A small hack to simplify the application for temporary parental benefit for care of children from the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (Försäkringskassan). Typically this involves multiple steps in a web browser. Now, moving a doll to a square and the computer will send relevant information to kindergarten and the social insurance agency.
Method and system for monitoring Lego hate on Twitter
(Cunningly illustrated using patent application art). A small Python script monitors twitter for the phrase “I hate lego”. Upon finding a matching tweet it sends a signal to an Arduino board that turns a servo pushing a small lego figurine over the edge of a table. Live example here (at approx 7:30). A hack for the Make All event in Stockholm.
Meanwhile, on the west coast of Sweden
A small crab attacked my GoPro camera.
Visualizing Statistics in Minecraft
Data about public sector spending is often hard to understand and compare. Statistics about government is often presented in tables. In this hack I have used open data from Eurostat (the EU statistics agency) about government expenditure for a set of countries and rendered sets of boxes in a Minecraft world. This makes it possible to explore the data by walking (flying) around the world.
The Queue Ticket UX
The queue ticket machine in Uppsala, Sweden.
Publishing Open Data – Do you really need an API?
As open data is gaining momentum an increasing number of organizations are thinking about ways to make their data available for others to use. Here are some thought on how to approach design issues when making open government data available.
Harvard University Entrance Exam 1870
One can not help but wonder how many Harvard freshmen would pass this exam today.
Data visualization tools
With the increasing availability of big/open data more people discover a need to make it understandable. One way of understanding data is by looking at it. As I have received a lot of questions lately here is a roundup of tools you can use to create visualizations of data.
when other people take notice of an individual’s identity-related behavioral intention, this gives the individual a premature sense of possessing the aspired-to identity
Did you think that by announcing your goals you would feel more pressure to work to achieve them? Apparently works the opposite way.
When Intentions Go Public – Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap? by Peter M. Gollwitzer et al.
Pointless Pong with Processing and the Kinect
I did a quick excursion using the Microsoft Kinect in Processing with Daniel Shiffmans excellent Kinect library. Source code for Kinect Pong is here.
Quotes from the Nato Software Engineering Conference in 1968
Sometimes we forget that other people have faced the same problems we face today in software development. These quotes are from the proceedings of the Nato Software Engineering conference in 1968.