Using the Environment Agency’s bathing water quality data provided by DEFRA and UK Location, I’ve whipped up a very quick visualisation of my own – showing off indicators for faecal bacteria at the bathing sites.

The data source:
http://environment.data.gov.uk/doc/bathing-water.html?_view=basic&_properties=samplingPoint.lat,samplingPoint.long,latestSampleAssessment.faecalColiformCount,latestSampleAssessment.faecalStreptococciCount,latestSampleAssessment.totalColiformCount&_page=0&_sort=-latestSampleAssessment.faecalStreptococciCount

Notable parameters I used:

• view = “basic” view
• properties = lat, long, total coliform count, faecal coliform count, faecal streptococci count
• page size = 500
• sort = by faecal streptococci count (descending)

The steps to create the visualisation:

• Realised I was quite interested in seeing where the bathing sites were that contained the most faecal bacteria (Blackpool area by the looks of it)
• Tailored my own API call using instructions from the API documentation.
• Tried using Yahoo Pipes and other connecting API thingys to see what I could do within about 5-10 minutes.
• Decided to use Googles Fusion Tables as it can create maps from spreadsheet data
• The Enviroment API offers several formats, so I just changed my API call to include “.csv” intsead of “.html”.
• Then, after spending the last half year developing the LinkedGov extension for Google Refine – I immediately thought of it as the first go-to tool to shape the data and make it fit for importing into some sort of mapping API.
• I used Google Refine’s faceting & number range features to decide how to split the bacteria counts into low, medium and high.
• I exported the data from Refine as CSV to my computer.
• I uploaded the CSV into Fusion Tables – and all the hard work was done for me!
• Time taken = 15 minutes (I have experience with the Linked Data API – otherwise it would have taken me a little while longer to tailor the API call I wanted)

Please note: I have manually adjusted the banding points for the levels of bacteria so the visualisation showed a visually pleasing number of red, yellow and green markers. While a site may have a red marker – it could actually be of quite high water quality.

Total Coliform Count

Low-temperature electron micrograph of a cluster of E. coli bacteria, magnified 10,000 times. Each individual bacterium is oblong shaped. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Faecal Coliform Count

Faecal Streptococci Count

Gram-stained smear of streptococci (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You can play with it here:

http://danpaulsmith.com/apps/postlist_new?dept=dft.

You can replace “dft” with a department acronym (e.g. co, dfe, hmrc…).

I’m sure I’ve come across this before, but it’s a good visualisation.

Simple, meaningful and accurate.

Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15975720.

I also played around with some of the visualisations on ManyEyes (IBM’s community-based visualisation website) – you can play around with my visualisation here – http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/london-tube-station-passenger-coun.

2009 – London tube station entry & exit counts (millions)

FOOTBALL MANAGER

I’ve never played Football Manager, but I have a number of friends that do – some of them being almost computer illiterate. But after a friend posted a work-in-progress screenshot of the Football Manager 2012 interface, I realised that each of them become accustomed to a certain interface for a year – and they *use* this interface like no other – the speed they click buttons at is depressing. This is an addictive game and players will reluctantly admit it’s a part of their life – I’ve experienced the same with another game – the situation you find yourself in as a result of the addiction can leave you questioning yourself, your worth and being for a decade. I’ll probably save this for another post.

Aside from the interfaces, Football Manager is an interesting game to talk about – specifically how game events map to real life events, and how the game developers have it’s ‘story board’ written for them every year for free by the football sector.

A note worth adding about my analysis of the Football Manager interfaces; I’ve never played the game and don’t have an understanding of the game dynamics – so my thoughts will be strictly limited to visual and spacial observations regarding to how information is designed and conveyed – so this is more for the design and user experience lot, this is not in any way a preview of the game.

So the first thing to say about FM is that it’s got one serious interface – it’s a data cockpit. The latest interface of the new edition of the game, “FM 2012″ – is the result of tweaking an interface for seven years with an enormous amount of money and hard work put behind it. It’s impressive.

So let’s go back to 2005, when I was 17 – and very much into gaming. Unfortunately for Sega, I had already been won over by a different game by that time and so Football Manager never found it’s way into my life.

2005

2005 feels similar to a phase I went through when I first got the hang of basic web development styles (or Cascading Style Sheets – CSS). As soon as you’re able to round the corners of boxes, add drop shadows and add gradients – you tend to apply one or more of these styles to nearly every element on the screen – just because you can.

Images courtesy of www.totalvideogames.com and www.gamershell.com.

2006

Images courtesy of Eurogamer.net.

2007

2008

Images courtesy of www.gamershell.com.

2009

Images courtesy of www.gamershell.com.

2010

Images courtesy of www.gamershell.com.

2011

Images courtesy of www.eurogamer.net.

2012

Images courtesy of Eurogamer: http://www.eurogamer.net/gallery.php?game_id=15854&article_id=1388656

I’m documenting what I’ve done incase anyone else out there is Googling away while pulling their hair out.

Device: MAudio Firewire Audiophile

Issue: Random periods of distortion and crackling during any activity using sound.

OS: Windows 7 32-bit SP1

IEEE1394 controller driver: 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller (Legacy).

I’ve also disabled the two other USB ports on the same PCI connection as the Firewire port (apparently a dedicated PCI connection is preferred?).

• Go to device manager > view > resources by connection
• Expand Interrupt Request
• Find your IEEE1394 driver (mine is “Texas Instruments 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller”) and make note of the code to the left of the label “0×0000017 (23)” (or whatever yours is).
• Right-click on any other connections using the same PCI code and disable them (obviously if you have anything plugged into those ports they won’t work any more!)

It’s worth mentioning that everything worked absolutely fine for about a year until I decided to do a fresh install of Windows 7 the other week.

So here are my trial and errors:

Set up 1 – FAIL

Driver: Windows 7 32-bit SP1 (5.10.0.5058)
Sample rate: 44100
ASIO Buffer size: 1024
Sync source: internal
Disable ASIO direct monitoring: TRUE
A/B switch function: Direct monitoring

Set up 2 – FAIL

Driver: Windows 7 BETA driver (5.10.0.5060)
Sample rate: 44100
ASIO Buffer size: 256
Sync source: internal
Disable ASIO direct monitoring: FALSE
A/B switch function: Headphone

Set up 3 – FAIL

Driver: Windows 7 BETA driver (5.10.0.5060)
Sample rate: 44100
ASIO Buffer size: 4096
Sync source: internal
Disable ASIO direct monitoring: FALSE
A/B switch function: Headphone

Set up 4 – WIN

I think I have the winning set up once again! The key was to use the legacy firewire driver instead of the Texas Instruments driver:

Driver: Windows 7 BETA driver (5.10.0.5060)
Sample rate: 44100
ASIO Buffer size: 256
Sync source: internal
Disable ASIO direct monitoring: FALSE
A/B switch function: Headphone

The brief was to build an open-source, interactive, cross-browser dashboard of widgets; that would allow the comparison of council’s spending data, say, per month.

After a little time spent researching, I came to the conclusion that RaphaelJS (an open-source JavaScript vector library) would fit the bill for this project nicely. The documentation wasn’t great (I’m used to that though as I’ve been using theJIT library for previous visualisation work), but understandable enough to pick some of the demos apart and get the hang of how things worked within a few days.

The great thing about RaphaelJS is that it’s simply a drawing library, so you can create a static SVG image of a banana or you can create a animated, multi-coloured, shape-shifting, real-time rotting banana, thanks to being able to manipulate and listen to events on the SVG DOM elements that form the vector image.

I opted to make use of three of the demos available – two versions of line chart and a pie chart.

After getting familiar with the innards of the demos, the next stage was to groom and convert the JSON data returned by the Linked Data API into a processable array of numbers to feed into the functions provided by RaphaelJS – once that was working then customisation could begin, letting colours, spacing and familiar chart techniques to help convey the data.

To emphasize the project backbone – open data – I threw in a sortable and paginated table inside each widget, so the user isn’t simply presented with a summarised chart, they can dig down a level and manipulate and scan the actual figures being used to create the visualisations.

Image via Wikipedia

Does anyone know how to read the oyster card journey history? I’m not having much luck. Am I being thick? I’m trying to figure out how much a return journey from Gospel Oak to Kew Gardens costs using London Overground. 8.51 am I touch through Gospel Oak’s barriers. I’m assuming “-” means no fare as it’s only entry and not a complete journey, and that £6.50 is my balance. I can’t think what the £-1.30 is for. 9.29 am I touch out of Kew Garden‘s barriers. £5.10 is clearly not the fare, however I can imagine my balance going from £6.50 to £5.10? But apparently my balance is £3.80 – did the journey cost £2.70? I have an incredibly blurry memory of seeing £2.** flash on the barrier. 12.03 pm I touch through Kew Garden’s barriers. Again, “-” no fare, but is that my balance that’s £4.40? You can see that there’s actually quite a few £4.40′s when I touch through a barrier – perhaps that’s how much I’m charged if I don’t touch out? And if that’s the case, why is it different when I touch through at Gospel Oak (£6.50)? My balance is then stated as £-0.60, again this amount is a bit baffling. 12.45 pm Touch out of Gospel Oak’s barriers. £3.10 OH MY GOD I’VE WORKED IT OUT How to read your oyster journey history... When you touch in through a barrier, you are automatically charged quite a large fare (it will change depending on where you are by the looks of it), so you can see where it says “Gospel Oak, Entry”, I have been charged £6.50 which leaves me with a negative balance of £-1.30 (if I don’t touch out then I think this is what I’m left with). This means my balance before the journey was £5.20. When you touch out at your destination you are reimbursed (the amount you were just charged for touching through MINUS the actual journey fare) – so £6.50-£5.10 means that Gospel Oak to Kew Gardens cost me £1.40. I then touch in through Kew Gardens using a balance of £3.80 (£5.20 – £1.40), the system assumes I’m not going to touch out so it charges me £4.40, leaving me with a negative balance of £-0.60. I touch out of Gospel Oak and I’m reimbursed £3.10, leaving me with £2.50. Gospel Oak to Kew Gardens on the London Overground costs £2.70. Thank you, thank you very much.