One can not help but wonder how many Harvard freshmen would pass this exam today. Click to see the Harvard admission document.
Harvard University Entrance Exam 1870
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. Continue reading
Plant boy
Keeping goals to yourself increase chances of completing them?
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.
Barcelona Run
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. Continue reading
Changing energy behavior with real-time feedback
In this blog post I try to put household energy usage in a control theory context to see if we can find better ways to influence behavior. Continue reading
A laser scanner for photographic experiments
I want to see how shapes appear in long exposures when they are lit by a computer controlled laser beam. Check Flickr for updates.
Visualizing Eurostat data with the JIT
A small visualization hack for the Eurostat Hackday on december 16.
A lightweight semantic interoperability framework for countries and large organizations (and small ones)
This post is a summary of some ideas for a lightweight semantic interoperability framework It is mainly a composition of existing open standards to form a framework for organisations to be able to ensure that semantic and technical descriptions stay connected over time. The idea is to provide a framework that allows for an increasing semantic interoperability emerging over time without having a large centralized organisation defining vocabularies. Continue reading
Making FuzzyFinder work in MacVim 7.3
I have seen many posts that are having trouble getting FuzzyFinder to work in MacVim. In certain configurations you will see multiple errors “E806: using Float as a String”. This is because some locales make MacVim treat floating point numbers differently. Here is how I did to make it work on my system (OS X 10.6.4 and MacVim 7.3). As an added bonus we will map it to the Apple-T key and default it to subdirectory search. Continue reading
A short summary of Codemocracy 2010
On september 4-5 we had our first open data hack day here in Sweden called Codemocracy. The event was a success (thank you Martin Svalin!) with close to 50 participants hacking away at various data sets. I did an intro on the state of open data but tried to keep it short so that everyone could start coding as soon as possible. Continue reading
Beta testing the UR TWEETS SUCK Tee
My son has the dubious pleasure of being the primary beta tester of T-shirt messages. This time it is the first draft of the model that will be called “Twat”. Turned out pretty OK… Also see the Ballmer Tee.
Implement open data for EU institutions
Jonathan Gray of the Open Knowledge Foundation participated in a conference of the Communia project, a European thematic network on the digital public domain. In a great post about the meeting at the OKFN blog, he recommends two improvements to the current PSI work; 1: Broaden the scope of the PSI Directive to include publicly funded cultural heritage organisations and 2: Broaden the evidence base for opening up PSI. Continue reading