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The New York solar map just debuted at the fifth annual Solar Summit. Solvecimate News reports: “The map is an important part of this effort,” said Tria Case, who heads the New York City solar map project as director of sustainability for the university. “It’s a tool that building and homeowners, installers, city officials and Con Ed can use.” The map is exact. During night flights over New Yok in May 2010, a twin-engine plane equipped with lasers captured the architecture of the city. From these images, CUNY’s Center for Advanced Research of Spatial Information created a 3-D model of the city. “It’s as if we shrink-wrapped the entire city in paper lined with a one-meter grid and got the exact elevation and horizontal location of each square meter,” Sean Ahearn, the geographer who directs the center, told SolveClimate News. Ahearn said the site incorporates so many bytes of information that it took a supercomputer with 10 processors some 50 hours to generate the map interface. The website can calculate how much solar radiation hits every square meter of the city — every hour, every day for an entire year. For building owners it means they can size up of the solar energy potential of their rooftops within minutes.

Maps are great because our brains are good at making sense of pictures. So representing data in a visual form is a good way of understanding it. The question is how.

in reality things are more complicated. You'll probably have thousands of books and customers. Each book now comes, not with a pair of numbers, but with a huge long list containing the rating of each customer or perhaps a blank if a specific customer hasn't rated the book. Now you can't simply plot the data and spot the pattern. This is where topology comes to the rescue: it gives a neat way of turning shapes into networks. Suppose you've got a wobbly circle as in the figure below. You can cover it by overlapping regions and then draw a dot on a piece of paper for each region. You then connect dots corresponding to overlapping regions by an edge. The network doesn't retain the wobbliness of the shape, that information has been lost, but its topology, the fact that it's circular, is clearly visible. And the great thing is that it doesn't matter what kind of covering you use to make your network. As long as the regions are small enough — the resolution is high enough — the network will draw out the topology of the shape.

After data were collected, the children drew the map’s first draft on a big sheet of paper. It clearly labelled and colour-coded each detail, from houses to street lamps. Now, the map and survey – which identified 71 sources of water but not one clean enough for drinking – can also be used as a powerful advocacy tool.

Ms. Das says improvements have already been made. Pointing to a lamp post in her crowded alley, she observes, “Things are already better. We have more light here.” The children also use survey data to target households during polio immunization campaigns. In teams armed with handmade paper megaphones and signs, they regularly march about shouting: “Shunun, shunun (listen),” imploring neighbours to bring children for polio drops. They also take toddlers to polio booths themselves. The children also mobilize for malaria information drives, to check on children who drop out of school, or to teach proper hand washing techniques. They tackle tough topics, like child marriage and human trafficking, with puppets and street plays at each community festival.

The children used mobile phone technology developed by Matt Berg at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. With their phones, they enter demographic info like age, sex and health into a database and take pictures of things like water pumps and power sources. How exactly does this help? By providing concrete information for advocacy. The children’s survey turned up 71 water sources–but not one with water clean enough for drinking. They’ve already gotten some results too, like streetlights put in formerly dark alleys.

On the benefit side, people become more engaged when they can filter information that is presented visually and make discoveries on their own. On the risk side, Professor Shneiderman says, tools as powerful as visualizations have the potential to mislead or confuse consumers. And privacy implications arise, he says, as increasing amounts of personal, housing, medical and financial data become widely accessible, searchable and viewable.

In the 1990s, Professor Shneiderman developed tree mapping, which uses interlocking rectangles to represent complicated data sets. The rectangles are sized and colored to convey different kinds of information, like revenue or geographic region, says Jim Bartoo, the chief executive of the Hive Group, a software company that uses tree mapping to help companies and government agencies monitor operational data. When executives or plant managers see the nested rectangles grouped together, he adds, they should be able to immediately spot anomalies or trends. In one tree-map visualization of a sales department on the Hive Group site, red tiles represent underperforming sales representatives while green tiles represent people who exceeded their sales quotas. So it’s easy to identify the best sales rep in the company: the biggest green tile. But viewers can also reorganize the display — by region, say, or by sales manager — to see whether patterns exist that explain why some employees are falling behind. “It’s the ability of the human brain to pick out size and color” that makes tree mapping so intuitive, Mr. Bartoo says. Information visualization, he adds, “suddenly starts answering questions that you didn’t know you had.”

data visualization is no longer just a useful tool for researchers and corporations. It’s also an entertainment and marketing vehicle.

1. Data Visualisation Must be data driven - not just fancy looking text (think chart, map etc.) 2. Clean Colour Pallet Must compliment the website, colour must be significant - no MS Paint style colour pallets. 3. Clear Story Should tell a story with pictures - and contain more than one piece of information (good infographics weave different facts and data together). 4. Dimensions Don't make the infographic too big. It has to fit on the average viewers monitor. Max 1000px wide if vertical scrolling or 700px wide if horizontal scrolling (personally I hate horizontal scrolling - it ain't natural!) 5. Not Text Heavy Similar to point No.1 - it should be visual and data driven without too much text. 6. Simple Branding As infographics are used as advertisements the branding must be unobtrusive 7. Subject Matter The content of the infographic must be relevant to the website that hosts it! 8. "AHA!" The infographic should give an "Aha" moment - in other words it should provide a unique insight on the facts that are being presented.

Some have argued that piracy is rampant in those countries where the online Android Market is not yet available. But a recent KeyesLabs research project suggests that may not be true. KeyesLabs created a rough methodology to track total downloads of its apps, determine which ones were pirated, and the location of the end users. The results were posted in August, along with a “heat map” showing pirate activity. 

In July 2010, Google announced the Google Licensing Service, available via Android Market. Applications can include the new License Verification Library (LVL). “At run time, with the inclusion of a set of libraries provided by us, your application can query the Android Market licensing server to determine the license status of your users,” according to a blog post by Android engineer Eric Chu. “It returns information on whether your users are authorized to use the app based on stored sales records.”

Justin Case, at the Android Police Web site, dissected the LVL. “A minor patch to an application employing this official, Google-recommended protection system will render it completely worthless,” he concluded.

I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them.

I began by taking a sample of about ten million pairs of friends from Apache Hive, our data warehouse. I combined that data with each user's current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city. At that point, I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points. After a few minutes of rendering, a big white blob appeared in the center of the map. Some of the outer edges of the blob vaguely resembled the continents, but it was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines. I thought that making the lines semi-transparent would do the trick, but I quickly realized that my graphing environment couldn't handle enough shades of color for it to work the way I wanted.

Instead I found a way to simulate the effect I wanted. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line's color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world. View high-res (3.8MB)

View SlideshowDownload this gallery (ZIP, undefined KB)Download full size (214 KB) An infographic from FastCompany indicates the highest activity "scientific productivity" in 2003. The number of scientific papers published are the variable and the greater the size of the circle, the greater the number of papers published. The locations of top scientific activity are Boston, London, and New York. The radius of our circle is bigger than the island ourselves.

Another project that can help us visualise the impact of our nation's science is from WorldMapper. Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest. This method helps us to see the familiar island shape much larger and gives us the understanding of how "fat" we are in relation to the world.View SlideshowDownload this gallery (ZIP, undefined KB)Download full size (149 KB) W

one day he took one of these – finding a mathematical proof about the properties of multidimensional objects – and put his thoughts on his blog. How would other people go about solving this conundrum? Would somebody else have any useful insights? Would mathematicians, notoriously competitive, be prepared to collaborate? "It was an experiment," he admits. "I thought it would be interesting to try."He called it the Polymath Project and it rapidly took on a life of its own. Within days, readers, including high-ranking academics, had chipped in vital pieces of information or new ideas. In just a few weeks, the number of contributors had reached more than 40 and a result was on the horizon. Since then, the joint effort has led to several papers published in journals under the collective pseudonym DHJ Polymath. It was an astonishing and unexpected result.

"If you set out to solve a problem, there's no guarantee you will succeed," says Gowers. "But different people have different aptitudes and they know different tricks… it turned out their combined efforts can be much quicker."

There are many interpretations of what open science means, with different motivations across different disciplines. Some are driven by the backlash against corporate-funded science, with its profit-driven research agenda. Others are internet radicals who take the "information wants to be free" slogan literally. Others want to make important discoveries more likely to happen. But for all their differences, the ambition remains roughly the same: to try and revolutionise the way research is performed by unlocking it and making it more public.

better management of flood risks in Australia will depend up better data on flood risk.  However, collecting such data has proven problematic

As many Queenslanders affected by January’s floods are realising, riverine flood damage is commonly excluded from household insurance policies. And this is unlikely to change until councils – especially in Queensland – stop dragging their feet and actively assist in developing comprehensive data insurance companies can use.

? Because there is often little available information that would allow an insurer to adequately price this flood risk. Without this, there is little economic incentive for insurers to accept this risk. It would be irresponsible for insurers to cover riverine flood without quantifying and pricing the risk accordingly.

The discovery that Android devices - which are quickly becoming the best-selling products in the smartphone space - also collect location data indicates how essential such information has become to their effective operation. "Location services", which can help place a user on a map, are increasingly seen as important for providing enhanced services including advertising - which forms the basis of Google's business.

Smartphones running Google's Android software collect data about the user's movements in almost exactly the same way as the iPhone, according to an examination of files they contain. The discovery, made by a Swedish researcher, comes as the Democratic senator Al Franken has written to Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs demanding to know why iPhones keep a secret file recording the location of their users as they move around, as the Guardian revealed this week.

Magnus Eriksson, a Swedish programmer, has shown that Android phones – now the bestselling smartphones – do the same, though for a shorter period. According to files discovered by Android devices keep a record of the locations and unique IDs of the last 50 mobile masts that it has communicated with, and the last 200 Wi-Fi networks that it has "seen". These are overwritten, oldest first, when the relevant list is full. It is not yet known whether the lists are sent to Google. That differs from Apple, where the data is stored for up to a year.

Kurzweil is still claiming that we can infer something about how much complexity is in the brain from the genome. He writes: The amount of information in the genome (after lossless compression, which is feasible because of the massive redundancy in the genome) is about 50 million bytes (down from 800 million bytes in the uncompressed genome). It is true that the information in the genome goes through a complex route to create a brain, but the information in the genome constrains the amount of information in the brain prior to the brain’s interaction with its environment.

Statistical Literacy Why take this course? We are misled by numbers and by our misunderstanding of probability.

Our world is shaped by widespread statistical illiteracy. We fear things that probably won’t kill us (terrorist attacks) and ignore things that probably will (texting while driving). We buy lottery tickets. We fall prey to misleading gut instincts, which lead to biases like loss aversion—an inability to gauge risk against potential gain. The effects play out in the grocery store, the office, and the voting booth (not to mention the bedroom: People who are more risk-averse are less successful in love).

We are now 53 percent more likely than our parents to trust polls of dubious merit. (That figure is totally made up. See?) Where do all these numbers that we remember so easily and cite so readily come from? How are they calculated, and by whom? How do we misuse them to make them say what we want them to? We’ll explore all of these questions in a sequence on sourcing statistics.

This year will fundamentally change how we think about and buy access to prospects, namely keywords. It is the dawn of paid search without keywords.

Google's search results were dominated by the "10 blue links" -- simple headlines, descriptions, and URLs to entice and satisfy searchers. Until it wasn't. Universal search wove in images, video, and real-time updates.

For most of its history, too, AdWords been presented in a text format even as the search results morphed into a multimedia experience. The result is that attention was pulled towards organic results at the expense of ads.

There are more universities operating in other countries, recruiting students from overseas, setting up partnerships, providing online degrees and teaching in other languages than ever before. Capturing the moment: South Korea has turned itself into a global player in higher education Chinese students are taking degrees taught in English in Finnish universities; the Sorbonne is awarding French degrees in Abu Dhabi; US universities are opening in China and South Korean universities are switching teaching to English so they can compete with everyone else. It's like one of those board games where all the players are trying to move on to everyone else's squares. It's not simply a case of western universities looking for new markets. Many countries in the Middle East and Asia are deliberately seeking overseas universities, as a way of fast-forwarding a research base.

"There's a world view that universities, and the most talented people in universities, will operate beyond sovereignty. "Much like in the renaissance in Europe, when the talent class and the creative class travelled among the great idea capitals, so in the 21st century, the people who carry the ideas that will shape the future will travel among the capitals.

"But instead of old European names it will be names like Shanghai and Abu Dhabi and London and New York. Those universities will be populated by those high-talent people." New York University, one of the biggest private universities in the US, has campuses in New York and Abu Dhabi, with plans for another in Shanghai. It also has a further 16 academic centres around the world. Mr Sexton sets out a different kind of map of the world, in which universities, with bases in several cities, become the hubs for the economies of the future, "magnetising talent" and providing the ideas and energy to drive economic innovation.

People who don't believe their pain medicine will work can actually reduce or even cancel out the effectiveness of the drug, and images of their brains show how they are doing it, scientists said

Researchers from Britain and Germany used brain scans to map how a person's feelings and past experiences can influence the effectiveness of medicines, and found that a powerful painkilling drug with a true biological effect can appear not to be working if a patient has been primed to expect it to fail.

By contrast, positive expectations about the treatment doubled the natural physiological or biochemical effect of an opioid drug among 22 healthy volunteers in the study.