Autodesk TED BigViz
I'm a big fan of TED conference talks. In most cases the presenter are very smart people, which know how to tell a story and make inspiring presentations. My favourit talks include Hans Rosling talk about "Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen, Golan Levin about "The truly soft side of software", Joshua Prince-Ramus about "Designing the Seattle Central Library", Seth Godin about "Sliced bread and other marketing delights", John Maeda about "Simplicity patterns" or Jonathan Harris on "The Web's secret stories".
In this years TED conference AutoDesk made a technology experiment called BigViz. The experiment is an exploration in the visualization of the Big Ideas presented on the TED conference. David Sibbet and Kevin Richards, two visual cartographers, captured more than 700 sketches highlighting memorable quotes, great questions and unexpected connections. All this was done on wacom tablets and transfered simultaneously to the Autodesk BigViz system for later exploration. The BigViz system is an interactive system that allows to record scratches and work on them in a visual collaborative environment, which can be used intuitively. Combined with a multitouch display, the system demonstrates how future collaboration could look like. The visualizations are also available as 200 pages pdf download.
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How to grow your own company
The presentation got my attention on two different levels. First I always liked the presentation style of Nancy Duarte and her Design Company Duarte Design. This presentation is another example of her professional skills to enhance her presentation with visuals that support her talk. The presentation is smooth and doesn't distract you with to many facts from the actual talk, while still providing some more information than the pure talk.
On the other hand I found it very interesting to see how she explained the growth of her company. The problems she struggled with and how she solved it. I really enjoyed watching the talk. But this is just the beginning of the full talk she is giving on the changes shes is experiencing in the business of presentation professionals. She carefully selected recent trends and present insightful thoughts on how different changes affect the presentation style and methods. The shifts she is explaining are:
- Global Economy
- Prolific Devices
- Social Networking
- Technology Advances
- Virtual Tradeshows
- Hollywood
Click read more to see the whole presentation.
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The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet
Just another book that I would like to recommend to read is now available under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 license. The book explores the profound implications of the online collision between free speech and privacy.
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New Book from Rainer Kuhlen
Rainer Kuhlen has just published a new book (german) "Erfolgreiches Scheitern - eine Götterdämmerung des Urheberrechts" about the the changing digital landscape and the difficulties with the copyright transformation. He describes the transformation of the web from the early days till the current web and translates that into the copyright context and the implication to the copyright. He further dives into CreativeCommons and the Open Access Movement to explain how these are changing factors for the copyright and the digital knowledge ecology and draws on the consequences of these changes. Unfortunately the book is only in available in German.
The book is available as a free download under the CreativeCommons licence and can be downloaded here:
http://www.inf-wiss.uni-konstanz.de/RK2008_ONLINE/
But although the book is available for free you are encouraged to donate. The donation will be used to fund the 'Das Aktionsbündnis "Urheberrecht für Bildung und Wissenschaft"'. The goal of the "Aktionsbündnis" is that "In a digitised and networked information society, access to global information for the purposes of education and science must be guaranteed at all times from any place."
MapReduce Stats and Cloud Computing
Google just published an updated version of their MapReduce paper, that can be found at ACM. It gives some new information and statistics about the usage of the MapReduce software framework that supports "parallel computations over large (...) data sets on unreliable clusters of computers". Mapreduce was introduced in 2003 to be used for indexing the web and computing the PageRank, as well as for processing geographic information in Google Maps, clustering news articles, machine translation, Google Trends etc..
403,152 TB (terabytes) of input data were used in September 2007. The average number of machines allocated for a MapReduce job was 394, while the average completion time was 6 minutes and a half.
