Displaying Data Well

Data is often displayed poorly leaving it difficult to see what is important. By displaying data well the important facts should leap off the page and into the viewers mind. Edward Tufte is an expert on the topic and has published great books. I strongly recommend reading at least one (and if you do I think the odds are good you will read more): Beautiful Evidence, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations.

Smashing magazine has some nice examples of good display techniques in Data Visualization: Modern Approaches. I don’t like all the examples they show but it does provide some help by showing some creative ways to display data.

Mars Rovers Getting Ready for Another Adventure

Mars Rover

Mars rovers begin to stir as dust storms recede

NASA’s twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity are starting to move again after being immobilised for six weeks by severe dust storms. The storms hit in late June, just as Opportunity was poised to enter the 800-metre-wide Victoria crater, which may contain crucial geological records of past conditions on Mars.

Lofting dust high in the atmosphere, the storms blocked precious sunlight needed for the rover solar panels to generate power. Both rovers had to stop driving, and Opportunity was so starved of power that its handlers worried it might freeze to death during the cold Martian night. Now, the storms have finally receded and both rovers are about to start driving towards much-anticipated targets.
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Opportunity is getting about 300 watt-hours of energy per day, more than twice the level it was getting during the worst part of the storms. But it is still not enough to start the descent into the crater, Arvidson says: “We want to make sure if we have some mobility problems that there’s energy to spare to get out of the problem areas.”

These rovers just keep going. From a NASA press release last October: “NASA’s long-lived Mars Exploration Rover Spirit will finish its 1,000th Martian day Thursday, continuing a successful mission originally planned for 90 Martian days.”

Image credit: NASA/JPL Artist’s concept of the Mars Exploration Rover on Mars.High Resolution Image

Science Journal Publishers Stay Stupid

Science publishers get even stupider by Andrew Leonard:

The American Association of Publishers and everyone associated with it should be ashamed of trying to protect their profit margins by slandering the open access movement as government intervention and censorship. Research paid for with government funds should be freely accessible to the general public.

I wish it was amazing that these people have so little grasp of what has been going on in the world the last 5 years (but I must say such failure to adapt seems to be a common trait in too many organizations). Previously I have posted on the importance of continuing the scientific tradition of open debate and open access. In the past there have been distribution complexities that made paid journals an acceptable compromise. That people working at journals don’t see that the internet changes that is going to lead to their rapid irrelevance. They had to figure this out a couple of years ago. Given they still haven’t, I must say that they really don’t seem to have much understanding of science or modern communication methods. Given their industry that is sad. It is time for the scientific community to give up on these journals and start looking to move to work with new organizations that will encourage scientific communication and advancement (PLoS – arXiv.org – Open Access Engineering Journals) and leave those that seek to keep outdated practices to go out of business.

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” Dr. W. Edwards Deming

I do object to scientific knowledge being kept out of the scientific and public community. The ability to use the internet to more effectively communicate new knowledge should not be sacrificed to protect the old model journals had for sustaining themselves. They should find a way to fund themselves and make their material available for free on the internet (I think some delay for free public access would be fine – the shorter the delay the better). Or they should be replaced by others that do so.

JMU Adds School of Engineering

JMU to create engineering program next fall by Kelly Conniff:

The research group focused on material from several areas that had shown that engineering is in great demand at JMU. The commonwealth of Virginia has also identified the top three labor shortages areas as nursing, education and engineering. JMU decided to respond to this need by creating a program that will produce close to 50 graduates per year, starting with the first graduating class in 2012.
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The school of engineering will also focus on incorporating business elements into the curriculum. The Steering Committee created two new business courses designed for engineering students. The courses, called Management of Technology I and II, will be specially constructed in order to allow students to pursue post-graduate studies in business or engineering upon graduation.

“The addition of business skills is really important to our program,” Prins said. “Having our graduates be able to speak both engineering and business is key to their success.”

Ocean Foam

Cappuccino Coast: The day the Pacific was whipped up into an ocean of froth

One minute a group of teenage surfers were waiting to catch a wave, the next they were swallowed up in a giant bubble bath. The foam was so light that they could puff it out of their hands and watch it float away. It stretched for 30 miles out into the Pacific in a phenomenon not seen at the beach for more than three decades.

Scientists explain that the foam is created by impurities in the ocean, such as salts, chemicals, dead plants, decomposed fish and excretions from seaweed. All are churned up together by powerful currents which cause the water to form bubbles. These bubbles stick to each other as they are carried below the surface by the current towards the shore.

As a wave starts to form on the surface, the motion of the water causes the bubbles to swirl upwards and, massed together, they become foam.
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As for 12-year-old beachgoer Tom Woods, who has been surfing since he was two, riding a wave was out of the question. “Me and my mates just spent the afternoon leaping about in that stuff,” he said. “It was quite cool to touch and it was really weird. It was like clouds of air – you could hardly feel it.”

First Year of Google WiFi

First year of Google WiFi

Our Mountain View WiFi network just celebrated its first anniversary, and we thought you’d appreciate a few data points. The network’s 400+ mesh routers cover about 12 square miles and 25,000 homes to serve approximately 15,000 unique users each week month. Since the beginning of 2007, traffic has grown almost 10 percent each month, and the network now handles over 300 gigabytes of data each day, sent to over 100 distinct types of WiFi devices. Virtually the entire city has been taking advantage of the network, with 95 percent of the mesh routers being used on any given day.

Around the globe and across the U. S., many people are still not able to access the online services that are increasingly helpful, if not essential, tools for our daily lives. This is why we’re committed to promoting alternative platforms for people to access the web, no matter where you are, what you’re doing or what device you’re using.

Financial Engineering

In addition to this blog I also run the Curious Cat Investing and Economics blog. Still I don’t really understand what financial engineering is. Here is an article from the author of an excellent economics blog – Reverse engineering financial engineering:

Call it the downside of complex financial engineering. That engineering took some risks off the banks balance sheet (literally in some cases), but it also means that no one quite knows where the subprime losses are. And there is a suspicion that some of those losses are hiding in funds that haven’t offered adequate compensation for the risk.

A few months ago a lot of subprime debt could be packaged into a security that was worth more than the sum of its parts (with a bit of help from the credit rating agencies. And this process was widely lauded. The IMF argued that the United States unique skill at creating innovative fixed income “product” was pulling in the capital needed to finance the US current account deficit. The Fed argued that financial innovation allowed the banks to sell risks that they previously might have held on their balance sheet — though it is also worth noting that the banks themselves were big buyers of MBS as well. Risks were divided and then sold to those best able to manage them.

I understand there has been a large move toward using highly complex math for financial strategies. I understand many derivatives and other investment vehicles have been created. I just don’t really get what makes some of it engineering. Creating new financial instruments, I can come close to understand the argument for calling that engineering but still… And I don’t understand why complex accounting often seems to be called engineering instead of accounting. And the portion that is mainly about changing legal classification then isn’t it more legal than engineering (it seems much financial engineering are gimmicks or tricks or… to gain favorable legal classification for tax… purposes).

Studying Martian Soil for Evidence of Microbial Life

Study: Martian soil may contain life

The search for life on Mars appeared to hit a dead end in 1976 when Viking landers touched down on the red planet and failed to detect biological activity. But Joop Houtkooper of the University of Giessen, Germany, said on Friday the spacecraft may in fact have found signs of a weird life form based on hydrogen peroxide on the subfreezing, arid Martian surface.

His analysis of one of the experiments carried out by the Viking spacecraft suggests that 0.1 percent of the Martian soil could be of biological origin. That is roughly comparable to biomass levels found in some Antarctic permafrost, home to a range of hardy bacteria and lichen. “It is interesting because one part per thousand is not a small amount,” Houtkooper said in a telephone interview.

“We will have to find confirmatory evidence and see what kind of microbes these are and whether they are related to terrestrial microbes. It is a possibility that life has been transported from Earth to Mars or vice versa a long time ago.”

Interesting, certainly far from convincing evidence but still fun speculation. Claim of Martian Life Called ‘Bogus’:

Norman Pace, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado, is skeptical of the new claims. “It sounds bogus to me,” Pace told SPACE.com. “I don’t consider the chemical results to be particularly credible in light of the harsh conditions that Mars offers.”

Lunar Landers X-Prize

Crash destroys rocket ahead of X Prize contest

The front-runner for a $2 million NASA competition to build mock lunar landers has lost one of its two main vehicles in a fiery crash. The company, Armadillo Aerospace, says it will enter a smaller vehicle instead, but outsiders say the upset will level the playing field and add suspense to the upcoming contest.
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The challenge has two ‘levels’ that involve a vehicle lifting off at one launch pad and hovering – for either 90 or 180 seconds, depending on the level – at an altitude of 50 metres as it moves to a second launch pad 100 metres away. Then the vehicle must do the same thing in reverse. If more than one vehicle achieves this, then the vehicle that can repeat it the greatest number of times in a given time period of time will win.
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He notes that the front-runner for the first solo, non-stop transatlantic flight of an aircraft in 1927 was not Charles Lindbergh but Richard Byrd, “until he crashed on take-off, and just like that, was out of the race.” That left Lindbergh to win the $25,000 prize for the flight.

The X prize contests continue to be an interesting method of encouraging research and development. Previous posts: $10 Million for Science Solutions – Autonomous Vehicle Technology Competition – Lunar Lander X-prize site

Vertical Rotation Personal Windmill

New wind turbine spins success for winning student

Ben Storan, a student graduating with an MA in Industrial Design Engineering from the Royal College of Art (RCA), has been working for the past year in conjunction with Imperial College to design an affordable personal wind turbine suited to the urban environment.

The result is a unique design which uses vertical, rather than traditional horizontal, rotation. This feature gives a slower rotational speed, which allows the turbine to capture more energy from turbulent air flow, common to urban environments. It also means quieter operation. As a result, it is able to generate more energy than domestic models currently on the market. Similarly sized existing personal wind turbines claim to generate 1kW at a wind speed of 12 m/s, but typically produce just 40% of what is claimed. Ben’s design should realistically produce 3 times that (1.2kW) of those currently on the market.