103 Delegates Today
Getting near the end - Oregon and Kentucky hold their primaries today. Looks like Clinton will win Kentucky (51 delegates). Obama will win Oregon (52 delegates). And Clinton will continue to smoke the high grade and think she can somehow win. I updated the election center and added a summary tab. The tab contains two charts: a pie chart showing current totals; and a bar chart showing how many delegates each candidate needs to win. Most telling is Clinton needs to win 72% of the remaining delegates to win.
Election Center Update!
Updated the counts and added some more charts. Not perfect, but, better. Here it is. Also, lots of bugs when you resize!
Google Data Viz API
Google has released a data visualization API. Some of it is Flash - specifically the code they got when they purchased Gap Minder.
Update: Infosthetics has a good post about this as well.
Mississippi Primary
I’ve finally found a way to blog regularly - update primary data. Mississippi data added to the Election Dashboard.
Election Center Update
It’s worth doing political charts just to have titles like “Election Center Update”. Obama won Wyoming and Mississippi is tomorrow. Anyway, I just added a delegate count comparison page, here.
Election Update
Entered the latest state info from CNN. Again, I can’t figure this data out: Is it wrong? (state totals don’t add up to overall totals) Is it sloppy? (Texas 12 superdelegates, but, 12 to Clinton and 9 to Obama) Well, it’s updated anyway. I changed the colors a bit - don’t love them, but, at least Clinton and Obama colors are consistent.
Also - the source is a mess, but, if anyone’s interested - here’s the xml file adn the xsd. If you make a chart, please send me an email.
Election Dashboard
Combination of being annoyed that I couldn’t find the data I wanted on-line and playing around w/ Flex 3 Charting, led to this.
Still very incomplete, but, figured I should post in case Obama wins Texas and no one cares about delegate counts any more.
toXMLString
File this under either RTFM or “can I get that hour of my life back”, maybe both. To trace xml that is simple (e.g., one node), you need to use toXMLString.
public var myXML:XML =<root>
<item id=’1′/>
<item id=’2′/>
<item id=’2′/></root>
public function init(): void {
trace(myXML);
trace(’*************@mID_n==2**************’);
trace(myXML.item.(@id==2));//traces 2 nodes
trace(’************@mID_n==1***************’);
trace(myXML.item.(@id==1));//traces nothing
trace(’***************************’);
trace(myXML.item.(@id==1).toXMLString());//traces the node
}
Data Viz Talk Files
Here are the files from my BFPUG and Harvard Flash User Group talks. I can’t upload the applications I showed of Visual i|o work, but here’s everything else.
Presention File:
A lot of the middle slides I didn’t even show, but, used as notes while I was demoing the apps.
Download - 10MB rar file. Extracts to Open Office doc.
Here is a PowerPoint version compressed as a zip.
Sample Code:
AS2 Bar Chart - code set up for Eclipse using FDT - to run from Flash IDE - import Main.as and run Main.main(); It also uses SOS for tracing.
Flex Chart Bar Chart example (by Peter deHann) - a great example of how easy it is to chart in Flex. I was going to port the above AS2 example to AS3 - but I’m busy and Flex charting is excellent.
Links to sites I mentioned in the talk:
Intro:
Patraeus Charts - Iraq by the Numbers
National Geographic Ethanol Story
Visual i|o data Viz Wak Throughs
Can’t post what I showed - but here are some examples of our work:
Trends/Mashups:
Chart to Art:
Alex Dragulescu - Spam Architecture
Martin Wattenberg - Shape of Song
Wisdom of the Swarms
Ok - I never blog any more, but, occasionally I read. There’s a great article in National Geographic on swarm behavior. Surowiecki’s quoted a few times. And he readily admits that wisdom of the crowds (stock market) is paralleled in the animal kingdom (ant colony). The article even includes a good dose of computer modeling.