Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

November 6, 2015

JournalismCourses.org/

Filed under: Journalism,News,Reporting — Patrick Durusau @ 11:26 am

JournalismCourses.org/

From the webpage:

Welcome to JournalismCourses.org, an online training platform of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin.

Since 2003, our online courses have trained more than 50,000 people from 160 countries. Initially, the program was focused on online classes for small groups of journalists, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean, but eventually the Knight Center began offering Massive Open Online Courses. It became the first program of MOOCs in the world specializing in journalism training, but it still offers courses to small groups as well. The MOOCs are free, but participants are asked to pay a small fee for a certificate of completion. Other courses are paid, but we keep the fees as low as possible in an effort to make the courses available to as many people as possible.

Our courses cover a variety of topics including investigative reporting, ethics, digital journalism techniques, election reporting, coverage of armed conflicts, computer-assisted reporting, and many others. Our MOOCs and courses for smaller groups last from four to six weeks. They are conducted completely online and taught by some of the most respected, experienced journalists and journalism trainers in the world. The courses take full advantage of multimedia. They feature video lectures, discussion forums, audio slideshows, self-paced quizzes, and other collaborative learning technologies. Our expert instructors provide a quality learning experience for journalists seeking to improve their skills, and citizens looking to become more engaged in journalism and democracy.

The courses offered on the JournalismCourses.org platform are asynchronous, so participants can log in on the days and times that are most convenient for them. Each course, however, is open just for a specific period of time and access to it is restrict to registered students.

The Knight Center has offered online courses in English, Spanish and Portuguese. Please check this site often, as we will soon announce more online courses.

For more information about the Knight Center’s Distance Learning program, please click here .

For more information about the Knight Center’s MOOCs and how they work, see our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) .
…

JournalismCourses.org/ sponsors the Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization MOOC I just posted about but I thought it needed more than a passing mention in a post.

More courses are on the way!

Speaking of more courses, do yourself a favor and visit: Knight Center’s Distance Learning program. You won’t be disappointed, I promise.

Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization

Filed under: Infographics,Journalism,News,Reporting,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 11:08 am

Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization by Alberto Cairo.

MOOC: Time: November 16 – December 13, 2015

From the webpage:

This is Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is offered by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC) at the University of Hong Kong and the Knight Center at the University of Texas at Austin. This MOOC is hosted on JournalismCourses.org, the Knight Center’s distance-learning platform. It is designed primarily for journalists and the public in Asia, but is open to people from other parts of the world as well. The Knight Center’s MOOCs are free. Other online courses, with a limited number of students, have a small fee.

…

Goal

This course is an introduction to the basics of the visual representation of data. In this class you will learn how to design successful charts and maps, and how to arrange them to compose cohesive storytelling pieces. We will also discuss ethical issues when designing graphics, and how the principles of Graphic Design and of Interaction Design apply to the visualization of information.

The course will have a theoretical component, as we will cover the main rules of the discipline, and also a practical one: to design basic infographics and mock ups for interactive visualizations.
…

One hopes that given a primarily Asian audience, that successful infographics from Asian markets will be prominent in the study materials.

Thinking that discussion among the students may identify why some infographics succeed while other fail in that context. Reasoning that all cultures have preferences or dispositions that aren’t readily apparent to outsiders.

…Whether My Wife is Pregnant or Not

Filed under: Bayesian Data Analysis,Statistics — Patrick Durusau @ 10:56 am

A Bayesian Model to Calculate Whether My Wife is Pregnant or Not by Rasmus Bååth.

From the post:

On the 21st of February, 2015, my wife had not had her period for 33 days, and as we were trying to conceive, this was good news! An average period is around a month, and if you are a couple trying to go triple, then a missing period is a good sign something is going on. But at 33 days, this was not yet a missing period, just a late one, so how good news was it? Pretty good, really good, or just meh?

To get at this I developed a simple Bayesian model that, given the number of days since your last period and your history of period onsets, calculates the probability that you are going to be pregnant this period cycle. In this post I will describe what data I used, the priors I used, the model assumptions, and how to fit it in R using importance sampling. And finally I show you why the result of the model really didn’t matter in the end. Also I’ll give you a handy script if you want to calculate this for yourself. 🙂
…

I first saw this post in a tweet by Neil Saunders who commented:

One of the clearest Bayesian methods articles I’ve read (I struggle with most of them)

I agree with Neil’s assessment and suspect you will as well.

Unlike most Bayesian methods articles, this one also has a happy ending.

You should start following Rasmus Bååth on Twitter.

November 5, 2015

#Won’tFlyList – ’til TSA is Gone

Filed under: Government,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 8:09 pm

TSA airport screeners’ ability to detect weapons declared “pitiful” by David Kravets.

From the post:

US lawmakers and federal watchdogs on Tuesday derided the Transportation Security Administration’s ability, or lack thereof, to adequately detect weapons and other contraband during the passenger screening process at the nation’s airports.

“In looking at the number of times people got through with guns or bombs in these covert testing exercises it really was pathetic. When I say that I mean pitiful,” said Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), speaking Tuesday during a House Oversight hearing concerning classified reports from federal watchdogs. “Just thinking about the breaches there, it’s horrific,” he added.

Auditors from the Inspector General’s Office, posing as travelers, discovered enormous loopholes in the TSA’s screening process. A leaked classified report this summer found that as much as 95 percent of contraband, like weapons and explosives, got through during clandestine testings. Lynch’s comments were in response to the classified report’s findings.
…

David cites the testimony of Inspector General John Roth and testimony from Jennifer Grover of the General Accounting Office, both of which detail the appalling depth of TSA incompetence.

A new TSA administrator is quoted as saying the agency is undertaking a “full system review.”

With a 95% failure rate after being in operation for fourteen (14) years (as of November 19, 2015) the time for a “full system review” has long past.

At a 95% failure rate, abolishing the TSA won’t increase risks to passengers and will in fact save $billions in lost time due to airport security delays.

However, airport security is a well-heeled business and is firmly entrenched.

The best option is to start a #WontFlyList in the social media of your choice and ask frequent and infrequent flyers to volunteer what trips they won’t be taking until ineffectual airport security is removed.

Don’t limit the list to removing the TSA because it will just change its name. No, airport security must be in the hands of the airlines and as minimal as possible.

Threatened with financial ruin, the airlines will activate their lobbyists and circles of friends in Congress. Much more likely to eliminate the TSA root and branch.

My attention was first drawn to David’s article by a tweet from Cory Doctorow.

Some Holiday Spending Money (“bug bounty”)

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 5:38 pm

Vulnerability Reward Program

From the post:

F-Secure rewards parties who report security vulnerabilities in certain F-Secure products and services, also known as a “bug bounty” program. In order to avoid misunderstandings and ambiguities, we apply the following guidelines; even if lengthy, please read them in their entirety before participating.

We want to hear about any security vulnerabilities in our products and services. In order to reward security researchers, we offer monetary rewards for eligible security vulnerability reports that are disclosed to us in a coordinated way. However, there are certain rules that need to be followed to ensure that your security research does not cause security risk to other users or their data, and to decrease the likelihood that your research would be flagged as a malicious intrusion attempt by our monitoring. We also want to be clear about certain aspects relating to acceptance of reports and payment of rewards in order to avoid any surprises.

A “security vulnerability” is defined as an issue that causes a breach of confidentiality, integrity, or availability of the service or data, or applies to personal data (privately identifiable information) being stored or processed in a way that is not compliant with the current Finnish data protection legislation.
…

See the post for a list of products that are eligible under the “bug bounty” program.

I reported recently on the $1 million dollar bounty on the iPhone: Justice Department on iPhone Hacking: Call Chaouki Bekrar @Zerodium.

At the other end of the “bug bounty” world, you can find F-Secure, which offers:

…
The size of the reward is solely determined by an F-Secure team consisting of our technical staff, and is based on the estimated risk posed by the vulnerability. The current reward range is from EUR 100 to EUR 15.000.

If you report several issues that are duplicates in different parts of the service (e.g., the same code running on different nodes or platforms), or part of a larger issue, these may be combined into one and only one reward may be paid.
…

On the higher end you might get a buzz for a day or two but the rewards aren’t enough to attract serious talent.

On the other hand, you won’t have a lot of competition so perhaps your odds will be marginally better.

Good hunting!

NPR’s new podcast concierge…

Filed under: Audio,News — Patrick Durusau @ 5:25 pm

NPR’s new podcast concierge recommends shows from inside — and outside — public radio by Shan Wang.

From the post:

Seventeen percent of Americans age 12 and older have listened to at least one podcast in a given month, and awareness of podcasting medium has grown to nearly 50 percent of that population, according to recent data from Edison Research. But if you’re a creator of podcasts, you might see this number as a mere 17 percent, and one that represents a relatively affluent, smartphone-toting slice of society.

With its new Earbud.fm tool, billed as “your friendly guide to great podcasts,” NPR is hoping to expand that slice of society — and lower the barrier of entry for people who want to listen to a podcast for the first time but are paralyzed by thousands of options.

“Podcasting is expanding in a way that makes it a competitor with books, music, movies, [and] TV shows,” Michael Oreskes, NPR’s senior VP of news and editorial director, told me.

…

I pass this along as a good source for podcasts if you want to include them in the mix of data covered by your topic map.

If you create podcasts, include transcripts whenever possible.

BEOMAPS:…

Filed under: Social Media,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 4:49 pm

BEOMAPS: Ad-hoc topic maps for enhanced search in social network data. by Peter Dolog, Martin Leginus, and ChengXiang Zhai.

From the webpage:

…
The aim of this project is to develop a novel system – a proof of concept that will enable more effective search, exploration, analysis and browsing of social media data. The main novelty of the system is an ad-hoc multi-dimensional topic map. The ad-hoc topic map can be generated and visualized according to multiple predefined dimensions e.g., recency, relevance, popularity or location based dimension. These dimensions will provide a better means for enhanced browsing, understanding and navigating to related relevant topics from underlying social media data. The ad-hoc aspect of the topic map allows user-guided exploration and browsing of the underlying social media topics space. It enables the user to explore and navigate the topic space through user-chosen dimensions and ad-hoc user-defined queries. Similarly, as in standard search engines, we consider the possibility of freely defined ad-hoc queries to generate a topic map as a possible paradigm for social media data exploration, navigation and browsing. An additional benefit of the novel system is an enhanced query expansion to allow users narrow their difficult queries with the terms suggested by an ad-hoc multi-dimensional topic map. Further, ad-hoc topic maps enable the exploration and analysis of relations between individual topics, which might lead to serendipitous discoveries.
…

This looks very cool and accords with some recent thinking I have been doing on waterfall versus agile authoring of topic maps.

The conference paper on this project is lodged behind a paywall at:

Beomap: Ad Hoc Topic Maps for Enhanced Exploration of Social Media Data, with this abstract:

Social media is ubiquitous. There is a need for intelligent retrieval interfaces that will enable a better understanding, exploration and browsing of social media data. A novel two dimensional ad hoc topic map is proposed (called Beomap). The main novelty of Beomap is that it allows a user to define an ad hoc semantic dimension with a keyword query when visualizing topics in text data. This not only helps to impose more meaningful spatial dimensions for visualization, but also allows users to steer browsing and exploration of the topic map through ad hoc defined queries. We developed a system to implement Beomap for exploring Twitter data, and evaluated the proposed Beomap in two ways, including an offline simulation and a user study. Results of both evaluation strategies show that the new Beomap interface is better than a standard interactive interface.

It has attracted 224 downloads as of today so I would say it is a popular chapter on topic maps.

I have contacted the authors in an attempt to locate a copy that isn’t behind a paywall.

Enjoy!

Trans-Pacific Partnership (full text)

Filed under: Government,Intellectual Property (IP),Law — Patrick Durusau @ 4:14 pm

Trans-Pacific Partnership (full text)

The Trans-Pacific Partnership text has been released!

Several of the sites I have tried were down due to traffic but this medium.com site appears to be holding up.

Be forewarned that this is a bizarre presentation of the text with promotional logos, etc.

A wave of commentary is sure to follow and within a few days I will collect up the best that is relevant to software/IP and post about it.

Just for grins, check your reading time against the suggested reading times by Medium. It rates the Intellectual Property chapter (18) at 106 minutes.

Hmmm, it might be possible to read it in 106 minutes but fully understanding what you have read is likely to take longer.

Enjoy!

Hopping on the Deep Learning Bandwagon

Filed under: Classification,Deep Learning,Machine Learning,Music — Patrick Durusau @ 3:51 pm

Hopping on the Deep Learning Bandwagon by Yanir Seroussi.

From the post:

I’ve been meaning to get into deep learning for the last few years. Now, the stars having finally aligned and I have the time and motivation to work on a small project that will hopefully improve my understanding of the field. This is the first in a series of posts that will document my progress on this project.

As mentioned in a previous post on getting started as a data scientist, I believe that the best way of becoming proficient at solving data science problems is by getting your hands dirty. Despite being familiar with high-level terminology and having some understanding of how it all works, I don’t have any practical experience applying deep learning. The purpose of this project is to fix this experience gap by working on a real problem.

The problem: Inferring genre from album covers

Deep learning has been very successful at image classification. Therefore, it makes sense to work on an image classification problem for this project. Rather than using an existing dataset, I decided to make things a bit more interesting by building my own dataset. Over the last year, I’ve been running BCRecommender – a recommendation system for Bandcamp music. I’ve noticed that album covers vary by genre, though it’s hard to quantify exactly how they vary. So the question I’ll be trying to answer with this project is how accurately can genre be inferred from Bandcamp album covers?

As the goal of this project is to learn about deep learning rather than make a novel contribution, I didn’t do a comprehensive search to see whether this problem has been addressed before. However, I did find a recent post by Alexandre Passant that describes his use of Clarifai’s API to tag the content of Spotify album covers (identifying elements such as men, night, dark, etc.), and then using these tags to infer the album’s genre. Another related project is Karayev et al.’s Recognizing image style paper, in which the authors classified datasets of images from Flickr and Wikipedia by style and art genre, respectively. In all these cases, the results are pretty good, supporting my intuition that the genre inference task is feasible.

…

Yanir continues this adventure into deep learning with: Learning About Deep Learning Through Album Cover Classification. And you will want to look over his list of Deep Learning Resources.

Yanir’s observation that the goal of the project was “…to learn about deep learning rather than make a novel contribution…” is an important one.

The techniques and lessons you learn may be known to others but they will be new to you.

Pentagon Farmed Out Its Coding to Russia [Plus the Sad News]

Filed under: Government,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 3:04 pm

Pentagon Farmed Out Its Coding to Russia by Patrick Malone.

From the post:

The Pentagon was tipped off in 2011 by a longtime Army contractor that Russian computer programmers were helping to write computer software for sensitive U.S. military communications systems, setting in motion a four-year federal investigation that ended this week with a multimillion-dollar fine against two firms involved in the work.

The contractor, John C. Kingsley, said in court documents filed in the case that he discovered the Russians’ role after he was appointed to run one of the firms in 2010. He said the software they wrote had made it possible for the Pentagon’s communications systems to be infected with viruses.

…

The DISA official confirmed that the practice of outsourcing the work to employees in Russia violated both the company’s contract and federal regulations that mandate only U.S. citizens with approved security clearances work on classified systems, Kingsley’s complaint said.

On Monday, NetCracker and the much larger Virginia-based Computer Sciences Corporation—which had subcontracted the work—agreed to pay a combined $12.75 million in civil penalties to close a four-year-long Justice Department investigation into the security breach. They each denied Kingsley’s accusations in settlement documents filed with the court.
…

The sad news is there is no mention of either NetCracker or Computer Sciences Corporation being banned from government contracts in general or defense contracts in particular.

If you were a CIO and discovered that a contractor had violated primary security requirements for a contract, or failed to discovered that a sub-contractor had violated such requirements, how eager would you be to sign up with either one again?

One of the fundamental problems with government IT security is the lack of any meaningful penalty for failing to provide IT security.

Unless and until the government holds its own staff, contractors and sub-contractors liable for accountable in some meaningful way, such as severance (w/o benefits), forfeiture of current contracts plus civil/criminal liability, government IT security will continue to be a sieve.

Information Visualization MOOC 2015

Filed under: Computer Science,Graphics,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 2:39 pm

Information Visualization MOOC 2015 by Katy Börner.

From the webpage:

This course provides an overview about the state of the art in information visualization. It teaches the process of producing effective visualizations that take the needs of users into account.

…

Among other topics, the course covers:

  • Data analysis algorithms that enable extraction of patterns and trends in data
  • Major temporal, geospatial, topical, and network visualization techniques
  • Discussions of systems that drive research and development.

The MOOC ended in April of 2015 but you can still register for a self-paced version of the course.

A quick look at 2013 client projects or the current list of clients and projects, with who students can collaborate, will leave no doubt this is a top-rank visualization course.

I first saw this in a tweet by Kirk Borne.

Modern Pathfinders: Creating Better Research Guides

Filed under: Guided Exploration,Librarian/Expert Searchers,Library,Pathfinders — Patrick Durusau @ 2:14 pm

Modern Pathfinders: Creating Better Research Guides by Jason Puckett.

From the Amazon description:

Whether you call them research guides, subject guides or pathfinders, web-based guides are a great way to create customized support tools for a specific audience: a class, a group, or anyone engaging in research. Studies show that library guides are often difficult, confusing, or overwhelming, causing users to give up and just fall back on search engines such as Google. How can librarians create more effective, less confusing, and simply better research guides?

In Modern Pathfinders: Creating Better Research Guides, author Jason Puckett takes proven ideas from instructional design and user experience web design and combines them into easy-to-understand principles for making your research guides better teaching tools. It doesn’t matter what software your library uses; the advice and techniques in this book will help you create guides that are easier for your users to understand and more effective to use.

This may be a very good book.

I say “may be” because at $42.00 for 157 pages in paperback and/or Kindle, I’m very unlikely to find out.

The American Library Association (publisher of this work) is doing its members, authors and the reading public a disservice by maintaining a pinched audience for its publications.

Works by librarians and on pathfinders in particular would be help, albeit belated help, for technologists who have tried to recreate the labor of librarians. Poorly.

If and when this work appears at a more reasonable price, I hope to offer a review for your consideration.

NSF: BD Spokes (pronounced “hoax”) initiative

Filed under: BigData,Government,NSF — Patrick Durusau @ 12:00 pm

Big Announcements in Big Data by Tom Kalil, Jim Kurose, and Fen Zhao.

From the webpage:

As a part of the Administration’s Big Data Research and Development Initiative and to accelerate the emerging field of data science, NSF announced four awards this week, totaling more than $5 million, to establish four Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs (BD Hubs) across the nation.

Covering all 50 states and including commitments from more than 250 organizations—from universities and cities to foundations and Fortune 500 corporations—the BD Hubs constitute a “big data brain trust” that will conceive, plan, and support big data partnerships and activities to address regional and national challenges.
…

The “BD Hubs” are: Georgia Institute of Technology, University of North Carolina, Columbia University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of California, San Diego, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Washington.

Let’s see, out of $5 million, that is almost $715,000 for each “BD Hub.” Given administrative overhead, I don’t think you are going to see much:

…improve[ment] our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of data, but also help accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering, strengthen our national security, and fuel the growth and development of Smart Cities in America

Perhaps from the BD Spokes (pronounced “hoax”) initiative which covers particular subject areas for each region?

If you can stomach reading Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs: Establishing Spokes to Advance Big Data Applications (BD Spokes), you will discover that the funding for the “spokes” consists of 9 grants of up to $1,000,000.00 (over 3 years) and 10 planning grants of up to $100,000 (for one year).

Total price tag: $10 million.

BTW, the funding summary includes this helpful note:

All proposals to this solicitation must include a letter of collaboration from a BD Hub coordinating institution. Any proposals not including a letter of collaboration from a BD Hub coordinating institution will be returned without review. No exceptions will be made. (emphasis in original)

Would you care to wager on the odds that “a letter of collaboration from a BD Hub coordinating institution” isn’t going to be free?

For comparison purposes and to explain why I suggest you pronounce “Spokes” as “hoax,” consider that in 2014, Google spent $11 billion, Microsoft $5.3 billion, Amazon $4.9 billion and Facebook $1.8 billion, on data center construction.

If the top four big data players are spending billions (that’s with a “b”) on data center construction alone, how does a paltry $15 million (hoax plus the centers):

…improve our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of data, but also help accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering, strengthen our national security, and fuel the growth and development of Smart Cities in America

??

Reminds me of the EC [WPA] Brain Project. The report for year two is summarized:

As the second year of its Ramp-Up Phase draws to a close, the HBP is well-placed to continue its investigations into neuroscience, medicine, and computing. With the Framework Partnership Agreement in place, and preparations underway for the first Specific Grant Agreement, the coordination of the Project is shifting into a higher gear.

Two years into a ten year project and “coordination of the Project is shifting into a higher gear.” (no comment seems snide enough)

My counter-proposal would be that the government buy $10 million (or more) worth of time on Azure/AWS and hold an open lottery for $100,000 increments, with the only requirement that all code and data be under an Apache license and accessible to all on the respective cloud service.

That would buy far more progress on big data issues than the BD Spokes (pronounced “hoax”) initiative.

November 4, 2015

We Put 700 Red Dots On A Map

Filed under: Humor,Maps,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 4:04 pm

We Put 700 Red Dots On A Map

dots

Some statistics can be so unbelievable, or deal with concepts so vast, that it’s impossible to wrap our heads around them. The human mind can only do so much to visualize an abstract idea, and often misses much of its impact in the translation. Sometimes you just need to step back and take a good, long look for yourself.

That’s why we just put 700 red dots on a map.

The dots don’t represent anything in particular, nor is their number and placement indicative of any kind of data. But when you’re looking at them, all spread out on a map of the United States like that—it’s hard not to be a little blown away.
…

Enjoy!

PS: Also follow ClickHole on Twitter.

Governments will still comfort the comfortable, afflict the afflicted and lie to the rest of us about their activities, but this may keep you from becoming a humorless fanatic.

The benefits of being a humorous fanatic aren’t clear but surely it is better than being humorless.

I first saw this in a tweet by Matt Boggie.

.Astronomy 7

Filed under: Astroinformatics — Patrick Durusau @ 3:47 pm

.Astronomy 7

November 3-6, 2015 Sydney CBD, Australia

Yes, the conference is going on right now but I wanted to call your attention to live blogging of the event by Becky Smethurst at: Live Blog: .Astro 7 Day 1.

Among other goodies at her live blog you will find this visualization of the development of Astropy.

Lots of other goodies, links, etc. follow.

Sorry neither you or I are at the conference but following Becky’s live blogging is the next best thing.

BTW, you do know that the conference page, .Astronomy 7, has Twitter addresses for the participants? So you can follow people who are interested in big data, astronomy, etc.

A much better list than the top N stuff you see as listicles.

Enjoy!

The Disappearance of Privacy in the UK

Filed under: Government,Privacy,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 2:00 pm

Investigatory Powers Bill: what’s in it, and what does it mean? by Matt Burgess.

From the post:

Internet service providers will have to store the details of every website people visited for 12 months if the new draft Investigatory Powers Bill is passed, the government has confirmed.

The measure was announced by Home Secretary Theresa May in the House of Commons and is included in a raft of new powers intended to reform the way MI5, MI6, GCHQ, and others use surveillance powers.

May said that “communication records up to 12 months” will have to be stored by internet and communications service providers.

This means the individual webpage — “just the front page of the websites,” in May’s words — will be kept. She distinguished between domains visited and “content” — including individual pages, searches and other information — which will not be stored.

In a lengthy statement to parliament, May reiterated that the powers were intended to allow security services to protect the public, and particularly children, against threats including terrorism, organised crime and sexual predators.
…

At least from the standpoint of protecting the public and children from organized crime and sexual predators, full monitoring of government offices would do more good than surveillance of the general public.

As far as terrorism, people in the UK, those old enough to remember less pleasant times in Northern Ireland, know that the modern “terrorism” is a fiction, wrapped in a lie and hidden behind national security interests.

The interests of the security agencies and their contractors are the only ones being served by concerns over “terrorism.”

The Investigatory Powers Bill, all 299 pages, is online.

Curious, is anyone working on a comparison of the Investigatory Powers Bill and the Patriot Act?

The full text of the Patriot Act (Public Law version).

I have read snippets of the Patriot Act but not in its entirety. It’s a difficult read because it amends some existing statutes, inserts entirely new content and creates new statutes as well.

A comparison of these two offenses against the citizens of the UK and the US, respectively, might prove to be useful in opposing them.

With the caveat that whatever new outrages against citizens are contained in the UK bill will be doubled down by the US against its own.

I first saw this in a tweet by Simon Brunning.

It’s Official! Hell Has Frozen Over!

Filed under: .Net,Microsoft,OpenShift,Red Hat — Patrick Durusau @ 1:23 pm

Microsoft and Red Hat to deliver new standard for enterprise cloud experiences

From the news release:

Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq “MSFT”) and Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) on Wednesday announced a partnership that will help customers embrace hybrid cloud computing by providing greater choice and flexibility deploying Red Hat solutions on Microsoft Azure. As a key component of today’s announcement, Microsoft is offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the preferred choice for enterprise Linux workloads on Microsoft Azure. In addition, Microsoft and Red Hat are also working together to address common enterprise, ISV and developer needs for building, deploying and managing applications on Red Hat software across private and public clouds.

I can’t report on the webcast because it requires Flash 10 and I don’t have that on a VM at the moment. Good cyber hygiene counsels against running even “patched” Adobe Flash.

The news release has the key points anyway:

…
Red Hat solutions available natively to Microsoft Azure customers. In the coming weeks, Microsoft Azure will become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider, enabling customers to run their Red Hat Enterprise Linux applications and workloads on Microsoft Azure. Red Hat Cloud Access subscribers will be able to bring their own virtual machine images to run in Microsoft Azure. Microsoft Azure customers can also take advantage of the full value of Red Hat’s application platform, including Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat JBoss Web Server, Red Hat Gluster Storage and OpenShift, Red Hat’s platform-as-a-service offering. In the coming months, Microsoft and Red Hat plan to provide Red Hat On-Demand — “pay-as-you-go” Red Hat Enterprise Linux images available in the Azure Marketplace, supported by Red Hat.

Integrated enterprise-grade support spanning hybrid environments. Customers will be offered cross-platform, cross-company support spanning the Microsoft and Red Hat offerings in an integrated way, unlike any previous partnership in the public cloud. By co-locating support teams on the same premises, the experience will be simple and seamless, at cloud speed.

Unified workload management across hybrid cloud deployments. Red Hat CloudForms will interoperate with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, offering Red Hat CloudForms customers the ability to manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux on both Hyper-V and Microsoft Azure. Support for managing Azure workloads from Red Hat CloudForms is expected to be added in the next few months, extending the existing System Center capabilities for managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Collaboration on .NET for a new generation of application development capabilities. Expanding on the preview of .NET on Linux announced by Microsoft in April, developers will have access to .NET technologies across Red Hat offerings, including Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, jointly backed by Microsoft and Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be the primary development and reference operating system for .NET Core on Linux.
…

More details at: The Official Microsoft Blog and the Red Hat Blog.

I first saw this in The Power of Open Source… Microsoft .NET and OpenShift by Chris Morgan.

A small pebble in an ocean of influences and motivations but treating Microsoft fairly during the ISO process for ISO 29500 (I am the editor of the competing ISO 26300) wasn’t a bad idea.

Interhacktives

Filed under: Data Mining,Journalism,News,Reporting — Patrick Durusau @ 11:18 am

Interhacktives

I “discovered” Interhactives while following a tweet on “Excel tips for journalists.” I thought it would be a short article saying “don’t” but was mistaken. 😉

Turned out to be basic advice on “using” Excel.

Moving around a bit I found an archive of “how-to” posts and other resources for digital journalists and anyone interested in finding/analyzing content on the Web.

You won’t find discussions of Lamda Architecture here but you will find nuts-an-bolts type information, ready to be put into practice.

Visit Interhacktives and pass it along to others.

I first saw this in a tweet by Journalism Tools.

KeeFarce Cracks KeePass

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 8:40 am

Researcher releases Free Hacking Tool that Can Steal all Your Secrets from Password Manager by Swati Khandelwal.

Swati advises that Denis Andzakovic has written and released KeeFarce on GitHub.

From the GitHub page:

KeeFarce allows for the extraction of KeePass 2.x password database information from memory. The cleartext information, including usernames, passwords, notes and url’s are dumped into a CSV file in %AppData%

…

KeeFarce has been tested on:

  • KeePass 2.28, 2.29 and 2.30 – running on Windows 8.1 – both 32 and 64 bit.

This should also work on older Windows machines (win 7 with a recent service pack). If you’re targeting something other than the above, then testing in a lab environment before hand is recommended.

It has a cool logo:

KeeFarce

I don’t have an estimate for when the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) will upgrade to Windows 7 making it vulnerable to KeeFarce.

Until that happens, use older hacking techniques (circa late 1990’s/early 2000’s) when targeting the OPM.

Personally I would mirror their backups, when they run that is, rather than doing anything fancy. What’s suspicious about a backup? That way you have current data without all the media hysteria.

PS: In case you want to become vulnerable or want a suggestion to make someone else vulnerable: KeyPass.

November 3, 2015

UpSet: Visualization of Intersecting Sets [Authoring Topic Maps – Waterfall or Agile?]

Filed under: Set Intersection,Sets,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 8:43 pm

UpSet: Visualization of Intersecting Sets by Alexander Lex, Nils Gehlenborg, Hendrik Strobelt, Romain Vuillemot, Hanspeter Pfister.

From the post:

Understanding relationships between sets is an important analysis task that has received widespread attention in the visualization community. The major challenge in this context is the combinatorial explosion of the number of set intersections if the number of sets exceeds a trivial threshold. To address this, we introduce UpSet, a novel visualization technique for the quantitative analysis of sets, their intersections, and aggregates of intersections.

UpSet is focused on creating task-driven aggregates, communicating the size and properties of aggregates and intersections, and a duality between the visualization of the elements in a dataset and their set membership. UpSet visualizes set intersections in a matrix layout and introduces aggregates based on groupings and queries. The matrix layout enables the effective representation of associated data, such as the number of elements in the aggregates and intersections, as well as additional summary statistics derived from subset or element attributes.

Sorting according to various measures enables a task-driven analysis of relevant intersections and aggregates. The elements represented in the sets and their associated attributes are visualized in a separate view. Queries based on containment in specific intersections, aggregates or driven by attribute filters are propagated between both views. UpSet also introduces several advanced visual encodings and interaction methods to overcome the problems of varying scales and to address scalability.
…

Definitely paper and software to have on hand while you read and explore AggreSet, which I mentioned yesterday in: Exploring and Visualizing Pre-Topic Map Data.

Interested to hear your thoughts comparing the two.

Something to keep in mind is that topic map authoring can be thought of as a waterfall model, where ontological decisions, merging criteria, etc. are worked out in advance versus using an agile methodology, that explores data and iterates over it, allowing the topic map to grow and evolve.

An evolutionary topic map could well miss places the waterfall method would catch but if no one goes there, or not often, is that a real issue?

I must admit, I am less than fond of “agile” methodologies but that is from a bad experience where an inappropriate person was in charge of a project and thought a one paragraph description was sufficient for a new CMS system built upon subversion. Sufficient because the project was “agile.” Fortunately that project was tanked after a long struggle with management.

Perhaps I should think about the potential use of “agile” methodologies in authoring and evolving topic maps.

Suggestions/comments?

Locating a Compiled Federal Legislative History: A Beginner’s Guide

Filed under: Law,Law - Sources — Patrick Durusau @ 8:19 pm

Locating a Compiled Federal Legislative History: A Beginner’s Guide by Robert Brammer.

From the post:

Compiling a federal legislative history may seem daunting, but it does not have to be. We hope, through our last few Beginner’s Guides, that we have made this process easier for researchers. There is another, possibly less complicated, option for finding legislative history documents that we wanted to be sure to highlight — determining whether someone has already done the work for you and created a legislative history report! There are many sources of pre-compiled legislative histories available that you will want to check before compiling your own. These compilations range from finding aids that help you locate a compiled legislative history to monographs that contain the legislative history for one act.
…

If you want less friction when researching federal legislative history, Robert has a number of suggestions to help with just that task.

On the other hand, if you want to have a sense of frustration, despair and ultimately joy at persevering, then compile a legislative history on your own. 😉

Seriously, government documents, to say nothing of legislative history, is a world unto itself. There are librarians who don’t do anything but government documents. They are a god-send if you do have to use a depository library.

Of course, legislative histories are for those who take the surface of legislation at face value. For all of the surface action, there are deeper currents of benefit and personalities that are being played out in the legislative dance.

By and large, official legislative histories don’t give you that view.

Can Good Web Design Create Joyful User Experiences? [Is Friction Good for the Soul?]

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Users,UX — Patrick Durusau @ 8:01 pm

Can Good Web Design Create Joyful User Experiences? by Daniel O’Neil.

From the post:

The next revolution in web design is Joy.

Karen Holtzblatt, who is one of the creators of modern interaction design, argues that the discussion about interaction design needs to change to focus more on the idea of “Joy,”—for want of a better word—both in life and in use.

What does this look like for users of sites? Well, in short, the fundamental role of website and app designers is to help users avoid doing anything hard at all.

And yet we don’t always want things to be easy; in fact if everything is easy, the sense of accomplishment in life can be lost. Jesse Schell recently gave a talk called “Lessons in Game Design” that explores this idea. In Schell’s talk, he gives a lot of examples of people who seek out—in fact, expect—challenges in their gaming experience, even if they were not easy. Schell argues that many games cannot be good unless such challenges exist, largely because games need to appeal to the core facets of self-determination theory.

…

I am quite intrigued by the discussion of “friction:”

…
The first concept is friction. Any effort we take as human beings involves specific steps, be they throwing off the covers when we wake up to browsing a website. The feeling of fulfillment is in the stated goal or objective at that moment in time. When there is friction in the steps to achieve that goal, the effort to accomplish it increases it, but more importantly the steps are a distraction from the specific accomplishment. If, for example, I wanted to drive somewhere but I had to scrape ice off my windshield first, I would be experiencing friction. The step distracts from the objective.
…

Recalling Steve Newcomb’s metaphor of semantic friction between universes of discourse.

The post goes on to point out that some “friction” may not be viewed as an impediment. Can be an impediment but a particular user may not see it that way.

Makes me wonder if information systems (think large search engines and their equally inept cousins, both electronic and paper) are inefficient and generate friction on purpose?

To give their users a sense of accomplishment by wrangling a sensible answer from a complex (to an outsider) data set.

I haven’t done any due diligence on that notion but it is something I will try to follow up on.

Perhaps topic maps need to reduce “semantic friction” gradually or only in some cases. Make sure that users still feel like they are accomplishing something.

Would enabling users to contribute to a mapping or “tweeting” results to co-workers generate a sense of accomplishment? Hard to say without testing.

Certainly broadens software design parameters beyond not failing and/or becoming a software pestilence like Adobe Flash.

Glue [icon/sound for lossy search engine use]

Filed under: Graphics — Patrick Durusau @ 7:29 pm

Glue

Glue is a simple command line tool to generate sprites:

$ glue source output
  • Automatic Sprite (Image + Metadata) creation including:
    • css (less, scss)
    • cocos2d
    • json (array, hash)
    • CAAT
  • Automatic multi-dpi retina sprite creation.
  • Support for multi-sprite projects.
  • Create sprites from multiple folders (recursively).
  • Multiple algorithms available.
  • Automatic crop of unnecessary transparent borders around source images.
  • Configurable paddings and margin per image, sprite or project.
  • Watch option to keep glue running watching for file changes.
  • Project-, Sprite- and Image-level configuration via static config files.
  • Customizable output using jinja templates.
  • CSS: Optional .less/.scss output format.
  • CSS: Configurable cache busting for sprite images.
  • CSS: Customizable class names.

An example from Your First Sprite:

sprites

What sprites would you make for topic map operations?

If you are graphically inclined and taking requests, I would like to have a sprite of a toilet with a flushing sound that pops up every time I navigate away from a search engine result.

Good way to reinforce the reality that the use of standard search engines is a lossy proposition.

Think of paying a firm full of lawyers who are all using standard search engines. With every new search, whatever they found during the last one is lost to other searchers.

Makes your wallet heat up just thinking about it. 😉

XML Prague 2016 – Call for Papers [Looking for a co-author?]

Filed under: Conferences,XML,XPath,XQuery,XSLT — Patrick Durusau @ 6:54 pm

XML Prague 2016 – Call for Papers

Important Dates:

  • November 30th – End of CFP (full paper or extended abstract)
  • January 4th – Notification of acceptance/rejection of paper to authors
  • January 25th – Final paper
  • February 11-13, XML Prague 2016

From the webpage:

XML Prague 2016 now welcomes submissions for presentations on the following topics:

  • Markup and the Extensible Web – HTML5, XHTML, Web Components, JSON and XML sharing the common space
  • Semantic visions and the reality – micro-formats, semantic data in business, linked data
  • Publishing for the 21th century – publishing toolchains, eBooks, EPUB, DITA, DocBook, CSS for print, …
  • XML databases and Big Data – XML storage, indexing, query languages, …
  • State of the XML Union – updates on specs, the XML community news, …

All proposals will be submitted for review by a peer review panel made up of the XML Prague Program Committee. Submissions will be chosen based on interest, applicability, technical merit, and technical correctness.

Accepted papers will be included in published conference proceedings.

Authors should strive to contain original material and belong in the topics previously listed. Submissions which can be construed as product or service descriptions (adverts) will likely be deemed inappropriate. Other approaches such as use case studies are welcome but must be clearly related to conference topics.

Accepted presenters must submit their full paper (on time) and give their presentation and answer questions in English, as well as follow the XML Prague 2016 conference guidelines.

I don’t travel but am interested in co-authoring a paper with someone who plans on attending XML Prague 2016. Contact me at patrick@durusau.net.

Python Mode for Processing

Filed under: Graphics,Processing,Python — Patrick Durusau @ 6:35 pm

Python Mode for Processing

From the post:

Python Mode for Processing 3 is out! Download it through the contributions manager, and try it out.

Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community. Since 2001, Processing has promoted software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology. Today, there are tens of thousands of students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists who use Processing for learning, prototyping, and production.

Processing was initially released with a Java-based syntax, and with a lexicon of graphical primitives that took inspiration from OpenGL, Postscript, Design by Numbers, and other sources. With the gradual addition of alternative progamming interfaces — including JavaScript, Python, and Ruby — it has become increasingly clear that Processing is not a single language, but rather, an arts-oriented approach to learning, teaching, and making things with code.

We are thrilled to make available this public release of the Python Mode for Processing, and its associated documentation. More is on the way! If you’d like to help us improve the implementation of Python Mode and its documentation, please find us on Github!

When I see new language support, I am reminded that semantic diversity is far more commonplace than you would think.

Enjoy!

I first saw this in a tweet by Lynn Cherny.

Honesty in Response to Critical Vulnerability (What Was He Thinking?)

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 4:33 pm

I’m sure you have read some variation on Critical Xen vulnerability went undiscovered for seven years by Mark Stockley over the past day or so.

Mark has a good summary of the issue, etc., but I want to highlight the response of Ian Jackson, who Mark quotes in his post:

…

Ian Jackson, a long-time open source veteran and a member of the Xen Project Security Team provides a response on the Xen Project blog.

He explains why he thinks some people have the impression that Xen is buggier than other similar products:

Unlike almost all corporations, and even most Free Software projects, the Xen Project properly discloses, via an advisory, every vulnerability discovered in supported configurations.

... For researchers developing new analysis techniques, Xen is a prime target. A significant proportion of the reports to security@xenproject are the result of applying new scanning techniques to our codebase. So our existing code is being audited, with a focus on the areas and techniques likely to discover the most troublesome bugs.

More interesting than that though is his honest appraisal of the state of computer security and what he sees as our collective attitude to it:

The general state of computer security in almost all systems is very poor. The reason for this is quite simple: we all put up with it. We, collectively, choose convenience and functionality: both when we decide which software to run for ourselves, and when we decide what contributions to make to the projects we care about. For almost all software there is much stronger pressure (from all sides) to add features, than to improve security.

Ultimately, of course, a Free Software project like Xen is what the whole community makes it. In the project as a whole we get a lot more submissions of new functionality than we get submissions aimed at improving the security.

In other words, if we want better computer security then it necessarily comes at the expense of something else (typically, something shiny.)

…

From a marketing/upgrade perspective, you know who wins in a struggle between features and security.

At least until consumers start voting with their feet in favor of security and not features. Liability for failures of security would help a lot to tip the balance in favor of security. Are there any common law judges listening?

One other bit of useful (if not encouraging) news from Mark’s post: The bug became apparent only when looking at logic flows and not code. Add another dimension to your analysis, logic flows.

November 2, 2015

#OpKKK Engaged: … [Dangers of skimming news]

Filed under: Government,Social Media — Patrick Durusau @ 7:30 pm

#OpKKK Engaged: Anonymous Begins Exposing Politicians with Ties to the KKK by Matt Agorist.

From the post:

Over the last week, the hacktivist group known as Anonymous has been saying that they will expose some 1,000 United States politicians who have ties to the KKK.

On Monday morning, just past midnight, the hackers made true on their “threat.”

In a video posted to the We are Anonymous Facebook page Monday, the group began to release the names of those they claim have ties to the KKK.

In the video, Anonymous states that they are not going to release the home addresses of the politicians in fear of violent retaliation against the accused racists. But the group did release the politicians’ full name, the municipalities in which they work, and the addresses of their political offices.

While the video doesn’t come close to the promised 1,000 names, Anonymous did release a partial list.

It is rumored that Anonymous plans to release all the names on the 5th of November, also known as Guy Fawkes Night. Anonymous is synonymous with Guy Fawkes as the popular mask is used to shield the faces of its members during their broadcasts and protests.
…

I must admit I had my own doubts about #OpKKK when I heard the number “1,000.”

That illustrates the danger of half-listening or skimming a news feed.

The number was surely higher than “1,000.”

Turns out that #OpKKK means a direct connection to the KKK and not just supporting their policies. That was my mistake. Just supporting KKK objectives, the number would be far higher.

Take that as a lesson to read carefully when going through news stories.

Failure to release addresses

The failure to release addresses of those named, “so nobody gets it in their mind to take out their own justice against them” is highly questionable.

Who does Anonymous think is going to administer “justice?”

With 1,000 political leaders having direct ties to the KKK, who in the government will call them to account?

The position of Anonymous reminds me of Wikileaks, the Guardian and the New York Times failing to release all of the Snowden documents and other government document dumps in full.

“Oh, oh, we are afraid to endanger lives.” Really? The government from who those documents were liberated has not hesitated to murder, torture and blight the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions.

Rather than giving the people legitimate targets for at least some of those mis-deeds, you wring your hands and worry about possible collateral damage?

Sorry, all social change invovles collateral damage to innocents. Why do you think it doesn’t? The current systematic and structural racism exacts a heavy toll on innocents every day in the United States. Is that more acceptable because you don’t have blood on your hands from it? (Or don’t think you do.)

The term for that is “moral cowardice.”

Is annoying the status quo, feeling righteous, associating with other “righteous” folk, all there is to your view of social change?

If it is, welcome to the status quo from here to eternity.

Justice Department on iPhone Hacking: Call Chaouki Bekrar @Zerodium

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Government,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 5:01 pm

Somebody Just Claimed a $1 Million Bounty for Hacking the iPhone by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai.

From the post:

Apple devices are widely considered extremely secure and hard to hack. But as the internet adage says, everything can be hacked—even the new iPhone.

Over the weekend, somebody claimed the $1 million bounty set by the new startup Zerodium, according to its founder Chaouki Bekrar, a notorious merchant of unknown, or zero-day, vulnerabilities.

zerodium

The challenge consisted of finding a way to remotely jailbreak a new iPhone or iPad running the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system iOS (in this case iOS 9.1 and 9.2b), allowing the attacker to install any app he or she wants with full privileges. The initial exploit, according to the terms of the challenge, had to come through Safari, Chrome, or a text or multimedia message.

This essentially meant that a participant needed to find a series, or a chain, of unknown zero-day bugs, not just one, according to Patrick Wardle, a researcher that works at security firm Synack. For example, the Chinese white hat hacking team Pangu already found a way to jailbreak the new iPhone, but that method didn’t work remotely.
…

The Justice Department should stop pestering Apple (Justice Department Press Gang News) and contact Chaouki Bekrar at Zerodium for an appropriate hack.

Magistrate Judge James Orenstein should find as a matter of fact (take judicial notice is the fancy way to say it) that the Justice Department has reasonable alternatives to forcing Apple into involuntary servitude to crack the iPhone in question.

The Justice Department would have to pay Zerodium for that service but better an honest commercial transaction than reviving slavery to benefit the government.

PS: Yes, I know the issue with Judge Orenstein involves an earlier version of iPhone software but the fact remains that the Justice Department hasn’t exhausted its remedies before applying to the court under All Writs. The government should have to show that the NSA, CIA, and commercial exploit vendors like Zerodium can’t help before turning to the All Writs Act.

PS: The Justice Department call follow @Zerodium on Twitter.

Exploring and Visualizing Pre-Topic Map Data

Filed under: Aggregation,Data Aggregation,Sets,Topic Maps,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 3:06 pm

AggreSet: Rich and Scalable Set Exploration using Visualizations of Element Aggregations by M. Adil Yalçın, Niklas Elmqvist, and Benjamin B. Bederson.

Abstract:

Datasets commonly include multi-value (set-typed) attributes that describe set memberships over elements, such as genres per movie or courses taken per student. Set-typed attributes describe rich relations across elements, sets, and the set intersections. Increasing the number of sets results in a combinatorial growth of relations and creates scalability challenges. Exploratory tasks (e.g. selection, comparison) have commonly been designed in separation for set-typed attributes, which reduces interface consistency. To improve on scalability and to support rich, contextual exploration of set-typed data, we present AggreSet. AggreSet creates aggregations for each data dimension: sets, set-degrees, set-pair intersections, and other attributes. It visualizes the element count per aggregate using a matrix plot for set-pair intersections, and histograms for set lists, set-degrees and other attributes. Its non-overlapping visual design is scalable to numerous and large sets. AggreSet supports selection, filtering, and comparison as core exploratory tasks. It allows analysis of set relations inluding subsets, disjoint sets and set intersection strength, and also features perceptual set ordering for detecting patterns in set matrices. Its interaction is designed for rich and rapid data exploration. We demonstrate results on a wide range of datasets from different domains with varying characteristics, and report on expert reviews and a case study using student enrollment and degree data with assistant deans at a major public university.

These two videos will give you a better overview of AggreSet than I can. The first one is about 30 seconds and the second one about 5 minutes.

The visualization of characters from Les Misérables (the second video) is a dynamite demonstration of how you could explore pre-topic map data with an eye towards creating roles and associations between characters as well as with the text.

First use case that pops to mind would be harvesting the fan posts on Harry Potter and crossing them with a similar listing of characters from the Harry Potter book series. With author, date, book, character, etc., relationships.

While you are at the GitHub site: https://github.com/adilyalcin/Keshif/tree/master/AggreSet, be sure to bounce up a level to Keshif:

Keshif is a web-based tool that lets you browse and understand datasets easily.

To start using Keshif:

  • Get the source code from github,
  • Explore the existing datasets and their source codes, and
  • Check out the wiki.

Or just go directly to the Keshif site, with 110 datasets (as of today)>

For the impatient, see Loading Data.

For the even more impatient:

…

You can load data to Keshif from :

  • Google Sheets
  • Text File
    • On Google Drive
    • On Dropbox
    • File on your webserver

Text File Types

Keshif can be used with the following data file types:

  • CSV / TSV
  • JSON
  • XML
  • Any other file type that you can load and parse in JavaScript. See Custom Data Loading

Hint: The dataset explorer at the frontpage indexes demos by file type and resource. Filter by data source to find example source code on how to apply a specific file loading approach.

…

The critical factor, in addition to its obvious usefulness, is that it works in a web browser. You don’t have to install software, set Java paths, download additional libraries, etc.

Are you using the modern web browser as your target for user facing topic map applications?

I first saw this in a tweet by Christophe Lalanne.

Visualizing Chess Data With ggplot

Filed under: Games,Ggplot2,R,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 11:33 am

Visualizing Chess Data With ggplot by Joshua Kunst.

Sales of traditional chess sets peak during the holiday season. The following graphic does not include sales of chess gadgets, chess software, or chess computers:

trends-081414-weeklydollar

(Source: Terapeak Trends: Which Tabletop Games Sell Best on eBay? by Aron Hsiao.)

Joshua’s post is a guide to using and visualizing chess data under the following topics:

  1. The Data
  2. Piece Movements
  3. Survival rates
  4. Square usage by player
  5. Distributions for the first movement
  6. Who captures whom

Joshua is using public chess data but it’s just a short step to using data from your own chess games or those of friends from your local chess club. 😉

Visualize the play of openings, defenses, players + openings/defenses, you are limited only by your imagination.

Give a chess friend a visualization they can’t buy in any store!

PS: Check out: rchess a Chess Package for R also by Joshua Kunst.

I first saw this in a tweet by Christophe Lalanne.

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