The Power of Persistance

Reminds me of days at art school

As an art project this is pretty ambitious. Check out what the student says regarding the creation of this great piece of work.

"This is the final piece for my AS art course, a flipbook made entirely out of biro pens. It’s something like 2100 pages long, and about 50 jotter books. I’d say I worked on and off it for roughly 3 weeks."

Google Maps and the Vancouver Olympics

Where are the bars?

Check out this great map.

Olympic Reporter's 2010 Winter Games

Vancouver Sun 2010 Olympics reporter Jeff Lee's comprehensive listing of Olympic venues, hospitality events, pavilions, sponsor houses, road restrictions, Flag Walk & more for the 2010 Winter Olympics and Paralympics.

MAP ICON KEY
Snowflakes - Official celebration sites
Green tents: Official competition & practice venues
Red dot tags: Canadian official houses
Red tags: Other countries' pavilions
Yellow tags: Sponsor sites & events
Yellow pins: Vancouver Sun offices & house
Pink dot tags: Media centres
Green dot tags: City Halls
Green tags: Special Olympic sites
Blue flags: Official IOC sites
Trains: transit & Amtrak
Ship: SeaBus, ferries, Norwegian Star, RCMP cruise ships
Airplane:YVR, Harbour, Helijet
Blue dot tags: Olympic bus network,
Purple dot tags:free bicycle valet

Google View on Whistler slopes!

Where are the Mars Bars...

Leave it to Google Maps to take it to the next level. Yep they have done a street view of Whistlers sky runs just in time for the Olympics. Check them out and see where you would like to sky next year when the slopes have less competition.

FaceBook Fan-page Analysis

But what about Canada?

With the emergence of several new sources of data this week the lowly analyst is bringing fascinating new insight into the world of Data Mining and social applications like FaceBook. Check out this cool little web-data page to get the lowdown on fan-pages.

Here is part of a fascinating article "The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul"

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

If you think that's interesting you will really enjoy these defining zones in good old USA.

In a nutshell, Warden’s data analysis showed that Facebook users in the U.S. can be roughly segmented into seven regions, which he named facetiously:

Stayathomia: This belt’s defining feature is how near most people are to their friends, implying they don’t move far.

Dixie: Like Stayathomia, Dixie towns tend to have links mostly to other nearby cities rather than spanning the country.

Greater Texas: Unlike Stayathomia, there’s a definite central city to this cluster, otherwise most towns just connect to their immediate neighbors.

Mormonia: The only region that’s completely surrounded by another cluster, Mormonia mostly consists of Utah towns that are highly connected to each other, with an offshoot in Eastern Idaho.

Nomadic West: The defining feature of this area is how likely even small towns are to be strongly connected to distant cities; it looks like the inhabitants have done a lot of moving around the county.

Socalistan: LA is definitely the center of gravity for this cluster. Almost everywhere in California and Nevada has links to both LA and SF, but LA is usually first.

Pacifica: Tightly connected to each other, it doesn’t look like Washingtonians are big travelers compared to the rest of the West, even though a lot of them claim to need a vacation.