The New York Times also published a fun British-Irish Dialect quiz this week. Based on the answers given to questions about phrases, words and their meanings, the quiz plots a heat map of where it thinks you are from.
Google have released an API for Google Docs, allowing developers to build solutions for bulk document creation, content management and workflow management.
The New York Times have published a nice data visualisation of the 14 year journey taken by NASA's opportunity rover over 28 miles of the surface of Mars.
This week Swansea Laptop Orchestra completed the Ty Cerdd CoDI Electronics project with a concert in the Pontio in Bangor as part of the Bangor Music Festival. The concert featured pieces from the 6 chosen CoDI composers. Check out my photos of the rehearsals and concert here.
David McWilliams returns with another Irish economics book wrapped in characters, stories and comparisions. After listening to his interview on the Blindboy podcast, I picked up Renaissance Nation. McWilliams is great at observing trends in Irish society, breaking them down and classifying their origin, nature and intent.
Information Is Beautiful have released the winners of the World Data Visualisation Prize 2019. The winners are categorised into interactive, napkin and static categories, along with a grand prize winner. The results are available on the Information Is Beautiful website.
Researchers at CNRS and Aix-Marseille University, in the Institut des Sciences du Mouvement – Étienne Jules Marey (ISM) have developed a robot that can navigate outdoors without GPS. The AntBot mimics the cataglyphis desert ants, which navigate using an internal celestial compass based on the sky's polarised light combined with counting their steps taken.
Animal farming is the leading river in climate change, deforestation and species lost. The million dollar vegan campaign has issued a challenge to Pope Francis that if he goes vegan for lent, they will donate one million dollars to charity. The campaign wants to raise awareness for how trying vegan for lent can start the world down the road of halting climate change. Check out the video below fronted by activist Genesis Butler on how the 12 years the planet has to halt climate change isn't very much time at all.
Gajus Kuizinas has an interesting post over on Medium Programming about the lessons learned in scaling a Postgres database to 1.2bn records per month, including the different hosting options and data management and indexing techniques.
Researchers from RMIT University in Melbourne conducted an experiment that showed that bees can perform addition and subtraction arithmetic by associating abstractions such as colour to the operators and performing calculations within a maze in search for sugar water.
