Disordered Cogitations

The for-profit company, The Teaching Company, is giving away for free, a podcast lecture on Holiday Music by professor Robert Greenberg.

Labels: company, greenberg, holiday, music, podcast, robert, teaching

Atari Founder, Nolan Bushnell has opened up a restaurant with touch screens to order food (and play old video games). See this Yahoo News article.

My colleague, Matt, pointed me to a new book that will be published at the end of the month:

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

For more info, here is a link to the website: wikinomics.com

From the title, it seems like it extends the complexity theory concept of emergence to the world of wikis. Its like one telephone (or two or three or four hundred) doesn't do much for society. But 400 million phones changes society forever. And when they are cell phones, everything changes. The Chinese government doesn't know what is going to hit it when there are 2 Billion cell phones in China. The middle kingdom will never be the same again.

The same goes for wikis.

My friend, Glen, just pointed me to a cool new website called Swivel. A person uploads a data table (rows and columns) in comma separated values (csv) format. Swivel then starts to "swivel" the data, producing various charts and graphs. Swivel, then tries to find other data tables that might have similar columns. For example, if I upload yearly cancer death data, and someone else uploads yearly car accident death data, Swivel will sync up the year column then it can co-plot the cancer and accident data. Viewers can rate the graphs and charts to help the algorithm get smarter.

Here is my Swivel data table.