

The Sound of the Economy - sabalaba
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/audios/2015-07-22/sound-economy

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shoo
A slight tangent: another non-standard way of communicating high-dimensional
data visually is to render it as human faces.

Peter Watts mentions the idea in his novel "Blindsight" [0], but amusingly
enough it is based on actual research:

> those [faces] used near the end of the book represent a very real form of
> statistical analysis: Chernoff Faces[1], which are more effective than the
> usual graphs and statistical tables at conveying the essential
> characteristics of a data set[2].

Here's a passage from the novel:

> He nodded, turning his attention to a woman with no eyes. "Skull diameter
> scales to total mass. Mandible length scales to EM transparency at one
> Angstrom. One hundred thirteen facial dimensions, each presenting a
> different variable. Principle-component combinations present as multifeature
> aspect ratios." He turned to face me, his naked gleaming eyes just slightly
> sidecast. "You'd be surprised how much gray matter is dedicated to the
> analysis of facial imagery. Shame to waste it on anything
> as—counterintuitive as residual plots or contingency tables."

[0]
[http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm](http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)

[1] Chernoff, H. 1973. Using faces to represent points in k-dimensional space
graphically. Journal of the Americal Statistical Association 68:361-368.

[2] Wilkinson, L. 1982. An experimental evaluation of multivariate graphical
point representations. Human Factors in Computer Systems: Proceedings.
Gaithersberg, MD, 202-209.

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tempodox
Sound as one representation channel for data is an interesting idea. I'd love
to hear the sun's magnetosphere once, or radiation bursts from a quasar.

However, the article author seems to imply that there's a difference between
“pitch” and “frequency”. I wonder what that might be.

