I was honored to get to give a talk at PopTech about Data Without Borders as one of their Social Innovation Fellows this year. It was an incredible experience that I can never thank the good people at PopTech enough for. My 5 minutes of fame above!
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Drew Conway and I are going to be speaking about Data Without Borders Friday morning at 8:50AM at Strata 2011. This is a super awesome opportunity for us to share this amazing idea with the data world and we’re really in debt to Edd, Alistair, and everyone at O’Reilly for giving us time on their stage. They’ve already done a ton of great stuff for us with their Datashirts campaign, so this is really overly generous of them. If you’re at Strata, come bright and early tomorrow to see the talk live or, for those who couldn’t make it, you can watch all of the keynotes streamed live here.
Wow. I am incredibly honored, humbled, and excited to announce that I’ve been selected as a 2011 PopTech Social Innovation Fellow for Data Without Borders. Ever since I first heard about PopTech I have been hugely inspired by their mission of fostering world-changing ideas and bringing technology to bear on some of the world’s most pressing problems. I am extremely honored (and, frankly, almost embarrassed) to be given the opportunity to mingle among the incredible people there who are finding new and innovative ways of improving the world. I can’t thank PopTech enough for this and am going to spend the next month feeling like a kid trying to sleep the night before Christmas (Why can’t it be October _now_???) The fellowship program is of course followed by the wonderful PopTech Conference, the focus of which this year is “A World Rebalancing”. If you or anyone you know is up near Camden, Maine October 19th-22nd and likes awesome things, come join us!. #cantwait
We here at Data Without Borders fancy ourselves relatively savvy data visualizers. We have been doing data visualizations for some time, and have worked with many different kinds of data. We believe that a carefully crafted visualization is the most powerful way to convey insight from data. That said, one visual device we would never use is the pie chart. As Tufte eludes to in the above quotation—they suck. In our eagerness to pull together Data Without Borders, however, we violated our own cardinal rule when designing the DWB logo. As you can see, while the logo is compelling, at its core it is a pie chart. It took us a few weeks to admit it to ourselves, but this error must be corrected. Unfortunately, none of us are designers. Put us in front of gigabytes of data and an R console, and we can make it sing. But, put us in front of Photoshop and Illustrator and we are useless. We need your help. Today we are announcing the Data Without Borders Logo Contest. Starting right now, we are accepting logo submissions. Here is some basic information: The logo should convey the core mission of DWB: bringing together data scientists with non-profits and NGOs to generate value for both communities. But most importantly, to serve humanity through data analysis. The contest starts now, and runs until 12:00 AM September 6, 2011. Submissions should either be in PDF or PNG format. NO PIE CHARTS! Along with being showered with accolades by the DWB team, the winner will win a $100 Amazon Gift Card Please send entries to datawithoutborders@gmail.com, and please contact us if you have any questions at @DataNoBorders or DWB on Facebook. We’re really looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with and, seriously, no pie charts.  This has been an incredibly exciting week, with tons of you writing in to offer your services, your support, and your skills to launch this project. I couldn’t be happier with the turnout and I never cease to be amazed by the energy of this community. On that note, some quick updates on Facebook / Twitter accounts, a call for a web designer, and local event planning. Well that was awesomely unexpected. What I thought would be a casual blog post about a project I hoped to quietly roll out in the fall became a lightning rod for some of the most enthusiastic, engaged, and socially conscious data folk than I ever could have imagined. As of my writing this, over 300 of you have shown your interest in this initiative by signing up to stay in the loop on the Data Without Borders email list. Considering I envisioned 20 of us sitting around a borrowed office to tackle this problem, that turnout seems incredible to me. In addition, I have been inundated with emails from around the globe from people with amazing socially conscious tech projects and an unbridled enthusiasm for using tech and data to help others. To all of you, whether you’re an excel ninja working with disenfranchised communities or just an interested observer, thank you for signing up and getting involved. As we all know, the world is inundated with data about practically everything we do and it’s an extremely exciting time to be working in a field trying to make sense of all of it. However, as I and others have pointed out, there’s a lot of effort in our discipline put toward what I feel are sort of “bourgeois” applications of data science. On the other hand there are lots of NGOs and non-profits out there doing wonderful things for the world, but who don’t have experts on staff to deal with their data. At the same time, the data / dev communities love hacking together weekend projects, but they usually just culminate in a blog post or some Twitter buzz. Wouldn’t it be rad if we could get these two sides together?  I had the esteemed privilege of speaking at mongoNYC this week where I gave a talk about how we’re using mongoDB in our workflow at the NYT R&D lab to do wonderful and interesting things. The conference was a great chance to let people know what we’ve been up to at the lab as well as to beam about how great mongoDB’s been to us. Moreover, I learned a ton about mongo and learned that the people at 10gen are absolutely the most helpful, open, and generous group of devs I’ve met in a long time. Did you know they have office hours where you can go an ask questions about your schema / queries / what have you? Who does that? Everyone was ridiculously awesome and I walked away incredibly inspired to become a mongo ninja. You can snag slides of my talk here and there should be video up soon, but in the meantime I tried to emphasize the following 5 reasons mongoDB is great for a hybrid research / dev environment:  First off, an apology to my readers (both of you) for the infrequent updates to this blog. I know you’ve come to rely on my brief, inarticulate articles about boring tech stuff and for depriving you of that, I’m sorry. That said, here’s an update of some exciting goings-on as of the last couple of months that anyone interested in data, the New York Times, or some combination thereof, should get a kick out of…  I ran across this great Times article that focuses on a topic I was just discussing with some friends the other day – the death of the phone call. Because I’m constantly connected to e-mail, texting, Facebook, and Twitter through my phone, all media that involve communicating via “turn-based” messages that I can receive instantly but return at my leisure, making a phone call has insidiously and surprisingly entered my conscious as a “rude” way to communicate. Yet I can’t help but feel like we’re losing something in offloading our conversations to the purely digital. |
 I'm a data scientist and machine learning enthusiast living in New York City looking for new ways to help machines make sense of things. I'm completely enamored with DIY electronics projects, social and ubiquitous computing, and anything that brings a hint of art to technology. All ideas and opinions expressed here are solely my own and are in no way affiliated with The New York Times Company. Mentions are not endorsements.
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