New Florence. New Renaissance.

Contextualizing Data

“Data visualization has nothing to do with pie charts and bar graphs. And it's only marginally related to "infographics," information design that tends to be about objectivity and clarification. Such representations simply offer another iteration of the data—restating it visually and making it easier to digest. Data visualization, on the other hand, is an interpretation, a different way to look at and think about data that often exposes complex patterns or correlations.

Data visualization is a way to make sense of the ever-increasing stream of information with which we're bombarded and provides a creative antidote to the "analysis paralysis" that can result from the burden of processing such a large volume of information. "It's not about clarifying data," says Koblin. "It's about contextualizing it." “

Photo of air traffic over N. America

BusinessWeek

Where’s George?

Where’s George is tracking the movement of more than 150 million+ currency notes, with a value of almost US$ 850 million dollars.

But while it is a fun project, the fascinating thing is people are doing pattern recognition with the massive location data the site is collecting  to get clues on spread of flu or travel and labor migrations in a slow economy.

Reinventing the Coke machine

Courtesy of reader Bala Somasundaram, I see a radical change in the vending machine. No, not just the external design in the new Freestyle Dispensers

As InformationWeek says

“Freestyle will let Coke more easily test new drink flavors and new beverage concepts, such as adding various vitamin combinations to flavored waters and juices. The dispensers each contain 30 cartridges of flavorings that mix up 100 different drink combinations. The cartridges are tagged with radio frequency ID chips, and each dispenser contains an RFID reader. The dispensers collect data on what customers are drinking and how much, and transmit that information each night over a private Verizon wireless network to Coke's SAP data warehouse system in Atlanta. The company will use the data to develop reports that assess how new drinks are doing in the market, identify differences in regional tastes, and help fast-food outlets decide which drinks to serve.”

QSR Magazine adds

“Flavor aside, the machine is just plain cool. It operates on the same Windows CE system used in smart phones. Its body is inspired by Italian auto design and its touchscreen akin to something you might find on iPhone. The Freestyle I used is capable of creating 90 unique drinks from 20 SKUs, yet its supplies require 40 percent less storage. More importantly, the Willy's I visited has seen beverage business increase in the double digits since the machine appeared.

What really has me excited though is Freestyle's potential at the drive-thru. Coke theorizes  this machine might be the push the industry needs to move to touchscreen ordering at the loop. Can you imagine pulling into your local drive-thru and customizing not only your meal, but also your beverage.”

Yield Management and Baseball

“The San Francisco Giants are experimenting with a possible solution — software that weighs ticket sales data, weather forecasts, upcoming pitching matchups and other variables to help decide whether the team should raise or lower prices right up until game day.

The Giants are the first major league team to test the software, which some industry analysts say could transform the way teams adjust to the ebb and flow of the season, not unlike how airlines, hotels and rental car companies — which also use dynamic pricing — adjust to changes in the travel industry.”

New York Times

"Stream" Computing

“Now IBM has shown that stream computing can be used to analyze market data faster than ever before. The result is a machine that helps automated trading systems determine the price of securities using financial events that have just occurred. To build the system, the computing company partnered with TD Securities, an investment-banking firm, to tweak IBM software called InfoSphere Streams for financial data. The firm ran the software on one of the latest IBM supercomputers, known as Blue Gene/P.”

MIT Technology Review

Photo Credit: Argonne National Laboratory

Data Mining comes to HR

"The chart looks like colorful pop-art doughnuts flying through space. The message, though, is anything but playful. Based on a mathematical analysis of work at an undisclosed Internet company, each circle represents an employee. Those who generate or pass along valuable information within the company are portrayed as large and dark-colored. And the others? "On a relative scale, they don't add a hell of a lot," says Elizabeth Charnock, chief executive of Cataphora, the Redwood City (Calif.) company that carried out the study for a client. The upshot for managers faced with a mandate to downsize: Small and pale circles might be a good place to start cutting.

For most of its eight-year history, Cataphora has focused on digital sleuthing. The company hunts for statistical signs of fraud. But in the past few years, Cataphora has been dispatching its data miners into a new market: statistical studies of employee performance."

BusinessWeek

Rated R

for strong language - for sophisticated data analysis

"Close to 1,600 different packages reside on just one of the many Web sites devoted to R, and the number of packages has grown exponentially. One package, called BiodiversityR, offers a graphical interface aimed at making calculations of environmental trends easier.

Another package, called Emu, analyzes speech patterns, while GenABEL is used to study the human genome.

The financial services community has demonstrated a particular affinity for R; dozens of packages exist for derivatives analysis alone.

“The great beauty of R is that you can modify it to do all sorts of things,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And you have a lot of prepackaged stuff that’s already available, so you’re standing on the shoulders of giants.”

R first appeared in 1996, when the statistics professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman of the University of Auckland in New Zealand released the code as a free software package. "

New York Times

e-Verify

May not be whiz bang technology, but the process improvement/paperwork reduction is pretty impressive.

"E-Verify is a voluntary program for all employers, with very limited exceptions. Companies can access E-Verify online and compare an employee's Form I-9 information with over 444 million records in the SSA database, and more than 60 million records in Department of Homeland Security immigration databases."

"More than 87,000 employers are enrolled in the program, with over 6.5 million queries run so far in fiscal year 2008."

"The Global Math Elite"

"A captivating look at how a global math elite is predicting and altering our behavior -- at work, at the mall, and in bed

Every day we produce loads of data about ourselves simply by living in the modern world: we click web pages, flip channels, drive through automatic toll booths, shop with credit cards, and make cell phone calls. Now, in one of the greatest undertakings of the twenty-first century, a savvy group of mathematicians and computer scientists is beginning to sift through this data to dissect us and map out our next steps. Their goal? To manipulate our behavior -- what we buy, how we vote -- without our even realizing it."

a blurb for the new book by Business Week writer Stephen Baker

UK Government sponsored data mashup

BBC News

"The (UK) government is opening up gigabytes of information from a variety of sources (to the public). This includes mapping information from the Ordnance Survey, medical information from the NHS , neighbourhood statistics from the Office for National Statistics and a carbon calculator from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). "

"It is hoping to find new uses for public information in the areas of criminal justice, health and education. "