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Lucy Engelman has synesthesia, which is a perceptual response where one sensory pathway is stimulated, and a secondary sense is triggered. Daniel Mullen, in collaboration with Engelman, paints what she sees through the secondary sense.
In Lucy’s case, when she sees or thinks about time and numbers (days of the week, months, hours, years) as well as letters/words ie a person’s name, she experiences a different colour sequence in her mind’s eye. Additionally, time is spatial and coloured related, as in the days of the week, months, years, all have a coloured location in space and a shifting orientation. Essentially, she has an ever changing complex and luminous filter to view the abstract concepts of our world.
[via @mariuswatz]
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Peter Beshai was tasked with visualizing the toxicity in Twitter conversations. He arrived at this organic-looking model using 3-D visual effects software. Nice.
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Statistics. I kid, I kid. Hugo Bowne-Anderson, host of the DataFramed podcast, culled some information together that he’s gathered from interviewing data scientists. This is what data scientists really do.
One result of this rapid change is that the vast majority of my guests tell us that the key skills for data scientists are not the abilities to build and use deep-learning infrastructures. Instead they are the abilities to learn on the fly and to communicate well in order to answer business questions, explaining complex results to nontechnical stakeholders. Aspiring data scientists, then, should focus less on techniques than on questions. New techniques come and go, but critical thinking and quantitative, domain-specific skills will remain in demand.
Other than the best spots to nap in between classes, this is one of the most important things I learned in (statistics) graduate school.
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A fun experiment by Neil Charles that used the aesthetics of wind maps to represent World Cup 2018 play activity:
It looks like the familiar shape of an average football game, with the bulk of the play happening out wide and then converging onto the opponent’s area. Colour in this is example is by number of passes (hotter = more) and I’ve also drawn locations with fewer passes more faintly, but the aim is visual impact rather than strict best practice so I deliberately haven’t included a legend.
Clearly this has to be done for every other sport now.
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Ever since the huge forecasting upset in 2016, I’ve tended to stay away from that stuff. I mean, it was painful to watch the Golden State Warriors, a huge favorite to win the championship basically the whole series, lose to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Yeah. The Warriors. What were you thinking of?
Alas, it is 2018, and FiveThirtyEight has their forecast for who will control the House. Mainly, I post for the burger menu to select the type of forecast you want.
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Frustrated with the size of pockets on women’s pants, Jan Diehm and Amber Thomas for The Pudding, measured pocket sizes in 20 popular jean brands. They compared men’s and women’s pockets and calculated what actually fits in the mix of sizes.
[W]e programmatically determined whether various everyday items could fit in an otherwise empty pocket in jeans that aren’t being worn. (If an object won’t fit in the pocket of a pair of jeans on the hanger, it certainly won’t fit when you’re wearing them.) Only 40 percent of women’s front pockets can completely fit one of the three leading smartphone brands. Less than half of women’s front pockets can fit a wallet specifically designed to fit in front pockets. And you can’t even cram an average woman’s hand beyond the knuckles into the majority of women’s front pockets.
Impressive and informative work.
It reminds me of the Amanda Cox graphic that compared women’s dress sizes for different brands in 2011. There’s also the broken waistline measurement.
Let’s just all wear sweats from now on.
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Peter Aldhous for BuzzFeed News delves into the increasing number of wildfires in California:
Most of California’s rain and snow falls in between October and March, which means that fire season peaks in the summer, as vegetation dies and dries out. In Southern California, the season extends into the fall, when Santa Ana winds, which blow from the dry interior toward the coast, whip up small fires into major conflagrations.
As the state has dried and warmed, the fire season has started earlier and larger areas have burned. Similar changes have occurred across the western US.
Grab the data and code to look for yourself.
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The Mendocino Complex Fire, now the largest in California ever, continues to burn. I live a couple of hundred miles away, but the sky is yellow and orange at times, and it was smokey a few days ago. It’s a bit crazy. Lazaro Gamio for Axios provides a quick view to show scale with an animated graphic compared against Washington, D.C. and Manhattan.
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Map-making is a tricky business with many variables to consider that can directly change how someone interprets the land and people in a location. The Cartography Playground is a simple site to test these variables interactively. Learn about algorithms, mess with appearance, and toggle through representations.
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A gray piece of paper moves along a gradient. You won’t believe your eyes.
A demo of lightness perception pic.twitter.com/BSVpgcuIw1
— Akiyoshi Kitaoka (@AkiyoshiKitaoka) August 12, 2018
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The Padma River in Bangladesh is constantly shifting its 75-mile path. Joshua Stevens for the NASA Earth Observatory shows what the shifting looked like through satellite imagery, over a 30-year span.
Kasha Patel:
The upper section of the Padma—the Harirampur region— has experienced the most erosion and shows the most notable changes. The river has become wider at this section by eroding along both banks, although most activity occurred on the left bank. Using topographic, aerial, and satellite imagery, scientists found that the left bank shifted 12 kilometers towards the north from 1860 to 2009 and developed a meandering bend. The river left a scar where the water once flowed, as you can see in the 2018 image.
See also the dramatic shifts of the Ucayali River in Peru.
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The camera on the slightly creepy arm takes a picture of the pages in the book, the software uses OpenCV to extract faces, and the faces are passed to Google Auto ML Vision comparing the faces to a Waldo model. The result: There’s Waldo.
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Wherever more attention or the appearance of it equates to more money, there are those who try to game the system. Michael H. Keller for The New York Times examines the business of fake YouTube views:
YouTube’s engineers, statisticians and data scientists are constantly improving in their ability to fight what Ms. O’Connor calls a “very hard problem,” but the attacks have “continually gotten stronger and more sophisticated,” she said.
After the Times reporter presented YouTube with the videos for which he had bought views, the company said sellers had exploited two vulnerabilities that had already been fixed. Later that day, the reporter bought more views from six of the same vendors. The view count rose again, though more slowly. A week later, all but two of the vendors had delivered the full amount.
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Sometimes the visualization takes care of itself. Photographer Tim Whittaker filmed sheepdogs herding thousands of sheep, and the flows one place to another are like organized randomness.
[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BSI3aKtvXk” /]
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Popular summer songs have had a bubbly, generic feel to them the past several years, but it wasn’t always like that. Styles used to be more diverse, and things might be headed back in that direction. Sahil Chinoy and Jessia Ma charted song fingerprints over the years for a musical comparison.
Turn up your speakers or put on your headphones for the full experience. The song and music video snippets provide a much better idea of what the charts represent.
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We usually visualize data on computers, because it’s where the data exists and it’s a more efficient process. But as long as you can make shapes and use colors, you can use just about any material. Amy Cesal, as part of a 100-day creative project called Day Doh Viz, is using Play-Doh.
Ever since my son shifted his art station to my office, I’ve been drawn to his crayons, markers, and masking tape. The manual labor of it forces a shifted thought process that’s less technical and more about what you want to show. It also feels more like playing. Recommended. [via Visualising Data]
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There are many mistakes you can make when you first get into visualization. Yan Holtz and Conor Healy catalog the common pitfalls as part of their project From Data to Viz. While there are a lot, keep in mind that you’ll learn these as you go. But it’s good to at least be aware of them from the start.