Michael Perkins

A beautiful audio-reactive processing animation by Robert Hodgin:

A March 23 a Huffington Post headline asserts that:


The facts reported by Huffington Post to support this claim are:

• The Washington Times reported that a dozen SEC workers were caught viewing porn.
• Documents obtained by Gawker suggest that there were sixteen investigations of porn use at the SEC and that porn was viewed over 8000 times. The Huffington Post article doesn't say how many people were responsible for the page views or over what period of time they occurred.

According to a 2005 Harris Interactive poll, 25% of men and 12% of women admit to having viewed porn at work.  I don't know the proportion of men to women at the SEC so let's use the lower number and assume that 12% of the SEC workforce has viewed porn at work.  According to the SEC's site, they have 3500 employees.   If we believe the Harris Interactive poll and if the people at the SEC are like the general population, then we would reasonably expect 420 of them to have viewed porn at work.

The fact that twelve people were caught viewing porn and that sixteen were investigated hardly constitutes a rampant porn problem.  Actually, this is much less than we would expect from an organization of this size.  This is just another example of sensationalist media headlines unsupported by the facts.

The Fibonacci Sequence is a special sequence of natural numbers discovered by the Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci in the thirteenth century. The sequence begins with 0, 1 and continues with each subsequent number being the sum of the previous two numbers.

    0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 ...

The Fibonacci numbers can be found throughout nature and art. In nature, for instance, the number of lines in the spirals on a sunflower is almost always a Fibonacci number. Similar patterns are found in pine cones and pineapples. Also, the sequence of the ratios of adjacent Fibonacci numbers approaches the constant known as the Golden Mean which figures prominently in architecture and art.

In the video below, composer and pianist Bence Peter performs a composition based on the Fibonacci Sequence. Peter mapped the Fibonacci numbers onto the diatonic scale to generate the notes used in the composition.

The following headline appeared on Telegraph.co.uk today:


Similar stories were carried by other British media outlets.

The Telegraph reports that:

The virus has increased fourfold in Sunderland, Durham and Teesside, the areas of Britain where Facebook is most popular, because it has given people a new way to meet multiple partners for casual sexual encounters.

Professor Peter Kelly, director of public health in Teesside, said staff had found a link between social networking sites and the rise in cases, especially among young women. 

This conclusion appears to be based on the fact that the reported cases of syphilis in Teesdale last year rose fourfold to 30. And what is the connection with Facebook? The Telegraph reports that:

Research has shown that young people in Sunderland, Durham and Teesside were 25 per cent more likely to log onto social networking sites than those in the rest of Britain. 

So an increase to 30 total reported cases of syphilis in an area of Britain that is know to use social networking sites more heavily than the rest of Britain constitutes evidence that "Facebook is linked to a rise in syphilis."

It sounds like there's an opportunity here for the UK Statistics Authority!

It's easy to make fun of this, but the sad fact is that many people will read it and believe it.

It comes as no surprise that government officials often misuse statistics to advance their own political and personal agendas. In an attempt to reverse the British public's growing skepticism of public statistics, in 2008, the British Parliament established an independent agency, the UK Statistics Authority, for evaluating government practices in the collection and reporting of official statistics. The Authority's web site states:

The Authority's statutory objective is to promote and safeguard the production and publication of official statistics that serve the public good. It is also required to promote and safeguard the quality and comprehensiveness of official statistics, and ensure good practice in relation to official statistics.

Richard Aldritt was named the Authority's Head of Assessment. Aldritt, a professional statistican, and his team evaluate the data and review the claims made by officials in over 200 agencies.

Last month, for instance, Conservative MP Chris Grayling claimed that police statistics showed an increase in violent crime during the Labour party's time in government. The Conservatives, moreover, sent the numbers to activists throughout England and Wales in an attempt to show a decline in law and order under the Labour party. The UK Statistics Authority issued an assessment of Grayling's claim that concluded that the apparent increase in crime was due to a change in reporting methodology. Moreover, they noted that the British Crime Survey, normally considered a more reliable source, showed a decrease in violent crime during the same period.

Predictably, Chris Grayling responded as follows:

The reality is these figures actually reflect real crimes, reported to real police stations, by real people. And the reality is however you caveat these figures, whatever qualifications you make about changes to the recording methods, they show a big increase in violent crime over the past decade and we are going to carry on saying that.

Click here to read a BBC article about the flap.

It should be noted that not all assessments by the Authority have been dismissed so cavalierly. The BBC article states that:

In 2008, [the Authority] criticised Labour ministers for releasing what it said was "premature and selective" data about hospital admissions for knife wounds in certain parts of the country. The then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith apologised for the early release.

A truly independent gadfly agency that checks public statistics is probably a good idea, but I doubt that it is going to solve the problem. The flood of statistics, many of which are flawed or misleading, coming out of government and the media is making education in statistics increasingly important. As H.G. Wells said:

Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read or write.

Toxiclibs is an open source library of Java and Processing functions for computational design. The library contains functions for audio, color, geometry, math and physics. The following video is a collection of experiments and projects using the library.

toxiclibs showreel from postspectacular on Vimeo.

If you send a sample of your DNA to the folks at DNA 11, they will create a one-of-a-kind "art" work based on your DNA. The images don't really rock my boat, but the idea is very cool.

They also create works based on fingerprints and kisses.

Gapminder has just launched a new website.  If you've seen the Hans Rosling TED presentation that I posted a while ago, you have some idea what Gapminder is about.   Gapminder is a non-profit venture founded by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Hans Rosling in 2005.  Their motto is "unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view."  In particular, Gapminder aggregates world economic, health and political statistics, and provides a wonderful facility, Gapminder World, for charting those statistics and analyzing trends.  The new website is nice.  Check it out.

The result of putting the full text of Hamlet into Wordle.net.

A TextArc is a visual representation of a text. In a TextArc analysis, the full text of a work is drawn in a tiny, one pixel tall line in two concentric spirals. Each distinct word is also drawn in a readable font at a location that is the average of all the actual word locations. Each of the readable words is then attached to the tiny words that occur in the text by lines.  This provides a graphical representation of the word's distribution in the text.

For a more detailed explanation and additional examples, check out http://www.textarc.org.

Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.
- Ray Ozzie

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
– Brian Kernigan

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling - the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user.
– Niklaus Wirth

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
– Leonardo da Vinci

The following video was created by Jonathan Brandel using the Processing programming language. The overlayed animation appears to be reacting to motion in the video. Brandel describes it as "new type of interactive visualization combining computer vision and audio analysis." Click here for more awesome videos by Brandel.

News Dots  is a cool new service on Slate.com that represents current topics in the news as nodes in an interactive visual network. The network graph shows the relationships between the topics in addition to the importance of each topic.

News Dots uses Calais to automatically tag news stories from major publications. Relationships are established by identifying tags that appear together in the same stories. The visualization tool was built using flare, an ActionScript library for building interactive flash visualizations.

Click here to check it out.

A study reported in the August 2009 issue of the Journal of Investigative Dermatology seems to show that patients with psoriasis have a diminished capacity to recognize facial expressions of disgust.

When male psoriasis patients were shown images of disgusted faces, fMRI data showed significantly reduced activity in the insula cortex compared to age-matched male controls. No significant differences in brain response were found when the psoriasis patients viewed neutral or fearful faces.

These results were corroborated by the test subjects' performance on the facial expression recognition task (FERT). Psoriasis patients were less able than controls to identify various intensities of disgusted facial expressions. They were, however, able to identify fearful and sad expressions as well as the control group.

The investigators hypothesize that the psoriasis patients' inability to process disgusted facial expressions protects them from stressful emotional responses.

This appears to be a striking example of what Cordelia Fine calls the "vain brain."

The vain brain presents a "softer, kinder reality" that preserves the individual's positive self-evaluation. While it troubles philosophers, for the rest of us it is vastly more comfortable that we can only know ourselves and the world through the distorting prism of our brains. Freud suggested that the ego "rejects the unbearable idea," and since then experimental psychologists have been peeling back the protective layers encasing our self-esteem to reveal the multitude of strategies our brains use to keep our egos plump and self-satisfied. (Cordelia Fine, A Mind of Its Own,  p. 6, emphasis mine)

Flightpattern is a cool audio-reactive animation programmed in ActionScript by Gwen Vanhee. The music is El Cargo by Amon Tobin.


Flightpattern from Gwen Vanhee on Vimeo.