Complex Insight - Understanding our world

By creating new and innovative visual displays out of oceans of data, Christopher Murray hopes his tool can change this situation for the better. Called GBD Compare, users can rapidly determine which diseases are most harmful to children in Africa, or view how the developing and developed worlds compare in terms of heart disease, all with a few clicks of a computer mouse. The data viz tool processes data is implemented using D3.js and uses data  from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) report, which compiles statistics, charts and graphs on causes of death and disease. “The thing that’s really neat about the visualisations is they allow people to see the problem in context – in the context of all the other problems, how it’s changing over time, how it compares to other countries,” says Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics Evaluation (IMHE), based in Seattle. GBD is an important project and the new visualization tools are effective and easy to use. Click on the image or title to learn more.

Start with a NAND gate and end up with a computer playing tetris - thats the aim of the elements of computing systems - to bridge the understanding gap between the enabling elemental hardware and software systems and hwo they are designed, constructed and inter-operate to create a functioning computer. Awesome course and book - possibly the perfect present for someone wanting to understand some of the magic of computing.

BBC magazine article - makes this sounds like a fascinating must read for anyone interested in the history of the space industry- another for the reading list.

I was thirteen years old when I first read Alan Kay's dynabook paper. It had been published 11 years earlier and it described computers unlike any I had yet to see. The paper is probably one of the more inspiring computer research concept papers I have read over the years and its certainly one i have gone back and re-read .when looking for inspiration. Paul Ford has an interesting contrast in the visions of computing as described by Alan Kay and the Dynabook and facebooks's  more recent vision with Facebook Home. While a little contrived in placed the article is an interesting comparison and one which helps inform discussions around human computer interaction design on todays devices. Worth a read.

Interesting article  on how to consider cancer as a by product of cellular activity. Echoes - Danny HIllis's contention that rather thank think of Cancer as a single disease - its better to think of it as a process prodution error that occurs as part of cellular biology.

WiSee has been developed by researchers at University of Washington and promises to bring a sense of awareness using wifi to buildings and environments. Very interesting indeed. Click on logo or title to learn more.

Great article - watch the embedded video - it helps explain the methodology and the approach and how they verified the alarm call classification using statistical analysis. Awesome research. 

FierceVaccines is a great source of info on new research. The summary of work published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology from The Scripps Research focus on an area of the HIV virus where mutation is limited is worth reading and shows new approaches towards researching vaccines for HIV.

Excellent article by Ben Sesser on the economics and positioning of SaaS based applications. If you are involved in software application development - and need to understand the inter-relationships between customer churn, service pricing, cost of customer acquisition and lifetime value - this is a great illustrated article. Worth reading.

I have a very deep appreciation for the art and technical artistry of the guys who have been and are involved in the demo scene. The Brain Control team are without doubt one of my favourite groups - both because of the skill in what they produce and because of the sophistication of the tools they build to create their demos. Their Turtles All The Way Down demo zooms from the sub atomic to the macroscopic universe like a digital Eames's Powers of Ten film revisted and augmented. Click on the image to watch the demo, read about the process and find links to their Enigma Studio authoring toolset. Serious art and serious fun. Go discover.

BBC article on Dr Christine Iacobuzio-Donahue and Norman Baker's book Hidden Beauty - Exploring the Aesthetics of Medical Science.  The stunning beauty of the human body - even with disease and medical problems-  is portrayed from an artistic sense accompanied by explanations of the images shown and how visualisation is also used in modern medical science.. Short video with Dr Lacobusio-Donahue certainly made me curious about the book - one for the reading list.

 A recurrent and central theme for us at Complex Insight is how important simulations are to tackling major real world challenges.  In a paper appearing in Nature Climate Change, Bruno Basso, Michigan State University ecosystem scientist and other members of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project unveiled an all-encompassing modeling system that integrates multiple crop simulations with improved climate change models.The new simulation model better predicts global wheat yields while reducing political and socio-economic influences that can skew data and planning efforts..In engineering simulation there has long been a trend to model based design - hopefully other areas of public policy can leverage work such as this to follow in a similar direction. 

To understand the scale of this simulation the team simulated more than two trillion particles for nearly 23,000 time steps with VPIC, a large-scale plasma physics application. The simulation used approximately 80 percent of Hopper’s computing resources, 90 percent of the available memory on each node, and 50 percent of the Lustre scratch file system. In total, 10 separate trillion-particle datasets, each ranging between 30 to 42 terabytes in size, were written as HDF5 files on the scratch file system at a sustained rate of approximately 27 gigabytes per second. This type of simulation will become increasingly necessary for many of the large scale science challenges underway in many areas of physics, geophysics and lifesciences. Click on the image or title to learn more.

The discovery of a translational fossil has helped identifiy the series of evolutionary steps and small changes that gradually add up to the evolution of the turtle shell. 

Like many industry players, IBM see a confluence of four factors -- social, mobile, analytics and cloud driving changes in computing and the need for machine learning being central to analytics. Information Week has an overview of IBM's strategy.