Visualization

Well, there is nothing new in this statement. The smartphone OS Android is catching up and even overtaking its rival iOS in many domains: more activated products per day and per year in 2011, more Samsung Galaxy S3 (running Android) sold in Q3 2012 than iPhone4 and 5S (running iOS), more devices worldwide, catching up Apple’s market share in tablets, … All this is summarised in an infographics MBA Online designed (the original address is here: http://www.mbaonline.com/android/ - click at your own risk). It is sweet and colorful, with lots of numbers and some references in the end. Unfortunately these references are embedded in the image so you cannot click on them if you ever want to read more info. ...

As you probably know I am interested in both diseases (and health in general) as well as visualization. Recently Online Nursing Programs (*) invited me to have a look at their latest infographics about the effects of tobacco on health ( directly to figure). Although numbers seem correct (references are at the bottom), although they intelligently re-use the presentation of some well-known tobacco companies, there is one thing that I don’t like that much: like this sentence, the figure is very, very long. You have to scroll many pages in order to see everything. It may look like a story but it is not presented as such (I mean: there are no clear marks of different steps in the story, except the three “chapters”). On the right is the complete figure in exactly 800 pixels of height - can you read something? GOOD.is solved this issue by using a Flash player that allows the viewer to woom in/out and go to different sections of the figure ( see here for instance). ...

A few posts ago I wrote about my discomfort about stacked bar graphs and the fact I prefer to use simple table with gradients as background. My only regret then was that the table was built in a spreadsheet. I would have liked to keep the data as it is but also have a nice representation of these categorical data. This evening I spent some time analysing results from a survey and took the opportunity to buid these representations in R. ...

This afternoon I received a bunch of data accompanied by stacked bar graphs for each dataset. For example, this one: The chart shows the incidence of disease X in various age ranges. That incidence is split by 8 severity levels. The chart shows that the disease especially affects age ranges 4 and 5, at different severity levels. However I didn’t feel comfortable … what are the different levels of severity in age ranges 1, 2 and 3? how can we compare levels C, D and E in age ranges 4 and 5? is there anywhere some severity A? (it’s even worst when some age ranges don’t have any incidence at all: what is happening?) etc. I looked on the web but couldn’t find much information apart from the fact " The Economist says they’re so bad at conveying information, that they’re a great way to hide a bad number amongst good ones" (but are still using them in their graphic detail section) or " a stacked column chart with percentages should always extend to 100%" (this doesn’t really apply here). Then in a post on Junk Charts, someone mentioned Steven Few who would have said “not to use stacked bar charts because you cannot compare individual values very easily and as a rule [he] avoid[s] stacked bars with more than six or seven divisions”. And Steven Few also participated in his forum here. ...

The NPR has produced a nice visualization / video showing how population grew to 7 billion ( original article): [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcSX4ytEfcE] If you want to model the improvement in child survival, you just turn the birth tap off (or nearly). Then, with wealth, prevention, healthcare and better food, the population will also grow older (death tap also turned off or nearly) and during a certain time, lots of adults will be economically active (i.e. they will work and consume). This is a demographic dividend. But it comes with a risk: at the next stage, there might be a disproportionately high number of people compared to / depending on a small number of active adults (the next generation). In addition, if you fill it up slowly but you also empty it slowly, the container risk to be full soon, it all depends on the various rates … ...

During lunch time, I discovered an old street art video (well, old = 2010) where people poured hundreds liters of painting on Rosenthaler Platz (Berlin, Deutschland) to visualize traffic patterns (below: screenshot and video). [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXCnWUzUw_E] This reminded me that I recently discovered that Google Maps now includes traffic for Brussels. It was the case for Berlin since a long time and the Rosenthaler Platz looks quite quiet for the moment: ...

In the 300-and-more RSS items in my aggregator this week, there are 2 great ones from Information is Beautiful, a blog gathering (and publishing its own) nice ways to visualise data. The first one is based on a talk by Clay Shirky who, in turn, was referencing his book Cognitive Surplus. In Cognitive Surplus visualized, David McCandless just represented one of Shirky’s ideas: 200 billion hours are spent each year by US adults just watching TV whereas only 100 million hours were necessary to create Wikipedia (I guess the platform + the content) … ...