"visualization of the week" entries
Visualization of the Week: Visualizing marginalization
A look at the World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE) interactive visualization tool.
The Education for All Global Monitoring Report team launched a new visualization tool this week, the World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE).
This is far more than a typical visualization that presents information in an interesting way. WIDE is an interactive website that lets users mine and explore the data themselves.
The about page on the WIDE website explains that the tool pulls together education data from more than 60 countries. Users can compare education levels and availability between countries and groups, and results can narrow down to parameters such as gender, ethnicity, location and wealth. The data is freely available and can be downloaded in an Excel spreadsheet. Charts, tables or maps created by users can also be shared.
The following screenshot shows an example of the data explored through specific indicators — in this case, populations living in extreme education poverty:
Visualization of the Week: Forecasting disruptions in health care
Envisioning Technology mapped out how we can expect the health care space to be disrupted in the coming decades.
The health care space is ripe for disruption (that’s a topic we’ve covered recently) and the disruption will surely touch everyone. But what will this disruption actually look like?
Speculating decades into the future, Envisioning Technology’s Michell Zappa and Patrick Schlafer along with Prokalkeo’s Colin Popell put together a map of when we likely can expect particular health disruptions to occur and what forms the disruptions will take.
Visualization of the Week: Watch music go viral
A band gave its new album to one fan. See how it spread from there.
The Internet has opened many new avenues for music discovery and marketing — case in point, the viral music video. English indie pop band The xx wanted to try something different: to watch the spread of their new album Coexist, beginning with just one fan.
Bryan Lufkin at Fast Company reports:
“While other bands have experimented with social-media-driven record releases, typically those campaigns begin with a big public reveal. In this case, the band originally shared the album with just a single listener, with the intention of observing the viral spread (the first listener’s identity is being kept secret, but he or she lives in southeastern England). The band, partnering with Microsoft, built a website to track the path of their digitally distributed Coexist. After a gradual build, the site crashed due to unprecedented traffic.”
Visualization of the Week: Northern Hemisphere summers are getting hotter
NASA animations show increasingly hot summer temperatures, especially since 2000.
If you count yourself on the critic side of the global warming debate, NASA has a couple new visualizations that might provide more food for thought. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center GISS and Scientific Visualization Studio put together the animations below that show increasingly hot temperature anomalies in the Northern Hemisphere.
In this first animation, the bell graph charts the seasonal mean temperatures between 1951 and 2011, showing a shift toward hot summers. A post by Wyle Information Systems’ Patrick Lynch at the Scientific Visualization Studio blog explains the curve to the right shows decreasing “hot” anomalies deviating from the standard norm, varying from “hot” to “very hot” to “extremely hot.” To the left, the curve shows “cold” deviations from the norm, varying from “cold” to “very cold” to “extremely cold.” The standard “normal” temperatures are represented by the .43 and -.43 standard deviation mark range; the seasonal mean temperature base period is set between 1951-1980 and is plotted at the top of the curve.
Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center GISS and Scientific Visualization Studio
Visualization of the Week: The story behind the U.S. power grid
"America Revealed" illustrates the complexity of the United States electric power grid.
The PBS TV series "America Revealed" visualizes the creation, use and fragility of the U.S. electric power grid. It's also an example of how data and context should always go together.
Visualization of the Week: A whole new way to look at the NBA Finals
A series of basketball visualizations reveal team and player tendencies.
The New York Times uses shot selection and completion data to break down the championship matchup between the Miami Heat and Oklahoma City Thunder.
Visualization of the Week: Global BitTorrent usage
A 24-hour look at world-wide BitTorrent activity.
This week's visualization comes from BitTorrent, which has created a time-lapsed video showing a day's worth of geo-located logins.
Visualization of the Week: 56 years of tornadoes
Data from NOAA is used to map the strength and paths of tornadoes.
John Nelson's visualization taps NOAA historical data to map tornado paths and strengths.
Visualization of the Week: 30 years of tech IPOs
How Facebook stacks up against other tech IPOs.
This week's visualization comes from The New York Times and compares the last 30 years of tech IPOs (hint: watch for the big blue dot).
Visualization of the Week: Urban metabolism
Visualizing cities' energy usage, population density, and material intensity.
This week's visualization is an interactive web-mapping tool that lets you explore energy usage, material intensity and the overall "urban metabolism" of major U.S. cities.