They provide an anchor in your charts, and you compare everything else against the anchor. Where you set the anchor changes your chart completely.

Rewind to 2006 when Hans Rosling’s talk using moving bubbles was at peak attention. Researchers studied whether animation in visualization was a good thing. Danyel Fisher revisits their research a decade later.

While they found that readers didn’t get much more accuracy from the movement versus other method, there was a big but:

But we also found that users really liked the animation view: Study participants described it as “fun”, “exciting”, and even “emotionally touching.” At the same time, though, some participants found it confusing: “the dots flew everywhere.”

This is a dilemma. Do we make users happy, or do we help them be effective? After the novelty effect wears off, will we all wake up with an animation hangover and just want our graphs to stay still so we can read them?

Working from the Quick, Draw! dataset, Moniker dares people to not draw a penis:

In 2018 Google open-sourced the Quickdraw data set. “The world’s largest doodling data set”. The set consists of 345 categories and over 15 million drawings. For obvious reasons the data set was missing a few specific categories that people enjoy drawing. This made us at Moniker think about the moral reality big tech companies are imposing on our global community and that most people willingly accept this. Therefore we decided to publish an appendix to the Google Quickdraw data set.

Draw what you want, and the application compares your sketch against a model, erasing any offenders.

Nicholas Rougeux, who has a knack and the patience to recreate vintage works in a modern context, reproduced Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants:

If someone told me when I was young that I would spend three months of my time tracing nineteenth century botanical illustrations and enjoy it, I would have scoffed, but that’s what I did to reproduce Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants and I loved every minute.

The best part is that you can select flowers in the text or on the illustrations to focus on a specific parts, which makes descriptions easier to interpret.

Read more on Rougeux’s process here.

A few years ago, The New York Times asked readers to guess a trend line before showing the actual data. It forced readers to test their own beliefs against reality. TheyDrawIt from the MU Collective is a tool that lets you make similar prediction charts:

These line graphs encourage readers to reflect on their own beliefs by predicting the data before seeing it. Only after they draw a prediction does the real data appear. The graph can then show the reader traces of other peoples’ predictions. This progression makes it easy for readers to visualize the difference between their predicted beliefs, their peer’s beliefs, and the actual data.

Give it a go.

Some people love the Tidyverse in R. Others are less fond of it. For me, the more tools the better.

When it comes to reading lists, we usually look for what’s popular, because if a lot of people read something, then there must be something good about it. Russell Goldenberg and Amber Thomas for The Pudding took it the other direction. Using checkout data from the Seattle Public Library, they looked for books that haven’t been checked out in decades.

Also: How cool is it that there’s an API to access library checkout data?

National Geographic went all out on their atlas of moons. Space. Orbits. Rotating and interactive objects in the sky. Ooo. You’ll want to bookmark this one for later, so you can spend time with it.

As you might expect, NASA collects a lot of data, and much of it is seasonal. Eleanor Lutz animated a few maps to show the detail:

To show a few examples, the NASA Earth Observations website includes data on seasonal fire incidence (1), vegetation (2), solar insolation, or the amount of sunlight (3), cloud fraction (4), ice sheet coverage (5), and processed satellite images (6). My own map (7) combines the ice sheet data and the Blue Marble satellite images (6). The NEO database also has many more interesting datasets not shown here, like rainfall, chlorophyll concentration, or Carbon Monoxide.

Check out the final result. And, if you want to make your own, Lutz published her code on GitHub.

The citizenship question for the upcoming Census is still stuck in limbo. One of the arguments against the question is that it could lead to a significant undercount in population, which can lead to less funding. For Reuters, Ally J. Levine and Ashlyn Still show how this might happen with a highlight on federal programs that rely on population estimates.

Roger Peng provides a lesson on the roots of R and how it got to where it is now:

Chambers was referring to the difficulty in naming and characterizing the S system. Is it a programming language? An environment? A statistical package? Eventually, it seems they settled on “quantitative programming environment”, or in other words, “it’s all the things.” Ironically, for a statistical environment, the first two versions did not contain much in the way of specific statistical capabilities. In addition to a more full-featured statistical modeling system, versions 3 and 4 of the language added the class/methods system for programming (outlined in Chambers’ Programming with Data).

I’m starting feel my age, as some of the “history” feels more like recent experience.

You can also watch Peng’s keynote in the video version.

It’s about purpose. It’s about who your work is for. It’s about what you’re trying to show.

Alfred Ng for CNET:

Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in May, demanding answers on Alexa and how long it kept voice recordings and transcripts, as well as what the data gets used for. The letter came after CNET’s report that Amazon kept transcripts of interactions with Alexa, even after people deleted the voice recordings.

The deadline for answers was June 30, and Amazon’s vice president of public policy, Brian Huseman, sent a response on June 28. In the letter, Huseman tells Coons that Amazon keeps transcripts and voice recordings indefinitely, and only removes them if they’re manually deleted by users.

Marvelous.

Mark Rober, who is great at explaining and demonstrating math and engineering to a wide audience, gets into the gist of machine learning in his latest video:

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmlRbfSavbI” /]

I have a feeling we’re in for a lot of manipulated videos as we get closer to the election. The Washington Post provides a guide for the different types. I hope they keep building on this with a guide on how to spot the fakes, but as they say, knowing is half the battle.

Here is the good stuff for June 2019.

In some public places, such as schools and hospitals, microphones installed with software listen for noise that sounds like aggression. The systems alert the authorities. It sounds useful, but in practice, the detection algorithms might not be ready yet. For ProPublica, Jack Gillum and Jeff Kao did some testing:

Yet ProPublica’s analysis, as well as the experiences of some U.S. schools and hospitals that have used Sound Intelligence’s aggression detector, suggest that it can be less than reliable. At the heart of the device is what the company calls a machine learning algorithm. Our research found that it tends to equate aggression with rough, strained noises in a relatively high pitch, like D’Anna’s coughing. A 1994 YouTube clip of abrasive-sounding comedian Gilbert Gottfried (“Is it hot in here or am I crazy?”) set off the detector, which analyzes sound but doesn’t take words or meaning into account. Although a Louroe spokesman said the detector doesn’t intrude on student privacy because it only captures sound patterns deemed aggressive, its microphones allow administrators to record, replay and store those snippets of conversation indefinitely.

Marvelous.