A big focus of VisWeek this year was on “Telling Stories with Data”, or turning data visualizations into a narrative form. It sounds powerful, taking mountains of data and extracting the core essence of the message to relay to the viewer. However, it also has a dark side common to statistics in that it can easily be manipulated to tell many stories from many different sides, pretty much whatever you want.
One of our goals for the workshop was to learn what humanities scholarship might have to say about the creation of data narratives. In this session, we invited two speakers to lead a discussion of the theoretical aspects of storytelling: what kinds of stories exist, what the component elements of a story are, and how those might be embodied in a visualization.
AMD has briefed EnGadget on the future of the AMD CPU and GPU lines, and the results look impressive.
The slides explicitly describe the recently launched HD 6870 / 6850 as mere refreshes, aiming to bring HD 5800 series performance in a more efficient package, but peek beyond them and you’ll see an armada of HD 6900 chips just itching to bring the fight to NVIDIA and its newly crowned GTX 580 king of the single-GPU hill. No specs yet, of course, but at least we now know there’ll be some fireworks to greet us early in the new year.
The roadmaps show upcoming Radeon cards, as well as the upcoming ‘Fusion’ APU unit.
Yesterday we told you about Samsung’s (SMD) impressive AMOLED Flexible Display, and now someone has posted a short video of the screen in action.
The display is impressive, but like the original poster I’m a bit concerned about the white lines in the display. Is that systematic of traditional trade-show wear & tear (faulty signal line), or is this display a combination of 6 or so displays cobbled together? I honestly don’t know.
Teachers. Their importance transcends the simple role of an educator. I mean, who doesn’t have a teacher as a referential, someone who played that key role in our lives? Mud Pies and Butterflies names them our greatest resource, in their infographic, and we couldn’t agree more. Our daily selection also includes Space‘s giant infographic about the Space Shuttle, the history of women in the workplace, by Credit Score, Heart Math shows us how stress effects the body, and Motorcycle Insurance takes a look at the traffic related deaths around the World.
Typically, Visualization is done after the data is gathered or simulation, but a research study by Donald Appleyard back in 1969 flipped this around by turning the visualization into the data gathering step.
Another chart plotted peoples’ perception of their “home territory” on the 3 different streets. On the heavily traffic street, residents drew red rectangles which shows their apartment, or in some case, their whole building, as being their home territory. In contrast, on the lightly traffic street, most of the people are defining their entire street as their home territory, with some people highlighting their building or a slightly larger area.
Now, he did go with more traditional methods, plotting connections between neighbors to show how interconnected an area of light traffic is compared to high-traffic. It’s an interesting study with impressive results.
Tableau Software, brainchild of a former Pixar founder, has just released the newest version of their flagship product Tableau 6. Taking on all the major players in business intelligence, the new version has some huge improvements.
From the speed of the Data Engine to the I-can’t-believe-it ease of Data Blending, Tableau 6 will change what you can achieve with data. And with more than 60 new features including beautifulcombination charts and page trails, you’ll never forget the first time you had 6.
To celebrate the launch, today is the first day of “Six Education Day“. A collection of 6 licensed experts are on-hand to field questions submitted via blog comments, email, or Twitter. In addition, every 6-minutes after the hour they’ll be giving away “Joy of 6″ T-Shirts!
So go check it out, they have a free 14 day trial you can download and play with (if you’re on a Windows Machine), and view the PDF of all the new features.
At the recent FPD International, SMD was on-hand with some of their newest flexible AMOLED displays. The photos don’t do them justice, but you’re looking at screens with a curvature radius of only 1 centimeter, running at 800×480.
The brightness and contrast ratio of the panel are 250cd/m2 and 100,000:1, respectively. It can display about 16.7 million colors and has a 100% or higher color gamut on NTSC standards.
A historic look at America’s grocery spending habits is our first infographic of the day, brought by Bill Shrink, followed by the best and worst performing retailers in the past 12 months, by Gavin Poptenza. From Online Finance Degree comes the life and death of a $1 bill, Mint explains what are Capital Gains, and to close this up, Savings asks if the Black Friday deals will continue on trend.
A big focus of VisWeek this year was on “Telling Stories with Data”, or turning data visualizations into a narrative form. It sounds powerful, taking mountains of data and extracting the core essence of the message to relay to the viewer. However, it also has a dark side common to statistics in that it can easily be manipulated to tell many stories from many different sides, pretty much whatever you want.
Yesterday
Teachers. Their importance transcends the simple role of an educator. I mean, who doesn’t have a teacher as a referential, someone who played that key role in our lives? 
Typically, Visualization is done after the data is gathered or simulation, but a research study by Donald Appleyard back in 1969 flipped this around by turning the visualization into the data gathering step.
Tableau Software, brainchild of a former Pixar founder, has just released the newest version of their flagship product Tableau 6. Taking on all the major players in business intelligence, the new version has some huge improvements.
A historic look at America’s grocery spending habits is our first infographic of the day, brought by 
VizWorld.com 
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