WaveScope is a system for developing distributed, high-rate applications that need to process streams of data from various sources (e.g., sensors) using a combination of signal processing and database (event stream processing) operations. The execution environment for these applications ranges from embedded sensor nodes to multicore/multiprocessor servers.

WaveScope

OpenGL is powerful, but it can also be more complicated than actually necessary. For applications involving 2D graphics, a low amount of interactivity, and a smaller amount of data, it would be simpler not to bother with the video card and the rendering pipeline. Additionally, some visualizations are meant for print form. The Gnome Foundation’s Cairo 2D graphics toolkit is perfect for these applications. As luck would have it, Haskell also has an excellent binding to Cairo.

Three other things make Haskell ideally suited to information visualization and visual analytics: a well-thought out and extensible library of generic data structures, lazy evaluation, and the separation of data transformation code from input/output inherent in a pure functional programming language. Visualizations written in Haskell tend naturally to break up into portions of reusable and visualization specific code. Thus, programs for visualization written in Haskell maintain readability and reusability as well or better than Python, but do not suffer the performance problems of an interpreted language.

For much the same reason as Simon Peyton-Jones put together Tackling the Awkward Squad, I have put together these lecture notes. I hope these will bring a programmer interested in visualization and open to the aesthetic advantages of functional programming up to speed on both topics.

Beautiful Code, Compelling Evidence: Functional Programming for Information Visualization and Visual Analytics

Once when I needed to entertain my daughter while we were driving somewhere, I said, "Let's pretend that, rolling along outside the window, there was a little ball that would pick up trash and boxes and trash cans, and that as it collected items it got bigger and bigger, until it was picking up houses and buildings, and that there was happy music playing that sounded like this (I hummed a bit), while hundreds of citizens called out for help that would never come."

Her little eyes got really wide.

She was very quiet for the rest of the ride.

From the archive:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

"As a friend of mine said, it takes half a second for a baby to throw up all over your sweater. It takes hours to get it clean."

Parenting Tip #234: Katamari Damacy

Open Salon is a publishing platform with a built-in audience. It was developed for writers, photographers and artists of any stripe in need of a smart home for their work (and not one of those giant, anonymous blog networks), and who are hoping to be rewarded for it. After a quick, free registration, you can immediately begin posting your words, images or videos to your blog, start building an audience and even earning money.

Open Salon is also a place where passionate media lovers can find a new generation of creative voices, and help them discover a wider audience.

What, precisely, can you do here? After a quick registration, you can start blogging immediately -- and rating and commenting on other posts, messaging other members, and more. You can also invite other members into Open Salon from your own blog page.

The Open Salon home page functions like a real-time magazine cover. We spotlight the best content, but you can also see what other members are reading, rating and commenting on. A new issue goes up every evening; we update the cover every morning. In the near future, we'll begin featuring the best Open Salon content on the cover of Salon.com. We'll also be unveiling ways for you to earn money for your great work on Open Salon, which includes a built-in peer-to-peer payment system called Tippem.

Open Salon

See how many of the 100 most common words in the English language you can guess in 5 minutes...

The 100 Most Common English Words

The essential fashion item if you are going to the Beijing Olympics to watch people compete in air made of Jello - a gas mask.

Gas masks are all more or less terrifying to look at, which is why some people get a kick out of them, creating artsy fetish masks, or artists create ironically cute masks such as Bill Barminsky’s Mickey Mouse mask.

The irony is on the artists, however, since genuine Mickey Mouse inspired gas masks were given to children in both the UK and the US, during wartime, to appear less scary.

From the archive:

On January 7th, 1942, one month after Pearl Harbor, T.W. Smith, Jr., the owner of the Sun Rubber Company, and his designer, Dietrich Rempel, with Walt Disney’s approval introduced a protective mask for children. This design of the Mickey Mouse Gas Mask for children was presented to Major General William N. Porter, Chief of the Chemical Warfare Service. After approval of the CWS, Sun Rubber Products Company produced sample masks for review. Other comic book character designs were to follow, depending on the success of the Mickey Mouse mask.

People say to me, "Whatever it takes."

I tell them, It's going to take everything.

And still I see a woman in row four, cutting an apple. With a four-inch knife.

Between the 5% tint on the windows, the gas masks and wires blocking my front view, the highly questionable steering, and the 35 pounds of liquid propane on the roof, I pretty much have my bases covered in the "constant rolling threat to all things living" department. The IV drip bag is real, although the blood is actually Mountain Dew and cherry pie filling.

... Here are the controls for Alexi. A lot of people ask what all the backlit switches do. "Well, most of them turn on other switches, which are also backlit" I tell them.

"You mean they don't actually DO anything?" They always ask me.

The truth is that I like how light up toggle switches look. So most of them just sit there, glowing away, looking cool, doing nothing.

unusual gas masks

Personal income growth slowed in 2007 in most of the nation's metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), according to estimates released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. On average, MSA personal income grew 6.2% in 2007, down from 6.8% in 2006. Personal income growth slowed in 208 MSAs, increased in 144, and remained unchanged in 11 MSAs.

The twenty slowest growing MSAs were all in the Great Lakes Region (Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin). Personal income growth in most of these MSAs was one-half the national pace or less as compensation declined in the durable goods manufacturing sector, often by substantial amounts. In some cases, compensation in 2006 had been boosted by the acceptance of employee buyout offers from automakers while 2007 compensation reflected a smaller workforce and pay concessions in the auto and auto parts industries.

From the archive:

A substantial portion of our workforce finds itself in direct competition for jobs with lower-wage workers around the globe, and leading-edge scientific and engineering work is being accomplished in many parts of the world. Thanks to globalization, driven by modern communications and other advances, workers in virtually every sector must now face competitors who live just a mouse-click away in Ireland, Finland, China, India, or dozens of other nations whose economies are growing.

"We're in so deep that it doesn't seem like anything will help," said Rebekah Ao, 33, a pregnant homemaker who lives in a new four-bedroom home in Avondale with her husband, Otto, a truck driver. The Aos, with $50,000 in income, owe a total of $607,000 on mortgages for two houses they bought since they moved to the Phoenix area about two years ago.

Personal Income for Metropolitan Areas, 2007

Atlanta is hosed, yes, but Ohio is really hosed.

The turmoil of the mortgage market granted a temporary reprieve from hearing about the woes of America's Rust Belt. That doesn't mean things are better. Despite a decade of national prosperity, the former manufacturing backbone of the U.S. is in rougher shape than ever, still searching for some way to replace its long-stilled smokestacks.

Where's it worst? Ohio, according to our analysis, which racked up four of the 10 cities on our list: Youngstown, Canton, Dayton and Cleveland. The runner-up is Michigan, with two cities--Detroit and Flint--making the ranking.

From the archive:

As no repairs have been carried out for 34 years, all of the buildings are slowly falling apart. Nature is reclaiming the area, as metal corrodes, windows break, and plants work their roots into the walls and pavements.

Andrucha Waddington directs this epic drama that explores how daughters ultimately become their mothers.

The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.

Income and net worth are two important factors in determining economic well-being in the United States. This report looks at net worth and asset ownership by various socioeconomic factors, including monthly income. The data come from the Survey of Income and Program Participation.

Welcome to the new Korean craze of "well-dying". In a country infatuated with "well-being" - living and eating healthily, even to the point where tobacco-makers offer vitamin-enriched "well-being cigarettes" - training companies are now offering courses on dying a good death.

We should expect a prolonged, grinding decline in home prices, back to more or less their pre-bubble inflation-adjusted levels.

America's Fastest-Dying Cities

Jeffrey Rosen reviews a new book about Gitmo:

Khan captures the bizarre culture of Guantánamo, where lawyers struggle to represent their clients — and to bring them chai lattes from the Starbucks on the base — in the face of military officials who try to obstruct her and the lawyers at every turn.

The fact that many of the prisoners Khan describes appear to have been innocent of the vague accusations against them, were imprisoned for years without formal charges or fair hearings and were eventually released by the United States without apology or compensation makes the abuse they suffered during years of imprisonment all the more outrageous. By giving us the perspective of the detainees, “My Guantánamo Diary” provides a valuable account of what we can now recognize as one of the most shameful episodes in the war on terror. It is hard to read this book without a growing sense of embarrassment and indignation.

The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me

What makes you depressed?

Seeing stupid people happy.

Q&A: Slavoj Zizek, professor and writer