

CS171 - Data Visualization at Harvard - Anon84
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/courses/cs171/

======
mustpax
Looks like a pretty neat course. I've been meaning to jump in to the
Processing language for a while now; never had enough time to.

If you're in to data visualization, I would highly recommend Edward Tufte's
beautiful tome _Envisioning Information_
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0961392118/> . (Which reminds
me, Amazon, please introduce some decent looking permalinks. Am I giving away
my SID with that link or what?)

You may know Tufte from his wonderful essay lambasting PowerPoint and it's
role in the Columbia shuttle disaster:
[http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0...](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0001yB) .

~~~
gjm11
No, you aren't giving away your SID. The random-looking number is the ASIN of
the product. (You could have reassured yourself by reasoning as follows:
everything apart afrom that final number clearly contains very little product-
specific or user-specific information; and there surely isn't enough
information in a 10-bit number to identify both a product and a user
uniquely.)

I don't think it's reasonable to expect Amazon to have product URLs with no
random-looking unique ID in at all, and 10 digits seems pretty modest. But I
don't see why they couldn't make <http://www.amazon.com/ASIN/0961392118> take
you to their main page for that book.

~~~
mustpax
Okay, I admit, I was being cheeky :) But there was a whole section of the
query that I left out that looks like this:

    
    
      ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238082049&sr=1-1
    

This all looks like info they use for clickstream analysis, so nothing too
critical. But I wish they had basic functionality on the page itself to
generate a URL like you just gave. Maybe with some more info as well like
tufte-envisio-XXXXXXXXXX.

------
berrow
You need a login to see the videos from the links shown. Only Harvard students
will have that. Unless you go to <http://www.cs171.net> and choose "2008
Videos on iTunes U" Then (through iTunes) you can get to CSCI E-64 which seems
like the same thing taught through the "extension school".

~~~
RK
Try this link for the spring 2009 lecture videos:

<http://cm.dce.harvard.edu/2009/02/22872/videopage.shtml>

~~~
berrow
Thanks, that works really well

------
bobbyi
Sounds interesting.

Hanspeter Pfister is a very smart guy.

