Carl Bialik, for The Wall Street Journal, reports on PSAs and the use of scary numbers: The Ad Council usually avoids statistics in PSAs. “We know from our experience that effective advertising has to have an emotional component and statistics-based campaigns can be very rational,” Conlon said. “We’ve also found that people tend not to [...]
The following articles were authored by Nathan Yau
Stop global warming. Decrease the National Science Foundation’s R&D budget. It’s so easy. More lessons on correlation and causation found here.
Facebook logs and saves a lot of data about you and what you do on their site. This shouldn’t be surprising given the more time people spend on Facebook, the greater the cash flow, but just how much data do they store? Austrian law student Max Schrems, because European law states that citizens can do [...]
Charts and graphs are great, because they can let you see a pattern that you might not see in a spreadsheet, but they only work when you use the actual data. Fox News isn’t doing themselves any favors by putting up this chart. It shows the recently announced drop in unemployment rate to 8.6 percent [...]
Transportation check-ins on foursquare. This is from this past Thanksgiving, but relevant again with Christmas around the corner. White represents check-ins on highways and roads (really?), orange is for trains, and blue is of course is same-day check-…
Transparency International released annual data for the Corruption Perceptions Index. The Economist plotted it against the UN’s Human Development Index: Comparing the corruption index with the UN’s Human Development Index (a measure combining health, wealth and education), demonstrates an interesting connection. When the corruption index is between approximately 2.0 and 4.0 there appears to be [...]
It’s always nice to hear from the people who are the best at what they do. Data visualization studio, Interactive Things has an interview series going, Substratum, that asks designers and artists the same set of questions. The most recent issue is with Amanda Cox from The New York Times and Nicholas Felton, who you [...]
As a resident at Eyebeam, Alexandar Chen visualizes the first Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suites: Using the mathematics behind string length and pitch, it came from a simple idea: what if all the notes were drawn as strings? Instead of a stream of classical notation on a page, this interactive project highlights the music’s underlying [...]
This has been sitting in my drafts folder for a few months. Figured I’d just hit publish and throw it out there. Obvious statement: there are infographics that are horribly made. Some are way too big for the information conveyed and others are useless because the creator had no idea what he was doing. Some [...]
Quick announcement: I have a handful of signed Visualize This copies available in case you’re looking for a gift for that data geek cousin or you’re up for some learning over the holidays. I only have a limited supply, so grab a copy before they’re gone. And of course, you can still get an untarnished [...]
During the riots in London this past summer, a lot of information spread quickly about what was going on. Some of that information was true and some was not so true. The Guardian explores this spread of information on Twitter, and how fact and fiction seem to reveal themselves on their own: A period of [...]
As part of their series on road accidents, BBC News mapped every recorded death on the road in Great Britain, from 1999 to 2010. That’s 2,396,750 road crashes. As you’d expect, the map looks a lot like population density, but check out the videos, which show twelve years of data compressed as if it were [...]
Famed statistician John Tukey created the boxplot in 1970. It shows a distribution summary in a small amount of space. Hadley Wickham and Lisa Stryjewski look back on the old standby and its evolution up to present. Keep it in mind, while still used today, the boxplot was created with pencil and paper. One of [...]
Form design intern at Fathom, James Grady, maps population density in Dencity: Dencity maps population density using circles of various size and hue. Larger, darker circles show areas with fewer people, while smaller, brighter circles highlight crowded cities. Representing denser areas with smaller circles results in additional geographic detail where there are more people, while [...]
