Month: July 2007

There is plenty of data in the world. Mostly we are unable to process it accurately, and we rely on intuitive judgments to draw meaning from it. Hans Rosling, the Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, has come up with new techniques of data visualization over the past few years to enable us to draw more accurate information from large data sets.

Hans Rosling developed the techniques to interpret world health and economic data. He draws conclusions that are not obvious from a casual observation. He provided a remarkable presentation of his techniques at the international Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference in 2006 and followed up with another in 2007.

Rosling sold the Trendalyzer software to Google in March 2007. Google have indicated that the software (or a version of it) will be freely available, but they have not announced what they plan to do with it.

For me, the business significance is the potential benefit of not just the statistical analysis of data, but the visualization of it. The human brain is designed to process vast amounts (in digital terms) of data through visual pattern recognition. Statistical software can process the data and draw all the same conclusions, but not in a way we can easily understand. Visualization software provides the link.

Here are a few companies in this area:

• Advanced Visual Systems
• Corda
• Dundas (for MS SQL and .NET)
• enumerate
• Thinkmap
• Visual Analytics

One of the principle lessons Hans Rosling gives is that we don’t need more data or better analysis. We need better presentation of the data so we can make more sense of it. That is worth bearing in mind if you are considering a Business Intelligence project.

Here’s a really useful device for travellers. We have probably just grown used to travelling with several chargers for different devices like the laptop, the mobile and the iPod. The iGo charger means you can carry just one.

You buy the charger you need, then Power Tips for the devices you want to charge.

• You can buy one charger for AC and one for the car
• The top of the range charger will handle your laptop as well as all your other devices
• Works with international AC power supplies
• You can buy Power Tips for just about everything you could need.

Have a look at iGo.

Following the analogy of the PC and the car, the next stage of evolution for the car will be to achieve a form of distributed management.

The aims of distributed management will be to:

1. Make cars more reliable, safer, more secure.
2. Handle the conflicting interactions between cars sharing the same network.
3. Provide a degree of social control.

For the user:

• SMS message if your car moves when it is outside your own mobile phone radio cell.
• Automatic collision avoidance between two cars in the same vicinity. If another car is approaching, the cars are automatically alerted and take avoidance measure.
• Auto alert for parts failure.
• Journey report and analysis.

For the network

• Auto-streaming. You join a busy segment of the network and your car comes under auto-control, regulating the speed and distance until you leave the segment. This allows many more cars to use the segment at a much faster average speed.
• Auto-junction. You approach a junction. Your car obtains a ticket to cross. You are allowed to cross in the most balanced effective pattern. Your speed and direction are controlled for the duration of the crossing.
• Space-finder. Automatic parking space identification, first-in priority and guidance to space.
• Auto-pay for parking spaces, toll roads and controlled zones.

Social control

• Your car will not start without a valid license and insurance.
• Trucks are disabled from entering residential zones at night.
• Cars receive penalties for stopping in controlled zones.
• Monthly emission allowance calculated on actual emissions.
• Accident and near-miss investigations. Authorities study data to identify dangerous driving.
• Dangerous drivers disabled from driving any vehicle.
• Auto-enforcement of traffic directions (no right turn, one way).

For network optimisation, you would need to achieve a critical mass where enough vehicles were capable of using the system for it to be worth having the system. The best way to do this would be to provide some sort of independent benefit irrespective of other users. For example:

• congested roads and bridges open at peak time only to networked vehicles
• traffic lights change at clear junctions for networked vehicles.

Any more ideas?

Trains are like the old mainframes. They should be more efficient than a car, but in practice they aren’t.

Like a PC, the car has the advantage over the train of:

• distributed, not central, control
• variety of type to suit different and unknowable needs
• many competing suppliers.

Cars share a road system with only a few enforced rules. They interact with each other with a complexity and subtlety that no designer could possibly foresee. They use the road infrastructure much more intensively than trains can use rail. Overall, although they are obviously a sub-optimal way to travel, they beat the train for most people most of the time.

Like a mainframe, a train has the advantage in a few situations:

• when the load is very heavy
• for predictable, repeated loads
• when you are not paying for it.

Transport engineers are like IT people. They would much rather everyone used the train. But in practice they spend their time dealing with the unpredictable world of the car.