Let my dataset change your mindset

In the previous post, I shared a video of David McCandless giving a talk about information visualisation. One phrase caught my attention and a bit of research lead to a very good discovery. The phrase and context is (emphasis is mine):

We need relative figures that are connected to other data so that we can see a fuller picture, and then that can lead to us changing our perspective. As Hans Rosling, the master, my master, said, “Let the dataset change your mindset“. And if it can do that, maybe it can also change your behavior.

Who is Hans Rosling? A Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and Director of the Gapminder Foundation (from Wikipedia). Nothing fancy nor anything related to information visualisation at first sight. Except that the Gapminder Foundation is “a non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals“. So what? Gapminder also “pursue[s] the development of the Trendalyzer […] [seeking] to unveil the beauty of statistical time series by converting boring numbers into enjoyable, animated and interactive graphics“.

And this software is really great (see screenshot below but, above all, in all Rosling’s videos): from one single interface, you can gather lots of different types and sources of data (about the development of the countries of the world) on the same chart and it nicely display them along more than the two dimensions of your screen. Bubble sizes and colours represent other dimensions. And the whole thing move with time (years).

Trendanalyzer screenshot

What is also very interesting is that you can play with Trendanalyzer (in Gapminder world) and download the data behind it. In addition, Google acquired Trendanalyzer and offers some of its components as a “gadget”: Motion Chart.

The beauty of the software is nothing without appropriate use. And in all of his videos, Hans Rosling makes appropriate use of data visualisation, succeeding in converting messages heavily relying on statistics and various sources of data (not something usually visual attractive) in simple visualisations. As David McCandless said: “It’s effortless; it literally pours in”. By visualising it in such a way, it’s more easy for the dataset to try to change your mindset.

Because the tool isn’t everything. With its help, Hans Rosling is trying to convey messages. And if you watch any of his videos, you’ll see that he effectively succeeds in doing it wether it’s to make you stop talking about “developing” countries or to make you think about the role of the end of poverty in the growth of world population, for example. In his Six Minutes blog, Andrew Dlugan summarises Hans Rosling’s technique in 6 points:

Explain the data axes
Highlight subsets of data
Dig deeper to unwrap data
Place labels close to data points
Answer the “Why?” questions
Complement data with energetic delivery

Hans Rosling presenting The seemingly impossible is possible at TED 2007

Althought some of these techniques were taught or discovered by own practise during B.Sc./M.Sc./Ph.D., the combination of them make a presentation very effective, even in front of a small audience.

Why do I blog this? I watched all Rosling’s videos in one go. Once the current presentation was over, it was difficult to resist to watch the next one. From a general perspective, I’m very interested in all means to ease the way people can grasp huge amount of data and to maintain their interest during presentations. From a more practical perspective, I’m starting to deal with some amount of information for various projects and I’m looking for attractive ways to show them. And I was about to forget Hans Rosling is professor of Global Health, a field close to my current one: Health Economics. You couldn’t dream of a better thing than learning more about your field with interesting ideas and appealing presentations.
What triggered the redaction of this blog post is the release of a 55-minute documentary about Hans Rosling’s life and thoughts on YouTube.

David McCandless on information visualisation

Tonight, I realised that David McCandless was behind informationisbeautiful.net, a blog dedicated to information visualisation which I often mentionned before on this blog.

David McCandless speaking at TED, July 2010

Last month, David McCandless gave a talk at TED, a NGO “devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading”. And it was very interesting to hear him, to put a living face on a blog and to apprehend the amount of work to make such great infographics simple to understand. Here is the video (thanks to the license: CC-by-nc-nd – on this page, there is a link to download the high quality video):

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Why do I blog this? I was always and I am still interested in information visualisation, could it be from others (like the flu tracker or, more modestly, my own attempts (to stay in the flu topic). As David said, everyday, everyone of us is blasted by information design, it’s being poured into our eyes, it’s a “dormant litteracy”. And I am curious of new ways of visually presenting large datasets like at the Hack.lu 2009 InfoVis Contest or results of time-consuming models of disease spread.
But of course, on the other hand, you have to ask the right questions, look from the right angle: the one who master information design may also influence the minds of those who see this information and, more importantly, its interpretation. David McCandless didn’t say anything about this: the responsability of the designer regarding the interpretation of his/her design.

"Facts & data"

A colleague of mine is always hammering home the message of bringing facts and data to a discussion rather than rumors, hearsays and daily newspaper articles. Since a few days (because H1N1 is not a pandemic anymore?), newspapers are coming with another “Superbug” or “Germinator“, wrongly named “NDM-1“. So, before spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt, please read the scientific litterature or, at least, read quality newspapers (articles from The Guardian are quite fair and balanced).

NDM-1 (New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase) is just the name of a gene in a plasmid that two bacteria at least, K. pneumoniae and E. coli, can carry. This gene makes bacteria resistant to almost all antibiotics. If you want to know more about this gene, Yong’s paper characterised it (access without subscription). Health care agencies know about this issue at least since last year.

Now, you can still go to India and Pakistan. New Delhi is still a safe city to visit. But yes, in general, the world will face a problem in the future because bacteria are becoming resistant to more and more antibiotics.

Llinking two recent posts seen elsewhere

Namechk.com (Check Username Availability at Multiple Social Networking Sites) bookmarked on delicious.com by Philippe
“one possible use of the Facebook profile information: generating a good dictionary from fabebook-names-original.txt to brute-force password” seen on Twitter.com/adulau

Now use Namechk to find all combinations of >= 2 letters used on more than 1 service. I guess there is a high probability that two identical username strings on two different services belong to the same physical person. Look at their profile/activities/pages/whatever on the various websites, you have now a wonderfull network of knowledge about these people. I also guess that if a flaw is discovered in one of these services that allows to recover users passwords, you could use the same password on all the other services for the same username.

Or take Alexandre’s fabebook-names-original.txt items and sign in other services with them. You have now saturated the web2.0 space. People will need to be more creative to sign in now.

(ok, I know these service providers should have put some protection in place in order to avoid large-scale abuse of their services)

Summer in Scotland

We are back from Scotland and it was really amazing. “Awesome!” (as they would say in another part of the world). You can’t imagine how beautiful is the landscape, how rich is the biodiversity (although we were in the West, where they said “God had no earth left when he created Scottish Highlands”) and how kind are people.

We spent lovely nights at the Rowantree Cottage in Arrochar. It was the first time Neel called someone “The Gentleman” (Bill Thompson) and “The Lady” (Irene Thompson), our lovely hosts. And Charlie the cat was also very kind and patient with Neel.

In Rowantree Cottage

If you have time, we definitely also recommend The Ballyhennan restaurant, situated between Arrochar and Tarbet. In a beautifully renovated 18th Century former church (*), the service is very warm and the food excellent. Try it with or without your family, its food is really excellent and will please everyone!

(*) we learned and saw it’s very common in Scotland to transform lovely churches into restaurant, bed and breakfast or private houses.

In West Scotland, you can’t miss Loch (lakes) and mountains (and midges too, when it just rained and the sun appears). Driving there is very funny (especially on B type roads!). And everywhere you go, you want to stop and just look at the beautiful scenery around you.

Fun at the lake

In Ardnamurchan, we also spent lovely moments at Craig Na Shee, the Rock of Peace. When you arrive there, you wonder how they managed to fit all this comfort in a remote place. And then you sit, relax and enjoy the place! (We were so relaxed we even forgot to take a picture of the great house.) If you have the chance to have good weather conditions (i.e. not too much rain) – and we did, one day – go and visit Sanna Bay, a wonderful bay on the Atlantic ocean.

Sanna beach

So you have to discover Scotland, it’s wonderful!

Scotland valley

Thank you for the bread

First evening after first day of work after holidays, we decided to keep the dinner simple: rice and sandwiches (“bread” for The Little One).

As usual, he couldn’t easily find sleep (but finds every possible excuses not to sleep). When it’s my turn to go and comfort him, he finally decides he’ll go to sleep with Bow-bow, his plush dog …

Dad – Good night, Neel
Son – Good night, papa
Son – Thank you for the bread

Then how not to melt? I love you, Son.

Tetris wall

Dear wife,

I agree to have the decoration you want everywhere in our new home. You can have all the furniture and appliances you want in the kitchen. I’m OK if all the shelves with my computer books are in the basement. OK too if you don’t want to see the file server in the living room. Agreed: I’ll put back Windows on your laptop. But …

But I absolutely want one wall painted like these:

Tetris wall 1

Tetris wall 2

Jean-Etienne 😉

Photos found on Olybop.info (without original credit). Other walls with Tetris can be found on Flickr.

Bittorrent used to deploy updates

I just watched a video from Larry Gadea working at Twitter: Twitter – Murder Bittorrent Deploy System (speaking at CUSEC 2010).

Briefly, the problem Twitter was facing was the deployment of updates to thousands of servers in a short amount of time and dealing with errors (broken servers, e.g.). A nice, simple, cool and free way of solving this issue was to use the Bittorrent protocol (via Python and a stack of other free software) to actually deploy updates. In summary, you go from a unique repository facing thousands requests approximately at the same time:

And you end up with a nice “distribution chain”:

The beautiful thing is that they now go 75 times faster than before!

And now, the video:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=11280885&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

The Murder software is hosted on Github (Apache 2 license).

Why do I blog this? First, I like to see simple ideas no one had before implemented like this. I also wonder how other companies facing the same problems are doing (status.net for example ; I don’t think it could be useful for Forban). Finally, you see, Bittorrent is sometimes about good stuff too!

Cognitive Surplus visualised

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) …

Cognitive Surplus visualised from Information Is Beautiful

It makes you think about either the waste television helps to produce either the potential of human brain(s) if relieved from the burden of television.

The second interesting post appeared in fact in information aesthetics, a blog where form follows data (referencing Information is Beautiful but I can’t find this post). In Top Secret America: Visualizing the National Security Buildup in the U.S., Andrew Vande Moere relates “an extensive investigative project of the Washington Post that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the September 11 attacks”. The project website contains all the ingredients for a well-documented investigation with the addition of interactive maps and flash-based interfaces allowing the user to build his/her own view on the project.

Top Secret America from the Washington Post

It’s nice to see investigative journalism combined with beautiful data visualisation and handling!

Network bandwidth during lecture

One of the differences between university lectures in Belgium and in the United States of America is that, in the US, most of the students are carefully “listening” to the lecture while having their laptop on and connected to the internet. I didn’t departed from this custom 🙂

Yesterday, I was trying to download a Linux DVD (that’s what university networks are for, isn’t it?) and observed an interesting pattern in the network speed during the lecture. If I assume that the total bandwidth available remains constant, the one available to me was drastically reduced as the lecture was going on.

evolution of network speed

Now, if you think that the y-axis isn’t about the remaining network bandwidth but about the level of attention in students, you might not be far from the truth 😉 Attention drops rather quickly during the theoretical lecture and people were very busy during the practicals. Note that the remaining bandwidth was also very small during Mundial matches …