- Statistical Misdirection Master Class — examples from Fox News. The further through the list you go, the more horrifying^Wedifying they are. Some are clearly classics from the literature, but some are (as far as I can tell) newly developed graphical “persuasion” techniques.
- Wall of Awesome — give your coworkers some love.
- Dave Winer on Medium — Dave hits some interesting points: Users can create new buckets or collections and call them anything they want. A bucket is analogous to a blog post. Then other people can post to it. That’s like a comment. But it doesn’t look like a comment. It’s got a place for a big image at the top. It looks much prettier than a comment, and much bigger. Looks are important here.
- SIGGraph Asia Trailer (YouTube) — resuiting Sims and rotating city blocks, at the end, were my favourite. (via Andy Baio)
"visualization" entries
Visualization of the Week: Profits vs Super Bowl ad expense
The team at Quartz compares 3.5 hours of advertiser profits to the nearly $4 million Super Bowl ad price tag. Were the ads worth it?
Commercials have long been a highlight of the Super Bowl (if you missed any, the Verge grabbed the Hulu compilation), but how much do the advertising companies profit from the notoriously expensive ad spots?
Ritchie King at Quartz pulled together a chart to provide context. King reports that ads this year sold for an average of $3.7 to $3.8 million, but as King explains and the chart shows, that dollar figure is a mere “pittance” for the advertising companies. “In fact,” King notes, “some of them make almost as much in profits in an average 3.5 hours — roughly the time it takes to air the Super Bowl itself.”
Visualization of the Week: Identify your insiders, outsiders, connectors and gateways
WolframAlpha's updated Facebook tool visualizes your network (and makes outliers obvious).
WolframAlpha announced an upgrade to its Personal Analytics for Facebook platform that allows users to visualize a number of aspects of their Facebook ecosystem. John Burnham outlines the updates on the WolframAlpha blog, noting that the popular visualization from the tool’s first release has a number of enhancements that allow users to better visualize how their social network fits together.
Visualization of the Week: Pollution exposure by city
Using WHO data, The Guardian Data Blog team pulled together a world map of annual pollution exposure.
The latest reports of severe smog blanketing Beijing inspired The Guardian Data Blog team to dip into World Heath Organization data and design a world map of annual pollution exposure by city. Data Blog researcher Ami Sedghi writes:
“The World Health Organisation (WHO) warns that exposure to particulate matter increases the risk of many chronic and acute respiratory conditions in children and adults. The WHO air quality guidelines indicate that by reducing particulate matter (PM10) pollution from 70 to 20 micrograms per cubic metre, air quality related deaths can be reduced by around 15%.”
Visualization of the Week: Australia’s weather and wave forecast maps
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology adds new colors to forecast maps to accommodate rising high temps topping 129 degrees Fahrenheit.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology recently had to update its interactive weather forecasting chart to add new colors. Peter Hannam explains at The Sydney Morning Herald that the previous temperature range topped out at 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) to accommodate forecasted high temperatures. Now, they’ve had to add two new colors, dark purple and bright pink, to represent temperatures up to 54 degrees Celsius (129.2 degrees Fahrenheit). Hannam captured a forecast map for 5 p.m. January 14 that required the new deep purple color.
Visualization of the Week: Your US tax rate, from 1913 to 2012
An interactive chart showing equivalent inflation-adjusted incomes and effective federal tax rates for the past century.
Prompted by Warren Buffett’s appeal to establish a minimum tax on the wealthy and the “fiscal cliff” negotiations in Congress, Ritchie King designed an interactive chart showing historical effective federal tax rates (federal taxes paid divided by taxable income) based on inflation-adjusted 2012 income.
This chart shows the 1963 equivalent income and federal tax rate for a married couple filing jointly and earning 100,000 in 2012. Click here for the full interactive visualization.
Visualization of the Week: Evaluating basketball teams as networks
ASU researchers find the science behind the Lakers' 2010 championship.
Had the Lakers consulted with Arizona State University (ASU) researchers Jennifer Fewell and Dieter Armbruster, they might have gone a different way after firing coach Mike Brown. Nonetheless, current Lakers coach Mike D’Antoni may be wise to consult Fewell and Armbruster’s work. The duo led a team at ASU that used a network analysis model to analyze basketball plays — they applied the technique to the 2010 NBA playoffs to help explain the results.
According to their published research paper, “[t]he study involved more than a thousand ball movements and typically more than one hundred sequences or paths for each team” in the playoffs, which provided enough data to enable them to treat the game as a network.
“Weighted graphs of ball transitions across two games for the (d) Lakers. Red edges represent transition probabilities summing to the 60th percentile. Player nodes are sorted by decreasing degree clockwise from the left.”
Read more…
Visualization of the Week: Every bomb dropped in the London Blitz
Researchers at BombSight.org have developed an interactive map visualizing the London Blitz.
A team of researchers and developers at BombSight.org has put together an interactive map showing every bomb dropped during the London Blitz of World War II, between October 7, 1940, and June 6, 1941. The bird’s eye view of the map (shown below), though inaccessible for deriving any detailed data, shows the sheer volume of destruction wreaked upon the city in those eight months.
Click here for the full visualization.
The real value in this visualization is found when you drill down to specific areas. The dots turn into bomb icons that can be clicked to bring up additional information about that particular devastation, including a “read more” link that brings up a page with related images in that area and related stories from people who were nearby at the time of that bomb drop:
Visualization of the Week: On tour with the Rolling Stones for 50 years
An interactive timeline visualization of The Rolling Stones' touring history.
The Rolling Stones have reached their 50th anniversary milestone. The band celebrated by kicking off an anniversary tour, and the team over at CartoDB took the opportunity to test their new CartoDB Javascript library and visualize The Rolling Stones’ complete touring history.
Click here for the full visualization.
From a data display perspective, the visualization is an interesting approach to a timeline story. It shows a progression through visualization as opposed to the more traditional static images along a bar or time graph.
Visualization of the Week: NFL rushing stats
Every NFL rushing play from 2008-2011, visualized.
Juice Labs has cooked up an interactive visualization, “The Spider,” showing rushing tendencies of every NFL team from the 2008 through 2011 seasons. Want to know which way the New England Patriots typically run — and the average or total yards gained — on first and long, or Stevan Ridley’s average yards gained on 4th and short during the 2011 season (-1 … ouch …)? The visualization shows this and more for every team, player, and rush.
