Many colleges use virtual proctoring software in an effort to reduce cheating on tests that students take virtually at home. But the software relies on facial recognition and assumptions about the proper testing environment. YR Media breaks down the flaws and even provides a simulation so that you can see what it’s like.

Based on data from autonomous sensors floating in the oceans, researchers are able to model the flows and characteristics of ocean currents in more detail than ever before. For The New York Times, Henry Fountain and Jeremy White show how the shifts have unwelled centuries-old water deep in the ocean, which releases carbon into the air.

The scrollytelling format of this piece works well to show sensor estimates over time. You get a sense of the currents without needing to see animated lines.

The COVID-19 Online Visualization Collection is a project to catalog Covid-related graphics across countries, sources, and styles. They call it COVIC for short, which seems like a stretch for an acronym and a confusing way to introduce a project to people. But, it does categorize over 10,000 figures, which could be useful as a reference and historical context.

NASA is launching the James Webb Space Telescope on December 22, 2021 with an objective to collect data on light from 13.8 billion light-years away.

Using 3-D models from NASA, Rahul Mukherjee and Lorena Iñiguez Elebee for The Los Angeles Times show how the $10 billion telescope works and how NASA plans to launch the telescope into orbit a million miles from Earth. Nothing to it.

Zach Levitt and Bonnie Berkowitz for The Washington Post mapped and animated the natural and weather disasters from 2021. Differing from the 2019 version by Tim Meko, they framed it by month, which let them start with floods in January, through the storms in March, April, and May, to fires in July, up to the tornadoes in December.

It was a rough year for many, only compounded by that virus.

Steven L. Franconeri, Lace M. Padilla, Priti Shah, Jeffrey M. Zacks, and Jessica Hullman published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest an expansive review of what researchers know so far about how visualization works:

Effectively designed data visualizations allow viewers to use their powerful visual systems to understand patterns in data across science, education, health, and public policy. But ineffectively designed visualizations can cause confusion, misunderstanding, or even distrust—especially among viewers with low graphical literacy. We review research-backed guidelines for creating effective and intuitive visualizations oriented toward communicating data to students, coworkers, and the general public. We describe how the visual system can quickly extract broad statistics from a display, whereas poorly designed displays can lead to misperceptions and illusions. Extracting global statistics is fast, but comparing between subsets of values is slow. Effective graphics avoid taxing working memory, guide attention, and respect familiar conventions. Data visualizations can play a critical role in teaching and communication, provided that designers tailor those visualizations to their audience.

The paper is free to access.

I’m bookmarking this for later. It’s going to take a while to digest.

You know it’s the holiday season when Mariah Carey starts singing about wanting you for Christmas. The Washington Post goes into why we listen to the same songs every year:

Holiday music burrows into a sweet spot in our brains’ wiring, said Brian Rabinovitz, a lecturer at the College of William & Mary whose expertise is the neuroscience of music.

All music can stimulate the brain’s pleasure centers, he said, but holiday music can evoke treasured memories on top of that, courtesy of the brain’s filing system. Tonal patterns and autobiographical events are processed in overlapping regions of the medial prefrontal cortex.

Kind of the same reasons why we watch re-runs.

See also Jon Keegan’s analysis of old Christmas songs.

A little bit of sorting and organization can make a big difference in readability.

NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe in 2018 in an effort to explore closer to the sun. The probe recently flew through and out of the Sun’s upper atmosphere to successfully sample particles and magnetic fields. Amazing.

The video above from NASA explains the origins, challenges, and future of the project. I want all government agencies to release videos like this.

Vaccine supply is only part of the equation. For The New York Times, Keith Collins and Josh Holder looked at distribution of available doses in countries, categorized by income group.

Lazaro Gamio and Peter S. Goodman for The New York Times used a flowchart to explain how the world’s supply chains got to where they are now. The scroll takes you through the set of intertwining variables.

The effects of climate change can be seen around the world, in the present. The New York Times uses a mix of maps, charts, videos, illustrations, and photographs to imagine postcards sent from every country in the world to show what’s happening.

Leland Wilkinson passed away on Friday, according to his daughter Amie. In visualization circles, he was best known for The Grammar of Graphics, which defined a system to describe and implement all statistical charts. Here’s Jessica Hullman on Wilkinson’s contribution:

My own admiration for Grammar of Graphics is partly why I chose to get into visualization back as a grad student. I remember thinking his concept of a frame was really important but underappreciated in any discussions I’d heard about visualization. I read it for the first time as a Ph.D. student and have been calling it my favorite book for years. Whenever I go back to reread chapters I always come away with some new appreciation. I even bring in a copy to pass around in my interactive visualization course, trying to get students to sense its influence and hopefully read it. Just looking at the examples is like an education in visualization.

Hadley Wickham, whose ggplot2 package in R is based on Wilkinson’s grammar, posted:

Lee Wilkinson is the reason that ggplot2 exists; not just because he wrote the Grammar of Graphics, but also because he was so kind and supportive to me when I was a young grad student thinking of trying to implement it. He will be missed.

The Grammar of Graphics was one of the first books I ever read on visualization, and the topics have stuck with me ever since. Wilkinson’s work no doubt influenced many others and helped push visualization to where it is today.

I am told people use these things called emoji in their messages to communicate emotional cues in the text. There is a face for laughter. There is a smiling one. There is even one that is a pile of poo with a face on it. Imagine that. Poo. Jennifer Daniel shows the rankings for emoji usage in 2021 (along with another chart that shows the shift in usage since 2019).

Stephen Curry is about to break the record for number of three-pointers made in a career. By law, as dictated by sports visualization record keeping, a multiple line chart must be made to show the player of interest compared against others. The Washington Post got it done, along with shot charts and other career timelines.

Using estimates based on satellite data, Joshua Stevens for NASA Earth Observatory mapped the concentration of microplastics in the ocean over time:

Researchers at the University of Michigan (UM) recently developed a new method to map the concentration of ocean microplastics around the world. The researchers used data from eight microsatellites that are part of the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) mission. Radio signals from GPS satellites reflect off the ocean surface, and CYGNSS satellites detect those reflections. Scientists then analyze the signals to measure the roughness of the ocean surface. These measurements provide scientists with a means to derive ocean wind speeds, which is useful for studying phenomena like hurricanes. It turns out that the signals also reveal the presence of plastic.

What happens when you spend too much time with a dataset.

Shortlife is a clock by artist Dries Depoorter that simply shows the percentage of your life lived, based on life expectancy from the World Health Organization. It has a warranty of six months.

I kind of want this? Please note: Results may vary.