Why are so many men pregnant?
May 17, 2012 12:01 am • Permalink Garbage in, garbage out the old adage goes. Nigel Hawkes, Director of Straight Statistics, describes a sort of statistical whistleblowing letter to the British Medical Journal.
A team from Imperial College found that in 2009-10, nearly 20,000 adults were coded as having attended paediatric outpatient services, and 3,000 patients under 19 were apparently treated in geriatric clinics. Even more striking, between 15,000 and 20,000 men have been admitted to obstetric wards each year since 2003, and almost 10,000 to gynaecology wards.
It's hard to put your faith in analysis, visualization, policy, and anything else that comes out of data with reports like these. With human error being a known issue, we have to find better ways of inputting and double-checking data. Unfortunate mistakes at the outset only lead to bigger problems down the line.
The Descriptive Camera
May 16, 2012 09:42 am • Permalink 
The unassuming little Descriptive Camera made me rethink data. This project by Matt Richardson was on display at the ITP Spring Show. The basic premise is that you take a photo and the camera spits out a textual description of what it sees. The results are remarkably accurate, detailed, and humorous.
Here's what my photo said:
A woman wearing a seriously awesome jacket that is printed with yellow, blue, and grey circles looks at her ipad rather than making eye contact with Matt Richardson.
I mean, my jacket *IS* seriously awesome! So it not only described what it saw, but it also has great fashion sense. What a clever programmer you may be thinking.
Ah, but it's all a ruse. Albeit, a very novel and sly ruse. Matt described being underwhelmed by the EXIF data provided by digital cameras which provides you with things like date, time, camera model, and sometimes geo-spatial info. He wanted to see a world where cameras actually told you about the contents of the photo. Undeterred by the fact that this type of technology isn't feasible or practical right now, Matt decided to take a more human approach. He uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk and alternatively, instant messages to his friends, to subvert the computational task of providing a textual description of the photo.
So back to how this made me rethink data. It struck me that sometimes it's not what's immediately in front of you. Sometimes it's the shadow of the thing that's important; sometimes it's what envelopes it, or connects it to its surroundings, or maybe even a subjective description of what it is. Sometimes it's not a jacket... it's a seriously awesome jacket.
No comments:
Post a Comment