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Episode #50: Max Galka
135 Plays9 years ago
Welcome back to the show! This week, I’m pleased to have Max Galka join me on the show. Max is a data enthusiast and has created a lot of great visualizations, ranging from such topics as immigration, traffic, and climate...
The post Episode #50: Max Galka appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction and Max Galca's Background
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabich. I'm joined today by Max Galca, who is a man of mystery, shall we say.
00:00:21
Speaker
A man who has created lots of really cool visualizations. You may have seen his recent project, The History of U.S. Immigration. We're going to talk about that in some other very cool projects he's been working on. Max, welcome to the show. Well, glad to be here, John. Thanks for coming on. Why don't we start, since I'm not sure a lot of people in the data field, I'm not sure they know a lot about you, so why don't we start by having you talk a little bit about yourself, and then I want to dive into some of these great projects.
00:00:46
Speaker
Sure, sure. So I have, as I imagine a lot of people that you speak to do, I have quite a varied background. I've worked in a lot of different industries in a lot of different ways. So I started my career trading mortgage backed securities, which had very little to do with data that was kind of the stereotypical trader job of doing tons of trades throughout the day, very stressful. And I sort of from there made my way to working with more complex financial products. So
00:01:15
Speaker
I spent most of my career trading insurance-linked derivatives, which is really sort of the opposite end of the trading spectrum. So instead of doing 200 trades a day, it would be maybe one or two trades a month. So at that point, it's really much less a trading job than it is a modeling job, looking at these trades and really understanding what the risk is. So that's really where most of my experience working with data comes from.
00:01:42
Speaker
So modeling things like hurricanes, earthquakes, stuff like that is just very, very data intensive. So that's where I spent both my career.
00:01:52
Speaker
Since then, I have worked on a number of projects, startups,
Entrepreneurial Ventures and Transparency Projects
00:01:58
Speaker
I guess. Not all of them are revenue generating, so I don't know if you can call them startups, but I started a real estate data-related business. Well, they started. You've got that, so they started. Yes, yes. They started, so I guess that makes them startups. I started a real estate data-related business called Reevaluate, which I exited.
00:02:22
Speaker
about a year ago. Since then, I have worked on a Freedom of Information related project called FoyMapper, which I launched earlier this year. Metrocosm is the site where I do my data visualization work.
00:02:38
Speaker
which I've known for about a year now, and have another project coming up called Truth From Data that we'll be launching shortly. Right, so I want to talk about both the FOIA mapper and the Truth From Data product, but let's start with some of the data visualization projects you've done.
Immigration Visualization and Misconceptions
00:02:55
Speaker
The most recent one is the history of of us immigration can you talk a little bit about why you created that visualization and what your thought process was as you were creating it so for those who haven't seen it, it's a map of the world with circles flowing back and forth from the different countries into the us so you just talk a little bit about the project and how you built it and what your what your thought process was going into it.
00:03:17
Speaker
Sure, sure. So, uh, what I like about doing these data visualizations and what the work I do on, on Metrocosm, I sort of enjoy digging into, you know, sometimes political questions or other questions that are out there and looking at it from a very analytical data-driven perspective.
00:03:33
Speaker
So this is one that I've looked at with all the discussion right now about immigration. I wanted to dig into the data and kind of really see, okay, what is the reality about immigration to the US? How many people are coming over? Why are they coming over? Where are they coming from? And it turns out there's actually a very, very rich set of data that the government makes public about that kind of stuff.
00:03:59
Speaker
get too much into political views when I post stuff. I try to keep it pretty objective and let people reach their own conclusions. But really my view is that some of the discussion going on about immigration has gotten a little bit out of hand. I fully understand where people are coming from with their illegal immigration problems that's causing for certain people, certain families. But a lot of the talk right now is kind of getting into legal immigration.
00:04:29
Speaker
Yeah, cause on that and I think that's Just makes no sense from so many different levels So yeah, I think if there is a message that I wanted to communicate with with this graphic is that you know, we're really a country of immigrants and you know, that's sort of a cliche people say that a lot but Yeah, I mean in reality
00:04:56
Speaker
I would imagine in this map, it shows every everyone who's come over here since 1820. And the country had about 10 million people total population. So I would be pretty shocked if anyone in the country is not descended from somebody who's come over since then. So, you know, when you see comments out there, people saying things like, we've been opening the door to the world for the last 200 years.
00:05:26
Speaker
I think the we is sort of, regardless of what your ultimate political view is, I think that we is sort of misplaced. All of us had ancestors that came over here looking for a better life. I think should have a little more respect for the fact that really just for our history.
00:05:45
Speaker
Sure. We're allowed to come here. So can I ask a little bit about the process you went through to create this particular visualization? So how did you end up in both a map format and then also an animated format?
The Future of Animated Visualizations
00:05:56
Speaker
I think that's what sort of people really got engaged with is that actually sort of the animation allows you to look at the data and the visualization in kind of a different way than your sort of standard interactive where you click and you move things around, that sort of thing. So how did you end up in that particular approach?
00:06:14
Speaker
Well, I mean, that that's something that I'm really big on is, is animated visualization. I think Mark Zuckerberg, this is just general for content, but he made some comment about within the next few years, the majority of content online is going to be video is going to be animated. I think it just it just makes sense. I mean, it gives you an entire additional dimension by which to, you know, when it comes to visualizations to communicate information. I mean, I think
00:06:41
Speaker
making graphics animated doesn't require that much additional work. And it just makes them tire to mention richer and more engaging. Right. And so you're building these in D3 and JavaScript. This one, it uses D3 all the way through, but D3 is traditionally used with SVG. So SVG is what I used for the background map. Okay.
The Power of Cartograms in Politics
00:07:02
Speaker
But the problem with SVG
00:07:05
Speaker
Where it's limited is with the you can't have too many things moving around on the screen at the same time So that's where canvas comes in so the little particles that are moving around
00:07:15
Speaker
Those are done using Canvas. Cool. So let me pivot just a little bit because you've also written on maps. You've written that great blog post. You're a big kind of cartograms. Yes. So can you talk a little bit about what you see as the advantages and disadvantages of cartograms? We are now entering, we've been in the political cycle for a while, we're going to enter the general now. We're going to see lots of choropleth maps with reds and blues.
00:07:37
Speaker
We'll see people yelling about that in different ways. So what about the cartogram intrigues you and do you see that as maybe that'll be the standard map that we'll be looking at soon? I don't know if it'll be the standard map. I think for certain purposes and it's I think the political maps is a very good example. They make a lot more sense in some cases. So for political maps when you're looking at elections, I think it should be the standard. Something that we're all familiar with is looking at the
00:08:05
Speaker
country in the red and blue states, the area is broken out, and the country always looks entirely red with a few little patches of blue. How are these elections always so close? The whole map is red except for the states on the coast. If you do the color by smaller regions, by counting, it's even more exaggerated.
00:08:24
Speaker
Because you have all the dense little cities going Democrat and everything else Republican. I wouldn't go so far to say it's misleading to do that, but it doesn't really accurately convey the information. You can have, well, you do have gigantic segments of the population that live within tiny little areas. When you just use color on a map, it just conveys no sense of magnitude. Color is great for when you're comparing
00:08:48
Speaker
Two different areas I'm trying to say, is this area more than this area? For example, if you're looking at two different states and you're looking at the populations, color them accordingly. You could say, okay, does state A have a greater population than state B? And you can answer that very easily just looking at color. But what you can't really communicate well with color is how much bigger is the population of state A than state B. Yeah, that's really the advantage of cardograms. You can also use color.
00:09:13
Speaker
You can still do that, but distorting the dimensions of the regions is a much better way of communicating magnitude.
00:09:22
Speaker
There's a trade-off there, right? Like you get this, the color on the map is, is perhaps more accurately distributed, but then you, you distort the geography. And I feel like that's what people love about maps that they know that they live in Buffalo, New York, and they can go see that point in New York. And then when you distort the map, it's harder to see. So, yes. I mean, maybe there is no balance. Maybe there is no right, right way. I mean, how do you, how do you get people to engage with a map where it doesn't really resemble the geography that they're familiar with?
00:09:51
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's a really simple solution for that. This is what I do on my website is you make them animated and this kind of gets right back to what we were discussing before about animation is if you animate cartograms, so they start off with the geography you're familiar with and then they change to distorted. By seeing that transition, you can pretty clearly tell which area is which. I made a map like that that shows the total property value of every county in the US, just looking at the cartogram itself.
00:10:19
Speaker
there would really be no way of knowing which little area is which. Maybe by looking at the whole thing, you could tell that it's the US, although even that I think is not so clear. But by animating it, you can see very clearly where everything comes from. You can see Manhattan, which starts off as like barely visible, grows into a big share of
00:10:41
Speaker
So when you're building the animation in a visualization like that where you're transitioning between sort of traditional map and a cartogram map, what are you thinking about when it comes to the timing for each of the different views that someone's going to see? So they see sort of a standard map and then it morphs into another map. How are you thinking about how long each piece of that visualization should show up on someone's screen? There's something I've given too much thought to. I think as I've done it, I've tried to just make it long enough to where you're comfortable and
00:11:09
Speaker
Just make it clear. Yeah. So you can see the map and see where each place is and then be able to follow the transition to what it looks like in the cardiogram. Right. Very cool. Well, I'm thinking of making things
FOIA Mapper and Government Data Accessibility
00:11:19
Speaker
clear. I want to talk about another project you have. This is your FOIA mapper project that you mentioned earlier. This is a project funded by the Knight Foundation. It won a prototype fund award. So can you give folks a background on that? It certainly has a really interesting background, not just what it does, but actually a really cool background to it.
00:11:36
Speaker
FOIA is something that I've used for several years now and I've used in many different capacities. I mentioned that I used to model hurricanes and earthquakes. A lot of that data I was able to get using freedom of information. Specifically, what I really needed to build those models was accurate information about the amount of damage that was done by past disasters.
00:11:57
Speaker
on a very granular level. That kind of information is really not available online, but I discovered that you can get pretty detailed information by requesting it using freedom of information. Sort of hard to describe, but as I got looking at freedom of information, I found it to be something that is just really striking how much information is out there and how powerful this law is. It's used by only a very small number of people.
00:12:22
Speaker
The amount of information that is out there is just that you have access to the freedom of make. Information is just enormous. Can you talk a little bit about the process of actually submitting a FOIA request? Because I think perhaps one of the reasons that there are so few requests is that people think it's this huge administrative burden to go in and make this request. I don't think that's quite the case, right?
00:12:44
Speaker
That's right. Yeah. I think that there are some people that will spend lots of time laboring over the request to make sure it's worth it just perfectly. But in reality, doing that only kind of is a marginal difference in terms of whether you get the information or not. Really, you can make a request as to just the simplest thing in the world. You find the email address for the government agency that has the information you want. You write in plain English what you want. And really, that's it.
00:13:15
Speaker
It's that simple. Yeah, you know, like when I started this project, a lot of people when they asked me what it does, you know, they were asking me if it helps you make the FOIA requests, which I sort of find to be, I don't know, sort of an odd question. Right. Like if you can write an email, you can make a FOIA request, right? Yeah, exactly. Just type out what you want. Right. That's really good. So what does the FOIA mapper do then?
00:13:39
Speaker
So what does make requests difficult is what I found is that there's no directory online that tells you what information each government agency has. So that's really the time consuming part is finding information that's out there requires going to agency websites and looking through reports and maybe there's a mention of some database in a report and then you submit a request for it and maybe that request gets denied, but in the process you figure out
00:14:09
Speaker
more information about what this thing actually is. So that's really the challenge. So what I have done is I have sort of gone after the problem in two different ways. The first way is, I guess I would call it like a FOIA hack, which is what they call FOIA logs.
00:14:27
Speaker
which is just a list of requests that other people have submitted to an agency. So you can see exactly what other people asked for, you can see who asked for it, and that gives you some clues as to what information this agency has. So what I did is I've gone out and requested that information from a bunch of different agencies, and hey, I'd like to see every request you've received over the last few years. So it's requesting the requests? Yes. As easy as making an actual FOIA request?
00:14:56
Speaker
In fact, it's one of the easiest ones to make because every government agency is familiar with these requests. If you say, I request your FOIA logs for last year, then don't really know exactly what you're talking about. No good chance they already have it processed on hand and ready to send out. Mostly they arrive in PDF format, which is kind of a pain in the neck to deal with contracting information with PDFs. Before I started doing it, I had no idea.
00:15:25
Speaker
And I still don't understand why it's so difficult, but it is really challenging. You have to get someone from Adobe on the show to find out. Yes, I look forward to seeing that. So I took this information, I extracted it, put it into a database, and made it searchable. So you can search by topic, type in some examples. I get up there, Hillary Clinton, and you can see what information people are requesting about Hillary Clinton. UFOs.
00:15:53
Speaker
any topic. And is this a living project? Do you continually update it? Or is it sort of now? Well, so it needs to be continually updated, I would guess. Yes, so it is. There's another side of the project too, which I think is the area that I originally envisioned and where I think it has the most room to grow. There is documentation online about what information government agencies have. Or I should say some of it's online, some of it
00:16:18
Speaker
we need to actually request similar to the FOIA logs. And it's kind of covered in a number of different kinds of documents that aren't really intended as like a directory of information databases, but they do contain that information. So for example, the information that's on there now is what they call record disposition schedules.
00:16:40
Speaker
So agencies for every three record system they have, they have to decide, get approved, the amount of time they're going to keep the information and what they're going to do with it once that time period runs out. So that information I've gone out and collected and these documents have descriptions of each of these record systems. So that's another database that I have that's searchable.
00:17:05
Speaker
Yeah, there's a number of really different kinds of documents out there like that, like what they call RFPs, when an agency actually builds these record systems. They have to give the instructions to the person who builds it. And those instructions give you pretty good detailed description of what's in this database. So yeah, I mean, in concept, it's one thing to know that if you're looking for information about, throughout an arbitrary topic, noise, which is a problem, it's a
00:17:34
Speaker
Something I dealt with in my real estate startup was that noise is something that really bothers people. So if you're looking for information on noise, you might find out that the FAA has information about airplane noise, airplane noise database. But actually understanding what information is in there is really another challenge. So my hope is to get enough documentation about these different record systems that someone can type in noise
00:18:04
Speaker
for example, and they'll see a list of record systems. So they'll say, okay, all the FDA has information about airplane noise. And then they can dig in further and see, okay, great, this is exactly the information they have. So now I can ask them for a very, very precise request with exactly the information that I want. I gotcha, I see. So you're actually helping people craft their FOIA requests? Yes, in a sense, yes, yeah. The FOIA requests are very easy to write. Right, if you know.
00:18:35
Speaker
So this is giving you the information about helping you figure out what it is. Very good. Let's talk about another project that you have, which is not quite out yet.
Truth From Data and Addressing Discrimination
00:18:44
Speaker
It's something called Truth From Data. So tell us a little bit about that and when folks are going to be able to see it. So Truth From Data is a business I'm starting with my co-founder Lee Godfrey, who is a guy I've known for a long time and was actually my first boss when I started my career.
00:19:01
Speaker
The two of us both have combined a lot of experience working with data in a lot of different industries in a number of different capacities. And just very generically in concept, we both see just an enormous opportunity out there with data analytics. It sounds sort of generic in that sense, but it is, but there is so much data out there that could be helpful in making decisions, generating value and solving problems. It really needs specialized help.
00:19:31
Speaker
in so many different areas in terms of finding the data, which is sort of what FOIA mapping is about, in terms of organizing it and cleaning it, in terms of putting together the architecture to store it, and then, let's say from there, both analyzing it and communicating it visually. Each of those steps is not trivial. So I think that it's really just an
00:20:01
Speaker
a huge opportunity out there to help people with these, make value from data. That's really what the business is about at a very high level. The first project we're working on deals with discriminatory lending, both from the perspective of identifying it and helping to address the problem, and also from the perspective of the mortgage companies, really helping them to identify whether they are doing it, dealing with
The Role of Data Analytics in Decision-Making
00:20:30
Speaker
the regulatory issues that are around that. So there is a very large data set called, it's the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, which includes for every year nearly every mortgage application in the country. So the first project involves digging into that data and looking for different kinds of patterns that come out of it.
00:20:51
Speaker
Great, great. Well, yeah, I mean, there's clearly a need for more data analytics and of course data visualization and the whole spectrum of working with data. So good luck with that new project. And I'm looking forward to seeing more things on your site, Microcosm. This has been really great, really interesting. Thanks for coming on the show. Yeah, thank you very much. Glad to be here. Yeah. All right. Thanks again for everyone for listening and tuning in. That's it for this week's episode. So until next time, this has been the PolicyViz podcast.