And you are here why?

For those who have known me for a while, my antipathy towards pie-charts (and donut charts!) should be nothing new FWIW, it’s not something off the cuff - pie-charts are,  almost always  better off being replaced by something different (bar graphs being the obvious replacement). Why? Because Quantity is represented by angles and humans are   VERY   bad at identifying differences in angles (87 °   vs 82 ° ? Labeling slices ends up confusing stuff even more Small percentages (which might be important) get goofy Anything above 2-3 items in the pie chart are crazy difficult to figure out Don’t get me started on donut charts, that just take all of the above, and make it Even harder to deal with And it’s not just me, Stephen Few ( Perceptual Edg e. Think “grandmaster of all things Visualizaion”. Hell, he, literally, invented the  bullet graph …) wrote the definitive “ DO NOT USE PIE CHARTS ” article back in 2007. And yeah, if you don’t feel like reading the whole...

/via https://www.slideshare.net/tgwilson/waw-sep2010-datavisualizationwithnotes Is your Visualization effective? Yes, yes, this is a totally loaded question. After all, WTF does “ effective ” even mean? Well, if you’re using it to understand data, did it work? OTOH, what if you’re trying to explain it to somebody else? You may have to make it easier to comprehend, or more accessible (you’re not color-blind, but what if they are?), etc. And how do you make sure that in doing so for Bob, you didn’t foreclose the ability to explain it to Carol (who, unlike Bob,  really  sweats the small stuff). The common point underlying the above is — “ Why do I, the end-user, give any f**ks about this? ”. And that tends to be issue. Static visualizations, by their very nature, represent a single viewport into the data, the one baked into it’s current representation. And that’s where  Interaction  comes in. An interactive visualization changes the lens with which the data ...

Nathan Yau   has   a nice roundup of the different ways in which we can show #Uncertainty , including   Ranges ,   Distributions ,   Multiple Outcomes , and   Obscurity . Wait   what ? Obscurity ? WTF is   Obscurity   in this context? It’s actually quite straightforward — the more uncertain the data, the more difficult it is to see — which you can do via   blurring ,   transparency ,   colors , etc. — something that sounds really obvious in retrospect, no? 😌 The upside is clear — reliable data is made prominent. The downside, well, it has to do with what Obscurity actually   means   to us — do we actually understand gradations? If so, how many levels are feasible — 3 levels of blurriness? 13? Or is it just   “blurry or not”   in our minds? It turns out that there is surprisingly little research into this 😞 Anyhow, a pretty cool tool for #Visualization , and something I hadn’t seen before… ...

Showing how the connections between the characters evolve as the movie progresses

Clearly a slow news day at the Wonkblog (2.6 Million, and Texas Wins)

 Todd Schneider analyzed a crapload (ok, 1.1 B illion ) taxi rides in NYC, and the results are here .  There is a lot (!!!) to digest, but one of the parts I particularly liked were these Notice how the pickups are concentrated in Manhattan (and the airports), while the dropoffs extend out, way  out.  Nice asymmetry :-) There is more, a lot more, including The rise of Uber Don't go to an airport at 5pm (well, d'uh) Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson would have made their trip 39% of the time

/via Jessica Hagy

Check out this map of the genetic diversity of the Y chromosome (basically, how it migrated through the world) (via Wikipedia ) Interesting info from the above : Adam came from Cameroon based on the A0 and A00 haplogroup The predominant Greek haplogroup (E) is most commonly found in Africa (remember, Greeks are "white", whatever that means) Continuing on "whiteness", the predominant European haplogroup (R) is also all over west/central Africa And Egypt is a mix of European and African haplogroups, which pretty much makes sense 'cos thats pretty much where everybody had to go through to get out of Africa and go anywhere (and vice-versa!)  

Mind you, Bangalore? Bangalore ? /via Bloomberg

via Drew Roos The Mercator projection is infamous for its distortion at high latitudes. This distortion gets exponentially worse as you approach the poles. It is in fact impossible to show the poles on a Mercator map — they are infinitely far away. Any Mercator map you've ever seen must cut off the top and bottom edges at some arbitrary point. The map stops short hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from the poles. His solution - redo the Mercator, centered on wherever you want (e.g., where you live), and reduce the cutoff to make it somewhat mind-boggingly tall To make things actually interesting, we must artifically shift the pole of the project to a more interesting place. Imagine the earth encased by a rigid cage of latitude and longitude lines. We rotate the earth while leaving the cage fixed until a new point of interest has taken the place of the North Pole. This is called an   oblique Mercator , and is normally used to shift an area of interest onto the e...

An animation by Pakiavelli - complete with Enya-esque music - answers the question...

via Floating Sheep ...a new publication by members of the Floatingsheep team. Just released is "Offline Brews and Online Views: Exploring the Geography of Beer on Twitter",  a new book chapter written by Matt and Ate that analyzes the geographies of beer-related tweeting activity  [and]  shows that geotagged tweets about beer, and other alcoholic beverages for that matter, are reflective of people's offline consumption preferences. Using a database of one million geotagged tweets from June 2012 to May 2013 containing the keywords "wine", "beer" or the names of a range of light or cheaper beers within the continental US, some clear regional variations in alcoholic beverage preference are detected. [...] While Bud Light is more popular in the eastern and southeastern US, Coors Light tends to dominate the west coast, with Miller Lite and Busch Light being preferred in the midwest and Great Plains. The dominance of these brands in virtual space is no...

via You Are Here ,  the location of every coffee shop in San Francisco, and its Walkingshed Independent coffee shops are positive markers of a living community. They function as social spaces, urban offices, and places to see the world go by. Communities are often formed by having spaces in which people can have casual interactions, and local and walkable coffee shops create those conditions, not only in the coffee shop themselves, but on the sidewalks around them. We use maps to know where these coffee shop communities exist and where, by placing new coffee shops, we can help form them. Visualizations - use the power for good, never for evil :-)

via Visual.ly

Seriously - this is a chrome extension that visualizes your browser history as a stack of favicons As the author - Shan Huang  - puts it I decided to dig deep into my browser history data for my data visualization project. Because I spend so much time online everyday, doing all sorts of things from working to socializing to just aimless wandering, I thought browser history alone could narrate a significant portion of my life and what was on my mind. A plus of using browser history was that the data was nice and easy to obtain. Therefore I could skip the trudge of collecting and cleaning the data and focus on the content itself. The Github repo of the extension is here , and the extension itself is here

You already knew this, but now there is data (w00t!). via Tony Haile , (emphasis mine) A widespread assumption is that the more content is liked or shared, the more engaging it must be, the more willing people are to devote their attention to it. However, the data doesn’t back that up. We looked at 10,000 socially-shared articles and found that there is no relationship whatsoever between the amount a piece of content is shared and the amount of attention an average reader will give that content. When we combined attention and traffic to find the story that had the largest volume of total engaged time, we found that it had fewer than 100 likes and fewer than 50 tweets. Conversely, the story with the largest number of tweets got about 20% of the total engaged time that the most engaging story received. Bottom line, measuring social sharing is great for understanding social sharing, but if you’re using that to understand which content is capturing more of someone’s attention, you’re...

"Noon" should be when the sun is directly overhead, right? Well, not really.  As Stefano Maggiolo  points out , its pretty much almost never  the case that the two align It turns out, there are many places where  the sun rises and sets late in the day , like in Spain, but not a lot where it is very early (highlighted in red and green in the map, respectively). Most of Russia is heavily red, but mostly in zones with very scarce population; the exception is St. Petersburg, with a discrepancy of two hours, but the effect on time is mitigated by the high latitude. The  most extreme  example of Spain-like time is western China: the difference reaches three hours against solar time.  Check out the actual map...

via The Daily Viz . And yes, it do suck.

Starbucks? Dunkin Donuts? Peet's? ("Terrible" may be accurate, but not the response I'm looking for...) /via FlowingData