Author: atakle

An Australian Redittor Andrew Elloitt had a fascinating idea of quantifying his child’s first few months of life using Baby connect iPhone app. Using the app, he built a comprehensive database of his daughter’s sleep and wake cycles for every single day of the first six months of her life.  He then created a stunning visualization using  CAD package Rhinoceros and Adobe illustrator which looks like this:

The above visualization represents six months of wakefulness and sleep – indicated by yellow and blue patters respectively.  Birth is at the center of the spiral. As she gets older the spiral pattern wraps in outward direction with each full revolution of circle representing 24 hours. This means if we imagine this as a clock, midnight is at the top and noon is at the bottom.

What I liked about this visualization?

• This one continuous thread shows six months of baby’s sleep and wakefulness
• The visualization is able to show the baby’s initial life- the chaos in the middle; as the baby alternately slept and woke during day and night.
• After few months, we can see that things start to smooth out. the upper right quarter begins to stay blue prominently, while the rest turns mostly yellow.
• We can see dark blue strips in between the yellow part representing naps.
• One of the important takeaway from this visualization is that-it represents general patterns in newborns sleep and wakefulness. This is highly useful for parents who have recently had their first child and are going through that initial terrible and frightening time.

What I don’t like about the visualization:

I think the insights from the visualization are somewhat difficult to get at the first sight. You have to look at it carefully and understand

Considering that the audience of visualization are parents of the newborns, they wont have much time to sit and decipher this cryptic looking life cycle of new born baby.

What might be better: 

The above chart clearly shows that newborns alternate rapidly between sleep and wakefulness. As they get older, those sleep cycles begin to consolidate. By toddler age a child may get by on one or two naps a day. Heading into late childhood and early adulthood, naps tend to vanish altogether.

Conclusion:

Each newborn is different, of course, especially when it comes to sleep. Part of the reason why parents are scared in the initial period is that their babies don’t know how to sleep. Babies are yet to sync their internal clocks to the daily rhythms the rest of us use. The visualization surely gives crucial insights but if we consider the audience to be the parents of new born babies, it fails to convey those insights effectively to the audience.

References:

http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/5l39mu/my_daughters_sleeping_patterns_for_the_first_4

 

 

Akshar Takle

An ultra-high-resolution NASA computer model has given scientists a stunning new look at how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere travels around the globe.

What you are looking at is supercomputer model of carbon dioxide levels in earths atmosphere. This stunning visualization compresses one year of data into a few minutes. Carbon dioxide is the most important green house gas affected by human activity. About half of the CO2 emitted by combustion of fossil fuels remains in the atmosphere, while the other half is absorbed by natural land and oceans. In the northern hemisphere we see the highest concentration are focused around major emission sources over North America,  Europe and Asia.  We can clearly see these industrial areas in the map where there is a darker shade of orange and red.

The most interesting thing to notice from this viz is that the gas does not stay in one place.  There is dispersion of carbon dioxide which is largely controlled by weather patterns within the global circulation.

What I liked about this is it clearly shows the change in carbon dioxide levels over a period of time. We can easily get insights on the cause of these changes as we have the information about the regions and time (we can figure out the season from the day and month displayed at the bottom). At the end of spring and start of summer plants absorb substantial amount of carbon dioxide through photosynthesis thus removing some of the gas from atmosphere. We see this change in model as red and purple colors start to fade out.  The same is conveyed very simply and clearly from the annual CO2 cycle line graphs.

We can see as summer transitions to fall, and plants photosynthesis decreases and carbon dioxide begins to accumulate in the atmosphere again.

What I don’t like: 

At the point where nations vulnerable to climate change is shown, it is not clear why these countries? It looks like they are specifically talking about some countries and have excluded the surrounding region.  For example we can see that countries in middle Africa are vulnerable but those in South Africa are not.  We can think that as these countries are in southern hemisphere and surrounded by ocean bodies, the green house gas effect is less pronounced. But there are some countries in North Africa which emit less CO2 and are not in the vulnerability list.

Lets look at the graph of CO2 level since 1960 that is shown in the visualization. The graph is something like this:

The goal is to show average CO2 level each year in ppm. From the current graph,  it is hard to find out the exact value of CO2 at a particular year.

What I would improve:

• Instead of highlighting the vulnerable countries, I would use a heat map with country borders and a color model that is contrast to the gas flow pattern to represent level of effect on the countries.
• As shown in the below graph, I would use a simple line graph to show the average value of CO2, so that the value corresponding to each year is easily readable
•  It would be helpful to see a graph of CO2 levels for each month in consecutive years. That would would give us a better idea about the rate at which CO2 is increasing in our atmosphere.
• 

 

Sources:

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2016/12/12/13914942/interactive-map-cheapest-power-plant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere

https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/a-closer-look-at-carbon-dioxide/

https://www.co2.earth/

 

Akshar Takle

Organised by river charity Thames21 and made by artist Jason Bruges, the artwork shows different displays according to whether the water quality in Thames is improving, declining, or stable compared with the previous day’s data.

Checkout the video below:

The external lights on Sea Container building, next to Thames in London are meant to change according to live data on the water quality of the river Thames.  It provides a striking visual display of health of the water flowing past, by using data from samples that are taken daily.

But how is one supposed to interpret this sophisticated live action data viz?

Lets see what data is meant to be conveyed about the health of the river:

The health of the river is declining today, check out the @Thames21 page this weekend to find out how you can help! 🌊🌊 pic.twitter.com/FuuYQg99PN

— Thames Pulse (@thamespulse) April 13, 2017

The artwork displays one of three patterns based on whether the water quality is improving, static or declining compared to the previous week’s data reading.

• Declining water quality: lighting is largely green and static
• Static: lighting becomes more animated: a blue ‘wave’ sweeps across building
• Improving: pink and blue lights pulsate furiously up and down the frontage.

I think the visualization fails to convey the intended message to the audience largely because of wrong choice of colors.

Color plays a crucial role in transmitting a psychological message to the audience.

• Green is a color is generally linked to nature, peace, well-being and freshness. If used to represent declining water quality, people can easily misinterpret it to be the opposite.
• Similarly, a shade of red color speeds up the heart rate and conveys a message of danger.

I conclusion, the user experience should be also taken into consideration and not merely the aesthetics for a visualization to be effective.

References:

http://londonist.com/london/best-of-london/now-you-can-see-how-healthy-the-thames-is

http://www.thames21.org.uk/Pulse/