Datadoodle

Home » Archives for Ted Cuzzillo » Page 24

Ted Cuzzillo

A mossy viz to try at home

by

Visualization purists will reject this. It’s mossy — as in moss.

At first glance, it’s a visualization. It represents parks, forests, rivers, and lakes in Berlin, Germany. On further examination, you want to touch it.

The mossy-viz idea seems to have begun when Sebastian Meier sought a more sensual experience than he could give with an ordinary map. Meier, who works at at the Interaction Design Lab, part of the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam, Germany, begins his explanation this way.

Most visualizations use the two-dimensional plane of paper or screens, even when visualizing spatial (three-dimensional) data. Green Berlin explores the opportunity space of tangible artefacts, created with rapid prototyping techniques, in this case a laser cutter.

… Read the rest “A mossy viz to try at home”

Free-the-data movement meets privacy

by

Back when data was little and simple, self-service analysis advocates started the chant, “Free the data!” IT stood in the way, they said. Fast forward to 2016: “democratized data” has become common, but so has public concern over privacy.

That nettlesome struggle drove a discussion that now stands as the data industry’s’ most important discussion of 2016. Around the conference table at last summer’s Pacific Northwest BI Summit — the annual, invitation-only confab held in Grants Pass, Oregon — two dozen data leaders pondered the issue for almost two hours. They concluded with an idea that broke open industry assumptions.

UK-based consultant Mike Ferguson told of a meeting held on continental Europe.… Read the rest “Free-the-data movement meets privacy”

Stephen Few: data’s “harmful ways”

by

Visualization guru and data-industry skeptic Stephen Few in has a worthwhile review of Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil.

Data can be used in harmful ways. This fact has become magnified to an extreme in the so-called realm of Big Data, fueled by an indiscriminate trust in information technologies, a reliance on fallacious correlations, and an effort to gain efficiencies no matter the cost in human suffering.

Read his review here.