Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
FYI from O'Reilly Radar.
And does this suggest possibility of something like “distributed data analysis” whereby a number of widely scattered watchdogs could be poking into the same data set? If so, raises interesting questions for journalism educators: who is developing the tools to manage such investigations?
Enabling Massively Parallel Mathematics Collaboration — Jon Udell writes about Mike Adams whose WordPress plugin to grok LaTeX formatting of math has enabled a new scale of mathematics collaboration.
http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/07/31/polymath-equals-user-innovatio/
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Polymath = user innovation Posted by Jon Udell under Uncategorized [9] Comments In February 2007, Mike Adams, who had recently joined Automattic, the company that makes WordPress, decided on a lark to endow all blogs running on WordPress.com with the ability to use LaTeX, the venerable mathematical typesetting language. So I can write this: $latex \pi r^2$ And produce this: When he introduced the feature, Mike wrote: Odd as it may sound, I miss all the equations from my days in grad school, so I decided that what WordPress.com needed most was a hot, niche feature that maybe 17 people would use regularly. A whole lot more than 17 people cared. And some of them, it turns out, are Fields medalists. Back in January, one member of that elite group — Tim Gowers — asked: Is massively collaborative mathematics possible? Since then, as reported by observer/participant Michael Nielsen (1, 2), Tim Gowers, Terence Tao, and a bunch of their peers have been pioneering a massively collaborative approach to solving hard mathematical problems. Reflecting on the outcome of the first polymath experiment, Michael Nielsen wrote: The scope of participation in the project is remarkable. More than 1000 mathematical comments have been written on Gowers’ blog, and the blog of Terry Tao, another mathematician who has taken a leading role in the project. The Polymath wiki has approximately 59 content pages, with 11 registered contributors, and more anonymous contributors. It’s already a remarkable resource on the density Hales-Jewett theorem and related topics. The project timeline shows notable mathematical contributions being made by 23 contributors to date. This was accomplished in seven weeks. Just this week, a polymath blog has emerged to serve as an online home for the further evolution of this approach.
Posted by Jon Udell under Uncategorized [9] Comments
In February 2007, Mike Adams, who had recently joined Automattic, the company that makes WordPress, decided on a lark to endow all blogs running on WordPress.com with the ability to use LaTeX, the venerable mathematical typesetting language. So I can write this:
$latex \pi r^2$
And produce this:
When he introduced the feature, Mike wrote:
Odd as it may sound, I miss all the equations from my days in grad school, so I decided that what WordPress.com needed most was a hot, niche feature that maybe 17 people would use regularly.
A whole lot more than 17 people cared. And some of them, it turns out, are Fields medalists. Back in January, one member of that elite group — Tim Gowers — asked: Is massively collaborative mathematics possible? Since then, as reported by observer/participant Michael Nielsen (1, 2), Tim Gowers, Terence Tao, and a bunch of their peers have been pioneering a massively collaborative approach to solving hard mathematical problems.
Reflecting on the outcome of the first polymath experiment, Michael Nielsen wrote:
The scope of participation in the project is remarkable. More than 1000 mathematical comments have been written on Gowers’ blog, and the blog of Terry Tao, another mathematician who has taken a leading role in the project. The Polymath wiki has approximately 59 content pages, with 11 registered contributors, and more anonymous contributors. It’s already a remarkable resource on the density Hales-Jewett theorem and related topics. The project timeline shows notable mathematical contributions being made by 23 contributors to date. This was accomplished in seven weeks.
Just this week, a polymath blog has emerged to serve as an online home for the further evolution of this approach.
Here's the Amazon link to Few's new book: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis
Stephen Few is the author of Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data, Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten, and the monthly Visual Business Intelligence newsletter. He has worked for more than 25 years as an information technology innovator, teacher, and consultant. As the principal of the consultancy Perceptual Edge, he focuses on practical uses of data visualization to explore, analyze, and present quantitative business information. He lives in Berkeley, California.
Product Description This companion to Show Me the Numbers teaches the fundamental principles and practices of quantitative data analysis. Employing a methodology that is primarily learning by example and “thinking with our eyes,” this manual features graphs and practical analytical techniques that can be applied to a broad range of data analysis tools—including the most commonly used Microsoft Excel. This approach is particularly valuable to those who need to make sense of quantitative business data by discerning meaningful patterns, trends, relationships, and exceptions that reveal business performance, potential problems and opportunities, and hints about the future. It provides practical skills that are useful to managers at all levels and to those interested in keeping a keen eye on their business.
For those of us familiar with San Franciso, its bay and its famous bridge, The Golden Gate, this is a compelling infographic. Fundamental in its data and a fine mix of data and representation of geography. Once again, thanks to Nathan at Flowing Data.
This graphic from SF Gate is a good four years old, well before I knew what an infographic was, but just because it's old doesn't mean it's not interesting. Here we see San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and the “sad tally” of 1,218 known suicides by location. Each black square represents a person who has taken his or her life and 128 light poles are used as reference points.
The east side of the bridge, where most of the suicides occurred, has a pedestrian walkway. The first suicide was just 10 weeks after the bridge opened in 1937.
gheat is, as its promo line says, a nifty tool to turn a Google pin map into a heat map. (Or should we be calling that a “Heat” map?)
Here's what the page looks like, but drill down into the examples. I especially like the map of Davis, Calif. bike accidents.
Google Maps gives you API for adding additional map layers. This software implements a map tile server for a heatmap layer.
Please tell me (chad@zetaweb.com) if you'd like a link here.
The Anglican Church in North America is using gheat on their homepage to show their parishes.
VisTrac is using gheat to visualize clicks on web pages.
Russell Neches is using gheat to visualize auto and bike accidents in Davis, CA. The data is parsed from about 10,000 raw police reports.
The Australian Honeynet Project is using gheat to visualize the origin of spam that gets caught in their SensorNET honeypots.
The Conficker Working Group is using gheat to track the spread of the Conficker worm.
This is an animated heatmap of the conficker botnet as found in Australia (one frame a day, unique IPs per frame, with data from the end of January through June, 2009). This was produced using a heavily modified gheat. Here's a Flash example.
Thanks to Michael Corey over on NICAR-L
Random find today for the geographically inclined: http://finder.geocommons.com/ Library of spatial data, and the ability to convert it all to and from Shapefile, KML and CSV.
They also produce http://maker.geocommons.com/, a quick way to build visually appealing maps with all that data. Haven't experimented with it much yet to know the limitations/features
Sidenote: Anyone using QGIS? How intimidating is installing all the necessary frameworks if you don't already have them?
Thanks,
Michael Corey Digital Projects Editor DesMoinesRegister.com 515.284.8076 mcorey@dmreg.com
An intriguing op-ed in The Washington Post on Saturday (June 20, 2009) claimed to spot fraud in the Iran elections by applying some analytic methods basically drawn from Benford's Law. Yes, read the article, but be sure to drill down into the 140+ comments. Most quite cogent and well argued.
The Devil Is in the Digits Since the declaration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide victory in Iran's presidential election, accusations of fraud have swelled. Against expectations from pollsters and pundits alike, Ahmadinejad did surprisingly well in urban areas, including Tehran — where he is thought to be highly unpopu…By Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco
Since the declaration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide victory in Iran's presidential election, accusations of fraud have swelled. Against expectations from pollsters and pundits alike, Ahmadinejad did surprisingly well in urban areas, including Tehran — where he is thought to be highly unpopu…By Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco
Discovered a new, online resource for teaching spatial thinking today while attending the UCGIS Summer Assembly here in Santa Fe. Take a lookat teachspatial.org:
About TeachSpatial TeachSpatial.org implements suggestions from a multi-disciplinary Symposium on a Curriculum for Spatial Thinking. The symposium, organized by Diana Sinton, Mike Goodchild, and Don Janelle, was hosted by the University of Redlands in June 2008. Its purpose was to discuss the merits and content of a general curriculum course on spatial thinking. One of its recommendations was to establish a wiki site to promote the discussion and sharing of resources among instructors. Participants in the Redlands meeting were Kate Beard-Tisdale (Spatial Information Science Engineering, Maine), Marcia Castro (Global Health and Population, Harvard), Jeremy Crampton (Geosciences, Georgia State), Phil Gersmehl, Geography, CUNY Hunter), Mike Goodchild and Don Janelle (spatial@ucsb), John Kantner (School of Advanced Field Studies, Santa Fe), Steve Marshak (Geology, Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Jo-Beth Mertens (Economics, Hobart and William Smith), and Diana Sinton (Spatial Curriculum, Redlands). What you can do here
TeachSpatial.org implements suggestions from a multi-disciplinary Symposium on a Curriculum for Spatial Thinking. The symposium, organized by Diana Sinton, Mike Goodchild, and Don Janelle, was hosted by the University of Redlands in June 2008. Its purpose was to discuss the merits and content of a general curriculum course on spatial thinking. One of its recommendations was to establish a wiki site to promote the discussion and sharing of resources among instructors.
Participants in the Redlands meeting were Kate Beard-Tisdale (Spatial Information Science Engineering, Maine), Marcia Castro (Global Health and Population, Harvard), Jeremy Crampton (Geosciences, Georgia State), Phil Gersmehl, Geography, CUNY Hunter), Mike Goodchild and Don Janelle (spatial@ucsb), John Kantner (School of Advanced Field Studies, Santa Fe), Steve Marshak (Geology, Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Jo-Beth Mertens (Economics, Hobart and William Smith), and Diana Sinton (Spatial Curriculum, Redlands).
Jorge Camoes is one of the serious folks when it comes to dataviz. Here's some work he's done recently in U.S. unemployment data. Note especially the good state-by-state dashboard. It quickly shows New Mexico is hangin' in there.
by Jorge Camoes on June 18, 2009
Here are two ways to display a relatively large dataset, montly unemployment rates by state since 1976. The first one is perfect to see the overall patterns, the range from the lowest to the highest, the outliers and the slopes. An interactive version would allow the user to highlight specific series.
A small-multiple version allows the user to focus on specific states, compare them to the normal band, etc. States are ranked by labor force size and, as you can see, in the first row seven out of ten are above the US average in April. In the last row, only one is above the US average. You can also see that Michigan was not well (unemployment-wire) long before the current crisis, or a spike in Luisiana (Katrina). It pays to study this chart carefully.
Bottom line: try to see the same data from different angles. There will always be semething interesting to find.
What do you think? How would you improve these charts? Would you use a different display? Share it in the comments! (here is the data file)
Update: I usually stay away from Excel’s surface charts, but I’d like to add this one:
Also check Michael’s Horizon chart.
Interesting discussion of, fundamentally, how the Digital Revolution drives the flow from products to services and services to products. Ergo, touches on much of what is at the core of SFComplex. See…. The New Negroponte Switch — “Designing things that think they are services, and services that think they are things”. Matt Jones presentation gushing with great ideas for the “Web Meets World” change. I love the evolving printed map they made for the British Council at Salone di Mobile. A five course meal with port and insulin shots for thought.
An interesting beginning for a potentially valuable and interesting tool….
“Javascript Infoviz Toolkit — Treemaps, Radial Layouts, HyperTrees/Graphs, SpaceTree-like Layouts, and more.in this Javascript suite for building data pretties. Higher-level than processing.js. (via O'Reilly Radar and chrisblizzard on Twitter)
