2010 US Census Cycling Dashboard

Here's the polished up dashboard from my previous post on a jump start with Tableau and the 2010 US Census Bicycle Commuter Data.

For better visibility, here's the direct link to the dashboard.

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Kicking Tableau's Tires - 2010 US Census Bike Commuter Data

I recently attended Tableau's open house in Austin to see what the buzz about this data visualization company,  opening a new office in Austin, was all about. Tableau's CEO and co-founder Chris Chabot gave an amazing demo on FAA flight delays slicing and dicing data and plotting visual graphs on maps of the US. Wow, it looked so simple and fast, slicing millions of rows of records in seconds! I thought I would give it a try to look at some US Census data on bicycle commuting. I just wanted to visualize some simple data and be able to quickly answer  some questions like, what states and cities have the highest ridership.  I quickly searched the net and found a small data set of US census cycling data from the League of American Bicyclists, 2010 Bike Commuting Data released blog entry.

Installation

For starters, I downloaded the Pro version trial of the product and did some initial work to get familiar it.  Following Tabluea's quickstart tutorials was a great introduction. Tableau is definitely a different way of thinking with the ability to categorize and drill down data in a single graph which might take several charts in a tool like Excel.  After learning how to create visualizations with the Pro version, I quickly realized I needed the Public version of the product to publish my visualizations.

My first attempt to connect with Tableau's Public desktop product was on my MacBook's virtual machine (VMWare Fusion 3) running Window 7. For some reason I kept getting HTTP 302 error from the Public tools and thus could not save my workbook. A quick install on a stand-alone Windows 7 install and I was up and running quickly.

Publishing

Saving your data on Tableau's Public service is seamless.  You wouldn't want to store your confidential data on public servers, but that's what the Pro product is for. My Bike Commuting visualization exercise is saved to my 2010 Bike Commuting Data workbook. Note that you can only view/download my workbook if you have Tableau Public installed on your Windows machine. While you can use your Mac Book to publish your Tableau workbooks, the only way to create visualizations is with the Windows Desktop installation. (The guys at Tableau assured me there's a Mac port on the way).

The Visualizations

Tableau allows you to create links to your visualizations from a web link or embed live graphs right in your blog or other social media outlets (much like YouTube). What's cool is that your visualizations are live, meaning that as you update your workbooks your visualizations will keep up to date for your data consumers.

The first visualization demonstrates total number of riders by State and City.

1. The direct link to the graph on Tableau Public is here. Notice that on this view you can drill down into the data, save data, and view the raw data.

 2. The embedded view is below. You will notice that the embedded chart here is bit truncated due to the fixed column with of the Google blogger template I am using. However, given a more flexible layout it is a simple operation to re-size the visualizations on your blog or dashboard.

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The second graph simply sorts out ridership by city and sizes the shapes according to percentage of riders.

1. The link to Tableau Public: Percentage of Riders By City
2. The embedded view is here. Again as above, the presentation is not quite perfect due to the limited column width.

After spending just a few hours with Tableua, I can see I am barely scratching the surface the visualization stories I could tell. There is a very vibrant and active community built around the product with forums and ability to download visualizations in the public gallery.

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23,845 feet and 21.73 miles of skiing (downhill)

I wondered how much vertical distance I could actually ski in one day. Since I never tried to calculate it and never heard anyone say what a high number would be I decided to wear my Forerunner GPS while skiing. I just tucked it away under my glove and left it running for about 7 hours (9AM -4PM). I got on the first lift at 9:05 and got on the last lift at 4:01 PM, so definitely a full day of skiing even with a 45 minute lunch break.

Since it was a decent powder day I only skied the steepest stuff on the mountain, which by Vermont standards isn't too steep but the terrain is still quite challenging - more so than that fluffy, light, wimpy stuff that falls out west.

So I wound up with a total of 23,845 vertical feet descending with 21.73 miles descending or flat. That's about 60% of the total mileage. The averge descening grade was 28%. I figured a good day of skiing with high speed lifts and not waiting around one could get 35,000 vertical feet.
The chart below shows 15 descents, so that's 15 lifts up.


Here's the google earth file.

A little ditty for the kiddies

Now topping the charts in the Kelly house, narrowly beating Laurie Berkner and Van Halen's greates hits - NightNightBabies.mp3. It only took me 20 years before I was able to write and record one solo song, but kids are a very unforgiving audience so I had a little more inspiration. Maybe in another 20 years I'll actually get this songwriting/recording thing figured out.

Toughest Place to Ski... If you can.

Ski it if you can. That's the Mad River Glen ski mountain's motto. And if you can ski anything here I think you can ski just about anywhere. This is one of the last mountains in the world where you can ski both snowboard and artificial snow free. Taos is the other one. Here there are no double diamond trails - if it's black it's hard and you better prepare to suffer a little.

Paradise Trail Panoramic (Published here too)

There's a few things that make this mountain particularly difficult to ski:

• Narrow trails
• Multiple fall lines on twisting trails
  
• Rock, ice and powder, cliffs
  
• Sharp moguls

And it's the last point that gives me so much pain. Mad river doesn't have nice smooth moguls you can slide over like most other parks. Rather, they are deeply grooved and sharp, carved out by expert tele skiers. If you don't hit them right your legs drop out from under you and remind you that you took the wrong line.

Every mountain I've skied I could go for a full day without ever taking a break. I've never been able to do that at MRG, even with their slow single chair lift.

Best Place in Texas to Fly a Kite: Enhanted Rock

Where else can you always find wind on the calmest of days, no trees, relatively few people, no great panoramic views? Enchanted Rock!













Oh, and of course it's great for climbing. Belle and Fi got their first experience on real rock on Practice Slab and Beginner's Bitch.

There goes Deigo!

We have a new foster dog named Diego and he doesn't like me so much, unless I'm laying down in bed in which case he'll try to lay on top of me. Diego has had a pretty rough start to his life. He's about 5-8 months old and spent the last couple of months in a prison shelter in Dallas. We don't know much about him before that since he was a stray pup. He's since gotten neutered and a nice little gash on his side from another dog that bit him during a temporary foster. He's a bit nervous, for good reason.

Diego is more like to befriend you if you are a girl, under the age of 6, and short. Since I don't fall into that category Diego runs as far away from me as possible. He lets the girls pet him and he actually seems to be interested in them (or at least not terrified). But basically Diego is afraid of his own shadow and startles very easily.

We're hoping that as his latest trauma we'll be able to find the puppy in him (which shows on occasion when he plays by himself in the backyard). So we'll need some good dog whispering skills for that (whatever that might be).

Diego is also a clean slate: he can't do anything a normal dog can do except eat and poop; and he does that in the house very well. However, because he's a very sweet and very attentive dog I have hope that he'll be very easy to train once he's recovered from his wounds and has adjusted to a more stable life.

You can see from the pictures just how skinny he is. He kind of looks like a funny old-man dog. Also, he obviously has some more growing to do because his feet and head are disproportionately huge compared to his body (despite his low body weight). I think he'll be a pretty good-looking dog, but hunting is something he'll probably never do.