About a year after the launch of the Federal IT Dashboard, business intelligence consultancy Juice Analytics focuses on five areas — message, flow, charts, context, and design fundamentals — where the dashboard could use some improvement.

The first tip on message:

The information designer is responsible for presenting the data in a way that the message is delivered in a clear and understandable way. If the data is left to speak for itself, users can be left confused or frustrated. And in all likelihood they won’t to [sp] see the full value of the data. That’s particularly tough for this Federal IT Dashboard where a huge amount of effort has been put into gathering consistent data across agencies.

Totally agree with this, but to avoid confusion, let’s clarify. You should always let the data speak for itself. It’s just that what the data says often seems like a foreign language to non-professionals. It’s up to you, the information designer, to translate. The better you can translate, the better the information designer you are.

See the rest of the redesign on Juice Analytics (who is hiring, by the way).

Thanks again, everyone for sharing FlowingData. It was another good month, and it wouldn’t be the same without you. In case you missed them, here are the most popular posts from the past month, based on views, comments, and links.

1. Flowchart to lifelong happiness
2. History of The Beatles as told by their hair
3. How to win Rock-paper-scissors every time
4. Periodic table of swearing
5. Path to happiness gets complicated and confusing
6. Citizen’s guide to fancy pants coffee drinks
7. Flowchart shows the startup business cycle
8. 7 Basic Rules for Making Charts and Graphs
9. Who participates online, by age
10. How Britain has changed since 1997

And remember – the FlowingData forums is still a great place to get your data questions answered, share tasty links, and post visualization job openings.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.
Read More

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.

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.
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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.

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.
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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.

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.
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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]

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?

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]

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]

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]

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]