In “Immaterials: The ghost in the field”, a film by Jack Schulze of BERG and Timo Arnall of the Touch project, they visually map out the invisible fields produced by RFID readers to better understand the technology

Netflix recently awarded their $1 million prize to a seven person group of statisticians and computer scientists for improving the accuracy of customer movie recommendations by ten percent.

Attempting to escape chain restaurants and big box stores in the US can seem like an impossible task. On a recent road trip, artist Stephen Von Worley noticed that they were popping up everywhere, even in the middle of formerly barren landscapes.

Mint, the newly acquired financial startup, crunches user data to reveal which American cities cut spending the most in 2009.

Jer Thorp of the blprnt blog has created a simple but compelling data visualization of Twitter posts across the planet which say “good morning” in some way.

Earlier this year, we wrote about the creation of Data.gov- a site that allows access to a large amount of US government data. DataMasher is a tool that takes these vast quantities of information and allows you to whittle it down into simpler terms- offering an easy way to get hard data on certain topics without any intrusive media spin.

Backblaze, a Silicon Valley startup that provides unlimited online file storage for $5 a month (USD), is offering the cost-effective methodology they developed for their storage pods on their website for free on their company’s blog

A new iPhone application offers to help you understand how happy you are, and what makes you happy, by tracking what factors are associated with your personal happiness.
The TrackYourHappiness application is actually part of psychology research being performed by Matt Killinsgworth at Harvard.  The site identifies the mission of the project as a
“new scientific research project that aims to use modern technology to help answer this age-old question. Using this site in conjunction with your iPhone, you can systematically track your happiness and find out what factors for you personally – are associated with greater happiness.”
Upon signing up for the program, [...]

Taking your phone to bed has up until now meant answering e-mails and working until it is time to shut off the lights. Not anymore. With the new iPhone Passion application your lovemaking can be rated on a scale from 1 to 10, or “bad” to “perfect”. By strapping the phone to arm or belt, users are rated on duration, activity and climax.

Yesterday, the Obama administration launched Data.gov to allow the public access to large set of raw data in a variety of readable formats.  The move marks a new step in the government’s use of technology and appeals to the growing interaction between average citizens and lawmakers.  While the site is still noticeably lacking the wealth of information the US government holds, it starts a number of interesting projects such as the access to widgets tracking the H1N1 Flu and the NOAA Weather Watch.  Wired writes about the current state of the site,
“Data.gov says that our information is your information,” said [...]

Digital visualizer Aaron Koblin started his lecture at the 2009 OFFF in Lisbon with a quote from Bruce Schneier of the BBC:
Data is the pollution of the information age.
While it was a theme that seemed to be running through the OFF conference this wasn’t what he was going to talk about. He said while it’s important to be aware of the extreme abundance of data it’s ironic that his job is to use it. With the vast volume of data he argued that we can make insights that we never could have seen before. He said:
“Data tells stories about our [...]

Using 35 million geotagged photographs from Flickr, David Crandall and a team from Cornell University have created accurate global and city maps from the data alone. Plotting the raw data from the photos (geotags, text descriptions, key visual features) onto a blank canvas revealed the planet’s familiar landscape, as well as  where in the world people were placing their attention. They also discovered some interesting facts from the experiment, such as: New York is the world’s most photographed city (12 million images), and the midtown Apple Store is the fifth most photographed location in the city.
[New Scientist via The Morning [...]

Dedicated to featuring the visual beauty of happy marriages between art and data, Infosthetics put out a call to its readers to come up with their best graphical representations of a set of data of their choice. The only catch was they had to construct it out of paper. Charlene Lam of Umeå, Sweden won for her submission called ‘Petals’. Her inspiration came from both strips of paper discarded next to a paper trimmer and, because of her extreme northern latitude location, a yearning for sunlight.
Our winter days are short and summer days are long. Using the actual and [...]