Sunfleet

Yummy 3D data visualization

This is the kind of 3D visualization I 100% endorse! The 3D tangible objects nicely illustrate the scale of the data and they are delicious to eat.

The U.S. Defense Budget, Explained with OREO Cookies

Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Visualization"  | 

Visualizing Risk

The New York Times published an article today on the difficulties patients have in making appropriate decisions about their medical care: In Medicine, Acceptable Risk Is in the Eye of the Beholder. It is very hard for people to understand the risks associated with medical treatments, because as humans we are particularly averse to risk when it comes to potential losses to our personal situation. What can be more personal than one's health? And as the article discusses, patients frequently make sub-optimal decisions for themselves because of this aversion.

To read more about this "irrational" behavior, start by looking into prospect theory, a seminal idea from the field of behavioral economics, developed by Kahneman & Tversky.

This article stands out for me though because it explains how visualizations of the risks can dramatically help patients understand the issues more completely. I am very interested in this integration of visualization & decision-making and would like to see more systematic analysis of why different visualizations lead to different conclusions.

From the NYTimes:

In a paper published in the June issue of PLoS Medicine, Dr. Jerome R. Hoffman says using illustrations is helpful. Pie charts, dartboards and, best of all, roulette wheels, he suggests, communicate the complex information about the probability of a good outcome more understandably.

My question is why are roulette wheels the best visualizations? Is it because, on average, patients are most familiar with the concept of risk from gambling with roulette wheels? Does that mean you should get a visualization tailored to your personal life experiences? Nerds get pie charts, barflies get dartboards, and gamblers get roulette wheels? Or is there something inherent in our visual analysis that is universal for all types of people, making roulette wheel visualizations easier to analyze than the other representations?

Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Visualization"  |  Comments[2]

Large-scale dataset visualization

For inspiration on how to present lots of data in a playful and informative way, check out this applet We Feel Fine. (found on information aesthetics, as usual.) It visualizes blog entries that refer to feelings, organized by time. The content is interesting enough, but I most enjoyed the non-traditional ways of presenting statistics and large amounts of data.

Here are some screenshots to get you interested in checking it out:

Selecting a random point in a large sea of data:

Ordered list of term frequencies:

Histogram with many datapoints missing:

Histogram with organic, animated blobs:

Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Visualization"  | 

More Circles

Due to the insights of our commentors, I've changed my mind about circular treemaps. They have a distinct disadvantage compared to rectangular treemaps in that the parts (sub-circles) do not add up to the whole (the surrounding circle). But circular, colorful data representations still appeal to me.

Ciros circular graphs (shown above) are quite appealing. They represent a method for visualizing genome relations, but could be applied to any complex relational dataset. It is also an free GPL project, so you can try it out for yourself. For inspiration, checkout these lovely screenshots.

Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Visualization"  | 

Circles v. Squares

For those of you who are big fans of circles (me! me!), there's a new treemap visualization on the street: "Circular" Treemaps. They look more organic than Ben Shneiderman's original Treemap visualizations.

Circles:

v. Squares:

found via information aesthetics

Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Visualization"  |  Comments[4]

America's Favorite Pastime: Discussing Housing Prices

If you haven't checked out the new real estate search website Zillow, I highly recommend it. It aggregates all the public information about home sales and assessments into an easy-to-view map format, so you can see the value of your home growing (or shrinking?) over time. Finally, a website has made this information transparent, instead of locking it away (like 100% of real estate agency websites seem to do)!

Another good one, although it only covers Seattle, is Redfin. This site shows you houses currently on the market along with recently sold houses. Kind of like Zillow, in that it organizes the information on a google-esque satellite map, but here the information is very time relevant. (Via information aesthetics)

Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Visualization"  |  Comments[2]

Demos of Social Visualizations: BayCHI event, Feb 14th

Two of the visualization applications mentioned recently on our blog, TheyRule.net and Prefuse, are going to be demoed by their creators at a meeting of BayCHI (the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of ACM SIGCHI). It is hosted at PARC and is open to the public.

Event Details

Factoid of the day: The members of Sunfleet work in the Bay Area 52% of the time. [calculation = (SUM(Person*DaysOfTheWeekInBayArea))/(NumPersons*NumWorkDaysInWeek)]

Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Visualization"  |  Comments[0]

Prefuse & Vizster

A commenter, Steven, pointed out another Social Network visualization tool that is worth mentioning here. Vizster is a research project that visualizes online social networks. It utilizes a toolkit for visualizing both structured and unstructured data, prefuse. Prefuse appears to be a very useful tool for prototyping many different types of visualization applications. And it is written in 100% pure Java. excellent! Both projects are being done at UC Berkeley.

Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Visualization"  |  Comments[1]