I'm quoted in the "Infosys Digital Radar 2023"

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on · · 150 words
Cover page of the report.

A few months ago, I had a lovely rambly chat with Harry Keir Hughes about the nature of data, transparency, and how it can tie into the Net Zero agenda. Harry and his team have taken my pontifications and placed them in the very swanky Digital Radar Report. The full report quotes lots of people […]

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Running a Shortest Splitline Algorithm on the UK - and other mapping adventures

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on · · 2,600 words · read ~273 times.
South Western tip of England split into three.

How do you fairly split a country into electoral subdivisions? This is a difficult problem. Whatever you choose, you'll piss off someone. A politician will be annoyed that their loyal voters are no longer in their district. And voters will be annoyed that they're now lumped in with people from the wrong side of the […]

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The point of a dashboard isn't to use a dashboard

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on · · 11 comments · 400 words · read ~1,957 times.
Colourful graphs and charts. Image by Yvette W from Pixabay.

Every so often, an employer asks me to help make a dashboard. Usually, this causes technologists to roll their eyes. They have a vision of a CEO grandly staring at a giant projection screen, watching the pretty graphs go up and down, and making real-time decisions about Serious Business. Ugh! What a waste of time! […]

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x-no-data-charges

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on · · 4 comments · 650 words · read ~209 times.
Screenshot of a Symbian mobile phone asking "Opening a secure connection. Yes or No?"

Here's an idea that can't possibly work. People used to pay-per-minute for telephone calls. Some numbers were "zero-rated". That is, if you called them you wouldn't be charged. At first1 it was calls to the emergency services which were free. Businesses and other organisations realised that it was good customer service to provide a free-to-call […]

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How do you store numbers with leading zeros?

By
on · · 12 comments · 950 words · read ~547 times.
Binary code displayed on a screen.

I am very interested in your opinion on this. Imagine that you work at a company which sells widgets. Each widget has a unique serial number. The number is a fixed length, and can contain leading zeros. That is, the following are all valid identifiers: 00001 01010 12345 What data type would you use to […]

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(re) Introducing TweeView - a Tree Visualisation for Twitter Conversations

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on · · 3 comments · 350 words · read ~620 times.
A dozen or so Tweets in a thread.

Previously on Terence Eden's blog... About 4 years ago, I wrote about Visualising Twitter Conversations in 2D Space. Based on an idea by Lucy Pepper, I built a quick hack to show what Twitter threads actually looked like. Well, lockdown finally got the best of me, and I finished the project! TweeView.ml Here are a […]

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Visualising Twitter Conversations in 3D Space

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on · · 6 comments · 350 words · read ~1,589 times.
A small conversation.

Here's set of visualisation I've been working on. Last night, at #TapIntoTwitter, I demonstrated a fun way to view your Twitter conversations as a force-directed graph in 3D space. I'm going to show it off to you, then explain how it works. This is a designed as a "fun" demo. Here we go! So, what's […]

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MSc Assignment 2 - Data Analytics Principles

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on · · 2 comments · 6,400 words · read ~698 times.
A map where square relating to a specific group all have the same colour.

I'm doing an apprenticeship MSc in Digital Technology. In the spirit of openness, I'm blogging my research and my assignments. This is my paper from the Data Analytics module. I enjoyed it far more than the previous module. This was my second assignment, and I was amazed to score 72%. In the English system 50% […]

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Best Bulk Data PAYG SIMs in the UK

By
on · · 6 comments · 250 words · read ~523 times.
The Doctor on the phone.

I want to buy a big chunk of data and use it until it runs out. I'm not interested in a contract. I don't want a bundle of phone calls, SMS, or ringtones. Just give me DATA that lasts for as long as possible. Here's the best data deals that I could find. Stick them […]

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A Decade of Drinking Beer on Untappd

By
on · · 500 words · read ~139 times.
Map of the world with dots all over it.

10 years ago, I asked an innocent question on Twitter. Is there any service which will let me "check in" to a beer? Because this Chocolate Tom I'm drinking is amazing. — Terence Eden (@edent) July 21, 2011 The answers came in swiftly - Untappd was the app to use. So, a few minutes later: […]

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