Sunday, December 12, 2004 at 2:53PM DATA: The New York Times Magazine's The Year In Ideas is a perennial favorite of mine. Be sure to check it out.
Has it really been another year already? Well, 2004 for me was a year of preparing for 2005, tying up loose ends and what have you. Given that, I shouldn't be surprised it flew by. 2005 however has some monumental changes in store; it could be the longest year of my life since I was a kid.
Wednesday, December 8, 2004 at 4:31PM INFO SCIENCE: There are two interesting talks going on tonight at Intel Research Seattle. I won't be able to make either, but I thought I would pass the info along.
Mary Czerwinski from the MSR will be speaking on Information Visualization and Large Display Research. Wednesday, December 8th, 4-5pm
Abstract. Our early user studies documenting the increased productivity gained through the use of large displays allowed us to observe quite quickly that Windows and current applications do not scale well when vast amounts of screen real estate are available. Our group therefore set about iteratively designing software tools, based on real user problems, to support large-scale navigation and interaction. To ensure our software user interfaces provided value, we ran user studies against existing features and performed user-centered design. This talk will provide an overview of the prototypes we designed, and our methodology. In addition, I will discuss a few areas of long-term basic research on information visualization and interaction, and our attempts to scale the user experience across the spectrum of large and smaller displays.
Bio. Mary Czerwinski is a Senior Researcher and Manager of the Visualization and Interaction Research group at Microsoft Research. The group is responsible for studying and designing advanced technology and interaction techniques that leverage human capabilities across a wide variety of input and output channels. Mary'' primary research areas include spatial cognition, information visualization and task switching. Mary has been an affiliate assistant professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Washington since 1996. She has also held positions at Compaq Computer Corporation, Rice University, Lockheed Engineering and Sciences Corporation, and Bell Communications Research. She received a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Indiana University in Bloomington. Mary is active in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, publishing and participating in a wide number of conferences, professional venues and journals.
Erik Sudderth from MIT will be speaking on Visual Hand Tracking Using Nonparametric Belief Propagation. Wednesday, December 8th, 10:00 – 11:00pm
Abstract. Probabilistic graphical models provide a powerful general framework for formulating and solving learning and inference problems. However, practical applications of graphical models in fields such as computer vision are often hampered by high-dimensional variables and non-linear relationships. In this talk, we describe nonparametric belief propagation (NBP), a stochastic algorithm which propagates sample-based approximations to true, continuous likelihoods. NBP effectively extends particle filters to the more general graphs rising in problems with spatial or hierarchical structure.
We use NBP to visually track a 3D geometric hand model from image sequences, a challenging problem with applications in human-computer interfaces, motion capture, and scene understanding. Our tracker is based on a local representation chosen to allow information about each finger's location to guide the estimates of neighboring fingers. We show that the kinematic, structural, and temporal constraints underlying the tracking problem are naturally described by a graphical model. In addition, by introducing binary hidden variables describing the occlusion state of each pixel, NBP is able to properly reason about finger self-occlusions in a distributed fashion. Our results show that NBP may be used to refine inaccurate model initializations, as well as track hand motion through extended image sequences.
Bio. Erik Sudderth is a doctoral student in the department of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received the M.S. degree in 2002.He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at San Diego in 1999. His research interests include statistical modeling and machine learning, and in particular the application of graphical models to problems in computer vision.
Tuesday, December 7, 2004 at 12:16PM INFO VISUALIZATION: It Affects You has a table showing the teen birth rates of red states and blue states.
The "value" column is the "Birth rate per 1,000 estimated female population aged 15-19 years in each area." The data comes from the 9th page of this 2002 CDC Report.
This analysis is interesting but I have a few questions.
1) Why is the District of Columbia missing? Perhaps because it is geographically the odd-man-out. Or maybe because it is the bluest of the blue states and also has a higher teenage birth rate then any other state listed (69.1).
2) How is abortion effecting this table? (This table shows only births, not the pregnancy rate overall.)
Friday, December 3, 2004 at 5:11PM DATA: C.S. Monitor has an interesting article on recent demographic shifts in America, complete with pop culture references to keep your attention.
Since 1970 the percentage of households containing five or more people has fallen by half. [...]
"The demographic trends that we are seeing are really quite dramatic, and are creating what I see as backlash," says Bella DePaulo, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Ms. DePaulo sees a gap between the nation's actual demographics and the way society is reflected on TV, in advertisements, and so forth. "There is this relentless glorification of marriage and coupling at a time in the nation's history when marriage has never been less important," says DePaulo.
Friday, December 3, 2004 at 4:55PM INFO VISUALIZATION: Lately I've been doing a lot of interaction modeling and web-based information system design for an upcoming project. I usually focus on data visualization here, but information visualization can be so much more than(*) that. Sometimes the only way to clearly represent a model of a system or interaction or process is visually. My current UML-esque model (it's UML-esque and not just UML because I find formal UML so awfully restrictive) of the Java servlets that will run this site is a case-in-point. (I'll be posting these later.)
Anyway, musing aside, I really enjoyed a number of the visual representations of systems and processes over at Funnel Inc. They are a great example of how to use images to give a holistic view of a project.
(Via NiXLOG - Infographics)
* Thanks for the grammar tip, Philo. I know I constantly write then when I mean than, I'll try my best to catch future occurrences. :-)
Friday, December 3, 2004 at 12:35PM INFO VISUALIZATION: The Onion wins again. Check out their genius Iraqi Terror Alert System.
Monday, November 29, 2004 at 2:37PM DATA: What could be a better time to be thinking of your credit than right before throwing down more then you can afford on Christmas? Well, you can get your credit report for free starting tomorrow (Tuesday, December 1st) if you live in a Western state. 
(When was the last time the West got something first? I'm still waiting for the god damn quarters to get past Wisconsin. Washington State will get its quarter in 2007, that's the 9th year of a 10 year program. If we still want to give New Mexico back to Old Mexico or get our $7.2 million back from Russia, we should do so now, before we honor them with a shiny quarter in 2008. And while we're giving things away, let's give Texas back to Mexico or let them go back to being the Republic of Texas.)
But anyway, get your free credit copy right away and make it a yearly tradition to do so. Now, if we could get congress to require credit companies fess up about how they calculate your FICO score... Or better yet, someone should make a website that collects individuals' FICO scores and then use the data to reverse engineer the calculation scheme.
UPDATE: Dear idiot Texan (and perennial commenter) Mark. Stop making all Texans look bad.
Texas was its own independent country before it joined the union (remember the Alamo?), and we still have the right to subdivide into four more (for a total of 5) states.
If you're trying to be funny, you should at least be accurate.
Or better yet, maybe the west coast should secede, or join Canada.
Saturday, November 27, 2004 at 7:06PM INFO VISUALIZATION: I ran across an interesting hypothesis while running through Andrew Sullivan.
I have many issues with this chart and with the authors spurious conclusions. But rather then rehash them, you can read a comment on the article here.
My main problem with the article is the author seems to believe this to be a relationship of causation, rather then just association. Long story short, association is not automatically causation, but the author makes a lot of assumptions to the contrary.
Also, he attempts to take on Thomas Frank, but fails miserably. He writes:
In a year of predictably partisan books, one lively surprise has been What's the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank, a leftwing journalist from Kansas who now lives with his wife and single child in the Democratic stronghold of Chicago. [...]
While the Christian right in Kansas doesn't much hold with Darwin, they are doing well at the basic Darwinian task of reproducing themselves: pro-life Kansas has the fourth highest white fertility in the country at 2.06 babies per woman, and the birthrate of the conservative Republicans that Frank finds so baffling is likely to be even higher. On the crucial question of whether a group can be bothered not to die out, "What's the Matter with Massachusetts?" would be a more pertinent question. Massachusetts' whites are failing to replace themselves, averaging only 1.6 babies per woman, and the states' liberal Democrats are probably reproducing even less than that.
Tuesday, November 23, 2004 at 7:17PM INFO SCIENCE: It always nice to read a story about the amazing abilities of the human brain. We spend so much time in them, it's easy to forget they are the most versatile and resilient information systems of all time.
Ms. Schiltz and other patients like her are the beneficiaries of an astonishing new technology that allows one set of sensory information to substitute for another in the brain.
Using novel electronic aids, vision can be represented on the skin, tongue or through the ears. If the sense of touch is gone from one part of the body, it can be routed to an area where touch sensations are intact. Pilots confused by foggy conditions, in which the horizon disappears, can right their aircraft by monitoring sensations on the tongue or trunk. Surgeons can feel on their tongues the tip of a probe inside a patient's body, enabling precise movements.
Friday, November 19, 2004 at 12:21PM OFF TOPIC: A picture is worth... Ok, I hate that hackneyed expression. But still, I could come up with a five hundred word essay about this picture if I had to. It's just that awesome.
This is what happens when big-headed men -- men who haven't said "no, after you" to anyone since their inauguration speeches -- come upon a door. They squish through, all at once, with confused looks on their faces.
Meanwhile Bush Sr. patiently waits in the background for his two two-term successors to battle out who gets to go first. Well, Clinton does, silly. Bush may be the new Come Back Kid, but Clinton has a way of shrinking him back down to that whiny frat-boy just by being in the same room. The guy has presence.
UPDATE: Yet another priceless photo-op thanks to the New York Times:
Look at the Clintons. Go ahead, look at them. Wow. What a sexy god damn family. This picture would be perfect, if it weren't for that mysterious Bush head/neck problem thing going on there. Is it about to fall off?