dataskills

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Sure. But most of the time? Zero.

The right principle is that charts ought to show appropriate context. Sometimes that context includes zero, but sometimes it doesn’t. It’s long past time to say no to y-axis fundamentalism.

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Displacement topologies?

File under: ripe for rewording!

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53%, hey?

Skinner-box rats trained to predict currency market movements #1yrago

Viennese artist Michael Marcovici’s Rat Traders uses reward, punishment and selective breeding to create a strain of lab-rat that can predict the movement of international currency markets.

The rats are kept in Skinner boxes, and are trained by playing them piano scores whose pitch reflects actual historical currency market fluctuations; when the music ends, each rat chooses a door, one representing a long position, the other a short one. If they correctly anticipate the market, they’re given food; for incorrect predictions they get a shock. The most successful rats are bred to produce new generations.

The outcome is a group of rats that can predict USD/EUR market movement with 53% accuracy.

Or, possibly, the result is a bunch of credulous posts like this one, accepting the reality of the experiment without much evidence, but producing an attention-bubble that says that high-flying finance operatives underperform relative to lightly trained rats, which is also a useful contribution to the literature, albeit not the scientific literature.

In any event, Skinnerian training doesn’t usually involve punishment for undesirable behaviors; the point of “positive reinforcement” is to reward “good” behaviors and ignore everything else.

Read the rest

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The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (WisconsinWatch.org <http://wisconsinwatch.org/>) has a rare opening for a newly created position: Data and Visual Director. We're looking for some combination of the following skills:   - Data analysis and visualization   - Experience in conceiving and producing ambitious multimedia   investigative news projects   - Website management and posting   - Supervisory experience More details are posted here and below: http://wisconsinwatch.org/2015/08/data-and-visual-editor-opening-at-the-wisconsin-center-for-investigative-journalism/ Deadline: September 27, 2015 *Data and Visual Director opening at the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism* We have a rare opening at the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, as Kate Golden, our beloved and multitalented multimedia director, exits to Australia. If you’re interested in succeeding her, we want to talk with you about our newly fashioned position: Data and Visual Director. The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism punches way above its weight. See WisconsinWatch.org <http://www.wisconsinwatch.org/>. We are a nonpartisan nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that focuses on government accountability and quality of life issues. In five years we have won 32 regional Milwaukee Press Club awards and the first Associated Press Media Editors Innovator of the Year for College Students award for collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism school. And our student reporters are three-time finalists in the Investigative Reporters and Editors Awards. Perks of working at WCIJ include reporting on a state with astonishingly divided politics and a presidentially inclined governor with no end of surprises. We’ve reported recently on alleged prison abuses <http://wisconsinwatch.org/2014/07/waupun-prison-guards-accused-of-abusing-dozens-of-inmates/> , the use of students as confidential drug informants <http://wisconsinwatch.org/2014/09/undercover-students-used-in-drug-busts-at-some-uw-campuses/>and — in the number-one state for old-fashioneds — why drunken driving is still a misdemeanor <http://wisconsinwatch.org/2014/11/in-wisconsin-statehouse-laws-on-drunken-driving-seen-as-tough-enough/> offense here. Also, nearly half the private drinking water wells are unsafe, and a dead zone appears in Green Bay <http://wisconsinwatch.org/2015/04/farmers-vow-to-reduce-phosphorus-bane-of-green-bay/> each year. Still, it’s awfully nice here in Madison. The bike paths are numerous, the rent relatively cheap and the farm produce plentiful. Our office bar is the famed Memorial Union Terrace <https://mediafluency.journalism.wisc.edu/buckylist/295/>, over Lake Mendota. The rest of the staff includes an executive director, an associate director who focuses on the business side, a managing editor, a part-time veteran environmental reporter, three paid reporting interns and one paid public engagement and marketing intern. We also are hiring a radio reporting fellow in conjunction with Wisconsin Public Radio. We’re a flexible, fun workplace that still manages to do some hard-core work. It’s not unusual for homemade pie or guacamole to show up at the “world headquarters” in Vilas Hall. We communicate by Slack (also in person – yo!) and are willing to experiment with new techniques <http://wisconsinwatch.org/series/frac-sand/> and technologies. (Ask us about our wooden cow! <http://wisconsinwatch.org/2015/04/investigative-reporting-art-the-spring-2015-wisconsin-tour/> ) Interested in working with us from a remote location? You’ll miss out on the pie and guacamole, but we’ll consider your application. Preference given to someone who can be here at least once a week, to facilitate our work with student journalists. We’re looking for some combination of the following: High-priority skills:   - Data analysis and visualization. Whether you call yourself a coder or   not, you should know how to find and learn the tools you need to find   answers in structured data. We want someone who is skilled in the gray arts   of acquiring data, in assessing its flaws and possibilities, and in making   beautiful data visualizations.   - Bulletproofing your work. We use a fact-checking system and we’re   obsessive about accuracy.   - Website management and posting. Familiarity with the world of HTML,   CSS, Twitter Bootstrap (for landing pages, special features, staff pages).   Design chops and good taste.   - Photography: Shooting and editing.   - Experience in conceiving and producing ambitious multimedia   investigative news projects.   - Interpersonal skills, like flexibility, kindness and a sense of humor,   suited for working in small teams on intense projects.   - Supervisory experience. We work with student journalists, who bring   great energy into the newsroom but whose limited experience can be perilous   for complex projects.   - A sense of mission that aligns with our guiding values: Protect the   vulnerable. Expose wrongdoing. Seek solutions. Lower priority skills:   - News reporting.   - Radio writing and production. We work regularly with Wisconsin Public   Radio and aim to get more on the radio.   - Video shooting, writing and production. We have done web features and   worked with Wisconsin Public Television as collaborating producers.   - Programming. Target start date: Flexible, around Dec. 1, 2015. Expected salary range: $45,000-$70,000, commensurate with skills and experience. Benefits: Generous paid vacation. We don’t offer health insurance yet but are willing to subsidize health-care premiums. Deadline: The initial application window will be open until Sept. 27, 2015. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. To apply: Please send a cover letter, resume, a list of references and examples of your work to Executive Director Andy Hall at ahall@wisconsinwatch.org. If you’d like to chat about the job before applying, contact Andy at 608-333-2333.

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Three openings on Quartz's "Things team"—the people responsible for their most ambitious data-driven, visual, and interactive journalism. The Things team is not a graphics or dataviz department, but a group of self-sufficient journalists within the newsroom who know how to code and wrangle data. They work primarily on their own stories (check out the team's latest work @quartzthings), and also build tools for the broader staff—such as Atlas, a standalone chart-publishing platform that powers the production of thousands of charts in Quartz stories every year.

They're looking for an editor in New York, a reporter in New York, and another in London—but will also consider people who want to work remotely from elsewhere. You'll need to be able to write and report and have a solid technical grounding in one or more of: + frontend web development, + systems administration, + statistics, + data science, + design, or + information architecture.

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Jobs, y'all.

If you are in the market for some data storytelling work, perhaps editing, remote or in Northern California (Sacramento, SF), perhaps teaching mapping (I have excellent materials to get you started)...say the word. My own job hunt is coming to a close and there are a few great opportunities that I am having a hard time letting go of. So ping me if you want to talk about whether this or that might be a good fit.

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Always be fact checking.

5 Facts Exposing the Media’s Lies About Police Shootings | US Uncut

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The many uses if the element inspector.

let me demonstrate my point wrt doctoring social media using my twitter

here’s my original tweet here

if i right click and click “inspect element” on chrome and find the line that says my actual tweet like so

and select that line, right click, and click “edit as html”

I can type in whatever i want like this

and like that i can make a screenshot that says that i like to eat children and use it to call myself out

and thats why you should’t believe screenshots of tweets at face value w/o a link to the original tweet

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See also, Gawker. My data journalism friends have been having a field day with the famous Ashley Madison dump. Which is cool. I keep getting sidetracked trying to figure out who on earth thought Ashley Madison was more than a porn fantasy, but there are some pretty fascinating findings in both Gawker and El Espanol, most of which came from just pulling the data into database (or R, possibly R) and poking around looking for patterns.

[dataskills]

Cost of living.

A new tool compares housing, food, child care, and other household costs in 618 American metros.

[dataskills]

Cost of living.

A new tool compares housing, food, child care, and other household costs in 618 American metros.

[dataskills]

Seems relevant.

Newspapers are, pretty much, dead. #1yrago

Clay Shirky has some some truths: “Maybe 25 year olds will start demanding news from yesterday, delivered in an unshareable format once a day. Perhaps advertisers will decide ‘Click to buy’ is for wimps. Mobile phones: could be a fad. After all, anything could happen with print. Hard to tell, really.”

The other significant point is that journalists are being kept deliberately in the dark about the fortunes of their employers. When asked to estimate their own circulation, they overestimate it by an order of magnitude. It’s the sharp between the newsroom and the business side: “

Read the rest

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I love this.

7E Guest Artist Stefanie Posavec

Stefanie Posavec is an London-based data artist with an MA in Communication Design (Central Saint Martins).  With a background in book design and text visualisation, she works as a designer with a focus on data-related design, with work ranging from data visualization and information design. She is commissioned for data art and data illustration for a variety of clients. Her personal work focuses on the visual representation of language, literature, or numbers and has been exhibited internationally.

Check out her site. We love her book art.  

-7E

[dataskills]

What I Learned During my Google Fellowship with The Texas Tribune

By Jeremy Lin

The style guide is your friend, not your enemy

When I first started designing data visualizations for the Tribune, I felt like I was on the style guide struggle bus hardcore.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that our style guide is strict by any means, it’s just that I’d only had experience designing for school assignments and side projects. I was not used to having these “restrictions.”

However, very soon I realized it’s exactly these restrictions that enable me to refine my thinking in graphical elements: typefaces, colors, forms, empty space, visual hierarchy. These elements aren’t only there to create a beautiful design; how they’re designed is also key to how we tell a story with the data.

I learned to think critically in my design process. Looking pretty isn’t good enough. How to present information in the most effective way should always be a journalist-designer/journalist-developer’s first priority.

In the story about solar energy production for the 31 Days, 31 Ways series, I designed a few different versions and went back and forth for editing. Finally, I came up with a design that was true to myself as well as to the Tribune. I can’t express how much I learned in the process of redesigning and polishing this chart.

Editing and interviewing data are important, even for graphics

The web provides us (arguably) infinite space for content. But it’s also because of this seemingly infinite space that having a visual hierarchy is as important as ever. Instead of visualizing the whole data set without any editing and data manipulation, I learned how to prioritize the most important information, and the not-so-important, secondary stuff I want to present to our readers.

Also, I learned to always design with a story in mind. I always have some questions written down for the data set I am working on to help me “interview” the data. If the data set I’m working with can’t answer my questions, sometimes I would even join and compare that data with other data sets.

In the 31 Days, 31 Ways story about people who’ve purchased health plans on the federal marketplace, I wanted to find out the correlation between income, location and the number of people who’d enrolled. I joined four data sets: marketplace enrollment, total population, median household income from the American Community Survey and geospatial data. After some data wrangling and normalization, I created a series of choropleth maps that enable readers to quickly compare the percentage of healthcare enrollment and median household income in different ZIP codes.

Rethink interactions and visual design

As a journalist-turned-designer-turned-developer, sometimes I got excited about the design/computational aspects of a graphic and fell into the trap of abusing complicated visual forms and mouse interactions. But working at the Tribune has taught me to restrain myself and focus on really nailing down the design and visual presentation.

Because every time a reader needs to actively “work” to interpret a graphic, the more they will get distracted from seeing the bigger story of the graphic. On top of that, mouse interactions never really translate well on mobile.

In the freestanding emergency room story, I decided to experiment with minimal interaction. Instead of having a play button or having five buttons representing different years for readers to select from, I created a GIF-like map with automatic looping and animation effect. This way, readers can easily understand the story without having to conquer a steep learning curve or being interrupted by unnecessary interactions.

It’s OK to have fun in your design

At the Tribune, I also started to experiment with illustrations – a field that I had zero experience in. There are so many things that are important but also entirely boring to a lot of people.  In order to reach a larger audience, it’s my job as a graphic journalist to make things interesting. (With the right story, of course.)

In the story about how the Texas legislature eliminated license fees for some professions, I added a bunch of hand-drawn illustrations and icons into the table. Are these illustrations necessary for the story? Probably not. Does these illustrations add some flavor into the story? YAAAAAAAASS.

The rule of ask/don’t ask questions

Problem solving is the essence of programming. You break a big problem into small little problems, and then break these small little problems into tiny problems that you can easily solve. Of course, sometimes I still get stuck and need help from falling into the abyss of obsession over one problem. But before I turn my head to other coding gurus on our team, I always search on Google, Stack Overflow and Block Explorer first! Sometimes I feel like I even learn more from searching for the answer and teaching myself than relying on others to solve my problems.

It’s been an amazing ride with the Texas Tribune News Apps team.  I’ve learned so much and now I can walk out with a lot of great clips in my portfolio. If you are interested in working with the Texas Tribune News Apps team, you should apply to be next year’s Google fellow!