Technology

In the field of genetic ancestry, services like 23andMe enable us to trace our roots back 100,000 years. However, the recent ancestry — the closer generations to us — are paradoxically harder to trace. Why? This is in part due to advent of increasingly common, fast, and cheap travel: horses, ships, trains, cars, planes, … It basically mixes populations in much deeper, complex, dynamic ways. The technological revolution made genetic ancestry possible, but also complicates the assumption that one can easily relate location with DNA. Similarly, today, a comparable shift is taking place in the digital world. As I explain below, we can no longer assume that any digital record is a factual representation of the present or the past. This was the case before. It is the end of presumption of digital veracity. ...

I demoed Google Glass to the Spanish president, Mariano Rajoy. It was a funny anecdote, and this is how it happened. In January my President Mariano Rajoy came to meet Obama, and also held a reception at the Ambassador’s residence. I was invited. I had Glass, and I decided to bring them to the event, not wearing them, but in their pouch. Right after entering I asked someone to take a picture of us, we started talking and it turned out that the person was the Head of Intelligence of the President’s cabinet, Alfonso de Senillosa. We started talking about technology and I mentioned the Google Glass I had on its pouch. He was very keen to try them so I took them out. He enjoyed trying them and I told him I would be honored to demo the Glass to the president if he wanted. At the same time virtually everyone around us also wanted to try them so I spent the next 30 minutes demoing and talking about the Glass with all the invitees and all the national and international media gathered around. ...

I’ve joined MapBox as Chief Scientist! This is a long-coming love story, made possible thanks to my recent extraordinary visa. An amazing next stop on my journey to bridge Science and Technology with Society at large. I am very excited to join this awesome team. Think of MapBox as a mix of Wikipedia for maps (leveraging the power of open data and crowds) and Apple style to master a product that is beautiful, fast and breaks beyond convention. Faster, better, open maps for anything that has a location. ...

This is the little story of how Foursquare and Twitter led to a VIP visit to Space X, the rocket factory, back in 2010. I was at a conference in Irvine, CA. This is when I worked as a fellow of the Space Studies Board of the National Academies. The sessions were great but I had no plans the evening of the first day. After I was done with work I went to the bar for a quick bite. It occurred to me that maybe they had a Foursquare deal, so I used my mobile to check in. Indeed they had a free appetizer if you ordered a beer. Cool. ...

That was the title of my first Data Science DC Meetup. Mike Dewar, from bitly, presented his work on tracking attention. The background hypothesis is that attention leads to revenue, and he wants to measure attention at any given time by means of click rates. With bitly he has access to all clicks on shortened links. The problem is then to transform that stream of single events into an attention function estimate in real time. ...

This is a map of 2 years running around Washington DC with RunKeeper. I always wanted to make a [heat]map with all my tracks. I finally got some time to play with TileMill and Mapbox to make it. The map above is the result, and these are the steps to make your own: Run a few routes :) Get your data from RunKeeper. Import in TileMill Style at will. Use Mapbox for hosting and base layer. Get your data Click on “export data” link under Settings page in RunKeeper. Select the dates, you might want all your data so just select a wide range. You´ll get the link on your email in a few minutes. ...

A Russian satellite makes a time lapse of the Earth from space. A truly beautiful video. This reminds me of a text I read many years ago: Carl Sagan was defending the inclusion of visual cameras in scientific payloads, even when the scientific value would be arguable. Researchers were complaining about the extra weight and limited value, and longevity, of such an instrument, versus the many other things they could put there to measure wind speed, chemical composition, … ...

This idea is for a synthetic multi-beam microphone, basically allowing to select and amplify sound coming from any, and all, selectable angles and distances, at once, live or replaying the sound, and to detect their LOS velocity. Combined with a speaker, it can be a multi-beam sonar.Physically it would be an array of microphones, as the size of the lattice would define part of the resolution. The rest would come from the software. I thought of this by merging concepts from sounds, nets, radio astronomy, and optical interferometry. ...

[Cross posted at GAIN] Engineers will be among those on the front lines of adaptation. From improving the resilience of water pipes and energy transport systems to redesigning how entire urban areas are built, engineering firms will need to solve new challenges created by population growth, urbanization and climate change. Incorporation of new scientific, economic and social science data is becoming more critical as unprecedented changes are upon us. Engineering innovation and technology will be part of the solution. These were the main takeaways according to participants at the Engineers Without Borders (EWB)–USA 10-year anniversary International Conference in Henderson, Nev., March 22-24. ...

Today I went to a lunch meeting with the Apps 4 Climate folks. It is basically a challenge for developers to make apps using the vast archive of open data at the Bank. It was great to see such a motivated team behind the project. We talked about the challenge itself, requirements and timelines. It was very appropriate for Habiba Gitay to point out the importance of rightful sourcing attribution (most times the Bank acts as a portal that archives someone else’s data). Alex Barth also gave a talk about building maps with World Bank Climate Data (slides here). ...