Visualizing data is a big part of BlueCanary and d3.js plays a big role in building those visualization. D3 provides such a powerful toolset with tons of features and built in capabilities. Chief among those are: DOM Manipulation Data Fetching, e.g. Ajax Data parsing, e.g. CSV, JSON, XML Data Manipulation (Grouping, transforming, filtering, etc.) And of course, SVG There is definitely some overlap with jQuery‘s features but d3 takes a slightly different approach. For example, jQuery more or less assumes you are starting with a DOM and wish to do something interesting with it. D3 on the other hands assumes that you have data and wish to iterate over it and display it in some interesting manner. To illustrate what I mean, first start with an array of values, e.g.: var data = [1, 2, 3, 4]; To display these values with jQuery you could write something like this: data.forEach(function(d) {…
Month: February 2014
Is Religion Negatively Correlated With Intelligence?
A Pitfall of Measuring Correlation I saw this article on The Australian titled: “So, Who Are the Smartest Scientists?” reporting on a paper from Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion. Naturally, my first thought was “Data scientists are the smartest!” But then my second thought was “wait, how would you even measure that?” The article just says “IQ,” but then it goes on to say that scientists in physical sciences are less religious than ones in social sciences. One of the paper’s authors is quoted as explaining “This is predicted by their high IQ.” This raised more questions: Does the paper claim that smarter people are less religious? Well, here’s the first sentence of the conclusion: “There is sound evidence of a negative correlation between intelligence and religiosity and between intelligence and political extremism.” So, yeah. It pretty clearly makes that claim. What about method? Does the paper have reason to claim that? I’m…