Not sure why I never knew about Google Public Data until today. I’m forever researching some topic and looking for just the right data set and a way to great a graphical representation of it. Google Public Data brings many public sources together and allows you to create line, bar, pie, and bubble charts a la Google Docs.
AB — 15 January 2012
Here’s an interesting infographic from Publicis Healthware International, a healthcare-focused communication firm based in Italy. I think this is interesting and potentially useful for marketers of pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and products and services directed at physicians — it gives some idea of how physicians are using social/professional media and identifies some of the trusted communities where they might be reached.
In an accompanying article, Publicis writes that
The proliferation of small and large communities is the result of physicians’ increasing need to share ideas and discuss clinical cases with colleagues in every part of the world.
The article categorizes physicians’ online social media (although “social” doesn’t necessarily express the purpose of these communities) in three ways:
AB — 7 September 2011
I came across this useful infographic from MBAProgramInfo.com, which analyzes the effect of outsourcing on the U.S. jobs picture (this image is reduced in size — click on the image to link through to the original and examine it in full size):
AB — 30 August 2011
Recently I wrote about confirmation bias in connection with the climate change controversy — see my article at ThomasNet, “All This Wrangling Over Climate Change – What’s Up With That?” The Skeptic’s Dictionary refers to confirmation bias as “a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one’s beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one’s beliefs.”
Today I ran across an interesting TED Talk (TED hosts and posts video talks on innovative topics) by political activist Eli Pariser who has some interesting things to say about how the algorithms used on web sites such as Facebook and Google tend to reinforce our current thinking and filter out new ideas — see his talk, “Beware Online ‘Filter Bubbles‘” — well worth watching, only nine minutes.
Pariser explains what he means by a filter bubble:
Your filter bubble is kind of your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online … the thing is, you don’t decide what gets in, and more importantly, you don’t actually see what gets edited out.
If you and I both search for the same thing at the same time on Google, for example, we get different results. The danger of the filter bubble, says Pariser, is that
this moves us very quickly toward a world in which the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.
He suggests that a personalization algorithm deciding what to show us needs to look not just at what it thinks is “relevant,” but at other factors too, such as those in this slide from his presentation:
This seems like a great insight. Anyway, I highly recommend this short video to get you thinking outside the box:
AB — 24 August 2011
I’m interested in infographics in themselves as tools for communication, but this one from Community 102 also has some useful information about silencing Internet trolls (click on the image below to see the original at full size):
AB — 13 August 2011
On the Cisco blog on July 15, 2011, Dave Evans, Cisco’s Chief Futurist in their Innovations Practice, posted the following infographic about the Internet of Things, which I’ve been writing about for a few years — see “Developing the Internet of Things and a Smarter Planet” and “Is an ‘Energy Internet’ Emerging?,” which touches on similar idea.
Click on this image to link through to the full-size original:
I’m as much interested in the infographic as a method for the visual presentation of information as I am about the particular content of any infographic — in examining any of these presentations, I think it’s important to understand the data sources and to recognize that these graphics are simplifications of research that is often quite complicated.
I notice that author of this graphic says that by the end of 2011, “20 typical households will generate more Internet traffic than the entire Internet in 2008.” While the denizens of Casa Bredenberg no doubt generate a lot of traffic as Internet users, I doubt whether the objects in our house are right now generating 5 percent as much traffic as the 2008 Internet. Maybe if Progress Energy eventually gets its smart-grid rollout going …
AB — 18 July 2011
Here’s an interesting infographic that gives an idea of the extent of renewable energy use in the U.S., future projections of the energy mix, and some other useful information — click on the image to examine it in full size:
AB — 14 July 2011
Here’s an interesting infographic giving statistics about the volumes of various activities on the Internet every 60 seconds. The graphic is credited to Go-Globe.com, but I found it at 22 Words. Click on the image appearing here to go to the full-size original:
AB — 21 June 2011
My favorite computer interface has to be the fictional one used by Tom Cruise in the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report (based on a 1956 short story by Philip K. Dick). In the movie, Cruise plays a time cop who is part of a team that prevents murders by predicting them in advance and arresting the future perpetrators.
What has always fascinated me about the movie is the computer interface the cops use to do their investigations — it’s a huge holographic screen that hangs in the air in front of the user, who interacts with it using virtual-reality gloves. Here’s a screen shot from the movie that will give you an idea:
The exciting news for me comes from a TED Talks video from February 2010 showing a lecture by John Underkoffler of the MIT Tangible Media Group (“John Underkoffler points to the future of UI“), who was science advisor for Minority Report. He and colleagues designed the interfaces that appeared in the film.
Underkoffler has some fascinating things to say about how interfaces are evolving. He tells how the design work was done for Minority Report — the design for the computer interfaces was done as a real R&D project.
But most exciting is that Underkoffler and colleagues are actually developing the real thing — the “spatial operating environment” as he calls it — and he was able to demonstrate it during his talk. Here’s a still of his demo from the video:
During his talk he says:
Much of what we want computers to help us with in the first place is inherently spatial, and the part that isn’t spatial can often be ‘spatialized’ to allow our wetware to make better sense of it.
A spatialized interaction model, he believes, improves our computing experience, as it aligns better with the way our brains work.
During the talk, Underkoffler demonstrates a logistics application his team is developing that combines structured data with 3D geographical mapping. He also shows how a spatial operating environment might be used for media manipulation and editing.
Very soon, Underkoffler says, “this stuff will be built into the bezel of every display, it’ll be built into architecture.”
At the end of the presentation, the host asks the big question: “When? … In your mind, five years’ time, someone can buy this as part of a standard computer interface?”
Underkoffler replies, “I think in five years’ time, when you buy a computer, you’ll get this.”
The fist “killer app” for the spatial operating environment? “At the moment, our early adopter customers — and these systems are deployed out in the real world — do all the big data-heavy, data-intensive problems with it. So, if it’s logistics in supply chain management, or natural gas and resource extraction, financial services, pharmaceuticals, bioinformatics — those are the topics right now. But that’s not the killer app!”
He leaves us hanging at that point, recognizing perhaps that the most interesting applications are impossible to foresee.
Here’s the video in its entirety, with lots of fascinating demonstration footage:
AB — 1 June 2010
Pingdom has put together a fascinating (and useful for innovation researchers) infographic on Google, providing details on Google’s organization, technologies, usage, finances, and more.
For example, the graphic shows us that Google allows employees to spend 20 percent of their time working on “blue-sky” projects and that 50 percent of Google’s products have resulted from that blue-sky time. 37.5 percent of the company’s employees work in R&D and 37 percent in sales and marketing. 97 percent of revenue comes from advertising.
Thanks to Boing Boing for pointing me to the infographic, which is linked here (click on the image to see it full-size):
AB — 25 February 2010
A Thinking Person, a.k.a. Cogit8R 