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- Visual numeracy for collective survivalNovember 18
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In response to an item last week about regional sources of imported oil, @jesperfj wrote:
Not sure what to conclude? Do informed people like Udell really not know that?
I really didn’t. And the reaction to the item, plus my survey of friends and associates, tells me that while some informed people did, many did not.
From this, I know exactly what to conclude. Like all complex systems, our civilization is buggy. We need many eyes to make the bugs shallow, and there all kinds of things that the brains behind those eyes can’t know a priori. But with the right kinds of mental prosthetics, we can learn rapidly and bootstrap ourselves into a position to reason effectively.
Data visualization is a crucially important mental prosthetic. But we’ve yet to evolve it much beyond the graphical equivalent of the wooden leg.
Consider this chart:
It’s a somewhat useful way to visualize the fact — counter-intuitive for many — that the Middle East ranks only third among suppliers of oil to the U.S. But here is a
- Twine, del.icio.us, and event-driven service integrationNovember 17
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Last week on Interviews with Innovators I spoke with Nova Spivack about Twine, a service that’s been variously described as the first mainstream semantic web application and “just del.icio.us 2.0″. You’ll find support for both points of view in my conversation with Nova. It’s true that, unlike del.icio.us and other comparable services, Twine is built squarely on top of what Nova calls a “semantic web stack.” But it’s hard to discern, in Twine’s current incarnation, just what that entails.
One of the bookmarks I imported into Twine, for example, is http://www.educause.edu/HEBCA/623. It’s the home page for an organization called the Higher Education Bridge Certification Authority (HEBCA). In Twine, the item shows up tagged as an Organization. That’s the kind of thing that you’d expect a semantically-aware service to do. But what does it mean for Twine to classify HEBCA as an Organization? It’s unclear. Here’s the offered link. It points to a small collection of items that mention HEBCA, but Twine does not “know” anything at all about HEBCA.
What our conversation revealed, though, is that my method of testing Twine
- Where the oil comes from: Not from where I thoughtNovember 9
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At a party the other night, a friend mentioned that the country supplying us with the most oil is Canada. Maybe so, I said, but on a regional basis the Middle East dominates, right? He wasn’t sure, but didn’t think so. And it turns out he was right, at least according to the US Dept. of Energy data he sent me. That data says that the Middle East ranks third among our regional sources, behind North America and Africa.
Here’s the world overview for 2007 in thousands of barrels:
And here’s the regional breakdown:
North America 1,648,765 33.56% Africa 980,231 19.95% Middle East 837,841 17.05% South America 784,999 15.98% - Hello WorldNovember 7
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In July 1995 I wrote a column in BYTE with the same title as this blog post. It began:
One day this spring, an HTTP request popped out the back of my old Swan 386/25, rattled through our LAN, jumped across an X.25 link to BIX, negotiated its way through three major carriers and a dozen hosts, and made a final hop over a PPP link to its rendezvous with BYTE’s newborn Web server, an Alpha AXP 150 located just 2 feet from the Swan.
Thus began the project on which this column will report monthly. Its mission: To engage BYTE in direct electronic communication with the world, retool our content for digital deployment, and showcase emerging products, technologies, and ideas vital to these tasks. We don’t have all the answers yet — far from it. But we’re starting to learn how a company can provide and use Internet services in a safe, effective, maintainable, and profitable way.
Today I felt that same kind of excitement when I clicked on this URL:
There isn’t much to see. But what happens behind the scenes is quite interesting to me. The URL hits a deployment in the Azure cloud where I’m hosting an IronPython runtime. Then it invokes that runtime on a file that contains this little Python program:
hello = "Hello world"Finally, it gets back an object r
- When the lights go on at the New York Times, our work can startNovember 6
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On election night, the most useful information display I found was the New York Times’ interactive election map. It’s another bravura performance from a team of talented designers and programmers who keep raising the bar. Back in May, two of them — Gabriel Dance and Shan Carter — joined me for a conversation about how they do this work, and why it matters.
Last week, the venture capitalist Tim Oren wrote an essay entitled The Newspaper Crash of 2009… And How You Can Help in which he argues:
The industry has abdicated its social function to support a well-informed electorate, and become a propaganda arm of the left. In so doing, they have sullied their brands and lost the trust of their readers. The economic consequences of this default of their value proposition are now becoming apparent. The Internet and an economic crisis together would be bad enough, but the industry has only itself to blame for the egregious behavior on d