FEEDER CATTLE PRICE DIFFERENTIALS IN GEORGIA TELEAUCTIONS

Three Georgia feeder cattle teleauction markets were analyzed from 1977 to 1988 to estimate the impacts of cattle characteristics and market conditions on prices. Cattle characteristic price impacts were similar to those in previous studies. The impact of feeder cattle futures price on teleauction price was positive but varied across markets. Optimal lot size ranged from 143 to 276 head. In one market, 14 lots were necessary to generate positive price impacts. Additional buyers were estimated to have a $.30/cwt per buyer impact on price.Demand and Price Analysis,

Geographically weighted visualization: Interactive graphics for scale-varying exploratory analysis

We introduce a series of geographically weighted (GW) interactive graphics, or geowigs, and use them to explore spatial relationships at a range of scales. We visually encode information about geographic and statistical proximity and variation in novel ways through gw-choropleth maps, multivariate gw-boxplots, gw-shading and scalograms. The new graphic types reveal information about GW statistics at several scales concurrently. We impement these views in prototype software containing dynamic links and GW interactions that encourage exploration and refine them to consider directional geographies. An informal evaluation uses interactive GW techniques to consider Guerry's dataset of 'moral statistics', casting doubt on correlations originally proposed through visual analysis, revealing new local anomalies and suggesting multivariate geographic relationships. Few attempts at visually synthesising geography with multivariate statistical values at multiple scales have been reported. The geowigs proposed here provide informative representations of multivariate local variation, particularly when combined with interactions that coordinate views and result in gw-shading. We argue that they are widely applicable to area and point-based geographic data and provide a set of methods to support visual analysis using GW statistics through which the effects of geography can be explored at multiple scales

Visualising E-mail Communication to Improve E-discovery

Electronic Discovery (E-discovery) is an investigation domain where electronic data is searched to find information and use it as an evidence in a legal case. One of the investigation areas in this domain is electronic mail (E-mail) communication. Lawyers and analysts involved in this activity are usually presented with a large E-mail dataset to manually comb through information in order to discover key information they need, expending large amounts of time, energy, effort and money in the process. We design and develop an interactive visualisation that will support our collaborators in an organisation specialising in E-discovery to unravel the multi-faceted information in the given communicated E-mails to find/discover pertinence, key information, points of interest (PoIs) and to develop evidence through which legal cases can be built

Towards a WHAT-WHY-HOW Taxonomy of Trajectories in Visualization Research

Effective analysis of movement often requires a comprehensive approach where computational and visual methods are combined to address a wide variety of tasks involving movers with diverse characteristics. In order to help the process of designing effective methods for a wide range of movement analysis cases, we develop a provisional taxonomy that links what Brehmer et al. [BM13] term statements of WHY-WHAT-HOW with tasks, types of movers, context and methods used to compute or visualize data. Within this document we present the origin of this taxonomy, the process we followed to populate it, discuss the novel categories within it, and finally use it to explore relationships between elements of trajectory analysis. Our main contribution is to provide a new means of connecting elements of WHY-WHAT-HOW when analysing trajectories

Splotch: porting and optimizing for the Xeon Phi

With the increasing size and complexity of data produced by large scale numerical simulations, it is of primary importance for scientists to be able to exploit all available hardware in heterogenous High Performance Computing environments for increased throughput and efficiency. We focus on the porting and optimization of Splotch, a scalable visualization algorithm, to utilize the Xeon Phi, Intel's coprocessor based upon the new Many Integrated Core architecture. We discuss steps taken to offload data to the coprocessor and algorithmic modifications to aid faster processing on the many-core architecture and make use of the uniquely wide vector capabilities of the device, with accompanying performance results using multiple Xeon Phi. Finally performance is compared against results achieved with the GPU implementation of Splotch

Visualizing Multiple Variables Across Scale and Geography

Comparing multiple variables to select those that effectively characterize complex entities is important in a wide variety of domains – geodemographics for example. Identifying variables that correlate is a common practice to remove redundancy, but correlation varies across space, with scale and over time, and the frequently used global statistics hide potentially important differentiating local variation. For more comprehensive and robust insights into multivariate relations, these local correlations need to be assessed through various means of defining locality. We explore the geography of this issue, and use novel interactive visualization to identify interdependencies in multivariate data sets to support geographically informed multivariate analysis. We offer terminology for considering scale and locality, visual techniques for establishing the effects of scale on correlation and a theoretical framework through which variation in geographic correlation with scale and locality are addressed explicitly. Prototype software demonstrates how these contributions act together. These techniques enable multiple variables and their geographic characteristics to be considered concurrently as we extend visual parameter space analysis (vPSA) to the spatial domain. We find variable correlations to be sensitive to scale and geography to varying degrees in the context of energy-based geodemographics. This sensitivity depends upon the calculation of locality as well as the geographical and statistical structure of the variable

Supporting crime analysis through visual design

We describe and discuss a visual analysis prototype to support volume crime analysis, a form of exploratory data analysis that aims to identify and describe patterns of criminality using historical and recent crime reports. Analysis requirements are relatively familiar: analysts wish to identify, define and compare sets of crime reports across multiple attributes (space, time and description). A challenge particular to the domain, identified through workshops with Police analysts in Belgium and the UK, is in developing exploratory data analysis software that offers some sophistication in data selection, aggregation and comparison, but with interaction techniques and representations that can be easily understood, navigated and communicated. In light of ongoing discussion with Police analysts, we propose four visual design and interaction maxims that relate to this challenge and discuss an early visual analysis prototype that we hope conforms to these maxims

Dynamic Design Documents for supporting applied visualization

A common characteristic of applied visualization is collaboration between visualization researcher and domain expert – where the vi- sualization researcher attempts to assimilate sufficient detail around data, task and requirements to design a visualization tool that is manifestly useful. We report on a method for enabling such a col- laboration that can be used throughout the design process to gather and develop requirements and continually evaluate and support iter- ative design. We do so using highly interactive web-pages that we term dynamic design documents. Applied during a four-year visual data analysis project for crime research, these documents enabled a series of data mappings to be explored by our collaborators (crime analysts) remotely – in a flexible and continuous way. We argue that they engendered a level of engagement that is qualitatively dis- tinct from more traditional methods of feedback elicitation, offered a solution to limited and intermittent contact between analyst and visualization researcher and speculate that they provided a means of partially addressing certain intractable deficiencies, such as so- cial desirability-bias, that are common to evaluation in applied data visualization