allie's blog
Why Kids Can't Search
November 27, 2011 - 23:05 — allieAccording to a recent Wired magazine article, reporter Clive Thompson speculate why high schoolers and college students are inept at searching on Google, despite the website's sophisticated PageRank algorithm. Frances Harris, a librarian at the University Laboratory High School in Urbana, Illinois, educates eighth and ninth graders in how to format nuanced queries in Boolean logic, much like what we had covered in recent lectures. She also teaches them to analyze the tone of a web page to judge whether it was created by a credible source.
On-Call: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
October 30, 2011 - 17:45 — allieIn the the 2010 Economist article Show Me, Martin Wattenberg, a graphic designer at SmartMoney, came up with a "Map of the Market", a way of visualizing closing share prices of 500 companies in the stock market by sector. Today, data visualization has been extended to fields of computer science, statistics, artistic design, and storytelling. In contrast to numerical data, words are often represented a "word clouds".
