Periodic Videos

Fun videos and lessons for all elements: A lesson about every single element on the periodic table by TED-Ed.

Making Money!

Our old friends (Python, JavaScript, and R) will do you quite well: These programming skills will earn you the most money

Bar Charts

Bar charts are hip again and with that we see renewed interest in how to use (and not!) use them to accurately convey information. The classic 'truncated y-axis' approach remains popular (for example, see A History Of Dishonest Fox Charts), but there are additional visual embellishments that can be used to confuse viewers and push a certain message.

This brings us to An Evaluation of the Impact of Visual Embellishments in Bar Charts (slides)

by SeeingStructure.

Yo Jeb - maybe this helps!

Simple Machines

Via Co.DESIGN: Simple Machines by Tinybop is an awesome iOS app to learn about the six simple machines (lever, pulley, wheel, wedge, inclined plane, and screw) that are at the core of STEM education.

Or, at least at the heart of physics and engineering - too often confused or considered synonymous with STEM as a whole. Which, of course, also includes the earth sciences and live sciences...but those are usually conveniently ignored by the physics and engineering mafia.


Speaking of that: give Robot Factory a try!

GIS in Higher Education: Realities and Opportunities

What skills do you need for a successful GIS career? That was the underlying question we discussed in our presentation GIS in Higher Education: Realities and Opportunities at the Spring 2015 NEARC at UMass Amherst on 11 May 2015. Here are a few (selected) results based on our simple survey of the conference attendees:

• Many folks learned the GIS skill most important for their daily work during their undergraduate and/or graduate degree. In other words: what we teach actually matters!
• Many folks learned the GIS skill most important for their job on their own somehow. In other words: being a lifelong learner is critical for success as a GIS professional. Now, how do you teach that?

Then we discussed what that single most important GIS skill is and the two pictures below summarize our completely unscientific analysis. It seems that big-picture skills such as problem solving and analysis are (in general) more important than narrow technical skills such as ModelBuilder, etc.

I see two connected implications here: Let's focus less on the specific tools and skills when we teach our GIS courses and instead focus more on encouraging big-picture 'habits of mind'. At the same time I would hope that the GIS profession would emphasize those when writing job ads as opposed to requiring expertise in some specific tools.

For more information you can have a look at our presentation and explore A GIS Career, Want a GIS Job? (Part 1), and Want a GIS Job? (Part 2).

Explore Your Neighborhood

Explore You Neighborhood is an interactive web-mapping interface to display US Census data, basically an open-source version of Social Explorer (albeit without the option of getting the underlying data).

Homicides around the world

Via Maps Mania: Here's a 'fun' topic - murders around the world visualized as  3-D interactive choropleth map by the Homicide Monitor. Download the data and map yourself!

The Matterhorn!

Via Maps Mania: Chasing the Matterhorn is just cool - a 3-D interactive story map of the controversy surrounding the first ascent.

Evolution and Environment

Evolution, the Environment, and Religion by Josh Rosenau (posted on the NCSE blog) created a bit of a stir on the web (e.g. Chris Mooney's article here in The Washington Post). Here's the key chart - have a look yourself:

TRAVIC

Yes, these dots (representing individual trains) are indeed moving in real-time - click on one of them to see where they are headed and with how much delay: TRAVIC

NOVA LABS

NOVA LABS are a great resource for educators and recently added one for Evolution: well-done! Fyi: the Energy one is excellent as well!

Sailing Seas of Plastic

Interactive web map and associated article in Popular Science (June 2015).

Time-Lapse Mining from Internet Photos

Now this is super-cool: Time-Lapse Mining from Internet Photos is exactly what is says it is - you crowd-source pictures of whatever and then sequence them into a time-lapse video.

Las Vegas 1972-2014

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/1/8529995/satellite-timelapse-images-video

Earthshots

Earthhots (by the USGS) uses satellite images available since 1972 to show how the Earth has changed over the last 40+ years. That's nothing new and in-fact the basis for a lot of scientific research into, for example, glacier recession due to climate change.

On Vox via FlowingData: 5 human activities you can see from space or 15 before-and-after images

Mount Everest: Adventure or Business

Mount Everest: Adventure or Business by D. G. Fernandez is a nice multi-media presentation investigating the connections between money and climbing on Mount Everest.

http://visualoop.com/media/2015/05/image_3.jpg

Men vs. Woman

David Bauer maps, visualizes, and explains why there are more men than women globally in A story of drinkers, genocide and unborn girls.

Let's Play A Game Of Climate Change!

Interesting read: Climate change games as tools for education and engagement by Jason Wu and Joey Lee (Nature Climate Change, May 2015) which includes a nice summary table of different climate change games and their format.

I'm a little ambivalent of using games in this context - treating serious issues such as climate change and its very real impacts as a 'game' feels not quite appropriate to me.

What Killed The Infographic?

What Killed The Infographic? is a nice article by Mark Wilson on fastcodesign.com - it's worth reading over the entire piece, but here are a few nuggets:

• Data viz has gone corporate.
• The (data) viz geek is being replaced by the data geek as good data viz is now much easier with products like D3 and Tableau.
• Simple is often better on mobile devices (e.g. simple bar charts are hip again).

Pretty much all of that applies to maps as well (which, in some ways, are a type of infographic).

Words on Maps

Some ideas about the importance of text on maps (with input from The Most Essential Ingredient in Interaction Design? The Words).

• Words are usually the first interaction people have with your map.
• Imagine the title as a greeting: " Hi, I'm...and I like..." to start the conversation or story of your map.
• About the map - imagine a good course description that really tells you what the class that you are signing up for is all about.
• What do they need to know about your analysis and map so they can take the next step?
• Simple, clear, and professional writing.

US Counties 1629 to 2000

Via Flowing Data: a simple animation of US counties since 1629 (see below) and - always nice - the source data in case you want to do your own analysis or visualization.

Lichtenstein or Pencil?

What does the world really look like? Sure, the most realistic 'version' of reality are high-resolution aerial images, but maybe you like to emphasize a different reality so how about using Lichtenstein or Pencil as your base map?  These (and others cool options) are brought to us by Mapbox Studio. Other great options are available from Stamen.

And - why not?

http://xkcd.com/1523/

Map Projections

Nothing new here, but once again a nice demonstration of the fact that the world does not in reality look like the world that you see on maps: Areal Distortion of Global Map Projections. Now go outside and experience reality. Unless you are into making maps yourself...in which case you should consider What your favorite map projection says about you (by xkcd).

STEM vs. Non-STEM and Jobs

Interesting visualization from the U.S Census Bureau: Where do college graduates work? Download the data and see for yourself!

2002 to 2015 Clouds

This is a pretty amazing satellite composite: the average of all MODIS cloud measurements between July 2002 and April 2015. What's interesting here is the big-picture: cloudy conditions along the ITCZ and cloud-free conditions over the Atacama, the Sahara, the Arabian Peninsula, and Australia - now we can ask the question: why?

R in 4 weeks for $39

That's a pretty good deal: for $39 you can take the Visualization in R course by Nathan Yau - he recommends scheduling about 5 to 10 hours over 4 weeks or so.

Emery's Essentials: Chart Choosing Tool

The Chart Choosing Tool by Ann K. Emery is just great: each chart comes with additional resources, examples of their use, and links to similar posts. I especially like that she includes non-standard data viz such as sketching, tables, word clouds, and heat maps. You can also filter by category or typical use (e.g. do-able in Excel, patterns over time, etc.).

Similar: The Data Visualisation Catalogue and Chart Suggestions - A Though Starter.

This gives me the chance to again show one of the classic data vix fails of all time:

Teens and Technology

The Pew Research Center just released their Teens, Social Media, and Technology Overview 2015. This is quite relevant to us in higher education as we ponder how best to implement and use technology for teaching and learning.

That's the positive spin.

Another way to look at this is that colleges and universities are increasingly trying to 'outsource' basic instructional technology such as laptops or mobile devices to the students and the associated tech-support to the faculty.

Testing...

'Heat Tables' in MS Excel

Tables can be boring, but remain an excellent way to show and document data. Charts and infographics are nice, but tables 'visualize' the actual data and are thus often a lot more useful than some interactive data visualization that uses the latest hipster technologies(remember the Viz-O-Matic!). Here are two great tutorials by Ann K. Emery to make your MS Excel tables look better in your reports and presentations:

1. Heat Table How-To in Excel
2. Tables for Reports and Presentations

http://annkemery.com/heat-table/

The World's Largest Urban Areas

The World's Largest Urban Areas is a simple ArcGIS Online map layer with population data from 1950 to 2025 in 5-year increments - a nice data set to explore some of the styling and analytical features of ArcGIS Online.

Landsat, AWS, and Esri

That's a pretty nice connection: Landsat data have been freely-accessible for years, but accessing them is now easier with Amazon hosting them and Esri (and others) offering new tools for 'streaming' and online, on-the-fly analysis. Esri's Unlock Earth's Secrets App, for example, demonstrates nicely how Landsat data are made accessible on Amazon via Esri.

Now, even better, you can even specify any band combination you want for display and enhancement right in ArcGIS Online!

Of course it is frustrating as usual that the spatial resolution of those free satellite data is only 15 or 30 m and all the really cool high-resolution data remain, in practice, off-limits to the public.