A little humor on a Monday is always welcome, so here’s an humorously recursive list of 16 Infographics about Infographics.
Graphic designers love self-referential whimsy, and they loved making fun of the often amateurish data visualizations, using the infographic designers’ own format against them.
So here are 16 meta-infographics that mock, defend or explain infographics.
YellowFin has a short article on “Best practices” For data analysis and visualization in the Business Intelligence space, and they make a somewhat surprising (and correct) statement that too many people get stuck trying to make flashy and dazzling graphics, forgetting that they’re supposed to be useful before pretty.
Not only can this modern addiction to the sleek and sometimes superficial affect the initial purchase decision, this mindset can place corporate data analysis in a long-term straitjacket. Users of all types will be tempted to dazzle colleagues and clients with impressive looking 3D multi-pie charts and animated graphs to the detriment of the data analysis – The chart, rather than the data, becomes the star of the show. For best practice data analysis, the visualization of that data should only support and facilitate understanding, never distract or detract from it.
This is a trend that’s furthered even more by the constant deluge of infographics that keep popping up around the net. Rather than condensing mountains of information into a simple understandable image, many of them take one or two sentences and turn it into a 5-screen tall 4Meg image.
via Data analysis & data visualization best practices for Business Intelligence (P1).
It took me longer than I thought to finally get back in the groove of this, so please be gentle as we return to the weekly VizWorld Podcast!
Folks from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have compiled a bunch of Microsoft Kinect’s into an incredible inexpensive 3D Teleconferencing system.
The setup uses up to four Kinect sensors in a single endpoint, capturing images from various angles before they are processed using GPU-accelerated filters. The video captured by the cameras is processed in a series of steps, filling holes and adjusting colors to create a mesh image. Once the video streams have been processed, they are overlaid with one another to form a complete 3D image.
That description doesn’t do it justice honestly. They’re using GPU’s to realtime process the data from 4 kinects, performing mesh alignment, color correction, and surface smoothing in realtime. The results are then sent to another screen where they can be viewed in 3D (with glasses of course), but another Kinect tracks the head of the viewer to adjust the display to create an even richer experience.
Check out the amazing video below.
Daden has a blog post up detailing some of their work with Second-Life derived OpenSim and visualizing unstructured datasets within the world. They have some great tools for visualization on surface plots, scatter plots, and more.
Based on over 5000 tweets captured at 5 minute intervals over the day. Central cone layer shows most prolific tweeters (size = number of tweets, red = quoting others, yellow=being quoted). Position in layer reflects sentiment, high=good, low=bad (orange surface level = neutral). Lower cone layer is other Twitter users being mentioned in tweets, upper cube layer is hashtags being used, for both size=number of mentions. Each object has a label identifying name. Hovering cursor over an object brings up more information/options such as bringing up the twitter page of the user (in this case imPrinceHarry – who luckily rated positive on sentiment!). Further refinement could show social graph data from people mentioning other people in tweets, and links to hashtags they used etc.
It’s interesting to see some of the old research used for CAVE’s and Immersive Environments come back in the Virtual World space. Not all the same rules apply, but it’s a completely different world looking at data from the Inside Out, rather than the Outside In.
via Adventures in #opensim data visualisation & visual analytics #4 – Daden Blog.
Now here’s something I didn’t expect. SGI is preparing an OpenGL Training Course over in California where students get a nice 5-day course on OpenGL, GLEW, and GLSL.
Students learn to view and model in 3D, and to create animated, wire frame and solid geometery, under interactive control from input devices. Students add lighting, textures, and other effects to increase realism. New OpenGL 3.0 topics include using vertex buffer objects for better performance and an introduction to the programmable shaders and GLSL for advanced shading techniques using vertex shaders and fragment shaders. This course discusses both the fixed and function pipeline and an introduction to the newer programmable shader pipeline with OpenGL.
I find it ironic and humorous that the company that was sadly always one step behind is now offering a “cutting edge training class” on OpenGL3, rather than the current OpenGL4. Nonetheless, looks like a great course covering a wide variety of topics.
If you follow our Daily Viz from Visual Loop, you probably noticed that we’ve been picking up a weekly topic to bring some infographics about, and this week we’ll be covering several environmental issues – after all, yesterday was the World Environment Day. So, to start this Monday’s selection, a couple of infographics from Graphic.is, about the top CO2 emitters and the World’s forests. Then, Mother Nature Network‘s interesting look at the United States of the Environment, for the better and the worst, the Ozone protection timeline, by Environmental Protection Agency, and finally, a look at global budget estimates for atmospheric methane in recent years, by Nigel Hawtin.
Infographic: The History of Networks
Are you who you say you are?
Privacy Please: Mobile Privacy Is A Top Concern For Users
The “Buy Local” Boost
How Many Jobs Do Americans Hold in a Lifetime?
#E2sday: The State of Compensation in the Enterprise
A Guide to S&P’s Latest Credit Ratings by Country
Infographic: Evolving Attitudes About Interracial Marriage
2011 Summer Movie Guide by the Numbers
The Small Business Checklist
The Cost of Raising a Child
Raise the Roof: a Look at the U.S. Debt Ceiling
The Exam Cram: Why Stress Can Hurt Your Test Scores
Credit Scores, Home Sales, Prices by State
The State of Tax Extensions
Mysterious Symbols of the Dollar Bill
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