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Is simplicity in data always desirable? Part 1 I recently stumbled on a really cool blog post looking at the alignment of buildings on the Open Street Map (OSM) database. The author loaded the OSM database for the British Isles, and then calculated the azimuth* of each building. His results are interesting. What does […]
January 12, 2013 by jacobalonso
Can data visualization be used in the classroom? I recently stumbled on some research suggesting that presenting information visually may have significant benefits over text-based materials. The BBC reports that interpreting visual data requires fewer cognitive resources than reading texts. The results showed that when tasks were presented visually rather than using traditional text-based software […]
October 31, 2011 by jacobalonso
I recently wrote a brief post suggesting that data visualization may, in fact, have a place in education. I think a recent find from BYU may be able to elucidate this point further. David Wiley, a Professor at Brigham Young, suggests that teachers may want to visualize test grades in an easily understandable form using a new […]
October 22, 2011 by jacobalonso
I have been spending my free time during the last couple of days putting together a paper for an upcoming e-learning conference in Austin, TX (Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education). The theme, which at least I find potentially very interesting, is using data visualization in education, both for teaching and assessment. A colleague […]
March 27, 2011 by jacobalonso
A while back I read an article (Turner 2010; available here) that explained the rapid growth in the number of international Non-Governmental Organizations (INGO‘s) as a function of of demographics and the structure of economic systems in developed countries. Essentially, the authors argue that an over-supply of cultural and economic elites led to the creation […]
February 15, 2011 by jacobalonso
When I was a kid I learned that our bodies were host to a large (10^14) number of bacterial flora. After that I became sort of obsessed with the idea that to those bacteria, my gut was like the earth is to us humans (this theme is explored in greater depth in the Futurama episode […]
May 4, 2013 by jacobalonso
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