The book’s argument is that while statistical analysis may be increasingly computer-driven and need less human intervention, smart interpretation will become more necessary and more sexy. Mr Board says they may be right, but that we’re not there yet. In his experience, three more common quantitative abilities are valued at senior levels: making the meaning of numbers come alive either visually or in words; a keen sense for when numbers should be an important part of a story yet are missing; and not being bullied by impressive correlations into assuming causality.
The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.
New from POKE…
Interesting new work from Poke London check out http://phonefund.orange.co.uk/
Over the past few months, Poke have been building a socially-driven (physical) web game for mobile operator Orange.
In it, people can power a giant set of robotic chattering teeth through a mini-cityscape via the use of a hashtag (or Facebook post, depending on which platform they use). Each tweet and each Facebook post a player shares helps to push the teeth further along the track.
If a user’s tweet / post lands the teeth on certain prize points dotted around the track, they win anything from iTunes vouchers to BlackBerry phones.
The game is now live and viewable from 8am - 10pm GMT:
(via thiswolf)
Really like this hue test from x-rite - gives you an idea of not only how colourblind you are, but also of which parts of the light spectrum give you gip. I didn’t do so well…
Believe.in Blog: 6 months later...
Really looking forward to seeing more from believe.in - they’ve got a great vision, and a very exciting product on their hands…
The last 6 months have been a veritable rollercoaster ride with Will, myself and the Believe.in team facing a ceaseless onslaught of mundane, through to what felt like insurmountable challenges. Fortunately, there were few times where we ever seriously considered giving up altogether - in the…
More experiments with Twitter visualisation, aided and abetted by tutorials over at OUseful.
If you fancy having a go yourself, a few quick steps…
- Download and install R (also, get over the fact that the site was put together by a statistician)
- Download, install and open RStudio
- Type install.packages(“ggplot2”) into the console and press enter
- Type whichever number is nearest to you and press enter - you just installed a package
Pretty much all the rest is covered over on OUseful (you just need to repeat step three for any other packages needed).
Quick ‘n’ dirty histogram of the #kanye hashtag on Twitter.
I’ve recently started dipping my toe into Social Network Analysis across this tutorial on starting out with open source graphing app Gephi - my first bash at graphing a social network since an ill-advised sixth form project called the “love web”…
This time round, what you can see is a rather more sober visualisation of my Facebook ego network (without the ego, and ignoring weak ties i.e. friends who don’t know any of my other friends).
In case it’s not obvious, the nodes are people, and the edges show friendships (in the Facebook sense); the layout is worked out by a force-based algorithm, and the colouring is from an automatic function to cluster by modularity (i.e. how closely knit a particular set of people are). What struck me was the ease with which I could work out what each colour meant - I don’t think I could have done a better job doing it by hand.
On the right hand side are people I’ve worked with - POKE on top, and Government underneath, the green bunch are mostly school friends, and the rest are mostly people I met while at University (or friends met through those people). Yellow from my course, blue were housemates, and the remainder my main social circle (red generally people I met before I spent a year in France, orange afterwards).
I downloaded the OpenPaths iPhone App shortly before heading off for an amazing week of skiing in the trois vallées in the French Alps, and put together this really simple little animation using their web interface showing five days of skiing (and our eight hour train journey back to London).
OP is the latest of many great ideas to come out of the NY Times R&D lab, and other than offering a personal locker for geolocation data, they intriguingly promise a platform allowing users to give access to this information to researchers, artists, and technologist. You can access your data via an API, download as JSON, KML or CSV, and connect up Foursquare (other Apps soon to follow).
