the art of surveys

perhaps the most interesting use of visualizations!
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/02/are_surveys_art.php

A sudoku puzzle

Pavan and I solved this sudoko today, using the usual rules of engagement until we got to a point where every square had two possible options. Finally, we just picked one, and went as far as we could with that until we reached the same impasse. Each time we made one of these decisions, we labelled the ensuing numbers with a symbol, hence the circles, squares, triangles and diamonds (in that order). Each time, we thought we would hit a contradiciton and the whole thing would unravel until the last incorrect decision. To our surprise, everything worked out, despite the fact that we made four guesses. In the end, we checked the answers, and saw that our solution differed to the published one in the first and last three rows. In the first three rows, our 2s and 4s were swapped with the published answer, and in the last three rows, our 1s and 7s were all swapped. So go figure. I thought sudoko answers were unique.

Questions: how to design a unique sudoko? ie how do you know which numbers to fix?

Vege-Visualization

Here are some visualization successes and a fail from a Scientific American article: "The Greenhouse Hamburger", by Nathan Fiala, Feb 2009, p. 62



I like this one: it shows the CO2-emissions from producing a half a pound of the vegetables on the left-hand side with the driving distance (perhaps along Laszlo's road maps) necessary to produced the equivalent emissions. So, producing half a pound of beef is dramatically more polluting than producing half a pound of potatoes (9.81 miles vs 0.17 miles).



This one is a meaty visualization that gives a new perspective on the term "red states". It projects US beef consumption to 2020 and 2030 compared with the world average.




This one is a visualization fail. It requires good working memory about the shapes of the world's countries...

Anyway, i'm going out for a burger. Anyone want fries with that?

Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education

Check out this SlideShare Presentation: Something that Aalto university should hear!

Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education

View more presentations from David Wiley. (tags: future policy)

Scientific field branding

Recently, there was a competition put forward by the British minister of science to explain the Higgs-Boson in 2 pages or less (link needed). Similar wagers have been made before to explain climate change in one slide, or string theory in less than 2 minutes.

Here, I propose two simple visualizations using already existing widgets for the shortest practical introduction to a scientific field (i.e. a given keyword eg. visual cortex). The goal is to capture the brand of a field for a scientifically curious lay audience. For the given keyword, look up the list of publications with that keyword from Google Scholar. Prune the list to retain only top-few publications, sorted by a metric (eg. no. of citations, or other relevant ones like h-index or Erdös Number depending on the field).

1. Collect the keywords from each of these publications and input into wordle.
2. Collect the affiliations of each author in each publication and plot it on a google world map with pins.

This can be a simple add-on to a social network for scientists such as ??. In Finland it seems to be Facebook.

Coming up: For the latest in social software, see graphjam and jamglue

Magnetic poetry. Seriously

As always, a tinge of deft curiosity delves into the cunning lair of zealously torpid ennui.

Obsequious drollery is tantamount to admonition with melifluous language.

Fecund woman! Come without guile and repose in taut beauty
or be slathered by trenchant fusillade of Kafkaesque observation

A limpid veil and an arid man.

Know this, that I secrete wry lapses sedulously.

My individual space-ebb is valid.

Beyond non-cooperative behaviour

Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 17:21:58 +0200 (EET)
From: Cathy Nangini

Moi!

i got pretty side-tracked today when reading a paper for our journal club here, but it got me reading this paper: Sally, Phil Trans R Soc Lond B (2003). (see attached)

essentially, Sally states that a player's strategy in a game is more than just the "asocial utility equation" that gives the outcome of a player's move as a function of that person's payoff (eqn 2.1). But rather, this eqn should be modified to
include the player's "perceived and psychological distances" from the other players (eqn 4.1). For example, it has been found that "psychological similarity and amiliarity will support prosocial behaviour" in games like the Prisoner's Dilemma (which, on a purely logical level, promotes non-cooperative behaviour as the best outcome).

so, i don't know anything about game theory, and in fact i'm terrified of games mostly, but i bet that we could look at the sub-prime crisis in this modified game theory approach and show that it is the psychological closeness among cronies that lead to their mutually-benefiting but criminally fraudulent behaviour.

ie: why is it that Moody's, Goldman Sachs, S&P etc participated in the fraudulent bundling and approval of bad morgages whereas other financial institutions did not? Why is it that Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary that got handed 700 billion to bail out these institutions, used to be head of Goldman Sachs? I see a list of personal connections a mile long here...which means that their "prosocial behaviour" was, and will be, limited to their own "psychologically close" group members. Which explains why they authored the sub-prime disaster to maximize their payoff at the cost of everyone else, and makes one suspect that Paulson's "fix" will no doubt subserve the same group.

the question i have is: can we actually show this? does anyone know how to use the eqns in this paper?

i think this would be a fun, informative, and proactive exercise!!