve Your Country Food to psycho-geography to visualization, to mobile mapping to re-factoring urban landscapes.

The expectation is simply that you participate. It's your event and we'll all get out of it what you put into it.

It's free to attend, but you can reserve a spot early (and help fund Wherecamp) by buying a ticket. I'll be there with a purchased pass in hand.

The three days right before Where Camp is Where 2.0. The two events work really well together. There's always a buzz happening after the conference and WhereCamp provides us the opportunity to dissect the news and tech. Radar readers can get a 20% discount if they register with whr09rdr.

Ignite @ Google I/O; Submit Your Talk

Ignite is coming to Google I/O later this month. On May 27th, the first afternoon of the conference, I'll be hosting an Ignite at the Moscone Center. As with all Ignites each speaker will only get 20 slides that each auto-advance every 15 seconds for a total of five minutes. We'll be looking for talks that geeks will like. Think of hacks, how-to's, and insights. If you're not sure what an Ignite talk looks like check out the Ignite Show. You have until May 11th to submit your talk.

I/O is Google's developer conference. If you rely on Google's APIs this is something to attend. They'll be running sessions on Android, App Engine, Chrome, Open Social and many of their other projects.

Four short links: 30 Apr 2009

Youth, Government, Tween Arduino Hackers, and Table Slurpage

1. Ypulse Conference -- conference on marketing to youth with technology, from the very savvy Anastasia Goodstein who runs the interesting Ypulse blog on youth culture that I've raved about before. Register with the code RADAR for a 10% discount (thanks, Anastasia!).
2. Government in the Global Village -- departing post by the NZ CIO (and Kiwi Foo Camper) Laurence Millar. The principles here are applicable to almost every nation. We need to recognise the network effects of opening up government data in a form that means others can access it. Economic value is created by businesses building innovative new services using government data. Public value is created by enabling a richer and deeper understanding and dialogue among interested individuals about what the data tells us about our lives.[...] The legal, policy, and moral position is clear - New Zealanders own the data, having paid for its collection through taxes. These “problems” will all be solved by the community, and our role as government is to give priority to this. These efforts are stuff that matters. See also Google adds search to public data.
3. Children's Arduino Workshop (Makezine) -- video of three eleven-year old girls working on an Arduino project, and should be inspiration to anyone who has ever wanted to work on hardware projects with kids. Whoever did it succeeded in making it fun! (via followr on Twitter)
4. With YQL Execute, The Internet Becomes Your Database -- YQL is a query language for Yahoo! data sources, and now they've added a server-side Javascript way to import your own web page's tables into YQL. YQL and Pipes are turning into very interesting pieces of infrastructure (e.g., Museum Pipes blog). (via Simon Willison and straup on delicious)

Wordle visualization of my Tweetstream

Mike Hendrickson (@mikehatora) sent me a nice Wordle visualization of my tweet stream, dating back as far as Twitter keeps it. As you can see, I retweet a lot. It's also interesting that many of the repeated words are not concepts or topics, but people's names (in the form of twitter handles.) This is one of the interesting things about twitter: it's a reflection of a community of shared minds, rather than of shared ideas.

(Tweets were retrieved using this python script.)

Jack Dangermond Interview 2 of 3: Sharing Government GIS Data

Jack Dangermond is the founder and CEO of ESRI. ESRI's software is used by every level of government around the world. You can see ESRI's influence in online mapping tools from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and FortiusOne. I had the opportunity to interview him over the phone on April 20, 2009. In this portion of the interview we discuss the history of GIS and online mapping.

Jack will be speaking at Where 2.0 on May 20th in San Jose. You can use whr09rdr for 20% off at registration.

Brady Forrest: Thank you. I want to look back in history a bit. Last summer you made an announcement at Where 2.0 with John Hankey that would enable ESRI customers to publish to the web more easily. I was wondering what type of uptake you'd seen in that.

Jack Dangermond: We've had a lot of people that are putting their datasets out in the form of KML and loading it up onto Google Earth. I would've guessed that more would've happened than actually happened, but technologically now there's no limit to doing it. And I don't know why it hasn't been as popular as we would've wanted. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Brady Forrest: Fear of making data more available, either from a keeping my job standpoint or for a fear about terrorism. And just poor awareness of doing it. Why they would do it. What would be the positive benefits for them? As Ian White has pointed out before, people are paid to maintain that data. And if it doesn't go through them personally and it's just off the web, they're not as important as they were before or they don't perceive themselves to be as important.

Jack Dangermond: I actually haven't seen any of that. From the very earliest days, GIS was all about sharing data. And so USGS shared their topographic basemaps. And they became the basis for state and local government GIS's. And the ability to share planning data within engineering departments within agencies certainly wasn't restricted. In the early days, we're talking about 1995, '96, '97, we came out with a product called ArcIMS which was one of the first commercial versions of web mapping. And we sold over 50,000 copies of that server. So people were serving up parcel data, serving up land use maps, serving up demographic maps all over the web. And that's a pretty remarkable result of that. So contrary to that notion that GIS people don't share their data -- in fact, I'm absolutely certain that that's not the case.

Okay. There are a couple of agencies here and there that have been restrictive about sharing their property data. And the reason why they've done that is for commercial reasons and almost Machiavellian reasons like they get revenue for selling their property data and, therefore, they don’t want to make it available openly.

And there's even been some court cases on that in California. And that's sort of slowly working its way out. Today, I think there's only two counties left in the state of California, and it's probably been replicated across the country where people don't openly share their data on any kind of request. The three big reasons --

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Four short links: 29 Apr 2009

4chan, urban redesign, 3D printing, and search in Python

1. Moot Wins, Time Inc. Loses -- summary of how the 4chan group Anonymous rigged the voting in Time's 100 Most Influential poll to not just put their man at the top, but also spell an in-joke with the initial letters of the first 21 people. Time tried weakly to prevent the vote-rigging, and ReCAPTCHA gave the Internet scalliwags their biggest setback, but check out how they automated as much as possible so that human effort was targeted most effectively. It's the same mindset that build Google's project management, ops, and dev systems. Notice how they tried to game ReCAPTCHA, a collective intelligence app whose users train the system to read OCRed words, by essentially outvoting genuine users so that every word was read as "penis". Collective intelligence should never be the only security/discovery/etc. feature because such apps are often vulnerable to coordinated action.
2. The old mint in downtown SF painted by 7 perfectly mapped HD projectors -- looks absolutely spectacular. I love the combination of permanent and fleeting, architecture and infotexture. (via BoingBoing)
3. 3-D Printing Hits Rock-bottom Prices With Homemade Ceramics Mix (Science Daily) -- University of Washington researchers invent, and give away, a new 3D printer supply mix that costs under a dollar a pound (versus current commercial mixes of $30-50/pound).
4. Haystack and Whoosh Notes (Richard Crowley) -- notes on installing the search framework Haystack and the search back-end Whoosh, both pure Python. It's a quick get-up-and-go so you can add quite sophisticated search to your Django apps. (via Simon Willison)

Recent Posts

• Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web | by Tim O'Reilly on April 29, 2009
• Jack Dangermond Interview 1 of 3: Web Mapping | by Brady Forrest on April 29, 2009
• Forge.mil Update and DISA Hacks Public Domain | by Jim Stogdill on April 28, 2009
• Ignite Seattle (and elsewhere) Tomorrow, 4/29 | by Brady Forrest on April 28, 2009
• Four short links: 28 Apr 2009 | by Nat Torkington on April 28, 2009
• How Big Data Impacts Analytics | by Ben Lorica on April 28, 2009
• Trying to Track Swine Flu Across Cities in Realtime | by John Geraci on April 27, 2009
• Your brain really is forgetting... a LOT | by Brett McLaughlin on April 27, 2009
• Four short links: 27 Apr 2009 | by Nat Torkington on April 27, 2009
• Four short links: 24 Apr 2009 | by Nat Torkington on April 24, 2009
• Locavore's Open Data | by Brady Forrest on April 23, 2009
• Four short links: 23 Apr 2009 | by Nat Torkington on April 23, 2009