Doing a Graph to highlight usefulness of twitter followers - math

I'm making a blog post about how if you follow TOO many people on twitter they end up becoming less useful (because you have too many tweets to go through/miss important updates).
So there's a direct correlation between the number of users you follow and how useful they become. If you follow too many the, the usefulness goes down, you need to find the right amount.
I'm trying to represent that in a graph vaguely (with no specific points)
I can imagine the graph having an X - with usefulness being Horizontal and No. of users you follow being Vertical. the sweet spot would therefore be in the middle.
Is this a good/correct way to represent what I'm trying to do? Could I potentially do it using a different graph type?

Would be more logical - at least in the Western world - to plot the friends count in X (horizontal) axis and the usefulness in Y (vertical) axis, I can see this in a line chart.
The chart would help readers get the idea, but I doubt you will be able to measure the "usefulness" in a relevant way.
Its value would also differ according to the profile of twitter friends: teenagers and niche professionals don't have the same usage of twitter and therefore do not publish the same volume of tweets. Therefore I would not use actual number of followers in the X axis, but instead only show "few followers" to the left, and "many friends" to the right.

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Plot movement over time in (preferably) Google Maps

I have a spreadsheet with columns for person, date, event, place name, latitude, and longitude. This is the result of many years of genealogical research that shows the birth, marriage, and death locations for several hundred of my direct ancestors as they migrated across the world and finally converged in South Africa for the last few generations.
I'd very much like to create an animation or video showing their movements over time, preferably with a marker flashing at the location, then fading away, with or without lines linking the markers for the duration of the person's life. At 9 generations ago this would then show 512 births happening at roughly the same time, moving on to them converging into 256 places as couples got married, then between those 256 marriages and the original 512 deaths, the 256 births of people of the next generation would flash on, and so on, finally converging on just my birth. I believe such an animation would be an excellent way to make the vast family tree accessible in a visual way, and other genealogical researchers would probably also enjoy doing this. The ability to automatically zoom in on the bounding box of the locations at any given time would be needed to show movements within a smaller geographic location, but first and foremost I simply want to plot points over time.
Does anyone know of a free or commercial tool that would allow doing this? I have explored this in most genealogical software solutions but they provide very limited tools showing one person or one couple at a time, so I suspect I'm going to have to plug this into a generic 'plot movement over time' tool in a good map service.
I have used GraphXR for plotting family tree members linked to one of their several maps, with the edges being either a birth, marriage or death date. The data is queried from Neo4j which has a seamless interface with GraphXR.
I'm now working on a Neo4j PlugIn for genealogy and collaborating with GraphXR developers to make such visualizations easier for end users.
It's not exactly what you are looking for, but it may be helpful?
http://gfg.md/blogpost/7

Here api not showing any data in /places/v1/dicover/here for specific lat long

I am using here map api for getting nearby places but it is giving blank data (/places/v1/descover/here). While in /descover/explore/ it is giving so many records on same lat long. I am sharing screenshot for better understanding, Visit https://www.awesomescreenshot.com/image/3804672/65583a3e4f228ade754feba101ef26eb.
This depends on the use case you have.
The Here entrypoint helps users to identify direct places at their location or at a point selected on a map by returning places close to a given point, sorted by distance. (Normally the closest known places are returned, but if the uncertainty in the position is high then some nearer places are excluded from the result in favour of more popular places in the area of uncertainty.)
Then again the Explore entrypoint retrieves a complete list of relevant places nearby a given position or area. It answers the question "What interesting places are in the viewport of the map?" The results presented to the user are confined to those located in the current map view or search area and are ordered by popularity.
In general I would recommend to use the Explore entrypoint as the Here one is deprecated:
https://developer.here.com/documentation/places/topics_api/entrypoint-maturity-availability.html

Procedural Road Generation, Unity

Im developing 2d isometric game. You driving car on city, thats all.
The issue is generating random maps with connected roads.
I would like to write script - i think i will be able to - but i cant find an idea for alghoritm itself.
Lets say i have 100x100 map, and i would like to build boolean table 1 is road 0 is not road.
As far i have solution that is drawing random number of lines (4-8 for ex) in horizontal and same vertical. But this road map is straight.
Can u share some ideas? Any will help
the question is too broad for a simple answer. theres plenty of ways in various degrees of complexity.
but as tip, consider the problem from a different perspective. sure in the end you want roads, but why are the roads there in the first place?
in your case its a city. a city consists of city blocks wich usually are rectangular. so one way would be to find a way to fill the map with rectangular shapes and consider the edges roads (or only some).
or you could look into triangulation algorithms and triangulate your map with a bunch of random points. then combine some triangles and use those edges as roads.
or even only use a random walk set up so it doesnt turn around completely.
or ...
... seriously though, the options and possible solutions are manifold and dependent on your skill level (as well as how you want to look your city in the end).
dont search for your specific problem, try to adapt some other algorithm for your need. theres plenty of tutorials on random dungeon generation for roguelike games.
also in the end there probably wont be a single generation algorithm giving you the best result, but a combination of many.

Is it possible in sketchup, to have one face in multiple groups/layers?

i wana to make simple plugin in sketchup, but first of all i need to understand how sketchup works. So i played with faces, shapes, groups and layers as little kid, but there is something that blows my mind.
Is here even posible, to have one face in two groups? Or probably layer, but group will be much better. For example, i have a house which i wana to split into two zones (house + garage for example) and i know, that between this two rooms is only one wall, but it belongs to house (living part) and to garage. I would like to have garage and house (living part), but im not able to click this one in sketchup. If needed i can provide image, but i think its enough explained.
If you add a face in a ComponentDefinition and place ComponentInstances in the model that face will exist in several places in the model. Groups are like component instances - but they are made unique when you edit them.
For more details you can read this article: http://www.thomthom.net/thoughts/2012/02/definitions-and-instances-in-sketchup/

Determining the popularity of a video with ratings and views

I am about to embark on a new project - a video website. Users will be able to register, and vote on videos by clicking "like" or "dislike", or something to that effect. In any event, it will be a 2-option voting system, not a 5-star system.
Every X number of days, I will be generating a "chart" of the most popular videos. So my question is: how should I determine the popularity of a given video?
If I went the route of tallying up the videos with the most views, this could have the effect of exceptionally bad videos making it to the of the charts (just because they're so bad).
If I go the route of a scoring system based on the amount of "like" and "dislike" votes (eg. 100 like votes, and 50 dislike votes equals a score of 2), videos with few views could appear on the top of the charts.
So, what I need to do is a combination of the two. Barring, of course, spammy views and votes.
What's your guys' thoughts on the subject?
Edit: the following tags were removed: [mysql] [postgresql], to make room for other, more representative tags; the SQL technology used in the intended implementation does not seem to bear much on the considerations regarding the rating model per-se.
You seem to be missing the point that likes and dislikes in movies are anything but objective even within the context of a relatively homogeneous group of "voters". Think how the term "Chix Flix" or the success story called "NetFlix", illustrate this subjectivity...
Yet, if you persist in implementing the model you suggest, there are several hidden variables and system dynamics that need to be acknowledged and possibly taken into account in the rating's formula.
the existence of a third, implicit, value of the vote: "No vote"
i.e. when someone views the movie page and yet doesn't vote, either way.
The problem of dealing with this extra value is its ambiguity: do people not vote because they didn't see the movie or because they neither truly like nor disliked it? Very likely a bit of both, therefore we can/should use the count of the "Page views without vote" in the formula, to boost (somewhat) the rating of movies that do not generate a strong (positive or negative) sentiment (lest the "polarizing" movies will appear more notorious or popular)
the bandwagon effect
Past a certain threshold, and particularly if the rating and/or vote counts is visible before the page view, the rating and vote counts can influence the way people decide to vote (either way) or even decide to abstain from voting. The implication is that the total vote and/or view counts do not relate linearly to the effective rating.
"quality" vs. "notoriety"
Vote ratios in general (eg "likes" / "total" or "likes"/"dislikes" etc.) are indicative of the "quality" of a movie (note the quotes around quality...), whereby the number of votes (and of views) is indicative of the notoriety ("name recognition" etc.) of a movie.
statistical representativity
Very small vote and/or view counts are to be handled carefully because they introduce much volatility in the rating. Phrased otherwise, small samples make for not so statically representative ratings.
trends (the time variable)
At the risk of complicating the model, consider keeping [some] record of when votes/view happened, to allow identifying "hot" (and "cooling") movies in the collection. This info may inform the rating logic, but also may be used to direct the users towards currently hot items. BTW, hence feeding the bandwagon effect mentioned :-( but also, increasing the voting sample size :-).
All these considerations suggest caution in implementing this rating system. It also hints at the likely need of including statistics about the complete set of movies into the rating formula for an individual movie. In other words, do not rate a given movie solely on the basis of the its own vote/view counts but also on say the average vote counts a move receives, the maximum view a movie page gets etc. In fact, an iterative process, whereby movies are [roughly] ranked at first and then the ranking is recalculated by using the statistics of groups of movies similarly rated may provide a better system (provided the formulas are "fair" and somehow converge)
A standard trick is to start with a neutral baseline: say 10 likes and 10 dislikes that gives a score of 1. The first few votes don't change the ratio too much, but as votes accumulate, the baseline is overwhelmed. The exact choice of the baseline values will influence the rating of a new movie (the two values don't have to be equal), and how many votes are needed to change the rating substantially.

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