visualize

Google Earth app shows effects of climate change

The Met Office Hadely Center, British Antarctic Survey, and the U.K. government on Monday introduced a Google Earth application that visualizes the anticipated temperatures changes from climate change over the next 100 years.

The animation uses a color scheme to show the differences in temperatures layed over a Google Earth image.

People can also click on icons on the image to get more on how the data was compiled, stories from people affected by climate change, and information on the projected regional impact of climate change.

The initiative was launched by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the Google … Read more

Maybe Microsoft isn't completely useless on the web, after all

I admit that Microsoft's software wouldn't be my first choice for building a web application, but a small consultancy decided to give it a whirl with its Meet with Approval application. As is often the case with Microsoft (to its credit and shame), its tools took care of the heavy lifting of writing code:

Visual Studio provides a number of prebuilt web controls that we were able to drag and drop onto our pages and allowed us to get a considerable way before having to write any code. A criticism of this approach is that such controls output bad HTML or restrict design however we did not find this. We were impressed by the way in which .NET produced relatively little code and we were able to apply all styling via CSS. Visual Studio 2008 offers a full WYSIWYG editor with CSS support that we found to be better than Dreamweaver although we did find rendering problems within the IDE when coding for cross browser CSS.

So, pluses and minuses. But what about the end result?

Pretty good, according to the developers and according to a quick review of the site. That said, plenty of critics have weighed in suggesting that the same results could be had more cheaply and in a more sustainable fashion using open-source tools.… Read more

Adventures in music analysis

Founded to two MIT Media Lab alums, The Echo Nest is focused on what it calls "music intelligence." The company is developing software technology that can analyze the sounds within music files, text within online articles and blog postings about music, and other online data (such as songs being downloaded in a particular week). It will then license this technology to developers--commercial and non-commercial--to help them create a whole new class of music software and Web applications.

It's possible to imagine hundreds of possibilities. A music company could build an application to identify current trends in order … Read more

Google offers snapshot of VisualRank efforts

Google is starting to provide a fuller picture of the work it's undertaking to create a practical tool for image searches.

On its Google Research blog Thursday, the company offered a brief introduction to VisualRank, a system that sorts out images by means of visual cues rather than by text associated with the images. The write-up is a distillation of a much longer paper (PDF), "PageRank for Product Image Search," that two Google researchers presented last week at a conference in Beijing on Web technologies.

The VisualRank system is not yet live, and Google intimated that the … Read more

Zoho adds VB macros, pivot tables to its Web spreadsheet

Zoho continues its quest to build the most comprehensive online productivity suite, adding support for macros and pivot tables in its spreadsheet, Zoho Sheet.

The new version includes support for Visual Basic (VB), the scripting language used for Microsoft Excel for macros, said Raju Vegesna, Zoho's chief evangelist. Zoho built its VB engine independent from any Microsoft code, he noted.

"This means your existing macros will now work in Zoho Sheet. This makes Zoho Sheet the first online spreadsheet to understand macros. Even OpenOffice doesn't understand VB macros," Vegesna said in a note about the new … Read more

Has Microsoft become too corporate for its own good?

I found this article on O'Reilly's (Microsoft-sponsored) Port 25 page fascinating. For all Microsoft's attempts to own the budding minds of students, it may well be that Microsoft has become too corporate, too sterile to be of interest to the creative mind:

Even back in my day, you could go to a "Windows lab" and work with Visual Studio or go to a "UNIX lab" and use vi and gcc. And you know what? All the fun was in the UNIX lab. And not just for me. There was just a difference in the attitudes and ethic across the two lab environments. People in the Windows lab were trying to get their project in before it was 11:59 PM, while people in the UNIX lab were goofing off, playing with code, and... trying to get their project in before it was 11:59 PM.

What is it about UNIX, vi, emacs, gcc, perl, and INSERT-HERE that makes it fun to play with, while Visual Studio just makes you want to... well, work?

In the enterprise, this alleged Microsoft attribute might be considered a Very Good Thing. But is it? Do enterprises really want automatons that punch in and code to spec? Or do they want innovation that changes the game?… Read more

Presidential election insight via data visualization

Dow Jones Insight is applying text analysis to thousands of documents to measure trends, such as favorability and issue coverage of the presidential candidates over time. In the first example below, Dow Jones Insight parsed 26,435 documents, including English language newspapers, magazine, transcripts from broadcasts and news wire services.

Dow Jones is pitching the service as a generalized tool for analyzing the impact of media coverage, and targeting corporations, as well as political candidates, who need competitive insight. Other services, such as Nielsen BuzzMetrics and BuzzLogic, provide similar kinds of media analysis based on parsing a variety of document … Read more

ManagedQ: A visual search experiment that actually works

I have puzzled over several tools that try to put a visual interface on Web search. Most are either too clever, too slow, or both. But a new experiment, ManagedQ, shows us that it's not the concept that's been at fault, it's the execution. This one actually makes sense.

ManagedQ displays Web search results in visual snapshots. The images are bigger and more readable than the thumbnails you get on a search engine like Exalead, and arrayed in front of you so you can process them all at once, unlike Redzee (see: Redzee is fancier, less useful than text). … Read more

Tom Brokaw kicks off Windows Server launch

LOS ANGELES--Microsoft brought out former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw on Wednesday to kick off the launch of Windows Server 2008.

In explaining his appearance at a server launch, Brokaw said he was trying to redeem himself after his recent Saturday Night Live appearance, in which he was interviewed by Will Farrell as Anchorman character Ron Burgundy.

"I'm not here to write new code, to design new apps," Brokaw told the crowd at the tony Nokia Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Instead, Brokaw spoke for several minutes on the radical transformation of society being brought about by … Read more