- Disinformation Visualisation: How to Lie with Datavis — We don’t spread visual lies by presenting false data. That would be lying. We lie by misrepresenting the data to tell the very specific story we’re interested in telling. If this is making you slightly uncomfortable, that’s a good thing; it should. If you’re concerned about adopting this new and scary habit, well, don’t worry; it’s not new. Just open your CV to be reminded you’ve lied with truthful data before. This time, however, it will be explicit and visual. (via Regine Debatty)
- Microtugs — a new type of small robot that can apply orders of magnitude more force than it weighs. This is in stark contrast to previous small robots that have become progressively better at moving and sensing, but lacked the ability to change the world through the application of human-scale loads.
- Vault — a tool for securely managing secrets and encrypting data in-transit.
- iSAX: Indexing and Mining Terabyte Sized Time Series (PDF) — Our approach allows both fast exact search and ultra-fast approximate search. We show how to exploit the combination of both types of search as sub-routines in data mining algorithms, allowing for the exact mining of truly massive real-world data sets, containing millions of time series. (via Benjamin Black)
"data visualization" entries
Four short links: 29 April 2015
Deceptive Visualisation, Small Robots, Managing Secrets, and Large Time Series
Top keynotes at Strata Conference and Strata + Hadoop World 2014
From data privacy to real-world problem solving, O’Reilly’s data editors highlight the best of the best talks from 2014.
2014 was a year of tremendous growth in the field of data, as it was as well for Strata and Strata + Hadoop World, O’Reilly’s and Cloudera’s series of data conferences. At Strata, keynotes, individual sessions, and tracks like Hardcore Data Science, Hadoop and Beyond, Data-Driven Business Day, and Design & Interfaces, among others, explore the cutting-edge aspects of how to gather, store, wrangle, analyze, visualize, and make decisions with the vast amounts of data on our hands today. Looking back on the past year of Strata, the O’Reilly data editors chose our top keynotes from Strata Santa Clara, Strata Barcelona, and Strata + Hadoop World NYC.
It was tough to winnow the list down from an exceptional set of keynotes. Visit the O’Reilly YouTube channel for a larger set of 2014 keynotes, or Safari for videos of the keynotes and many of the conference sessions.
Best of the best
- Julia Angwin reframes the issue of data privacy as justice, due process, and human rights (and her account of trying to buy better privacy goods and services is both instructive and funny).
Four short links: 2 September 2014
Antilogs, Waitbots, Interactive Interactive Visualisation Book, IoTbot
- Antilogs — There are companies before you who have done something like you want to do that you can copy from, and others who have also done something similar, but that you choose not to copy from. These are your analogs and antilogs respectively.
- Korean Meal-Transport Robot (RoboHub) — the hyphen is important. It transports all meals, not just Korean ones. Interesting not only grammatically, but for the gradual arrival of the service robot.
- Interactive Data Visualisation for the Web — online (interactive, even) version of the O’Reilly book by Scott Murray.
- wit.ai — Natural language processing for the Internet of Things. Startup, racing to build strategic value beyond “have brought voice recognition to irc bots and aimed it at Internet of Things investors.”
Four short links: 20 August 2014
Plant Properties, MQ Comparisons, 1915 Vis, and Mobile Web Weaknesses
- Machine Learning for Plant Properties — startup building database of plant genomics, properties, research, etc. for mining. The more familiar you are with your data and its meaning, the better your machine learning will be at suggesting fruitful lines of query … and the more valuable your startup will be.
- Dissecting Message Queues — throughput, latency, and qualitative comparison of different message queues. MQs are to modern distributed architectures what function calls were to historic unibox architectures.
- 1915 Data Visualization Rules — a reminder that data visualization is not new, but research into effectiveness of alternative presentation styles is.
- The Broken Promise of the Mobile Web — it’s not just about the UI – it’s also about integration with the mobile device.
Interactive Visualization of Big Data
Human judgment is at the center of successful data analysis. This statement might initially seem at odds with the current Big Data frenzy and its focus on data management and machine learning methods. But while these tools provide immense value, it is important to remember that they are just that: tools. A hammer does not a carpenter make — though it certainly helps.
Consider the words of John Tukey 1, possibly the greatest statistician of the last half-century: “Nothing — not the careful logic of mathematics, not statistical models and theories, not the awesome arithmetic power of modern computers — nothing can substitute here for the flexibility of the informed human mind. Accordingly, both approaches and techniques need to be structured so as to facilitate human involvement and intervention.” Tukey goes on to write: “Some implications for effective data analysis are: (1) that it is essential to have convenience of interaction of people and intermediate results and (2) that at all stages of data analysis the nature and detail of output need to be matched to the capabilities of the people who use it and want it.” Though Tukey and colleagues voiced these sentiments nearly 50 years ago, they ring even more true today. The interested analyst is at the heart of the Big Data question: how well do our tools help users ask better questions, formulate hypotheses, spot anomalies, correct errors and create improved models and visualizations? To “facilitate human involvement” across “all stages of data analysis” is a grand challenge for our age.
Visualization of the Week: Booze, tipple, imbibe, or whatever you’d like to call it
A much needed break away from data transparency and privacy issues
Sooooooo. This is what happens when Jenn Webb attends Velocity this week and I briefly step in to cover the Strata Visualization of the Week element.
I could have focused on the Governments Search for Google Data visualization from Chris Canipe and Madeline Farbman of the Wall Street Journal. Or, I could have focused on Neal Ungerleider’s piece that covers Eric Fisher and MapBox for Gnip’s twitter metadata visualizations. Yet, my curiosity took over once I came across The Economist’s High Spirits graphic. Not only do I make my own bitters which qualifies me for preliminary booze nerd status, I also needed a brief break away from the transparency issues currently dominating the data-oriented conversations. Following my booze nerd curiosity led me to this interactive data visualization of common cocktail ingredients:
Analysis of 25,000 recipes from drinksnation.com and drinksmixer.com
Data Journalists Gather, Transparency, and Data Viz
Notes and links from the data journalism beat
Data journalism is becoming a truly global practice. Data journalists from the UK, China, and the US are sharing data-oriented best practices, insights, and tools. Journalists in Latin America are meeting this week to push for more transparency and access to data in the region. At the same time, recent revelations about NSA domestic surveillance programs have pushed big data stories to the front pages of US papers. Here are a few links from the past week:
Transparency…or Lack Thereof
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OpenData Latinoamérica: Driving the demand side of data and scraping towards transparency (Neiman Journalism Lab)
“There’s a saying here, and I’ll translate, because it’s very much how we work,” Miguel Paz said to me over a Skype call from Chile. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s illegal. Here, it’s ‘It’s better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.” Paz is a veteran of the digital news business. The saying has to do with his approach to scraping public data from governments that may be slow to share it. -
The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism (zdnet.com)
On Thursday, June 6, the Washington Post published a bombshell of a story, alleging that nine giants of the tech industry had “knowingly participated” in a widespread program by the United States National Security Agency (NSA). One day later, with no acknowledgment except for a change in the timestamp, the Post revised the story, backing down from sensational claims it made originally. But the damage was already done. -
We are shocked, shocked… (davidsimon.com)
Having labored as a police reporter in the days before the Patriot Act, I can assure all there has always been a stage before the wiretap, a preliminary process involving the capture, retention and analysis of raw data. It has been so for decades now in this country. The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the FBI and NSA are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. But the legal and moral principles? Same old stuff. -
Big Data Has Big Stage at Personal Democracy Forum (pbs.org)
Engaging News Project’s Talia Stroud tackled the issue of public engagement in news organizations. Polls on websites don’t yield scientifically accurate results, nor do they get people to address difficult issues, she said. “These data are junk. We know they’re junk,” Stroud said. “City council representatives know they’re junk. Even news organizations know that the results of these data are junk. The only reason that this poll is being included on the news organization’s site is to increase interactivity and increase your time on page.”
On becoming a code artist
An interview with Scott Murray, author of Interactive Data Visualization for the Web
Scott Murray, a code artist, has written Interactive Data Visualization for the Web for nonprogrammers. In this interview, Scott provides some insights on what inspired him to write an introduction to D3 for artists, graphic designers, journalists, researchers, or anyone that is looking to begin programming data visualizations.
What inspired you to become a code artist?
Scott Murray
Scott Murray: I had designed websites for a long time, but several years ago was frustrated by web browsers’ limitations. I went back to school for an MFA to force myself to explore interactive options beyond the browser. At MassArt, I was introduced to Processing, the free programming environment for artists. It opened up a whole new world of programmatic means of manipulating and interacting with data — and not just traditional data sets, but also live “data” such as from input devices or dynamic APIs, which can then be used to manipulate the output. Processing let me start prototyping ideas immediately; it is so enjoyable to be able to build something that really works, rather than designing static mockups first, and then hopefully, one day, invest the time to program it. Something about that shift in process is both empowering and liberating — being able to express your ideas quickly in code, and watch the system carry out your instructions, ultimately creating images and experiences that are beyond what you had originally envisioned.
Visualization of the Week: Real-time Wikipedia edits
The Wikipedia Recent Changes Map visualizes Wikipedia edits around the world in real-time.
Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi have put together an addictive visualization of real-time edits on Wikipedia, mapped across the world. Every time an edit is made, the user’s location and the entry they edited are listed along with a corresponding dot on the map.
Click here for the full visualization.
Read more…
11 Essential Features that Visual Analysis Tools Should Have
Visual analysis tools are adding advanced analytics for big data
After recently playing with SAS Visual Analytics, I’ve been thinking about tools for visual analysis. By visual analysis I mean the type of analysis most recently popularized by Tableau, QlikView, and Spotfire: you encounter a data set for the first time, conduct exploratory data analysis, with the goal of discovering interesting patterns and associations. Having used a few visualization tools myself, here’s a quick wish-list of features (culled from tools I’ve used or have seen in action).
Requires little (to no) coding
The viz tools I currently use require programming skills. Coding means switching back-and-forth between a visual (chart) and text (code). It’s nice1 to be able to customize charts via code, but when you’re in the exploratory phase not having to think about code syntax is ideal. Plus GUI-based tools allow you to collaborate with many more users.