Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
All of the charts have input data and output data. You can synchronize two charts just using the output data element of the first chart as the input data element of the second chart. You can even build formulas based on data outputs, like for instance using the element selected in a control list to be part of a formula which filters a given datasset based on one column which elements match with the selected element in the control list. Charts use to have two main data outputs:
Simulation modeling has been one of the cornerstones of the IAJ since its founding 20+ years ago. Nice to see other disciplines catching up. (That’s a joke, kid.)
Simulations becoming third way to find scientific truth — http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2014/3/the-nature-of-scientific-proof-in-the-age-of-simulations Computer simulation is increasingly being used as a third method to establish scientific truth, alongside theory and experimentation. Astrophysicist Kevin Heng breaks down the pros and cons of computer simulations in a perspective piece in American Scientist. “Simulations as a third way of establishing scientific truth are here to stay. The challenge is for the astrophysical community to wield them as transparent, reproducible tools, thereby placing them on an equally credible footing with theory and experiment,” he writes.
From FlowingData….
“You can get pretty far with data graphics with just limited statistical knowledge, but if you want to take your skills, resume, and portfolio to the next level, you should learn standard data practices. Of all places, UK Parliament has some short and free guides to help you with basic statistical concepts. They provide 13 notes, each only two or three pages long that can help you with stuff like how to adjust for inflation, confidence intervals and statistical significance, or basic graph suggestions [pdf]. I like.”
A good piece on the googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com on how the Wall Street Journal crew created a fine set of maps illustrating various major-city marathons. Go here for complete piece.
Sunday, August 08, 2010
The following guest blog post was written by Albert Sun of the Wall Street Journal. He takes us behind the scenes in the creation of a recent news graphic titled: “Going the Distance: Comparing Marathons“.
The Google Maps API has been a great boon for news websites and a great help in creating all kinds of interactive graphics involving maps. Here at the WSJ we're big fans of the API and happy that Google continues to improve it and roll out new features.
We got the idea to map out the routes of Marathons from a story by Kevin Helliker about how despite the beautiful scenic route of the race, the San Francisco marathon was still very unpopular. The difficulty and the hilly terrain kept people from attempting it. To help people see this better, we decided to compare the San Francisco marathon to the big three US marathons: Boston, New York and Chicago.
The code for our marathons graphic grew out of a similar graphic we did for our coverage of the Tour De France. In this one, we managed to incorporate many improvements. Two new features of the Google Maps API played a big role in this graphic. The Elevation API let us quickly and easily get a comparison between the different routes.
Styled Maps let us give the map more of a distinctive WSJ look. We have a distinctive style for our maps in print, and there is some reluctance to run maps online that deviate from that style. Styled Maps lets us get close enough for what we're trying to show. When Styled Maps first becomes available we used the Styled Map Wizard to create a set of different looks for different types of maps, trying to recreate our own maps style.
Along with the Google Maps API, we used jQuery for its wealth of convenience functions and how much easier it makes writing programs in JavaScript. The core of the graphic is a basic Polyline drawn in Google Maps showing the route. [more]
From GISUser at http://blog.gisuser.com/?p=6962
Modeling real-time situations… This video goes back a few months to the Haiti disaster response, however, its a great example and reminder of how geo technology (ArcGIS Explorer in this case) and social media (Twitter) can be combined to result in a very useful application. Enter the video showing Real-time modeling of the disaster situation in Haiti. Viewing Twitter updates on the map in real-time really puts the situation in context and provides the responders with much needed situational awareness. No doubt these forms of Geo services and mashups will be useful in the near future with the Gulf of Mexico BP oil spill response and cleanup efforts.
Go to: http://flowingdata.com/2010/05/26/bp-tries-to-mislead-you-with-graphs/
BP senior vice president Kent Wells explains in this new video what his group is doing towards repairing the leak. He presents the bar graph above to show the improvement in their efforts. It's increasing, so they must be improving. Nifty. The problem is that it's cumulative, and the rate at which they're collecting isn't improving.
From the Maddow blog:
[T]hose green bars go up because the tube has been in place since May 16. The longer it stays, the more gallons it collects. It's not necessarily collecting more oil on successive days, let alone “most” of the oil as Wells says they're trying to do.
Stephen Few provides a different view, with collection rates:
Few goes on to say:
While the amount of collection increased in the beginning, it has decreased or held steady for the last four days and is now well below the average amount of daily collection for this period as a whole. Things are definitely not getting better. How do you spin bad news like this? One way is to create a misleading graph, but cover your ass by doing it in a way that isn’t an outright lie.
To put it differently, you could easily spin BP's results in the opposite direction. A cumulative graph for the amount of oil spilling into the Gulf would be an increasing one too.
“Reporting Complexity (with Complexity): General Systems Theory, Complexity and Simulation Modeling“
See the PPT slides from a vid-conference lecture from Santa Fe to
INDIANA UNIVERSITY – PURDUE UNIVERSITY INDIANAPOLIS School of Public and Environmental Affairs School of Journalism COURSE: Mass Media & Public Affairs March 31, 2010 =============================================================================
Many of us are commonly using the term “data visualization” or “dataviz” or even “infoviz.” Perhaps we should add to the lexicon “newsviz.” If so, you saw it here first. Maybe. In any event, check out this interesting page at Slate.
By Chris Wilson
Like Kevin Bacon's co-stars, topics in the news are all connected by degrees of separation. To examine how every story fits together, News Dots visualizes the most recent topics in the news as a giant social network. Subjects—represented by the circles below—are connected to one another if they appear together in at least two stories, and the size of the dot is proportional to the total number of times the subject is mentioned.
To use this interactive tool, just click on a circle to see which stories mention that topic and which other topics it connects to in the network. Double click a dot to zoom in on it. From there, you can click on any connected dot to see which stories mention both subjects. To zoom out, just double click in white space or use the zoom out button in the upper left corner. The buttons in the upper right can toggle the emphasis between the importance of a subject and how recently it has appeared on the radar. A more detailed explanation of how News Dots works is available below the graphic.
Analysis, Feb. 24, 2010: Three potential 2012 Republican presidential nominees–Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, and Tim Pawlenty–all cluster around the Republican Party dot. But newly minted senator Scott Brown dwarfs them all.
This is a work in progress, so please send us your ideas for features you'd like to see or other ways we can improve it.
How News Dots works
Step 1: Behind the scenes, News Dots scans all articles from major publications—about 500 stories a day—and submits them to Calais, a service from Thompson Reuters that automatically “tags” content with all the important keywords: people, places, companies, topics, and so forth. Slate's tool registers any tag that appears at least twice in a story.
Step 2: Each time two tags appear in the same story, this tool tallies a connection between them. For example, a story about a planned troop increase in Afghanistan reform might return tags for President Obama, the White House, and Afghanistan. These topics are now connected:
Step 3: As this tool scans hundreds of stories, this network grows rapidly, and “communities” begin to form among the tags. Subjects that are highly connected—those that appear together in many stories—cluster together in the network. This occurs in the same way that a picture of the social network of your Facebook friends would reveal clusters of friends from high school, college, and work, with some unexpected connections between them when friends belong to multiple cliques.
Step 4: The news network that results is visualized using Slate's custom News Dots tool, which is built using an open-source Actionscript library called Flare. Tags are displayed if they appear in at least four stories, and connections are made if at least two stories link those two subjects. The visualization covers the previous three days of news and is updated daily.
Press Release 10-028 2009 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge Winners Announced http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_images.jsp?cntn_id=116369&org=NSF Winning entries appear in the Feb. 19 issue of Science “Branching Morphogenesis” aims to reveal–through abstraction–the unseen beauty and dynamic relationships that exist between endothelial cells and their surrounding extracellular microenvironment. Movies of networking endothelial cells cultured on a 3-D matrix were analyzed to generate computational tools that simulate this process. Next, large-scale templates from simulations were overlaid with more than 75,000 inter-connected zipties. Credit: Peter Lloyd Jones, Andrew Lucia, and Jenny E. Sabin, University of Pennsylvania's Sabin + Jones Lab Studio Download the high-resolution JPG version of the image. (9.8 MB) Use your mouse to right-click (Mac users may need to Ctrl-click) the link above and choose the option that will save the file or target to your computer. Scanning electron micrograph of tiny plastic fingers around a sphere. Tiny plastic fingers, each with a diameter 1/500th of a human hair, assemble around and hold a tiny sphere. The image brings to mind global efforts to promote the sustainability of the planet. The image was produced with a scanning electronic microscope and was digitally enhanced for color.
