David Lidsky's Blog, page 4676

Obama's Data.gov Relaunch: Twitter-Tracked Airport Security Lines, County-by-County Health, and More

Part of Obama's pledge for greater governmental transparency in his first term was the website Data.gov, a massive repository for datasets on all manner of government statistics, including hot-button topics like healthcare and the environment. It's come a long way since launch--it now has more than 250,000 datasets, compared to 47 at launch--but it never received the popularity (read: web traffic) the administration expected. That was in large part because it was a massive repository of...

Infovideographic: Seven Years of Flickr Source Code, Visualized

[image error]Daniel Bogan, known as Waferbaby (whether he's a nerd, Catholic, or a Catholic nerd is left unclear), created this mesmerizing visualization of Flickr.com, Yahoo's excellent and immensely popular image uploading service. Thanks to Gizmodo for finding this little gem:

Flickr/Gource from Daniel Bogan on Vimeo.

To create this, he used Gource, hosted here on Google. Gource's visualizations are based on the structure of a tree--the root directory is, coincidentally enough, the "roots," with other...

Google Introduces WebM, Web Media Format to Compete with H.264

[image error]The first day of Google's I/O conference was short on exciting consumer news--no Google TV, no Android 2.2, just a bunch of developer tools (I know, I know, it's a developer conference, but we're not developers, and we want consumer-focused announcements). The one exception might be the introduction of WebM, an "open web media project" that's focused on providing an entirely open-source, free web standard for audio and video to compete with H.264, which is in part owned by both Apple and...

The Man Who Changed the Ears of the World: R.I.P. Dr. Fritz Sennheiser

Musicians, and those who toil in the radio, TV or film industries may find life today sounding quieter, a little less crisp, even. Dr. Fritz Sennheiser, the founder of the eponymous family engineering firm, has died a few days after his 98th birthday. The good doctor leaves an enormous legacy, having been the driving force behind the creation of some of the best products in the audio industry, including a mic that won him an award from AMPAS, as well as an Emmy and a Grammy. The product that...

National Research Council: We Need to Act Now to Mitigate the Effects of Climate Change

The climate change debate is filled with questionable reports and studies from both sides. But now the National Research Council,  an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, has come out with three comprehensive new reports claiming that the U.S. needs to take immediate action to mitigate the inevitable effects of climate change. All three reports were requested by Congress and funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The first of the three reports, Advancing...

Augmented Realty

Potentially disruptive news for Realtors: Augmented reality browser Junaio has partnered with real estate search engines ROFO and HotPads—commercial and residential, respectively—to make finding the perfect space easy, sans wily brokers and landlords.

Just hold your phone up to a city block or neighborhood, and the app shows what spaces are available for sale or rent, as well as square footage, pictures, contact information, and price listings. Having knowledge of neighborhood pricing and...

Why Are Tar Balls Showing Up in the Florida Keys?

The mammoth Gulf oil spill is bad enough without oil traveling through currents to other parts of the world. But that's exactly what has happened--the oil slick has reportedly been captured by the Loop Current, a fast ocean current that moves from the Caribbean Sea into the Gulf of Mexico before looping west and south, exiting through the Florida Straits. Earlier this week, authorities thought the worst when approximately 50 tar balls showed up on beaches in the Florida Keys. The good...

Barnes And Noble's Nook and Pubit: A Self-Publisher's Heaven

Barnes and Noble are really, really getting into this e-publishing game. In addition to combating Amazon's Kindle platform with the Nook e-reader and apps, they've also planned a self-publishing e-book system for authors, leveraging the Nook store.

The system is called Pubit, and it's "coming summer 2010" according to the Web site.

From a sheer branding perspective, it couldn't be a worse name. Seriously, how did you pronounce it when you read it the first time? Did it remind you of...

Pantone Expands From Color Services to Hotels (With Rooms to Dye for)

Pantone has been aggressively pursuing a new line of business: Product licensing, which culminates today in a new Pantone Hotel.

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Every designer knows Pantone: Their numbered color-matching system
identifies that exactly perfect shade precisely, ensuring its fidelity
all the way to production. Yet even though it's a $200 million business,
it's hardly a household name. They're hoping to change that with consumer products--and today, their latest licensing venture, the Pantone Hotel, opened...

Body Fluid-Powered Fuel Cell Could Turn Pacemaker Patients Into Steve Austin

Fuel cell technology is hyped as a possible future power system for electric vehicles, but it's actually got a plethora of uses: The latest, and perhaps greatest, is a glucose cell for medical devices that could get its "fuel" from your body.

The innovation is coming from France's Joseph Fourier University, where they've been experimenting with the complex physics and chemistry needed to create a miniature glucose-powered electricity generating device. The goal was to make the device...