
Show HN: Scottish Independence Referendum Heatmap - chriswait
http://bubb.al/vote
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maxbog
I think you are publishing locations that are too specific. I can identify
houses, from which the votes were cast. This information can be abused and is
therefore dangerous. Please do not publish such information without informing
the user loudly and clearly of the implications of voting.

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chriswait
I think you're absolutely right. I was considering adding some noise to the
lat longs collected to mitigate this.

We're looking at the copy (to better highlight what data is stored and
displayed).

Thank you for the feedback.

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Nowaker
Maybe place all the marks in the town center?

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billybofh
That would diminish the usefulness of the map quite a bit. People will be
interested in this on a ward-by-ward basis - I'm pretty sure. A small random
'shuggle' should be enough to help.

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midhir
Looks interesting, congrats on getting it shipped!

A couple of things:

1) At any kind of scale, with smaller data-sets, the blue and red are
overlapping in places to form purple and the user has to work out from the hue
which is doing better. E.g. Edinburgh looks like it has a high blue content
but I need to zoom in to see that really it's dominated by a massive blue blob
on Grassmarket.

2) (Wonkish) The YES and NO buttons are stacked vertically with no margin. If
the order isn't randomised already I'd consider doing that and separating the
buttons.

3) I'm not from Scotland, but I did vote. If you're collecting that data also,
why not show it? It'd be interesting for sure. We can often see Scotland
across the water from our town, there are plenty of people here who consider
themselves Scottish and others besides who have a dog in the fight.

Looking forward to the 18th anyways. Yes or No, it'll be a hell of a party!

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chriswait
Hi there, thanks for the feedback!

1\. I'm looking at the way google maps heatmaps lump results together at
different zoom levels. If anyone has any experience with this, I'd love to
hear about it.

2\. This is exactly right. On the todo list now.

3\. If you voted outside scotland (and the browser got a location), then it'll
be displayed on the map in the place you voted from. Is this what you meant?

Really appreciate all the comments.

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midhir
Ah cool! Starting to see some colours over here now.

Belfast voting Yes and Dublin voting No.. Now there's a turnup for the books.

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chestnut-tree
This is a nice idea. My UX suggestions:

\- display the heatmap first \- have a prominent link saying something like:
add your vote to the map. When someone clicks that link, ask them to enter
their location (city or town and country), then ask them the same question the
Scots will vote for in the referendum: _Should Scotland be an independent
country?_ Yes/No.

I think the auto-detect location causes too many problems and may have privacy
implications if, as another poster says, you can identify quite precise
locations.

What would be really nice would be a map similar to the Book Depository
("Watch people shop" map):

[http://www.bookdepository.com/live](http://www.bookdepository.com/live)

In this case, you would display a pop-up each time someone voted with the name
of their town or city and whether they'd voted Yes or No.

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mbesto
> _\- display the heatmap first - have a prominent link saying something like:
> add your vote to the map. When someone clicks that link, ask them to enter
> their location (city or town and country), then ask them the same question
> the Scots will vote for in the referendum: Should Scotland be an independent
> country? Yes /No._

One nitpick - don't show the heatmap first if you want correct poll results.
This heavily biases the undecided people into "oh, everyone in Aberdeen says
No...I guess I say No then too!"

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chriswait
The (Scottish) startup I'm working for builds a contextual publishing platform
called Bubbal ("context" based on a user's location and interests, as well as
time of day).

We're using it to collect and heatmap yes/no opinions, worldwide, for the
Scottish Independence Referendum next month. We'd love to know how you feel,
and I'm particularly interested in any feedback you can give me on performance
or UX.

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tlarkworthy
The kernel size (smoothing width) should be chosen based on something like
leave-on-out cross validation. At the moment the sampling is too sparse and
everything is independent and not smooth at all.

This is described in the intro of "Assessment of probability density
estimation methods: Parzen window and Finite Gaussian Mixtures"

[http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/c.archambeau/publ/iscas_aa06....](http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/c.archambeau/publ/iscas_aa06.pdf)

(as well as many other places that just happened to be the first google
result)

email me if you want more details, I am ex-informatics.

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chriswait
This is massively useful, I was looking for a way to 'aggregate' results
somewhat. I will read through this today and might send you a question or two
later on if you don't mind.

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tlarkworthy
Yeah send any queries over or I can go through it face to face if you want.

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touristtam
I don't think a heatmap is the best representation for this kind of data:

1\. if this is meant to show both votes, then a pie chart for each position
(town/council) would be more effective 2\. the blur is not clearly visible at
all when zooming out completely 3\. taking into account 'votes' from outside
the country concerned is a bit confusing as pointed out in another comment,
the rules for the referendum states that you have to be in Scotland to cast
you vote.

However, I had a look at the [http://bubb.al/](http://bubb.al/) website and I
can see how this could be used in a contained area (like an attraction park)
or more generally if you could tie this up with a social media to show the
mood of a user population in a wide area.

On a side note, I am surprised you are not located near the Quarter Mile. ;)

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chriswait
Thanks for the feedback! Looking at each point individually:

1\. We went with a map over a series of pie charts as we'd like to create
something a bit more engaging for the user.

2\. Agreed: The blur is causing me several issues, and is something I'm
absolutely still working on.

3\. Obviously these "votes" won't be counted, we're just trying to get a sense
of how people in different part of the world feel about it.

Thanks for taking a look at our site! Attraction parks are a use-case we're
absolutely something we're looking into.

We're currently based in a tech incubator called CodeBase
([http://www.thisiscodebase.com/](http://www.thisiscodebase.com/)). Quarter
Mile is a beautiful building, but you can't beat being surrounded by other
startups!

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nly
Looks like a population map.

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valarauca1
Because it basically is. XKCD even did a comic about this
[http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/heatmap.png](http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/heatmap.png)

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touristtam
Just a side note. The map is continuously trying to locate me in Birmingham
which I guess is my ISP's end-point connection to the internet, whereas I am
actually in Edinburgh. I am using a few different extension in chrome and in
firefox that normally block advert/analytics request, but this time the
extensions are disabled to check for interferences.

So how to you get the location? Because it isn't working for me.

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AndrewGreen
To be clear, what is the question -- is it "Do you want independence", or is
it "Do you want unity"?

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smcl
This is a good point but interestingly within Scotland (i.e. the target
audience) the question doesn't need to be explicitly stated. People will have
"Yes" (or "Aye") or "No" badges on their facebook profiles without any
context.

It's probably good that they added the question in though as I'm fascinated by
the responses outside Scotland!

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k-mcgrady
You broke my browser (Safari). I said yes to giving location and it located me
- then asked me again, and again and again. The only way out was to allow it
to remember my decision for 24 hours. Then the site told me it couldn't locate
me despite having a pin on my house.

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chriswait
Ah this sucks, sorry about that. I think I've found the source of this and it
should be sorted now.

Thanks for taking a look!

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k-mcgrady
Great thanks. I'll give it another try!

Edit: Working now. I'd love to see a breakdown of votes (total yes/no and
world yes/no vs scotland yes/no).

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chriswait
Have since added global totals to the key at the top right, working on per-
country totals over the next few days. Thanks again.

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moron4hire
I wanted to see what you have so far, but since I'm not Scottish, I didn't
want to vote first. I denied access to location data, received a message
saying I couldn't vote without location, and then had no way to view the
current data on the map.

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chriswait
Thanks for the feedback! You make a good point: We're asking before we're
giving anything. Completely understandable to deny location services.

Would your preference be to see the heatmap worldwide before being asked for
your location?

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moron4hire
Well, if you show the heatmap right away, it might skew your results. Perhaps
if you had a third option "skip voting and view results".

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GordonS
Doesn't work for devices that can't accurately provide location information.
For example, I live near Aberdeen, but my ISP is in London - so this shows me
as in London.

Doesn't seem to be a way to override the 'detected' location?

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chriswait
You're right - we haven't done this yet as we anticipated most of the traffic
to come from mobile devices. I will have a look an manually entering location
today (now wondering if an address search box is better, or "drop a pin"?).

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jarofgreen
The location services on my phone are often off, or I may deny location
permission until I see more what the site is. Bad assumption.

(Good luck with project tho!)

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smcl
I'm afraid I can't see a thing, is it down due to the load coming from HN?
Just a white screen with a sort of google-maps-ish compass in a box. I'm very
keen to see something like this, with the referendum so close!

edit: back up now

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chriswait
Really appreciate you taking the look. The site is still very much up, could
you try reloading the page?

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pawn
I don't know anything about Scottish politics, but as a generality, it looks
like most larger cities vote Yes while the smaller towns have people voting
No. Can anyone with insight explain why that'd be?

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mrloop
The colour blue for one of the result sets is a poor choice as the map is
drawn in blue / turquoise. You need 2 colours for the results which are of a
similar distinguishability against the map colour.

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chriswait
Good call, having a think about choosing other colours now.

Thanks for taking a look!

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s_dev
You should include the total respective votes with the key so the accuracy of
the data can be compared to other polls. Maybe even a break down of the UK/
Ireland/ Europe/ Rest of World.

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chriswait
I love this idea. Will probably start with the global breakdown first.

Thanks for taking a look for us!

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jarofgreen
What is "vote every 24 hours and show your support" about?

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pmtarantino
You should post it on /r/Scotland on Reddit!

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chriswait
I was planning to give it a day (give the server a rest), but somebody beat me
to it:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Scotland/comments/2ej5kk/scottish_in...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Scotland/comments/2ej5kk/scottish_independence_referendum_heatmap/)

