I was fortunate enough to be able to attend this year's Strangeloop conference (http://thestrangeloop.com/). Hilary Mason, data scientist extraordinaire, gave the opening keynote entitled "Machine Learning: A Love Story". As soon as she said we'd need a little bit of math to get through the presentation, I knew it was gonna be good. After healthy background on failed attempts at machine learning across the twentieth century she got into Bayesian statistics and then related this back to her work at bit.ly. 

That's when I decided it was my weekend's goal to get her to hack on something, anything, related to data mining with me. Check her out on Twitter @hmason or her website @ http://www.hilarymason.com/

Graciously, she agreed and we set up the time and place. We ended up with around ten people in total hacking for about an hour in a small cafe here in St. Louis. I published the final product here: http://github.com/jcbozonier/Strangeloop-Data-Visualization

and Hilary is hosting the visualization here:

That's the background and this is what came of it for me.