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Twestival Phoenix: Concern

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

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A User Group… For Data?

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.

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Code And Beats: Music Powered Twitter Wall

I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to Code And Beats. I could’ve worked on work work. I could’ve worked on non-work work. But I didn’t do either. Instead, I experimented with some visual effects in Flash — combining video, audio input, and tweets.

By 2am, here’s what I had come up with! (I’ll post the code soon eventually)

Code & Beats: Music Powered Twitter Wall from Brian Shaler on Vimeo.

Fun stuff! I’m interested in seeing this event come to Phoenix. We just need to get the organizer (+developer +designer +DJ) Avi to fly out and then round up a few local DJs with some good electro material. Un tiss un tiss un tiss…

Also, here’s a separate pic I snapped of the Twitter wall:

Code And Beats: Music Powered Twitter Wall
Code And Beats: Music Powered Twitter Wall

I should’ve put together a video showing more of the background dancing clips. Some of them were pretty excellent!

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Code and Beats

I found out yesterday that there’s going to be a rad event called “Code & Beats.” If it turns out to be as fun as it sounds, I’ll probably lobby to bring it to Phoenix.

Here’s the basic premise:

A party celebrating the art of programming through performance. A handful of hardcore coders from the city’s hottest startups will work in the center of a pounding dance floor to a musical journey of electro beats.

Some additional details: it sounds like the “hardcore coders” will be facing the dance floor, with external monitors mirroring their laptops and facing the dance floor. There may also be one or more projectors involved.

I’m going to experiment with some new visual Flash-based stuff, and will try to include the room’s music, a webcam, and/or tweets as inputs!

It should be exciting! Also, I’m probably going to open-source everything I write at the event and post it somewhere like GitHub.

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The Glass: Half Empty or Half Full?

Ah, the age-old optimism vs pessimism metaphor. What does a realist say about the glass’s liquid level?

I think a realist would choose one or the other based on observations, and say it’s half empty if it had recently been emptied from a full level or half full if it had just been filled up.

If someone hands you a full beer and you drink half of it, your beer is half empty. Half is the progress you have made so far on emptying the glass of beer.

If someone asks a realist if a glass of beer he or she has never seen before is half empty or half full, the realist would likely take into consideration whether or not is any beer foam residue above the beer level to indicate that it had been partially emptied. “It’s half-empty,” the realist would reply. You could poor half a glass of beer for that same realist, and he or she would likely complain, “Hey! My beer is only half full! WTF?”

Just a random thought.