The Goatee Saver

I found this over on Only Dead Fish (thanks Neil). This is flippin' hilarious. I thought the first guy was CGI - doesn't he look odd?

Email Data Visualisation

I'm a geek. I freely admit it. I'm also really into Social Media in all its forms - Blogging, Social Networking, Micro-blogging etc. etc. I also have a professional interest in the convergance of data, and how the meaning of data is rapidly becoming more accessible to AI systems (admittedly simple AI systems such as webbots and spiders).

So when I saw this, I loved it!
Christopher Baker analysed over 60,000 emails sent and received since 1998 to understand the "social network" created by his correspondance. Further to this, he decided the best way to represent the dats was visually:


"Like many people, I have archived all of my email with the hope of someday revisiting my past. I am interested in revealing the innumerable relationships between me, my schoolmates, work-mates, friends and family. This could not readily be accomplished by reading each of my 60,000 emails one-by-one. Instead, I created My Map, a relational map and alternative self portrait. My Map is a piece of custom designed software capable of rendering the relationships between myself and individuals in my address book by examining the TO:, FROM:, and CC: fields of every email in my email archive. The intensity of the relationship is determined by the intensity of the line. My Map allows me to explore different relational groupings and periods of time, revealing the temporal ebbs and flows in various relationships. In this way, My Map is a veritable self-portrait, a reflection of my associations and a way to locate myself."

- Christopher Baker

Obama is Web 2.0

I posted before about the digital elements that Barack Obama brought to his election campaign. I posted before about the amount of money spent on Social Media. For some people the question still seems to be hanging out there, is that all electioneering or does he really understand what Social Media means?

If it's any indication of Obama's personal beliefs and opinion, here are two word clouds of his two most important speeches to date.

Winning Election Speech


Inauguration Speech

Facebook now double MySpace's membership

Considering that only 6 months ago Facebook and MySpace were at roughly the same number of members, it begs the question, how has facebook managed to double it's membership in such a short space of time. A report released by TechCrunch (citing ComScore data) shows Facebook with 222 million in December compared with 125 million for MySpace. On top of this, Facebook also counted nearly twice the number of page views, with 80 billion in December compared with MySpace's 43 billion.

The main reason given by MySpace for it's slow down in membership growth is due to a strategic shift in overall company strategy. MySpcae has said, "[it's now] laser focused on building a sustainable global business which we measure by profits and revenue -- not just eyeballs."

Further to that, MySpace added that it "continues to dominate the U.S. market -- where the bulk of online advertising revenues reside -- both in terms of monetization and user engagement with more than 76 million unique users and a 40% spike in engagement year over year."

Personal Supercomputing

There's been a lot of articles all over the net in the last 6 months about the power that the new Cell Processor (from the PS3) offers and the potential that have when linked in paralle clusters. I read one particular article where several MIT students linked 16 PS3's to form their own Supercomputer because they couldn't get enough time on the campus system. So surely the time when we'll all have supercomputers in our homes isn't far away?

Well, with NVidia's new “Tesla personal supercomputer” you can now have the serious digital horsepowerof a supercomputer at home. The beast delivers cluster computing performance and up to 250 times faster computing then a standard top of the range PC. The Tesla is powered by 4 GPU’s, each with 240 processing cores (that 4x240=960 cores working in parallel) based on the NVidia’s CUDA architecture, delivering a gigantic maximum performance of nearly 4 Teraflops!

Here are some more of its specs:

• Massively-parallel many-core architecture
• 3 or 4 Tesla C1060 Computing Processors with 4GB of dedicated memory per GPU
• 2.33 GHz+ Quad-core AMD Phenom or Opteron, — OR — Quad-core Intel Core 2 or Xeon
• Minimum system memory: 12 GB for 3 Tesla C1060s and 16 GB for 4 Tesla C1060s (at least 4GB per Tesla C1060)
• 12GB+ system memory (at least 4GB per Tesla C1060)
• 240 scalar processor cores per GPU
• Integer, single-precision and double-precision floating point operations
• Hardware Thread Execution Manager enables thousands of concurrent threads per GPU
• Parallel shared memory enables processor cores to collaborate on shared information at local cache performance
• Ultra-fast GPU memory access with 102 GB/s peak bandwidth per GPU
• IEEE 754 single-precision and double-precision floating point
• Each Tesla C1060 GPU delivers 933 GFlops Single Precision and 78 GFlops Double Precision performance

The only bad news is that you'll need to spend about $10,000 to pick up one of these monsters. If I had the money I so would!