Decision Mechanics

Insight. Applied.

What Nathan Yau uses to visualize data

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Nathan Yau of FlowingData has published an up-to-date list of what he uses to turn raw data into his impressive visualizations.

What’s always striking about the tools he uses is that there’s no “quick fix”. He utilizes a range of industry standard data manipulation (e.g. R) and graphic design (e.g. Adobe Illustrator) tools in his work.

I particularly liked his comments on processing and formatting data

Assuming I have the data I want (big assumption), this is a stage of tedium. Solutions typically reflect my state of I-want-this-to-be-done-already, and I use whatever tool is closest. I would use a hammer if I could.

Google’s self-driving car causes crash

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Google self-driving car

The New Scientist reports that one of Google’s autonomous cars drove into a bus on 14 February 2016.

Apparently Google’s cars have been involved in 18 accidents in Mountain View since it started testing in 2010. All have been other vehicles striking a stationary or slow moving Google car. However, in the latest incident the AI decided to pull out into the path of the slow-moving bus—i.e. the AI was at fault.

What interested me was the explanation given by Google

Our car had detected the approaching bus, but predicted that it would yield to us because we were ahead of it

As the driver is software, it’s possible to to examine the logs and know exactly how and why the accident occurred. Obviously, things are rarely as clear-cut when human drivers are involved in accidents. This makes it a lot easier to determine where the problem lies and, more importantly, to reduce the chances of it happening again. A single incident produces a bunch of useful data.

The ability to audit the behavior of autonomous cars is going to be one of their big selling points.

Kaggle provide home for high quality public datasets

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Kaggle have launched Kaggle Datasets—a repository of “high quality public datasets”.

The repository will support:

  • Access: simple, consistent access to the data with clear licensing
  • Analysis: a way to explore the data without downloading it
  • Results: visibility of previous work performed using the data
  • Conversation: forums for discussing the nuances of the data