30 km/h! It doesn't move very far, but it does so in milliseconds.

Jeffrey Friedl show us an amazing mini-movie of the shutter of a Nikon D3 (the photos are by Marianne Oelund).

It's amazing so accurate the shutter mechanism is. 16 milliseconds from it opens to it starts closing. Click-click-click. The D3 it's rated for three hundred thousand exposures.

With so many things that are now electronic, poorly built or both it's refreshing to get reminded how durable and precise they are still building SLR cameras.

I talked to a guy from the company Medtime which is making personel planning for the health care sector, i.e., a program for the process of coordinating who is on shift when, on a hospital. Nice product and it looked good too. The task of planning the duty rosters for hundreds of people, taking into account many rules and conditions is extremely complicated and their product looked like a necessary tool to do it.

But someone still has to do it. Someone and not something. There is a human being administrating the planning tool, who talks to the people having special wishes such that "I would really prefer not to be on nightshift with Jim again anytime soon" or "Can I skip Mondays?" and whatever. It is a natural job for a human: It requires good intuition and understanding of human relations.

It is a difficult but not impossible task to teach a machine to do a similar task. But it requires data to substitute the experience and knowledge of the human administrator. And thats the point: As we record more and more data, more and more tasks are possible to solve by machines. In that sense, a full featured machine culture is a successor of the "data recording age". If you are afraid of the machines taking over, on the other hand, the game is to keep data recoding to a minimum.

An article in the Danish newspaper Information reports that the European Union and IBM is working together to investigate the prospects of using police websites to collect photos etc. on other citizens offences. The idea is to use social services as a model to create a user generated content of photos, videos and similar material of other citizens minor offences such as illegal parking.

What an extraordinarily bad idea. When taking risks on citizen rights, the stakes should be high as in case of terror or public health safety, not illegal parking. If someone observes what he believes to be a crime, he shold of course contact the police and if he has recorded the event on his camera phone, then it should be used in court. And it does. It is already like that - new technology is used in fighting crime.

On the other hand, what a nice place to exercise some harasment. If you dont like someone who is wellknown to the general public, feel free to upload pictures claiming all sorts of things - in the media the person will be convicted even before the court trial begin.

Behind the thoughts are Søren Duus Østergaard, senior e-gorvernment advisor from IBM Europe and David Osimo, scientific officer at the European Comission (Osimos blog, Slides on the topic).

Talking to some colleagues recently on the matter of correlations, I had a welcomed opportunity to discuss a good point of the English statistician Frank Anscombe: The Anscombe Quartet from 1973.

The anscombe quartet is four 2D data sets with same mean, variance, correlation and optimal least squares regression line:

Mean(x) = 9
Variance(x) = 10
Mean(y) = 7.5
Variance(y) = 3.75
Regression line: y = 0.5 x + 3

But with quite different appearance when inspected visually

This is demonstrating two simple but important points:

• Visual data inspection is important
• There is more to life than first and second moments

Well I guess many people would say "I knew that", but many simple and yet important things are often forgotten.

I like Wordpress beacuse it is free, is based on PHP/MySQL and is published under GPL license. So just for fun I created an account at wordpress.com, wrote my email address, chose a login, chose a password, etc. And quite suprisingly, WP flashed me a website and wrote me an email back BOTH in which my password was presented in plain text. How amateurish is that?!

As a sarcastic bonus, it is not possible to delete an account - since as the FAQ says: "We don't. Don't worry about unused accounts. It doesn't hurt anything. The software could break if we deleted accounts, so accounts are permanent."

What? "The software could break"? Is that meant to be funny or is it simply bad manners?

Steven Jobs will love this. If you have had an iPhone in your hand, you have probably tried to browse the photos or albums with your index finger by light sideways movements. Thats apparently truely intuitive: A friend of mine from Spain recently bought an iPhone and showed it to his two year old niece who learned this browsing technique almost instantly. Two years. At that age most kids cannot even talk.

According to an article in Computerworld, the offical organisation for Danish language (Dansk sprognævn), has decided to include the verb "to google" in the next Danish spelling dictionary. "Dansk sprognævn" is the organisation who defines what is spelled correctly and what new words to include in the language.

I just learned a new word: "Infographics". According to the encyclopedia it means "Information graphics or infographics are visual representations of information, data or knowledge". Here was the graphics which coayught me attention: The winner of some competition presented on Flowing Data:

While working at Technical University of Denmark I once visited a colleague in his home. In the hallway he had all sorts of information visualtion from Underground maps to 3D brain scans. Clearly it was the visualization part of it which had his interest and now I realize that he was interested in infographics years before I even knew it existed.

I found the name "infographics" on the blog Cool Infographics by Randi Krum, which I in turn found when looking for Flowing Data, another blog on data, data usage and data visualization. In fact, there are quite a few blogs on infographics, so I might make a list of it

• "Infographics News"
• Cool Infographics
• Flowing Data
• Neoformix
• ...

If I forgot your favorit Infographic blog, please let me know so we can make the list more complete.

As many times before, Dilbert is telling the awful truth - this time on the nasty topic of model building on garbage data. Sadly it happens rather often that bad data is clouded by subsequently (wrong) model building.

Via a posting on BoingBoing I found the shop The Particle Zoo with the slogan "subatomic particle plush toys from the standard model and beyond". It is a small shop in Los Angeles where Julie Peasley is making woolen toys with inspiration from particle physics - below is the gravity related higgs-boson of "wool felt with gravel fill for extra mass".

On January 1 2008, NASA released an album available on iTunes Store, with radio communication from the Apollo missions. The album is titled "The Apollo Missions" and holds 222 sound clips from mission 7 t o17. Yes - I considered buying it and no I haven't bought it yet.

One thing I did buy, however, was this new debut electronica album by Mike Sheridan. It is called "I syv sind", which literaly translates into "In seven minds" meaning a state in which it is hard to decide. Very nice debut album by the sixteen year old Mr. Sheridan. The album has received very positive reviews. And for good reasons.

Warning - Advertisement: In my company Epital, we have decided to set up a course in non-linear mathematical models. It is to be held in ScionDTU Hørsholm (north of Copenhagen) on november 26 and 27. You can see more details here and sign up ny email to "kursus (a) epital.dk".

Somehow I like the terrible Lada Niva. It is a 4x4 going 10.5 km/l, letting out 233 gCO2/km and have not even been tested in the EuroNCAP - rather strange that it is legal not to be testet! But I like the old school retro-look and the feeling that in that car, you dont have to clean your shoes before getting in.

And it turns out that some other people like it too. On this russian forum, which I do not understand at all, I found an image of a rebuild Lada Niva dashboard with a computer monitor. And what a computer!? It looks like something from the early eighties in monochrome text terminal - probably not good for GPS guidance.

The Danish newspaper Information had an article September 12 with the title "Generation Stupid" by journalist Mette-Line Thorup. The main claim is that the younger generation is too busy sending sms's and chat to get involved in some topics with real immersion - reading some serious books for example.

How incredibly reactionary a point of view is that?! As a readers comment pointed out, it has been the favorit comment for thousands of years that the youth of today is lazy, and unreflected. So either it has been going downhill since the ice age OR the adult generation is not really capable of understanding the behaviour of the young.

It is of course interesting to focus on how new technological possibilities are influencing young people, their intellectual development, social acitivities, etc, but to sum it all up with the headline "Generation stupid" is not accurate, not catchy, simply not good journalism. That the otherwise reasonably intellectual newspaper such as Information brings a message like that on the front page is almost unbelievable.

The swiss pilot Yves Rossy, known for his spectacular jet driven wing, were according to Reuters crossing the English channel on Sep 26 in 13 minutes and with 200 km/h.