2011 December

• Backbone of the flavor network

  December 27, 2011 to Network Visualization  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (5)

  

  Food flavors across cultures and geography vary a lot. Some cuisines use a lot of scallion and ginger, whereas another might use a lot of onion and butter. Then again, everyone seems to use garlic. Yong-Yeol Ahn, et al. took a closer look at what makes food taste different, breaking ingredients into flavor compounds and examining what the ingredients had in common. A flavor network was the result:

  Each node denotes an ingredient, the node color indicates food category, and node size reflects the ingredient prevalence in recipes. Two ingredients are connected if they share a significant number of flavor compounds, link thickness representing the number of shared compounds between the two ingredients. Adjacent links are bundled to reduce the clutter.

  Mushrooms and liver are on the edges, out on their lonesome.

  [Nature | Thanks, Elise]

• Merry Christmas to you, from FlowingData

  December 23, 2011 to Announcements  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (7)

  

  Thanks for making this a memorable year, everyone. Happy holidays!

• Van Gogh for the colorblind

  December 22, 2011 to Design  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (6)

  

  After a chat with his color deficient friends about how Vincent van Gogh's paintings seem to appeal to all eyes, Kazunori Asada used visual filters to see how the paintings looked to the colorblind. The experiment produced some interesting results and musings:

  Was van Gogh partially color vision deficiency (anomalous trichromat)? Perhaps using a strong color vision deficiency (dichromat) simulation was the wrong approach. How about carrying out the simulation by removing the middle portion of normal color vision, maybe then I could see van Gogh’s pictures in a better light?

  The color choices for van Gogh's popular paintings seem less out there with the filters. The greens in the sky of Starry Night, for example turn to yellows.

  A colorblind van Gogh though? Probably not. Either way, don't forget to pick your colors wisely. Asada has an easy-to-use tool to see what your own images look like to others.

  [Asada's memorandum]
• 

  The Best Data Visualization Projects of 2011

  I almost didn't make a best-of list this year, but as I clicked through the year's post, it was hard...

• Record your movements with AntiMap

  December 20, 2011 to Self-surveillance  •  Share on Twitter  •  Add Comment

  

  AntiMap is an open source toolset that lets you record movements with your iPhone or Android phone. Originally developed as a way for snowboarders to record their movements and play the data back like a video game, the toolset was generalized for all outdoor activities.
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• When numbers are too factual

  December 19, 2011 to Statistics  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (7)

  Carl Bialik, for The Wall Street Journal, reports on PSAs and the use of scary numbers:

  The Ad Council usually avoids statistics in PSAs. "We know from our experience that effective advertising has to have an emotional component and statistics-based campaigns can be very rational," Conlon said. "We’ve also found that people tend not to believe statistics."

  And sometimes they just don’t care much about them. "When we were developing our underage drinking prevention campaign," Conlon recalled, "we found that it doesn't resonate with parents to learn about how many children are drinking underage. It's too easy for them to say 'it's not my child.' We found that it was much more compelling to include a statistic that was more about the consequences of underage drinking: Those who start drinking before age 15 are six times more likely to have alcohol problems as adults than those who start drinking at age 21 or older."

  The well-known Stalin quote comes to mind.

  [The Numbers Guy]

• Charts with explosions now easier than ever

  December 16, 2011 to Miscellaneous  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (16)

  Score.
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• Causation is real, people

  December 15, 2011 to Statistics  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (2)

  

  Stop global warming. Decrease the National Science Foundation's R&D budget. It's so easy. More lessons on correlation and causation found here.

• What Facebook knows about you

  December 14, 2011 to Data Sources  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (14)

  

  Facebook logs and saves a lot of data about you and what you do on their site. This shouldn't be surprising given the more time people spend on Facebook, the greater the cash flow, but just how much data do they store? Austrian law student Max Schrems, because European law states that citizens can do this, requested all the data Facebook had about him. He got back a CD with 1,222 PDF files.
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• Fox News still makes awesome charts

  December 12, 2011 to Mistaken Data  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (56)

  

  Charts and graphs are great, because they can let you see a pattern that you might not see in a spreadsheet, but they only work when you use the actual data. Fox News isn't doing themselves any favors by putting up this chart. It shows the recently announced drop in unemployment rate to 8.6 percent as a non-change.
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• Mapped: Transportation check-ins on foursquare

  December 12, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (1)

  

  Transportation check-ins on foursquare. This is from this past Thanksgiving, but relevant again with Christmas around the corner. White represents check-ins on highways and roads (really?), orange is for trains, and blue is of course is same-day check-ins at airports. I guess no one takes Amtrak cross-country anymore.

  [foursquare via datavis]

• Corruption versus human development

  December 9, 2011 to Statistical Visualization  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (7)

  

  Transparency International released annual data for the Corruption Perceptions Index. The Economist plotted it against the UN's Human Development Index:

  Comparing the corruption index with the UN's Human Development Index (a measure combining health, wealth and education), demonstrates an interesting connection. When the corruption index is between approximately 2.0 and 4.0 there appears to be little relationship with the human development index, but as it rises beyond 4.0 a stronger connection can be seen. Outliers include small but well-run poorer countries such as Bhutan and Cape Verde, while Greece and Italy stand out among the richer countries.

  Interesting, although I suspect that the indices have some factors in common.

  [The Economist via @mikeloukides]

• Substratum: A series of interviews with smart people

  December 8, 2011 to Design  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (1)

  It's always nice to hear from the people who are the best at what they do. Data visualization studio, Interactive Things has an interview series going, Substratum, that asks designers and artists the same set of questions. The most recent issue is with Amanda Cox from The New York Times and Nicholas Felton, who you know from his annual Feltron reports and now at Facebook.

  Amanda Cox, the chart marker, on how her work and goals have changed over the years:

  At one point — I call it my impressionist phase — I was really interested in making things abstract but interesting and beautiful. And then I had a "curves are fun" phase for a while where I was really into curved things. And then I had an "intentional simplicity" phase for a while, like, how stripped down can you make something and have it still be interesting? I don’t know what my current phase is, but it's kind of an "aspirational reporting" phase. I'm not that great of a reporter yet, but I'm thinking a lot about how we can stop using the same information that's already on the Internet and just remix that. I want to start working with more, deeper information, information that's harder to surface.

  This is coming from someone who has won an international award for being the best. So much to learn, I have.

  [Substratum]

• Bach Cello Suites visualized

  December 8, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (20)

  As a resident at Eyebeam, Alexandar Chen visualizes the first Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suites:

  Using the mathematics behind string length and pitch, it came from a simple idea: what if all the notes were drawn as strings? Instead of a stream of classical notation on a page, this interactive project highlights the music’s underlying structure and subtle shifts.

  Interaction version here. Charming.

  [Alexander Chen via @blprnt]
• 

  On low-quality infographics

  This has been sitting in my drafts folder for a few months. Figured I'd just hit publish and throw it...

• Visualize This: Signed copies available

  December 7, 2011 to The Book  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (4)

  Quick announcement: I have a handful of signed Visualize This copies available in case you're looking for a gift for that data geek cousin or you're up for some learning over the holidays. I only have a limited supply, so grab a copy before they're gone. And of course, you can still get an untarnished version at the major booksellers.

• Rise and fall of riot rumors on Twitter

  December 7, 2011 to Network Visualization  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (3)

  

  During the riots in London this past summer, a lot of information spread quickly about what was going on. Some of that information was true and some was not so true. The Guardian explores this spread of information on Twitter, and how fact and fiction seem to reveal themselves on their own:

  A period of unrest can provoke many untruths, an analysis of 2.6 million tweets suggests. But Twitter is adept at correcting misinformation - particularly if the claim is that a tiger is on the loose in Primrose Hill.

  Other rumors include when rioters cooked their own food at McDonald's (false), London Eye was set on fire (false), and Miss Selfridge was set on fire (true).

  Each bubble represents a tweet and is sized by number of followers the tweeter has. The big one is usually the orignal tweet and the small ones that cluster around are retweets. Then the colors represent tweets that support, oppose, question, or comment. So when you play the animation for each rumor, bubbles swiftly pop up at the rumor peaks and then settle at true or false.

  You can also use the scroll to move to a certain point in time, and roll over bubbles to see the tweets.

  Really nice graphic and worth a look.

  [Guardian via @jakeporway]

• Every death on the road in Great Britain

  December 7, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (5)

  

  As part of their series on road accidents, BBC News mapped every recorded death on the road in Great Britain, from 1999 to 2010. That's 2,396,750 road crashes. As you'd expect, the map looks a lot like population density, but check out the videos, which show twelve years of data compressed as if it were one week, played out over a few minutes. Each light represents an accident.

  Contrast with road fatalities in the United States.

  Update: The BBC headline and copy seem to conflict, but this seems to be just accidents, and I'm not sure when casualties enter the equation. At 2.4 million crashes over 12 years, that's about 455 per day.

  [BBC News via @aaronkoblin]

• 40 years of boxplots

  December 6, 2011 to Statistical Visualization  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (4)

  

  Famed statistician John Tukey created the boxplot in 1970. It shows a distribution summary in a small amount of space. Hadley Wickham and Lisa Stryjewski look back on the old standby and its evolution up to present. Keep it in mind, while still used today, the boxplot was created with pencil and paper.

  One of the original constraints on the boxplot was that it was designed to be computed and drawn by hand. As every statistician now has a computer on their desk, this constraint can be relaxed, allowing variations of the boxplot that are substantially more complex. These variations attempt to display more information about the distribution, maintaing the compact size of the boxplot, but bringing in the richer distributional summary of the histogram or density plot. These plots can overcome problems in the original such as the failure to display multi-modality, or the excessive number of "outliers" when n is large.

  Alright, computers are useful. I guess.

  [40 years of boxplots]

• What seven billion people looks like

  December 5, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (6)

  

  Form design intern at Fathom, James Grady, maps population density in Dencity:

  Dencity maps population density using circles of various size and hue. Larger, darker circles show areas with fewer people, while smaller, brighter circles highlight crowded cities. Representing denser areas with smaller circles results in additional geographic detail where there are more people, while sparsely populated areas are more vaguely defined.

  While we've seen population density mapped, both directly and indirectly, the circle approach adds a different aesthetic that seems to add something about what it's like to live somewhere. Compare to a broader country-level map or one that uses only color. Doesn't this version feel like more?
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