FORTH GO

The 2008 Science Blogging Conference is coming up January 19. I attended last year and will be co-leading a session this year on “Public Scientific Data”. My selfish interest in public data is wanting to try to improve the visualizations I see in science papers, but I can’t readily do it without the data. The other discussion leader, Jean-Claude Bradley, is a real scientist, though, running a real open science chemistry lab at Drexel.

I started a skeleton outline of some of the issues at the conference wiki, and I’m happy to see others have expanded it.

Three years after getting new countertops, we finally got around to replacing the vinyl backsplash with tile. Though we hired someone to install the tile, we still had to do a lot of prep and clean-up work ourselves.

The first problem was that earlier electrical work had left a channel cut out of the drywall and stray wire for the under-cabinet lights.

I placed nail stoppers where the wiring crossed the studs and rerouted the wires to exit the wall underneath the cabinets where it would be hidden by the lights. I repaired the drywall with nylon mesh over some thin metal sheeting sold for roof flashing. The rest of the existing backsplash had to be removed, too, because it wasn’t flat everywhere. Removing it caused more damage to the drywall, which I smoothed with drywall mud.

Finally we were ready for the installers, who did a good enough job, but had to come back to fill in some gaps in the grout.

Here’s the final product after reinstalling the under-cabinet lights.

Here is a summary graph of the 2007 Chapel Hill Town Council elections [source data]. Each horizontal bar is a precinct, and the heights are proportional to the number of votes cast in each precinct. Each color is a different candidate, and the sub-bars widths are proportional to the percent of votes that each candidate got in the corresponding precinct. Precincts that had too few votes to show up well have been omitted (Country Club, Hillsborough, Mail-in, and Provisional)

With so much information it’s hard to pick out too many details. However, it’s easy to see how Ward and Raymond did in each precinct since they’re on the edges and have a stable baseline.

The order of the candidates is by overall finish position, and the order of the precinct is by percent of total Czajkowski/Hill votes that went to Czajkowski. That makes it a little easier to see how those two candidates matched up in the battle for the fourth seat.

Czajkowski got the final spot on the council in a close race, though there is quite a bit of variation among precincts. Not sure if the variation is due to political make-up of the precincts or to targeted campaigning.

I notice my precinct, Estes Hills, was one of the best for my friend Will Raymond. Maybe my yard signs helped!

Update:Here’s another view, highlighting the broad range of results for Czajkowski. Each circle is a precinct.

And a similar one, this time with circle size being proportional to total precinct votes and color being set based on the Czajkowski/Hill ratio. Red precincts went for Czajkowski and blue for Hill. You can see some correlation among the incumbents and among the challengers.