What Do We Actually Learn from Evaluations in the "Heroic Era" of Visualization?

We often point to the relative increase in the amount and sophistication of evaluations of visualization systems versus the earliest days of the field as evidence that we are maturing as a field. I am not so convinced. In particular, I feel that evaluations of visualizations, as they are ordinarily performed in the field or asked for by reviewers, fail to tell us very much that is useful or transferable about visualization systems, regardless of the statistical rigor or ecological validity of the evaluation. Through a series of thought experiments, I show how our current conceptions of visualization evaluations can be incomplete, capricious, or useless for the goal of furthering the field, more in line with the "heroic age" of medical science than the rigorous evidence-based field we might aspire to be. I conclude by suggesting that our models for designing evaluations, and our priorities as a field, should be revisited

Troubling Ambition of Federal Rule of Evidence 502(d), The

Federal Rule of Evidence 502 promised to change American litigation for the better. It was heralded as a solution to the gross inequity and spiraling litigation costs associated with the painstaking, cumbersome, and largely wasteful document reviews necessary to protect the attorney-client privilege. And in some measure, it succeeded. It has brought uniformity, predictability, and equity to issues of inadvertent disclosure and subject matter waiver. But a largely overlooked provision of the rule promises even bigger, and more troubling changes. Federal Rule of Evidence 502(d) authorizes district courts to enter discovery orders protecting parties from the waiver consequences normally attached to sharing privileged materials. This new power, however, was not meaningfully circumscribed by Congress. Instead, Rule 502(d)\u27s plain language appears to authorize everything from court sanctioned “claw back” and “quick peek” agreements to wholesale voluntary disclosures. What is more, once a district court authorizes a disclosure, subsequent parties and even state courts are bound by the district court\u27s decision. This Article examines the development and early application of Rule 502(d) as well as its underlying rationale in an effort to address some of the potential benefits and consequences attendant to such a far-reaching – even paradigm changing – evidentiary rule. It finds that, while the new rule could promote more efficient litigation, Rule 502(d) orders may ultimately bring about little in the way of cost savings, erode the attorney-client privilege, and further complicate modern discovery practice

Are We Making Progress In Visualization Research?

In this work, I use a survey of senior visualization researchers and thinkers to ideate about the notion of progress in visualization research: how are we growing as a field, what are we building towards, and are our existing methods sufficient to get us there? My respondents discussed several potential challenges for visualization research in terms of knowledge formation: a lack of rigor in the methods used, a lack of applicability to actual communities of practice, and a lack of theoretical structures that incorporate everything that happens to people and to data both before and after the few seconds when a viewer looks at a value in a chart. Orienting the field around progress (if such a thing is even desirable, which is another point of contention) I believe will require drastic re-conceptions of what the field is, what it values, and how it is taught

Is There a Doctor in the (Station) House?: Reassessing the Constitutionality of Compelled DWI Blood Draws Forty-Five Years After Schmerber

The vast majority of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence of the last century has been dedicated to parsing the physical and in- tangible boundaries of the home, developing the expectation of privacy, and, as of late, exploring the constitutional implica- tions of an increasingly electronic society. In the midst of this development, one major area has quietly fallen by the wayside - the preservation of bodily integrity. As technology has ren- dered the human body an ever-increasing source of crucial evi- dence, the Supreme Court has remained largely silent on the government\u27s power to harvest information through medical procedures. Since the Court\u27s consideration of the constitutio- nality of compelled blood draws in Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757 (1966), the Fourth Amendment questions atten- dant to bodily evidence have been largely left to the states. This Article examines a narrow subset of that state-level develop- ment: non-consensual DWI blood draws. A review of the state statutory and jurisprudential applications of Schmerber reveals increasing disagreement over the scope of the Fourth Amend- ment when police seek to recover fleeting evidence of blood al- cohol content. Based on this review, this Article suggests a number ofpolicy proposals designed to better insure police stay within the Fourth Amendment strictures of Schmerber while al- so procuring the most effective evidence possible

The economics of corn on corn

This article discusses some of the important factors to consider when contemplating corn on corn. Only the factors that apply to the individual producer will be discussed. There are a number of environmental and societal costs and benefits that are important; however, space does not permit going into that discussion here. The biggest factor in comparing the different rotations is the yield differences. Research has shown that there is a yield drag of approximately 5 to 15 percent for second-year corn relative to first-year corn. This yield difference varies by soil and location. The yield penalty is most prevalent in bad weather years

When the Body Became Data: Historical Data Cultures and Anatomical Illustration

With changing attitudes around knowledge, medicine, art, and technology, the human body has become a source of information and, ultimately, shareable and analyzable data. Centuries of illustrations and visualizations of the body occur within particular historical, social, and political contexts. These contexts are enmeshed in different so-called data cultures: ways that data, knowledge, and information are conceptualized and collected, structured and shared. In this work, we explore how information about the body was collected as well as the circulation, impact, and persuasive force of the resulting images. We show how mindfulness of data cultural influences remain crucial for today's designers, researchers, and consumers of visualizations. We conclude with a call for the field to reflect on how visualizations are not timeless and contextless mirrors on objective data, but as much a product of our time and place as the visualizations of the past

OSCAR: A Semantic-based Data Binning Approach

Binning is applied to categorize data values or to see distributions of data. Existing binning algorithms often rely on statistical properties of data. However, there are semantic considerations for selecting appropriate binning schemes. Surveys, for instance, gather respondent data for demographic-related questions such as age, salary, number of employees, etc., that are bucketed into defined semantic categories. In this paper, we leverage common semantic categories from survey data and Tableau Public visualizations to identify a set of semantic binning categories. We employ these semantic binning categories in OSCAR: a method for automatically selecting bins based on the inferred semantic type of the field. We conducted a crowdsourced study with 120 participants to better understand user preferences for bins generated by OSCAR vs. binning provided in Tableau. We find that maps and histograms using binned values generated by OSCAR are preferred by users as compared to binning schemes based purely on the statistical properties of the data.Comment: 5 pages (4 pages text + 1 page references), 3 figure