Dudok

It's here

Y U R T H: YouTube and GoogleEarth mashed

Geographic Web: Google Earth mashed with Panoramio

Geographic Web: Google Earth mashed with Wikipedia

Fine dining: the Fisherman

I enjoyed a fine diner with friends in this restaurant located near Eindhoven, The Netherlands. If you are a connaisseur of fine fish food in a classic French style this place is worth a detour. Restaurant The Fisherman Kruisstraat 23 5502 JA Veldhoven Tel: +31 (0)402545838

Wayfinding and Navigation

Me being interested in information visualisation, navigation and information architecture I'm lucky to be gifted with an eye for design details. I've seen websites changing their heading font (h1, h2, etc.) from Arial, to Verdana to Tahoma. For readability reasons mainly, sometimes following the pack. Reading the book Information Architecture for Designers by Peter Van Dijck loaded with examples/pictures of good and bad signs and what can be learned from them, I came up with the idea to have a look at the font used on road signs. These fonts have been carefully designed with readability and clearness as a major objective. Maybe the font used for headings would be better if we used the interstate font family?

Shameless family promotion: My brother

On December 8, Professor René Castelein will receive a prize from the French Cotrel Spinal Research Foundation for his scientific research on idiopathic scoliosis.This deformity of the spine occurs in children during puberty. Castelein is head of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University Medical Center (UMC) Utrecht. The prize is a research grant of 25,000 euro and is part of the Cotrel Foundation’s program to stimulate new types of treatment for idiopathic scoliosis. Castelein will receive the prize also on behalf of researcher Jan Willem Kouwenhoven and the whole of his research group. Idiopathic scoliosis is a severe spinal curvature that occurs in children during growth spurts for which the cause is unknown. In general, this disorder occurs in healthy children, more often in girls, who develop an unhealthy curvature of the spine during their adolescent growth spurt within a short space of time. This can lead, not only to back problems, but also to problems in the heart and lungs. The curves in the spinal column nearly always take on the same characteristic form, direction and rotation. From the group that Castelein studied, it was clear that healthy people also have the same kind of rotation but to a much lesser degree. This is why the deformity has a similar shape in all patients. Ultimately, the research will lead to treatment of the scoliosis in an early stage of the deformity. It is possible that the degree to which current radical treatment is performed can be reduced. The treatment now used involves a child wearing a corset during the growth years or undergoing extensive surgery to the spinal column whereby the spine is fixed in position to titanium rods with bolts and screws. The prize will be presented in the Palais de l’Institut Francais in Paris where a representative of the Dutch Embassy will be present.

Swivel: a YouTube for Data

Swivel will soon offer a kind of functionality that will revolutionize the usage of data on websites. The kind of data comparison they offer in a 'YouTube'-fashion is currently only possible using portal tools with elaborate integration technology combined with business intelligence tooling to be able to compare data and derive conclusions. I can't wait to try it! TechCrunch announced it today:

Swivel co-founders Dmitry Dimov and Brian Mulloy start off by describing their company as “YouTube for Data.” That’s a good start for someone trying to understand it, because the site allows users to upload data - any data - and display it to other users visually. The number of page views your website generates. Or a stock price over time. Weather data. Commodity prices. The number of Bald Eagles in Washington state. Whatever. Uploaded data can be rated, commented and bookmarked by other users, helping to sort the interesting (and accurate) wheat from the chaff. And graphs of data can be embedded into websites. So it is in fact a bit like a YouTube for Data.

But then the real fun begins. You and other users can then compare that data to other data sets to find possible correlation (or lack thereof). Compare gas prices to presidential approval ratings or UFO sightings to iPod sales. Track your page views against weather reports in Silicon Valley. See if something interesting occurs. And better yet, Swivel will be automatically comparing your data to other data sets in the background, suggesting possible correlations to you that you may never have noticed.

Swivel is putting significant computing power behind the scenes to run the data analysis. “We use farms of powerful computers and algorithms at the Swivel data centers to transform a lonely grid of numbers and letters into hundreds - sometimes thousands - of graphs that can be explored and compared with any other public data in Swivel.”

Not all data will be public. The companies business model is to provide the service for free for public data, and charge a fee for data that is kept private. Private data can still be compared by the owner to public data sets. Look for Swivel to launch later this week after a year of quiet development. The company is based in San Francisco and is part of Minor Ventures.

MIT's Lecture Browser, a spoken language system

Try it yourself, it's a prototype, be gentle.

Grand Opening as a finale of a grand project: Sound and Vision