Happy Holidays from Piraeus!

We had a busy holiday season here, but not too busy that we forgot how to have fun We hosted a Mad Men themed potluck, complete with cocktails. It was great to see everyone dressed to the nines. Thanks for playing along!

Happy Halloween from the Piraeus Data crew

There were more costumes too, and some brilliant karaoke by even our newest crew members. Fun was had by all!

It’s on like Donkey Kong!

I know, I know, old news. This happened in Paris already.

But you know what? Post-it wars are fun. I saw an angry bird up in the window across the street and then noticed the space invader a few floors up and Pac Man a few doors over. We just had to join in.

Turns out it looks like the folks over at Health Solutions Network started with Pac Man and Runic Games did the space invaders. PlacePlay followed suit, setting off the folks across from us, and now there’s a smile face above them.

I hope this keeps going.

Thanks GeekWire, for getting this rolling with your article here with original Pine Street Space Invader attack .

Most people I know have a wordpress or blogger site at this point. My family even has one going that includes emergency contacts, updates on health and new family photos from weekend excursions to keep those of us away from the East Coast in the loop. The templates are easy to use and you don’t have to be a programmer to add a slide show or link back to an article. Remember an earlier day, one that included GeoCities? I have to say I’d completely forgotten about GeoCities, but then I stumbled across this visualization this morning, via Mashable. I like the idea of “The Deleted City” being an enormous virtual city that never really existed, but sort of did. (Video via Mashable)

Deleted City

I remember the Math Olympiad and the Science Olympiad in high school, but for some reason I never thought of the practice continuing out of the classroom.  Since school is supposed to prepare you for the real-world, I don’t know why I was surprised to come across this project from Charlotte, North Carolina.

Welcome to the Business Intelligence Olympiad! Every two years, starting in 2008, the city of Charlotte pits business unit teams from different city departments against each other to address a fictional problem with analytics and data sets.

I’m sure the competition leads to plenty of laughter and good-hearted competition, but according to the article I read, it’s also created an environment where “a lot of information that previously had not be [sic] shared is now shared regularly between BI analysts throughout the city.”  The competition in 2010 included a fictitious hurricane that bore a striking resemblance to Irene.

“The underlying benefit was with Hurricane Irene coming up the coast almost on the same track as the theoretical Hurricane Vixen from December, teams were more used to looking at contingencies and how they affected portions of their business,” [manager of data administration for the city of Charlotte] Raper said.

As far as I know there isn’t something comparable in Seattle, but maybe there should be. Is it time for a BI Olympiad with data from the viaduct?

For more about Charlotte’s Olympiad, see the original article from govtech.com here.

The teams here at Piraeus put in a lot of hard work, so it’s nice that we can also hang out together. We had our summer picnic on Friday and our fearless office manager managed to pick just about the nicest day all summer. The food was great, we had balloons and music, a little bit of ladder golf and a little bit of swimming. Most importantly, some really great people!

Oh yeah, and water balloons. I forgot how much fun water balloons are! I’ll update the slideshow as I get more photos.

As you may know by now, a rare earthquake happened on the East Coast yesterday.  But how did you find out?  Piraeus alumni Evan Nagle analyzes the social network response quite nicely.  From his blog entry:

I think the earthquake shook a little dust off the social shelf and shed a wee bit of light on what exactly each social network “is” and “is for”.

Read his analysis here.

Social networks aren’t something to be ignored. I know that sounds sort of like a “well, duh!” statement.  Surprisingly, I still hear the I’m just not interested in what so-and-so had for breakfast! It isn’t all eggs and toast.  Social media gives data-junkies tons to play with, amazing tools to crowd source from and entirely new headaches for HR departments.

Social media is still evolving, as I suspect it will be for a long time. Policies will have to change, and there will be new ways of processing all of the data.  My hope is for more visualizations

(image credit: Mentalpez)

Though Google has dominated the news lately with their Motorola purchase, don’t forget to keep an eye on Microsoft.  The SQL devs I know are pretty excited about Denali (Preview 3 is available here) and Windows 8 is in pre-release blog mode. According to the first entry

We’ve been hard at work designing and building Windows 9, and today we want to begin an open dialog with those of you who will be trying out the pre-release version over the coming months…

Interestingly, Steve Sinofsky also writes

We’ll… make mistakes and admit it when we do. It is almost certain that something will hit a nerve, with the team or with the community, or both, in the blog posts or in the product, or both. In any case, we’ll work hard to have constructive conversations with you, share the data, and, when the situation calls for it, make thoughtful changes.

I’m intrigued to see how this will play out.  The release of the first blog post coincides nicely with news of the Google/Motorola deal–doesn’t seem like coincidence.

The real question: if I go to BUILD, Microsoft’s conference for hardware and software developers in Anaheim, CA in September, do I get to hang out wherever this photo was taken? It sure makes me want to swim with the goldfish

Found this today via FlowingData. Looks like the folks at YesYesNo didn’t stop at this project.

This time the folks at YesYesNo loaded a year’s worth of data from several cities to create visualizations for the Nike stores. One of these days I really will go for Nike+, if only for the chance to see a run transformed into something more than left foot, right foot, breathe.

Watch the video here.

If you live in Seattle, you may know about the Block Party. No, I’m not talking about the Capitol Hill Block Party that required tickets and a willingness to endure cattle-run type crowds jammed into each other.  I’m talking about National Night Out and all the block parties that are sprouting up around town this evening.

National Night Out started in 1984, and according to the NATW website

400 communities in 23 states participated… Nationwide, 2.5 million Americans took part…The 27th Annual National Night Out last August involved 37.0 million people in 15,110 communities from all 50 states, U.S. territories, Canadian cities, and military bases worldwide.

2.5 to 37… quite the jump! Unfortunately the NATW website doesn’t have a record of historical participation, but I’m searching around to find some numbers.  I’m still reading Visualize This and I think it might be fun to try to make my own visualization with the data (when I can find it).  I want to compare neighborhood participation with police crisis in each year.  Did participation go up when there was highly publicized crime in a sleepy neighborhood? What drives people to want to know their neighbors? So it’s two charts; a timeline of notable crime and a graph of participation per year. Time to find some data!