Category: Thoughts

The Mountain View based, Computer History Museum has a great online exhibit on Steve Jobs. Well worth a virtual visit, and a excellent example of museums responding quickly to public interest. #blogpost

Computer History Museum

At a conference last week discussing the upcoming “Internet of Things”, there was much discussion about the security concerns of connecting infrastructure to the web. SCADA systems have for a while been connected and this story of the hacking of a water pump to destruction was mentioned by a few people.

Turns out to be a 21st century McCarthyesque scare story, that said security is a real issue which needs to be designed in from the ground up in any future machine to machine network.

It was the broken water pump heard ’round the world.

Cyberwar watchers took notice this month when a leaked intelligence memo claimed Rus…

Some good news from the UK Autumn Statement on the Economy, Great to see the Open Data Institute – Tim and Nigel bring their startup to Shoreditch !

And some real logic breaking the potential Public Data Corporation into Customer and supplier orgnaisations, The Data Strategy Board and the Public Data Group.

Public sector data will be opened up to make travel easier and healthcare better, and create significant growth for industry and jobs in the UK.

There is a long way to go, just ask your kids what they think of ICT teaching.. In the meantime to get your younger family members into programming I recommend "Hello World! Computer Programming for Kids" by Warren & Carter Sande

The teaching of computer science needs to be reformed to make it more relevant to modern needs, says the government.

We solved our shortage of space for our engineers in London by building a starship in geostationary orbit over the UK. Turned out to be cheaper than central London office rents… Beam me up Boris!

Happy Thanksgiving! Here's a fun video based on Google StreetView from my friend +Elise Urbanek:
http://flowingdata.com/2011/11/24/touching-google-streetview-stop-motion/

Aaron's cincemasapes are beautiful artistic workings of original Street View images.. very atmospheric

donkey confronts a google street car in mexico. cinemascapes – Google Street View Edition in search of enchanted and remote lands typically only reserved for the eyes of it's inhabitants, but now …

Once again the Google SketchUp team are running a Competition for 3D modellers to build a model of their local neighbourhood. It’s not necessary to add every building of course but do as many as you can to represent what makes your local town or neighbourhood special. From past experience the real driving motivation here seems to be civic pride and the wish to put the places we love “on the map”

To take part..

1. Make 3D models of the buildings in your neighbourhood using SketchUp.
2. Upload your models to the Google 3D Warehouse.
3. Create a 3D Warehouse collection to contain your models.
4. Complete the Competition Entry Form.

The motivation to add user generated content remains an interesting area in this era of mass participation mapping, while some communities focus on the development of tools and processes, others such as many in the 3D warehouse community strive to produce the most detailed and accurate representations of the world as possible. An increasingly important community are the casual users of mapping products who want to provide “quick fixes” to the errors they come across using them.

These different motivations of course lead to the development of different mapping applications and platforms, as historically there has never been a single universal map of the world, so in the future we will continue to have the choice of geospatial content reflecting more closely the needs of different user communities, as they now have a hand in creating them.

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

The UK launch of Google Earth Builder at the Science Museum.