Analysis of Piracy Around the Horn of Africa

The 2009 hostage rescue by US Navy SEALs off the coast of Somalia made the media focus attention on the growing threat of piracy to international shipping in the Horn of Africa. Palantir have applied their advanced analysis capabilities to data published by the International Maritime Bureau Piracy Reporting Centre, as well as open source news reports. The analysts at Palantir then focused on geo-temporal patterns of attacks, as well as the financing network of the Central Regional Coast Guard, a federation of Somali pirates to create an amazing analysis of the events.

The second video on the page, about the Gulf of Aden, shows the dramatic increase in piracy in the area beginning in 2008 and continuing to the present. With Palantir’s advanced visualization capabilities, a couple of interesting patterns emerge:

  • Before the fall of 2008, piracy events were somewhat scattered in the eastern end of the Gulf.
  • Beginning in August 2008, there is a surge of attacks that occur in a band about 60 km off the Yemeni coast.
  • In mid-February 2009, a new band begins to appear another 50 km further out into the Gulf.

It’s possible that shipping companies shifted the shipping lane in response to the surge in piracy along the original route.

What are your thoughts of this types of analysis of monumental proportion? How will governments (Palantir’s largest market segment) use Palantir’s tools for the better good?

Posted via email from Share Joy | Vent Frustrations

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Runkeeper… taking me and itself further!

This morning, Central European Time, saw the release of the iOS4 compatible version of Runkeeper. Now I myself am not updating to iOS4 yet since my iPhone 3Gs is jailbroken and am happy with it so far. I'll skip over my arguments for jailbreaking and dive directly into the great update Jason Jacobs and his team have released.

This wasn't a major update but in my eyes Runkeeper has made great work of matching web functionality with their iPhone version of its app (not sure if Android will have the same features as well). The 3 major items that got me excited were the following:

Routes
On the Runkeeper website you were able to set up routes. Let's say that you constantly (or at least the majority of the time) you do your workouts along the same route, in the website you were able to define these routes and monitor your times on it. The iPhone app now has the possibility to select that route before you start your activity. Upon selecting a route, the route is shown to you and you can see your fastest time on it aswell. There is, as far as I know, no feature yet to set the pace to your fastest time so that you can train against it. Nonetheless, this functionality is great as it takes away the unconcious burden of wondering if your activity will be coupled to the defined route in your account.

Sharing
Many of us use the sharing functionality within Runkeeper to share our activities and progress with our friends. Again, Runkeeper has made it possible to change your settings, which have always been available on the website, from your iPhone. You can easily change the settings for:
  • Make activities public
  • Make maps public
  • Runkeeper LIVE (paid service)
  • Post to Twitter
  • Post to Facebook
I, for one, like to share… well most of the time. I usually track my 5k bicycle rides to work, but can imagine that this will irritate a few people as it really isn't a siginificant activity. With the emergence of filtering of social media, I believe that as participants we should always consider what we share and how often. Signal is more important than noise.

Post Activity
The last great part of the Runkeeper update is the post activity screen. When you complete an activity the only option we had was to save or discard it. Now, depending on your share settings, this would cause the activity to automatically be shared as you had defined. Now, Runkeeper will allow you to select how you would like to share the activity (in my case via Facebook or Twitter) and you have the added option of attaching a note to the activity.

Keep in mind that these are just new functionalities that have been added to an already great application. Runkeeper also gives you the opportunity to setup audio cues, take photo's during the activity, setup live tracking of your activity, manually add activities, join Street Teams, setup training schedules (interval or paced based trainings) and much much more. The website also offers added services for a mere $20 a year. By paying this small fee you get access to activity trend, progress and analysis reports which will give you full insights into your activities, be it cycling, running, walking or what ever you can imagine. I have even seen swimming, but this was of course entered manually… don't dive in with your iPhone. Runkeeper is great but doesn't make your iPhone water resistent!

Runkeeper is very good at motivating me to go a nd workout. As an online analyst during the day, the statistics about my efforts really make me happy. I am currenty only running 3 times a week, but Runkepper is making me want to workout more. Feel free to check out my Runkeeper profile and join my Street Team.

Posted via email from Share Joy | Vent Frustrations

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Optimalisatie binnen de Organisatie

webform20 oktober j.l. vond de 4e en tevens laatste Adversitement seminar plaats, georganiseerd onder auspiciën van Thuiswinkel.org. In dit 4e deel werd er gekeken naar online optimalisatie. Methodieken, middelen en interne adoptie waren de hoofdonderwerpen die middag in zaal 4 van Seats2Meet in Utrecht. Mijn taak was om via een presentatie inzichten te geven in het verkrijgen van steun voor een optimalisatieproject vanuit de organisatie. Met dit artikel wil ik graag enkele tips en gedachtes met jullie delen over het werven van steun van collega’s en het verkopen van online optimalisatie binnen een organisatie. lees meer »

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Interview Paul Veugen – Usabilla.com

In het kader van een nieuw project heb ik een interview afgenomen met de oprichter van Usabilla.com, Paul Veugen.

In elk interview met iemand uit de ‘online’ wereld zullen 10 vragen gesteld worden en krijgt de gast ook de mogelijkheid om zelf een vraag te stellen voor de volgende gast.

Het is de bedoeling om alle interviews op 1 website te plaatsen buiten ActualInsights. Tot die tijd zullen de interview alleen beschikbaar zijn via mijn eigen blog, ActualInsights, Vimeo en de websites van mijn gasten.

Heb je zelf interesse om geïnterviewd te worden, ben je werkzaam in een ‘online’ functie, geef je dan snel op via matthew.niederberger [apenstaart] gmail.com

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The first UX Bookclub meeting in Delft

This short video was taken during a UX Bookclub meeting in Delft, the Netherlands on June 25th 2009. Since I work as a User Experience Designer in my daily life, I thought that it would be nice to meet some others by attending these meetings and giving us a chance to talk shop.

Our chapter was set up by Jeroen van Geel and Bette Burger. Jeroen and Bette who both work for Fabrique were so kind as to invite everyone over to their office. After a quick round of introduction from the co-ordinators and a cool beer to beat down the heat, the meeting got started. We took took tuns introducing ourselves. There was a nice mix of people attending ranging from interaction designers to industrial designers. As far as experience was concerned, it was nice to see the professionals mix with recent college/university graduates.

As discussions got livelier a decision was made to move the talks to the garden of the Frabrique office. A, still, warm summer’s evening was a great setting for the first UX Bookclub meeting in Delft and after having decided which book to focus on for our next meeting the meeting slowly came to an end. We drank another beer, talked off-topic and then we parted our ways. A big thank you to Fabrique’s Jeroen and Bette for hosting the meeting and for supplying the beer…

If you are interested in joining a UX Bookclub in your area, take a look at the UX Bookclub website for more details or follow @uxbookclub on Twitter.

Music in the video “City Lights at Night” by Revolution Void used under Creative Commons license and downloaded from Jamendo.

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