Flipgrid

So I tried Flipgrid and here are some thoughts.

• First, to make one, you need to surrender your Google or Microsoft account to Flipgrid. I guess that's okay, but I would preferred a separate account.
• You have to respond by recording a video and that requires you to surrender your Google or Microsoft account. Recording a video is fun and easy for many, but terrifying for others.
• You can then comment on a video by text or another video.

So, I'm not sold. Its cooler than just a Padlet, but the mandatory video part is problematic.

Farewell to the Arctic of Old

Mark Serreze on the Hazen Plateau ice caps!

Earthrise (Amanda Gorman)

 

IPCC: Worlds Apart

IPCC: Worlds Apart is a nice attempt at a scientific storytelling infographic data viz thing. But, it does not work: too much of everything, but at-least they did not also use interactivity.

UN-HABITAT Open Data

Great and overwhelming for urban indicators data: https://data.unhabitat.org/

The COVID-19 Dashboard

Pretty cool data viz: The COVID-19 Dashboard (by informationisbeautiful.net). I like the five side-by-side charts comparing different countries. Obviously, these are absolute values and therefore the larger countries should always stand-out.

The Teacher's Guide to Tech 2021

The Teacher's Guide to Tech 2021 is back and updated for 2021. A pretty good $25 investment, but really this is something that institutions should provide for their faculty. A couple of examples:

• Mote looks great: a Chrome extension to leave voice comments in Google Docs.
• Google Lens is just cool, but also useful for teaching: point it at text and the app will read it for you aloud.

Decolonizing Data Viz

Good article by Stephanie Evergreen: Decolonizing Data Viz. Read and then move-on to Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein.

The net-zero america project

The net-zero america project is basically Princeton's solutions project for clean energy buy 2050 (to go along with the proposals from UC Berkeley, Stanford, etc.). The details differ, but the two take-home messages are consistent:

1. This is possible.
2. This will require massive scaling-up of clean energy technology.

One aspect here that often goes underappreciated: all these plans basically involve much much more electricity and that will require a massive expansion of our electrical grid. Not just making it into a 'smart grid', but also increasing its capacity by 50 percent or more. And this will create social and environmental issues and damages.

For a critical article of this and other 'climate neutrality solutions take a look at Mediocrity Is The Enemy Of The Solution.

2020 = Hot

It's official now: 2020 tied with 2016 for the hottest year on-record (since 1880). This GIF is just great and shows that a) there is variability from year-to-year and b) that there is an overall warming trend as the annual cycle 'creeps-up' the y-axis.

Warming in your city

Well, at least if your city happens to be in Europe: EDJNet’s analysis looks at temperature data for more than 100,000 European municipalities in 35 countries. Mean values of the 1960s were compared with those of 2009-18, in order to explore the scale of global warming in each local community. Data is drawn from Copernicus and from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

Here's the map!

Making Vectors

 I'm not sure what to call these things, but they are pretty cool:

• City Roads renders every single road in a given city and you can export as a PNG or SVG. Or put it onto a coffee mug.
• City Railways is the same thing, but - you guessed it - for railways.
• Peak Map draws, well, peaks. Cool.

Virtual Mars

 These virtual 3D Mars are just cool: Explore with Curiosity and Access Mars.

CDC COVID Data Tracker

The CDC COVID Data Tracker has a lot of great data and data viz - nothing too fancy, but simple and effective. One thing to improve: add a dedicated tab for the data downloads.