Jenn Webb
Jenn Webb is a veteran of the newspaper industry turned freelance scribe, editor and researcher. She is a nerd with a passion for publishing, technology and cultural disruption.
Visualization of the Week: CIA rendition flights of terror suspects
The Rendition Project has published an interactive visualization of three year's worth of suspected rendition flights.
The Rendition Project, a collaboration between academics at Kent and Kingston universities and the NGO Reprieve, has developed an interactive visualization of the extent of CIA rendition flights of terror suspects.
Strata Week: Are customized Google maps a neutrality win or the next “filter bubble”?
Two views on new Google Maps; a look at predictive, intelligent apps; and Aaron Swartz's and Kevin Poulsen's anonymous inbox launches.
Google aims for a new level of map customization
Google introduced a new version of Google maps at Google I/O this week that learns from each use to customize itself to individual users, adapting based on user clicks and searches. A post on the Google blog outlines the updates, which include recommendations for places you might enjoy (based upon your map activity), ratings and reviews, integrated Google Earth, and tours generated from user photos, to name a few.
Visualization of the Week: Real-time Wikipedia edits
The Wikipedia Recent Changes Map visualizes Wikipedia edits around the world in real-time.
Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi have put together an addictive visualization of real-time edits on Wikipedia, mapped across the world. Every time an edit is made, the user’s location and the entry they edited are listed along with a corresponding dot on the map.
Click here for the full visualization.
Read more…
Strata Week: President Obama opens up U.S. government data
U.S. opens data, Wong tapped for U.S. chief privacy officer, FBI might read your email sans warrant, and big data spells trouble for anonymity.
U.S. government data to be machine-readable, Nicole Wong may fill new White House chief privacy officer role
The U.S. government took major steps this week to open up government data to the public. U.S. President Obama signed an executive order requiring government data to be made available in machine-readable formats, and the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy released a Open Data Policy memo (PDF) to address the order’s implementation.
The press release announcing the actions notes the benefit the U.S. economy historically has experienced with the release of government data — GPS data, for instance, sparked a flurry of innovation that ultimately contributed “tens of billions of dollars in annual value to the American economy,” according to the release. President Obama noted in a statement that he hopes a similar result will come from this open data order: “Starting today, we’re making even more government data available online, which will help launch even more new startups. And we’re making it easier for people to find the data and use it, so that entrepreneurs can build products and services we haven’t even imagined yet.”
FCW’s Adam Mazmanian notes a bit from the Open Data Policy memo that indicates the open data framework doesn’t only apply to data the government intends to make public. Read more…
Visualization of the Week: Building collapse rescue efforts
The BBC pulled data from the International Rescue Corps to create an interactive guide to emergency response efforts in a building collapse.
In the wake of recent building collapses, the BBC addressed the question of what goes into the rescue efforts by creating an interactive guide outlining how rescuers approach a collapsed building.
Strata Week: The power of the Internet, wielded by machines and things
Jon Bruner's industrial Internet report; IBM, Belkin, and the Internet of Things; cars as software platforms; and coding is the job of the future.
Soon, everything will be an Internet platform
Ben Schiller at Fast Company took a look this week at a recent report by Jon Bruner on the industrial Internet. “According to Jon Bruner [the industrial Internet] is ‘machines becoming nodes on pervasive networks that use open protocols,’” writes Schiller. “And, to many others, it is as a big a deal as the Internet itself: essentially completing a job that’s only half-finished with web sites, email, Twitter, and so on.”
Shiller pulls some highlights from Bruner’s report, especially noting how the industrial Internet will effect various industries, such as energy, health care, and transport. Read more…
Visualization of the Week: A DDoS attack on VideoLAN downloads infrastructure
Using Logstalgia, developer Ludovic Fauvet created a video visualization of a recent DDoS attack on VideoLAN.
In the wake of a recent DDoS attack on open source software distributor VideoLAN, developer Ludovic Fauvet created a video visualization to show what the attack looked like.
Strata Week: Revolutionizing human resource management with work-force science
Big data aids HR, DataKind heads to the U.K., and German regulators fine Google a "paltry" 145,000 euros.
Big data replaces gut instinct in HR management
In a post at the New York Times, Steve Lohr took a look this week at a new data discipline: work-force science. The field pairs big data with human resources to help remove subjectivity and gut instinct from the hiring process and HR management. Lohr notes that in the past, studies conducted to understand worker behavior included a few hundred test subjects at most. Today, they can include thousands of subjects and far more data points. Lohr writes:
“Today, every e-mail, instant message, phone call, line of written code and mouse-click leaves a digital signal. These patterns can now be inexpensively collected and mined for insights into how people work and communicate, potentially opening doors to more efficiency and innovation within companies. Digital technology also makes it possible to conduct and aggregate personality-based assessments, often using online quizzes or games, in far greater detail and numbers than ever before.”
Lohr looks at several companies applying data-driven decision making to HR management. Read more…
Visualization of the Week: Every recorded U.S terror attack 1970-2011
Using START Global Terrorism data, Simon Rogers mapped every U.S. terror attack recorded between 1970 and 2011.
The recent terror attack at the Boston Marathon prompted the Guardian’s Simon Rogers (who will soon be Twitter’s Simon Rogers) to look into the history of attacks on U.S. soil. Using data from the START Global Terrorism Database, Rogers mapped every recorded terrorist incident in the U.S. from 1970 to 2011.
Strata Week: Movers and shakers on the data journalism front
Reuters' Connected China, accessing Pew's datasets, Simon Rogers' move to Twitter, data privacy solutions, and Intel's shift away from chips.
Reuters launches Connected China, Pew instructs on downloading its data, and Twitter gets a data editor
Yue Qiu and Wenxiong Zhang took a look this week at a data journalism effort by Reuters, the Connected China visualization application. Qiu and Zhang report that “[o]ver the course of about 18 months, a dozen bilingual reporters based in Hong Kong dug into government websites, government reports, policy papers, Mainland major publications, English news reporting, academic texts, and think-tank reports to build up the database.”
