Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Visualizing the London Underground

A reader of this blog pointed me to this interesting project Matthew Somerville which displays the live position of trains on the London underground railway system. It is a fun visualization, and a great example of free data and dev ecosystems coming together. I wonder where this could go product-wise? Analytics for train problems? delays? Many of the tube lines have trains running at a frequency such that one just hops on the next one that arrives. I'm guessing that it might be useful in a late night, mobile scenario where optimizing dynamically over connections could make a big difference to getting around.

Visualizing the World Cup

There are a few visualizations of the World Cup knocking around.

• Clearly and Simply writes about using Tableau to visualize historical data.
• Andy Kirk has a pretty good list of a variety of approaches to both historical and match data.

As football, compared with many other games popular in the US, is often a low scoring affair, I'm interested in those visualizations that can help me understand if the result was due to consistent skill, or if it was rather a matter of luck (and poor refereeing ;-) With this in mind, I quite like the New York Times approach. The summary statistics can help get at the differences between the teams.

However, ultimately, this is not much more than a table of data points. I don't see anything in the timing that helps me understand anything other than Italy's desperation towards the end of the match.

I suspect that their hear map view of the location of play might be of interest if it could be anything more than the brief time slices that it currently provides.

 

Groups A and C Getting Most World Cup Attention

A quick formulation of queries against BlogPulse ("world cup" AND (team1 OR team2 OR team3 OR team4) suggests that Groups A and C are getting the most attention from the blogosphere.

Visualizing Wireless Signals in AR

I really enjoy the idea described in this film: being able to see parts of the real world not visible to the human eye through AR-like experiences.

 

Wireless in the world 2 from timo on Vimeo.

 

Fixing Google's URL Masking

Sometimes, when searching, you really want to get a hold of the URL of one of the documents in the result set. Generally, the URL of a search on Google is displayed below the title and snippet of the result. However, it is not uncommon for the URL to be shortened in some way if it is too long, so that you can at least see the host name and the name of the file.

 

When this happens, however, you can't copy and paste the URL for use elsewhere. The link backing the title, which you click on in order to get to the document isn't actually the URL of the document, but a proxy that Google users to track which users click on what, so copying that URL won't get you the URL of the document either. The URL is in there, but encoded.

One way around this problem is to click on the 'similar' link. This will take you to a Google results page for which the query (found in the search box) is composed in part of the link you are after. You can then copy it from there.

 
Ideally, from a user perspective, Google would back the URL displayed in the results with the actualy URL. 

What Does the Internet Make You?

While Nicholas Carr argues that the internet actually affects the brain making individuals dumber, Clay Shirky only argues that the internet creates useful cultural artifacts (regardless of whether or not something bad is happening to your brain). This pair of articles is definitely worth reading, but they don't appear to meet in the middle. I suppose one could read more in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, or Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, two books which happen to be mentioned at the end of the respective articles.

Google's Bing-like Image Background

Fascinating to see Google' come out with a Bing-like image background.

Note that some work is needed on the fit and finish to avoid readability issues like this: