Tufte: Visual and Statistical Thinking

Visual and Statistical Thinking is a “textbooklet” by Edward Tufte that Lorna got me (along for a replacement for my missing The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. It looks closely at two examples of how graphs were used to think through a problem in order to recommend action; first John Snow’s analysis of the Broad Street cholera epidemic, and then the decision to launch the space shuttle Challenger. Tuftewrites that his “general argument is straightforward”:

An essential analytic task in making decisions based on evidence is to understand how things work – mechanism, trade-offs, process and dynamics, cause and effect. That is, intervention-thinking and policy-thinking demand causality-thinking.
Making decisions based on evidence requires the appropriate display of that evidence. Good displays of data help to reveal knowledge relevant to understanding mechanism, process and dynamics, cause and effect. That is, displays of statistical data should directly serve the analytic task at hand. (p. 3, copyright 1997, Graphics Press, Cheshire, Connecticut).

Text visualization in the humanities is not, however meant to guide decisions. Literary analysis guides interpretation which does not lead immediately or causally to decisions. What then is point of interpretative analysis (visual or not)? An extreme view would be that it is an art; the art of creating new aesthetic works of a particular genre called intepretation that stand in a particular relationship with other works. Interpretations are made or crafted from abstract matter, namely other works of art. Their appreciation is predicated on knowledge of the “original”.
Continue reading Tufte: Visual and Statistical Thinking

Wal-Mart sells $500 linux laptop

InfoWorld: Wal-Mart breaks price barrier with Linspire Linux laptop is a story about a laptop from Linspire for $498 USD for sale at Wal-Mart. While it isn’t a Mac titanium, it has 128 MB of memory, 30 GB hard drive, a 14.1″ LCD panel, and a VIA C3 processor, 1.0 GHz. See the Walmart.com – Balance 14.1″ Notebook Computer with CD-ROM Drive catalog entry.

SuprNova.org movie site closed

According to Reuters story, Download Site SuprNova Closes Amid Hollywood Crackdown (Dec. 21, 2004), one of the major sources of links to pirated movies, the SuprNova.org site in Slovenia, was closed down after pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America. Essentially the same process of legal pressure followed by the RIAA is now being used by the MPAA to discourage the growing P2P sharing of movies. Will we see the same incentives like iTunes to legitimate acquisition of movies online? I think the general principle is, “if the pirates show that it works then its time for a service.”
SuprNova apparently used the BitTorrent “tit-for-tat” file distribution technology which is described in a paper on the The Official BitTorrent Home Page and is analyzed at The Register in an article on The BitTorrent P2P file-sharing system by Johan Pouwelse, Dec. 18, 2004. BitTorrent has legitimate and pirate uses.

Google Library Scanning

According to a BBC story titled, Google to scan famous libraries (Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2004, BBC News, UK Edition), Google, working with the University of Michigan, will scan selected books from the libraries of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, Oxford and the New York Public Library. The scanned books will be mostly books out of copyright, and the online pages may have some links to Amazon. The full collection of seven million volumes will take six years to digitize at Michigan.
Continue reading Google Library Scanning

International Cultural Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark

International Cultural Studies is an interesting program at Aalborg University that is offerred in multiple languages and which is taught through Project Themes:

Projects take their starting point in practical problems or theoretical topics, which are related to your course work. Each study programme investigates a different topic each semester. Lectures and seminars are offered to prepare students for project work on problems within that topic.

Apparently 50% of the instruction is through project work around themes. They seem to have short two week intensive themes and longer ones. A colleague in Political Science pointed me to this program.

CiteULike

CiteULike: A free online service to organize your academic papers is a social (or public) bookmarking and referencing project similar to del.icio.us which I blogged before. The focus in CiteULike is citations to papers; such a service could replace private EndNote bibliographic databases. Looking at it quickly, I am not sure it can generate a reference for a paper I am writing using different styles the way EndNote can, but that must be coming. The added value is that you could have other people writing sharing notes (since the main issue with reference databases is remembering what the hell the reference was about a year later) that would help you remember what you have supposedly read. Another added value would be to provide a persistent citation to something where I could cite the CiteULike page in addition to the online doc. Now … I wonder if this could be connected to the Internet Archive so that cached versions of papers from when I read the paper could be called up?

Blogger’s Code of Ethics

On CyberJournalist.net I found A Bloggers’ Code of Ethics. This code was adapted from a journalists code, so I am not sure if it should be applied to research blogs, but most of it reads right. Is there a research blog code? How would it be different?

Note, the link is no longer functional. Here is a different Code of Ethics from Morten Rand-Hendriksen. How to start a blog was also recommended to me as a place to get advice on setting one up.

TAPoRware Features

We are releasing version 1.0 of the TAPoRware Tools. (You can get the version 1.0 now, but we there are some loose ends to clean up.) That got me thinking about the next version. Stan Ruecker and Zachary Devereux of the University of Alberta gave a paper at the Face of Text on Scraping Google and Blogstreet for Just-in-Time Text Analysis which showed the potential for certain tools and included a list of features they would like. Stan kindly sent me the list so I could weave it into my list.
Continue reading TAPoRware Features

The Da Vinci Effect: Carnegie Mellon Gift Tour

The Da Vinci Effect is a fundraising campaign by Carnegie Mellon that is touring the US and which bills itself as a “multisensory theatrical event”. From the digital video is seems to involve an actor dressed up like Leonardo who coordinates a multimedia show.
What is interesting is how Carnegie Mellon is focusing on the intersection of arts and technology and using Leonardo as an iconic figure for that interesection. They aren’t promoting Italian studies or Renaissance studies, but the combination of entertainment and technology. I wonder what Leonardo would have pushed as a curriculum for effect?
Continue reading The Da Vinci Effect: Carnegie Mellon Gift Tour