Tech News

We've written before about how the latest technology can give us access to the remotest past. Specifically, we've covered the use of lasers to understand and even model our buried history.

Now, with the Scottish Ten project, Historic Scotland, in conjunction with CyArk, is laser-mapping five Scottish sites and five international ones, all designated World Heritage sites and making them available online. The laser mapping produces 3-D renderings that are accurate down to within three millimeters.

Sponsor

All the vast data and its renderings will be hosted by, and available on, CyArk, a non-profit organization devoted to digital records of our global heritage. CyArk's goal is to capture and host 500 sites of importance to the human story.

Having finished mapping the 18th century New Lanark mills in Scotland, Rossyln Chapel and Mt. Rushmore in the U.S., the team has begun scanning the neolithic sites on Orkney off northernmost Scotland. The Orkney Islands are a neolithic site of extraordinary richness.

The Rushmore job gives one an idea of the scope. They used six Leica laser scanners and 11 digital SLR cameras. They downloaded dozens of gigabytes of data daily. To save the data from the job, the team's computer system had over ten terabytes of hard-drive space. That was for one job. They're doing ten. And Orkney is equally vast, comprising the tomb of Maeshowe, the settlement of Skara Brae and a host of stones, including Stenness, Barnhouse, the Watch Stone and the Ring of Brodgar.

Once the Orkney's are done, the remaining Scottish sites will be the Antonine Wall, Edinburgh's old and new towns and St Kilda. The remaining international sites include locations in Japan, India and China. The project, which started last year, will not finish up until 2013.

Discuss

Looking for a job? You're probably about to find one. By the year 2018 there will be 1.4 million job openings for so-called "computer specialists" - that's everyone from developers to database administrators - according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The non-hardware-related job market is expected to grow faster than almost any other sector in the country. For instance, jobs for systems and application software developers are expected to grow 30%-34%. The number of network systems and data communications jobs will explode by 53%.

Sponsor

The BLS' analysis, which measures from 2008 to 2018, found that only a few other job sectors are expanding as fast as tech. Health care is also at the top of the list - which makes sense considering the growing needs of the aging Baby Boomer generation. But many "computer specialist" jobs are unique in that they have some of the lowest replacement rates in the nation. That means those double-digit growth figures represent almost entirely new jobs.

Editors Note: This post is part of a series ReadWriteWeb is producing in partnership with Tableau Software, where we examine interesting data sets relevant to technology trends today. You can use Tableau Public to create interactive visualizations like this and publish them to your own blog or website or anywhere online. This is the last week to enter Tableau's User Generated Graph Contest. Winner will receive a free trip to Web 2.0 and $500. Sign up before March 26.

Play With the Data

The top graph shows what kind of education will be required for the fastest-growing jobs. The bottom graph puts employment growth into a wider perspective. You can play with the data yourself by choosing different education levels or job types. You can also download the data and create your own visualizations.

Data source: Employment Projections Program, U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Photo by Mark Puplava.

Discuss

What Do You Suggest? is a site that lets you visually explore how Google Suggest autocompletes a query. "What Do You Suggest takes a seed from you, then guides you on a journey through language and the collective lives of Google users."



Simon Elvery, who created the site, found a lot of interesting patterns:

There are some recurring themes which have emerged as I've been playing with the site during its creation. Among other things, it seems people do rather a lot of searching on the topics of music, religion and relationships.

Sometimes the results are sad, like the people searching for free ebooks on relationships for dummies, and sometimes hopeful like looking for love.

Health is also a recurring theme with the names of medicines, diseases and symptoms appearing over and over again.

{ via Information Aesthetics }

Google Browser Size is an experimental service that shows if a web page has interface elements that can't be viewed by a significant amount of people. "Google Browser Size is a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google. For example, the 90% contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger."

The service can be used for any web page, but the data is obtained from the visitors of google.com. As you can see from the screenshot, Google's top result can be viewed by more than 99% of the visitors if no ad is displayed above the results.


Google Browser Size is one of the many Google tools that help you optimize web sites:

* Google Website Optimizer - testing and optimization tool
* Google Analytics - web analytics
* Google Webmaster Tools - site performance, crawl errors, top search queries
* Page Speed - an open-source Firebug add-on that helps you evaluate the performance of a web page.
* Speed Tracer - a Chrome extension that helps you fix performance problems in your web applications.
* Closure Compiler - a tool for making JavaScript download and run faster.
* "Let's make the web faster" tutorials.

{ Thanks, Kevin. }

Google released a new Google Labs experiment related to image search: Google Image Swirl. The service "organizes image search results based on their visual and semantic similarities and presents them in an intuitive exploratory interface."

Google Image Swirl clusters the top image search results for more than 200,000 queries and it lets you explore the clusters and the relation between images.

"Once you find the group of images you're interested in, you can click on the thumbnail and a cluster of images will "swirl" into view. You can then further explore additional sub-groups within any cluster. Image Swirl expands on technologies developed for Similar Images and Picasa Face Recognition to discern how images should be grouped together and build hierarchies out of these groups. Each thumbnail on the initial results page represents an algorithmically-determined representative group of images with similar appearance and meaning. These aren't just the most relevant images — they are the most relevant groups of images," explains Google.

Try queries like: jaguar, flowers, van Gogh and keep in mind that this is an early demo, so not all the queries will return results.


Google has two other visualization tools: "wonder wheel" for exploring related searches and YouTube Warp, an interactive way to visualize related YouTube videos.

Gone are the days when search engines provided mostly textual information, a list of 10 blue links that invite you to find the answers on your own. Search engines are now focused on extracting useful information from web pages and surfacing data in interesting ways.

In June, Google launched Squared, a Labs project that generates lists of entities related to your query and finds values for the associated attributes. Search for [dog breeds] and you'll find a list of breeds, suggestive images, information about the average weight and the country of origin.

Bing, Microsoft's search engine, has just launched a similar feature: visual search. It's just an early demo and it requires Siverlight, but it looks more impressive than Google Squared. Probably because Microsoft built the interface around images and used the attributes to refine the results.

"Visual Search allows you to quickly scroll through the galleries or do a one-click refinement using the quick tabs on the left, which are specifically relevant to the type of results you are browsing through," mentions Bing's blog.


Bing's visual galleries are more polished than the results generated by Google Squared, but Bing only shows galleries for a small number of queries like "popular TV shows" or "world leaders" and the information is obtained from structured data sources.

It remains to be seen if Microsoft manages to extend the visual search engine and dynamically generate results for any query. For now, you can play with the demo galleries.

YouTube added the "wonder wheel" visualization tool for exploring related searches interactively. The feature has been launched last month for Google search and it's now available in a different context.

Type a general term in YouTube's search box, click on "Search" and then click on "Wonder wheel" to find some suggestions. As you click on the suggestions, YouTube shows the search results next to the wheel and it lets you go back to the initial search terms.

"The Wonder wheel visually presents connections between related searches and your search term as an interactive diagram. Click the different nodes in the diagram to see how searches can branch out," explains Google.


While the idea seems interesting, I didn't find the "wonder wheel" very useful. It only works for some searches and the suggestions aren't diverse enough.

Google Labs has a new service for visualizing data: Google Fusion Tables. Unlike Google Spreadsheets, the service is optimized for large data sets, so you can import tables of up to 100MB.

"The goal of Fusion Tables, as with other database systems, is to manage larger amounts of data than spreadsheets typically do. This size difference leads to a focus on a different set of functionalities. For example, Fusion Tables focuses more on bulk operations on the data (filtering, aggregation, merges). These operations are typically not necessary for smaller collections of data stored in spreadsheets. In contrast, spreadsheets preserve complete flexibility in managing data -- you can put any value you want in any cell and work carefully to format your spreadsheet to make it look nice," explains the FAQ.


You can import spreadsheets from your computer, select one from Google Spreadsheets or open a table from the gallery.


One of the samples, titled "Popular Baby Names -- 1880 to 2008", has 129,000 rows, but Fusion Tables displays 100 rows at a time. To manage a such a large amount of data, you can apply filters, show aggregates, create views that only include some of the columns.

There are many options to visualize the data: on a map or intensity map, using lines, bars, pies, scatter plots, motion charts or on a timeline. For example, you can visualize the popularity of the name "John" in the US, which has slowly declined since 1924.


To see which are the most popular male names in the US since 1990, I added two filters: year >= 1990,rank <= 3 and then I aggregated the data by male name. The bar chart shows that Michael is the most popular male name.


The service has rough edges and there aren't many options to perform computations: there's no support for SQL or GQL queries, the sorting options are limited and you can't add data using forms.

Even if it's just a pre-alpha version, Fusion Tables has built-in collaboration features: you can invite people as viewers, contributors (they are allowed to add columns, but not to edit the existing columns), collaborators or owners. Anyone who is invited can add comments to a cell or a column.

{ Thanks, Surendra. }

Interesting timing. On the same day when Stephen Wolfram shows a demonstration of his knowledge engine Wolfram | Alpha, Google launched a new OneBox that visualizes public data. If you search for [Florida Unemployment Rate], Google shows an answer ("9.5% of the labor force - Not seasonally adjusted - Mar 2009"), the source and a graph that illustrates how the unemployment rate changed over time.



For now, you can only search for data related to the US: for example, California population. When you click on the result, the graph lets you compare California's population with the population for other states.


"Public statistical data, such as unemployment rates or population numbers, doesn't need to be hard to find or, more importantly, hard to understand. Google is making it easier to find and use important public statistical data from governments and other sources. This data is included in Google.com search results and displayed as interactive graphs that you can customize and share with others. If you've ever done research involving large datasets, you know that it can take hours to comb through databases in order to find and analyze trends. Anyone who searches for U.S. unemployment rates or population numbers on Google.com will see relevant statistics and graphs included in their search results. You can even search by state or county (but not by city)," explains the help center.

Google News Timeline is the second new services released today in Google Labs. According to Google, it's "a web application that organizes information chronologically. Google News Timeline allows users to view news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and more on a zoomable, graphical timeline."

The search box is very powerful, but you first need to pick a category from the drop-down. Google lets you add different sources: blogs, newspapers and it shows structured information from Wikipedia and Freebase.

Here's a simple way to visualize the list of posts from two Google-related blogs:


Using data aggregated by Freebase, Google can show some famous paintings by Claude Monet:


You can create interesting timelines using this services and it would be nice to save them or to have a permalink for future reference. Hopefully, the service will also add the option to use custom data sources.