Areas of Expertise:
- Visualization
- Hadoop
- Big Data
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Recent Posts | All O'Reilly Posts
Pete blogs at:
http://petewarden.typepad.com/
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May 12 2013
Photo by Curtis Perry The Declassification Engine - "Saving history from official secrecy". A fascinating concept that shows how the firehose of cheap distributed computing power fundamentally changes what privacy and secrecy mean. We can probably reconstruct a lot of... read moreMay 08 2013
Photo by Grant Hutchinson Assuming everybody else sucked - If an industry is behaving in an apparently irrational way, try to figure out the internal logic that's driving that behavior. You'll be much more effective at breaking the rules if... read moreWe're all starting to track ourselves
May 07 2013
We're releasing a massive and growing amount of information about who we are, where we go, and when. There are hundreds of millions of public checkins already out there, and millions more are being created every day. People think of... read moreMay 03 2013
Photo by Neil Platform1 GeoURI - I have no earthly use for these, but I love that they exist, and are even an IETF standard! Nathaniel Bowditch - He created the American Practical Navigator over two hundred years ago. He... read moreMay 01 2013
Photo by Courtney Carmody Sentiment analysis is fiendishly hard to solve well, but easy to solve to a first approximation. I've been frustrated that there have been no easy free libraries that make the technology available to non-specialists like me.... read moreApril 26 2013
A Global Poverty Map Derived from Satellite Data - This is an old paper from 2006, but I love the idea of using how much light that a neighborhood sends into to the night sky to measure how wealthy it... read moreApril 23 2013
Photo by Tasty Goodness Yoyodyne - How a fictional company was born in the novels of Thomas Pynchon, was adopted by Buckaroo Banzai and Star Trek, and ended up in the GPL. What will be left of our cities? -... read moreDo we need a slow software movement?
April 19 2013
Photo by Tim Regan When I was an isolated kid in the English countryside my only connections to the computing world were "Public Domain" floppy disks. Mail-order libraries would send me one of the disks in their catalog if I... read moreApril 18 2013
Photo by Kurtis Garbutt Geo-location estimation of Flickr images - The caption, title, and description of a photo is incredibly useful when it comes to guessing where a photo was taken, even using fairly crude language analysis algorithms. This is... read moreConverting to and from Google map tile coordinates in PostGIS
April 10 2013
Google Maps' system of power-of-two tiles has become a defacto standard, widely used by all sorts of web mapping software. I've found it handy to use as a caching scheme for our data, but the PostGIS calls to use it... read moreApril 09 2013
Photo by Alan Levine Elephant - A beautiful open source project to store data in a way that's "as durable as S3, as portable as JSON, and as queryable as HTTP". Tim O'Reilly has talked about the web operating system,... read moreMarch 20 2013
Photo by Jesse Bell I have middlebrow tendencies, but over the years I've learned that the struggle with difficult work can pay off. I grew to love Infinite Jest, once I figured out Wallace was boring me deliberately, that he... read moreMarch 19 2013
Photo by Earl Want to live somewhere nice? Be prepared to work longer - How an area's living costs affect poor and rich workers differently. Moving towards an identity and patient records locator - As Ben Adida points out, a... read moreQuantity has a quality all its own
March 18 2013
Photo by Kevin Collins I used to be an image processing engineer. I'd be handed a picture, and I'd have to do something useful with it. To do that I had to take a big mental leap. Instead of seeing... read moreMarch 13 2013
Photo by Yersinia The Deleted City - A spatial reinterpretation of the old Geocities sites. Having data in a single large dump instead of behind an API makes it possible to do things like this with it, things that the... read moreWhy I'm a terrible privacy advocate
March 12 2013
Photo by Michael Scott People often think I'm a privacy researcher, thanks to the Facebook and iPhone stories. The truth is I'm just curious about undiscovered data. Because a lot of it is about people's behavior, and that's an inherently... read moreMarch 12 2013
Photo by Flood G BetaShapes - Using geotagged Flickr photos to define San Franciscos neighborhoods as a crowd-sourced 'folksonomy'. I'm entranced by how many useful things emerge from the clouds of data exhaust we're all generating. Bacteria farming and software... read moreWhy should you care that artists are underpaid?
February 26 2013
Picture by Jamie I've spent most of my career working closely with artists, and they were usually paid less than me. At first this was just awkward, but I began to realize it was part of a deeper problem. Most... read moreWhich iOS versions are Jetpac users running?
February 21 2013
Photo by Visual Media I just hit a nasty bug in the Jetpac iPad app that only seems to affect users on iOS 6.0.1. Unfortunately it seems to be deep in the OS's Facebook integration code, so I wasn't able... read moreFebruary 20 2013
Photo by Martin Fisch Facial profiling for the detection of mal-intent using thermal imaging - I've been out of the loop on how far image processing has come in detecting emotions. If you think a computer that recognises your face... read moreA pub that's also a theater?!?
February 19 2013
I love drinking beer, and I love watching plays. I usually have to elbow my way into a crowded bar in intermission to combine the two, which is far from ideal. Imagine my delight when I ran across the concept... read moreThings that happen to startup founders
February 16 2013
Photo by USACE Europe District You get into a lot of debt living off an anaemic salary and go bankrupt. Your spouse breaks up with you. You are fired from your own company by an outside CEO. Your company is... read moreFebruary 14 2013
Photo by Spodzone Why the Open Data movement is a joke - An impassioned rant, but it misses the point when it accuses the movement of cloaking itself in the mantle of progressive politics. Tom seems to expect it to... read moreWhat's the SF apartment market really like?
February 13 2013
Photo by Post Bear For the last six weeks I've been looking for an apartment in San Francisco. I thought I'd have to elbow through screaming mobs at every showing, but it really hasn't been too bad. I have to... read moreHow to track iOS memory crashes
February 12 2013
Photo by Fingle I love being able to use HTML5 content within Jetpac, but hosting it in Apple's UIWebView component can use a lot of memory. That matters because iOS apps crash when they run out of memory, and to... read moreFebruary 08 2013
Mural by Monte Thrasher Heads by Monte Thrasher - Normally my short link images are side-notes, but the pentagonal helmet image led me to discover what I think is my favorite mural ever. Check out Twiggy, the world's ugliest dog,... read moreThe dignity of customer service
February 07 2013
Photo by Ricky Brigante When I started my first job as a supermarket clerk, I dreaded going in. I needed the money to feed my weed and D&D habit though, so I gritted my teeth and dragged myself to work... read moreHow do analytics really work at a small startup?
February 05 2013
I was lucky enough to spend a few hours today with my friend Kevin Gates, one of the creators of Google's internal business intelligence systems, and it turned out to be a very thought-provoking chat. His mind was somewhat boggled... read moreFebruary 04 2013
Photo by Oatsy 40 My last post was a quick rant about the need for a decent open geocoder, but what's wrong with the ones we have? I've created a command-line tool to explore their quality: https://github.com/petewarden/geocodetest. As a first... read moreFebruary 13 2012
Creating a visualization requires more than just data and imagery. Pete Warden outlines the process and actions that drove his new Facebook visualization project. read more3 ideas you should steal from HubSpot
June 14 2011
HubSpot's location (near Boston) and its target market (small businesses) may keep it under the radar of Silicon Valley, but the company's approach to data products and customer empowerment are worthy of attention. read moreLessons of the Victorian data revolution
May 23 2011
Examples from the Victorian era show that if we're going to improve the world with data, it's absolutely essential we stay grounded in reality. read moreWhy you can't really anonymize your data
May 17 2011
Because we now have so much data at our disposal, any dataset with a decent amount of information can be matched against identifiable public records. To keep datasets available, we must acknowledge that foolproof anonymization is an illusion. read moreWhy the term "data science" is flawed but useful
May 09 2011
While formal boundaries and professional criteria for "data science" remain undefined, here's why we should keep using the term. read moreThe iPhone tracking story, one week later
April 27 2011
Apple announces fixes and sheds more light on location data. Plus, a look at some of the reporting and potential applications that have popped up. read moreAdditional iPhone tracking research
April 24 2011
The iPhone tracking story led to a host of related investigations. Here's a look at some of the latest developments. read moreiPhone tracking: The day after
April 22 2011
The iPhone tracking story published here a few days ago struck an unexpected nerve. Here's a selection of the most interesting immediate reactions. read moreWill data be too cheap to meter?
February 08 2011
The data acquisition process should be increasingly automatic, and so increasingly cheap. I'm hoping for a world where information producers are paid for extracting value from that data. read more4 free data tools for journalists (and snoops)
January 06 2011
You no longer have to be a technical specialist to find exciting and surprising data. In this excerpt from Pete Warden's ebook, "Where are the bodies buried on the web? Big data for journalists," Pete looks at four services that reveal underlying information about web pages and domains. read moreRecent Posts | All O'Reilly Posts
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