Alasdair Allan
Alasdair Allan is the author of Learning iOS Programming, Programming iOS Sensors, Basic Sensors in iOS, Geolocation in iOS, iOS Sensor Apps and Arduino and Augmented Reality in iOS. Last year he and Pete Warden caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all of the time without you knowing. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. He isn't sure what to think about that. From time to time he stands in front of cameras, and you can often find him at conferences run by O'Reilly Media.
He runs a small technology consulting business writing bespoke software, building open hardware and providing training, including a series of workshops on sensors. He sporadically writes blog posts about things that interest him, or more frequently provides commentary about them in 140 characters or less.
Alasdair is also a senior research fellow at the University of Exeter. As part of his work there he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes which, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of the most distant object yet discovered, a gamma-ray burster at a redshift of 8.2. 
Tertiary data: Big data’s hidden layer
Thoughts on the hidden data that's generated about us, rather than by us.
Big data isn't limited to multi-terabyte datasets or data markets. It also includes the hidden data you carry with you all the time and the growing data on your movements, contacts and social interactions.
Radiation visualizations paint a different picture of Japan
Radiation data collected in Japan contradicts some media reports.
From talking to people on the ground in Japan, and by looking at the actual measurements across the country, a very different picture emerges than that reported by the Western media.
