Insight

ICYMI – Weekly roundup of best bits Vol. 9

The inspiration keeps coming thick and fast as we fast approach mid-March there’s no stopping the flow of data led content as it takes on more density and various shapes and sizes.

Should you buy an Apple Watch?
HubSpot

Take Apple for example and the possibilities of the Apple Watch. How can something as small as a 38 mm device create such a mountainous buzz, whether it be the product or the countless thought leadership views on what marketers need to prepare for to stay ahead. The guys at Hubspot created this convenient and slightly quirky flowchart to help answer this #1stworldproblem.. should you buy an apple watch? Taking it further (Tufte close your eyes now) we stumbled on a slightly more daring version doing the social media rounds. Dollar Dollar bill y’all!

Solar Beat
White vinyl design

In space, no one can hear you scream. However Whitevinyl have managed to serve up an audio delight in the form of Solarbeat, a web app which not only visualises the length of a year for all of our neighbouring planets, but generates a cosmic sounding tune in the process. Take a listen for yourself, we think the result is out-of-this-world.

The Wealth Report 2015
Knight Frank

It feels like the whole world is becoming increasingly obsessed with how the rich and famous live. For those interested in the ultra rich, (those who are worth over $30m), the 2015 edition of The Wealth Report from Knight Frank offers some fascinating insights. A wealth of charts are used to highlight various nuggets of information, such as the number of billionaires living in various cities, to the percentage who enjoy stamp collecting in their spare time. A survey has revealed London to be the most important city to these multi-millionars, so although we don’t share quite the same lifestyles as these bigwigs, we do share a love for this fantastic city we call home.

A global picture
Women of the World Festival

Last week the Women of the World Festival was held at London’s South Bank Centre, and those lucky enough to visit were treated to an animated visualisation of how the legal rights of woman in 18 countries have shifted during the last 50 years. Designed by Stefanie Posavec and researched by Miriam Quick, the piece highlights where women are becoming part of the bigger picture, and where the picture is still incomplete. It’s saddening to see so many countries where woman are still lacking basic rights, but equally shocking that places like the UK have been slow to recognise these in the past. Things appear to be heading in the right direction, although true equality can not come soon enough.

Convene: Visualising Meeting Activity Across Large Organisations
Office for Creative Research

In true Minority Report style, The Office for Creative Research has unveiled Convene, an interactive exploratory data visualisation to help large organisations understand employee meeting activity. Designed to work with large touchscreen displays, multiple users can explore the data collaboratively, allowing mangers to discus meeting activity together or in collaboration with their employees. Understanding the connections between workers allows companies to understand their own structure in a level of detail not possible until now.

Left behind
UNESCO

You may remember that in volume 3 of our ICYMI we featured an interactive visualisation examining the number children not receiving an education, created by FFunction for UNESCO. A new article from the same group takes a data-driven storytelling approach, using interactive charts to highlight the sorry state of the education system for girls in Africa. The left side of the screen displays interesting observations pulled from the data, while the charts allow us to explore and compare in more detail. The photographic images in the background make it impossible to forget that there are real people behind these numbers, making the information all the more impactful.

Workers’ Comp Benefits: How Much is a Limb Worth?
ProPublica

Accident at work that was not your fault? Looking for compensation? This interactive from ProPublica may be just what you are looking for to find out how much your various body bits are worth. These distorted humanoid pictograms scale various limbs and appendages by area to visualise their monetary value, allowing us to compare how this varies from state to state across the US. The differences are sometimes quite astonishing, and we would give our right arm to see this concept expanded into a version that includes more international data.

Here’s Waldo: Computing the optimal search strategy for finding Waldo
Randal S Olson

We remember spending many an hour as children hunting for that pesky Wally (or Waldo for familiar with the American translated version), but it appears we were all going about it the wrong way. Randy Olson, a PhD candidate in Michigan State University’s Computer Science program, had calculated the optimal search strategy to find that elusive fellow. Using a kernel density estimation we can see where on the page he is most likely to be hiding, then a genetic algorithm suggests the most efficient path our eye should follow to locate him. It seams so simple that we wonder why as children we didn’t think of this approach before.