Have you ever been into a meeting with a presentation being shown by some techie or project lead that attempts to describe some kind of trend or probabilistic projection and been bored by the visualization? Well many sectors of the economy rely on very simple visualization tools that aren’t at the fore front of data visualization and mining techniques that are available nowadays.
In the recent past I’ve posted about Google Maps mashups with heat map technology but there are many powerful tools out there (some web based, others not) that intrinsically yield powerful trends that may not even have been discoverable with simple charts, graphs and basic visualization tools of the past era.
An article in SmashingMagazine.com has catalogued and captured screenshots of the most amazing and beautiful data visualization models out there including everything from 3d heatmapping/contouring, content clouding, to mind mapping.
One of my favorites is a 3d visual population hill/spike density map from Time Magazine:
If you are in the business of analysis of any kind, you should definitely read this article and check out the screen shots. You might find the technologies that these companies are creating useful to your endeavor.
Steve Jobs deserves an applause again!
In addition to the recent price drop from Apple for the 8GB iPhone model, an open letter from Steve Jobs gives any first-to-buy iPhone owners a $100 offer towards other Apple gear.
Are you loving apple yet?
So I’ve been yapping about touch screen technologies a lot this year (Apple iPhone, Microsoft Surface, Jeff Han’s Multi-touch) and you may have enjoyed the essential tools I’ve posted for Apple’s iPhone but I thought that my fellow TabletPC friends out there could enjoy some of the tools and resources that I’ve been enjoying on my TabletPC.
Also if you’re not yet a TabletPC lover and are thinking about getting a laptop PC in the near future, I recommend you review and compare the prices / features of your choice notebooks and also the top TabletPC’s out there. I own the Lenovo Thinkpad X61 TabletPC which I believe to be the best TabletPC out there by far in comparison to the others.
Now here are your tools. Enjoy!
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Technion Israel Institute of Technology researchers have developed a theoretical model of a time machine that, in the distant future, could possibly enable future generations to travel into the past. An article on this research was published last week in the scientific journal Physical Review.
By tweaking Einstein’s space time and general relativity models these researchers are becoming more confident with the idea of travelling back in time, something that most scientists believe to be improbable because of the paradoxes and other reasons that could happen if one did so. Curving space time, as is the basis for wormholes to travel instantaneously from one point in space to another, is the basis for this research. So instead of going to another space point in your time, you go from your point in time to another point in time.
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Here are some great tools, tweaks, hacks, and other cool stuff for your iPhone.
I’ll probably be posting more stuff like this so stay tuned.
If anyone has any good tools that may be useful, feel free to drop a comment with the url(s).
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Well it’s been about two weeks since I’ve gotten my Apple iPhone. I must say overall I’m in love with the phone. I say this adamantly because honestly I’ve never been able to say this about any other phone I’ve purchased before. I’ve been a Microsoft Mobile and Pocket PC user for years but with the Microsoft phones and PDAs I’ve also experienced OS issues, had to reboot. I guess I’m used to that with Windows in general!
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A team from MIT call this wireless power transfer invention ‘WiTricity’ and believe it could change the way we use electricity and do away with the tangle of cables, plugs and chargers that clutter modern homes.
I predicted that this technology could be feasible one day when I was doing my bachelor’s in electrical engineering back in the 90′s.
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So there are some simple tricks that you can do to speed up the experience and interface in Visual Studio.
Partial Attribution : thekua.com
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In Spain’s Canary Island chain, researchers from all over Europe generated a polarization-entagled photon pair with the twin sent over an optical free-space link to Tenerife about 144 kilometers (90 mi) away where the Ground Station of the European Space Agency acted as a receiver. Previously 13km was the record on similar experiments. 
Quantum entanglement is a property of particles, such as photons, to become entangled with each other, behaving like psychically connected twins. Even at vast distances a disturbance on one affects the other. This was even predicted and labelled “spooky interaction” by Albert Einstein himself.
If this technology continues on these records, we could be seeing satellite-based quantum communication and experiments on quantum physics in space in addition to ubiquitous instantanenous communication across light years. Think of the instantaneous communication in the Star Trek TV shows over many light years.
So any of you who have seen the movie “The Island”
probably remember the amazing office desk of the administrator of the facility that the main charachters (the lovely Scarlett Johansen and Obi Kenobi — Ewan McGregor) resided. Well didn’t you wish you could have that table the first moment you saw the guy interact with it?
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