2010 July

• A graphical look at Burning Man

  July 30, 2010 to Infographics  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  This graphic on Burning Man is totally lost on me, but maybe you guys will appreciate it more. I first heard about the event on Malcom in Middle several years ago and that's about it. Well, that and my friend posted a picture on Facebook yesterday of him wearing fairy wings, which just confuses me more.

  I feel like I'm missing out on something though. I mean, who doesn't want to see a giant, burning wood man on the beach?

  The designer Flint Hahn notes:

  The history of Burning Man has always been a complex entity that has survived, nay, mutated over the years. And because of this, it has grown rapidly since its humble beginnings of a simple gathering on a beach.

  The infographic poster shows only a small portion of what Burning Man is. By no means do mere numbers even begin to show a complete picture, as that is a history of stories, experiences, and individual tales.

  Ok then.

  [Thanks, Turtle & Jesse]

• FlowingData is brought to you by…

  July 30, 2010 to Sponsors  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  My thanks to the FlowingData sponsors. They keep the lights on and keep FlowingData going strong. Check out the services they have to offer. They help you make sense of your data.

  Zoho Reports - Offers an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that assists you to easily do in-depth reporting and visual analysis of your business data. It is best suited for SMBs using spreadsheets or custom software for data analysis.

  Tableau Software - Combines data exploration and visual analytics in an easy-to-use data analysis tool you can quickly master. It makes data analysis easy and fun. Customers are working 5 to 20 times faster using Tableau.

  Grapheur - Once upon a time data analysis and business intelligence used to be complex, slow, static and boring. Not anymore with Grapheur: import your data and navigate a the speed of light. The tool disappears, your preferences and insight come into the spotlight.

• Discuss: Why collect data about yourself?

  July 30, 2010 to Discussion, Self-surveillance  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Personal data fascinates me. I collect data about myself mostly as a way to journal and document the present so that I can look back on it later - similar to how someone else might flip through an old photo album.

  In just about every interview I've read with Nicholas Felton, author of several personal annual reports, he's asked how the data, or rather the information from that data, has changed his behavior. For the most part, it doesn't. It's more of an interesting view into the past year for him.

  However, there are plenty of others who collect data in an effort to change their behavior in some way. They might be trying to lose weight or stay more disciplined with their exercise regimen.

  The Question

  So if you collect data about yourself, whether it be an automated system or with pen and paper, why do you do it? How long have the you been doing it? What do you track? Have you found anything interesting or surprising from your data?

  If you don't collect data, what's holding you back?

  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

• How to win Rock-paper-scissors every time

  July 30, 2010 to Infographics  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  I admit it. When I first heard there are actual tournaments for Rock-paper-scissors, sanctioned by the World Rock Paper Scissors Society, I laughed. I mean seriously, $50k to the winner of a game that requires no skill whatsoever? Absurd. Boy was I wrong.

  Rock-paper-scissors isn't just a silly game kids play or a way to decide who has to be the designated driver at parties. This is serious stuff. It's psychological warfare. ChaCha Answers explains.

  Males have a tendency to throw rock on their first try, inexperienced RPS players will subconsciously deliver the item that won previously, and paper is thrown least often, so use it as a surprise. And remember, when in doubt, throw the Spock. Your opponent will never know what hit him. You'll be disqualified, but at least you'll go out fighting.

• Two-minute journey through the history of cinema

  July 29, 2010 to Data Art  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  35mm, a short film by Sarah Biermann, Torsten Strer, Felix Meyer, and Pascal Monaco, strips 35 movies to their simplest form and cleverly strings them together in a set of motion graphics. From Singin' in the Rain, Titanic, and Jaws to Fight Club, Star Wars, and Terminator.

  Can you figure out all the movies portrayed? Test your movie wits in the video below. I only recognized two the first time around. I suck.
  Continue Reading

• Ugly chart used to confuse readers

  July 29, 2010 to Ugly Visualization  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Charles Blow on this unnecessarily complex chart used to show the network of Obamacare:

  Maybe it's the former graphics/art director in me, but I get really offended when people use charts to confuse rather than to clarify.

  Take a look at this monstrosity released today by the Joint Economic Committee minority, which is led by Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) and Representative Kevin Brady (R-Texas).

  To paraphrase one of my favorite quotes: they’re using this chart like a drunken man uses lampposts – for support rather than for illumination.

  Really, Joint Economic Committee? Look - I'm not going to pretend I know all the intricacies of the US health care system, but this is clearly chart abuse.

  Looking at this horribly designed piece of propaganda makes me want to throw up. I'm throwing up right now. Dang it. Someone owes me a new keyboard.

• Process: Mapping War Logs for the Guardian

  July 28, 2010 to Design  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  This is a guest post by Alastair Dant, interactive lead at the Guardian. He describes the efforts that went into designing the recently published war logs map of incidents revealed by Wikileaks.

  Our site editor approached me with a serious challenge: could I visualize six years worth of military reports? Up in their makeshift war room, our team introduced me to Julian Assange. While reporters from the New York Times and Der Speigel took photos and video, the director of Wikileaks booted his encrypted netbook and showed me a page from the war logs. I may have looked a little distressed. The gravity of this material was stark and, having never dealt with such documents before, I was uncertain if I wanted to start.

  After several days feeling like I'd walked into the Bourne trilogy, David Leigh and Rob Evans put my mind at rest. We wouldn't be publishing any material that might put anyone at risk and my work could focus on charting the rise in explosive devices from 2004 – 2009.
  Continue Reading

• Brief history of data visualization

  July 28, 2010 to Visualization  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Shawn Allen of Stamen Design provides a brief history of data visualization, starting with William Playfair's charts in the late 1700s and William Smith's map sketch of Britain, up to the more recent works from The New York Times, Martin Wattenberg, and Ben Fry.

  This leads into a description of what data is, from a practical point of view, as the writeup is actually an introduction for Allen's visualisation course at the School of Visual Arts. Totally looks like a course I wish I could've taken in grad school.

• Afghanistan war logs revealed and mapped

  July 27, 2010 to Data Sources, Mapping  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  This past Sunday, well-known whistle-blower site Wikileaks released over 91,000 secret US military reports, covering the war in Afghanistan. Each report contains the time, geographic location, and details of an event the US military thought was important enough to put on paper.
  Continue Reading

• Where all the BP oil could end up

  July 27, 2010 to Mapping  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Now that the oil flow has finally stopped, for now, the attention has shifted to the effects all that oil will have on wildlife and the ecosystem. Chris Wilson for Slate reports on where all of that BP oil could end up during the next 130 days, based on modeling data from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. These models are based on how water flows in different areas of the Gulf.

  Three scenarios are presented. All end up with oil leaving the Gulf.

  Of course, these are all approximations, and the models can't possibly account for all the factors that play into oil drift (e.g. biological degradation of the oil), but it's an educated guess, so take it at that. Wherever all the oil ends up, one thing is for sure. There's still a lot of cleanup left to do.

• Military budget contextualized with CGI tanks

  July 27, 2010 to Data Art  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  It's no secret. The US military gets a lot of funding for manpower, weapons, equipment, security, so and so forth. Do you know how much money they'll have received come end of this year? I could tell you how many billions of dollars they get, or go the other way, and contextualize it by telling you what you could buy with that money - like the number of mosquito nets or pounds of food for the homeless.

  Moustache, a design and direction studio, goes with the context option in their short CGI video Softwar. Thousands of tanks are piled on top of each other to show just how much the military budget can buy.
  Continue Reading

• Sorting algorithms visualized

  July 26, 2010 to Misc. Visualization  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  This will be lost on many of you, but to the programmers this will make perfect sense. Basically, when programming, there are a lot of times when you have a long list of numbers or words that you'll want sorted greatest to least or alphabetically. The way this is done will vary by what algorithm you use. Aldo Cortesi visualizes these sorting algorithms, showing just how each one works.

  If you're confused but still interested, here's a simple example.

  Let's say you have a list of numbers from one to five listed as such: 4, 20, 6, 12, 100. We want to organize these systematically least to greatest. The easiest way would be to setup five "spots" and then go through each number, starting at the beginning, and decide if the number is bigger or smaller than the number we already looked at. That's not the most efficient way to do it though, and when you have millions of numbers to sort, instead of just five, then efficiency matters.

  [Thanks, Marlena]

• Exploration of our aging world

  July 26, 2010 to Statistical Visualization  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  From Ben Fry's newly established Fathom Information Design, is a visualization for GE on our aging world:

  According to the United Nations, the elderly population of the world is growing at its fastest rate ever. By 2050, there will be more than 2 billion people aged 60 or over. The age of a country's population can reveal insights about that country's history, and can provide a glimpse towards the economic and healthcare trends that will challenge their societies in the future.

  The piece is a simple but elegant interactive that lets you compare age distributions between countries, over time. Select one country on the top, and select another on the bottom. For each country, you get a pair of stacked bars (for men and women). Age moves left to right, so the left-most bars represent the youngest, and the right most represent the oldest.

  Use the slider on the bottom to navigate through time, and the distributions shift further right (i.e. people live longer) in a wave-like motion, as the population of each respective country increases.

  Finally, watch a composite of all eight selected countries in the bottom right.

  The one thing missing for me is the percentages for each age/gender group as you roll over each bar. But I'm just being picky. Really good stuff. The interactive leaves it up to you to see what's going on in the data.

  How does your country compare to others?

• Field guide to typographic moustaches

  July 23, 2010 to Data Art  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Sure, why not, let's make it a hairy Friday. From Tor Weeks: a series of moustaches styled by their typographic counterpart, aka typestaches. The big and bold typefaces like Federal and Wide Latin get thick and burly moustaches, while the more delicate typefaces, get thin and curvy.

  If only facial hair were as easy to select as fonts. I'd get myself a 24pt Mr. Century Ultra.

  Grab a print for yourself here.

  [via kottke]

• History of The Beatles as told by their hair

  July 23, 2010 to Infographics  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  The Beatles were famously known for their mop-top haircuts in the early 1960s, but their styles evolved over time. DeviantArt user mozzarellapoppy has a look at the hair, moustache, and spectacle changes over an eight-year span. Watch as they slowly morph into The Bee Gees.

  [via Alison]

• 7 Basic Rules for Making Charts and Graphs

  July 22, 2010 to Design  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Charts and graphs have found their way into news, presentations, and comics, with users from art to design to statistics. The design principles for these data graphics will vary depending on what you're using it for. Making something for a presentation? You'll want to keep it extremely simple and avoid using a lot of text. Designing a graphic for a newspaper? You'll have to deal with size constraints and try to explain the important parts of your graphic.

  However, whatever you're making your charts and graphs for, whether it be for a report, an infographic online, or a piece of data art, there are a few basic rules that you should follow.

  There's wiggle room with all of them, and you should think of what follows as more of a framework than a hard set of rules, but this is a good place to start for those just getting into data graphics.
  Continue Reading

• Tardiness solves statistics theorems

  July 21, 2010 to Statistics  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  Yeah, you read that right. Tardiness makes the world go 'round:

  One day in 1939, Berkeley doctoral candidate George Dantzig arrived late for a statistics class taught by Jerzy Neyman. He copied down the two problems on the blackboard and turned them in a few days later, apologizing for the delay — he’d found them unusually difficult. Distracted, Neyman told him to leave his homework on the desk.

  On a Sunday morning six weeks later, Neyman banged on Dantzig’s door. The problems that Dantzig had assumed were homework were actually unproved statistical theorems that Neyman had been discussing with the class — and Dantzig had proved both of them. Both were eventually published, with Dantzig as coauthor.

  Other benefits include more hours of sleep, exercise while power-walking to your destination, and all-around warm, fuzzy feelings knowing that you live by nobody's schedule. You might also supposedly inspire films like Good Will Hunting.

  Who knew?

  [via Bobulate]

• Global forest heights mapped in detail by NASA

  July 21, 2010 to Mapping  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  NASA has mapped the world's forest heights, based on satellite data, for a first-of-its-kind global view. While there are plenty of maps that show forest height regionally and locally, this is the first time it's been mapped globally with a single, uniform method.

  The new map shows the world’s tallest forests clustered in the Pacific Northwest of North America and portions of Southeast Asia, while shorter forests are found in broad swaths across northern Canada and Eurasia. The map depicts average height over 5 square kilometers (1.9 square miles) regions), not the maximum heights that any one tree or small patch of trees might attain.

  These heights range from 0 to 70 meters. The darker the green the higher the tree canopies.

  NASA believes the new map could help scientists with a new perspective on how much carbon forests store and more insight on carbon cycles within ecosystems.

  Click through to NASA for the high-res version.

  [via Boing Boing]

• Investigation of top secret America

  July 20, 2010 to Infographics  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  In response to the the 9/11 attacks, the United States government created a highly secretive set of organizations with zero transparency and very little oversight. How much money do these secret programs cost? How many people do they employ? The Washington Post reports on Top Secret America:

  These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

  The series of articles, video, and graphics, allow readers to explore the information themselves.

  Of main interest: a network diagram shows organizations and their top secret activities and a map shows the geographic distribution of government organizations and companies within Top Secret America.

  Click on a specific organization for within group breakdowns. At this point it gets a little confusing with drill-down pie charts, especially if you're just browsing, and a spiral view is also offerred which feels extraneous. The overall story and heavy research, however, makes it worth clicking through the clunky at times set of interactives.

  [Thanks, Erika]

• Citizen’s guide to fancy pants coffee drinks

  July 19, 2010 to Infographics  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  In the same spirit of the original coffee drink infographic from a few years ago, Plaid Creative describes the perfect pour, or as I like to call it, the citizen's guide to fancy pants coffee drinks. At its root, its a series of pie charts where each wedge represents the percentage of ingredient in a given fancy pants drink. But the subtle stylings make it look so much more delicious, from the pattern fills out to the mug-like border.

  [via thisisnthappiness]