Blog Archives
Excel Graphing Screencasts
These two videos are for my classes, made using the free screencast tool ScreenCast-O-Matic.
The first is for my IB Bio group for setting up a graph for a complex set of data, adding extra datasets, error bars and formatting. The second is a similar video for a simple Physics investigation in Grade 10.
Hopefully they are helpful as you can go back and re-watch important bits as you do the write-ups.
If anyone knows of a decent way to add best-fit curves (lines are easy) to datasets, please let me know!
What’s Your Water Footprint?
Visualizing.org had a competition for best visualisation for World Water Day (22nd March), and the winner is this interactive world map by Joseph Bergen and Nicki Huang, from Harvard:
What's your water footprint? Joseph Bergen and Nicki Huang's interactive visualisation.
Information Is Beautiful at TEDGlobal 2010
Linked to some of the other posts about data visualisations, here is Information is Beautiful creator David McCandless at TED Global 2010.
“Data is the new (s)oil”
Visualisation is a great tool for highlighting trends and patterns in data sets, but we must still learn to go into the data ourselves. We must use a critical eye when looking at these graphics – what do they intend to communicate and how well do they achieve their goal?
Snake Oil? Cool infographic on health supplements
One of my favourite blogs is Information Is Beautiful, and here is a lovely example of how a large dataset can be turned into something visual and easily interpreted: The Scientific Evidence for Popular Health Supplements.
What does it represent?
– size of bubbles represents Google search popularity
– height of bubbles represents strength of scientific evidence for its efficacy in the specific health use
By making use of the Cochrane.org systematic reviews of double-blind clinical studies, IIB have made sure that we are looking only at reliable, scientifically sound data. You can even see the data here.
I am looking forward to seeing David McCandless’ TED Talk in the upcoming TED Global 2010 at Oxford. Of course, I’ll be watching on the web. Check out more of their infographics here.
Not a video, but…
… a great site for visualising data. InformationIsBeautiful.net.
Deadliest infections, from Information is Beautiful
I particularly like these posts:
How safe is the HPV vaccine? (in response to ridiculous scare-mongering news stories)
The Billion-dollar-gram (What is a billion, anyway?)
i-Biology 