Simple Complexity

IMA Dashboard: Measuring a Museum’s Performance

Welcome to the IMA Dashboard, an ongoing effort to measure various aspects of the Museum’s performance.

To navigate the Dashboard in particular areas, the tabs at the top of the screen drop down to allow for more detail.

Drill-down to the Student Level:

The goal of the Dashboard is to seek to quantify and report out on areas of activity of general interest to museum observers and to particular interest to museum studies specialists, colleagues, and patrons.

Popularity: 48% [?]

Posted in Business Intelligence, Data Mining, Interesting Sites, Visualization | No Comments »

Xobni: A Whole New Look for your Outlook Inbox

Xobni offers a new way to organize and search your Outlook email. Xobni creates profiles for each person that emails you. These profiles contain relationship statistics, contact information, social connections, threaded conversations, and shared attachments.

I’ve been increasingly interested in how the ever growing popularity of social networking sites would integrate with new technology to actually create something valuable beyond trading pictures, wall posts, and friend requests…

Xobni Launches Partnership with Facebook Connect

The Xobni sidebar in Outlook will display public data from Facebook profiles and will also offer the user an option to sign into their Facebook account through Xobni and view private data like photos and status messages for their Facebook friends.

Now… unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you know that Facebook is a preferred site for wasting time at work. Maybe employers will embrace this as a way to hopefully keep internet roaming employees more focused on work…? Or probably not

I’ve only been using Xobni for a few days and I can confidently say that I’m less bored checking my work e-mail. Thanks Xobni!

Here’s a video demo of the tool. Take a look:

And you can Download Xobni Here for free

Popularity: 63% [?]

Posted in Decision Making, Gadget, General Business, Visualization | No Comments »

Avoid local Traffic and Speedtraps Using Free, Real-Time Information

In the 3-4 months I’ve been checking TrafficLand.com somewhat regularly, it has probably saves me at least 10 hours of what could have been traffic hell!

TrafficLand.com aggregates and delivers live traffic video over the Internet and on TV. The Company has developed patent-pending technology to allow it to aggregate thousands of CCTV (closed circuit television) video feeds from multiple Departments of Transportation (DoTs) traffic camera networks.

The site also features traffic cameras from around the world and makes it simple to view multiple ‘Top Camera’ categories.

Parliament Square, London

Nothing terribly interesting to report, but still…

It’s a smooth, functional, and intuitive interface pointing to relevant and real-time information that you can immediately use to make better decisions.

Now if you combined the traffic information at TrafficLand.com with the database over at www.SpeedTrap.org, a site devoted to identifying the location of speed traps, you might be able to tip the balance in your favor during those long road trips.

Although not as robust an interface, SpeedTrap.org claims a comprehensive database of detailed user submitted speedtraps, which could be useful to take a look at before going on that next long drive somewhere.

The site also features some pretty sound advice on how to exercise your rights to fight speed traps and speeding ticke:

• How To Fight An Unfair Speeding Ticket
• Fight Your Speeding Ticket With Simple Math
• 7 Ways To Shut Down A Speed Trap

And if you’ve got a lead foot and you live in/near any of these cities:

. List of the worst speed trap cities in all fifty states.

Popularity: 69% [?]

Posted in Data Mining, Decision Making, Gadget, Interesting Sites, Visualization | 2 Comments »

Code_Swarm - An Experiment in Organic Software Visualization

I’m a fan of Open Source technology as well as interesting visualizations… so when I came across this experiment in information visualization on the creation of Open Source applications, I was intrigued.

This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits (when a developer makes changes to the code or documents) in a software project.

Organic information visualization, coined by Ben Fry, is a different approach to information visualization. It eschews traditional data confinement in space and lets the elements play together in free-form and unpredictable ways.

Have look at the video below, which shows Python’s project evolution.

code_swarm - Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

More videos can be found here.

Popularity: 80% [?]

Posted in Interesting Sites, Natural Language, Visualization | No Comments »

Data Integrity - What Does It Really Mean? Why Is It Important?

The truth is, Data Integrity is essential to even the most rudimentary Information Visualizations.

No visualization is worth a thing if it leads you to the wrong conclusion.

Buzz words are carelessly tossed around in the attempt to impress (by subtle confusion) the intended audience.

buzz.word n. — A usually important-sounding word or phrase used primarily to impress laypersons.

More often than not people have varying perceptions of what buzz words actually mean, causing a barrier to clear communication.

What does Data Integrity really mean and why is it an important term for people to understand?

As the need to derive meaningful information from large sets of data becomes a higher priority both in the government and private sector, Data Integrity is what gives users the assurance that the information they see is trustworthy.

Many organizations build and rely on a Data Warehouse,

“…the main repository of an organization’s historical data, its corporate memory. It contains the raw material for management’s decision support system”

I believe I’ve identified a few definitions that hopefully embody what Data integrity is meant to be:

Wikipedia:

Data Integrity is a term that can mean ensuring data is “whole” or complete…

Put simply, data integrity is the assurance that data is consistent, correct, and accessible.

The author of Ensuring Data Integrity offers:

…Data Integrity is defined as information that adheres to a strict standard of value and completeness. That is, the data is both accurate and the entire population of relevant data is contained within the data warehouse.

The credibility of the data warehouse solely rests with the integrity of its data.

Data Integrity is clearly important and now it seems there are so many more questions:

• How does one ensure data integrity?
• How can the integrity of data be compromised?
• What activities go in to providing data integrity assurance?
• How is data integrty success/failure reported?
• What’s the worst that could happen if a little of my data lacks integrity?

Popularity: 93% [?]

Posted in Business Intelligence, Data Integrity, Data Warehouse, Decision Making, General Business | No Comments »

Cool Infographic Videos: Nextel

Some new videos for Nextel done by Superfad.com.

How did Sprint establish operations, restore communications and coordinate supplies in less than 72 hours after Hurricane Katrina Hit?

How do emergency responders use Nextel Direct Connect to find you before a bear does?

Thanks to CoolInfographics for the link.

Popularity: 96% [?]

Posted in Random, infographic | No Comments »

Who has the Oil? Map of Country usage and production

I’m sure I’ve posted this map before… but after spending nearly $70 on a tank of regular gas this afternoon (i drive a 4-door sedan) I couldn’t help but think back to this image and how perilous it seems.

The United States consumes more than 20,000,000 barrels of oil every day (more than 3 times any other country) but has less than 2% of the worlds remaining oil.

While energy efficient cars seem to be the no-brainer quick fix… I wonder if Americans are truly willing to sacrifice the feeling of satisfaction that many get when driving a behemoth of a car. (That’s why people drive Hummers, right? It’s not for the trunk space)

Popularity: 100% [?]

Posted in Random, Statistics, Visualization | No Comments »

Mapping the Rhythm and Flow of Literary Works

Found on notcot.com, On The Map is a cool project by Stefanie Posavec that maps the rhythm and flow of literary works into some stunning visual posters.

Breaking a story down into chapters, paragraphs, sentences and finally individual words. Then color coded to capture the topics as they reappear throughout the story. The level of detail is really impressive.

Popularity: 95% [?]

Posted in Books, Random, Uncategorized, Visualization | 1 Comment »

Smashing Magazine Inspiration: Data Visualization and Infographics

Smashing Magazine is well designed… and so is their post on popular Infographics and Data Visualization.

DIZZIA, Gregory M.
This is the documentation of every intimate relationship Gregory Dizzia has ever had. The data spans 23 years.

The main goal of data visualization is its ability to visualize data, communicating information clearly and effectively. It doesn’t mean that data visualization needs to look boring to be functional or extremely sophisticated to look beautiful.

Virtual Water
Simple, clean, elegant and effective. A double-sided poster visualizing the water footprint of products and nations.

Mapping the Blogosphere
This is what the blogosphere looks like

Megan Jaegerman
A review of Megan Jaegerman’s work by Edward Tufte. Notice how clean and legible the infographics are.

Popularity: 96% [?]

Posted in Business Intelligence, Interesting Sites, Visualization, infographic | No Comments »

America’s Most Sinful Cities - Interactive Map

Forbes ranked and mapped cities based on the seven deadly sins. (Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride).

While the interactive map isn’t all that complex, it’s an interesting and enjoyable way to discover what Forbes believes to be America’s most sinful cities.

“For each sin we stretched our imagination to find a workable proxy–murder rates for wrath, per capita billionaires for avarice–then culled the available data sources to rank the cities.”

I’ve lived in and around Washington DC all my life…. maybe it’s the allure of a sinful city?

Washington DC Ranks:

• Avarice - #9
  • Greed isn’t confined to money… Power?
• Lust - #6
  • I can only conclude that I must not be hanging out with the right crowd
• Wrath - #7
• Hmmm… well, we do have SouthEast DC

So where’s Vegas? Las Vegas only ranks in the top ten in one category, Sloth (#3).

Thanks to Flowing Datafor the link.

Popularity: 87% [?]

Posted in Data Mining, Interesting Sites, Visualization, infographic | No Comments »