It was about a foot off the ground then. When I returned later after forgetting about it, my head bumped into the gravel piece. A spider on the roof must have been trying to pull in the thread. I bet he was getting tired.

It was nice to see JMP 8, the product I help develop, on the desktop of one of the presentation machines, though I didn’t find out whose machine it was.

I did make it to Tara Richerson’s session on Scientific Visualization, even though it was in a small conference room at about 3x capacity. (The facilities at Sigma Xi RTP were otherwise excellent.) She did a good job leading the discussion, especially considering the broadness of the topic and of the diversity of the audience. Given the amount of interest, visualization could be a separate track onto itself in the future. Tara posited that a good (online) visualization has: Story + Interactivity + Glanceability.

and sleeps hard:

and chews holes in rugs when not entertained:

Two cluster of precincts and candidates

I also figured out how to color the clusters by absolute values rather than relative values, which helps to differentiate the candidates. They still fall into two large groups, but now it’s easier to see subgroups. Mayor-council alignments are highly sensitive to the council multiplication factor (4 here), so ignore Kleinschmidt and Czajkowski for candidate clustering.

For the record, low scoring candidates have been eliminated (otherwise they make all precincts look more similar), and absentee and provisional votes have been combined with One Stop precincts.

The precincts present a similar clustering as before, except the under-voters are now distributed into other clusters. The yellow group is fairly neutral. The green group is left leaning. The purple group is left-leaning with a focus on Harrison/Rich/Easthom. The blue group is left-leaning with a focus on Merritt/Kleinschmidt. The red group is right-leaning and includes two of the Durham precincts.

As a bonus, I thought this visual was attractive. It shows a smoothed trend line of the vote percentages (times four for town council candidates) by precinct, where the precincts are ordered by support for Kleinschmidt, the winner of the race for mayor. (Click graph for a larger version.)

The “left-leaning” candidates generally rise with Kleinschmidt while the “right-leaning” candidates (dotted lines) fall. Merritt’s strong showing at Lincoln and Northside is also evident. Unfortunately for him, those precincts had very low turn-out.

Two-way clustering of candidates and precincts

I’ll agree the diagram looks a bit complicated, but if you put in a little work, there’s a few gems to be found. Precincts are listed down the left side, and candidates across the bottom. The square at each precinct-candidate intersection is colored according to the candidate’s relative support at that precinct, red being strong, gray medium and blue weak. That part’s called a cell plot or heat map.

The tree-like parts are dendrograms, which show the results of the hierarchical cluster analyses. Similar items (precincts or candidates) are grouped together in the tree.

For the candidates, along the bottom, there’s a clear pair of clusters, which I’ll call left-leaning and right-leaning candidates. Coincidently, the left-leaning are on the left and the right-leaning are on the right.

The precincts are more interesting, though I have even less knowledge of their actual political orientations. I’ve colored the precincts into five groups. The first (red) and to a greater extent the second (yellow) cluster generally voted in favor of the right-leaning candidates. That is, the left six columns of the heat map are bluish and the right four columns are reddish. The opposite is true for the green and purple clusters; they’re more left-leaning, especially the purple precincts.

What puzzles me is the middle (blue) cluster. Those precincts don’t seem to like anyone. The numbers I used for clustering were percent of ballots cast, and apparently there were more voters in those precincts with incomplete ballots, voting in some but not all races. For instance, the two major mayoral candidates, Kleinschmidt and Czajkowski, only received votes on 28% and 21%, respectively, of the ballots at the Kings Mill precinct.

That leads to looking at votes per ballot for each race by precinct. Here’s a bar chart with the precincts ordered by town council votes per ballot.

Most precincts had near 100% participation in the mayoral race (exactly 100% for Booker Creek and Coker Hills), and most precincts averaged over three (of four available) votes in the town council race. So only the already-identified cluster of three (plus Dogwood Acres to a lesser degree) stand out regarding participation.

I imagine the One Stop (early voting for all precincts) totals reflect a lot of Carrboro voters. What makes the others different? Were people there to vote for a different race, like the school board? Or just voting for a favorite son/daughter candidate?

Sitar

Just like in this tame New York Times review from eight years ago, Ravi Shankar looked very frail coming out on stage and needed help getting set up, but after that he played energetically for the rest of the evening with his daughter playing at his side. Shankar was smiling, laughing, and playing very quickly toward the end. Both played sitars, with occasionally accompaniment from other musicians. They played only two long, continuous pieces. Though I wasn’t familiar with the music, I could recognize many sequences that are now embedded in Western guitar music. So maybe it’s true that Shankar is the “the godfather of world music,” as George Harrison called him.

For myself and others I talked to, the performance felt like it went by fast, but on checking the time afterwards, over two hours had elapsed. I wonder if the music had induced some kind of trance state that impaired our perception of time.

Memorial Hall did a great job at relaying the music to the audience. It was, however, annoying that they still haven’t convinced the audience not to keep checking cell phones or taking photos. I mean, how good a photo can you get anyway?

The interesting part was the “customers also purchased” list:

Four of the items are related to breaking locks. I wonder if these earphones are popular with people that steal iPhones and iPods.