Dear wife,
I agree to have the decoration you want everywhere in our new home. You can have all the furniture and appliances you want in the kitchen. I’m OK if all the shelves with my computer books are in the basement. OK too if you don’t want to see the file server in the living room. Agreed: I’ll put back Windows on your laptop. But …
But I absolutely want one wall painted like these:
Jean-Etienne 
Photos found on Olybop.info (without original credit). Other walls with Tetris can be found on Flickr.
Posted in Computers, My life, Projects.
Tagged with fun, geek, house, idea, paint, tetris, wall.
By Jean-Etienne
– July 20, 2010
In the 300-and-more RSS items in my aggregator this week, there are 2 great ones from Information is Beautiful, a blog gathering (and publishing its own) nice ways to visualise data.
The first one is based on a talk by Clay Shirky who, in turn, was referencing his book Cognitive Surplus. In Cognitive Surplus visualized, David McCandless just represented one of Shirky’s ideas: 200 billion hours are spent each year by US adults just watching TV whereas only 100 million hours were necessary to create Wikipedia (I guess the platform + the content) …
It makes you think about either the waste television helps to produce either the potential of human brain(s) if relieved from the burden of television.
The second interesting post appeared in fact in information aesthetics, a blog where form follows data (referencing Information is Beautiful but I can’t find this post). In Top Secret America: Visualizing the National Security Buildup in the U.S., Andrew Vande Moere relates “an extensive investigative project of the Washington Post that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the September 11 attacks”. The project website contains all the ingredients for a well-documented investigation with the addition of interactive maps and flash-based interfaces allowing the user to build his/her own view on the project.
It’s nice to see investigative journalism combined with beautiful data visualisation and handling!
Posted in Reading, User Interface.
Tagged with America, cognitive, data, surplus, visualization.
By Jean-Etienne
– July 19, 2010
One of the differences between university lectures in Belgium and in the United States of America is that, in the US, most of the students are carefully “listening” to the lecture while having their laptop on and connected to the internet. I didn’t departed from this custom 
Yesterday, I was trying to download a Linux DVD (that’s what university networks are for, isn’t it?) and observed an interesting pattern in the network speed during the lecture. If I assume that the total bandwidth available remains constant, the one available to me was drastically reduced as the lecture was going on.
Now, if you think that the y-axis isn’t about the remaining network bandwidth but about the level of attention in students, you might not be far from the truth Attention drops rather quickly during the theoretical lecture and people were very busy during the practicals. Note that the remaining bandwidth was also very small during Mundial matches …
Posted in Computers.
Tagged with bandwith, lecture, network, speed.
By Jean-Etienne
– June 30, 2010
FluTE is an influenza epidemic simulation model written by Dennis L. Chao at CSQUID. It works out-of-the box on GNU/Linux (just type make and run it).
I wanted to see how it works. But since I’m temporarily stuck with a Windows laptop, I downloaded a free C++ compiler for Windows (wxDev-C++), imported all the files in a project and compiled. For those who want to try, here is the project file and the specific makefile in a zip file (2 kb). Just decompress the FluTE archive (I used version 1.15), copy the two files from the zip file above and launch the IDE. In the project options (Alt+P), specify the custom makefile (in the "Makefile" tab) as the one from the zip file above. Compile (Ctrl+F9). Done.
On my Intel Core2 Duo T5450 (2Gb RAM), it took 6 minutes to simulate the "two-dose" example.
Please note that I didn’t try to compile with OpenMPI. Maybe for next time.
Posted in Lab life, Open Source.
Tagged with C++, FluTE, influenza, makefile, mingw, model, Windows, wxDev-C++.
By Jean-Etienne
– June 25, 2010
Following this article (French), official phone eavesdroppings again increased in Belgium in 2009: Belgian police listened 5265 times to private conversations. The French transcript is here.
One doesn’t get much more than these numbers: nothing about the number of hours spent listening, nothing about the percentage of effectiveness/results, nothing about internet eavesdropping (e-mail e.g.). One thing struck me: all requests for eavesdropping were accepted. Or, at least that what the Minister implied when he wrote “there is no distinction between the number of requests and the number of effective eavesdropping”.
Posted in Reading, privacy.
Tagged with 2009, Belgium, eavesdropping, phone.
By Jean-Etienne
– May 11, 2010
Well, now I understand a bit better why experts said the small fall in carbon emissions indirectly due to the volcano is unlikely to have any significant impact on climate (see previous post) … InformationIsBeautiful made a correction following comments and the difference in CO2 emission is smaller:
However, although the air traffic is to slowly come back to normal, we can still enjoy some very nice moment without any plane in the sky:
Posted in Reading.
Tagged with carbon, emission, Eyjafjallajoekull, plane, pollution, volcano.
By Jean-Etienne
– April 20, 2010
One side-effect of the eruption of the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano is that there is no more plane in the European sky for the last few days. On one side, people are obliged to stay longer on holidays, others can’t make business trips, some food and other items can’t be transported, plane companies are crying but train and coach ones are more than happy. The last week-end was sunny and a lot of people enjoyed going outside in North Europe.
This morning, stuck in a traffic jam, I was wondering what is the amount of CO2 emissions saved by forcing planes to stay on the ground. And I found this great illustration from Information Is Beautiful:
So, visually, forcing planes to stay on the ground has an impact. But experts says although this has caused a small fall in carbon emissions, it is unlikely to have any significant impact on climate (cited by The Guardian). I don’t really know who these experts are. I guess the newspaper wants us to believe what it wrotes as is. But continuing reading about the subject, one learns that although the industry seems to take the pollution aspect of flights into consideration, we are far from perfection.
Finally, what I like the most in this illustration, it’s that it’s backed by real data (see at the bottom of the cited post). BlueSkyModel.org also has some data on how to compute a flight carbon footprint.
Credits:
First illustration: Lavender Ash Cloud from tj.blackwell on Flickr
Second illustration: Planes or volcanos from InformationIsBeautiful.
Posted in Reading.
Tagged with carbon, emission, Eyjafjallajoekull, plane, pollution, volcano.
By Jean-Etienne
– April 19, 2010
As I promised before, you’ll find here the text and slides of my Ph.D. thesis (btw text and slides are in French). The oral presentation was on March 24th, 2010 and everything was fine Slides can be watched below.
Posted in Lab life, Neuroscience, Proteomics.
Tagged with doctorat, PhD.
By Jean-Etienne
– March 25, 2010
In one of his buzz, Cédric Bonhomme drew my attention on the Highcharts javascript library. This library can produce beautiful charts of various types with some Ajax interaction. The only negative point imho is that it is dual-licensed and all cases deprive you from your freedom:
- there is a first Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License: you can use the library for your non-profit website (see details on the licensing page) ;
- there is a commercial license for any other website.
Now what if we only need the end-product, i.e. the resulting chart, in a commercial environment? What is covered by the license is just the re-use of the javascript library in a website, not the resulting chart. If a company choose to use Highcharts internally to render some beautiful charts and just publish (*) the resulting image, I guess they can just download the library and use it (* by “publishing”, I mean: publish a scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal, not publishing on its website). On the other hand, no one ever questioned the fact commercial companies have licenses for all the proprietary software they use to produce anything else, from charts to statistical data, just because they publish results with these software as tools. So the “trick” here would be that, by changing the medium on which you display end-results (from website to paper, even if it’s in PDF on the journal website), you can use the free-to-download license, even in a commercial environment, for an article from a commercial company. I’m not sure this was the original intention of Highslide Software.
Posted in User Interface, Websites.
Tagged with chart, Creative Commons, dual, end product, Highchart, license.
By Jean-Etienne
– March 19, 2010
