Evan Peck

Makeability Lab Handbook Makeability Lab Handbook By Professor Jon Froehlich and lab membersAllen School of Computer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Washington Welcome to the Makeability Lab! 👋 We are so happy that yo...

As I start building infrastructure for year 2 of my growing group, a shout-out to @jonfroehlich.bsky.social and the @makeabilitylab.bsky.social handbook for helping me reason through the implicit processes & practices that should be more visible to our lab.

🔗 docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Left, screen shot of google search results for "well-being vs. wellbeing". Right, screen shot of google search results for "wellbeing vs. well-being" - reversing the hyphenation. When hyphenated "well-being" was first in the query, it said that was the "traditional and preferred spelling in North American English". When non-hyphenated "wellbeing" was first, it said "this was the more common and preferred spelling in many parts of the world, including the United States, Canada, and Australia"

This wild AI example just happened to me + a colleague trying to decide on "wellbeing" or "well-being" for public material.

Depending on query framing, Google gives inverse recommendations for US audiences!

Almost as if its inferring my preference from order and trying to make me happy 🤔

As a fellow "personal & local vis" evangelist, this article is rich with great examples.

ChatGPT is out here gifting my research to other folk today...

> "Studies like “Data is Personal” (Kovacs et al., 2019) show that data framed to reflect local or personal experience increases trust and perceived relevance."

(unfortunately, I'm actually flattered it surfaced in an unrelated query)

The visual design in this article is just straight-up gorgeous.

Even if I'm wrong (probably), it's kind of interesting that both publications chose color palettes that forces *every* value into "rising" or "falling" visual schemes. Wouldn't this make every city look a little bit dramatic, even if it was among the most stable?

A wild, not-investigated guess on the vis discrepancy:
Since the two colors (orange/green) diverge around zero, maybe it depends on what "side" you bin the zeroes in your dataset?

If that's the case, I'd probably redesign both to make 0 gray.

Dug up the paper (left) the WPost vis (right) is based on to see how they presented the same data. It's fascinating to me how subtle color differences can shape the spatial patterns we see.

(I can't quite figure out why more of Houston seems to be rising in the paper than the WPost article 🤔)

Chernoff fishes

I think we have overloaded the term "student reviewer", and your response is totally reasonable given that muddiness.

I actually don't think that option was intended to capture all students who are also reviewers.

My understanding is it is meant to capture the specific "student reviewer" role that is meant as a training program this year at vis: ieeevis.org/year/2025/in...

More awful news.

The US has been the leader in scientific research for **80** years due to robust funding for NSF, NIH, and other scientific agencies.

All that infrastructure, human capital, and international prestige that we have built over those years is at real risk of just collapsing.

Crushing to hear of more junior colleagues in the computer science & human-computer interaction (HCI) space whose NSF CAREER grants were terminated this week. I'm hopeful that philanthropic funders can find a way to support this generation of scientists studying online manipulation, bias in AI, etc.

This is one of the worst violations of research ethics I've ever seen. Manipulating people in online communities using deception, without consent, is not "low risk" and, as evidenced by the discourse in this Reddit post, resulted in harm.

Great thread from Sarah, and I have additional thoughts. 🧵

Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Advances AI Education for American Youth EMPOWERING AMERICA’S YOUTH: Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to create new educational and workforce development opportunities

From my NSF grant that was TERMINATED on Friday for not advancing priorities: "AI literacy is important [...] However, not all relevant learning happens in the classroom, especially since in the United States, many K-12 schools still do not have computing courses." www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/...

Harvard University Harvard University is devoted to excellence in teaching, learning, and research, and to developing leaders who make a difference globally.

Harvard redid its whole homepage to push back against the administration’s demands. I mean, this is just a website but I think it’s kind of a great PR move: www.harvard.edu

Where Students Have Had Their Visas Revoked The Trump administration has quietly revoked hundreds of student visas across the country, wreaking havoc on the system.

This map by @insidehighered.com, with downloadable data that has links to sources, shows every school where students have had visas revoked. And yes, CMU has had 7 revoked.

1 in 3 students and 1 in 4 faculty are foreigners here in the US. This is terrorism on our campuses.

Law and ethics Post-API Age XML and JSON IP and HTTP Static web pages Archives web pages Dynamic web pages PDFs Wikipedia Government APIs Social APIs Automation AI APIs

Got around to pushing all my @cuboulder.info Web Data Science @jupyter.org notebooks to @github.com

Enjoy! github.com/cuinfoscienc...

I'm just a small-town professor. I'll never be a provost or chancellor. But here's some free advice: we're about to hold the most watched college sports event in 🇺🇸. Every college president should be all over TV, at every game, explaining why the March Madness of federal budget cuts is a huge crisis.

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I always shock my students a bit when I tell them that quantitative data is just qualitative data that has already been interpreted numerically.

We have two job openings in the Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Non tenure-track, of interest for those who work in cultural studies or critical media, don't mind a full-time lecture schedule, and enjoy working with grad TAs. It's a three-year renewable post. Please circulate!

The interactivity in this article is 🪄.

While I teach all these topics in my vis course, being able to play with each concept is a wonderful amplifier to understanding.

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The NIH capping the indirect cost rate (IDC) for grants at 15% can best be described as a direct assault on Universities. It’s such a bureaucratic, innocuous sounding thing that actually means that research universities will be kneecapped. Thousands of employees across the US will lose their jobs.

For folks looking for COVID-19 📊, the COVIC archive is a wonderful resource with thousands of COVID-19 data visualizations that appeared on the web.

covic-archive.org/index.html

line graph called "Valuation of town and city property owned by Georgia Negroes". While the line increases, it is annotated with things like "Ku-Kluxism, Lynching, and Political Unrest"

We often share W.E.B. Du Bois's more colorful work, but his annotations in charts like this ensured that positive-trending data did not mask America's social reality.

Give me more Du Bois designers right now.