I’m pretty pissed, and I’ve dug this far down
so I figure in for a penny, in for a pound!
Tim Minchin
Coming to Terms with Being a Terrible Person
February 29th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink
New Job, New Site
September 9th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
I feel like I’ve been neglecting this blog and my site as a whole, but it’s been for legitimate reasons.
A Visual Resume
April 18th, 2011 § 2 comments § permalink
At the beginning of this year, I had two jobs. By March, however, I had quit one and been informed that I was, for all intents and purposes, being laid off from the other. While this wasn’t a huge surprise, I was still pretty disappointed – time to start the job-hunt again. I brushed up my resume, pulled all my references together, and got started searching. As I applied and attended job fairs and the like I started noticing a disheartening trend, however. I’m graduating in May with a degree in music composition, but applying for technical jobs. More than I once, I was turned down without further consideration as soon as the recruiter got to the education section of my resume.
Rather than be coy about my education, however, I’m combining the fact that much of my applying for jobs happens online with my resume into a visual resume that offers all the same information while show-casing my design and visualization abilities.
Update to State of Furry Vis
December 8th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
Two new aspects visualized: species and a choropleth of population for the US. I had to grab, shred, and parse the data myself from responses to forum topics (i.e.: members would respond with their location and a moderator would add their name to one enormous list – I had to turn that into JSON with magic), so the data may not be terribly accurate, but some trends may be visible. Since they’re separate but related, I’ve added them to a different section of the site.
Two New Visualizations
December 7th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
It’s been a busy few days at home and work. Work itself was really slow, so I started working on one large visualization project and wound up completing another smaller one in the meantime. I may need to take a break from protovis for a little while, as I’ve been working for several days straight on these projects.
The smaller of the two projects was a very fast (about two hours) visualization of data regarding a disturbing punishment discrepancy between heterosexual/non-heterosexual teens by both the justice system and schools. You can see in the vis that, in some cases, non-heterosexual teens can be two to three times as likely to be punished by schools or police. Some reasons for this are debated in the original article that was pointed out to me. The comments section on the article is rather distressing, I should warn.
The second, larger project has taken up most of my energy over the past few days. A friend pointed me toward the results of the Furry Survey, which I hadn’t seen before. The furry community differs from society at large in several very important demographic areas, from gender to sexual orientation (or at least openness regarding the same), to mean age. With these important differences, I felt that a series of visualizations was almost necessary. I’ve pulled those together into a dashboard that displays each visualization in miniature (not just thumbnails – the visualizations are reconstructed in miniature within the dashboard). Check it out and find out some neat things about the furry fandom. If you don’t know what furries are… well, Google carefully.
Visualization-in-a-day
November 20th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
I woke up this morning with an idea in mind and, lo and behold, over the process of the day, finished the visualization. At least, a rough draft of it. This one’s even personalizable! Check out a sample here.
FurAffinity.net is a neat site full of neat artists and good community. However, the statistics they provide for each user’s art are not only private, but rather lacking, being simply a list of numbers. Sounds like a good job for visualization, though! The numbers FA provides are views, favorites, and comments per submission. Not only did I display those, but averaging them and normalizing for those averages gives a pretty good idea of relative popularity of each submission. Users can view all four statistics in a steam chart, and also each alone in a bar chart. I figured this was a good way to divide things up: trends are visible in general over time and one can explore specifics for each set.
There’s still some work I’d like to do, and I’m planning on collating the data I collect into a general graph of submissions on FA, but that’s for later. It’s fall break and I’m still on the job!
Data visualization: Wikipedia Fundraising
November 17th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
Nathan Yau, over at FlowingData, posted another “Visualize This” challenge, this time to take a look at some data that Wikipedia released regarding their recent fundraising campaign. They tracked four banners’ performance – how many people visited the pages, how many people wound up starting the donation process, and how many people actually completed the donation process, amongst several other factors. Again, I figured I’d take a stab at showing the data with Protovis.
You can see the result here.
Addendum to ‘Res Est’
November 1st, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
I had a few more thoughts on the earlier entry and I don’t want to belabor anything, though this may come rather close to the last post, but I hope to make just a small addendum to that with three points. This has been sitting in the ‘drafts’ queue for a while now, and was mostly written. Sorry for flooding!
Data Visualization: Aging Sexuality
November 1st, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink
I just realized that I posted this to Twitter and not anywhere else; whoops!
Anyhow, I’m an avid reader of FlowingData, because Nathan Yau, the man behind it, does some pretty awesome stuff. His visualizations are clear and still aesthetically pleasing, and his concepts are always nice. Of particular interest to me, when I first started reading, was your.flowingdata which is a means to track your own life through Twitter – for example, you can tell it when and how far you ride your bike every day and have it automatically generate a visualization of distances ridden over time.
Recently, however, he posted a little challenge of sorts. Given a dataset, we, the readers, were to visualize it our own way and draw some conclusions from our visualizations (that, after all, being the point of visualizations). I’d never done anything like that before for various reasons. I didn’t want to learn a new domain-specific language such as R that would then require me to edit my results in the form of an image in some other program such as Gimp or Inkscape. Also, Gimp and Inkscape have some quirks that I’m still learning, and I didn’t want to have to chose between learning those and buying Adobe CS. However, I have been working quite a bit with Javascript recently, so it seemed to make sense that, when I found two libraries – Flot and Protovis – for visualization in JS that I go ahead and use one of these ‘Visualize This’ challenges to learn one of them. It’ll definitely be helpful in the future.
The most recent challenge was visualizing data from the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior. Given a small set of data – percentage of respondents in different age groups admitting to engaging in nine different behaviors over the past year – I worked hard to learn Protovis from scant documentation in order to pull together a visualization. Since it takes place over three ‘slides’ and has text to go along with it, I’ll let it speak for itself here.
Happy Halloween
October 31st, 2010 § 1 comment § permalink
Little song I whipped up in Reason for the occasion here.