From the Brookings Institute, here’s an interactive map of  graduate degree attainment, population 25 and over.

I’m pretty late to the game on this but I’ve had a lot of fun reading up on Hadoop and Cloudera. As I understand it, Apache Hadoop is a freeware/open-source software package that allows a lot of data-intensive computing systems to play nicely together and analyze large amounts of data. This is a top-level project from Apache who as you probably know supports a ton of software and web-related projects. Cloudera are the commercial Hadoop experts.

What strikes me as most interesting here is that the Hadoop system can bring together so many disparate functions – even during a system failure. Yes, it is self-healing. Interesting. It even does this working side-by-side of existing/legacy systems. Seems very pertinent to the ever growing mountains of data generated daily.

I am ESTATIC that I’ll soon be a member of School of Information Studies at Syracuse University (iSchool). However, it’s been a rather very hard past couple months. I’ve been on a yo-yo between Syracuse University’s Office of Financial Aid and Scholarship Programs and Direct Loans, studentloans.gov, the U.S. Department of Education, Common Origination and Disbursement (COD) School Relations Center, etc. trying to finalize a loan so I could go pursue my MLIS at the The School of Information Studies at Syracuse University (iSchool).

It has been quite an arduous and, at times, upsetting experience. Long story short, there were many emails, letters, phone calls and faxes and an ongoing finger pointing exercise between Financial Aid and the various government organizations listed above.

Drove me BONKERS and was hanging over my head for MONTHS.

I kept pretty detailed notes on emails, phone calls, faxes and letters as well as promised timelines and the names of involved parties. During this frustrating period my vengeful side kept saying, ‘When everything gets worked out, unleash this beast of negative exposure and get people in trouble.’ I opted against that and literally got rid of all non-essential documents and records related to the loan. It felt good to purge those feelings and memories.

I’ve had to keep a lot of this under wraps at work for obvious reasons but FINALLY this Monday I got that giving notice thing at work taken care of. Next? Update Facebook. Done. Update LinkedIn. Done…Work…….YES…finally done. I was originally hoping to give work notice at least 2 weeks earlier but due to the delays with the aforementioned Financial Aid, I couldn’t do it until this week. I was really hoping to be in Syracuse at the beginning of August, then go out to LA for Emily and Nick’s wedding, then return to Syracuse, but I just couldn’t leave my employer high and dry. I’ve worked there too long and have to much respect for the organization to do otherwise. Gotta finish strong and transition appropriately.

So essentially it’s all over now. On to the next chapter in life. Gave my notice at work on Monday. In other news, I just watched The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Man som hatar kvinnor). Great movie. Haven’t read the book.

Sean Stiegemeier became quite displeased with the less than mediocre footage that was being produced from the spewing annoyance that was the Icelandic Volcano which seemed to hold up the western world for a couple weeks. So he took matters into his own hands. Miraculously he managed to get a flight out to Iceland in the midst of the ultimatley frozen air traffic to the region. The weather was terrible when he arrived but shortly before his departure from what he thought was an expenisve and useless trip to Iceland, he got about a day and a half to capture the stunning time-lapse images you see below. (from his site)

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

Wow. What’s next? Matt McClellan posted some pretty impressive numbers eating a healthy slice of pizza every 3 hours and nothing else but water. Read on for video and details.

In just thirty days here were Matt’s results;

• Weight- 203 pounds to 179 pounds
• Bloood Pressure- 140/90 to 118/80
• Cholesterol- 243 to 157
• Biceps- 15 inches to 14 inches
• Chest- 42 inches to 43 inches
• Waist- 38 inches to 33 1?2 inches
• Hips- 42 inches to 39 inches
• Body Fat -19 percent to 9 percent
• BMI- 26.9 percent to 23.6 percent

Pizza Diet Essentials

Matt ate nothing but pizza for 30 days which consisted of 8 slices consumed over a 12 hour period. His first slice was at 9am and his last slice was at 9pm for a total of 2500 Calories from the pizza.

The pizza that he ate was made with skim milk cheese and included healthy toppings such as chicken, broccoli, avocado, pineapple, onions, peppers, and mushrooms. Sorry, meat lovers wasn’t on the menu.

Matt also increased his exercise level to 60 minutes a day alternating between cardio and weight training. Also, Matt didn’t change his habit of having some soda, energy drinks, or alcohol each day because he wanted to prove that pizza alone could be the healthy factor not cutting out unhealthy beverages.

Summary

With the pizza diet Matt proved that pizza can be part of a healthy diet if moderation and wise topping choices are selected. He believes that the key to any diet is portion control and that’s basically what his pizza diet is, a way to enjoy a great food, but not eat the whole pie in one go.

I suspect even greater health benefits could be achieved by cutting out the soda or energy drinks and making the pizza with whole wheat crust.

You can read about his whole journey at Tourdepizza.com

Enter wordle.com to the very random ‘things to pop into my head’ category. If you haven’t heard, they’ll help you make pretty pictures out of words or your webpage (as I did).

They’re baack…Those  mad scientists at EepyBird who shocked the world with those majestic Coca-Cola and Mentos fountains are at it again. They’ve moved on to much more functional projects, namely a Coke Zero & Mentos Rocket Car. Check the video after the jump.

Awesome. Read about it after the jump. From Graffiti Analysis.

Graffiti Analysis 2.0: Digital Blackbook from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Graffiti Analysis is an extensive ongoing study in the motion of graffiti. Custom software designed for graffiti writers creates visualizations of the often unseen motion involved in the creation of a tag. Motion data is recorded, analyzed and archived in a free and open database, 000000book.com, where writers can share analytical representations of their hand styles. Influential graffitis artist such as SEEN, TWIST, AMAZE, KETONE, JON ONE and KATSU have had their tags motion captured using the Graffiti Analysis software. All tags created in Graffiti Analysis are saved as Graffiti Markup Language (GML) files, a new digital standard used by other popular graffiti applications such as Laser Tag and EyeWriter. Graffiti Analysis 2.0 is an open source project that is available online for free in OSX, Windows and Linux. Graffiti writers are invited to capture and share their own tags, and computer programmers are invited to create new applications and visualizations of the resulting data. What Martha Cooper did for archiving graffiti on film, and Chalfant/Silver did for archiving graffiti in video, Graffiti Analysis intends to do for archiving graffiti in code. The project aims to build the world’s largest archive of graffiti motion and bring together two seemingly disparate communities that share an interest hacking systems, whether found in code or in the city.

Graffiti Analysis is a project by Evan Roth. All of the software changes in GA2.0 were written by Mzz Chris Sugrue, with support from the Fondation Cartier. GA1.0 was created at Parsons Art Media & Technology with input and advising from Zach Lieberman. Graffiti Analysis was built in Open Framewerkz.

For more information, please see the about page.

This has been around for some time but I just was introduced to it today. From HuffPo:

In the late 1960s, psychologist Walter Mischel performed a series of tests on preschoolers referred to as The Marshmallow Tests. Mischel would give a child a single marshmallow, then leave him or her alone in the room with it. Before he departed, he’d make each kid an offer: if they wanted to, they could eat it immediately — but if they waited for him to return, they’d get two marshmallows. The tests were designed to examine willpower and the mental processes behind delayed gratification. Watching kids go through the experiment can be poignant… and adorable. See the video below.

Remember those guys who a couple years ago paired Mentos with various versions of Coca-Cola to create some beautiful geysers? They’re at it again. Check out the trailer video below.