Latest Tweets:
![poptech:
Everything You Wanted to Know About Data Mining but Were Afraid to Ask
Big data is everywhere we look these days. Businesses are falling all over themselves to hire ‘data scientists,’ privacy advocates are concerned about personal data and control, and technologists and entrepreneurs scramble to find new ways to collect, control and monetize data. We know that data is powerful and valuable. But how?
This article is an attempt to explain how data mining works and why you should care about it. Because when we think about how our data is being used, it is crucial to understand the power of this practice. Without data mining, when you give someone access to information about you, all they know is what you have told them. With data mining, they know what you have told them and can guess a great deal more. Put another way, data mining allows companies and governments to use the information you provide to reveal more than you think.
To most of us data mining goes something like this: tons of data is collected, then quant wizards work their arcane magic, and then they know all of this amazing stuff. But, how? And what types of things can they know? Here is the truth: despite the fact that the specific technical functioning of data mining algorithms is quite complex — they are a black box unless you are a professional statistician or computer scientist — the uses and capabilities of these approaches are, in fact, quite comprehensible and intuitive.
Read more.[Image: Reuters]
(via theatlantic)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1ysolg1S91qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
Everything You Wanted to Know About Data Mining but Were Afraid to Ask
Big data is everywhere we look these days. Businesses are falling all over themselves to hire ‘data scientists,’ privacy advocates are concerned about personal data and control, and technologists and entrepreneurs scramble to find new ways to collect, control and monetize data. We know that data is powerful and valuable. But how?
This article is an attempt to explain how data mining works and why you should care about it. Because when we think about how our data is being used, it is crucial to understand the power of this practice. Without data mining, when you give someone access to information about you, all they know is what you have told them. With data mining, they know what you have told them and can guess a great deal more. Put another way, data mining allows companies and governments to use the information you provide to reveal more than you think.
To most of us data mining goes something like this: tons of data is collected, then quant wizards work their arcane magic, and then they know all of this amazing stuff. But, how? And what types of things can they know? Here is the truth: despite the fact that the specific technical functioning of data mining algorithms is quite complex — they are a black box unless you are a professional statistician or computer scientist — the uses and capabilities of these approaches are, in fact, quite comprehensible and intuitive.
Read more.[Image: Reuters]
(via theatlantic)
How the Daily Mail Conquered England : The New Yorker
Fantastic article (Source: interestingsnippets)
The Verge interview: David Carr on curation, crowdsourcing, and the future of journalism
David Carr has written about media for over 25 years, from his early days in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Washington, D.C., to his current post at The New York Times, where he’s been for almost a decade. His weekly column, “The Media Equation,” covers all aspects of journalism and culture, especially the always-evolving world of online news; his recent work has questioned the rise of Twitter activism, investigated the failure of Tribune media, and mused on Louis C.K.’s successful experiment in self-distributed comedy.
The recession killed journalism – and saved it
According to the data studied by LinkedIn, the professional social network, the newspaper industry experienced a 28.4 percent shrink rate between 2007 and 2011 … (Source: maidabobida)
Newcastle Brown Ale launch a cheeky outdoor ambush of Stella’s “Chalice” ads.
via Ad Week
You Can Do It on a Couch, You Can Do It on a Table
Image: Content shifting trends with tablets as reported by Google. Via ReadWriteWeb.
(Source: futurejournalismproject)
Nokia Lumia 800 - Initial Review
Today I collected my new Nokia Lumia 800, which is, for those who don’t know, Nokia’s new Windows Phone 7 smartphone - designed to compete with the likes of the iPhone and the numerous Android phones available. There is a slideshow of photos of the phone at the end of this blog post.
The Phone Itself
So I’m now part of what’s called, “The Amazing Collective”. A group of people who’ve been given Lumia 800’s to make everyday ‘amazing’, and share photos, videos and my experiences of amazing adventures, through my phone.
The handset itself is aesthetically stunning. It’s AMOLED screen is visually great too, you can’t argue when colours look so vivid. The benefit to AMOLED? Black really does look black. Like the abyss of space you really can’t see any bleed through of backlight or anything. The screen is also super responsive, but not that kind of responsive where I could control it through a brick wall, the right amount to make it great to use, but not impossible. Everything moves smoothly across the screen, and the icons are nicely sized, so not hard to tap.
I’m not going to go into it’s RAM, capacity, processor speed or any of that nonsense, because at the end of the day, well-built software can work well on a low-spec device. And anyway, in my opinion most phone consumers don’t care if they have ARM this or 1Ghz that in their mobile phone - they just want to be able to Facebook a picture to their ‘bro’ and Tweet about their admiration for their celebrity followers. (If anyone want’s to talk about the specification and hardware of the device, drop me a comment and I’ll write a bit more on it.)
I haven’t had a whole lot of chance to play with the camera, but I must admit that it seems to take pretty good photos, and very easily. What I liked particularly was the ability to tap on a point (to focus on it), but it one process it focused and took the picture without the need to press or tap another button. Very slick. It would appear to have a decent Carl Zeiss lens, and a super-bright LED flash too, which are both benefits to the quality of the photo too. The camera app also has a handy auto-fix (which takes about 2-3 seconds max.) which makes photos look that little bit nicer - simples!
I haven’t had chance to experience the battery life on here yet, but with much of the screen being black, that means there’s less power having to be used there, although admittedly, I expect like most smart-phones, it’s going to need a charge every night to make sure it lasts you the next day.
I’ve played around with the Spotify app (take a look further down for my thoughts on that) to test out the speaker, and it’s a great sound out of something so small. It’s a shame there’s no way to easily ‘dock’ the phone into a bigger set of speakers, but any 3.5mm headphone jack will work, and most iPhone docks will accomodate this.
Windows Phone 7 OS
As a Mac user, the prospect of ever using Windows again is daunting. But I’ve got to hand it to them, on a phone, it might have taken them 7 versions, but this is nice. Things are where you expect them to be, and do what you expect them to do when you tap them. There’s no ridiculous pop ups, unexplained floating buttons, or confusing folder structures. Everything is just where it should be. There’s even a permanent ‘home’ button (which consists of the familiar Windows symbol) to take you back home if you ever did get lost. Along with the home button, there’s a back button, and a search button, making it nice and simple to get to where you were, or find something you want (using Bing, naturally), in a tap.
The OS has a pretty standard lock screen, where you can see the time, date and latest calendar event if you have those set up. A simple swipe up reveals your main screen.
You then have your main or home screen (they call it ‘Start’), which you can pin items to, making them more readily available. Naturally you’re going to pin apps which you use more often to this Start screen. Alternatively, you can swipe left to reveal a menu (I guess this is the ‘Start menu’?) where you can find all of your apps in an alphabetical list. There’s a search in this list too so if you need an app but can’t find it, a quick search will flag it up. Everything on your start screen can be rearranged or ‘unpinned’ to suit. One of the best pre-loaded features in Windows Phone 7 is the ‘People’ app. In effect, this is a hub where EVERYTHING, and I mean everything, going on in your social life can be found. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live, emails and lots more. You get access to all your contacts, things they’re sharing, photos being uploaded, videos being watched, apps being downloaded - you name it, it’s there in one place. It’s downside is, if you’re like my and follow a lot (arguably too many) people on Twitter, it can drown out a lot of the other relevant information. I think with some tweaks and some clever analysis this could be like a live version of Summify, pulling up the most discussed or most influential content at the moment. Maybe something to work on for Microsoft.
The onscreen ‘soft’-keyboard is pretty nice too. Much better than the software keyboards on many of the cheaper Android handsets out there, it’s responsive, is pretty accurate even at high speeds, and has a reasonable autocorrect which will help avoid situations like these.
For those with Xboxes (note: is that even the plural of Xbox?), it has pretty good Xbox Live integration, and many of the games (e.g. Angry Birds) are linked up to Xbox live too, not bad if you’re into collecting your achievements.
The OS comes with Internet Explorer, and this could do with a severe beef up. It’s not particularly great on the eye, and website do not render particularly well at all. But for the basics it’s acceptable. And of course the idea is that there’s apps now for almost everything, so this is ever more making the web browser more redundant.
I think that brings me onto the biggest downfall of the OS, and arguably the most important part of a smartphone OS. It’s apps! On Windows Phone 7 it’s called the ‘Marketplace’, and I must admit there’s a severe lack of good quality apps available. Most of them are poor quality, or are incredibly overpriced, although I think both of these are due to the OS still being in it’s youthful days in comparison to iOS and Android. To use the Facebook, Twitter and Guardian apps as examples, they do look great, particularly on this screen. The theory behind the Windows Phone 7 OS is that it’s sort of a window onto an oversized page, and swiping sideways reveals a bit more of the page, with each swipe opening a new column. Although that may not have been the best explanation for it, hopefully this image will explain things better! I really believe that once developers get to spend more time with the development kit, more good apps will be available, and these apps will be visually stunning as well as great to use. Time will tell how this works out. (One app I’d like to single out in the new Spotify app, which is less than 2 months old. It looks great and uses the platform really well, I think developers should use this as a great example of what’s possible).
Overall
As a phone, it’s well built, has a plethora of good features, but could do with some tweaking, as well as some time to develop as a platform. I think the lack of good apps is it’s biggest downfall, and for most users will be weighted (or at least should be) quite importantly when looking to buy a new phone. If it doesn’t have a selection good apps at a reasonable price for their favourite hobby or past time, they’re more than likely to go to the dominant iOS and Android, where there’s almost an app for everything, including undoubtedly the kitchen sink. (P.S. I found one.) It’s lateness to the smartphone scene means that Microsoft is facing an uphill battle, but I think there’s still plenty of people getting their first ever smartphone, and there’s also a number of people who are getting their second smartphone, and they might be looking for something fresh.
Handset: 8/10
Operating system: 7/10
Ease of use: 8/10
Selection of apps: 3/10
Web browser: 4/10
Social network connectivity: 7/10
Keyboard: 7/10
Overall: 63%
After I’ve had a chance to play with the phone further, and discover what it’s like to use on a day-to-day basis, I’ll do another blog post. For now, if you have any specific questions, comment on here, or tweet me @chrishutchinson.
Take care about the choice of color, scale and the number of class!
That’s why they make the graphics so different like this.via vis4.net
Of course, the big question is: which visualization is actually more informative? The one that sorts states into two colors…or the one that sorts it into eight? Depending on the question, it could be 2 or 8.
Rock-Paper-Scissors: You vs. the Computer
Great little game, it’s method is fascinating!
Computers mimic human reasoning by building on simple rules and statistical averages. Test your strategy against the computer in this rock-paper-scissors game illustrating basic artificial intelligence. Choose from two different modes: novice, where the computer learns to play from scratch, and veteran, where the computer pits over 200,000 rounds of previous experience against you.
So, that English thing…
The gun has gone off…
The cheese has gone off…
The husband has gone off…
The same phrase, three totally different meanings.
