#Datasci

The intersection of datascience and epidemiology offers amazing opportunities to enhance quality of life for vast swathes of at-risk people. A new superpower conferred by the advent of cheap, rapid genetic sequencing. It might even help us avert the increasingly likely risk of the next global pandemic.

Another great example of the power of off-book, part-time projects, NextStrain was hatched after the two researchers responsible met at a conference and talked about the idea. The reseachers who developed it, Richard Neher of the University of Basel and Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle both recently won the Open Science Prize for their contributions.

Everyone I know that deals with large amounts of data has been looking closer at Hadoop as it’s matured. Especially with tools like Hive, old datawarehouse hands are taking a serious look at it as a better type of long time data archive and storage. You probably should too.

While most of the time for the types of real work you’d be doing, it makes more sense to spin up Amazon’s EC2, Elastic Map Reduce or another flavour of virtualized Hadoop instance in the cloud for the clustering and crunching benefits, it’s very good to have a local install for development and testing.

OK, kinda love this to scale comparison of the various planets of the solar system. Kinda cool to remember how much bigger some of the other planets in the neighbourhood are than good old Earth. Despite me starting off in astrophysics, it’s never top of mind how big Uranus and Neptune are.

Utterly amazing visualization and animation of live wind flows across the US generated from the National Digital Forecast Database.

Oh and it’s interactive too. Impressive piece of work from Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas .

(via FlowingData )

From NASA. An astounding visualization of all the currents of the world’s oceans. Amazing. And this isn’t even considering large scale phenomenon like the Great Thermohaline Conveyor .

Just look at it. Wow. Make sure to HD and full screen it for full effect.

This is a contest near and dear to my heart since every year I’m always a little scandalized at “Most Livable” and “Best City” league tables from various organizations every year. Especially having lived in some fairly prominent world capitals and livable cities (Paris, London, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Sydney, Toronto etc.). I want to figure this out to an answer I can agree with from my own experience, since it might finally answer the question of where I should live definitively.

So loving this. Possibly the best musical infographic , evah.

via GoFugYourself

Been holding down the fort in Oz this month and next with moving to the new place (you know, need nesting funds) and move to the freelancing and contract gig but still plotting some epic travel for this year and next. Not that I necessarily need the inspiration, but kinda loving this interactive world map with various historical and fictional travels with great little blurbs to explain them. Crack for my travel addiction. Check it for your fix.

I’ve gushed over Information is Beautiful ’s work a few times here, and this is actually almost mind-readingly topical as I was looking for a few great novels to queue up in my reading list since it’s a little non-fiction heavy and one of my goals for the year is interspersing some good novels between the hard core stuff. I was actually looking at a Top 100 book list the other day.

National Geographic is doing a year long analysis of the world’s population and put together this fantastic animation reel on what it actually means to be a typical human being on our tiny little planet of seven billion souls. Really well done.

I know NatGeo gets a bad rap from anthropologists due to its exoticism of the Other, but I have to admit it was seminal to my childhood and sense of far off places when I was growing up. Looking forward to their series.