VizWorld.com

What if you were able to redraw the map of Great Britain based on how humans interact via phone calls? What would the resulting map look like? One enterprising group tested it out, and has created this video of it.

Do regional boundaries defined by governments respect the more natural ways that people interact across space? This paper proposes a novel, fine-grained approach to regional delineation, based on analyzing networks of billions of individual human transactions. Given a geographical area and some measure of the strength of links between its inhabitants, we show how to partition the area into smaller, non-overlapping regions while minimizing the disruption to each person’s links. We tested our method on the largest non-Internet human network, inferred from a large telecommunications database in Great Britain. Our partitioning algorithm yields geographically cohesive regions that correspond remarkably well with administrative regions, while unveiling unexpected spatial structures that had previously only been hypothesized in the literature. We also quantify the effects of partitioning, showing for instance that the effects of a possible secession of Wales from Great Britain would be twice as disruptive for the human network than that of Scotland.

Carlo Ratti, Stanislav Sobolevsky, Francesco Calabrese, Clio Andris, Jonathan Reades, Mauro Martino, Rob Claxton, Steven H Strogatz – PLoS ONE, 2010

Graphics data visualization, information visualization

Back on March 25^th, we told you about the Design for America contest sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation. The idea was to shine some light into the United States government. It was not really one contest, but six contests. The contests are:

• Data Visualization of Sunlight Community Data
• Visualization of Data from the Federal Budget and/or USASpending.gov
• Visualization of Recovery.gov Data
• Visualization of How a Bill Becomes a Law
• Visualization of Congressional Rules/Floor Procedures
• Redesign of a Government Form
• Redesign of a .Gov website

Sunlight labs recently announced the winners of the contests.

The Design for America contest led to the most compelling, interesting visualizations of any of our contests. With about 72 entries, the design community stepped up and showed amazing ways for us to view government and imagine new ways for government to serve citizens.

via The Design for America Winners – Sunlight Labs: Blog.

Science data visualization, infographic

Back on March 25^th, we told you about the Design for America contest sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation. The idea is to shine some light into the United States government. It is not really one contest, but six contests where you can win $5,000. The contests are:

• Data Visualization of Sunlight Community Data
• Visualization of Data from the Federal Budget and/or USASpending.gov
• Visualization of Recovery.gov Data
• Visualization of How a Bill Becomes a Law
• Visualization of Congressional Rules/Floor Procedures
• Redesign of a Government Form
• Redesign of a .Gov website

via : Design for America contest

Graphics data visualization, infographic

The blog Information Advantage has posted an article describing their entry into the Interactive Graph Contest sponsored by ReadWriteWeb and Tableau Public. Using Tableau, they have a several nice data visualizations of public health by counties in the United States. Of course, it is interactive, so if you find some of it a little bit cluttered, you can always turn off some of the States, or zoom into a specific region.

Amongst all of the available choices, we decided to participate with a piece of analysis on “Activity Rates and Healthy Living Data”, for three specific reasons–

1. The contest reinforces our strong belief that effective visualization backed by solid analytics is the future of executive decision making.

2. Given the recent developments in health reform, this data presented a very interesting business and social challenge from an impact perspective.

3. We wanted to share our thinking and approach around challenging business and social problems where there is a nontrivial amount of data available and an opportunity to leverage advanced analytics and data visualization techniques.

via Data Visualization: Activity Rates & Healthy Living Across US Counties.

Graphics data visualization, tableau

In an effort to shine some light into the United States government, Sunlight Labs is launching, not one, but six contests where you can win $5,000. The contests are:

• Data Visualization of Sunlight Community Data
• Visualization of Data from the Federal Budget and/or USASpending.gov
• Visualization of Recovery.gov Data
• Visualization of How a Bill Becomes a Law
• Visualization of Congressional Rules/Floor Procedures
• Redesign of a Government Form
• Redesign of a .Gov website

Sunlight Labs is pleased to announce our latest contest — “Design for America.” This 10 week long design and data visualization extravaganza is focused on connecting the talents of art and design communities throughout the country to the wealth of government data now available through bulk data access and APIs, and to help nurture the field of information visualization. Our goal is simple and straightforward — to make government data more accessible and comprehensible to the American
public.

I already have a winning entry. For the visualization of How a Bill Becomes a Law, I would use the “I’m just a Bill” from School House Rock. Now you are going to have that song stuck in your head all day.

via Design for America.

Graphics data visualization, infographic

Today I ran across Flare, which is a data visualization tool for the web that utilizes Adobe Flash. Flare can do animations, tree graphs, bubble maps, stacked time series, scatter plots, bar graphs, and more. For example, the image to the right visualizes the changing labor force in the United States over the past 150 years by using a stacked time series. Of particular interest is Flare’s demo page, where you can see all the different features in action. From their web site:

Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel.

via Flare | Data Visualization for the Web.

Graphics data visualization, flare, flash

It bears repeating once again that Correlation does not imply Causation. We are back again, with the dueling charts that attempt to show one political party in the United States is better than another political party based on government statistics plotted against who is in power. The first chart to the right is one that we talked about some time ago. Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, would have us take a look at the job losses as report by the BLS, and correlate them with the President of the United States. From the bar chart to the right, one could mistakenly make the case that President Bush caused all the job losses, and President Obama has stopped the job losses.

However, if we look at the cumulative job losses, then one can make the case that things have continued to get worse under the Obama Administration. The chart to the right looks at the cumulative job losses under both administrations. The Y-axis to the right shows job losses in the thousands of jobs. Thus, the cumulative job loss is around 6.8 million jobs. Both the first chart, and the second chart use the same data from the same place. Both tell a completely opposite story. Neither is correct since there is no real link between who is President and job losses. It bears repeating once again that Correlation does not imply Causation.

Today, we see another one of these charts that attempts to paint one party as being better for jobs and the other party as being a jobs killer. Matthias Shapiro has created the third chart to the right, and he makes the same mistake that the other charts have made. He looks at whether one party in Congress, as opposed to the President, creates more jobs than the other. As British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli said “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” From the article:

The chart, below, is Shapiro’s graphical attempt to answer the question, “Does a Republican congress create more jobs?”

Shapiro gathered data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment numbers are averaged by quarter and charted from 2003 to the present. (2010 Q1 is just January, 2010) Republicans took control of both houses of Congress in January 2003. Democrats took control of both houses of Congress in January 2007.

via Data Visualization: Fighting Fire with Fire | TechRepublican.com.

Graphics data visualization, infographic, unemployment

The U.S. Department of State has collaborated with UC Berkeley’s Center for New Media to come out with a new data visualization tool called Opinion Space. This tool allows you to voice your ideas on on foreign policy issues, and to see how your opinions stack up against others. The tool groups your ideas along with others into hotspots, and then visualizes it. You are not grouped based on geography (no red or blue states here) or categories (Republican versus Democrat) but on how similar your opinion is to others. You start off with 5 initial questions, and one discussion question. Then your responses are visualized.

The five questions cover nuclear weapons, proactive diplomacy, climate change, investing in food, and empowering women. The discussion question asks you what ideas you would give to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately, you do have to register (and even put in your geographic location) to see your results. You can then view other responses and rate them up or down.

The U.S. Department of State is interested in your perspectives and input on a series of important foreign policy questions.  “Opinion Space” is a new discussion forum designed to engage participants from around the world.

Every participant chooses a “point of view” on a global opinion map. Your position is not based on geography or predetermined categories, but on similarity of opinion: those who agree on basic issues are neighbors, those who are far apart have agreed to disagree.  You can instantly see where you stand in relation to other participants; by reviewing their comments, you help the community highlight the most insightful ideas.

via : Opinion Space.

Graphics data visualization

whatdoyousuggest.net is a new way of searching for information on the web. The web site takes an input query, and displays the results from Google Suggest in a tree form. For example, if you enter a search item into the entry field, and it gives you options on where you can go from there. For example, I entered the term “books” which then brought up several options. I chose “online” and more options appear. In many ways, this search engine has the feel of Web Seer. From the search engine site itself:

What Do You Suggest takes a seed from you (or gives you something random) then guides you on a journey through language and the collective lives of Google users.

Using data from Google to make suggetions on where you might like to go next, What Do You Suggest is an experimental and interactive environment designed to explore how we use language and search on the internet.

via What do you suggest?.

Graphics data visualization, google, search

Imagine if government data were open and interactive. Well, the United States government has a great deal of information that you can download in an spreadsheet format. While that is a beginning, would it not be better if you had a website that took all the data the government collects and you could map it out yourself, however you like. In Victoria, Australia, they have such a website called VisualPlace.

VisualPlace is a six month Proof of Concept testing innovative ways of capturing, exploring and visualising government information and services through maps.

The website is actively soliciting the public’s participation, and suggestions for improvement.

via : VisualPlace

Graphics australia, data visualization, Website