One can not help but wonder how many Harvard freshmen would pass this exam today. Click to see the Harvard admission document.

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. I have divided the tools into three groups: Libraries for using in your own web project. Client side applications that generate a standalone visualization. Hosted applications to which you upload your data and create visualizations in the cloud. 1. Visualization libraries for using in your own web project A general recommendation is to stick with libraries that work on as many client platforms as possible. This means staying away from libraries that require Flash and Silverlight. The following libraries use javascript and SVG with various fallbacks and should work well on modern phones and tablets. ...

Plant boy

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.

I did a quick excursion using the Microsoft Kinect in Processing with Daniel Shiffmans excellent Kinect library. Source code for Kinect Pong is here.

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. On the management of software projects: Programming management will continue to deserve its current poor reputation for cost and schedule effectiveness until such time as a more complete understanding of the program design process is achieved. We build systems like the Wright brothers built airplanes — build the whole thing, push it off the cliff, let it crash, and start over again. ...

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. A lot of people are thinking about how we can reduce household energy use these days. Changing household energy use can be a challenge because to most people there is no working feedback loop available. Energy use is invisible. My own feedback loop consists of getting a monthly invoice displaying the cost I had for the previous month (e.g. “278 SEK”). That is a lousy feedback loop if you want to change behavior. I can not even see how much energy I used. Not that it matters because that information is useless without knowing what would be a reasonable level to compare with. And getting the information once a month does not provide a feedback loop for me to see the effect of my immediate behavior. ...

I want to see how shapes appear in long exposures when they are lit by a computer controlled laser beam. Check Flickr for updates.

A small visualization hack for the Eurostat Hackday on december 16.