21 Nov 2012
Mike Bostock talks about the design and construction of the “512 Paths to the White House” visualization for the New York Times. I found this visualization extremely useful on election night as it helped me understand the implications of each of the swing state calls as the night rolled on.
Regarding the use of outside information to annotate the graphic:
Applying background knowledge to give the data greater context—such as the influence of the auto-industry bailout on Ohio’s economy—makes the visualization that much richer. After all, visualizations aren’t just about numbers, but about understanding the world we live in; qualitative information can add substantially to a quantitative graphic.
While the technical details are fascinating, I was equally interested in the editorial decisions they had to make to build a usable visualization.
20 Nov 2012
Among all the young scientists I know, I think Ethan Perlstein is one of the most innovative in the way he has adapted to the internet era. His website is incredibly unique among academic websites, he is all over the social media and his latest experiment in crowd-funding his research is something I’m definitely keeping an eye on.
The basic idea is that he has identified a project (giving meth to yeast mouse brains -see the comment by Ethan below-, I think) and put it up on Rockethub, which is a crowd funding platform. The basic idea is he is looking for people to donate to his lab to fund the project. I would love it if this project succeeded, so if you have a few extra dollars lying around I’m sure he’d really appreciate it if you’d donate.
At the bigger picture level, I love the idea of crowd-funding for science in principal. But it isn’t clear that it is going to work in practice. Ethan has been tearing it up with this project, even ending up in the Economist, but he has still had trouble getting to his goal for funding. In the grand scheme of things he is asking for a relatively small amount given how much he will do, so it isn’t clear to me that this is a viable option for most scientists.
The other key problem, as a statistician, is that many of the projects I work on will not be as easily understandable/cool as giving meth to yeast. So, for example, I’m not sure I’d be able to generate the kind of support I’d need for my group to work on statistical analysis of RNA-seq data or batch effect removal methods.
Still, I love the idea, and it would be great if there were alternative sources of revenue for the incredibly important work that scientists like Ethan and others are doing.
19 Nov 2012
Jeff and I talk with Brian Caffo about teaching MOOCs on Coursera.
18 Nov 2012
Welcome to the re-designed, re-hosted and re-platformed Simply Statistics blog. We have moved the blog over to the WordPress platform to give us some newer features that were lacking over at tumblr. So far the transition has gone okay but there may be a few bumps over the next 24 hours or so as we learn the platform. Remember, we’re not the young hackers that we used to be.
A few things have changed. First off, the search box actually works. Also, in moving the Disqus comments over, we seem to have lost all of the old comments. So unfortunately many of your gems from the past are now gone. If anyone knows how to retain old comments on Disqus, please let us know! I think Jeff’s been banging his head for a while now trying to figure this out.
We’re hoping to roll out a few new features over the next few months so keep an eye out and come back often.
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