Posts about the analysis and presentation of:

Data

The revolution will be translated

March 9, 2010

From an NYT article on Google's translation services, this excerpt sums up the most critical transition in machine learning that has happened thus far: Creating a translation machine has long been seen as one of the toughest challenges in artificial intelligence. For decades, computer scientists tried using a rules-based approach — teaching the computer the [...]

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Get LOST!

February 2, 2010

LOST is back tonight! And what better way to prepare than an interactive timeline from the excellent NYT graphics team? A good infographic should communicate otherwise-complex ideas in a simple and intuitive manner... oh, never mind, LOST is back and that's really what matters. Check out the timeline here!

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The mathematician's lens

January 25, 2010

A beautiful article in the NYTimes contrasts abstract mathematics with the chilling reality of the Mexican drug cartel wars: I was born in Mexico City, in a world that seems less and less familiar to me. I live now in the opposite corner of the continent. I am training to be a political scientist at [...]

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Office 2010's 3D pie charts... now with extra 3D!

January 25, 2010

Microsoft has announced the system requirements for Office 2010. That's news in and of itself. Once upon a time, system requirements (at least, ones that anyone paid attention to) were strictly for high-end professional software, cutting-edge games and the like: software that actually needed powerful hardware. But the real news here is that Office 2010 [...]

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Stages of a photographer (an infographic)

January 25, 2010

Very amusing... and true: I especially love "The HDR Hole." Presumably the y-axis is measured in percent of personal potential... there must be all sorts of Bayesian self-reflection stuff going on there. (Via DataViz)

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Suggestions

January 24, 2010

(Via Piled Higher and Deeper)

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Data wars

January 11, 2010

The NYT writes about the military's data problem: Air Force drones collected nearly three times as much video over Afghanistan and Iraq last year as in 2007 — about 24 years’ worth if watched continuously. That volume is expected to multiply in the coming years as drones are added to the fleet and as some [...]

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Chart Wars

January 8, 2010

Alex Lundry, Vice President and Director of Research of the consulting firm Target Point, has published a brief talk called Chart Wars which is simply brilliant, serving as an excellent but brief (5 minutes!) overview of how easy it is to manipulate infographics and what tricks to be wary of. His specific focus is a [...]

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Walmart ad math

December 23, 2009

Walmart is running ads right now which claim that shoppers who spend more than $100 per week at the supermarket would save $650 a year by purchasing their groceries at the giant retailer instead. That's quite a jumble of conditionals and varying metrics: you have to first meet the requirements of shopping at a supermarket [...]

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Modern confessionals

December 22, 2009

We all know that you can get some funny/interesting responses by typing the first part of a question into a major search engine's search box and letting it suggest the remainder. The NYT has gone so far as to investigate those suggestions themselves. I particularly enjoyed their description of search engines as "modern confessionals:" This [...]

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Overcharting: airfare edition

November 28, 2009

Nate Silver writes about the dropping cost of air fares - yes, you read that correctly - over at Five Thirty Eight. His writing, as always, is excellent - I only want to point out a chart he uses and how it can be dangerous to draw conclusions at a glance (or, if you prefer, [...]

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It's American as sweet potatoes (but not sweet potato pie)

November 27, 2009

The NYT has published an infographic showing the top recipe searches on Allrecipes.com. Searches are broken out by state, allowing some interesting comparisons. (Local dialects and preferences are an interest of mine, and when combined with maps I can't resist... see also various words for soda.) Here's the chart for "apple pie", the 5th most [...]

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Pie chart fail

November 27, 2009

Via FlowingData, I found this amusing pie chart from a local Fox News broadcast: The survey plainly allowed people to give more than one answer, resulting in responses that were not mutually exclusive. It's tiresome but bears repeating: pie charts are only suited to data which adds up to 100% (and then, only if there [...]

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Choropleths galore

November 16, 2009

For a while, I've been following development of Indiemapper, a forthcoming web tool from the folks at Axis Maps. It should allow for easy map creation, including - yes - choropleths galore. However, the data analytics that will be available remain to be seen.

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Choropleths in R (yes, "choropleths")

November 12, 2009

Using R to recreate color-indexed maps of US unemployment data.

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Moral hazard and the NFL

November 11, 2009

The WSJ asks, "Is It Time to Retire the Football Helmet?" With the debate about football head injuries and CTE swirling, some are wondering if wearing helmets is actually exposing players to greater danger than if their heads were exposed. Though seemingly counter-intuitive, the argument follows well-established moral hazard reasoning that some have perceived in, [...]

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Ten statisticians every psychologist should know

November 11, 2009

Psychologist Daniel Wright has published a list of ten statisticians every psychologist should know. The list is comprised of The Founding Fathers: 1. Karl Pearson - who established statistics as an academic discipline 2. Ronald Fisher - who developed much of statistics' mathematical foundation, including ANOVA and maximum likelihood, and the importance of p-values 3. [...]

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How many roads...

October 29, 2009

Ben Fry has created a stunning image consisting of the 26 million roads in the United States (click to zoom): Nothing other than asphalt (gravel, dirt...) has been drawn here, but geographic and political features emerge nonetheless. In a very real sense, the geography is a latent feature of the roads dataset, as it creates [...]

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Don Draper would be proud

October 28, 2009

Recently, there have been countless ads for auto insurance all making a similar claim: drivers who switch to that firm save significant amounts of money. How can every major insurance company make a similar statement? They can't all be cheaper than every other company, on average. As a particularly egregious example, Allstate's website declares it [...]

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How Shazam works

October 28, 2009

Ever wondered how song-identifying iPhone app Shazam works? Now you know. (For the link-averse: it's a pretty cool implementation of pattern matching across song spectograms, and the key insight was to first reduce the spectograms by including only peak frequencies. Simple, yet genius.) (via Revolutions)

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Men are from mars, women are from gmail

October 22, 2009

ReadWriteWeb's coverage of a new study on webmail demographics contains one sentence that left me a little confused: Gmail, for instance, includes more females (53%) than males (47%). If those were election poll results, we would call it "too close to call," but in terms of tens of thousands of users, these percentage point differences [...]

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Data intervention

October 16, 2009

The always-excellent How I Met Your Mother addresses a major social problem: (via FlowingData)

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Suspicious poll distributions

September 25, 2009

I've covered Benford's method for first-digit fraud analysis before, and now Nate Silver has applied a similar method to polling results. He looked at the last digit of various polls (i.e. a 48% McCain, 49% Obama, 3% undecided poll would be recorded as an 8 and a 9) and compiled histograms of their frequencies. Following [...]

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Users still aren't right about changes

September 20, 2009

Once again, the self-proclaimed "experts" of social media are revealed to be not much more than some anecdotes and a keyboard. The latest is Dan Zarrella, who has written a vitriolic attack on Twitter's planned adoption of the retweet as an official mechanism. Zarrella does some excellent work in other areas, but I find him completely [...]

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Twitter's broken data model becomes slightly less broken

September 19, 2009

I don't usually have anything nice to say about Twitter (though I still ignore my mother's advice and say it anyway), but the company is finally taking steps to improve one of the most glaring faults with their service: retweets. Previously, retweets were simply new tweets that happened to contain old information. This created clutter [...]

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Radial clustering

September 14, 2009

Finally, a radial visualization which serves a purpose rather than just looking cool. Getting Genetics Done has a tutorial on using clustering functions in R. In it, they show how this this analysis: is much better represented like this: There's nothing wrong with making a chart which looks good - in fact it's encouraged - so long as [...]

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Questionable rankings

September 14, 2009

I read this morning about the drama at last night's MTV video awards (does anyone actually watch this stuff?), but the episode was overshadowed in my mind by a quirky accident of rankings: if Taylor Swift beat Beyonce for the "Best Female Video", how can Beyonce go on to win "Video of the Year"? Presumably, video [...]

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How to fix a broken pie chart

September 8, 2009

Datavisualization.ch has a helpful step-by-step on how to turn this (from a Mashable post): into this: Of course, the motivation is worth more than the mechanics.

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Augmenting reality

September 3, 2009

BMW is actively researching the use of augmented reality for servicing cars: Augmented reality (AR) has been getting a lot of press for recent advancements on the iPhone and Android platforms. While it's nice to see these developments, thus far I've thought the excitement is a bit premature. It's as if we all know how [...]

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More on solar coverage

September 2, 2009

Maybe there's something in the water today - no sooner had I finished estimating the Earth's solar radiation than this popped up on Cool Infographics: The map was created by the Land Art Generator Initiative to show the amount of solar panel coverage required to power the Earth for one year. Very interesting, and this [...]

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