# How Much Money Should Machines Earn?

Every inch of sky’s got a star
Every inch of skin’s got a scar

I think that a very good way to start with R is doing an interactive visualization of some open data because you will train many important skills of a data scientist: loading, cleaning, transforming and combinig data and performing a suitable visualization. Doing it interactive will give you an idea of the power of R as well, because you will also realise that you are able to handle indirectly other programing languages such as JavaScript.

That’s precisely what I’ve done today. I combined two interesting datasets:

• The probability of computerisation of 702 detailed occupations, obtained by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne from the University of Oxford, using a Gaussian process classifier and published in this paper in 2013.
• Statistics of jobs from (employments, median annual wages and typical education needed for entry) from the US Bureau of Labor, available here.

Apart from using `dplyr` to manipulate data and `highcharter` to do the visualization, I used `tabulizer` package to extract the table of probabilities of computerisation from the `pdf`: it makes this task extremely easy.

This is the resulting plot:

If you want to examine it in depth, here you have a full size version.

These are some of my insights (its corresponding figures are obtained directly from the dataset):

• There is a moderate negative correlation between wages and probability of computerisation.
• Around 45% of US employments are threatened by machines (have a computerisation probability higher than 80%): half of them do not require formal education to entry.
• In fact, 78% of jobs which do not require formal education to entry are threatened by machines: 0% which require a master’s degree are.
• Teachers are absolutely irreplaceable (0% are threatened by machines) but they earn a 2.2% less then the average wage (unfortunately, I’m afraid this phenomenon occurs in many other countries as well).
• Don’t study for librarian or archivist: it seems a bad way to invest your time
• Mathematicians will survive to machines

The code of this experiment is available here.

# Coloring Sudokus

Someday you will find me
caught beneath the landslide
(Champagne Supernova, Oasis)

I recently read a book called Snowflake Seashell Star: Colouring Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos and Edmund Harris which is full of mathematical patterns to be coloured. All images are truly appealing and cause attraction to anyone who look at them, independently of their age, gender, education or political orientation. This book demonstrates how maths are an astonishing way to reach beauty.

One of my favourite patterns are tridokus, a sophisticated colored version of sudokus. Coloring a sudoku is simple: once that is solved it is enough to assign a color to each number (from 1 to 9).  If you superimpose three colored sudokus with no cells at the same position sharing the same color, and using again nine colors, the resulting image is a tridoku:

There is something attractive in a tridoku due to the balance of colors but also they seem a quite messy: they are a charmingly unbalanced.  I wrote a script to generalize the concept to n-dokus. The idea is the same: superimpose n sudokus without cells sharing color and position (I call them disjoint sudokus) using just nine different colors. I did’n’t prove it, but I think the maximum amount of sudokus can be overimposed with these constrains is 9. This is a complete series from 1-doku to 9-doku (click on any image to enlarge):

I am a big fan of `colourlovers` package. These tridokus are colored with some of my favourite palettes from there:

Just two technical things to highlight:

• There is a package called sudoku that generates sudokus (of course!). I use it to obtain the first solved sudoku which forms the base.
• Subsequent sudokus are obtained from this one doing two operations: interchanging groups of columns first (there are three groups: columns 1 to 3, 4 to 6 and 7 to 9) and interchanging columns within each group then.

You can find the code here: do you own colored n-dokus!

# The Pleasing Ratio Project

Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand (Sir Duke, Stevie Wonder)

This serious man on the left is Gustav Theodor Fechner, a German philosopher, physicist and experimental psychologist who lived between 1801 and 1887. To be honest, I don’t know almost anything of his life or work exepct one thing: he did in the 1860s a thought-provoking experiment. It seems me interesting for two important reasons: he called into question something widely established and obtained experimental data by himself.

Fechner’s experiment was simple: he presented just ten rectangles to 82 students. Then he asked each of them to choose the most pleasing one and obtained revealing discoveries I will not explain here since would cause bias in my experiment. You can find more information about the original experiment here.

I have done a project inspired in Fechner’s one that I called The Pleasing Ratio Project. Once you enter in the App, you will see two rectangles. Both of them have the same area. They only vary in their length-to-width ratios. Then you will be asked to select the one that seems you most pleasing. You can do it as many times as you want (all responses are completely anonymous). Every game will confront a couple of ratios, which can vary from 1 to 3,5. In the Results section you will find the  percentage of winning games for each ratio. The one with the highest percentage will be named officially as The Most Pleasing Ratio of the World in the future by myself.

Although my experiment is absolutely inspired in Fechner’s one, there is a important difference: I can explore a bigger set of ratios doing an A/B test. This makes this one a bit richer.

The experiment has also some interesting technical features:

• the use of `shinydashboard` package to arrange the App
• the use of `shinyjs` package to add javaScript to refresh the page when use choose to play again
• to save votes in a text file
• to read it to visualize results

Will I obtain the same results as Fechner? This is a living project whose results will change over the time so you can check it regularly.

The code of the project is available in GitHub. Thanks a lot for your collaboration!

# Pencil Scribbles

Con las bombas que tiran los fanfarrones, se hacen las gaditanas tirabuzones (Palma y corona, Carmen Linares)

This time I draw Franky again using an algorithm to solve the Travelling Salesman Problem as I did in my last post. On this occasion, instead of doing just one single line drawing, I overlap many of them (250 concretely), each of them sampling 400 points on the original image (in my previous post I sampled 8.000 points). Last difference is that I don’t convert the image to pure black and white with `threshold` function: now I use the gray scale number of each pixel to weight the sample.

Once again, I use `ggplot2` package, and its magical `geom_path`, to generate the image. The pencil effect is obtained giving a very high transparency to the lines. This is the result:

I love when someone else experiment with my experiments as Mara Averick did:

You can do it as well with this one, since you will find the code here. Please, let me know your own creations if you do. You can find me on twitter or by email.

P.S.: Although it may seems otherwise, I’m not obsessed with Frankenstein 🙂

# The Travelling Salesman Portrait

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road (Stephen Hawking)

Imagine a salesman and a set of cities. The salesman has to visit each one of the cities starting from a certain one and returning to the same city. The challenge is finding the route which minimizes the total length of the trip. This is the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP): one of the most profoundly studied questions in computational mathematics. Since you can find a huge amount of articles about the TSP in the Internet, I will not give more details about it here.

In this experiment I apply an heuristic algorithm to solve the TSP to draw a portrait. The idea is pretty simple:

• Convert it to black and white
• Choose a sample of black points
• Solve the TSP to calculate a route among the points
• Plot the route

The result is a single line drawing of the image that you loaded. To solve the TSP I used the arbitrary insertion heuristic algorithm (Rosenkrantz et al. 1977), which is quite efficient.

To illustrate the idea, I have used again this image of Frankenstein (I used it before in this other experiment). This is the result:

You can find the code here.

# Mandalas Colored

Apriétame bien la mano, que un lucero se me escapa entre los dedos (Coda Flamenca, Extremoduro)

I have the privilege of being teacher at ESTALMAT, a project run by Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences that tries to detect, guide and stimulate in a continuous way, along two courses, the exceptional mathematical talent of students of 12-13 years old. Some weeks ago I gave a class there about the importance of programming. I tried to convince them that learning R or Python is a good investment that always pays off; It will make them enjoy more of mathematics as well as to see things with their own eyes. The main part of my class was a workshop about Voronoi tesselations in R. We started drawing points on a circle and we finished drawing mandalas like these ones. You can find the details of the workshop here (in Spanish). It was a wonderful experience to see the faces of the students while generating their own mandalas.

In that case all mandalas were empty, ready to be printed and coloured as my 7 years old daughter does. In this experiment I colour them. These are the changes I have done to my  previous code:

• Remove external segments which intersects the boundary of the enclosing
rectangle
• Convert the tesselation into a list of polygons with `tile.list` function
• Use `colourlovers` package to fill the polygons with beautiful colour palettes

This is an example of the result:

Changing three simple parameters (`iter`, `points` and `radius`) you can obtain completely different images (clicking on any image you can see its full size version):

You can find details of these parameters in my previous post. I cannot resist to place more examples:

You can find the code here. Enjoy.

# Mandalas

Mathematics is a place where you can do things which you can’t do in the real world (Marcus Du Sautoy, mathematician)

From time to time I have a look to some of my previous posts: it’s like seeing them through another’s eyes. One of my first posts was this one, where I draw fractals using the Multiple Reduction Copy Machine (MRCM) algorithm. That time I was not clever enough to write an efficient code able generate deep fractals. Now I am pretty sure I could do it using `ggplot` and I started to do it when I come across with the idea of mixing this kind of fractal patterns with Voronoi tessellations, that I have explored in some of my previous posts, like this one. Mixing both techniques, the mandalas appeared.

I will not explain in depth the mathematics behind this patterns. I will just give a brief explanation:

• I start obtaining `n` equidistant points in a unit circle centered in `(0,0)`
• I repeat the process with all these points, obtaining again `n` points around each of them; the radius is scaled by a factor
• I discard the previous (parent) `n` points

I repeat these steps iteratively. If I start with n points and iterate k times, at the end I obtain nk points. After that, I calculate the Voronoi tesselation of them, which I represent with `ggplot`.

This is an example:

Some others:

You can find the code here. Enjoy it.

# Fatal Journeys: Visualizing the Horror

In war, truth is the first casualty (Aeschylus)

I am not a pessimistic person. On the contrary, I always try to look at the bright side of life. I also believe that living conditions are now better than years ago as these plots show. But reducing the complexity of our world to just six graphs is riskily simplistic. Our world is quite far of being a fair place and one example is the immigration drama.

Last year there were 934 incidents around the world involving people looking for a better life where more than 5.300 people lost their life o gone missing, 60% of them in Mediterranean. Around 8 out of 100 were children.

The missing migrant project tracks deaths of migrants, including refugees and asylum-seekers, who have gone missing along mixed migration routes worldwide. You can find a huge amount of figures, plots and information about this scourge in their website. You can also download there a historical dataset with information of all these fatal journeys, including location, number of dead or missing people and information source from 2015 until today.

I this experiment I read the dataset and do some plots using `highcharter`; you can find a link to the R code at the end of the post.

This is the evolution of the amount of deaths or missing migrants in the process of migration towards an international destination from January 2015 to December 2017:

The Mediterranean is the zone with the most incidents. To see it more clearly, this plot compares Mediterranean with the rest of the world, grouping previous zones:

Is there any pattern in the time series of Mediterranean incidents? To see it, I have done a LOESS decomposition of the time series:

Good news: trend is decreasing for last 12 months. Regarding seasonal component, incidents increase in April and May. Why? I don’t know.

This is a map of the location of all incidents in 2017. Clicking on markers you will find information about each incident:

Every of us should try to make our world a better place. I don’t really know how to do it but I will try to make some experiments during this year to show that we have tons of work in front of us. Meanwhile, I hope this experiment is useful to give visibility to this humanitarian disaster. If someone wants to use the code, the complete project is available in GitHub.

# Tiny Art in Less Than 280 Characters

Now that Twitter allows 280 characters, the code of some drawings I have made can fit in a tweet. In this post I have compiled a few of them.

The first one is a cardioid inspired in string art (more info here):

```library(ggplot2)
n=300
t1=1:n
t0=seq(3,2*n+1,2)%%n
t2=t0+(t0==0)*n
df=data.frame(x=cos((t1-1)*2*pi/n),
y=sin((t1-1)*2*pi/n),
x2=cos((t2-1)*2*pi/n),
y2=sin((t2-1)*2*pi/n))
ggplot(df,aes(x,y,xend=x2,yend=y2)) +
geom_segment(alpha=.1)+theme_void()
```

```library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
t=seq(from=0, to=100*pi, length.out=500*100)
data.frame(x= t^(1/2)*cos(t), y= t^(1/2)*sin(t))%>%
rbind(-.)%>%ggplot(aes(x, y))+geom_polygon()+theme_void()
```

```library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
library(pracma)
seq(-5*pi,5*pi,by=.1)%>%expand.grid(x=., y=.)%>%
ggplot(aes(x=x, y=y, fill=erf(sec(x)-sec(y))))+geom_tile()+
theme_void()+theme(legend.position="none")
```

A x-y scatter plot of a trigonometric function on R2 (more info here):

```library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
seq(from=-10, to=10, by = 0.05) %>%
expand.grid(x=., y=.) %>%
ggplot(aes(x=(x+pi*sin(y)), y=(y+pi*sin(x)))) +
geom_point(alpha=.1, shape=20, size=1, color="black")+
theme_void()
```

```library(TurtleGraphics)
turtle_init()
turtle_col("gray25")
turtle_do({
for (i in 1:150) {
turtle_forward(dist=1+0.5*i)
turtle_right(angle=89.5)}
})
turtle_hide()
```

```t=seq(1, 100, by=.001)
plot(exp(-0.006*t)*sin(t*3.019+2.677)+
exp(-0.001*t)*sin(t*2.959+2.719),
exp(-0.009*t)*sin(t*2.964+0.229)+
exp(-0.008*t)*sin(t*2.984+1.284),
type="l", axes=FALSE, xlab="", ylab="")
```

```library(circlize)
chordDiagram(matrix(1, 20, 20), symmetric = TRUE,
col="black", transparency = 0.85, annotationTrack = NULL)
```

Most of them are made with `ggplot2` package. I love R and the sense of wonder of how just one or two lines of code can create beautiful and unexpected patterns.

I recently did this project for DataCamp to show how easy is to do art with R and `ggplot`. Starting from a extremely simple plot, and following a well guided path, you can end making beautiful images like this one:

Furthermore, you can learn also `ggplot2` while you do art.

I have done the project together with Rasmus Bååth, instructor at DataCamp and the perfect mate to work with. He is looking for people to build more projects so if you are interested, here you can find more information. Do not hesitate to ask him for details.

All the best for 2018.

Merry Christmas.

# Drawing 10 Million Points With ggplot: Clifford Attractors

For me, mathematics cultivates a perpetual state of wonder about the nature of mind, the limits of thoughts, and our place in this vast cosmos (Clifford A. Pickover – The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics)

I am a big fan of Clifford Pickover and I find inspiration in his books very often. Thanks to him, I discovered the harmonograph and the Parrondo’s paradox, among many other mathematical treasures. Apart of being a great teacher, he also invented a family of strange attractors wearing his name. Clifford attractors are defined by these equations:

$x_{n+1}\, =\, sin(a\, y_{n})\, +\, c\, cos(a\, x_{n}) \\ y_{n+1}\, =\, sin(b\, x_{n})\, +\, d\, cos(b\, y_{n}) \\$

There are infinite attractors, since a, b, c and d are parameters. Given four values (one for each parameter) and a starting point `(x0, y0)`, the previous equation defines the exact location of the point at step `n`, which is defined just by its location at `n-1`; an attractor can be thought as the trajectory described by a particle. This plot shows the evolution of a particle starting at `(x0, y0)=(0, 0)` with parameters `a=-1.24458046630025`, `b=-1.25191834103316`, `c=-1.81590817030519` and `d=-1.90866735205054` along 10 million of steps:

Changing parameters is really entertaining. Drawings have a sandy appearance:

From a technical point of view, the challenge is creating a data frame with all locations, since it must have 10 milion rows and must be populated sequentially. A very fast way to do it is using `Rcpp` package. To render the plot I use ggplot, which works quite well. Here you have the code to play with Clifford Attractors if you want:

```library(Rcpp)
library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)

opt = theme(legend.position  = "none",
panel.background = element_rect(fill="white"),
axis.ticks       = element_blank(),
panel.grid       = element_blank(),
axis.title       = element_blank(),
axis.text        = element_blank())

cppFunction('DataFrame createTrajectory(int n, double x0, double y0,
double a, double b, double c, double d) {
// create the columns
NumericVector x(n);
NumericVector y(n);
x[0]=x0;
y[0]=y0;
for(int i = 1; i < n; ++i) {
x[i] = sin(a*y[i-1])+c*cos(a*x[i-1]);
y[i] = sin(b*x[i-1])+d*cos(b*y[i-1]);
}
// return a new data frame
return DataFrame::create(_["x"]= x, _["y"]= y);
}
')

a=-1.24458046630025
b=-1.25191834103316
c=-1.81590817030519
d=-1.90866735205054

df=createTrajectory(10000000, 0, 0, a, b, c, d)

png("Clifford.png", units="px", width=1600, height=1600, res=300)
ggplot(df, aes(x, y)) + geom_point(color="black", shape=46, alpha=.01) + opt
dev.off()
```