Online Data Visualization Tools Research Articles

The Food-Energy-Water Nexus: Assessing undergraduate students’ decision making about complex socio-hydrologic issues supported by Hydroviz

The Food-Energy-Water (FEW) Nexus envisions interactions between water, energy, and food systems, in which water allocation decisions constitute complex socio-hydrologic issues. Undergraduate students need to develop skills to understand and make effective decisions about the FEW Nexus. We implemented a comprehensive curriculum where undergraduate students engaged in a systematic decision-making process around a FEW Nexus challenge after collecting and processing information from an online data visualization tool—Hydroviz. We ask (a) what components of the decision-making process were students able to engage in most effectively, and (b) what factors (e.g., students’ demographics, prior knowledge, use of Hydroviz, and curricular resources, among others) support students’ overall decision-making outcomes? The study is based on a mixed-methods approach in which we analyzed n = 94 students’ responses to a decision-making scenario, and n = 13 semistructured interviews from the second iteration of the module in 2021. Results suggest that students may need additional support to better frame the decision-making problem to provide a more in-depth and localized description, including their use of collected evidence to support their description. Factors that supported students’ decision-making outcomes include (a) their personal values and experiences and (b) scaffolding elements of the module, in which they were able to decompose the elements of the problem, prioritize different values in their analysis, and question their initial approaches to further analyze their choices. More information about the energy sources, and the impacts on the community and environment, would be beneficial. No differences between demographic groups were observed. The study can provide insights to enhance instructors’ use of the curricular resources and curricular design, thereby supporting undergraduate instruction to foster students’ engagement in decision making about socio-hydrologic issues.

Antibodies against HLA cross-reactivity groups: From single antigen bead assay to immunoinformatics interpretation of epitopes

Identification of anti-human leukocyte antigen (HLA) antibodies (Abs) is based on Luminex™ technology. We used bioinformatics to (i) study the correlations of mean fluorescence intensities (MFIs) for all the possible allele pairs, and (ii) determine the degree of epitope homology between HLA antigens.Using MFI data on anti-HLA Abs from 6000 Luminex™ assays, we provide an updated overview of class I and II HLA antigen cross-reactivity in which each node corresponded to an allele and each link corresponded to a strong correlation between two alleles (Spearman’s ρ > 0.8). We compared these correlations with the serological groups and the results of an epitope analysis.The strongest correlations concerned allele-specific Abs directed against the same antigen. For the HLA-A locus, the highest values of Spearman’s ρ reflected broad specificity. For the HLA-B locus, graphs defined the HLA-Bw4 public epitope, and correlations between HLA-A and -B alleles were only present for beads with the same Bw4 public epitope. For the HLA-C locus, we identified two groups that differed with regard to their KIR ligand subclassification. Lastly, the HLA-DRB1 subgroups were part of a network. In the epitope analysis, Spearman’s ρ was related to the number of matched epitopes within pairs of alleles.The combination of Spearman’s ρ with simple, undirected graphing constitutes an effective tool for understanding routinely encountered cross-reactivity profiles. Based on this model, we have implemented an online data visualization tool available at http://cusureau.pythonanywhere.com/.

Rhetorical cartographic story maps as public work

ABSTRACTThis essay details the process of creating an interactive visual aid—a digital story map—for the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Project in Power, Place, and Publics at the University of Nevada, Reno. In addition to reviewing story maps and their potential for communicating persuasive messages more generally, this essay also reflects on the utility and challenges involved with integrating online data-visualization tools into multiauthored, applied, public-facing projects specifically.

Seasonal trends of air temperature and diurnal range in the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, and Iraq: a spatiotemporal study and development of an online data visualization tool

As the temperature and the diurnal temperature range (DTR) influence our life in many fields like agriculture and health, changes in either parameter may affect our current and future plans in such areas. This paper investigates the variability of temperature and DTR in the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula (172 stations in 12 countries) in different study periods of 10, 25, 40, 50, and 60 years. The data were tested for homogeneity using four standard tests, and we used the nonparametric statistics Mann-Kendall and Theil-Sen to calculate trend significance, direction, and magnitude in time series. Our results show a significant warming trend in 45–60% of the region with an average increase of 0.65, 0.43, and 0.30 °C/decade for the 25-, 40-, and 50-year study periods. The highest number of stations that have a significant increase in temperature occurs in spring and summer. On the other hand, decreasing DTR trends occur in about 31% of the region, mostly in the south of the Arabian Peninsula at 0.60 °C/decade. This work, additionally, provides an interactive online tool that shows the trends and temperature on zoomable maps, charts, and other visuals to station level. This tool could benefit researchers and strategic planners for the studied region. In many stations, we found that there are a significant increase in temperature and a decrease in DTR which reflect a severe change in the climate that should be considered in future planning. We recommend expanding this study to cover precipitation and other meteorological factors.

Designing with Publics that Are Already Busy: A Case from Denmark

Design research has recently turned the attention to how designers contribute to the organization of publics when designing objects. This also raises the question of what kind of “good” public is being pursued. In this article, we argue for the importance of taking pre-existing normative projects into account to avoid approaching publics as yet another instantiation of “users” of design objects. We develop the argument by discussing our recent attempt at designing an online data visualization tool for public use. Instead of inviting potential future users of our tool to a design workshop, we decided to adopt an ethnographic interest in the existing “goods” that guided the publics for which we wanted to design. Based on explorations of three sites, we found our publics to be already busy with concerns that were both highly relevant to the data practices we were trying to facilitate, while at the same time overflowing and provoking our framing of the publics we were attempting to engage. Drawing from work in Science and Technology Studies on multiple ways of “doing good” in practice, we propose a reconsideration in design of the publics that we hope to “spark into being,” by pursuing the question of how to design with rather than for publics that are already busy.

Transport of hydraulic fracturing waste from Pennsylvania wells: A county-level analysis of road use and associated road repair costs

Pennsylvania’s rapid unconventional oil and gas (UOG) development—from a single well in 2004 to more than 6700 wells in 2013—has dramatically increased UOG waste transport by heavy trucks. This study quantified the amount of UOG waste and the distance it traveled between wells and disposal facilities on each type of road in each county between July 2010 and December 2013. In addition, the study estimated the associated financial costs to each county’s road infrastructure over that period. We found that UOG wells produced a median wastewater volume of 1294 m3 and a median of 89,267 kg of solid waste. The median number of waste-transport truck trips per well was 122. UOG wells existed in 38 Pennsylvania counties, but we estimated trucks transporting well waste traveled through 132 counties, including counties in West Virginia, Ohio, and New York. Median travel distance varied by disposal type, from 106 km to centralized treatment facilities up to 237 km to injection wells. Local roads experienced the greatest amount of truck traffic and associated costs ($1.1–6.5 M) and interstates, the least ($0.3–1.6 M). Counties with oil and gas development experienced the most truck traffic and incurred the highest associated roadway costs. However, many counties outside the active development area also incurred roadway repair costs, highlighting the extension of UOG development’s spatial footprint beyond the active development area. An online data visualization tool is available here: www.nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/transportation-of-hydraulic-fracturing-waste.

Toward Building Hybrid Biological/in silico Neural Networks for Motor Neuroprosthetic Control

In this article, we introduce the Bioinspired Neuroprosthetic Design Environment (BNDE) as a practical platform for the development of novel brain–machine interface (BMI) controllers, which are based on spiking model neurons. We built the BNDE around a hard real-time system so that it is capable of creating simulated synapses from extracellularly recorded neurons to model neurons. In order to evaluate the practicality of the BNDE for neuroprosthetic control experiments, a novel, adaptive BMI controller was developed and tested using real-time closed-loop simulations. The present controller consists of two in silico medium spiny neurons, which receive simulated synaptic inputs from recorded motor cortical neurons. In the closed-loop simulations, the recordings from the cortical neurons were imitated using an external, hardware-based neural signal synthesizer. By implementing a reward-modulated spike timing-dependent plasticity rule, the controller achieved perfect target reach accuracy for a two-target reaching task in one-dimensional space. The BNDE combines the flexibility of software-based spiking neural network (SNN) simulations with powerful online data visualization tools and is a low-cost, PC-based, and all-in-one solution for developing neurally inspired BMI controllers. We believe that the BNDE is the first implementation, which is capable of creating hybrid biological/in silico neural networks for motor neuroprosthetic control and utilizes multiple CPU cores for computationally intensive real-time SNN simulations.

Data visualization as a communication tool

Purpose – This paper aims to provide a framework for thinking about meaningful data visualization in ways that can be applied to routine statistics collected by libraries. Design/methodology/approach – An overview of common data display methods is provided, with an emphasis on tables, scatter plots, line charts, bar charts, histograms, pie charts and infographics. Research on “best practices” in data visualization design is presented; also provided is a comparison of free online data visualization tools. Findings – Different data display methods are best suited for different quantitative relationships. There are rules to follow for optimal data visualization design. Ten free online data visualization tools are recommended by the authors. Originality/value – Evidence-based libraries collect and use data to affect change and to support departmental and institutional accreditation standards. Proper data visualization allows libraries to communicate their message in a more compelling and interesting way, while assisting in the understanding of complex data.

The Application of an Online Data Visualization Tool, Ptplot, in the World Data Center (WDC) for Solar-Terrestrial Science (STS) in IPS Radio and Space Services, Australia

The CODATA Data Science Journal is a peer-reviewed, open access, electronic journal, publishing papers on the management, dissemination, use and reuse of research data and databases across all research domains, including science, technology, the humanities and the arts. The scope of the journal includes descriptions of data systems, their implementations and their publication, applications, infrastructures, software, legal, reproducibility and transparency issues, the availability and usability of complex datasets, and with a particular focus on the principles, policies and practices for open data.All data is in scope, whether born digital or converted from other sources.