Miso project: how it will help you make your own Guardian-style infographics and data visualisations | News The Miso project and Cabinet Office spending Here on the Guardian's data team, we've wanted to help you visualise our data and create new viz styles for a long time. And now, thanks to some great work by the Guardian's Interactive team, that dream has moved one step closer. This week, developers Alastair Dant and Alex Graul launched the first part of the Miso project. In this piece, Alex explains it is a Set of Open Source tools designed to make it faster and easier to create high quality interactive and data visualization content You can see more about the project here on its home page - which also has some examples of visualisations created using the code. It's funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, as part of its support of our Global Development site - and has been developed with Boston-based Bocoup. If you're not a developer but just interested in data and journalism, you might be a bit baffled by how it can help you, but it does. That's still in the future. More data
Y'a le petit qu'est sur Facebook ! Les 3 grammaires de Facebook. La nouvelle est déjà ancienne (dans les tuyaux de la geekosphère depuis Septembre 2011, annoncée "officiellement" dans les médias mainstream depuis Janvier 2012). Et pourtant les faits ne sont pas encore avérés. Je veux parler du déploiement de nouvelles fonctions-boutons Facebook censées compléter l'omniprésent parasite qu'est le "Like". J'aime. J'aime. Nul ne peut pour l'instant dire quand ces 3 boutons seront effectivement intégrés au site, mais tout le monde semble avoir acté qu'ils le seront un jour. 3 boutons. 3 fonctions. 3 grammaires. <précaution oratoire> Ceux qui m'objecteront immédiatement que Facebook n'est pas une langue peuvent s'épargner de lire la suite de ce billet. Le "J'aime" ... est une grammaire du désir. Le "Je veux" ... sera une grammaire du pulsionnel. Le "Je possède" ... sera une grammaire transactionnelle. Et ainsi de suite. Toutes les 3 remplissent des objectifs concordants : Parle moins fort, y'a l'petit qui réseaute. Tu seras un homme un ami, mon fils. - Quoi ?
Defining universal patterns in the emergence of complex societies Jeremy Sabloff on Emergence of Complex Societies Project Highlights: October 2013 The rise of the state is a key marker in the evolution of human society. Despite the presence of similar conditions, some states rose and flourished while some advanced chiefdoms never passed the threshold into statehood. In this project, scholars will build a database of all available quantitative archaeological information on early state formation and development. The Santa Fe Institute thanks the John Templeton Foundation for its generous support of this work. Social Media Monitoring, Analytics and Alerts Dashboard Judith Donath : Si Facebook est important, c’est le signe que nos relations sont importantes Par Hubert Guillaud le 16/03/11 | 9 commentaires | 3,393 lectures | Impression Judith Donath est professeur au Media Lab du MIT et fondatrice du Sociable Media Group. Elle est l’auteure de nombreux articles d’analyse sur les médias sociaux et l’impact social d’internet dont elle est l’une des spécialistes. InternetActu.net : Beaucoup de gens en évoquant Facebook dénoncent son “mur de futilité”. Judith Donath : Ce à quoi sert des sites sociaux comme Facebook n’est pas d’échanger des informations importantes, mais ils fournissent le moyen de garder le contact avec quelqu’un, montrer que vous portez de l’attention à quelqu’un. Image : Judith Donath lors du SXSW 2009, photographiée par le Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Internetactu.net : Pourquoi les gens bavardent-ils en ligne et pourquoi le montrent-ils si facilement ? InternetActu.net : Facebook nous rend-il idiot ? Judith Donath : Il est possible que ce soit une distraction.
WHY CITIES KEEPING GROWING, CORPORATIONS AND PEOPLE ALWAYS DIE, AND LIFE GETS FASTER This is in complete contrast to companies. The Google boys in the back garage so to speak with ideas of the search engine, were no doubt promoting all kinds of crazy ideas and maybe having even crazy people around them. Well, Google is a bit of an exception, because it still tolerates some of that. But most companies start out probably with some of that buzz. But the data indicates that at about 50 employees to a hundred that buzz starts to stop. A company that was more multi dimensional, more evolved, becomes uni dimensional. Indeed, if you go to General Motors or you go to American Airlines or you go to Goldman Sachs, you don't see crazy people. It's not surprising to learn that when manufacturing companies are on a down turn, they decrease research and development, and in fact in some cases, do actually get rid of it, thinking this is "oh, we can get that back in two years we'll be back on track." Well, this kind of thinking kills them. Read on. Well, you find quite the contrary.
Pimpact A month ago I drafted a post about personal impact metrics, spurred on by Amber Thomas coining the term "Pimpact". At the time, I'd been playing with totalImpact to compare it with my current repository metrics (and I was underwhelmed), so I had a fiddle with ReaderMeter (equally unimpressed). At that point I stopped and thought I'd let these services settle down a bit before posting about them, but that's now been rendered moot by the excellent summary just published by the SURF foundation: Users, narcissism and control – tracking the impact of scholarly publications in the 21st centuryWhat is the scientific and social impact of my research publications? This question has been of interest to scientists and scholars since the inception of modern science 400 years ago. The verdict coincides with my own experience - we've got some way to go in this area yet.
Is Facebook making us sad? Stanford University research and Sherry Turkle's new book Alone Together suggest that social networking may foster loneliness There are countless ways to make yourself feel lousy. Here's one more, according to research out of Stanford: Assume you're alone in your unhappiness. Libby Copeland is a writer in New York and a regular Slate contributor. She was previously a Washington Post reporter and editor for 11 years. She can be reached at libbycopeland@gmail.com. Follow "Misery Has More Company Than People Think," a paper in the January issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, draws on a series of studies examining how college students evaluate moods, both their own and those of their peers. The human habit of overestimating other people's happiness is nothing new, of course. In one of the Stanford studies, Jordan and his fellow researchers asked 80 freshmen to report whether they or their peers had recently experienced various negative and positive emotional events. As does the idea that Facebook might aggravate this tendency. Facebook is "like being in a play.
Innovation, economics, and messy, complex truths Andy Kessler, whose take on things I generally like, recently wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal called, “Robots, 3-D Printers and Other Looming Innovations.” In it he posed the question of whether the internet and other disruptive trends have destroyed more jobs than they’ve created. Could innovation actually be fueling the stubborn unemployment that has persisted in much of the country? But Kessler was merely tossing some rhetorical “chum” into the waters to bait naysaying Luddites. Kessler then delivered his list of future job creating “game changers” with the certitude of a preacher sermonizing to his flock (it’s WSJ, after all). But, Kessler’s truth ignores a messy paradox; namely, that while the innovations of tomorrow are most certainly worth working toward, that doesn’t obviate the parallel truth that the depth and duration of pain being experienced throughout much of the country is chronic, systemic, and arguably, must also be dealt with. Reassessing the calculus of ‘value’