Category: application

How to confuse your shareholders by bad data visualization

Like many people during the COVID19 crisis, I turned to the stock market as a new hobby.

Like the ignorant investor that I am, I thought it wise to hop on the cloud computing bandwagon.

Hence, I bought, among others, a small position in Rackspace Technologies.

A long way down

Now, my Rackspace shares have plummeted in price since I bought them.

Screenshot of Google Finance on August 25th 2021: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/RXT:NASDAQ?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjxqdr0oczyAhWKtqQKHZk3A90Q_AUoAXoECAEQAw&window=6M

Obviously, this is less than ideal for me, but also, I should not be surprised.

Clearly, I knew nothing about the company I bought shares in. Apparently they are going through some big time reorganization, and this is not good price-wise.

Fast forward to yesterday.

Doing research

To re-evalute my investment, I thought it wise to have a look at Rackspace’s Quarterly Report.

According to Investopedia: A quarterly report is a summary or collection of unaudited financial statements, such as balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements, issued by companies every quarter (three months). In addition to reporting quarterly figures, these statements may also provide year-to-date and comparative (e.g., last year’s quarter to this year’s quarter) results. Publicly-traded companies must file their reports with the Securities Exchange Committee (SEC).

Fortunately these quarterly reports are readily available on the investors relation page, and they are not that hard to read once you have seen a few.

Visualizing financial data

I was excited to see that Rackspace offered their financial performance in bite-sized bits to me as a laymen, through their usage of nice visualizations of the financial data.

Please take a moment to process the below copy of page 11 of their 2021 Q2 report:

Screenshot of page 11 of the 2021 Q2 Quarterly Report of Rackspace Technologies: https://ir.rackspace.com/static-files/474fde80-f203-4227-a438-57b062992d46

Though… the longer I looked at these charts… the more my head started to hurt…

How can the growth line be about the same in the three charts Total Revenue (top-left), Core Revenue (top-right), and Non-GAAP EPS (bottom-right)? They represent different increments: 13%, 17%, and 14% respectively.

Zooming in on the top left: how does the $657 revenue of 2Q20 fit inside the $744 revenue of 2Q21 almost three times?!

The increase is only 13%, not 300%!

Recreating the problem

I decided to recreate the vizualizations of the quarterly report.

To see what the visualization should have actually looked like. And to see how they could have made this visualization worse.

You can find the R ggplot2 code for these plots here on Github.

If you know me, you know I can’t do something 50%, so I decided to make the plots look as closely to the original Rackspace design as possible.

Here are the results:

Here are all three combined, along with two simple questions:

This I shared on social media (LinkedIn, Twitter), to ask for people’s opinions:

And I tagged Rackspace and offered them my help!

I hope they’re not offended and respond : )

Using OpenCV to win Mobile games

OpenCV is open-source library with tools and functionalities that support computer vision. It allows your computer to use complex mathematics to detect lines, shapes, colors, text and what not.

OpenCV was originally developed by Intel in 2000 and sometime later someone had the bright idea to build a Python module on top of it.

Using a simple…

pip install opencv-python

…you can now use OpenCV in Python to build advanced computer vision programs.

And this is exactly what many professional and hobby programmers are doing. Specifically, to get their computer to play (and win) mobile app games.

ZigZag

In ZigZag, you are a ball speeding down a narrow pathway and your only mission is to avoid falling off.

Using OpenCV, you can get your computer to detect objects, shapes, and lines.

This guy set up an emulator on his computer, so the computer can pretend to be a mobile device. Then he build a program using Python’s OpenCV module to get a top score

You can find the associated code here, but note that will need to set up an emulator yourself before being able to run this code.

Kick Ya Chop

In Kick Ya Chop, you need to stomp away parts of a tree as fast as you can, without hitting any of the branches.

This guy uses OpenCV to perform image pattern matching to allow his computer to identify and avoid the trees braches. Find the code here.

Whack ‘Em All

We all know how to play Whack a Mole, and now this computer knows how to too. Code here.

Pong

This last game also doesn’t need an introduction, and you can find the code here.

Is this machine learning or AI?

If you’d ask me, the videos above provide nice examples of advanced automation. But there’s no real machine learning or AI involved.

Yes, sure, the OpenCV package uses pre-trained neural networks under the hood, and you can definitely call those machine learning. But the programmers who now use the opencv library just leverage the knowledge stored in those network to create very basal decision rules.

IF pixel pattern of mole
THEN whack!
ELSE no whack.

To me, it’s only machine learning when there’s really some learning going on. A feedback loop with performance improvement. And you may call it AI, IMO, when the feedback loop is more or less autonomous.

Fortunately, programmers have also been taking a machine learning/AI approach to beating games. Specifically using reinforcement learning. Think of famous applications like AlphaGo and AlphaStar. But there are also hobby programmers who use similar techniques. For example, to get their computer to obtain highscores on Trackmania.

In a later post, I’ll dive into those in more detail.

Try Hack Me – Cyber Security Challenges

Sometimes I just stumble across these random resources that I immediately want to share with fellow geeks. If you like computers and programming, you should definitely have a look at…

https://tryhackme.com

TryHackMe started in 2018 by two cyber security enthusiasts, Ashu Savani and Ben Spring, who met at a summer internship. When getting started with in the field, they found learning security to be a fragmented, inaccessable and difficult experience; often being given a vulnerable machine’s IP with no additional resources is not the most efficient way to learn, especially when you don’t have any prior knowledge. When Ben returned back to University he created a way to deploy machines and sent it to Ashu, who suggested uploading all the notes they’d made over the summer onto a centralised platform for others to learn, for free.
To allow users to share their knowledge, TryHackMe allows other users (at no charge) to create a virtual room, which contains a combination of theoretical and practical learning components.. In early 2019, Jon Peters started creating rooms and suggested the platform build up a community, a task he took on and succeeded in.
The platform has never raised any capital and is entirely bootstrapped.
https://tryhackme.com/about

I don’t have any affiliation or whatever with the platform, but I just think it’s a super cool resource if you want to learn more about hands-on computer stuff.

Here’s a nice demo on an advanced programmer taking on one of the first challenges. I definitely still have a long way to go, but it’s fun to watch someone sneak into a (dummy) server and look for clues! Like a proper detective, but then an extra nerdy one!

There are many “hacktivities” you can try on the platform.

And if you’re serious about learning this stuff, there are learning paths set out for you!

If you like their content, do consider taking a paid subscription and share this great initiative!

How a File Format Exposed a Crossword Scandal

Vincent Warmerdam shared this Youtube video which I thoroughly enjoyed watched. It’s about Saul Pwanson, a software engineer whose hobby project got a little out of hand.

In 2016, Saul Pwanson designed a plain-text file format for crossword puzzle data, and then spent a couple of months building a micro-data-pipeline, scraping tens of thousands of crosswords from various sources.

After putting all these crosswords in a simple uniform format, Saul used some simple command line commands to check for common patterns and irregularities.

Surprisingly enough, after visualizing the results, Saul discovered egregious plagiarism by a major crossword editor that had gone on for years.

Ultimately, 538 even covered the scandal:

I thoroughly enjoyed watching this talk on Youtube.

Saul covers the file format, data pipeline, and the design choices that aided rapid exploration; the evidence for the scandal, from the initial anomalies to the final damning visualization; and what it’s like for a data project to get 15 minutes of fame.

I tried to localize the dataset online, but it seems Saul’s website has since gone offline. If you do happen to find it, please do share it in the comments!

Implementations of Trustworthy and Ethical AI (Report)

Want to consider artificial intelligence applications and implementations from an ethical standpoint? Here’s a high-level conceptual view you might like:

Kolja Verhage wrote a report The Implementation of Trustworthy/Ethical AI in the US and Canada in cooperation with the Netherlands Innovation Attaché Network. Based on numerous interviews with AI ethics experts, Kolja presents an overview of approaches and models on how to implement ethical AI.

For over 30 years there has been academic research on ethics and technology. Over the past five years, however, we’ve seen an acceleration in the impact of algorithms on society. This has led both companies
and governments across the world to think about how to govern these algorithms and control their impact on society. The first step of this has been for companies and governments to present abstract high-level principles of what they consider “Ethical AI”.
Kolja Verhage

You can access the report here.

Practical Tools for Human-Centered Design

Google’s guidebook to human-centered AI design refered to the Design Kit, containing numerous helpful tools to help you design products with user experience in mind.

The design kit website contains many practical methods, tools, case studies and much more resources to help you in the design process.

Human-centered design is a practical, repeatable approach to arriving at innovative solutions. Think of these Methods as a step-by-step guide to unleashing your creativity, putting the people you serve at the center of your design process to come up with new answers to difficult problems.

The design kit methods section provides some seriously handy guidelines to help you design your products with the customer in mind. A step-by-step process guideline is offered, as well as neat worksheets to records the information you collect in the process, and a video explanation of the method.