Visualizing Gas Mileage

Bankrate.com has a nice tool for estimating how far a car will go on a tank of gas. The visualization of the car's movement thus strays from the more-frequently emphasized metric of gas mileage but the charts do highlight the "cost per mile" using gas prices provided by the user. I'd like to be able to compare cars across classes rather than just within them, though.

Only bug is that the price per mile drops the tenths if cents are in 10's - $0.10 becomes $0.1, etc. Whoops! [Via|Link]

Visualizing Drafting in NASCAR Racing

ESPN and SportVision have developed a live visualization of airflow around cars in a race.

"We continue to be fascinated with showing viewers things that you cannot see - the line of scrimmage in football, the strike zone in baseball, and the airflow in motorsports ... known as drafting," said Jed Drake, ESPN senior vice president and executive producer. "Draft Track brings to life for the viewer an element of NASCAR racing that has been a much-discussed but unseen part of the sport for decades."

Video at the link. [Via]

The Color of Trust: Color-Coded, "Content-Driven Reputation" on Wikipedia

From the creators' website:

In this demo, the text background of Wikipedia articles is colored according to a value of trust, computed from the reputation of the authors who contributed the text, as well as those who edited the text. ... Text on white background is trusted text; text on orange background is untrusted text. Intermediate gradations of orange indicate intermediate trust values. ...

We compute the reputation of Wikipedia authors according to how long their contributions last in the Wikipedia. Specifically, authors whose contributions are preserved, or built-upon, gain reputation; authors whose contributions are undone lose reputation.

We call this a content-driven reputation, since the reputation is computed automatically via text analysis. This contrasts with other reputation systems, such as those in use at Ebay, where buyer and seller reputations are computed on the basis of user-provided ratings. [Via|Link]

Advertising Battles

Wang Qingsong is bang on:

My new work "Commercial War" focuses on the power of ads and the misconceptions that ads can create. For this photo work, I constructed a chaotic backdrop where over 20 people are depicted in a frenzy of competition with some even fist fighting while jostling for ad positioning on a huge billboard advertisement; this struggle for the most optimal outdoor ad placement is perceived as inevitably bringing power and influence. The struggle for ad placement in public space in China is not unlike a battlefield strewn with casualties after a pitched battle for power. Today one brand wins. The next day, its competitor will replace it with better positioning on public spaces. Every day, new ads go up, and old ones fall down, scattered in pieces, and discarded on the ground under newly erected billboard advertisements. [Link]

Human, But Not Too Human

From the New York Times:

If a robot had features that made it seem, say, 50 percent human, 50 percent machine, according to this view, we would be willing to fill in the blanks and presume a certain kind of nearly human status. That is why robots like Domo and Mertz are interpreted by our brains as creaturelike. But if a robot has features that make it appear 99 percent human, the uncanny-valley theory holds that our brains get stuck on that missing 1 percent: the eyes that gaze but have no spark, the arms that move with just a little too much stiffness. This response might be akin to an adaptive revulsion at the sight of corpses. A too-human robot looks distressingly like a corpse that moves. [Via|Link]

The Energy Line

From Behance:

At any given point in time there are a few projects that are urgent, some that are just important, a few that need to be kept moving, and others that are idle. How much of your time are you spending on what? Are you focused on the right things? Amidst the everyday craziness of a creative enterprise, it is hard to keep energy in perspective.

The Energy Line is a simple mechanism to graphically display energy allocation. A simple line starting at "Idle" and going up to "Extreme" is drawn along a cork or dry erase board. Then write the names of all of your major projects on small cards. Place the cards along the energy line according to how much focus they should get. Be realistic and make the tough decisions on what projects need to live on low energy for a while. [Link]

Photosynth: Visually Tagging The World

Amazing Demonstration of Photosynth by Blaise Aguera y Arcas.



Photosynth Website.

Timeline of Artifacts

Shared by Flickr user argybarg, who also offers detail shots of the timeline like the one below.

Top-Grossing Movie Color Chart

A visualization showing the dominant color schemes of top-grossing U.S. films (uncorrected for inflation, unfortunately), sorted by MPAA rating.

Created by the amazing Armin at Speak Up - follow the link for color schemes for the individual movies. Great stuff. [Link]

Visualizing Taste in "Ratatouille"

Michel Gagne, the animator behind this summer's animated film Ratatouille, shares sketches, musical compositions, and animations used to develop the taste visualizations in the film. Above, cheese. Many more of interest at the link. [Via]

Tortured Metaphors

More grammatical illustrations at the link.

"Kelly" contributes insanely inane and overwrought right-wing editorial cartoons to the Onion. I am a huge fan, but I guess it is no surprise that some people completely miss the joke. The cartoonist even portrays the creator seconding the rotten sentiments of the cartoons in the corner to reinforce the satire. The Grim Reaper is a frequent visitor, helpfully labeled with a placard designating what bogeyman he's standing in for. The Statue of Liberty appears, sometimes more than once, weeping tears of sadness or of joy. The running strip is a parody not just of angry, right-wing paranoia but of the manipulative and domineering act of editorial cartooning itself.

Visualizing Product Reviews

From information aesthetics:

[Summize is] a new type of search engine that crawls & analyzes user reviews of brands, consumer products, politicians, actresses or musicians, & presents the results as visual summaries or "snips", together with a bar chart of the "buzz" over time. the resulting color bars show the sentiment of these reviews[...]

[Link]

A New Digg Visualizer

[Via|Link]

Infographic "Map" of Online Communities

Click here to see the full map from XKCD and read the details.

Firefox Emissions Plug-In Measures The Global Cost of Your Travel

Real Costs "is a Firefox plug-in that inserts emissions data into travel related e-commerce website. The first version adds CO2 emissions information to airfare websites such as Orbitz.com, United.com, Delta.com, etc. Following versions will work with car directions, car rental, and shipping websites. Think of it like the nutritional information labeling on the back of food... except for emissions."

Download it here. [Via]

Google Themes: Not Dynamic.

Google got a nice bit of buzz when they released their new Google home page themes, and I was an early joiner. But despite the widespread praise they received for the user-friendly act of having dynamically-updating themes, the theme I have applied is completely out of sync with the information it is supposed to be in sync with. In other words, it is not dynamic at all.

Click on the image above, my Google personalized home page, and note two things: the time of day as represented by the image "theme" (sunset) and the time according to my date and time clock widget, which is accurate. It is almost TEN O'CLOCK AT NIGHT. I have provided Google with my zip code, which will remain nameless but which is in the Central Standard Time zone.

Not true - at least not from where I sit. The sun set about two hours ago. It is very dark outside. What gives, Google?

The simplicity of the claim and tool pretty much rule out user error. But maybe it's just screwed up for my zip code, or for my time zone. That seems hard to accept - this is the company behind Google Maps, after all - surely they can corrolate my sunrise and sunset to my zip code using the their own mapping data and the METAR data every weather website accesses from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But what's the alternative?

That Google themes are not dynamic at all.

I mentioned a ways up that the sun set about two hours ago. There is a place where it is, metaphorically speaking, two hours ago: the west coast of the United States. Pacific Standard Time. Very far away from my time zone, but very convenient to Google HQ and and the backbone of the Internet. Is it possible - is it even possible... that everyone who has been praising Google Themes and verified their functionality, everyone who actually adopted and lovingly watched their local sunset or sunrise from their Google home page, lives on the West Coast?

I changed my location to "New York, New York." It is now a little past ten o'clock p.m. here in Texas; in New York, for those of you who don't have your pencils handy, that means it's after 11 p.m. The Theme, which "will dynamically change" to "match" my "local sunrise and sunset times," now shows the sun ALMOST having set. Dusk. At 11:15 p.m., it is now OFFICIALLY nighttime in New York City. After 11 p.m., folks.

Let's all take our Google-goggles off for a moment and admit to each other that this is a poor standard of performance. Timeanddate.com identifies today's sunset in NYC as 7:44 p.m. - three and a half hours after it occurred on the Google home page which "matches" New York City's conditions. Insert your own analogy regarding three and a half hour delays here, and then fire them, miss the wedding, or lose the girl.

Why hasn't anyone written about how poorly Google Themes interact dynamically with the simple data they claim to track?

Publicizing Pollution With... Pollution

The World Wildlife Fund used this promotional vehicle (sorry) to publicize the effects of auto exhaust on the environment in China. The balloon inflates as the car idles. Apparently, the ballon represents the amount of carbon monoxide an average car releases in a day. Kind of cool how the total exhaust is being used to simulate the portion of the exhaust that is carbon monoxide... I'm sure there are interesting analogous visualizations. [Via|Link]

Pixel Breaker's Polar Clock: A Beautiful Visualization That Still Needs Work

Pixel Breaker has made a lovely visualization of a clock with the time of day, date, and day of the week represented by colored bars growing in a circular pattern and changing colors to represent how soon they will advance the digit above them. (Awkward, but I'm not sure how else to put it.) You can see the clock in action here, and download it as a screensaver as well.

Although the hands have been replaced by advancing bars, the bars all click in chords (six degrees per click for seconds and minutes, 30 degrees for hours. This makes sense for days of the week, dates, and months, but for the time of the day, it seems odd that the function of the clock would not reflect the fluidity of time that a growing shape, rather than a physical hand, suggests. I wonder if this was planned or not.

Less of an aesthetic choice and more of a true problem is the syncing of the second hand's numbering and its advance. Notice it? [Via]

Good Morning, Meat Man. Why Hello, Cigarette Face!

From a series of images designed to illustrate the nutritive paucity of various "diets."

Many more frightful images at the link.

Housing Prices, 1890-Present, Rendered As Virtual Roller Coaster

Brilliant. A full view of the coaster track from at or around ground level to give a sense of perspective on the 3D model and experience would have been nice. Otherwise, wonderful work.

Part of its brilliance is in its literal adaptation of a cliche. Beyond markets, how could such an experience be relevant to visualizing data? Has anyone seen simple game-making software in the service of visualization?

[Via]