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Hasbro is in the business of making toys. Some of the most beloved franchises of our youth – Transformers, G.I. Joe, Star Wars, and others – all come out of the behemoth toy maker. These toys are generally made in China, but the company now creates its prototypes and production models here in the U.S. with 3D printers.

Gizmodo recently got a tour of Hasbro’s workshop that’s nestled in its Providence, Rhode Island headquarters. It’s here that toy makers create the next generation of Transformers with the help of 3D printers. It’s an incredibly fascinating look at how 3D printers are helping to reduce the time required to move a toy from prototype to full on production model.

GIZMODO – Inside Hasbro: Model Shop Magic from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

It’s safe to assume that toys were a major part of your childhood, as they were mine. It’s nice to see that toy companies are on the cutting edge of innovation when it comes to 3D printers and stereolithography machines.

[h/t: 3ders]

Though Tuesday’s hack of the AP’s Twitter account that sent U.S. markets into a freefall is no laughing matter, our favorite Taiwanese animators over at NMA do their best to make it entertaining. According to NMA’s take on the event, the fake attack on the White House signaled by the bogus tweet has something to do with flatulence. The video also takes some shots at The NY Post and Fox News.

If that’s not enough of a reason to watch, I don’t know what is:

The AP Twitter hack has prompted an FBI investigation, and has likely sped up Twitter’s plans to add an extra layer of account security with two-step verification.

TED is in the business of online videos. And so we were very intrigued by this question from Michael Stevens, the creator of the popular educational YouTube channel Vsauce: how much does a video weigh?

In today’s talk, a TED-Ed lesson filmed at TEDActive, he answers. Watch it above to find out how to measure the immeasurable. But beyond that, Stevens also shares why he creates online lessons centered around off-beat questions.

“Asking a strange question is a great way to get people in,” explains Stevens. “Sparking curiosity is great bait—it’s a great way to catch a human. Once you’ve caught them, you can accidentally teach a lot of things.”

Below, some of our favorite questions Stevens has posed in videos.

What color is a mirror?

Is the five-second rule true?

What if every single person in the world jumped at once?

Why do we wear clothes?

Will we ever run out of new music?

What’s the most dangerous place on Earth?

How secure is your password?

How much money is there on Earth?

Is your red the same as my red?

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Why do we have two nostrils?

And finally, why are things cute?

Google announced today that it has improved maps in Thailand and Indonesia as part of a project called Ground Truth, which it started back inn 2008. The project is simply Google’s initiative to prove more comprehensive and accurate maps.

“Through this project, we use high-quality map data from authoritative sources around the world and then apply a mix of advanced algorithms, supplemental data (including satellite, aerial and Street View imagery), and human input to help create a map that mirrors the real world as closely as possible,” explains Brian McClendon, VP Google Maps and Google Earth.

“For example, the updated map for Thailand now provides more comprehensive information about the Bangkok city center,” adds McClendon. ” So next time you happen to find yourself needing to cross the Chao Phraya River, you’ll be able to see that many ferry routes across the river are now mapped in greater detail, with route names shown and piers clearly marked. You can also pinpoint nearby points of interest, such as the Grand Palace and other sites like Wat Pho (the Temple of the Reclining Buddha).”

Google has added more info to the maps as well, including improved local language labels and more detailed coverage of prominent places, such as universities and hospitals.

Additionally, Google is now including more of Thailand and Indonesia’s natural geography. Many of Indonesia’s 17,000 islands, for example, are appearing on Google Maps for the first time. This includes Komodo Island.

This week, Google also released its biggest update to date for Street View.

Continue reading…

Fans of Marvel superheroes have a big year ahead of them. In addition to the third Iron Man movie coming this summer, Chris Hemsworth will also be returning as Thor in Thor: The Dark World this November.

Marvel Studios today released an early trailer for the movie that teases new villains and more politics in Asgard. The trailer shows that Natalie Portman will be reprising her role as Jane Foster, and the very end of the trailer teases that Thor may have to make an alliance with Avengers villain Loki, played by Tom Hiddleston. It also shows at bit of the new enemies Thor will be facing: the Dark Elves of Svartalfheim, led by Christopher Eccleston’s Malekith.

MightyText may have the word “text” in its name, but its plans are bigger than just synchronizing SMS between your Android smartphone and PC. On Wednesday it launched a new version of its app that will sync your smartphone’s photos and videos with a PC or Android tablet as well.

Does that sound like Dropbox, Google Drive, or any of the numerous cloud storage and synchronization services out there? Well, that’s the idea, said MightyText founder Maneesh Arora. MightyText isn’t claiming to be technologically better than any of those services, Arora said, but it is claiming to be more convenient.

While Dropbox may be a profoundly useful service for storing and managing files, people don’t check their Dropbox folders everyday, Arora said. But MightyText’s customers do engage with its browser apps and tablet apps every day, Arora said, using them as desktop extensions of the SMS clients in their smartphones. Since customers are already receiving and sending text messages through MightyText, it’s a logical place to manage and share their smartphones photos and videos as well, Arora concluded.

As with similar services, photos and videos aren’t actually shipped to the PC, but stored in the cloud. From MightyText’s browser extensions, customers can view the files, send them off as MMS messages to anyone in the phones address book or generate a private link that customers can share through other messaging formats. The smartphone client can be set so it only uploads files when connected to Wi-Fi – otherwise data fees might get out of control for shutter flies.

Arora said the MightyText plans to add other synchronization capabilities in the future. He didn’t give any specifics, but he said the end goal is recreate as many smartphone capabilities as possible on the desktop. For instance, MightyText recently added a battery meter to its apps so customers can track their phone’s charge from their PCs.

The more immediate goal is to expand its reach. It now has 3 million users, and is developing desktop apps for the PC and Mac for customers, which will allow more people to use its services features, as well as an iPad app.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage
• A Media Tablet Forecast, 2011 – 2015
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in mobile

Well, I think we’ve successfully put to bed the idea that there’s any structural shift from bonds to equities going on (see here, here and here). Maybe time to look a little more closely at the numbers to pull out some more discrete swings in allocations.

We’ve just published the latest data on mutual fund and ETF flows from Lipper and there are, as ever, some clues. The snapshot of our interactive graphic below shows flows into and out of bond funds during March. You can click on the image to access the full graphic, or just click here.

One notable trend, and it represents a continuation from last month too, is the move away from corporate debt funds.

In fact, on a two month view, the 2,500 or so corporate debt funds and ETFs tracked by Lipper in four categories (EUR, USD, GBP and Global) show net outflows of $3.7 billion. That accounts for a little over 1 percent of the latest reported AUM at the funds in question. For euro-denominated corporate debt funds alone the rate is double that; sterling-denominated funds sit in between the two.

Talk to some of the players involved and they’re adamant there is no structural shift away from the sector. One source at a major fund firm said redemption rates – the rate of attrition expected as a rule – were steady or even marginally improved. What had happened was a switch by investors to push their ‘marginal’ money into equities instead of corporate debt. Two months’ data don’t make a trend, but we could label it a ‘mini rotation’.

Some other nuggets from among the data include a clear swing away from emerging market equities during March, with EM categories accounting for 10 of the top 25 for net outflows during the month.

An excellent visualization, according to Edward Tufte, expresses “complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision and efficiency.” I would add that an excellent visualization also tells a story through the graphical depiction of statistical information. As I discussed in an earlier post, visualization in its educational or confirmational role is really a dynamic form of persuasion. Few forms of communication are as persuasive as a compelling narrative. To this end, the visualization needs to tell a story to the audience. Storytelling helps the viewer gain insight from the data. (For a great example, how much do you think steroids have influenced baseball?)

So how does a visual designer tell a story with a visualization? The analysis has to find the story that the data supports. Traditional journalism does this all the time, and journalists have become very good at storytelling with visualization via infographics. In that vein, here are some journalistic strategies on telling a good story that apply to data visualizations as well.

1. Find the compelling narrative. Along with giving an account of the facts and establishing the connections between them, don’t be boring. You are competing for the viewer’s time and attention, so make sure the narrative has a hook, momentum, or a captivating purpose. Finding the narrative structure will help you decide whether you actually have a story to tell. If you don’t, then perhaps this visualization should support exploratory data analysis (EDA) rather than convey information. However, for the designer of an exploratory visualization it is still important to spark the viewers’ imagination to encourage examining relationships among and facilitate interacting with the data – think gameification.
2. Think about your audience. What does the audience know about the topic? Is it meant for decision makers, general interested parties, or others? The visualization needs to be framed around the level of information the audience already has, correct and incorrect:
• Novice: first exposure to the subject, but doesn’t want oversimplification
• Generalist: aware of the topic, but looking for an overview understanding and major themes
• Managerial: in-depth, actionable understanding of intricacies and interrelationships with access to detail
• Expert: more exploration and discovery and less storytelling with great detail
• Executive: only has time to glean the significance and conclusions of weighted probabilities
3. Be objective and offer balance. A visualization should be devoid of bias. Even if it is arguing to influence, it should be based upon what the data says–not what you want it to say. Tufte found numerous charts that misled viewers about the underlying data, and created a formula to quantify such a misleading graphic called the “Lie Factor.” The Lie Factor is equivalent to the size of the effect shown in the graphic, divided by the size of the effect in the data. Sometimes it is unintentional-a number that is three times bigger than another will be perceived nine times bigger if represented in 3D. There are simple ways to encourage objectivity: labeling to avoid ambiguity, have graphic dimensions match data dimensions, using standardized units, and keeping design elements from compromising the data. Balance can come from alternative representations (multiple clustering’s; confidence intervals instead of lines; changing timelines; alternative color palettes and assignments; variable scaling) of the data in the same visualization. Maintaining objectivity and balance is not a trivial effort and is easily unintentionally violated. Viewers and decision makers will eventually sniff out inconsistencies which in turn will cause the designer to lose trust and credibility, no matter how good the story.
4. Don’t Censor. Don’t be selective about the data you include or exclude, unless you’re confident you’re giving your audience the best representation of what the data “says”. This selectivity includes using discrete values when the data is continuous; how you deal with missing, outlier and out of range values; arbitrary temporal ranges; capped values, volumes, ranges, and intervals. Viewers will eventually figure that out and lose trust in the visualization (and any others you might produce).
5. Finally, Edit, Edit, Edit. Also, take care to really try to explain the data, not just decorate it. Don’t fall into “it looks cool” trap, when it might not be the best way explain the data. As journalists and writers know, if you are spending more time editing and improving your visualization than creating it, you are probably doing something right.

An illustration of the front facade of Internap’s newest data center, located in Los Angeles. It will be one of the launch facilities for the company’s “Cloudy Colo” dashboard.

There’s a continued movement toward using a single dashboard to see and control all IT assets, concurrent with the movement to use hybrid infrastructures. Internap, positioned squarely in the center of this thanks to a diverse portfolio of colocation, cloud and managed services, has moved closer to this one dashboard vision.

The company has formally announced its “cloudy colo” capabilities it teased earlier. The universal customer portal is now in limited release for Internap Labs customers and generally available at the end of the second quarter for customers in the company’s Los Angeles, Santa Clara, and Dallas data centers. The rollout will gradually be extended across the entire footprint.

The company is bringing cloud-like remote visibility and management benefits to colocation customers and enable hybridization of cloud and colocation footprints through a universal customer portal. The portal will be provided as a standard part of Internap’s offering and will deliver granular visibility and management of the colocation environment,  increasing control while reducing costly visits to the data center or the use of remote hands services.

Making Colo Feel Like Cloud

“Based on growing comfort with the automation offered by cloud services, organizations are seeking easier and faster access to their infrastructure,” said Carl Brooks, analyst, Internet infrastructure services at 451 Research. “As a result, there’s a strong opportunity for service providers to give customers access to elastic, on-demand resources with new kinds of controls, agility, ease-of-use, and infrastructure hybridization.”

Rather than replacing traditional services like colo, cloud often acts as a complement or breeding ground for future colo customers.

“Both cloud and colocation will continue to play critical roles in meeting organizations’ diverse application requirements,” said Raj Dutt, senior vice president of technology at Internap. “Internap’s universal customer portal bridges these typically distinct worlds with ‘cloudy colo’ capabilities, providing remote visibility into the colocation environment – unprecedented in data center offerings – and enabling the on-demand integration of colocation, cloud and other infrastructure with the simplicity of one trusted network, one contract and one support team.”

The portal will initially include the following colocation management features:

• Inventory management with integrated support tracking: Customers can review their entire colocation footprint; check device power status and create alerts; deploy stencils for device-level inventory tracking and management; and open support tickets instantly and receive feedback directly from Internap’s NOC.
• Power utilization monitoring and management: Customers can view circuit-level power utilization trends; remotely reboot or power down any configured device without incurring charges; and easily access and view log files of all initiated power actions.
• Environmental and bandwidth monitoring: Customers can view rack-level temperature and humidity conditions; track IP traffic and conduct trend analyses; and capture and analyze device health and usage stats.
• On-demand provisioning of hybrid services: Customers can integrate management of colocation – typically a “siloed” environment – with on-demand provisioning and scaling of cloud compute, bare metal and cloud storage assets to rapidly align their infrastructure portfolio with changing business and application needs.The company calls it on-demand hybridization. It’s made possible by its PlatformConnect service which provides private network connectivity between multiple Internap services – including colocation, managed hosting and cloud – within the same data center. Customers can hybridize application environments as needed via the universal portal, rather than in days or weeks. 

Google has begun to show a doodle honoring Ella Fitzgerald on its homepage in regions where the date has already changed to April 25th. Thursday would have been her 96th birthday.

This excludes Australia and New Zealand, as Google chooses to honor Anzac Day instead, with a small flower image:

Anzac Day is a national day of remembrance in these countries, commemorating Australians and New Zealanders who served and died in all wars, conflicts, and peacekeeping operations.

Google is sometimes criticized for its choice of doodles when it falls on the same day as another significant day in history. For example, Google celebrated the opening of the first drive-in theater last year, some people complained that Google chose this over a D Day doodle, but Google has indicated various times that it likes to keep doodles more about upbeat kinds of events. That’s probably why the company elected to go with the simple flower rather than a full-on doodle for Anzac Day.

Elsewhere in the world, however, it’s about Ella Fitzgerald’s birthday. She was born on April 25, 1917, and died on June 15, 1996 at the age of 79. She is commonly known as the “First Lady of Song” and the “Queen of Jazz”.

The Fitzgerald doodle can currently be seen at Google.com.fj, and no doubt on other Google international properties as the hours move forward.

For years, it was essential that every family had a phone line. The U.S. government started the Lifeline program to help impoverished families afford this essential communication tool. Now the Internet has overwhelmingly replaced traditional phone lines, but the Lifeline program hasn’t adapted to this reality. One Congresswoman is hoping to change that.

Ars Technica reports that Rep. Doris Matsui has introduced the Broadband Adoption Act of 2013. The bill would modify the Lifeline program to provide cheaper broadband Internet services to low-income families across the country.

“In today’s digital economy, if you don’t have access to the Internet you are simply at a competitive disadvantage. For example, more than 80 percent of available jobs now require online applications,” said Congresswoman Matsui. “The Internet is increasingly the economic engine for growth and innovation. The Lifeline program provides a tangible service to lower-income Americans and it is imperative that the Lifeline program be reformed and modernized to account for broadband services. We must ensure lower-income Americans have a greater opportunity to participate in the digital economy, whether it be for workforce training, education, finding a job or creating the next big idea.”

Matsui says that a recent FCC report found that nearly 100 million Americans are without broadband Internet services. She places the blame squarely on the high cost of broadband Internet in America. Many low income families simply can’t afford the high cost of broadband Internet. The bill would help to make faster Internet affordable to all.

Of course, the Broadband Adoption Act of 2013 isn’t just about providing faster Internet to low-income families. Matsui has envisioned a number of reforms to the Lifeline program for the FCC to enact if the bill were to become law: