resources
visualizations
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lunch break
Distractions and amusements, with a sandwich and coffee.
visualization + design
Hilbert Curve Art, Hilbertonians and Monkeys
I collaborated with Scientific American to create a data graphic for the September 2014 issue. The graphic compared the genomes of the Denisovan, bonobo, chimp and gorilla, showing how our own genomes are almost identical to the Denisovan and closer to that of the bonobo and chimp than the gorilla.
Here you'll find Hilbert curve art, a introduction to Hilbertonians, the creatures that live on the curve, an explanation of the Scientific American graphic and downloadable SVG/EPS Hilbert curve files.
Hilbertonians—creatures on the Hilbert Curve
Take a look at the Hilbertonian Posters and perhaps buy one. I take custom requests.
Definition of a Hilbertonian
A Hilbertonian is created by overlapping pixels sampled on points of three Hilbert curves of orders `i`, `i+1` and `i+2`.
At each level the pixels are placed at each of the curve points. Pixels are sized `4^-i`, which is one-half of the length of a segment.
The pixels are filled or white randomly, except for one exception: pixels on the lowest order curve are always black.
Pixel patterns that are not contiguous create Hilbertonians that are not viable.
The requirement that the pixels be placed on points of the Hilbert curve means that you cannot produce a single Hilbertonian—they are produced in multiples of 4.
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news + thoughts
Graphical Abstract Design Guidelines
Clear, concise, legible and compelling.
Making a scientific graphical abstract? Refer to my practical design guidelines and redesign examples to improve organization, design and clarity of your graphical abstracts.
"This data might give you a migrane"
An in-depth look at my process of reacting to a bad figure — how I design a poster and tell data stories.
He said, he said — a word analysis of the 2020 Presidential Debates
Building on the method I used to analyze the 2008, 2012 and 2016 U.S. Presidential and Vice Presidential debates, I explore word usagein the 2020 Debates between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Points of Significance celebrates 50th column
We are celebrating the publication of our 50th column!
To all our coauthors — thank you and see you in the next column!
Uncertainty and the management of epidemics
When modelling epidemics, some uncertainties matter more than others.
Public health policy is always hampered by uncertainty. During a novel outbreak, nearly everything will be uncertain: the mode of transmission, the duration and population variability of latency, infection and protective immunity and, critically, whether the outbreak will fade out or turn into a major epidemic.
The uncertainty may be structural (which model?), parametric (what is `R_0`?), and/or operational (how well do masks work?).
This month, we continue our exploration of epidemiological models and look at how uncertainty affects forecasts of disease dynamics and optimization of intervention strategies.
We show how the impact of the uncertainty on any choice in strategy can be expressed using the Expected Value of Perfect Information (EVPI), which is the potential improvement in outcomes that could be obtained if the uncertainty is resolved before making a decision on the intervention strategy. In other words, by how much could we potentially increase effectiveness of our choice (e.g. lowering total disease burden) if we knew which model best reflects reality?
This column has an interactive supplemental component (download code) that allows you to explore the impact of uncertainty in `R_0` and immunity duration on timing and size of epidemic waves and the total burden of the outbreak and calculate EVPI for various outbreak models and scenarios.
Bjørnstad, O.N., Shea, K., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2020) Points of significance: Uncertainty and the management of epidemics. Nature Methods 17.
Background reading
Bjørnstad, O.N., Shea, K., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2020) Points of significance: Modeling infectious epidemics. Nature Methods 17:455–456.
Bjørnstad, O.N., Shea, K., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2020) Points of significance: The SEIRS model for infectious disease dynamics. Nature Methods 17:557–558.
Cover of Nature Genetics August 2020
Our design on the cover of Nature Genetics's August 2020 issue is “Dichotomy of Chromatin in Color” . Thanks to Dr. Andy Mungall for suggesting this terrific title.
The cover design accompanies our report in the issue Gagliardi, A., Porter, V.L., Zong, Z. et al. (2020) Analysis of Ugandan cervical carcinomas identifies human papillomavirus clade–specific epigenome and transcriptome landscapes. Nature Genetics 52:800–810.