Posts tagged as:

Data

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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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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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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If you're watching this, it's not the future yet

November 12, 2009

It's been a while since I posted a video for the futurist set, so here we go: (This one is a commercial production for Freeband, heavy on the infographics and benefits of smart networking with a pinch of cheesiness. Sign me up.) (via Datavisualization.ch)

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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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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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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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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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Processing

August 28, 2009

John Maeda has written an article for the MIT Technology Review about Processing, the open source visualization language. It's a very interesting look into the story behind the code. Maeda is the president of the Rhode Island School of Design and was once the director of MIT's Media Lab, where Processing was born. Lately, I've [...]

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The million dollar question

August 20, 2009

Straight from GigaOm, emphasis mine: Despite all the hype and excitement around the real-time web, access to real-time information online is hardly a new phenomenon. That fact stuck with me after talking to Chris Cox, Facebook’s product director, last week at the social networking company’s headquarters. As he noted, “Real time has been around since [the [...]

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Manhattan in flux

August 13, 2009

A very nice graphic is making the rounds (though I believe it originated in a 2007 issue of Time Magazine) which shows Manhattan's population density by day and by night. The difference is striking: Happily, the density bars mimic the placement of Manhattan's skyscrapers - this follows because obviously the tallest buildings support the highest [...]

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Dronish number nerds

August 6, 2009

It's still not too late for Stats 101: The NYTimes published an article this morning titled "For Today's Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics." Of course I love to see articles like this, cognizant of the massive amounts of data we are faced we and acknowledging the efforts of the people trying to sort it all out: In [...]

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Test driving America's dashboard

August 3, 2009

Recently, the CIO of the United States released a Federal IT Dashboard, to show people exactly how their money is being spent. I've played with the site, and found it ultimately heavy on style and light on substance (3D graphs with slick animated transitions only frustrate me while I wait for results). But why read [...]

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No, Twitter does not deserve a Nobel Peace Prize!

July 13, 2009

Bubble 2.0 datapoint of the day: ReadWriteWeb is running an article with the title "Does Twitter deserve a Nobel Peace Prize? Maybe not yet, but it could someday." Fortunately, they acknowledge the idea is ridiculous for the moment and are really just responding to this outlandish post by Bush's Deputy National Security Advisor. Nonetheless, besides [...]

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Asimov on perceiving the world

July 8, 2009

Via economist Dan Ariely's blog, this is what Isaac Asimov thought about perceiving the world through data. It is an implicitly Bayesian approach and brings to mind the famous Keynes quote about changing one's mind. Asimov wrote: "Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — [...]

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Twitter, exposed

July 2, 2009

Twitter's data model is, interestingly enough, entirely user generated. Hashtags of every variety, retweets, and other methods of ascribing meta-information to tweets have developed outside any formal structural model or standard. The lone first-party implementation is that a "@" prefix links directly to a person, and even that isn't fully functional. All of my problems [...]

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Kottke on Twitter

June 25, 2009

No less an authority than Jason Kottke is taking up the "Twitter's data model sucks" mantle, instantly doubling the size of my little crusade. Actually, Kottke doesn't even attack Twitter, but rather sites that claim to provide Twitter-organization services, but it's close enough because it implicitly recognizes that Twitter doesn't have even a shard of [...]

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A Google Reader wishlist

June 24, 2009

Google Reader has become an inexorable part of my daily life. It's the only way I can keep up with the amount of reading I do each day, and as much as I love the service, there are a few things I miss. Here's my wishlist for Google Reader: Intelligent favorites: Right now, I have [...]

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Inferred ratings and modelling teacher comments

June 24, 2009

Another aspect of my conversation dealt with inferred ratings, a problem I've crossed before in other areas. There are two primary cases in which this arises: censored data and self-selection bias. In the first case of censored data, a problem is caused by the ratings system not eliciting useful responses. An example is a system [...]

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Personalized Yelp ratings

June 24, 2009

I had a great conversation last night which at one point verged into the pros and cons of various ratings systems. In particular, we discussed the "star+comment" system used by Yelp, in which between 1 and 5 stars can be assigned in addition to a text comment of arbitrary length. Yelp does some clever things [...]

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The flow of information

June 16, 2009

This NYT article on Twitter and Iran sums it all up (emphasis mine): “We’ve been struck by the amount of video and eyewitness testimony,” said Jon Williams, the BBC world news editor. “The days when regimes can control the flow of information are over.” It's an amazing and deserved accolade for the young service. But. [...]

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Illustrating the importance of data visualization

June 12, 2009

Andrew Gelman discusses research on attitudes toward gay marriage, by state, and notes this graph in particular, which shows the change in opinion over the last 15 years: Critically, he points out that the states which experienced the greatest change in attitude were the ones that already were most receptive. A naive analysis of the [...]

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Critiquing the Crimson

June 9, 2009

The Harvard Crimson has published its annual senior survey, which is making headlines in part because very few seniors are going into finance. Selected results were presented in an interesting visualization (the image below links to a full size pdf): Now that my brother has graduated after successfully steering the Crimson's business operations to one [...]

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Deconstructing the Gaussian copula, part I

June 5, 2009

A number of misconceptions about the Gaussian copula are addressed.

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Overcharting

June 2, 2009

An article in Friday's NYT called "Let the Kid Be" was accompanied by this graphic: I don't like this presentation because I think it is misleading. But first, a little history: You may remember last year a JP Morgan chart was circulated which showed the deterioration of bank's market values. The old and new market [...]

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Google Wave

May 29, 2009

If Google Wave is successful, will anyone care about Twitter anymore? To me the most exciting thing about Google Wave isn't that it's real time; nor that it's live; nor that it combines email, IM, and social networking; nor that it lets people send photos quickly; nor that it is the first "web application" that [...]

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