Each Friday we share some favorite reporting on, and examples of, data driven visualizations and embedded analytics that came onto our radar in the past week.
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Bird Brains: You’ve probably seen some version of the chart above before. It shows how fast various media – from telephones to the game Angry Birds – penetrated society to reach 50 million users. The chart feels correct, but a post on the Wall Street Journal’s Real Time Economics blog reveals that there is plenty wrong with it. (Too many things to list here, so we suggest you read the post.) Writer Timothy Aeppel traces the chart’s roots and picks apart its data, linking to sources all the way. The post – which, by the way, quotes my high school friend Shane Greenstein, a professor at Northwestern – is a timely reminder that our data visualizations must be carefully sourced and structured if they are to withstand careful scrutiny. “The irony,” Aeppel adds, “is that the basic idea behind the chart probably isn’t wrong.”
Sun Spots: The solar eclipse that swept across Europe and North Africa last week was extraordinary: It coincided with the March equinox, and it occurred almost simultaneously with lunar perigee (when the moon is closest to the earth) so the moon cast a larger-than-usual shadow on the Earth. The chart above shows that the eclipse even affected Germany’s solar energy production briefly mid-day on March 20. (That’s the little notch in the fifth beige hump.) The image here is a static screen grab from Energy Charts DE, an interactive site created by research organization Fraunhofer that tracks German energy production by source and date. It’s fun and interesting to explore.
City Sounds: While we’re in Germany – where many of our customers, partners and colleagues participated in the OpenText Innovation Tour in Munich this past week –check out the map above of downtown Berlin. Created by PlaceILive, this map visualizes traffic noise is greatest around the city. The PlaceILive site can overlay many data sets – such as schools, hospitals, WiFi hotspots, electric car charging stations and ATMs – on maps of London, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Berlin.
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Recent Data Driven Digests:
March 20: Pi Day, Dear Data, meteor strikes
March 13: Airline performance, diversity in tech, solar vs. clock time
March 6: Political pizza, smartphone use, House of Cards, data visualization contest