Posts tagged with infographics

Some friends of mine have been interviewing at Google and I've been helping them prepare. After some practice interviews, I drew up this flowchart for them to take with them (mentally) to the interviews.

Google uses "oral exam" type interviews:

• The best preparation guide is by Steve Yegge.
• You can pretty much ignore all the official guides that Google provides.
• Expect tough questions of the type that you would have received in your advanced CS classes.
• You can also mine programming contests for good questions.
• Another good source of questions is this mathNews question list.

For another strategy, pull out your copy of CLR(S) (you do have a copy, right?) and re-learn everything. It's all fair game in a google interview.

After you start reviewing, you must do practice interviews. Invite a friend over to ask you questions. Here is what they have to do:

1. Pick a challenging question and read it to you.
2. Not give you any help at all.
3. Ask for a solution in pseudo-code. When you provide it, ask for the order of magnitude runtime analysis.
4. If you make a mistake, after a while, they should say "are you sure that's correct?"
5. If you don't give the optimal solution, they should let you develop it, and when you're done, say "do you think there's a better way to do it?"

Believe it or not, interviewing someone isn't a fun as you think, so provide them with beer and/or pizza. Meanwhile you must do your work on a whiteboard. If you don't have one, use a flip-chart or as a last resort paper.

Trust me, answering questions in real time on a white board isn't like doing them in your head. You must practice this or you're going to mess up the interview. Practice with a friend!

Finally, use the interview flowchart to answer the questions:

• The first, simplest solution just has to work. Don't worry about runtime at this point.
• Start with pseudocode. Only real code if they ask for it.
• Do a bunch of examples. Make up some sample data and run through it by hand. This will help you understand the problem better, even if you think you already do.
• Once you complete a simple (slow) solution, prove it works and then move on to making it faster.

If you do well, the interviewer will tell you you're done before you run out of time. Good luck!

This data graphic isn't just crazy, it's misleading.

Enhanced information graphics are part Scientific American magazine's refresh effort. They probably feel the pressure from Seed magazine's great imagery. Right now they're they're just flailing around and showing how to do it wrong.

When I first looked "Baby's Life, Mother's Schooling" I thought it was a periodic table of the elements with psychedelic colours. My first intuition was the blue arrows would show the increase in child survival in each country as mother's education grew. But the colour gradients and line thickness changes confused me.

So I read the accompanying text. It purports to explain:

"Mortality drops in proportion to the years of schooling that women attain … as seen above in each rising line."

(this is wrong).

The legend clarifies what the colour gradients mean. It seems that the thickness and colour of each line shows the rate of infant mortality. The rising arrow, on the other hand, shows how much, between 1970 and 2009, education levels have gotten better for women. That's not what was advertised.

I thought I was looking at improvements in child health, not improvements in parental schooling. Where's the real data? Try to read the thickness of each line from left to right. It's not easy to quantify the thickness change by eye, and yet this is the key chart data.

Examples:

• Things seem to be going well in Guyana. But in fact, the change in infant survival has been minimal. Line thickness stays the same.
• Yemen appears to be doing poorly, but in fact, infant survival got better, even as women's education stagnated, contradicting the central theme. Line thickness decreases, even though the angle is flat.

(See the full chart.)

The irrelevant time data obscures the relevant correlation data. On the basis of this evidence, I claim that the chart is not only ugly but actually misleading.

In addition to these massive flaws there are also some only major flaws such as:

• The table of elements style obscures the geographic layout.

• The grid layout distorts actual continent shapes beyond identification.

• The colours surrounding each continent are unnecessary non-data ink and clash with the data colours.

• The extra world map in the legend adds to the confusion about geography.

• Since the arrows point up, the title should say that "child survival rates go up" rather than mortality going down.

That's a load of complaining, and it would be inappropriate if I didn't end by showing how to fix it. So. If I had been involved in the editorial design, I would have suggested that the artist replace the grid with a real world map, which can easily contain the data elements in free-form layout on top of the relevant country. Next, I would have made each arrow a mini-graph keyed to education in the X dimension and survival in the Y dimension. I would have calmed or eliminated the colouring, since it adds no information.

Multivariate charts are tough to implement, all infographic designers are aware of that. However, that's no excuse. Scientific American should be a beacon of good data graphics, not a disseminator of chartjunk. They need to get their game in shape before they consider themselves serious purveyors of data visualizations.

André Michelle, inspired by the TENORI-ON, created a grid-sequencer called ToneMatrix. It's an interactive experience written in Flash 10 that merges graphics, visualization, interactivity, and music. There are also iPhone knock-offs such as the free TonePad. As for ToneMatrix, click here to check it out and create your own tunes. Here's one of mine.

Eine Kleine ToneMatrixMusik from S Woodside on Vimeo.

You can also right-click on the ToneMatrix flash app and copy/paste numerical sequences to load and save your music. The sequence for the above is:

98386,1024,4096,1024,67474,96,65540,32768,65618,1024,64,0,65618,4,65600,0

Share and enjoy.

Who Will Get What? This is an information graphic based on Health Insurance Reform in Three Steps by Nicholas Beaudrot. I thought it would work better in this format, which shows the proportions of people as the thickness of the lines.

If you have updated/more correct numbers post them—I might roll an updated version.

This is licensed CC-Attribution-ShareAlike!

Also available on Flickr.

I was just reading this article on The Vets for Freedom faux grassroots movement . If there's one think that I don't like, it's astroturfing. See why at wikipedia . Especially political astroturfing, the worst kind.

The web of connections in the article is pretty confusing so I came up with this information graphic to try to untangle it a bit.

I have large versions in Some links between Republicans and Swift Vets and Vets for Freedom (PDF) suitable for printing at any size, and also bitmaps in PNG , and JPEG .

Keep an eye on this page and / or the blog generally, as I may update the infographic if more information becomes available.

It's licensed under creative commons CC-BY-SA , so if you want the original file (in OmniGraffle ) let me know.

I cross-posted this on sbwoodside's diary on DailyKos . If you want to comment, you can do so there (or just email me).

Oliver Byrne ("Surveyor of Her Majesty's settlements in the Falkland Islands and author of numerous mathematical works") made a masterpiece of information graphics in 1847, giving forth the Elements of Euclid in a visual format.

You can see the whole entire thing (OK, actually just the first 6 books, but isn't that enough?) at the University of British Columbia s Oliver Byrne's edition of Euclid site. The pictures are very cool.

Buckminster Fuller was obsessed with this word "dymaxion" which I think was supposed to be a combination of "dynamic" and "maximum". He created this "dymaxion map" of the world which was intended to have the least possible distortion of the shape of the land features. Have a good look at it.

One thing that's interesting about it I think is that Africa is really much bigger than North America. The "usual" map projection (Mercator) is really terrible because it totally accentuates the size of land masses that are close to the poles. So that N.A., Europe, and Australia are all way too big. Here you can see the truth.

Another interesting discovery for me is the small size of India. I always thought that India was a bit bigger than that. The arctic is also rather small. The Himalaya is very prominent. And I like the curving shape of the islands from Alaska down the eastern side of Asia.

You can also see how the continents all seem to almost be connected into one big island surrounded by water.

The funny shape of the map is because it's designed to be folded up into a roughly spherical shape. Here's an amazing animation of the dymaxion map folding and unfolding .

And here's the Buckminster Fuller FAQ .

Check out this amazing book "Around the World in a Flash" with Marie Neurath's brilliant information graphics.

Disruptive technology has a bit of a buzzword reputation. On the other hand, the Christensen book is always on people's lists as a good book. So I bought it and checked it out.

As it turns out, most people seem to be either wrong or only partly right when they define disruptive tech. There's big gaps missing in the Wikipedia entry , Dvorak gets it wrong , and even Cringely (surprise surprise) misses the boat .

Based on my new understanding straight from the book, I drew up this infographic / visual explanation (click for hig-rez PDF). I decided to zoom in on camera phones, since they are clearly a disruptive tech and show signs of blowing away the digital camera business the next year or two.

The graph is basically three-dimensional. The vertical axis is megapixels. The horizontal axis is the progress of time. And the third dimension (represented here with colour) is the market.

The point is that disruptive technologies initially enter into a new market that has different values. With camera phones, the highest value is that it's always at hand, wherever you go.

The disruption occurs when the new technology suddenly meets the needs of the old market as well. Then it suddenly (and seemingly "out of nowhere") takes over completely.

After reading this Sunday Times article by Ron Suskind I realized that the best explanation for W's behaviour is that he believes what he says. In this light, I put together this information graphic of what he believes the world to be like. I don't endorse this world view; it is constructed based on the best available evidence from transcripts of his speeches and media reports. I do not believe that any of this material is controversial. If you have additional information, please email me .

Available in PDF 128K and GIF 80K . Creative Commons.

This is an updated version of the graphic from this earlier version .

Also available: large GIF (100K) and also if you want the highest quality for printing, PDF file (900K) or EPS file (4.4 MB !!!!)

It says: George W. Bush / Vietnam-era Service Record / The chart data is based only on documents released by the US government.

An infographic / information graphic is a visual explanation. The point is to visualize some data, information, wisdom, story, etc, into a form that appeals to the visual centers of the brains. A well made infographic, in my opinion, can explain some concepts much better than text.

The kingpins of infographics in my opinion are Edward E. Tufte and Nigel Holmes . You can find some kick-ass examples of their graphics on their sites and even more if you dive into google's image search, I'll make it easy for you, holmes , tufte1 , and tufte2 . Tufte's specialty is in the visualization of data, and he's written a number of books on the subject that are basically famous and required reading—I almost never buy books but I just picked up "Envisioning Information". Nigel Holmes is more on the side of explaining concepts which may not be so much data but more like stories, like a lot of news stories, various technical concepts and so on.

Update: There's a new version 1.1 now that's a lot easier to read (but shows the same data).

Here's a visual explanation of W's air national guard record. I used only documents released by the military (in other words, official service documents) to build the graphic.

small GIF

large GIF

Also available in best quality: PDF 1.2 MB .

Most of the documents I sourced can be found either at coldfeet or through slate .

Here's an image I prepared based on a story about Karl Rover's smear campaign tactics in salon.com . My graphic illustrates the story's claims. I haven't personally fact-checked it at all.

I deliberately chose salon colours and I obviously have higher-resolution versions available.