Online Applications

• Gazing Deeply Into Your Many Eyes

  October 7, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  Dear Many Eyes,

  From the moment I stared into your thousands of solid black eyes, I knew we had something special. Since the day we met you've shown me the silver lining in my data and pointed out details that I never would have found on my own. You're never pushy or arrogant about it; you always let me learn for myself. You believe in my natural pattern-finding ability the same way I believe in your big, beautiful exploratory tools.

  Many Eyes, I want to tell you something. I just want to, well, let you know why you're so high up on my bookmark list. You should also know there's some ways that you can improve, but please don't take it personally. I just want you to be all that you can be.

  Sincerely,
  Nathan

  Continue Reading

• World Freedom Atlas

  October 5, 2007 to Mapping, Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  World Freedom Atlas is an online geo-visualization tool that shows a number of freedom indicators so to speak. For example, you can map by a number of indexes such as raw political rights score, civil liberties, political imprisonment, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or torture. If I've counted correctly the data comes from 42 datasets divided into three categories:

  1. What It Is
  2. How To Get It
  3. What You Get

  What It Is covers data such as political rights and civil liberties while How To Get It is data on government structure and education system. I'm not really sure What You Get is though. There's GDP and some economic indexes, so it could be something like quality of life. Maybe someone can explain it better?

  The mapping and plots are pretty standard, but what stands out is the number of datasets that have been formatted in such a way the user is able to map things quickly and easily. It would be really cool if the data was explained a little better, so that I could "browse" the data a bit more efficiently, and even better, if there were some way to compare indicators against each other. Nevertheless, worth exploring a bit.

• Swivel Gets a Data Guy

  October 3, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  What the heck's a data guy? According to Gerard, who studied computer science and economics in college

  It means that I'm the type of person who, instead of planning for a vacation like a normal person, will write a script to pull down airline data for all possible destinations and routes, load the data into R and perform a regression analysis to find the best time to buy.

  Oh, so that's what a data guy is. I guess that makes me a data guy.

  This should be good for Swivel, who has seemed to be missing the "data guy" piece of the puzzle. Will Swivel's visualization tools improve? Will data become more reliable on Swivel? I don't know. It's possible. There's definitely a lot of work to be done, so one person won't be enough, but hey, it's a start. It's not often that I see a computer science / economics person. I'm an electrical engineering and computer science / statistics person myself, and I like to see people with dual backgrounds (even if they did go to the other school across the bay).

  That being said, applications like Swivel, Many Eyes, and Data360 make me wonder where all the statisticians are. I see mathematicians, designers, economists, and businessmen. Come on statisticians. Show yourselves. The world needs you.

• Using Many Eyes to Visualize Text

  September 29, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Some time last month, Many Eyes introduced their text visualization, the word tree. The user starts from a word or phrase, which is the root (or the trunk?) of the tree and then the branches are the continuation of the sentence in which the word appeared. The advantage over the word tree is that the order of words stays the same, as opposed to a jumbled tag cloud:

  

  Hence, the word tree allows the user to gain a better understanding of text flow and writing patterns than she would with a cloud.

  I found that it was very easy to create a word tree with some text that I had uploaded, but while starting exploration, I was unsure about what words to begin with. The word tree interface is similar to Martin Wattenberg's earlier Baby Name Wizard. The user naturally has some ideas on what to start with since it's an exploration of names. However, with the word tree, it's not as obvious, because the user might be exploring a body of text she's unfamiliar with.

  So instead I began sifting with a word cloud, which gave me an idea of some important words and phrases used in the text. Then it was simple to move from the word cloud to the word tree. The two viz tools -- cloud and tree -- go together quite nicely as the cloud kind of works as a suggestion box for the tree. As a standalone, the word tree is off to a good start.

• Use Mint to Manage Your Finances

  September 26, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  Mint was released last week. It's an online application that brings financial data from all of your credit card and bank accounts into one place. Think Quicken online and free.

  It's super easy (only takes a few seconds) to add your financial accounts, and you only have to do it once. After you've added your accounts, Mint will update your data every night and compile them into useful reports. You'll get an overview of spending trends, transactions, and even ways you can save money based on your current credit cards' interest rates.

  So far I've found it useful simply because all of my data is one place. As I've made my way into adulthood, I've slowly accumulated more and more credit cards to the point where it's kind of annoying to login to every account to see how much debt I have.

  One Small Annoyance

  My one gripe about Mint is that the spending trends and savings features haven't been that informative, but I imagine will get better once more data comes in and Mint continues to tweak the system. My highest hope is that they do something about the dreaded 3-d pie chart...

  

  Overall though, I'm looking forward to seeing Mint grow and develop into an extremely useful tool that brings all of your data into one place and represents it in a way that's understandable and interesting.

• Why I Do Not Swivel Data

  August 31, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  I've been back and forth on whether or not I wanted to post about this. Two reasons: I feel blasphemous feeling this way; and I'm not sure if I'm working for or against my hopes for data awareness. I also think I might be getting some mild form of carpal tunnel. Ow.

  I'm a graduate student in Statistics, and I don't like Swivel. Why? How is that even possible? All of my work encircles data, I blog about flowing data, and I read about data. So why can't I force myself to enjoy the "tasty data treats for data geeks" offered by Swivel?
  Continue Reading

• Many Eyes on The Times U.S. Open Blog

  August 27, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  There was a post on The Times U.S. Open blog debating on the state of American tennis compared to the rest of the world. Right in the middle of the post, what do we see? It's a Many Eyes thumbnail!

  There was some discussion on the the decreasing trend shown in the graph, but as the graph only shows American tennis data, the obvious next step would be to show what the rest of the tennis population (i.e. Europe, etc) would look like.

  In any case, it's nice to see Many Eyes creeping into popular media.

• More Mapping from amMap Offering Flexibility

  July 13, 2007 to Mapping, Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Yes, more mapping. Map, map, map. amMap offers a Flash-based mapping tool that you can download and customize to your liking.

  Ammap is an interactive flash map creation software. Use this tool to show locations of your offices, routes of your journeys, create your distributor map. Photos or illustrations can be used instead of maps, so you can make different presentations, e-learning tools and more.

  There's some smooth browsing and zooming, and it's pretty sleek. Those who appreciate simplicity will appreciate amMap. Plus, it's free :) Continue Reading

• Xtimeline to Explore and Create Timelines

  July 7, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Xtimeline allows you to explore all sorts of user-created timelines from the US war in Iraq to the life of Angelina Jolie to the history of pornography. I think the site is still pretty new since the most viewed timelines for the month, past 3 months, and year are still all the same, but nevertheless, from the looks of things, a nice community seems to be developing over there.

  The timelines are (I think) in javascript and what you see is a timeline of user-entered events. As you click and drag through time, events are displayed on the right. You can click on the events for more details where events can be anything from text, a picture, or a Flash-embedded video.

  One suggestion -- it looks like timelines can only be ended by a single user. It would be cool if multiple users could contribute to a single timeline, because I think it's hard to remember all the dates (especially the months) for certain events. We can't all be like Victor, who seems to know an awful lot about Britney Spears.

  *UPDATE* I just read the xtimeline blog. Yup, xtimeline did in fact, just open up to the public July 1.

• Hans Rosling: Providing Data, Inspiring Change

  July 6, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  Okay, so this video has been posted probably on thousands of blogs already, but you know what, I don't care. Hans Rosling gives an amazing talk on poverty and life around the world, and he uses his interactive exploratory tool, Trendalyzer (acquired by Google), to show the different levels of health, education, and money around the world. Trendalzyer: useful, yes, but not the main point of the talk. Watch Rosling's talk all the way through. You won't be disappointed.

• Diet and Weight Loss Tracking with Viz

  July 2, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Weight loss is a difficult task for many, further complicated with so many diets -- Atkins, Jenny Craig, etc -- and lack of motivation. Fatsecret aims to make weight loss easier by providing the tools to track your weight loss, write about it, see what others are doing, and share your progress.

  There's a couple of graphs (built by Flash) on the homepage. The first, a pie chart, shows the proportions of fatsecret users on certain types of diets. You can see the proportions for this week, this month, or all time.

  Then towards the bottom -- a bar chart showing the average weight loss of fatsecret users for specified diets. Again, you can see for this week, this month, and all time.

  

  Every user has her own homepage which shows a line graph of her progress as well as the average weight loss of fatsecret members on the user's same diet.

  Fatsecret seems like quite of an active site with plenty of posting, tips, and member interactions, which makes me pretty happy. Next step: interactive tools.

• Time Series Tool Like Google Finance

  July 1, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Chronoscope is a work-in-progress time series visualization tool that lets you explore data similar to that of Google Finance. It's written in Java, unlike Finance, which uses Flash/Javascript, and uses the Google Web Toolkit as the hook. After a quick look-see, it's certainly still in alpha, and I'm not quite sure when beta will be available to the public. The browsing is pretty nifty though. I wonder how hard it'd be to do it Flash?

• Same Big Mac Data, Different Platform

  June 30, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  I went to Swivel, to see how they did with the same Big Mac data I visualized on Many Eyes. Swivel uses a Google Maps interface with an overlay:

  

  It looks nice, but it was incredibly slow when I tried to zoom in or browse the map. Actually, not just the map was slow, but the whole page. Maybe some caching issues? Exploratory graphics isn't really Swivel's high point at the moment. I also find it a little strange that the overlay is the same color as that of the maps on Many Eyes.

• Cost of Big Macs Worldwide

  June 28, 2007 to Online Applications  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  I was playing around at Many Eyes, and it was amazingly easy to map some data on the Big Mac. The data set was simply two columns: country name and the cost of the Big Mac in that country. I chose the mapping visualization option, and voila, data was mapped. Awesome.