Thursday, April 21, 2011

Obama's Cone of Silence

The BBC has an article about the mobile security setup that the US president uses when he travels.
Designed to withstand eavesdropping, phone tapping and computer hacking, Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities - also known as SCIFs - are protected areas where classified conversations can be held.
They can be permanent enclosures within a building, or mobile areas set up when a world leader is on the move, to allow them to view sensitive documents or have secret conversations without any outsiders listening or hacking in.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Video: The Joy of Stats

The Hans Rosling video The Joy of Stats is now online.  It is a bit long, almost an hour, but is a good intro to what Rosling has been saying about how statistics can be used to help people.  He also makes the point that increasingly powerful computers make bigger and bigger volumes of data usable by humans.

A while ago I blogged about a TED talk that Rosling did using animated graphics to show changes in statistics from the third world.  Still worth a look if you don't have time for the Joy of Stats.