February 2010 Archives

The firm wired up their office with a bunch of sensors, tied them together using Arduino, and are publishing the real-time results of their data gathering on their homepage, providing a peek at various metrics about life at the firm. It would seem that by doing so, they are implying that the gathering and analysis of data is relevant to creativity. Not so, however. If you watch their "behind the scenes" video, they clearly state that gathering numbers doesn't lead to better ideas. I strongly disagree. While it isn't enough to just gather data and look at it in order to come up with better ideas, data gathering and visualization can certainly give people the insights needed to make better decisions as well as provide inspiration for great ideas.

Either way, the site totally works.

Users of the service can look at the data in a few ways: they can create maps showing the data across all counties, they can view all of the county-level data for any individual county, or they can create maps of counties sharing the same degree of multiple-indicators, potentially revealing hidden relationships between various data values. For example, the map 

shown is a plot of counties with high obesity rates and a relatively high occurrence of convenience stores with gas, which as you can see has almost no correlation.

I really love how transparent our current government is becoming and look forward to seeing how people integrate this data with other sets currently available.  Now, if they can just get a designer in there to make this thing more pretty, it would be even better.

Featured in the article are four of Clark's Twitter infographics--TwitterVenn, Twitter Spectrum, TwitterArcs and StreamGraph (shown below).

While the graphs are both beautiful and accurate, one of the major concerns is using java as this language is particularly slow.

Regardless, Clark is paving the way for how we use and view information, especially relating to business and social activity. Read more about his data visualizations and see more stunning examples from his website. 

As he describes it, the Noteput was designed to combine as many of the senses as possible -- touch, sight and sound in this case. As someone who has forgotten how to read music, I could certainly see playing with this for hours on end.

The content awards $20K in cash prizes to 13 winners announced tonight. I know a lot of the judges and I think they did a great job acknowledging some really good entries. Personally, I think Trees Near You and WayFinder are the best of the best. Core77 has some in-depth reporting on these and other winners.

She wore the dress as she accepted the (appropriate) award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. Not only does she have 1.3 million followers, she's embraced the digital age by inviting her fans and followers to provide feedback, remixes and lyrics ideas.