VizWorld.com

Fantasy Sports fans live in the world of numbers and statistics, making the data they work with perfect for visualization.  CBS Sport’s Jamey Eisenberg has an article up covering how 2009 went down in Fantasy NFL events, and visualizes some of the data using Tableau.

As you can see with the interactive visualization below, we have a breakdown of the players that ended up with the highest winning percentage for Fantasy owners this past season. You can also see how their win percentage compared to their average draft position and how they did each week based on their Fantasy points in a standard-scoring league.

via Who were the big winners in 2009? – NFL Who were the big winners in 2009? : FantasyNews.CBSSports.com.

Science interactive, nfl, sports, tableau, visualization

Micheal Geist has been closely investigating the developing of the secret ACTA treaty, and just compiled the timeline into a great interactive visualization available on Dipity.

Michael Geist writes, “The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is generating growing concern as many people learn about the secret copyright treaty for the first time. I’ve create a visual timeline to trace its emergence that includes links to the leaked documents, official government statements, and NGO letters and work in the area.”

dipity / michaelgeist. via BoingBoing

Graphics acta, infographic, interactive, timeline

Michael VanDaniker has created an interesting visualization of web traffic to W3Schools.com using a soon-to-be-released visualization product called Axiis.

Each of the concentric rings are essentially pie charts showing the percentage of visitors using each browser for a particular time slice, starting with January 2002 in the center and working out to August 2009. The numbers on W3schools.com don’t quite add up to 100% because they don’t report on browsers that make up less than 0.5% of their visitors. This results in a gap at the end of each ring.

In the chart, Blue is IE, Orange is FireFox, Green is first Netscape then Chrome, Grey is Safari, and red is Opera.  It’s fully interactive, hovering over any bar gives the actual percentage number.  However, it still suffers from the same problem of almost all circular charts, it’s difficult to compare the lines.  With the high density of the chart, you can get a “feel” for trends (like FireFox grows fast, as does Chrome), but actual comparisons are difficult.

Visualizing Historic Browser Statistics with Axiis. via CoolInfographics

Graphics axiis, browser, infographic, interactive

If you’re running a WebGL compliant web browser, you can head on over to Shader Toy and interactively build Pixel Shaders in your browser and see the results.  This is all possible thanks to the new WebGL support and enables an incredible level of experimentation and interactivity, directly in the browser.

Unfortunately I’m not near a WebGL browser at the moment. Someone take a Pic and send it to us, and I’ll be happy to include it!

Graphics, Science browser, interactive, shader, webgl

The United States has 53 separate unemployment insurance systems. How can that be when there are only 50 states? The remaining three unemployment insurance systems are found in Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Each system is separate from one another; each system pays different benefits; each system has been funded separately. What that means is that some workers in low-benefit states can get half what the same type of worker gets in a high-benefit state. If that sounds unfair, consider this: some states have built up sufficient reserves to make it through this recession. Other states have seen their funds run dry.

ProPublica has an article and interactive infographic showing which states are in trouble, which states are not, and which states will be in trouble in six months. From their article:

The unemployment insurance system is in crisis. A record 20 million Americans collected unemployment benefits last year, and so far twenty-five states have run out of funds and been forced to borrow from federal government, raise taxes, or cut benefits. In many other states the situation is deteriorating fast. Using near real-time data on state revenues and the benefits they pay out, we estimate how long state trust funds will hold up.

Be sure to click on your state, district, or territory on the right side of their interactive infographic to see how it is doing.

via ProPublica : Unemployment Insurance Tracker

Science infographic, interactive

Labgrab.com has just released a neat visualization tool for parsing the massive volume of science news as a collection of box graphs.

Inspired by similar data visualization tools, this flash based application is the newest rich internet application (RIA) addition to hit the online science community. “We read a statistic that roughly 10,000 items of science news were published daily and thought it would be intriguing to animate that day after day” said Jed Herzog, lead developer on the project.

VizWorld.com. Doing our part to make that Science & Technology box just a little bit bigger since 2009.

BoxGraph via Science News Goes Visual with “Grab More Science” Graph from LabGrab.com.

Science boxgraph, interactive, labgrab, news

A nice new interactive visualization up on the New York Times allows you to pick a movie from 2009 and then see how often it was rented in various US metropolitan areas. The movies can be sorted by most to least rented, alphabetical, or by Metacritic score, and the resulting heatmaps cover 12 cities across the US and break the results down by zip code.

The visualization itself is impressive, but the data is a bit creepy.  Any NetFlix users see this as an invasion of privacy? (even thought it was presented as aggregate data, the top 50 rentals in each zip code).

A Peek Into Netflix Queues – NYTimes.com.

Graphics interactive, netflix, nytimes

Hook up the power of Google Suggest with real-time comparisons of multiple search completions, and you get a fun tool called ‘Web Seer’.

Is there a way to visualize people’s innermost thoughts? Google Suggest lets you see what others are asking when they search the web. From the existential to the mundane, the questions form a portrait of human curiosity. (Try it live now.) Take the phrase “why doesn’t he…” Even more revealing is the comparison between what he doesn’t do, and what she doesn’t.

Requires a flash-enabled browser, but go check it out.

HINT.FM: Web Seer.

Science google, infographic, interactive

The Nature Conservancy, the University of Washington, and the University of Southern Mississippi have collaborated to create an online interactive “Climate Wizard”.  You can review the last 50 years of data, or look at predictions out to 2050 and 2080 using one of about 30 different circulation models and emission scenarios.

With ClimateWizard you can:

• view historic temperature and rainfall maps for anywhere in the world
• view state-of-the-art future predictions of temperature and rainfall around the world
• view and download climate change maps in a few easy steps

ClimateWizard enables technical and non-technical audiences alike to access leading climate change information and visualize the impacts anywhere on Earth.  The first generation of this web-based program allows the user to choose a state or country and both assess how climate has changed over time and to project what future changes are predicted to occur in a given area. ClimateWizard represents the first time ever the full range of climate history and impacts for a landscape have been brought together in a user-friendly format.

The results are impressive, although every model I tried showed us all  digging out the shorts by 2080.

Climate Wizard.

Science climate, interactive, map, prediction, weather, Website

Cryosurgery, placing cryoprobes in cancerous tumors to instantly freeze and kill them while still inside the body, is a new technique to fight cancer, but training new surgeons in this technology is difficult because of the potential to destroy healthy tissue and cause other potentially deadly complications.  Carnegie Mellon Mechanical Engineering professors Yoed Rabin and Kenji Shimada have created a virtual surgery training simulation with the help of a $1.3Million grant from the National Cancer Institute to make training much safer and easier.

Dr. Shimada, in a news release, said the process will allow surgeons to place probes without risk to patients, visualize frozen regions with intuitive 3D computer graphics and benchmark their performance with hundreds of cases stored in a database. “It is a motivational and effective way of learning and improving their surgical skills,” he said.

via CMU expert works on tool to train cryosurgeons.

Science biomed, interactive, simulation, training