Reading

In the latest TED Prize wish, Jamie Oliver, the “Naked Chef”, talks about teaching every child about food. His wish is: I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity. Although I have a child and I’m obviously interested in his idea, I was also interested in the simple bar chart depicting the leading causes of death in the USA. In the tiny Flash video, the text is unfortunately barely legible and I was interested in knowing where he got his data from. ...

The October 14th, 2010 issue of Nature is obviously a good one. It had to be a good one! I usually advocate Open Access but it is always nice to reading complimentary issues of Nature which is Closed Access but is also publishing very good articles about science at the same time. In this issue, I was interested in various topics … First, there is a serie of articles about the US midterm elections and what (US) scientists feel about two years of Obama administration. Obama promised total transparency in American science, a new era of integrity and more freedom for scientists. From what I read, this isn’t the case yet. ...

In the previous post, I shared a video of David McCandless giving a talk about information visualisation. One phrase caught my attention and a bit of research lead to a very good discovery. The phrase and context is (emphasis is mine): We need relative figures that are connected to other data so that we can see a fuller picture, and then that can lead to us changing our perspective. As Hans Rosling, the master, my master, said, " Let the dataset change your mindset". And if it can do that, maybe it can also change your behavior. ...

Tonight, I realised that David McCandless was behind informationisbeautiful.net, a blog dedicated to information visualisation which I often mentionned before on this blog. Last month, David McCandless gave a talk at TED, a NGO “devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading”. And it was very interesting to hear him, to put a living face on a blog and to apprehend the amount of work to make such great infographics simple to understand. Here is the video (thanks to the license: CC-by-nc-nd - on this page, there is a link to download the high quality video): ...

A colleague of mine is always hammering home the message of bringing facts and data to a discussion rather than rumors, hearsays and daily newspaper articles. Since a few days (because H1N1 is not a pandemic anymore?), newspapers are coming with another “Superbug” or " Germinator", wrongly named " NDM-1". So, before spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt, please read the scientific litterature or, at least, read quality newspapers ( articles from The Guardian are quite fair and balanced). ...

In the 300-and-more RSS items in my aggregator this week, there are 2 great ones from Information is Beautiful, a blog gathering (and publishing its own) nice ways to visualise data. The first one is based on a talk by Clay Shirky who, in turn, was referencing his book Cognitive Surplus. In Cognitive Surplus visualized, David McCandless just represented one of Shirky’s ideas: 200 billion hours are spent each year by US adults just watching TV whereas only 100 million hours were necessary to create Wikipedia (I guess the platform + the content) … ...

Following this article (French), official phone eavesdroppings again increased in Belgium in 2009: Belgian police listened 5265 times to private conversations. The French transcript is here. One doesn’t get much more than these numbers: nothing about the number of hours spent listening, nothing about the percentage of effectiveness/results, nothing about internet eavesdropping (e-mail e.g.). One thing struck me: all requests for eavesdropping were accepted. Or, at least that what the Minister implied when he wrote “there is no distinction between the number of requests and the number of effective eavesdropping”.

Well, now I understand a bit better why experts said the small fall in carbon emissions indirectly due to the volcano is unlikely to have any significant impact on climate (see previous post) … InformationIsBeautiful made a correction following comments and the difference in CO2 emission is smaller: However, although the air traffic is to slowly come back to normal, we can still enjoy some very nice moment without any plane in the sky: ...

One side-effect of the eruption of the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano is that there is no more plane in the European sky for the last few days. On one side, people are obliged to stay longer on holidays, others can’t make business trips, some food and other items can’t be transported, plane companies are crying but train and coach ones are more than happy. The last week-end was sunny and a lot of people enjoyed going outside in North Europe. ...

Being away from presentations to my dismay since a few months, I always enjoy reading the Presentation Zen blog, Garr Reynold’s blog on issues related to presentation design. Recently, Garr came back on the Ignite presentation style with a presentation from Pamela Slim. Here is a video recording: [blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/AfDpaI73Pw] I maybe liked this presentation for its content but above all for its style … At Ignite, you can have a maximum of 20 slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds (so max. 5 minutes talk). I like this kind of challenge. Unfortunately, there is no planned Ignite event in Western Europe soon where I would be able to watch this live. ...