Model our World

Distorted maps

2008-12-05T11:57:00.002+01:00

There are several websites that can show you statistics in map form. This animated map, which shows countries resized relative to students in primary school, came from Show Mapping Worlds

World Mapper also offers maps which show stastics; download a .pdf file of maps already created.

Here is the picture of Primary Education from Worldmapper:

Zip Scribbles

2008-10-15T14:53:00.000+02:00

Robert Kosara asked "What would happen if you were to connect all the ZIP codes in the US in ascending order? Is there a system behind the assignment of ZIP codes? Are they organized in a grid? The result is surprising and much more interesting than expected."

And in other countries? Would the picture represent the bureaucratic mind, or the topography, or the population density?

"Switzerland is known for its mountains, and you can see that quite well on this map, especially in the middle to southern areas. Especially impressive is the canton of Uri (UR), which is one long valley; this is very nicely visible on this map." (Kosara)

Click on the title link for this post to see more European countries as "scribbles".

Update 15 Oct 08: Adrian Khun has left a comment on this post, pointing to his own work, ZIP Scribble of Switzerland, --fixed!--, with the script that produced these maps. I don't entirely agree with his comment - I do think Kosara's map represents Switzerland's topography and to a certain extent population distribution, very well, and that was one of the possibilities.
Khun's version of the map is equally interesting:

Jump to his site and read how he created it.

Visualize the history of your name

2008-04-04T08:22:00.005+02:00

One of my favorite bloggers, Josiah Blocker, "stumbled upon an extremely interesting little web-tool known as the NameVoyager. In a massive graph, you will see thousands of names, listed alphabetically, with the width of its bar tracking the name's popularity from the 1880s to 2006. It's a great little tool to see how many little kids will be running around with your name in the near future. This is really only a concern to people with the more infrequent names."

I went to check it out at The Baby Name Wizard site, and found this explanation:

Explore the sea of names, letter by letter...watch trends rise and fall, and dive in deeper to see your favorite name's place in the historical tides.

The Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager is an interactive portrait of America's name choices. Start with a "sea" of nearly 5000 names. Type a letter, and you'll zoom in to focus on how that initial has been used over the past century. Then type a few more letters, or a name. Each stripe is a timeline of one name, its width reflecting the name's changing popularity. If a name intrigues you, click on its stripe for a closer look.

So of course, I checked out my name. Here's the picture:

(Click on the picture to see it full size.)

This is really interesting, because my name is that of my Grandmother, who was born in 1895. I can see from the chart that it was a very popular name when she was born, but is less so now. I think that's probably right, because I know no other Katharine who spells it with an "a".

Test out your name! Too bad this is only and "American" data base - wouldn't it be amazing if you could look at different cultures' or countries' names? But it's an interesting tool to use, just to watch it work.

from the streets of San Francisco

2008-03-22T11:02:00.003+01:00

I read this post by a very thoughtful observer - of - the - world, who wrote about the flowering trees being in bloom, and then seeing these tape-measures on the ground (among the flower petals). Read the rest of her post below. It has nothing to do with directly with graphs and charts, but a lot to do with perspectives on data:

FineLine Letterpress

"No tape-measure trees in sight. I think a flock of school children left them here when they returned to the classroom after working in the garden (there is a fantastic garden in the slim unpaved strip next to Grattan School). I did not stop to measure my height, nor the length of my stride (although I was tempted to do both). But it did get me thinking about measurement. And reflecting on the fact that I like data, and I also like accuracy. Sometimes it’s great to guess, but sometimes it is satisfying to know. Maybe also it is reassuring to be able to measure the length of something in this world where many things seems so uncertain and mercurial. One of the things I enjoy during printing is the requirement for precision. I love chance and random beauty, and I also appreciate what can come of careful planning. I love that there can be both perspectives rendered in one scene: the tape can be used to measure carefully, and, look what a lovely pattern the tape has made from being dropped in a carefree manner!"

Online survey results

2008-02-28T08:30:00.009+01:00

Click on each chart to see it in more detail on flickr.com

Model our World - the Book!

2008-02-14T11:23:00.001+01:00

How much is a trillion?

2008-02-13T08:13:00.001+01:00

Science Friday Archives: How Much is a Trillion?

"One trillion is 1,000,000,000,000 -- 10 to the 12th power, or a thousand thousand thousand thousand. To put things in perspective, current estimates put the number of stars in the Milky Way as somewhere between 100 and 400 billion. The U.S. population is slightly over 303 million, and the world population is around 6.6 billion. One trillion dollars would be enough to buy about a thousand boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every person in the United States. A trillion barrels of oil would (at current consumption levels) fuel the world for about 33 years. We'll talk about other ways to visualize the number 'one trillion.' Is it possible for the human mind to really comprehend?"

The show's guest is David M Schwartz
Author of many books for children,
including "How
Much is a Million?', 'If
You Made a Million,' and 'Millions
to Measure'

Listen to the podcast, and click through to the related links:
The MegaPenny Project
Powers of Ten
eThemes: Math: How Much Is One Million?

What does a million km look like?

2008-02-10T11:49:00.000+01:00

You can read about how this photograph was created from Cassini images at NASA's Earth Observatory web page.

"Although it might appear that Earth is located within Saturn’s outermost rings, that positioning is just an illusion created by the enormous distance between Cassini and Earth. When Cassini took this image, the spacecraft was looking back at Saturn from a distance of about 2.2.million kilometers (about 1.3 million miles). The Sun was millions of additional miles beyond, hidden behind Saturn. On September 15, Earth’s orbit had brought our home planet to a location slightly behind and to the left of the Sun from Cassini’s perspective."

Which is more interesting - the photo, or this chart?

Click on the table to see it full size.

(This is a table is constantly updating itself with accurate distances from planets to the Sun. You can see it at this link or subscribe to it here.)

80 Million Tiny Images - a visual dictionary

2008-02-10T09:22:00.000+01:00

This screen shot is a small section of the Visual Dictionary, showing results for a mouse click within the "plant" area.

This web page (from Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus and William T. Freeman at MIT) is

" a visualization of all the nouns in the English language arranged by semantic meaning. Each of the tiles in the mosaic is an arithmetic average of images relating to one of 53,464 nouns. The images for each word were obtained using Google's Image Search and other engines. A total of 7,527,697 images were used, each tile being the average of 140 images."

The authors explain the project:

"The average reveals the dominant visual characteristics of each word. For some, the average turns out to be a recognizable image; for others the average is a colored blob. The list of nouns was obtained from Wordnet , a database compiled by lexicographers which records the semantic relationship between words. Using this database, we extract a tree-structured semantic hierarchy which we use to arrange tiles within the poster. We tessellate the poster using the hierarchy so that the proximity of two tiles is given by their semantic distance. Thus the poster explores the relationship between visual and semantic similarity.

For a large part of our language the two are closely correlated as shown by the extent of visual clustering within the poster. The large-scale groupings correspond to broad categories such as plants or people. Within the plant cluster, for example, tighter semantic groupings are visible such as flowers or trees. In turn each of these clusters contains further groupings all the way down to individual, highly specific nouns. The averaging within each tile removes the variation between images of a given word, enhancing the similarly between neighbors. By clicking on top of the map, you will see the word corresponding to that location, the average image and the first 16 images returned by the image search online tools.

Currently computers have difficult recognizing objects in images. While practical solutions exist for a few simple classes such as human faces or cars, the more general problem of recognizing all different classes of objects in the world (e.g. guitars, bottles, telephones) remains unsolved. Computer Vision researchers are currently investigating methods that can recognize and localize thousands of different object categories in complex scenes. A key component of these algorithms is the data used to train the computers' model of each object. Current approaches use collections of images gathered by hand. Our research explores how the billions of images available on the Internet can be used to train models for object recognition. With overwhelming amounts of data, many problems can be tackled with simple algorithms. We gathered from the web 79 million images. We are using this massive dataset to train a computer to recognize objects within an image and to understand the scenes depicted in photographs."

Origami as charts

2008-02-10T08:53:00.001+01:00

This origami represents Internet search engine use (in English)

The length of each fold correspons to a search engine

Moteurs de recherche les plus utilisés (English results)

a longueur de chaque rabat correspond à un moteur de recherche
Google	33 %
Yahoo	24 %
MSN	19 %
AOL	12 %
source : ComScore qSearch

Other views of the origami and a pdf file of the folds can be found at http://www.ordigami.net/stats-internet

Through a post at information aesthetics I found my way to ordigami.net. and this post:

"En février 2006, j'ai participé avec une dixaine d'autres origamistes à travers le net, au beta-test de TreeMaker5, la dernière version du logiciel d'origami de Robert Lang. Etant donné la simplicité de mes modèles, je n'ai pas rencontré beaucoup de bugs. Les travaux ci-dessus ont été réalisé avec l'aide de TreeMaker5 et notamment tous les dépliés à télécharger. Je tiens à remercier Robert Lang d'avoir mis gracieusement son programme à disposition sur Internet (TreeMaker5 est open-source sous license GPL). Pour ceux et celles qui souhaiteraient l'utiliser, je recommande de lire la documentation incluse avec le programme. En effet, avant utilsation, il est préférable de maitriser certains concepts comme celui de graphes, noeud, bord ou rabat."

(My translation: "In February 2006, I participated with a dozen other origami artists around the net, in the beta-test of TreeMaker5, the latests version of Robert Lang's origami software. Because of the simplicity of my models, I encountered few bugs. The above work were created with TreeMaker5, especially all the downloadable folds. I wish to thank Robert Lang for having made his software available over the Internet (TreeNMaker5 is open-source, under a GPL license). I recommend reading the documentation included with the program to anyone using it. Before beginning, it is important to have mastered certain concepts, such as graphs, nodes, edge and folds.")

Visit the web site to see the other extraoridnary origami-charts.

The World as you've never seen it before

2008-02-09T18:07:00.000+01:00

Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest. There are 366 maps, also available as PDF posters. The maps presented on this website are equal area cartograms, otherwise known as density-equalising maps. The cartogram re-sizes each territory according to the variable being mapped.

Children under the age of 15 in 2004

"Worldwide, children make up a third of the population. In 2004 there were 1,826 million children aged under 15. Only children under 15 are shown in this map and graph. Africa has the highest percentage of children. In Uganda and Niger half the population is under 15 years old. In Italy, Spain and Japan only 14% of the population are children aged under 15."

Visual Complexity

2008-02-09T17:21:00.001+01:00

VisualComplexity.com "intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field."

This is a site one could spend hours in (and I did..). A few of my favorites:

Time Travel Tube Map
http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/p5/tube_map_travel_times/applet/
"Click on (or select, above) a station to see the London Underground map reorganise around the times of travel from that station. Shortest paths are used to place the other stations - radius is proportional to time to travel, and angle should be correct for as-the-crow-flies direction on a map. The concentric circles are at 10 minute intervals. Press 'g' to get back to the geographical tube map."

Time Graphs: Sunsets by time

"About 15000 photos tagged "sunset" taken within the last year. ...

Their horizontal positions represent the day of the year the photo was taken. January is on the left, December is on the right. The vertical bars are the boundaries between months.

The vertical position represents the time of day the photo was taken, according to the EXIF data. The horizontal lines are hours, with the thick line in the middle representing 12 noon.

The deepest "dip" in the wave formed by the images is the Summer Solstice." Jim Bumgardner
From http://www.flickr.com/photos/krazydad/sets/140323/

EarthQuake 3D

EarthQuake 3D is a simple and easy to use desktop display of the world's last 20 significant earthquakes. You can zoom and spin your way around the globe while viewing earthquakes in three dimensions. See at a glance up to seven days of global earthquake activity.
http://www.starfield-screen-saver.com/quake.html

a graphic web browser

2008-02-09T15:40:00.000+01:00

If you're tired of seeing search results as long long lists of links, try TouchGraph. Enter the search term, then touch each of the clusters to explore connections.

This is a screen shot of the network of connectivity resulting from a search for "keepps", my web user name:

Nobel Peace Prize 2007

2008-02-09T13:55:00.000+01:00

Robert Kosara writes at EagerEyes.org about Al Gore's use of graphics to get his point across:

Gore has made a huge impact with his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. A large part of that comes from his use of graphs and charts.

The charts and the underlying data have of course been the subject of much scrutiny and ridicule, mostly from people who do not agree with the message of the movie. A thorough critique of these is certainly in order, but the fascinating thing is that these abstract charts help to further his story. ... the visual presentation of abstract data is what gets the message across - even if the representation is itself rather abstract.

Visualization and information graphics are excellent tools for presentation, and their impact is being felt in the world.

You can see the movie trailer here at the Apple web site; the charts and graphs can be seen here, and a post about Duarte Design, which prepared the slides can be read here at Pressentation Zen.

The Impossible is Possible

2008-02-09T13:21:00.000+01:00

Hans Rosling demonstrates (2006) how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He shows us the next generation of his Trendalyzer software -- which analyzes and displays data in amazingly accessible ways, allowing people to see patterns previously hidden behind mountains of stats. In this talk: New insights on poverty and life around the world, Dr. Rosling uses graphs, charts, info-graphics,along with his own software Dollar Street. Watch this video all the way to the end.

In Marcxh 2007, Google aquired Trendalyzer. You can use Trendalyzer at this link, to generate moving graphics and other novel effects in the display of facts, figures, and statistics.

a single grain of rice = demograophics

2008-02-09T12:12:00.001+01:00

Of All The People In All The World (UK) uses grains of rice to bring formally abstract statisitcs to startling and powerful life. It is a physical visualization of the world population demographics, by mapping 1 grain of rice to represent 1 human being.

"We know how big a grain of rice is; we can see that the pile showing the number of Africans taken on British ships to be slaves, for example, is made up of a horrifyingly large number of grains. to render the fact as a number would be to diminish it," James Yarker, stanscafe.co.uk, the creator of the project.

This video shows a bit of one installation (and contains an advertisement at the end).

"When you go into the room full of piles of rice that is Of All the People In All the World ... you are invited to take a single grain of rice in your hand. That grain is you. A lot of other people are in those piles, divided up in different ways to tell us various stories about the aggregates of people who make up the world." Read the whole story by Stephanie Bunbury

Another video of the project, at YouTube (which you cannot see in school).

"When he began the project, Yarker thought that if one could look somehow at 6.2 billion things individually, it would help to understand the human context. "But it's still too big to comprehend." Now, he feels the subject is inexhaustible. "I'd be happy to keep doing this. In each place, you learn more about the world." And the world, he finds, has an infinite number of stories to tell." Banbury