Dynamic Data Display

User Input in Google Charts

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 01:45:09 +0000

Enter Expenses for 2004:

Branding and Visualization

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 16:23:40 +0000

Can anyone tell from this image what company’s name is being visualized with artifacts?

Might be hard out of context, but when I went go google.com this morning it was abundantly clear. Now I don’t see the image as anything besides ‘Google’.

One heck of a brand

Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Speech

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 03:18:07 +0000

President Obama’s speech is still live on television but thanks to a scoop we can analyze his entire message using our old favorite tool, Wordle.

Can you tease out the major themes?

America, poeple, government, business, work, children, future….

Thanks to a quick analysis with tools from Rainbow Arch we can also get some quick frequency counts of the 6,950 words spoken (1,647 unique).

Connecting words obviously come up at the top.

The: 349
And: 235
To: 215
Of: 196
We: 185

Top meaningful words (my discretion)…

People: 33
America: 26
Jobs: 25
Work: 21
American:19

Amazing how quickly you can analyze a speech that hasn’t even ended yet!

Update: The NY Times has a neat look at buzz words used in State of the Union speeches from FDR to Obama
Update II: Word clouds seem to be a popular data visualization technique tonight. Check out this from CBC News Canada

Data on Doggy Years

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 05:11:16 +0000

I always heard the 1:7 ratio for converting dog years into human years. According to the Dog Food Corner it’s not that simple, because not all dogs are created equal.

The site lists a bunch of variables – such as gender, breed, and living conditions – that affect a dog’s lifespan and comparability to the human timetable.

How much your dog weights also has a lot to do with it. Here is the dog to human year conversion table they provide:

From this I whipped up the following interactive tool in Adobe Flex to help you determine just when your dog will (or did) get older than you. Just enter a few stats about yourself and the chart will adjust to show you when your age crosses your dogs age.

For instance, my dog was born in 2009. I was born in 1981. My dog, Dr. Elsa Schneider, weights 45 pounds. According to the data above, it is actually this year that I’ll be the closest to my dog after her actual age is adjusted to human years. How does your experience compare?

Visualizing a Trillion Dollars

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 03:36:56 +0000

Via Greg Mankiw I came across this cool way to wrap your head around how much a trillion dollars really is. I used it in class last week to demonstrate the magnitude of US GDP, which is around $15 trillion.

One TRILLION dollars… What does that look like? I mean, these various numbers are tossed around like so many doggie treats, so I thought I’d take Google Sketchup out for a test drive and try to get a sense of what exactly a trillion dollars looks like.

The author takes you from $100….

to a $1 million dollars….

and finally to $1 trillion dollars…..

Check out the entire post here