Friday, April 24, 2020

Corona Virus in MA

Not all that exciting from MassLive: Coronavirus in Mass.: Cases, maps, charts and resources. But, at least the data seem to be accessible in the Datawrapper charts. It would be nice to include the date of the data used in the charts, table, and map.

Thursday, April 23, 2020

Choices matter!

People of the Pandemic is a 'game' - an online visualization that models the impacts of social distancing of the spread of a global pandemic in your backyard. It is NOT a full and accurate model of COVID-19.

That's a key thing to realize before starting to play and then it becomes a nice tool to visualize that your choices actually do matter!

Another Flood on the Red River

Great example here of river flooding: Another Flood on the Red River



Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Using Images

Good explanation and advise here about the use of photos and images in Story Maps (and other types of presentations): Stick to the rules: How to properly find and use images in your stories.

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

"An Illustrated Guide"

These are pretty cool:  An Illustrated Guide to Biology and  An Illustrated Guide to Chemistry (by Jeff Grant) - now available for free @ https://ncse.ngo/freely-available-illustrated-guide-biology.


Friday, April 10, 2020

Du Bois Wrapped Bar Charts

Nice article: Visualizing Categorical Data with Disproportionate Values Using Du Bois Wrapped Bar Charts.

Learn AI with MIT

Mark Wilson writes about a new MIT Media Lab website for K-12 students to learn about AI: Innovating Learning and Education in the Era of AI.

From Maps Mania: The Ocean Navigator is an interactive map for visualizing and exploring scientific data about the world's oceans. The map allows you to browse and visualize a number of different ocean variables such as water temperature and ocean currents.

Great - have at it! TMI in my opinion...I'm not interested to start digging into this.

Thursday, April 9, 2020

Cute (but useless)

Here are two fun apps built-on OSM:
(seen on Maps Mania)

Dyson Engineering Challenges

These sound like fun: https://www.jamesdysonfoundation.co.uk/resources/challenge-cards.html

Lewis and Clark Story Map

Here's a Lewis and Clark story map created in Tableau. Meh - looks okay, but Tableau is just not a great tool for this type of data viz.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Mapping Photos in ArcGIS Online

This is clearly the simplest way to do it: From photos to features: Publishing photos with locations in ArcGIS Online. Additional context is here:
So I did this with students: we went outside, walked around campus, and took several photographs. Now came the unexpected challenge: transferring the photos from their phones to a computer: blank stares. So I suggested the quick and simple approach: email the photos to yourself as an email attachment. Well...I can't do that because I'm out of data and the Wifi here in the lab always kicks me off.

Seriously - what should have taken seconds turned into an epic - maybe this is different at more-fancy schools, but my 'digital natives' are remarkably incompetent.

Tuesday, April 7, 2020

Masks are better than signs

https://xkcd.com/2290/

Virtual Globes

Okay - so I confess: I'm not all that into these virtual 3D globes (or 3D in-general). Yes, it's cool and looks impressive. But it is also slow on the hardware and difficult to visualize well.
And then there is this: VGM 2.0 - Virtual Globes Museum

Wednesday, April 1, 2020