Protovis for intuitive visualization

Which uses the same declarative mechansims  as Jquery and other semi- or completely functional programming languages for enabling simple and intuitive chainiing of fanctions. It has been developed by a research group at Stanford that focuses on visualization. Protovis. zippad "weighs" less than 1 Mb.

One interactive example targets interactive job categories and shows how the the male-female proportions has changed over the years . It also illustrates how to present help text and interactively change the vizualization on a query immediately.förändrats genom historien både för män och kvinnor.

I also partly agree with with Douglas Crockford that Javascript is now good language - at least as Douglas says in his book - as you use the "The good parts" there.

Here is a quote:

 "The first is that you don't have a choice. The Web has become an important platform for application development, and JavaScript is the only language that is found in all browsers. It is unfortunate that Java failed in that environment; if it hadn't, there could be a choice for people desiring a strongly typed classical language. But Java did fail and JavaScript is flourishing, so there is evidence that JavaScript did something right.
The other answer is that, despite its deficiencies, JavaScript is really good. It is lightweight and expressive. And once you get the hang of it, functional programming is a lot of fun."

Personal Kyoto and "Real Costs"

R&D for the public domain is what the lab part of Eyebeam does. Some of their projects are listed here. Eyebeam per se seems to have some of the flavour of an open site for art and technology, ie similar to MIT Media Lab. And indeed it turns out that several of the managers have a Media Lab background.



One project is personal Kyoto which is a way of checking and tracking electrical usage (for New York residents for now) and realigning the projected consumption with target levels in the Kyoto protocol. They also co-financed The Real Costs - a Firefox plugin to show CO2 costs when buying airfare tickets.

Atlas of the Biosphere

Atlas of the Biosphere: the basic idea is to "gather as much information about the environment as possible, and deliver it to as many people as possible. We are dedicated to bringing environmental information to the widest possible audience."

It seems to give a broad survey of different important cycles like carbon, oxygen, and maps of land-use, human impact and more. I do not know right now if it still is maintained.