We all use the Internet and we are ruining the world we live on every time do. Does the power of the Internet as a communication tool out-weigh the amount of CO2 released by us constantly using the internet? Have a look at some of the stats set out in the infographic below:
Information graphics, visual representations of data known as infographics, keep the web going these days. Web users, with their diminishing attention spans, are inexorably drawn to these shiny, brightly coloured messages with small, relevant, clearly-displayed nuggets of information. They’re straight to the point, usually factually interesting and often give you a wake-up call as to what those statistics really mean.
Who can resist a colourful, thoughtful venn diagram anyway?
Today is your chance to try your hand at creating your own. To do:
1. Choose a topic that lends itself to visual representation in an infographic 2. Choose a tool that lends itself to creation of the inforgraphic 3. Get started collecting any data you need. $. Create the infographic
Stat Planet allows you to create some amazing interactive visualisations, which you can then use as is or create a static image. It can be used within your browser or downloaded for free. Stat Planet gives you access to some great world data and lets you customise that in your visualisations. It also has some great map-based visualisations to try.
Hohli is an intuitive, simple online chart maker. It’s incredibly easy to pick your chart type, add some data, vary the sizes and colours and see the finished chart. The finished charts are also very well designed and look great! 3. Creately
Creately lets you make easy-to-make diagrams and flow charts (easy to collaborate too). When you start, you can choose from a number of purpose-designed diagram types and quickly add your data to make your own chart. The end result looks very professional.
New York Times’ Visualization Lab lets you use statistics from recent NYTimes articles to create visualisations in various formats. You can also see other people’s visualisations and see how other people choose to display the same data. 5. Many Eyes
Many Eyes lets you upload your own data or use data already stored on the site. The visualisations themselves are well-designed and very professional-looking. This is definitely the easiest way to use your own data for online visualisations.
6. Google Public Data
Google Public Data lets you easily take public data and transform it into an infographic of your choice. These beautiful, colourful graphics simplify and communicate the data perfectly 7. Tableau
Tableau is a free Windows-only software for creating visualisations. As you can see, these impressive graphs are colourful and quite unique.
8. Gap Minder
GapMinder is a free Adobe Air (cross-platform by nature) application to ensure you have current data on major world issues and can create visualisations for your purposes. Data is updated yearly and released with new versions of the application. The visuals are also quite impressive!
Inkscape is a free vector graphic software available for many platforms. This is the ideal free option for the creation of your overall infographic. Simple and intuitive, you should have no problems importing your visualisations and combining them with other visuals to create your masterpiece.
Wordle lets you create word visualisations using text you enter. There are plenty of interesting designs to choose from. Enter whole books, short passages or see what other people have used. In this example, we can see the US constitution visualised.
Love Infographics?
If you’re a fan of infographics, these tools will probably become part of your everyday blogging tools. Here are some great tutorials on infographic creation:
An unscientific survey has shown that PC users tend to prefer fitting in with others, are less tech savvy, and prefer Hollywood films over indie films. The same survey suggests Mac users tend to throw more parties, are modern art enthusiasts, and would rather drive a Vespa than a Harley.
Amid rising scrutiny of their practices, Google Inc. defended the way it collects location data from Android phones, while Apple Inc. remained silent for a third day.
The companies' smartphones regularly transmit locations back to Google and Apple servers, respectively
Apple has come bottom of the most comprehensive green league table of technology companies because of its heavy reliance on "dirty data" centres.
The list, which is compiled by Greenpeace and released in San Francisco on Thursday, shows that the company relies heavily on highly polluting coal power at the sites that house its banks of servers.
PrintWhatYouLike lets you fully customize a page and print it directly or save it as a document. PrintWhatYouLike also offers a printer friendly button for your website.
To launch the PWYL editor, click the button or bookmarklet and wait a second. To isolate, remove, widen, resize, or save only selected items, simply click them in the website on the right and select the respective option from the little menu that opens up. You can select more than one element at once and apply the action to all of them at once.
You will also notice a sidebar on the left hand side of the website you are editing. In addition to manipulating single items, it allows you to change the default text size and font, remove the background, all images and margins, as well as undo and redo changes. A shortcut is to click Auto Format, which yields a text only version of the website.
Once you’re happy with the result, you can print the website directly or save it as PDF or HTML.
_______________________ 5. HTML5 Element Reference Table
There’s been a lot of buzz around HTML5 lately, especially since it is touted by many as the Adobe Flash replacement. HTML5, which is currently under development, will inevitably be the new content structure and presentation standard on the web.
Periodic Table of the Elements, a project by Josh Duck, aims to act as quick html5 element reference online. It has got 104 elements and 2 proposed elements arranged in a periodic table format.
As you see in the screenshot above, clicking on an item shows up a pop-up describing that tag, which also has links for your reference. You can also inspect webpages by typing in the URL in the box at the top of the page and hitting ‘Inspect’. It’ll highlight the tags on the table that are being used on that website.
Features
See HTML5 elements in a periodic table format.
Click on a tag to get more information about it.
Includes 104 elements in HTML5 working draft and 2 proposed elements.
CoolPreviews is the multi-feature FireFox addon that lets you preview any linked content including images. The image preview panel enables you to:
Zoom the image in or out;
Open the linked image in the separate tab;
Email the current link;
Play all the images on the page in the slideshow (works especially well for popular image search services like Flickr, Google Images, etc)
You can also turn previews on/off on specific sites anytime by clicking the icon on the status bar (or for those who have no status bar in FireFox 4, the same settings can be accessed in Tools -> Addons). CoolPreviews will memorize your settings.
The “Settings” dialog lets you customize your image previewing experience in many ways:
Set when you want the preview panel to appear: on mouse-over, on clicking the CoolPreviews icon, on mouse-over + CTRL key;
Set the location of the preview panel (relative to the cursor or the link);
Control the speed (how fast you want the preview panel to appear)
Set the theme (dark or ice);
Additional fun features:
Temporarily bookmark images to the right column with “stacks” feature;
Scroll Google Image search results on an “infinite 3D Wall” (Cooliris addon required).
Preview multiple thumbnails simultaneously without (mouse over subsequent images on a page while the preview window is open or pinned).
Obviously, there’s no point in using the above two addons simultaneously, so you should pick one.
Instead of taking advantage of one of the many physics engines for the Flash or Java platform, Sand Trap uses its own built-from-scratch HTML5 effort in this addictive puzzler. Each level contains a maze, and within that maze is a small amount of sand. By rotating the maze, it is your task to syphon the sand into the bucket.
VII transforms your whole browser window into a monochrome platform world, with smooth animations, physics and responsive controls. Using both the mouse and keyboard you must navigate, manipulate and clear each screen before progressing.
Blatantly inspired by the classic Line Rider, Canvas Rider allows users to create, share and ride user-generated tracks. If you’ve ever played a physics-based bike game (think Trials, or the more recent Trials HD) then the concept will be very familiar.
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8. Web Fundamentals Chapters 4 & 5
Work through Chapters 4 & 5 on Creating Text and Managing Graphics of the Web Fundamentals course, we will do a brief quiz on these Web Fundamentals chapters on Friday.
Its worth remembering that for all its power, the Internet is a series of networks based on primarily copper cabling and today, more crucially, fibre optic cables:
The traditional method of data transmission over copper cables is accomplished by transmitting electrons over a copper conductor. Fiber Optic cables transmit a digital signal via pulses of light through a very thin strand of glass. Fiber strands (the core of the fiber optic cable) are extremely thin, no thicker than a human hair. The core is surrounded by a cladding which reflects the light back into the core and eliminates light from escaping the cable.
A fiber optic chain works in the following manner. At the one end, the fiber cable is connected to a transmitter. The transmitter converts electronic pulses into light pulses and sends the optical signal through the fiber cable. At the other end, the fiber cable is plugged into a receiver which decodes the optical signal back into digital pulses.
Multimode vs Singlemode Fiber
A "mode" in Fiber Optic cable refers to the path in which light travels. Multimode cables have a larger core diameter than that of singlemode cables. This larger core diameter allows multiple pathways and several wavelengths of light to be transmitted. Singlemode cables have a smaller core diameter and only allow a single wavelength and pathway for light to travel.
Advantages & Disadvantages of Fiber Optic cable There are many advantages and disadvantages in using fiber optic cable instead of copper cable. One advantage is that fiber cables support longer cable runs than copper. In addition, data is transmitted at greater speeds and higher bandwidths than over copper cables.
The major disadvantages of fiber optic cables are cost and durability. Fiber cables are more expensive than copper cables and much more delicate.
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Australia's NBN
The NBN is one of the largest (and most disputed) public infrastructure currently under in OECD countries and indeed the world. Australia is seeking the overcome the tyranny of distance with a high-speed fibre-optic network.
National Broadband Network (NBN) is a open access telecommunication network under construction to overcome the digital divide in Australia. Fibre to the premises (FTTP) will provide up to one gigabit per second to 93% of Australians, with the remaining premises serviced by fixed wireless and satellite technologies with a minimum speed of twelve megabits per second. The NBN, the largest single infrastructure investment in Australia's history, was announced after the Request for Proposals (RFPs) for the original A$4.7 billion election promised NBN was terminated by then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, after facing a large compensation payment to Telstra and being unable to find private sector funding during the global financial crisis. Following the revised Tasmanian Government's proposal, the Tasmania rollout began in July 2009 with the first services going live in July 2010.
The NBN will have committed download speeds of one hundred megabits per second with peak speed of one gigabit per second for 93% of Australian connected via FTTH using a Gigabit Passive optical network (GPON) or Ethernet Point-to-Point fibre, while the remainder will be serviced by fixed wireless and satellite technologies with a minimum speed of twelve megabits per second.
The IT industry initially kept a neutral to positive opinion of the NBN, however with few exceptions are now supportive of the NBN.
Peak Australian business group, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) support the NBN with the CEO Peter Anderson calling it a "real productivity kick and benefit", but also called for more openness in relation to the costs of the project.
Homes and businesses are connected to a Point of Interconnect (PoI) via GPON, Ethernet, fixed wireless or satellite. Businesses within the 93% fibre footprint can be connected using Ethernet while home users will be connected via GPON. Homes and businesses outside the fibre footprint will be connected via fixed wireless or satellite. The fibre, fixed wireless or satellite will be connected to a Network Termination Unit (NTU) which gives four Ethernet ports and two Analogue Telephone Adapters (ATA).
The original NBN was an election promise by then opposition leader Kevin Rudd leading up to the 2007 Australian Federal Election. The plan was to build a A$15 billion fibre to the node (FTTN) network with the co-operation of the private sector, including a government contribution of A$4.7 billion. This would end the conflict of interest of Telstra wholesaling Australia's major telecommunications infrastructure, known as the copper network, and also providing retail services.
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Have a go at these Home Networking Quizzes and test your knowledge of networking basics:
Information graphics, visual representations of data known as infographics, keep the web going these days. Web users, with their diminishing attention spans, are inexorably drawn to these shiny, brightly coloured messages with small, relevant, clearly-displayed nuggets of information. They’re straight to the point, usually factually interesting and often give you a wake-up call as to what those statistics really mean.
