communicating with data
Back when I started learning programming, it was always fairly simple to achieve the canonical first step of accomplishments, that is, to get the system to announce that you are ready to do more by displaying “hello world” on the screen. In most systems then, there was a command prompt somewhere that would usually do [...]
a couple of days ago I posted the contribution of relative keywords to the earnings of a given movie. Well, it occurs that the cast of a movie is much easier to obtain than keywords and much less messy. So, I also had scraped the 4 lead actors for each movie of the Beautiful Information [...]
Inspiration In June 2010, I attended a Wolfram|Alpha event called the London Computational Knowledge Summit where speakers mostly focused on how computers can transform the way we teach and transmit knowledge. Several of the presentations made a lasting impression, and mostly the talk by Jon McLoone: Jon’s point was that academic papers today look an [...]
What is a map? before we start looking at the code it may be a good idea to think of the best way to represent a country. Countries are areas of land surrounded by borders, which are imaginary (or sometimes physical) lines going through a set of points. Some countries are made of one of [...]
When I started using protovis I had only a very basic knowledge of javascript, which in theory isn’t a problem as protovis is meant to be learned by example, and as it has its own logic and structure which is different from typical javascript code. So I started by looking and modifying examples which was [...]
Changing driving behaviors with campaigning alone is a tall order, but is literally a life-or-death matter. Road fatalities range from about 40/million in Japan, to about 6 times as much in Russia. Fortunately, the numbers tend to decrease in most places, due to better equipment, better roads, harsher punishment and safer behaviors. Of all of these [...]
Two weeks ago I have been at DD4D conference, conveniently located at my workplace. I will write some more on DD4D, meanwhile you can see this post on infosthetics by Petra and Marian. One of the things that struck me at DD4D was that several talks were about either data visualization for advocacy, or for [...]
In March this year, überscientist Stephen Wolfram, of Mathematica fame, revealed the world he was working on something new, something big, something different. The first time I heard of this was through semantic web prophet Nova Spivack, who is not known to get excited by less-than-revolutionary projects. That, plus the fact that the project was [...]
To solve any problem with data, there are 5 things you need to do in sequence. First, find the relevant data source. Then, access it and get the numbers you need. Then, process those numbers to make them answer your question. Present the results, for instance, as a data visualization, and, optionally, share your analysis with [...]