resources
visualizations
presentations
lunch break
Distractions and amusements, with a sandwich and coffee.
art + science
Bloomberg Businessweek Design Conference — San Francisco, 2013
science ♥ design
Together with Alberto Cairo, I presented at the Bloomberg Businessweek Design Conference (highlights) on the topic of design and communication in the sciences.
Alberto, as the journalist, motivated why communication should include access to detail through an engaging narrative. He made the distinction between the specialist (heavy on detail) and the communicator (focus on narrative) and emphasized that the distinction is artificial, though often played out (watch video).
I, as the scientist, underscored the importance of clear communication between scientists. As the specialists, they are often very poor communicators. Pick up any science journal and you'll quickly discover that scientists either aren't good at telling stories or are discouraged to do so by the medium. The consequence is the same: papers read like a wall of text. TL;DR anyone? The quality of visual communication in general ranges from muddled to abysmal (watch video).
We need more leaders in the field, such as Nature Publishing Group, to reward and emphasize good visual communication (e.g. Nature Cancer Review 2013 Figure Calendar).
Our presentations concluded with a 15 minute moderated discussion with Sam Grobart, senior Businesssweek writer. Everyone got a little cheeky. Good fun.
presentation video
Watch: my presentation, conversation with Alberto Cairo, moderated by Sam Grobart. (Bloomberg TV), Albert Cairo's presentation.
presentation slides
This was a lightning 7 minute talk. I did more planning about what to say than I usually do, given that there was virtually no opportunity for any kind of backtracking, and include a running narrative below each slide.
download presentation
My slides are available as PDF, keynote (zipped) or Quicktime. The format is 16:9 HD.
Bloomberg Businessweek Design Issue
On 28 Jan 2013, Bloomberg Businessweek Design Issue will capture the ideas from the conference and the personalities that generated them.
During the conference, each talk was captured in a series of sketches by Tom Wujec: my talk sketch and moderated discussion sketch.
news + thoughts
Find and snap to colors in an image
One of my color tools, the colorsnap application snaps colors in an image to a set of reference colors and reports their proportion.
Below is Times Square rendered using the colors of the MTA subway lines.
Colors used by the New York MTA subway lines.
Take your medicine ... now
Drugs could be more effective if taken when the genetic proteins they target are most active.
Design tip: rediscover CMYK primaries.
More of my American Scientific Graphic Science designs
Ruben et al. A database of tissue-specific rhythmically expressed human genes has potential applications in circadian medicine Science Translational Medicine 10 Issue 458, eaat8806.
Predicting with confidence and tolerance
I abhor averages. I like the individual case. —J.D. Brandeis.We focus on the important distinction between confidence intervals, typically used to express uncertainty of a sampling statistic such as the mean and, prediction and tolerance intervals, used to make statements about the next value to be drawn from the population.
Confidence intervals provide coverage of a single point—the population mean—with the assurance that the probability of non-coverage is some acceptable value (e.g. 0.05). On the other hand, prediction and tolerance intervals both give information about typical values from the population and the percentage of the population expected to be in the interval. For example, a tolerance interval can be configured to tell us what fraction of sampled values (e.g. 95%) will fall into an interval some fraction of the time (e.g. 95%).
Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2018) Points of significance: Predicting with confidence and tolerance Nature Methods 15:843–844.
Background reading
Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2013) Points of significance: Importance of being uncertain. Nature Methods 10:809–810.
4-day Circos course
A 4-day introductory course on genome data parsing and visualization using Circos. Prepared for the Bioinformatics and Genome Analysis course in Institut Pasteur Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia.
Oryza longistaminata genome cake
Data visualization should be informative and, where possible, tasty.
Stefan Reuscher from Bioscience and Biotechnology Center at Nagoya University celebrates a publication with a Circos cake.
The cake shows an overview of a de-novo assembled genome of a wild rice species Oryza longistaminata.
