The Rhiza Feed

At Rhiza, we love to experiment with new ways of visualizing data that help tell better data stories. In most of our work environments, using data is kind of difficult and visualizing is usually left to data experts. We’d love to see a future where sharing data visualizations (maps, charts, explanations, etc) is as easy as recording and sharing a video on YouTube. Not everything produced will be stellar in quality, but at least we’ll all be a lot further down the road towards breaking down the traditional data silos and moving data aggregation and visualization solely out of the hands of database admins and graphic designers. We’ll still need those folks, their jobs will just get a lot more fun!

To this end, when I saw a data animation created by John Detwiler that showed the spread of drilled Marcellus shale gas wells in Bradford County, I wanted to create my own data animation telling the same story, but for the entire state of Pennsylvania. I recruited Jeff Christensen here at Rhiza to work with me on creating a visualization that would not only show the locations of the drilled wells over time, but also visualize the number of wells drilled per month. The video below is the result of that work: Read more »

One of our customers, the Tides Foundation, recently partnered with Rhiza to analyze the impact of its grantmaking activities. Irene Kao, Project Manager for the Impact and Innovation Department at Tides talks about her experience of using Rhiza Upshot to bring their data to life to tell a continuous story that is meaningful, dynamic, and actionable in a recent blog post on NTEN’s Non-Profit Technology Blog.

Below is a map created by Irene using Rhiza Upshot that looks at the location of the education grants awarded by Tides in 2010 alongside contextual data about the areas of the country where the education needs are the greatest. Irene looked at indicators like per pupil public school funding, reading proficiency, and high school graduation rates. The result was an easy to understand visual framework that can be used to facilitate new conversations about education funding decisions going forward.

In the NTEN blog Irene says “The map, then, becomes the beginning of a story that continues with partner discussions around strategy and what the work looks like in a year, in two years, and onward. By harnessing quantitative data, our community begins a kind of qualitative “choose-your-own-adventure” story – one that empowers people to make decisions based on firmly anchored information and desired impact.”

For a closer look at how Tides is measuring impact, read Irene’s blog post on NTEN’s Non-Profit Technology Blog.

Actually, Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.” But I think we should apply the same logic to companies — and not just because they are legal “persons”

At Rhiza, we’ve always tried to be a responsible company. But what does that really mean? My background is in computer science and philosophy. It’s not that weird a combination. Both disciplines search for rules to make sense of the world with, and both have a (sometimes unfortunate) weakness for pedantic precision. So I have a natural tendency to want to clarify and systematize.

What I want to do here is to explore the definition of a socially responsible software company, or, at least, start a process for arriving at the definition.

Right now I have some intuitions, some things I think we’ve gotten right so far, and a lot of questions. The questions are probably the most important part. If this is a topic that interests you, please leave a comment. I’m also going to the Social Venture Network conference next week. I expect it to provide a firehose of relevant information (and if you’re going to be there, come find me and we’ll chat).

I’m also hoping to get some other folks at Rhiza to weigh in with their opinions. Here is a non-exhaustive and possibly wildly off-the-mark list of topics we may be discussing in this space over the coming days and weeks:

• Doing good for your employees. Frankly, I’m not sure this is “socially responsible” — it may just be enlightened self-interest! (Then again, maybe those two things aren’t so far apart.) Anyway, we have a lot of cool policies involving flex-time and working from home and babies in the office. But what else could we be doing? And how do we balance the demands of a start-up? Does success require a level of intensity that compromises other aspects of life? Or is that a false choice?
• Being green. There’s a lot of interesting technical complexity wrapped up in this one. Our office is LEED certified; how meaningful is that? Is hosting web-based software in the cloud more or less green than other strategies? Does it matter which cloud you pick? Should we encourage people to work from home and save the carbon, even if productivity takes a hit?
• Are some products inherently more responsible than others? Loads of potential controversy here! Some people think video games are bad for you, others extol their benefits. Fortunately, I can dodge that one since we don’t make video games. But you get the point: are there things we could put into or take out of our product that make it intrinsically more responsible? Or is it all a matter of perspective? Since our tools help people make data-based decisions, as a rationalist I like to think that the tools are intrinsically good. But maybe some would disagree.
• Customers! Must socially responsible companies worry about whether their customers are doing good? Is the answer different if you’re selling a one-size-fits-all product or if you’re doing custom work? Again, I am sure this is fraught with controversy.
• Open source software. There’s a big part of the geek community that thinks one of the most socially responsible things you can do as a programmer is to contribute to open source software. But there are obvious competitive implications for companies who do that. Can a balance be managed? And, assuming you are convinced that open source is the way to go, which of the zillions of licenses should you choose (and why)?

Okay. Enough questions. Write thoughts, send links, come find me (or Josh or Maryl) next week if you are in Philly. What do you think makes a company socially responsible? What would you like to see us do? Finally, I’ll bookend with another quote (from Upton Sinclair), just to remind us why these questions can be hard to think about:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

With Japan’s nuclear reactors on the brink of potential meltdown, I’ve been thinking a lot about the nuclear power plant that is about 20 miles from my house… and the over 100 nuclear power plants that are spread throughout our country. Many of these are located near some of the most densely populated areas in the United States, and most are fairly old. What would happen if a natural disaster like the one that struck Japan, struck here? I don’t have any expert answer to that question, but I did think that it might be useful to fire up our Rhiza Upshot web app and start looking at some data.

I imported a dataset of (approximate) locations for where the nuclear power plants are in the US, and also imported a real-time feed of data from the USGS of seismic events within the past week, globally. The map below is the result of that effort:
Read more »

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has announced a partnership with Rhiza’s client, the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities at the University of Pittsburgh (CHEC), to publish maps and data from their Rhiza-powered website, FracTracker. With over a million readers, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is considered one of the leading newspapers in the world. Their coverage of the Marcellus Shale boom on the web will now be powered by Rhiza Upshot because of the excellent data and mapping work of CHEC and the ease of use of Rhiza Upshot. FracTracker is also starting to appear in the print edition of the newspaper, where a map and well data was published in the very popular Sunday Edition on February 27, 2011.

We at Rhiza are thrilled to see this type of use of Rhiza Upshot’s technology. We’ve designed our web-based mapping tools to easily allow our customers to gather data from lots of sources, create map-based analyses of that data, and then share the results with the world on the web, in presentations and in print, and it’s great to see how creatively our customers are using them! If you’d like to see how Rhiza Upshot could be put to work for your company, organization or agency, please contact us to let us know!

Here are some screenshots from the Post-Gazette’s new Marcellus Shale Community website, called Pipeline:

Valentine’s Day is a big day for those of us who love chocolate. According to Nielsen, 58 million pounds of chocolate is sold during Valentine’s week. Who’s eating all that chocolate? Who’s selling it? Who’s producing it? Take a look at our Chocolate World Map to get the full story.

Some highlights – the Germans take the cake with a total of 24.5 lbs of chocolate consumed per person each year. That’s twice as much as the average American consumes. The top chocolate candy company by revenue has long been Mars, Inc, but with Kraft’s recent acquisition of Cadbury, we expect Kraft will move from 6th place to 1st place very soon. The top exporter of cocoa is Côte d’Ivoire, which produces a whopping 1,222,000 metric tonnes per year, almost twice as much as the next largest producer.

As you may have guessed, we built all of this using our Rhiza Upshot software, which makes it really easy to collect data from existing sources (or create new feeds of data) and then publish map-based analysis of that data to the web, Google Earth, Powerpoint and lots of other useful places. Feel free to contact us if you’d like to add this type of powerful tool for your work.

All of us at Rhiza would like to wish you a happy Valentine’s Day. We’ll be celebrating with a bit of chocolate this afternoon and think you should too!

Tim Berners-Lee gave a great talk at the recent Gov 2.0 Expo in which he describes the criteria for creating open and linked government data. In the beginning of his talk he describes a star-based rating system for putting data up in machine readable format, open formats, as a CSV file, etc. As with many things that Tim does, he almost completely had me until he started describing what “linked data format” is in his mind. His notion of linked data is that the values of attributes in a data table would be URLs to some web page somewhere that points to the “definitive” source of data about that thing. There are several reasons why this is incredibly short-sighted and wrong: Read more »

Whenever I picture the American West as it was at the turn of the 20th century I always picture wee homesteads, rocky country, trucks with curved fenders, and big herds of wild horses. After watching the Misfits, starring Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, I assumed that every last feral horse in the west had been rounded up long ago and shipped off to dark ends.

However, to my surprise, I learned this week that feral horses are a protected animal population in the United States. They have safe haven in many western states and are allowed to live unfettered. In Nevada (the setting of the above mentioned film) there are over 16,000.

There are also populations of wild donkeys roaming the empty spaces of the American West, which, unlike the horses, I knew about first hand. I met a small heard of them in the cascade mountains once when I was a little girl. They could smell a sucker from a mile away and would wait outside of our cabin until I would come out with a bag of carrots. They’re shaggy, friendly beasts and always happy to trade a pat on the nose for fresh produce.

They aren’t as numerous as wild horses and don’t have the same protections, but they still manage to get by on their charm. Yes, there is such a thing as burro charm.

I think it’s time to break out the maple syrup ice candy, because last week there was snow in all 50 states, at the same time!

Data pulled from the National Climactic Data Center shows total snowfall as registered by various weather stations around the country. Our map below shows all of the weather stations in the country that recorded a non-zero amount of snowfall for the month of February. Only Florida and Hawaii registered dustings so light or sparse that they didn’t make it into the total.

Compared to the rest of the country, it looks like the Mid-Atlantic region has been singled out for an extra-hard kick in the pants. Even without data for yesterday and today, we’re over 33 inches here in Pittsburgh.

Despite being an inland northeastern city, Pittsburgh is pretty lucky when it comes to the snow. We’re in a climactic sweet spot where we almost always get a few warm days after every snowfall. However, this time around it’s snowed almost every day for the last two weeks without going above freezing and we are running out of places to put the snow. I can’t remember the last time I saw the sun.

Still, unlike last week, it’s possible to drive from place to place without complete terror.

How is your town handling the snow?

View up the hill from the author's house, two days after the blizzard.

My family and I live at the bottom of a very steep, curvy street that dead-ends in front of our house. For over three days our street, home to 40 houses, went untouched by the City of Pittsburgh’s snow plows. With over 24 inches of snow on the ground, there was no way to get out. The City of Pittsburgh was almost totally silent on the progress of snow removal during the first 48 hours after the storm. Even after that, local officials provided almost no actionable information. After I spoke with some of them, I learned that nobody had given them any actionable information to provide. There was a complete information blackout throughout all levels of government.

While waiting for city snowplows to dig out our street and with no information about when they might arrive, I began to think about how a more open and transparent government might respond in this situation.

The test of a truly open and transparent government is how it responds to a crisis. For all its efforts to become more transparent, the City of Pittsburgh did not fare well on this test for a number of reasons: Read more »