Tag: visualization

Graphing human lifelines

Throughout a person’s life, their body traces a continuous path over the surface of Earth. By considering only their east-west motion we can graph this path in 2 dimensions, assigning the vertical dimension to time. If the lifeline of every human who’s lived in the last 100 ka were combined into one map it must look something like this. At the top, the first humans expand throughout Africa, and then gradually east, reaching China by 60 ka BP. (The simultaneous expansion into Europe is unfortunately masked by the overlapping African longitudes.) Between 15 ka and 10 ka BP humans probably crossed a temporary landbridge into the Western Hemisphere and quickly reached the eastern tip of Brazil.

Possible Words

In general, if we have an alphabet of size A and look at length N words, the space of possible words is AN large and each word has just (A-1)N neighbors. Hence the fraction of neighbors declines nearly exponentially. The number of W(N) real words looks like a Poisson distribution with a peak around N=8 for English.

Exploring the space of possible words of length n, with visualization

Math Education

combating innumeracy with 3D worlds: moving math from 2D symbols to 3D representations

For the first time since Euclid started the mathematics education ball rolling over 2000 years ago, we are within a generation of eradicating innumeracy and being able to bring out the mathematical ability that research has demonstrated conclusively is within (almost) everyone’s reach. Never before in the history of mathematics have we had a technology that is ideally suited to representing and communicating basic mathematics. But now, with the development of manufactured, immersive, 3D environments, we do.

2008-03-22:

it may be time to rethink the very idea of national teaching systems that with varying success prepare youngsters to join a global conversation when they grow up.

very enthusiastic +1

The Pathetic Fallacy of RDF

Graphs have limited value, even for many of the tasks which they are supposed to support. The harder question coming from this interrogation is how do we elegantly support the range of possible interactions both in pre-defined Semantic Web applications and in dynamic explorations of Semantic Web resources?? We have only sketched out some examples of current SW applications to support old tasks better and in new ways enabled by the Semantic Web, and to explore more dynamically SW-RDF resources for user-determined exploration. As is evident, much more innovative work is possible and needs to be done.

since the data model is a graph, the UI has to be, too, no?

Swivel

But then the real fun begins. You and other users can then compare that data to other data sets to find possible correlation (or lack thereof). Compare gas prices to presidential approval ratings or UFO sightings to iPod sales. Track your page views against weather reports in Silicon Valley. See if something interesting occurs.

And better yet, Swivel will be automatically comparing your data to other data sets in the background, suggesting possible correlations to you that you may never have noticed.

sweet. more data web. i hope they have a decent back-end.