Harvard Sailing Team: Boys Night Out

The beauty of data visualization

FlowingData wrote a post on David McCandless of Information is Beautiful. Watch the TED talk below. It's a great find for anyone who works in data visualization.

A house that knows when you’re happy and sad

"Auger Loizeau, in collaboration with Reyer Zwiggelaar and Bashar Al-Rjoub, describe their smart-home project Happylife. It monitors facial expressions and movements to estimate a family's mood, displayed via four glowing orbs on the wall, one for each member" Read the FlowingData post here.

A Hit Song on YouTube, Unnameable on the Radio

A popular Cee Lo Green song:

THERE is a world where when you see someone driving in a fancy car with the girl you love, you shout out, “Forget you!” It’s the same world where friends will talk smack about the crazy stuff their dads say.

That world is called traditional entertainment.

And while traditional entertainment increasingly relies on the anything-goes Internet to cultivate and stoke interest in music, TV shows and movies, there are still some important boundaries. The return to civilization comes at a cost.

A case in point is a recent viral musical sensation — a bouncy song by the soul-pop singer Cee Lo Green with over three million views on YouTube in little more than a week. The singer is peeved at a girl who has left him and concludes that “If I’d been richer, I’d still be with ya” and though “there’s pain in my chest, I still wish you the best ...” followed by a certain crude phrase, and an “ooh, ooh, ooh.”

This is hardly a fleeting expletive of the kind the Federal Communications Commission has tried to regulate...

Read the NYT article here.

The Government Can Now Track You, Sans Warrant, Via GPS

This is petrifying:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers California and eight other Western states, just made what might be the scariest ruling of the year. You know who else thinks so? The dissenting judge, a conservative, no less, who himself made the connection to Orwell's 1984. This is bad, bad news, and the sooner it gets overturned the safer we should all feel.

The story dates back to 2007, when the Drug Enforcement Administration began monitoring one Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregonian whom the DEA suspected of maintaining a marijuana grow operation. DEA agents, in the words of Time magazine, "snuck onto his property in the middle of the night" and planted a GPS tracking device on the underside of his Jeep, which was parked in his driveway at the time...

Read the rest of the FastCompany article here.

Survey: Those With E-book Readers Read 40% More Than Physical Book Readers

Read FastCompany article here.

Shell Oil Bets $2 Billion on ... Sugar?

Read the FastCompany article here.