Yes, you can make radar plots with R!
radar plots
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Tag Archives: visualization
cool live weather sites
This week I discovered several websites that show you cool snapshots of current weather. My colleagues are laughing at me because apparently I am the last to know. I think this is one example of how a complex visualization can sometimes be much better than a simpler one. Compared to the typical “synoptic” maps of warm and cold fronts, which are confusing to most people, this is something I think even an elementary school student could begin to grasp.
https://www.windytv.com/?pressure,38.836,-77.338,4
https://www.ventusky.com/?p=30.2;-78.2;4&l=pressure
Venn diagrams in R
Can you make Venn diagrams in R? Yes, of course you can!
resilience.org roundup
This “resilience roundup” links to so many interesting articles I just couldn’t pick one or two to link to. Among them:
- an argument that the “clean energy miracle” is here, and the press and the public just haven’t picked up on it yet
- a map of the global coal trade – an awesome map/Sankey diagram combo almost as cool as that famous one of Napolean’s death march into Russia
- the predicted return of oil shortages and high prices
- an argument that the big multinational oil companies need to “adapt or die”
- a cool animated gif of global warming
scenario analysis
Maybe this is not of interest to everyone, but I am always looking for new ways to analyze and communicate the results of alternatives and scenarios.
The new scenario framework developed by the climate change research community rests on the fundamental logic that a diversity of socio-economic pathways can lead to the same radiative forcing, and therefore that a given level of radiative forcing can have very different socio-economic impacts. We propose a methodology that implements a “scenario discovery” cluster analysis and systematically identifies diverse groups of scenarios that share common outcomes among a database of socio-economic scenarios. We demonstrate the methodology with two examples using the Shared Socio-economic Pathways framework. We find that high emissions scenarios can be associated with either high or low per capita GDP growth, and that high productivity growth and catch-up are not necessarily associated with high per capita GDP and high emissions.
nice maps
I’m always looking for ways to make nicer maps. Here are a number of resources.
- Cartographer’s Toolkit: Colors, Typography, Patterns
- GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design
- QGIS Map Design
dots moving around on a map
This is just dots moving around on a map, but I find these dots very engaging in helping me understand urban planning concepts and results of a simulation.
I found this on R bloggers, which talks about how the simulation and map were created.
Data Scientist Todd Schneider has followed-up on his tour-de-force analysis of Taxi Rides in NYC with a similar analysis of the Citi Bike data. Check out the wonderful animation of bike rides on September 16 below. While the Citi Bike data doesn’t include actual trajectories (just the pick-up and drop-off locations), Todd has “interpolated” these points using Google Maps biking directions. Though these may not match actual routes (and gives extra weight to roads with bike lanes), it’s nonetheless an elegant visualization of bike commuter patterns in the city.
“striking findings” from Pew Research Center
Pew Research Center has an interesting blog post showing some “striking findings” from their 2015 work, along with links to various surveys and analyses they did. Even if you didn’t tell me what the topics are, I would be interested in the graphics. Nice, clean time series plots, bar charts, “bump charts” – lots of bump charts, and even a pie. Their maps look good, except I don’t like the animated ones that move before you have time to look at them. They need a pause button.
You can see the striking findings on the site, but here are my top five:
- “For the first time since the 1940s, more immigrants from Mexico are leaving the U.S. than coming into the country.” Better move those guards to the other side of the wall! (Actually, there was a South Park episode about this as I recall…)
- 53% of white Americans say “Our country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites.” Which is not all that striking, except that it changed from 39% in March 2014 to 53% in July 2015. Unless there was some major flaw in the survey (and Pew is pretty good at surveys) that’s a big change in a short time.
- “People in countries with significant Muslim populations express overwhelmingly negative views of ISIS”. For example, 84% of people in the Palestinian territories disapprove.
- 88% of scientists think it is safe to eat genetically modified foods, versus 37% of U.S. adults. 82% of scientists think growing population will be a major problem, versus 59% of U.S. adults.
- 45% of the U.S. public thinks climate change is a very serious problem. But only 18% of people in China do!
Look at the pictures, they’re much better than my words.
Edward Tufte
Here’s a fun interview with Edward Tufte, insult comic and author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Here are a couple of his snappy retorts:
…highly produced visualizations look like marketing, movie trailers, and video games and so have little inherent credibility for already skeptical viewers, who have learned by their bruising experiences in the marketplace about the discrepancy between ads and reality (think phone companies)…
…overload, clutter, and confusion are not attributes of information, they are failures of design. So if something is cluttered, fix your design, don’t throw out information. If something is confusing, don’t blame your victim — the audience — instead, fix the design. And if the numbers are boring, get better numbers. Chartoons can’t add interest, which is a content property. Chartoons are disinformation design, designed to distract rather than inform. Thus they reduce the credibility of your presentation. To distract, hire a magician instead of a chartoonist, for magicians are honest liars…
Sensibly-designed tables usually outperform graphics for data sets under 100 numbers. The average numbers of numbers in a sports or weather or financial table is 120 numbers (which hundreds of million people read daily); the average number of numbers in a PowerPoint table is 12 (which no one can make sense of because the ability to make smart multiple comparisons is lost). Few commercial artists can count and many merely put lipstick on a tiny pig. They have done enormous harm to data reasoning, thankfully partially compensated for by data in sports and weather reports. The metaphor for most data reporting should be the tables on ESPN.com. Why can’t our corporate reports be as smart as the sports and weather reports, or have we suddenly gotten stupid just because we’ve come to work?
It’s a very interesting point, actually, that people are willing to look at very complex data on sports sites, really study it and think about it, and do that voluntarily, considering it fun rather than boring, hard work. It’s child-like in a way – I mean in a positive sense, that for children the world is fresh and new and learning is fun. What is the secret of not shutting down this ability in adults. I think it’s context.
junk charts and bump charts
The blog Junk Charts has a lot of examples of “bump charts”. These are pretty cool – simple, clean, and informative – as compared to tired old line, pie and bar charts, and the fashionable but junky infographic approach.