I know you were confused about Muppet names. I hope this venn diagram helps you figure things out and you can get on with your life. [via | Thanks, David]

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.

—John Tukey

Too many slots. Too many buttons. Spanish bank BBVA and design consultancy IDEO rethink the ATM:

ATMs were first introduced over 40 years ago and since then many features have been incrementally added to the machines, in order to fulfill the dream of a truly “automated teller”. Modern ATMs offer a wide range of banking transactions; nevertheless the actual interaction has remained largely untouched.

Fewer slots. Fewer buttons. More privacy and personalization.

[via]

Foursquare, the location-based social network, lets people share their location with others in the form of checkins. Map all of those checkins, and you get a sense of social hotspots across a city. This is what Anil Bawa-Cavia did in his project archipelago. Based on 845,311 checkins and 20,285 locations, he mapped activity for New York, London, and Paris.

In these maps, activity on the Foursquare network is aggregated onto a grid of ‘walkable’ cells (each one 400×400 meters in size) represented by dots. The size of each dot corresponds to the level of activity in that cell. By this process we can see social centers emerge in each city.

Here are the maps for each city.
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Using data from a recent Gallup report showing a correlation between wealth and faith, Charles M. Blow reports in graphic form. Each sphere, sized by population, represents a country. Spheres are colored by dominant religion in that country.
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There are a bunch of college ratings out there to help students decide what college to apply to (and give something for alumni to gloat about). The tough part is that there doesn’t seem to be any agreement on what makes a good college. Alex Richards and Ron Coddington describe the discrepancies.
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I asked this same question a couple of years back. I wonder: has the software that people use for visualization and data graphics changed at all? Punch your answer in the poll below. If you select ‘other’ let us know your tool of choice in the comments.

P.S. I know many of you use a combination of these. Pick your favorite if that’s the case.
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Physicist Kristian Cvecek hangs out in the forest sometimes to take these beautiful pictures of firefly trails, using slow shutter speeds on his camera. Even better than the long exposure shot of a Roomba. [via]

If you’ve ever created an interactive graphic or anything else that requires that you feed in data, you will love this barebones data conversion tool by Shan Carter. Copy and paste data from Excel, which I feel like I’ve done a billion times, and then take your pick from Actionscript, JSON, XML, and Ruby. Simple, but a potential time saver. [via]

You can get pretty far with data graphics with just limited statistical knowledge, but if you want to take your skills, resume, and portfolio to the next level, you should learn standard data practices. Of all places, UK Parliament has some short and free guides to help you with basic statistical concepts. They provide 13 notes, each only two or three pages long that can help you with stuff like how to adjust for inflation, confidence intervals and statistical significance, or basic graph suggestions [pdf]. I like.

[via | Thanks, @joemako]

Flowchart Friday, anyone? This one describes the process to solve all of your problems. Unfortunately, sometimes in life, you just end up going around in circles. That’s what Maury Povich taught me.

[via]

A couple of months back, WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show asked listeners who have moved to or away from New York some questions. They asked current zipcode, previous zipcode, year of move, and some other questions. BLS then posted the data and let information and data folk have a go at it. Here are the results.
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I trust we’ve all seen the OldSpice YouTube campaign by now? This graphic from Know Your Meme categorizes videos by who they were directed to and how many views they received. For example, a video to Joe Blow would be in the low-profile category, while responses to Alyssa Milano go to the high-profile category.
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The tennis US Open is in full swing, and since you’re at work, you probably need a way to keep up with all of the matches. In a collaboration between the US Open and IBM, this real-time display shows you what’s going on during any given match.
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A big thank you to FlowingData sponsors for their support. They help me keep the lights on. Check ’em out. They help you understand your data.

Splunk – Leading software used to monitor, report and analyze live streaming IT data as well as terabytes of historical data – located on-premise or in the cloud. More than 1,850 organizations in 70 countries use Splunk to gain valuable insights from their IT data.

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.

Want to sponsor FlowingData? Email me for details.

Last month we saw sorting algorithms visualized in rainbow technicolor. Now, by Rudy Andrut, here they are auralized.

This particular audibilization is just one of many ways to generate sound from running sorting algorithms. Here on every comparison of two numbers (elements) I play (mixing) sin waves with frequencies modulated by values of these numbers. There are quite a few parameters that may drastically change resulting sound – I just chose parameteres that imo felt best.

It sounds like someone is playing on old Atari game. Warning: may cause seizures. Watch it in action in the video below.
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It’s been a hectic month. With one month left until my thesis defense, there’s no letting up, and it’s time to turn on the after burners. It’s definitely been interesting though, culling everything I’ve learned these past five years.

As it turns out, writing for FlowingData is actually a nice break from thesis-writing every now and then, so I’ve managed to keep things up and running around here. Thanks to everyone who has sent suggestions. You’ve been a big help. And of course, thanks to all who continue to share FlowingData. Much appreciated.

In case you missed them, or you’re new, here are the top posts from this past month.
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Auger Loizeau, in collaboration with Reyer Zwiggelaar and Bashar Al-Rjoub, describe their smart-home project Happylife. It monitors facial expressions and movements to estimate a family’s mood, displayed via four glowing orbs on the wall, one for each member.
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Connoisseur of scaled rounded rectangles, bubbles, and triangles, David McCandless of Information is Beautiful talks data visualization in recently posted TED talk (below). He explains how information design can help us get through information glut on the Web and how simple charts can show patterns that we never would have seen otherwise. He uses his own works and collaborations as evidence.
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