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Neoformix

Discovering and Illustrating Patterns in Data


US VP DebateOctober 3

Last night was the US VP debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. I've taken the words from the debate and added them to my interactive transcript analyzer. The static image shown below gives an idea of what was discussed.

static image only - click to use the interactive application VPDebateTranscript.png

A few simple observations:

  • It looks like a fairly balanced debate in terms of who spoke the most and length of speeches.
  • After the introductions the primary topic was the economy and jobs.
  • This shifted into talk about taxes.
  • The next subject was energy and coal. Palin used the word 'energy' 26 times compared to Biden's 9.
  • There was a short section on 'marriage'.
  • 'Iran', 'Iraq', 'War', and foreign policy were next.
  • Not discussed directly were 'religion' and 'immigration' .
I have chopped off the word count information to improve legibility in the image. Try out the interactive version
Marc SmithSeptember 30

I saw a note this morning from Marc Smith saying goodbye to Microsoft Research after ten years. He has done some interesting work there. Here are a couple of images generated from his projects.

This first is from a project called NetScan and was generated back in 2003. It is a TreeMap showing the Usenet Newsgroup community where the area of each box is proportional to the number of authors in that group. See here for more details and a larger, less blurry image.

NetScan.png

This image below is called an 'AuthorLine' and is a type of dual histogram time-series that has some interesting characteristics. It was taken from a paper called Visualizing the Activity of Individuals in Conversational Cyberspaces.

Word Clouds on Financial Crisis IISeptember 25

Here is another tag cloud generated from Bush's speech last night on the financial crisis. Click to see a larger version.

BushOnFinancialCrisis_FAIL_s.png

Word Clouds on Financial CrisisSeptember 25

Here is a Wordle generated tag cloud for Bush's speech last night on the financial crisis.

BushOnFinancialCrisisDollar_wordle.png

Just for fun I've created one using my own tools in the shape of a dollar sign.

BushOnFinancialCrisisDollar.png

Average Campaign Donation by OccupationSeptember 16

I have created another simple graph based on data from the Federal Election Commision about political donations to the Obama and McCain campaigns. This one shows the average contribution amount for the various occupations of the donors. I restricted the analysis to occupations having at least 1000 separate donations. There were 106 occupations that met this criteria and the top 50 are shown below.

AverageDonationByOccupation_1000.png

A few observations from the graph:

  • The top 15 spots seem fairly obvious and are primarily high-level business executives or finance related
  • Position #16 is 'homemaker' which doesn't fit the pattern very well. Perhaps donors with this occupation have wealthy spouses.
  • I was also surprised that 'student' was #48 - relatively high on the overall list.

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