Interesting links 5-20-10

A data visualization tour "The goal of visualization is to aid our understanding of data by leveraging the human visual system's highly tuned ability to see patterns, spot trends, and identify outliers. Well-designed visual representations can replace cognitive calculations with simple perceptual inferences and improve comprehension, memory, and decision making. By making data more accessible and appealing, visual representations may also help engage more diverse audiences in exploration and analysis."

Open Science Summit "[The] advent of a truly "Open Science" which will profoundly affect the pace and character of subsequent theory and tool-driven paradigm shifts ... politicians and pundits point to the expectation that Science and Technology will let humanity invent its way out of the problems we've created."

Brits to Digitize 40M Newspaper Pages "Digitised material will include extensive coverage of local, regional and national press across three and a half centuries ... looking at key events and themes such as the Crimean War, the Boer War and the suffragette movement. The aim will be to build a 'critical mass' of material for researchers ... "

Revolution R for academia Revolution R Enterprise is designed for corporations, government agencies and academic researchers that require the highest levels of performance, reliability and computational power for their large-scale data analysis. It is optimized to run the fastest computations of any R software on a wide-range of platforms - features a visual development environment (i.e., no more command-line). RR Enterprise is FREE for academic researchers.

Digital diplomacy at US State Department "How do you move from a culture of "need to know" to a culture of "need to share?" Richard Boly thinks about the answer to that question every day. Boly, a speaker at next week's Gov 2.0 Expo, is the director of the Office of eDiplomacy at the State Department. His office is an applied technology think tank within the agency that's focused on improving the agency's communication and knowledge sharing. "Boly is responsible for overseeing Virtual Presence Posts (VPPs), enterprise search, classified web publishing, and social networking, including the development of StateBook."