Brian Shaler

Remember Save or Shave Carl? Well, it’s almost time for the final decision to be made!

Tomorrow, Friday, April 23rd, the mustache will either stay or go, and it all depends on the donations. Using my “MOspace” page on Movember.com, people can donate and leave a message. At the party, if the people who say “Shave Carl!” have raised more money than those who say “Save Carl!” then Carl will go — AT the party.

Where does the money go? Donations and votes are cast directly to the Movember Foundation. From there, the Movember Foundation splits the money between its two beneficiaries: Livestrong & the Prostate Cancer Foundation. More details on where the money is going.

So how about that party? I’ll be providing some pizza and drinks, and there will be a live taping of Evil Genius Radio. It’ll be great fun, whether or not Carl meets his end! If you want to make sure I get enough food and drinks, RSVP on Facebook so I know how many mouths I need to feed!

Friday, April 23, 2010 7:00pm
Gangplank
325 E Elliot Rd
Chandler, AZ

I dropped by Leo Laporte’s cottage to show him Carl and he ended up donating to help Save Carl. Here’s the video:

Sure, we all know juicy gossip spreads faster than praise. News of a scandal spreads faster than news of an accomplishment.

But what about the exciting news of a sold-out event getting a larger venue and re-opening ticket sales? Well, as I’ve observed in various situations, it can be hard to get the word out that space is once again available after the word to the contrary has spread.

This leaves event planners in a precarious situation. You don’t want people to miss out. You want everyone who wants to attend to be able to attend. But changing to a bigger venue and re-opening ticket sales can be risky. If the word doesn’t get out fast enough, you could end up with empty seats. When it comes to making an event pack a punch, you want the event to feel like it’s bursting at the seems. You don’t want empty seats. Filling 500 out of 1,000 seats will feel like a failure, while getting in trouble with the fire marshal for exceeding a 240-person limit will feel like a raging success.

Back to the news spreading. If you want to go to an event, but tickets are sold out, there’s an emotional reaction. It’s a tragedy. What you want is there and you cannot have it. Tragedy is news. People talk about their personal tragedies. If you then find out you can attend, the feeling is relief. Relief isn’t news. People don’t talk about things that feel “nice.”

Today, I heard Pecha Kucha Night Phoenix had re-opened ticket sales with the announcement of a new venue, after all the tickets for the previous venue were snapped up in a gold rush. It’s risky, but hopefully the word will spread to the people who missed out that they have a second chance!

Last year, I participated in Movember, an annual world-wide charity event where men grow mustaches during the month of November to raise money and awareness for men’s health — prostate cancer and testicular cancer. Women have October for breast cancer awareness, and now men have November for male cancers.

At the end of November, I decided to keep the ’stache and roll with it. I’m ready to give it up, but I’m going to give the charity fund raising one more push.

I figured it would be fun to allow people to choose whether or not I keep the mustache by casting votes with dollars. I might even throw a party in Phoenix (or should it be in SF?) to make the final decision and shave the mustache LIVE if “Shave Carl” gets more donations.

Check out SaveCarl.com or ShaveCarl.com for more details and to participate!

Twestival Phoenix is coming up this week! Unfortunately, I’m going to be out of town. I’m donating anyway.

I don’t think I need to describe it because the description below is pretty thorough.

Martini Ranch (map)
7295 East Stetson Drive
Scottsdale, AZ

Phoenix tweeps, come have a blast and help support those in need on 3/25 at Martini Ranch in Scottsdale.

We will have food, drinks (drink tickets), a raffle, silent auction and good company.

Twestival is a 100% volunteer run, globally held event brought together by the twitter community to raise money for charity.

In February 2009, 202 cities around the world participated in Twestival raising over $250,000 for charity: water, enabling the drilling of 55 wells with more than 17,000 people served in Uganda, Ethiopia and India. Phoenix raised $4,700+ and came in 7th out of 202 cities!

In September 2009, Phoenix chose St. Mary’s Food Bank as their charity and raised $9,332 to help feed the hungry in our community. Those funds allowed St. Mary’s Food Bank to distribute enough food into the community to provide over 65,000 meals.

Twestival’s 2010 goal is to help Concern WorldWide (@concern) in their efforts to reduce suffering and end extreme poverty. For 42 years, Concern has been tackling the root causes of extreme poverty through focus on education, health (HIV and AIDS), livelihoods and emergency response. Concern has more than 3,600 employees working in 28 of the world’s poorest countries in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

Concern is also actively focused on the emergency in Haiti.

If you have any questions please email us at twestivalphx@gmail.com. Follow @twestivalphx on Twitter or reach out to @chrislee directly.

NOTES: For the raffle, must be present to win. Event is 21 and over because of the venue.

Via Eventification, the Phoenix tech event site

Usually, a “user group” would revolve around a computer language, a development platform, or subsets of computing technologies. This title is phrased in such a way to imply that data is a platform under which statisticians, data analysts, and visualizers coincide

Last night, I had a conversation with Mark Ng and Marc Chung, two people who I have recently found to be highly enthusiastic in analyzing large data sets. The outcome of the conversation may potentially be two organizations, a user group and a work group.

The User Group:
I’m an interface guy who’s been doing data visualization lightly for 4 years and heavily for 1 year. My skill set for dealing with large amounts of data is creeping its way back, back, back from the front-end interface into the deep abyss of things that drive data visualization: statistical analysis, data mining, and distributed computing. In researching these topics, I’ve learned about some fascinating and useful tools that can do mind-boggling things with mind-bogglingly large data sets. This is stuff I would love to share, and even more, I’m interested to see what other people know and have done with these types of tools. My proposition was to start a recurring meet-up that would consist of presentations and/or demos of tools, languages, platforms, and cloud computing technologies.

The Work Group:
One VERY hot topic driving data visualization forward right now is government transparency. More and more local, state, and federal government bodies are releasing gargantuan amounts of data for the public to review. The problem? Gargantuan means BIG! Here, we need to connect a few dots:

First, we need to get the data. That can be through public repositories, or, as an example, a local news outlet that submits public records requests to obtain public data.

Second, we need to get the data in the right hands. Extremely large data sets are unmanageable to people who aren’t statisticians. So let’s get statisticians involved!

Third, we need to make the results public, which could mean looping back with a local news outlet to get coverage. It could also mean building and embedding interactive data visualizations into local news web sites, much like the New York Times.

I think both groups are excellent ideas and they even complement each other well (the user group would be an excellent resource pool for the work group). It is important to get data wranglers, statistics enthusiasts, and visualization gurus to come out of the woodwork and help these ideas come to fruition! Connect with me, Mark Ng, and/or Marc Chung to get in touch and stay in the loop.