Data Discovery Applications

Data Discovery Applications - The TEC Blog: Data discovery tools are specifically aimed at connecting users to a wide variety of data source types (structured, semi-structured, and non-structured) and enabling users to freely explore the data within. There are no predefined data drill paths, so users can interact with data the way they want to and easily create visualizations that suit their own purposes. As such, they boast a flexibility and freshness that traditional BI solutions might find hard to match.
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letting users explore data and discover insight without having formed a specific question
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For now, some organizations (especially large ones) rely on full-fledged traditional BI applications to cover all their BI needs, but data discovery tools are gaining presence in the small to medium business (SMB) market.
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Data discovery is akin to a spreadsheet on steroids

Google Scholar making new connections

Scholar Updates: Making New Connections - Google Scholar Blog: We analyze your articles (as identified in your Scholar profile), scan the entire web looking for new articles relevant to your research, and then show you the most relevant articles when you visit Scholar. We determine relevance using a statistical model that incorporates what your work is about, the citation graph between articles, the fact that interests can change over time, and the authors you work with and cite.

Estonia First Graders will learn Web Coding

Estonia Reprograms First Graders as Web Coders | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com: Public schools in Estonia will soon have a curriculum for teaching web and mobile application development to students as early as first grade.

According to an article published by UbuntuLife, the program begins this month with training for primary-school teachers. This will be followed by pilot programs. Eventually, the curriculum will be available to all public schools, with educational materials for all levels from grades 1 through 12.

(...)

Back in May, Mozilla executive director Mark Surman told Wired that kids start deciding whether to be content makers or mere consumers sometime around the age of 8 to 10 years old. “If we want kids to be makers rather than consumers (our goal), this is a critical age,” he said.

Tweets of the month

28 Aug
Texmaker - great (free) tool http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/

28 Aug
Thanks for the Lembas @joanappardal

27 Aug
Fight to get it back again!

22 Aug
@joanappardal just won the Put Tiago to Sleep Badge! Congratulations! ;)

14 Aug
Committed revision 200.

14 Aug
DoubleRobotics telepresence http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/13/doublerobotics-telepresence-gets-sexy-and-made-in-the-usa/

7 Aug
Well, enough geek jokes for one day. Back to work! I've been using Semantic Web technologies and it has been intriguing...

7 Aug
There's also an I in TIMMY http://www.userlogos.org/files/logos/PaparazziPulse/Think%20Geek%20(Logo%202).png

7 Aug
There's no I in TEAM (but there is one in TIM ;)

7 Aug
Great job Tim! The best work is always Tim's work ;)

3 Aug
Future of RFID, visual.ly http://visual.ly/future-rfid Thanks @joanappardal !

2 Aug
Critical analysis of open access scholarly/academic publishing http://scholarlyoa.com/ Recommended by CACM's editor M. Vardi

1 Aug
What 'svn merge' actually does is diff and patch on the local copy http://blog.eleutian.com/2008/04/02/HowToBranchProperly.aspx

Thanks Neil

Image credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chiukeung/7864344628

The Bourne Legacy

The Bourne Legacy

Khan Academy Programming

Coders Get Instant Gratification With Khan Academy Programming | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com: The tutorials are interactive and live entirely in the browser. Instead of a video, each lesson contains a pane on the left side for students to enter code and a pane on the right that displays the output. The first lesson walks students through the process of writing code that will draw a face in the right pane. After learning to generate graphics, students work up to animation and eventually to games, such as a Pac-Man clone.

Brave

Brave

For Joana:

Your wit is as sharp as her arrows!
Your smile as fiery as her hair!
Your heart fills the room as her eyes!

It takes real courage to make right what would be wrong...
Keep fighting and be humble, be smart, be Brave!

Eddie Vedder - Ukulele songs

Eddie Vedder - Ukulele songs

The album is very good (although the Ukulele sound can be a little tiresome after a while).

Also, check out this amazing illustration by Mark Frudd

Gradle introspection

I've been using the Gradle build tool for a while now, and it has been a very good experience. Not so much with Groovy beyond scripts, but that is another story... :)

Today I had a dependency problem caused by two alternative libraries being loaded at the same time (see SLF4J Multiple Binding).

To diagnose the problem I used the following Gradle inspection commands:

gradle dependencies

gradle properties

gradle tasks

(see user guide, chapter 11)

Here the excerpt from the dependencies command:

------------------------------------------------------------
Project :Util
------------------------------------------------------------

compile - Classpath for compiling the main sources.
+--- junit:junit:4.10 [default]
|    \--- org.hamcrest:hamcrest-core:1.1 [compile,master,runtime]
+--- org.apache.jena:jena-core:2.7.2 [default]
|    +--- org.apache.jena:jena-iri:0.9.2 [compile,master,runtime]
|    |    +--- org.slf4j:slf4j-api:1.6.4 [compile,master,runtime]
|    |    +--- org.slf4j:slf4j-log4j12:1.6.4 [compile,master,runtime]
|    |    |    +--- org.slf4j:slf4j-api:1.6.4 [compile,master,runtime] (*)
|    |    |    \--- log4j:log4j:1.2.16 [compile,master,runtime]
|    |    \--- log4j:log4j:1.2.16 [compile,master,runtime] (*)
|    +--- xerces:xercesImpl:2.10.0 [compile,master,runtime]
|    |    \--- xml-apis:xml-apis:1.4.01 [compile,master,runtime]
|    +--- org.slf4j:slf4j-api:1.6.4 [compile,master,runtime] (*)
|    +--- org.slf4j:slf4j-log4j12:1.6.4 [compile,master,runtime] (*)
|    \--- log4j:log4j:1.2.16 [compile,master,runtime] (*)
\--- javax.mail:mail:1.4.5 [default]
     \--- javax.activation:activation:1.1 [compile,master,runtime]

...
(*) - dependencies omitted (listed previously)

To exclude the log4j binding dependency, I added the following to build.gradle:

configurations {
    all*.exclude(group: 'org.slf4j', module: 'slf4j-log4j12')
    all*.exclude(group: 'log4j', module: 'log4j')
}

(see user guide 43.4.7. Excluding transitive dependencies
)

The new dependency tree now excludes the troublesome dependency:

compile - Classpath for compiling the main sources.
+--- org.apache.jena:jena-core:2.7.2 [default]
|    +--- org.apache.jena:jena-iri:0.9.2 [compile,master,runtime]
|    |    \--- org.slf4j:slf4j-api:1.6.4 [compile,master,runtime]
|    +--- xerces:xercesImpl:2.10.0 [compile,master,runtime]
|    |    \--- xml-apis:xml-apis:1.4.01 [compile,master,runtime]
|    \--- org.slf4j:slf4j-api:1.6.4 [compile,master,runtime] (*)
\--- javax.mail:mail:1.4.5 [default]
     \--- javax.activation:activation:1.1 [compile,master,runtime]

...