something i once said
As NYC retires into the grip of Jonas I thought it might be fun to go for a wintery hike. So many stories are popping up right now that I was tempted to go experience a bit of it firsthand. At the same time, I thought I could make an interesting contribution to the topic if I snapped a bunch of photospheres, Google’s VR-ready photos. If you have a Cardboard viewer, download one of the photos down…
Ideation skills are super important for effective team work. Collaborative ideation is the process where you tell me an idea, I try to identify any weakness or missing piece, augment the idea and hand it back to you. I have a good friend that I love to ideate with. We often will grab beers and just start riffing on startup ideas, technology ideas, or any crazy ideas. Single threads can pass…
In my post last week , I started digging into the challenges of getting ideas to move quickly in a startup culture. The post briefly summarizes four years of observation, and only near the end did I start to get at the current state of idea flow in the office. In reality, the topic of idea flow is something I’ve been getting more proactive about improving. Today, I’d like to talk about one…
A few years ago, I was part of a collaboration doing research on communities of soil microbes. In the research, I was taking sequence data from soil samples, building phylogenetic trees, and trying to find interesting hints of the universe within the exotic soils from mountain tops, glacial fields, and Antarctic deserts. I remember one day meeting with one of my committee members to try and learn…
This post is going to be short. Basically, CartoDB runs on the coolest database in the world, PostgreSQL . Because it runs on such an amazing open source technolgy, we often get to tap into amazing advances and amazing documentation of methods that come from the community. One really nice write-up I came across over the week was, Full text search in milliseconds with PostgreSQL by Max Novakovic .…
Classifying Torque maps is a neuron-twister. They are essentially rasters, but they regenerate based on zoom and respond to headers defined on the fly by the users. They resemble vector points when you finally see them. I dunno, they are kinda Point-based Vector Tiles with built in simplification… they are kinda not. At the end of the day, they are just Torque and all the rest are imitators. If…
The future of cartography wont be defined by you The origin of CartoDB is a curious story, but it can be summed up nicely as a collective of environmentalists, technolgists, and designers that decided maps shouldn’t remain difficult to create just because old school software hadn’t been brought up to speed with modern technology . I’ve worked at CartoDB since the beginning, which has been, to say…
Background On March 18-21, 2015, I attended a workshop to explore challenges around using data visualization in science and science policy. The workshop was the 2nd of a series of workshops and many of the write-ups from both sessions can be found on the EcoViz blog . The workshop this time around was very focused on reporting outputs from IPCC and IPBES . So, taken with a grain of salt, here are…
Background I was recently walking down the street with a good friend of mine. It was really late at night and I was doing what I often do in those situations, filling his ear with some story or another. It about some crazy thing I had done once and my hands were flailing a lot and I was getting really loud on the quiet streets. I love telling stories. After I was done my friend made a comment. It…
It’s been a while I’ve been meaning to get back into blogging for quite some time now. The last time I had my own blog was back in 2006. It was a blog I kept as part of an undergraduate research project. The blog, called Guiology, is now gone, forever lost save perhaps some cached versions here or there. The site was meant to deliver details about my exploration of the interface between…