Show HN: Scottish Independence Referendum Heatmap | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Scottish Independence Referendum Heatmap

bubb.al

30 pointschriswait48 comments

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 Please do not publish such information without informing the user loudly and clearly of the implications of voting.

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.

Maybe place all the marks in the town center?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

Hi, thanks for all the feedback. I love the bookdepository.com user experience with the live updates. We'll be working on this as we get closer to the date!

Auto detection of location is proving to be a bit tricky - we're seeing a lot of votes clustered around internet exchanges in places.

> - 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!"

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.

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....

(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.

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.

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

This is interesting, but I feel like I have no real knowledge of the situation to give a good vote. I voted 'yes' as I assumed, after looking at the map, that most Scots want it.

It doesn't matter to me, though. I'm not Scottish!

Interestingly "Scottish"ness doesn't necessarily matter for eligibility to vote in this referendum. I was born and raised there for 25 years but cannot vote as I'm not resident there. Those who live in Scotland can vote, regardless* of their nationality or how they identify. Which is of course correct and reflects what I'd like an independent Scotland to look like - immigrant friendly and diverse.

* = within certain restrictions, something like a couple of years resident prior to the referendum. Don't quote me on that :)

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/ 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. ;)

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/). Quarter Mile is a beautiful building, but you can't beat being surrounded by other startups!

Looks like a population map.

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

When the colours are summed up? I would hope it is - otherwise data is missing. But you can definitely see differences between cities when you zoom up. For example Glasgow seems to be a primarily "No" place, but Kirkcaldy is mostly for "Yes".

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.

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

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Hi Andrew. Thanks for the feedback, have updated the copy on the 'welcome' message to reflect this.

(This message is only displayed to first-time users of the site.)

It seems like on the ground in Scotland, the sides are just "YES" and "NO" at this point.

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!

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.

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!

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).

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

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.

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?

or maybe just a shortcut to see results button

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".

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?

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"?).

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!)

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

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

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?

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.

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

Thanks for taking a look!

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.

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

Thanks for taking a look for us!

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

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

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...

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