Data Mining, Data Visualization and Gaming

The first hurdle is to integrate the technologies and these two articles make it sound like we are picking up steam. The second hurdle is to reach people like Rodney Monroe on what data mining and integration can do for his responsibility area without providing everyone the face to face, one on one coaching he had. Or, if one-on-one coaching is the route we end up going, then the hurdle becomes helping get people comfortable with virtual coaching, collaboration and peer support.

Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game
By MICHAEL FITZGERALD
Published: May 20, 2007
Software lets you build a dossier of your clients that includes photographs and lists of their likes, dislikes and buying interests.

Bright Ideas
Reaping Results: Data-Mining Goes Mainstream
By STEVE LOHR
Published: May 20, 2007
Programs add new streams of data — about neighborhood demographics and payday schedules, for example — to try to predict where crimes might occur.

Baby Name Wizard web site - great visualization example

I'm glad to have found this link again in a post from VSL. It is such fun and a great example of how using visualization and a multidimensional tool opens up insights into aggregate data. Looks like the popularity of my first name peaked in 1940 and my second name on my birth certificate never made it out of the 1900s. No wonder I've substituted my family of origin name for it!

The Baby Name Wizard web site

Requires Java to load.

Here is a link to the VSL post on this site.

Connectedness: Organizational bypass and collective leadership

A post from Bruce Hoppe discussing a case study visualizing organizational networking among leaders. One powerful graphic shows both formal reporting structure and informal advice and collaboration relationships.

Connectedness: Organizational bypass and collective leadership

Metaweb and Freebase.com

Link to The Huffington Post by Esther Dyson. Nice design on the Metaweb home page - should be interesting to see this unfold.

More on Visualization of Data - IBM's Many Eyes

From acm technews

IBM's Many Eyes App After One Month

Read/Write Web (03/05/07) Wattenberg, Martin; Viegas, Fernanda B.

The motivation behind the creation of IBM's Many Eyes project was to create societal-scale software by setting up a participatory Web site that was available to the whole of the Internet to test the hypothesis that visualizations have a strong social aspect, according to Many Eyes developers Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viegas. Scaling in terms of the audience rather than the data is Wattenberg and Viegas' goal, and in the month since Many Eyes' launch several interesting visualizations have been generated. In one instance, a user of the Many Eyes site employed graph visualization to generate a network schematic of certain New
Testament figures who were mentioned together, and other users were in turn inspired by this visualization to establish visualizations of their own.Another notable visualization facilitated by Many Eyes was a bubble chart listing the top 50 books on LibraryThing, with a highlighting feature that indicated what books a person had or had not read. Wattenberg and Viegas comment that their Web site is one of three notable sites that share "a belief that the Web enables a new, social kind of data analysis; a type of statistical thinking that is both playful and serious."

Click Here to View Full Article

---

Information Visualization

Great Post and links from Stephen Downes.

10:00 AM (11 hours ago)

Information visualization

from elearnspace: Podcasts - Stephen Downes by gsiemens

The abundance and complexity of information requires that we rethink how we relate to information (creating, validating, disseminating, evaluating). David Gelernter says: "If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don't bother". To cope, we rely on technology to do our cognitive grunt work - providing visual representations of information...allowing us to move to meaning/sense-making more rapidly. A few recent articles on visualization:

Sense.us - collaborative information visualization

Shared information visualization by IBM's Many Eyes

Visualizing Data