Amitabh Chandra of Harvard University provided the data for a New York Times article back in 2006 based on babies born in the United States on dates between 1973 and 1999.
The data (visualized on the headmap below) shows Sept. 16 was most common with Feb. 29 (only in a leap year) obviously the least common.
Data source: NYTimes.com, Amitabh Chandra, Harvard University.
For more check How Common Is Your Birthday – Pt 2.
(via broadsheet)
Web design agency J6Design have designed an infographic detailing 6 reasons to visualize your data. They range from:
President Barack Obama budget for 2013 was submitted to Congress earlier this week. The document is more that 250 pages long, but helpfully the New Your Times have created a cool interactive visualization of budget spending data. Created by Shan Carter, it provides four ways of exploring where the $3.7 Trillion is spent.
To experience the full interactive budget, and explore types of spending, spending by departments and changes since last year, head over to NYTimes.
14 year-old twin brothers Cary and Michael Huang have created an superb interactive visualization of the scale of the Universe. It traces the relative scale of things – from quantum foam to the observable universe.
Music: Frozen Star by Kevin MacLeod
(via abcnews)
YouTube has just launched a nifty looking new website onehourpersecond.com, showcasing what happens in a single YouTube second.
Every second, one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube. That’s 24 hours every 24 seconds… or a decade every single day. Discover more time-bending stats at onehourpersecond.com
Search by Image, Recursively, Transparent PNG, #1 from kingcosmonaut3000 on Vimeo.
Sebastian Schmieg’s created the video above by feeding a transparent image into Google Image search, finding similar images, clicking on the first result and then feeding this back into the algorithm.
You’ll be amazed at image number 2951 (remember it all started with a transparent png).
(via boingboing)
London’s ICN gallery is currently running an exhibition “Goldfish Salvation” by artist Riusuke Fukahori. His work transforms the gallery into the world of goldfish – his lifelong theme and passion. From the exhibition:
His unique style of painting uses acrylic on clear resin which is poured into containers, resulting in a three-dimensional appearance and lifelike vitality.
This video gives you a glimpse of his amazing painting process.
Tripso have created a short animation of photographs taken across the world over a 12 month period. The movie shows a world map in which pixels light up according to the relative amount of pictures taken. Some tweaking had to be made however, due to their observation that:
There are more pictures taken in the city of Paris alone on one day that in all of Africa in a year so we corrected for the average.
The original article on the animation highlights more information on a series of snapshots describing some interesting trends and anomalies.
(via Infosthetics)
Pingdom.com have created an animated GIF illustrating the development of the world’s online population over the past 20 years. The data comes from the World Bank and shows that there are now an estimated 2 billion Internet users as of March 2011, representing about a third of the world’s population.
Regarding the animation:
Some statistics from the Pingdom blog post:
(via Pingdom)
In their 2007 research paper Towards A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management Ralph Lengler & Martin J. Eppler created a periodic table of 100 visualization methods. The paper abstract describes the research as “effort of defining and compiling existing visualization methods in order to develop a systematic overview based on the logic, look, and use of the periodic table of elements.”
They describe a Visualization method as:
a systematic, rule-based, external, permanent, and graphic representation that depicts information in a way that is conducive to acquiring insights, developing an elaborate understanding, or communicating experiences.
Visual-literacy.org have an interactive visualization of the table with a pop-up example of each visualization method upon mouse-over. It provides a fantastic framework for understanding and describing the multitude of visualization methods and styles available.
From the research paper:
The periodic table is constructed along two dimensions: Periods and groups. Of the five dimensions we deemed most relevant for a pragmatic classification of visualization methods, we found the dimension of complexity of visualization most fitting for “periods” and application area most fitting for “groups”.
As we classified the visualization methods along those two dimensions we also tried to organize them in a similar way. That means as you move down a column, you will find similar methods for similar purposes but getting more and more complex. This is an ordinal meas- ure within a group, meaning you will find in one period different amounts of complexity. This is for pragmatic reasons as we didn’t want to leave any empty spaces in the table. For example, a line chart is a more complex visualization method than a spectrogram (a single line having two extreme poles). On the other hand a tensor diagram is more complex than a spectrogram
The chart has the application area dimension (“groups”) into the following categories and distinguished them by background color:
The periodic table also puts the three other dimensions on top of the method symbol and used the following pictorial representations:
1. Task and Interaction: Depending on the task, visualization can emphasize certain aspects of the data.
2. Cognitive Processes: Visualization methods can help the user to articulate implicit knowledge (as in a visual metaphor) and to stimulate new thinking (like with a mindmap).
3. Represented Information: Structure or Process as a mechanism for representing data
The paper concludes with the underlying rational for structuring an explanation of the hundreds of visualization methods in a style similar to the periodic table:
With our table we do not mean to reveal the organizing principle of visualization methods, but we want to highlight the fact that there might not be only one appropriate visualization method for a given requirement. Rather, there is the potential of employing a combination of different methods to enhance the achieved results.
Our efforts in structuring the vast domain of visualization methods cannot be seen as a close adaptation of the peri- odic table of chemical elements. It is rather a functional, metaphoric homage to it. The choice of methods included as well as the order criteria cannot be considered exhaus- tive. Nevertheless, it does provide an overview over more than hundred useful visualization methods of great variety and by organizing them assists researchers and practitio- ners alike in choosing adequate visualization methods for their needs.
For more read the entire paper Towards A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management.
Infographics