Revolutions: Facebook's Social Network Graph

Paul Butler, an intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team, was interested in visualizing the “locality of friendship”. Luckily, he has some great data to work with: Facebook’s social network of the friendships between its 500 million members. But visualizing that much data can be a challenge in its own right – it takes skill to draw meaning from what could easily be an incomprehensible mess of data. After drawing a sample of 10 million friend pairs from the Hive interface to Facebook’s Hadoop-based database, Paul set to using R to solve this visualization problem. ...

December 15, 2010 · 1 min · Ermias Beyene Tesfamariam

Map of Great Britain phone calls

The map shows a great visualization of phone calls in UK from a study made by researchers at University College London, MIT, and Cornell University, with the help of BT Group. The map depicts bidirectional traffic of around 12 billion phone calls over a period of one month. Each of the 3042 pixels represents an area of 9.5 x 9.5 km with the color intensity indicating the length of the call time. Read more about the research, on the paper published at PLoS, Redrawing the Map of Great Britain from a Network of Human Interactions.

December 12, 2010 · 1 min · Ermias Beyene Tesfamariam

Which Fantasy/SciFi Character Are You?

I took a just for fun which matches you with famous science fiction characters that you have the most in common with and I got Anakin Skywalker. A famous character in the Star Wars Universe. :) Anakin Skywalker Struggling for self-assurance over hidden angst, you are highly adept and full of surprises. “I find your lack of faith disturbing.” short quiz

December 11, 2010 · 1 min · Ermias Beyene Tesfamariam