Spent a really interesting morning at one of the Arup Design Schools - thanks to Richard and Richard for the invite! Notes from the event were tweeted but i only tagged the last one, photos are on flickr and the slides are on slideshare.

Another great piece of work by Dopplr and this time it is even more personal. Just received my dopplr2008report.pdf. 50,000km traveled, away from home for 55 days and the velocity of a duck (5.73 km/h). I love the timeline that links through to the flickr images - just need to figure out how to add one in for Ambleside...

Great addition to the already great Dopplr tool. Am just about to expend the significant part of this years carbon footprint...

I came across a link to this location on google maps in one of their forums and it made me smile - no other reason to post it here than that.

Received the Wattson from DIYKyoto last week and had a quick install at home to see how it works. It has been running for 10 days and no problems so far but have not downloaded any data yet - software is to be delivered. Install was extremely simple, just clamp the current transducer (or is it a transformer?) around one of the two wires between the house electricity meter and fuse box and then turn on the wattson. Was very interesting when we first turned it on to see how many *hidden* appliances were running. Managed to get from 600 watts down to 80 watts by turning things off standby, however notice that it seems to average 700-800 watts in the evening. Max to date has been about 2500 watts when the dishwasher was on... Next step is to install it in Arup to monitor office appliance use...

Nice project for Haringey Council by Hot Mapping and Horton Levi. The aerial survey measured heat loss from every property by taking thermal images. The council claim this piece of work was completed for under 21k GBP. My house is shown circled below - not bad considering our poor level of insulation - but i did not live here (in 2000) and cannot be sure if, for example, any heating was on when Horton-Levi conducted the aerial thermal survey of the whole of London. More info.

Plugin for firefox that allows you to see the C02 impact of your journey WHILST you search for flights using you favorite website (US focus at mo so i had to use expedia.com) soon to come is a version for car directions... The calculations they are using are available on the project wiki

Nice example of tangibly making the invisible visible. On the balloon it says: Drive one day less and look how much carbon monoxide you'll keep out of the air we breath. [via infoaesthetics]

I wish i could do this....

Met with guys from Path Intelligence today. They are aiming at the holy grail of being able to track people in retail spaces without any kind of intervention being required (e.g. people wearing tags). They are using mobile phones as the tag (penetration in the UK is over 100%!!) and are measuring signal strength from radio beacons set-up around the venue. The volumes of data collected present some interesting data visualisation problems...

This came via infoaestheitcs blog - what a great visualisation...

Came across this nice image of toughened glass viewed through polarised glasses on wikipedia under their polarisation entry. I had been looking up info on Anisotropy for an image analysis project I am doing at Arup. Have been implementing some basic algorithms in processing using co-occurance matrices and simple thresholding functions... might provide a low cost solution. Also getting a demo of image pro plus as a completely alternative route.

Ask E.T.: Project Management Graphics (or Gantt Charts) - came across this forum from a newsletter email from brucemaudesign. A fantastic forum discussion thread still active after 4 years!! Lots of posts from large civil projects to novels to movies to F1 teams regarding how to visualise the many interdependencies in managing multivariant projects - did they use a Gannt chart for the great wall of china.

From one of the posts a link to good PM resource from ex Columbia uni prof: http://www.projectreference.com/

Working for experimental company Cloud9, James Clar is building a working prototype for a model of the Habitat Hotel, near Barcelona. He says:

It is a hotel with a light mesh that wraps the whole building. The light mesh has sensors that will read the daylight sun amplitude and then at night each node will give off color according to how much that node collected sun. Therefore, the mesh reflects the energy levels of each day, it will change over seasons and due to weather.