Thinking Analytically

OnlineEducation.net posted this interesting infographic showing the startling facts about bottled water.  There’s a lot to learn.  What pops out to you?

Presented by Online Education

Hat tip to Vizworld

Brad Feld at Technology Review gave Tableau a whirl for some personal data visualization. He used a online beta version to play with some data.

After I played around it with some, the data wizards at Tableau took
over and created the widget that you see above.  There are a few
things to note about it:

• It is a live exploratory visualization, not a static chart. 
  You can select workout days, highlight across views to see heart rate,
  or filter to different kinds of activities.
• This was done with no custom development. Typically interactive
  visualizations like this take a lot of custom flash work; with Tableau
  anyone can create and publish an interactive visualization with drag
  & drop ease.
• Tableau’s vision with this product is to set data free on the
  web. They want to make real data, no charts, accessible to people so
  they can question conclusions and offer their own analysis.

The visualization above is static but on Feld’s blog, they are interactive.  So check it out and tell him I sent you!

While poking around TED yesterday, I was surprised to notice that the standard five star video rating system had disappeared. (I’ve been watching TED videos on my iPod Touch instead of the web-site all year so the stars may have left awhile back.) After finishing the video, I clicked rate and the following popped up:

On this screen you have three clicks to use any way that you’d like.  You can spread them across three different items, load them all up on one item or use less that all three.  When finished, a heat map is displayed which I found more valuable than the typical star graph. In fact, I noticed that those same terms were used in the description of the video.  Very clever!

About ten years ago I collaborated with Mark Peck (currently president/CEO of ApexxGroup, LLC) on visual representation of customer buying behavior analysis. At the time we thought we were pretty clever since we were able to make effective use of bubble charts to compare changes in customer retention, defection and overall value at a decile-by-decile basis.  Our clients loved the work since it reduced large tables of mind-numbing numbers to simple graphics that focused attention on the critical patterns. On limitation of our charts is that they only compared two years of data so it was difficult to show changes over longer periods of time.

Today Mark shared this TED video.  It’s a few years old but the interactive nature of these relatively standard bubble charts makes for a powerful presentation.  Rosling used software created by his affiliate gapminder.org. Though we didn’t have that ten years ago, it now occurs to me that we could have simply used a PowerPoint slide presentation to accomplish a similar effect.

In addition to the great graphics, Rosling is both entertaining and thought provoking.  Your thoughts?

Source: TED: Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen, Feb, 2006

What better way to start the month than to immerse yourself in some excellent data visualizations.  webdesigner depot has assembled 50 Great Examples of Data Visualzations including Narratives 2.0 visualization of Beethoven’s 5th.

I can hear it now!

Is Microsoft Surface what an iPod Touch wants to be when it grows up or does the Surface aspire to be like the iPod?  Either way, the technology is neat.  MSNBC has been using it to analyze the current presidential race.  Take a look.

I bumped into GraphJam.com the other day and had to chuckle.  Like many folks, I’ve spent many a minute trying to perfect a chart or graph in order to relay just the right message.  Well, graphjam.com reminds us not to take our graphs too seriously.  At this site, users upload their favorite graphical representations of, well, just about anything…song lyrics, puns, political outcomes.  Here are a couple of favorites:

Hotel California:

The wall

Billy Joel

Need some humor in creating your own charts?  Try the book for Dummies:

This is a bit of an experimental post. I have been mind mapping How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of “Intangibles” in Business while reading the book. I use FreeMind because it is free and easy to use. While trying to find a way to publish my mind maps to the web (eventually to http://wikibooknotes.org) I found MindMeister.com which allows editing maps online by multiple people. I signed up for a free account, uploaded the FreeMind file, and clicked share. Now I can embed this map into my blog. Try repositioning the map by dragging within it’s window. Expand and contract nodes by clicking.

If you’d like to try editing the map, leave a comment for this blog post with your email address and I’ll send you an invitation. (Your address will not appear in the post.)

Here goes…

See How to Measure Anything for a direct link to the map or click the map above.

This amazing, interactive visualization was put together by the folks at the NY Times. It diagrams communication patterns of Presidential debate participants through mid-December 2007. In a nutshell, a line is drawn from one candidate to another each time the first candidate mentions the name of the other during the debate. To fully appreciate it, checkout the original and play for a bit. There’s a tremendous amount of information in one graphic including:

• Number of debates a candidate participated in (represented by slice)
• Political affiliation (represented by color
• Number of references a candidate made to other candidates (number of outgoing arrows)
• Number of references made to a particular candidate from other candidates (incoming arrows)
• Timing of such references within a particular debate (location of out going arrow)
• Timing of references over time (slices are organized by sequence of debates)

The technique is relatively simple but yet powerful. Though it may look like the output of my childhood spirograph, it is more like an inter-relationship digraph and generates interesting observations such as:

• Democrats apparently talk about each other much more than the republicans
• Democrat candidates that dropped earlier tended to be referenced fewer times (no surprise)
• Every candidate mentioned Clinton at least once

What do you see?

Thanks to A Beautiful WWW for bringing this to my attention!

What could be better than paying lawyers less money for more work? (Sorry Pat.)

In today’s world, litigation typically involves the review of thousands, if not millions, of e-docs. Though shredders can permanently destroy a paper document, past e-mails and e-docs hide in all types of digital nooks and crannies. Unfortunately, many companies have not kept up with the proliferation of e-documents. But that’s no excuse when in the middle of litigation. If there’s a chance that a relevant e-doc exists, it typically must be found, reviewed and deemed relevant or not.

Sean McNee describes a recent case where a small legal team representing a small time inventor was able to use visual analytics to review and analyze the contents of 50 million pages of electronic documentation in just a few months. (Yes, 50 million pages.) He states,

“Visual analytics tools identify nouns and noun phrases in a series of messages, then visually cluster the documents together according to similarities in subject matter”

Apparently some Fortune 1000 companies have seen three-fold productivity increases using visual tools. According to the article, “U.S. corporations spend nearly $5 billion a year analyzing emails for litigation, regulatory requests and investigations.” A three-fold increase in productivity yields signficant benefits!

Read more at BI Review Online.