SHODAN LIVES
Notes and links from @colemanm.
China Installed More Than 10,000,000 Surveillance Cameras in 2010 »
Talk about a stream of “big data”…
In May, Shanghai announced that a team of 4,000 monitor its surveillance feeds to ensure round-the-clock coverage. The south-western municipality of Chongqing has announced plans to add 200,000 cameras by 2014 because “310,000 digital eyes are not enough”.
Urumqi, which saw vicious ethnic violence in 2009, installed 17,000 high-definition, riot-proof cameras last year to ensure “seamless” surveillance. Fast-developing Inner Mongolia plans to have 400,000 units by 2012. In the city of Changsha, the Furong district alone reportedly has 40,000 – one for every 10 inhabitants.
[via publicintelligence]
Undisciplined spending in the name of defense »
A Reuters op-ed piece critical of NGA.
It’s ridiculous to claim that Google creates the same product as NGA for a fraction of the cost and then “gives it away for free”… A flagrant misunderstanding of geospatial data and how it’s produced.
I only call attention to this article for these insane stats on NGA:
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has 16,000 employees — nearly as many as Google — and a “black” budget thought to be at least $5 billion per year. The NGA is building a new headquarters complex with the stunning price of $1.8 billion, nearly the cost of the Freedom Tower rising in Manhattan. That new headquarters, near Fort Belvoir, Virginia, will be the third-largest structure in the Washington area, nearly rivaling the Pentagon in size.
Using data from the Audioscrobbler API and Amazon, tuneglue can visualize webs of relationships around any artist in Last.fm’s data catalog.
GeoPlanet Explorer, a tool for browsing the Yahoo! geolocation hierarchical database, GeoPlanet.
The tool queries Yahoo’s GeoPlanet API for a WOEID of a “place,” which is Yahoo’s clever method of uniquely identifying any “location of interest” in the world, with something more loose yet more descriptive than just a lat/long. Passing a WOEID to the API returns lists of locations spatially-related to your search, like parent/child/sibling places and historical “ancestor” records.
The developer used YQL, YUI, and Yahoo Maps to put it all together. Check out the source code on Github for the full experience.
Visualizing app development and code commits on Twitter using code_swarm.
Code and document changes are represented as points swirling around the users making the changes and repository commits. Makes boring version control look really cool.
The Eclipse IDE project has a really active community.
Try to figure out what data each map displays. I got 3 out of 22 correct (they’re not easy).
2D Boy » Pay-What-You-Want Birthday Sale Results »
For the first birthday of World of Goo, 2D Boy put the game on sale with one of them “name your own price” deals.
The results were interesting. They made a lot of money for a year old game, and they deserve all of it.
Visualizing the US power grid.
A neat data viz map of the US that allows you to see major power line arteries, types of power plants and their locations, and what source the power comes from in your area. There are even layers that show solar and wind power, and where those are most effective.
Looks like Florida is powered by:
- 38% Gas
- 28% Coal
- 17% Oil
- 13% Nuclear
13% of Florida energy comes from three nuclear facilities: Crystal River, Turkey Point, and St. Lucie. That’s pretty impressive. Nuclear power provides 48% of Illinois’ energy, and a whopping 71% of Vermont’s. It’s also interesting to see how important hydro power is to the Pacific Northwest, mostly sourced from the Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph dams on the Columbia River.
(benfry)
World War II DB »
A repository of items set up in a relational database form. Includes events, people, photos, equipment, countries, etc. Doesn’t seem like it’s structured like a wiki, at least not right now.
(mefi)
Girl Turk: Mechanical Turk Meets Girl Talk's "Feed the Animals" »
Andy Baio from Waxy.org uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to analyze data about the sample’s used in Girl Talk’s album Feed the Animals.
You can download GT’s album here, and choose whether to pay or not to pay.
Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America »
The viral infection that is Wal-Mart.
via the song chart meme set by boyshapedbox
