Author: viraaj589

The Beautiful Game!

Football (soccer) is the most popular sport in the world wherein FIFA has more countries as its members (211) than even the UN (193). This goes to prove how sports has managed to unite people more than anything else. Moreover, the FIFA World Cup is the biggest event of the world with over 3.2 billion viewers worldwide. Now moving on to the biggest debate in the football universe- who is the best? Messi or Ronaldo. Let’s hope we can find out by the end of this project.

Just like any other football fan, the question would always get me perplexed as to who should be on the top. The last nine Ballon D’ors have been won by either of the two with Messi winning five and Ronaldo four. Many believe both to be on the same level and it can be seen by the phenomenal records that they have shattered over the years. Still the curiosity inside me wanted to find the slightest of differences to adjudge one over the other. In my search for the answer I came across an abundance of data that had to be filtered for me to get the desired results. One of the biggest challenges that I had to face was selecting my audience. People who’d want to know this answer includes fans, managers, journalists, owners and media. World Soccer, fourfourtwo and when Saturday comes are the most popular football magazines in the world and would be a good medium to spread the claim of this project. These magazines are generally read by people who know quite a lot about football which makes them the perfect audience for this dashboard.

The claim that wish to prove with the help of these dashboards is how Messi is the best player of the last decade. First comparing the top ten players and then moving over to Messi VS Ronaldo. Comparing any two things is easier said than done. It must be based on multiple dimensions to strengthen our claim. Goals, assists, trophies, awards and salary felt like the natural choice when comparing them. Being a football fanatic myself, it was hard for me to stay unbiased for as long as I could until my worksheets started telling a story which was aligned with my claim.

 

Dashboard 1- Top ten players of the last decade

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6xsR3HojSRgSnNoQmkzUFBCa3M

Before comparing Messi with Ronaldo, it is important to first look at the top ten players of the last decade. This will show us why Messi and Ronaldo are above the rest and only then a comparison of the two is justifiable. Clearly this dashboard gives you a lot in a single glimpse.

On the top, we have statistics for all the players in a drop-down list manner which include overall rating, vision, curve etc. Bottom left corner has a soccer field in the background with images of players on top of it. Behind the images are pie charts that depict the percentage of matches won by each of them to show how much their teams win when they are playing. Next to it is a sheet with bubbles to show the overall ratings along with the number of goals they have scored in their careers. The last sheet is a world map with faces of players on the countries they are from.

Overall one can get a good impression of this comparison between the top ten players with the countries they are from, goals they have scored, their winnability and all major skill statistics. Now we shall have a look at each of these sheets in depth.

 

1.Player Stats:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6xsR3HojSRga1ZQenUxUGRRRGM

This sheet alone speaks about a wide variety of skills for each player. Drop-down list felt like a perfect choice for this kind of data since the number of skills are over 20 and that too vary for each player. One can choose the player they want to view to skills of and the dashboard will change accordingly. Data for this sheet was picked from FIFA 17 game website since only they provide the figures for these skills. I could not find a data set that I could use python on so had to select each player and write his stats in an excel sheet. Some stats might differ from those at FIFA website as I have modified some of them depending on how good a season they have had.

Critique- First I used different colors for each stat but it did not look appealing to the eye so I changed it to different shades of the same color.

2.Goals vs Rating-

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6xsR3HojSRgOXMzVlFTeFdsajA

This sheet is useful as it helps us differentiate among the players. Size of the bubble depends on the number of career goals that each have scored along with their overall ratings. We can see Ronaldo and Messi with the biggest bubbles when compared with others. Ibrahimović too has a bigger bubble but he has not won in terms of individual or team championships with respect to Messi or Ronaldo.

3.World map

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6xsR3HojSRgU1VQU2t2bVhIdkE

We can see how each of our top ten players come from a different nation with most of them from Europe or South America. These two continents have dominated football ever since its global existence. Picture of a player above his country tells you which country they represent.

Critique- Major downside in this sheet is the overlapping of player images on top of each other since the countries they represent are smaller in size and closely packed in clusters.

4. Winnability-

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6xsR3HojSRgVklUb05ua1UzLWs

This is certainly a beautiful sheet with a background image of a football field and player images on top of pie charts. Putting a background image was an easy task but to put images on top of pie charts required patience after numerous failed attempts. The pie charts represent the percent of matches that they have won, drawn or lost in their club career since it is the club that pays them money. Winnability speaks a lot about the ability of a player to win matches for his club and just how good their team performs when they play.

Dataset for this sheet were nowhere to be found and so I had to track back to each of their careers individually and find these values since 2007. I chose the formation of 3-4-3 as it is the formation of the world eleven and has been successfully adopted this season by Chelsea, arsenal, Barcelona and Juventus.

 

Dashboard 2: Messi vs Ronaldo (Goals and assists)-

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6xsR3HojSRgUWNIZEJjNWgwYlk

The dashboard gives a comparison between goals and assists provided by Messi and Ronaldo. In the goals sheet both of them are pretty close to each other with Messi scoring a tad more than his rival since 2009. As we go to the assists sheet we see a huge gap between them where Messi’s line graph never goes below Ronaldo’s. Data for this dashboard was found relatively easy and needed just some cleaning with python.

Showing some attribute with respect to time works better with line graph than with bar. One can clearly see the change in each attribute as time increases. Clearly Messi is our winner for this round by being the top goal scorer and playmaker for the past decade.

What these two are achieving year after year is unbelievable. What is even more remarkable is that Messi is two years younger to Ronaldo which means he could potentially play longer than Ronaldo.

 

Dashboard 3: Messi vs Ronaldo (Trophies and Awards)-

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6xsR3HojSRgNjZZYXhJejUzRU0

Let us now look at the most prized possessions in football which are trophies and awards. Both have a trophy cabinet that might just be bigger than most clubs in Europe.  Both are born winners and such a rivalry may never be seen again. In the first sheet, we have the championships that both won with their clubs or country and under it we see the individual prizes.

Clearly Messi has won more trophies than Ronaldo even though Ronaldo played some part of his career in England, winning the premier league thrice with Manchester united. If we have a look at Spain, Messi has won fourteen more tournaments. Even in club footballs biggest competition, the UEFA champions league Messi prevails. Ronaldo won the EURO last year with Portugal wherein Messi’s Argentina twice lost the final of Copa America to Chile. Nevertheless, Messi has an Olympic Gold to his name along with FIFA U-20 World Cup.

Messi also has more individual trophies to his name with five Ballon D’ors to his name, the most in the history of the game. Both have same number of European golden boots and Best player in Europe award as well. Spanish league (La Liga) is where Messi comfortably beats Ronaldo with five more best player in La Liga awards and three more top goal scorer in Copa Del Rey. But Messi also holds one award that even some of the greatest players ever might not have, the World Cup Golden Ball for the best player.

In these sheets, I first gave a background image and then I plotted each of those trophies as points on an X-Y plane over the image. Then replacing those points generated with images of trophies that had to be cropped on photoshop. It did require a lot of manual labor hours but in the end, it was worth it as the output generated is quite beautiful to look at.

Dashboard 4: Messi vs Ronaldo (Value for Money)-

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6xsR3HojSRgUWZIQ1ZsWE41eDA

Football like any other sport is a game of money. We should end the comparison by seeing how much did they both cost their clubs and who generated more value with their performance. Left hand side has two sheets depicting their salaries over time. Right hand side shows a line graph of weekly salary and bar graph of how much did they get per goal or assist.

More the gap between the line graph and bar graph more value that player has generated. Take the example of this season where FC Barcelona have had to pay less than 400k for each of Messi’s goals or assists whereas Real Madrid have had pay over half a million for each of Ronaldo’s goals or assists. The gap on Messi’s graph is more thus making him more valuable for the club. Values for the bar graph were created by dividing their salary by the total number of goals and assists in that season. The sheets were made by data from two different data sets where one had yearly salaries and the other had their weekly salaries. Ronaldo’s salary increasing every year from 2010 to 2013 does not mean he signed a new deal every year that his initial contract had a clause of his pay rising every year by some percent based on his performance.

In the end, we have seen Messi overcoming Ronaldo on all fronts, be it the number of trophies, awards, goals, assists or value for money. Even though four dashboards sound a lot but it must be seen how we did need all of them to prove our claim. Each of those sheets helped in strengthening our position on the claim. Based on this project, we can say that Messi is the best player of the last decade.

During the process of data wrangling I came across a huge problem where Jupyter was not giving me permission to create a new file and so I had to use class lab one file to clean data. After most of my data wrangling finished my laptop frequently got hanged ever since I had to install Ubuntu on Oracle Virtualbox for Big data class. So, the file some how did not get saved and it still opened the old lab one file.

Critique-

Given the knowledge and experience that I had of Tableau when starting this project, I must say I am quite happy with my efforts. However, this is just the first version and there can be improvements over it in the future.

There are millions of websites dedicated to providing information on a renowned topic like soccer. Hence, the biggest problem was validating the data that I found. Data would often be varying on different websites thus to get the correct set numerous more websites had to be search until I was sure about the facts provided in that dataset.

At places this dashboard looks beautiful but overall it does lack some refinement and maturity for it to be deemed as a brilliant one. A comparison based on their popularity on various social media platforms is something that is missing. Even though it does not change our claim still it would have given a new perspective to look with.

Moreover, what’s missing is their record against good team and poor teams to see how well they perform against better opponents. As often scoring against bottom teams is easier compared to top teams. Such a dashboard would help us understand how often they deliver when the going gets tougher. It is their impact versus the top teams which people fondly remember and judge a player based on it.

Another thing missing is a dashboard to show many goals they have scored from different body parts. This includes goals scored by each foot, head, and any other body part except hands to show their ability with both feet and head.

Scoring from outside the box, or from a free kick or from inside the box tells you a lot about the player. Many people call Ronaldo as penaldo for his knack of scoring from the penalty spot more often than Messi who generally scores more in open play. Scoring headers is something you won’t associate with Messi due his smaller height. So, we see how it can play a role in judging a player’s potential and performance on the pitch.

To conclude, it was a great experience to work on Tableau and try to learn some of the features provided by it. Tableau is a powerful tool to display your message in a way that speaks louder than words ever can. Choosing a topic that I had first class knowledge of did not make my job easy rather leaving me muddled often than not. With the help of data that I found and with the use of these dashboards, the message is loud and clear as to who the best player of the last decade is- Lionel Messi.

 

References:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lionel-messi-is-impossible/

https://www.kaggle.com/hugomathien/soccer

http://messivsronaldo.net/

http://messivsronaldo.net/records/

https://grup14.com/column/messi-vs-cristiano-ronaldo-what-defines-a-big-game-player

https://www.fifaindex.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Messi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristiano_Ronaldo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andres_Iniesta

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_Hazard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesut_ozil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlatan_Ibrahimovic

Github: https://github.com/viraaj589/MI2

FOX NEWS- What more can you say!

More than 2.8 billion people get their news from Television and it pains to see how top news channels are creating news rather than showing the truth. It has now been a trend to highlight news with spice to gain viewership thus focusing more on money rather than their actual duty of enlightening people. The sinking of Maine is one such example where public opinion was stirred against Cuba by deceptive media. Such false claims nearly broke global war and all due to misconceptions portrayed through press of the time.

Here too we have the wonderful Fox news once again just trying their best to show something that does not quite match with their data. The dashboard shows unemployment rates during president Obama’s time at the white house in 2011. One can clearly see the line graph to be completely wrong at places for example in the last point above November the value for the line is 8.6% yet it is placed on the same level as 9%. one can clearly see point with 8.8% to be placed lower than point with 8.6%.

We have no knowledge of whether it was done due to political reasons or a technical mistake but one thing is clear, news tycoon like Fox know what they are doing and there are certainly less chances of it being a technical glitch. Numerous studies and experiments have found out that people believe what they see and this trend increases as the audience goes from being higher educated to lesser.

Such a dashboard has nothing good to say about except for the fact that may be the topic of discussion is worth our while since many people are facing the issues of unemployment in all the corners of the world. Moreover, it looks validated since they mention the name of Bureau of Labor Statistics as their source for the data.

 

Modification-

1. The most basic modification that can be done is to primarily build a chart with a correct line graph. Now we can see why Fox news tried to be deceptive as the correct graph with same numbers shows how in the end of the year unemployment decreased at a fast pace. The graph shown by Fox news depicts a whole different message than a correct one even though they have the same data.                                                                                                                                              https://drive.google.com/a/scu.edu/file/d/0B8KmJc9yUb7ybnNwSjBSc0xYSGc/view?usp=sharing
2. It would certainly have been better had they shown the trends of unemployment of previous years and compared them with this graph thus giving a broader picture to its audience. Each year shows a wide variety of fluctuations and in such situations, it helps to know the overall fluctuation to gain a higher understanding of such important topic.

https://drive.google.com/a/scu.edu/file/d/0B8KmJc9yUb7yV09OUnNIazNrcU0/view?usp=sharing

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/10/06/syrian_conflict_relationships_explained.html

Syria

Every day we hear something new yet terrible news related to Syria. Complexity of the situation has been on the increase as more countries are joining hands with one party or the other thus aiding in worsening the conditions in the country. People have had to flee their motherland just to survive and find shelter where ever they can. Sadly, only few people have a complete picture about the involvement of all countries in this crisis.

Most countries and global organizations have come to the call of helping Syrian refugees by welcoming them with open arms while some are still skeptic about it. No one knows how long it could take to solve this crisis but as of now it has only been scaling upwards which means more war is yet to come in a land that was once a peaceful place to live.

Digging deeper-

Under such circumstances a dashboard like this can be of great help to educate people about the different ties each country has among them. Even though the images we see in our mind upon hearing the word Syria involves bloodshed yet this dashboard conveys the message with emoticons that are used by us frequently, just succoring us to digest this knowledge in the most understandable language of today.

One can clearly see how each country is linked with all other countries in terms of friendly, enemy or complicated. Moreover, on clicking on a relation between any two parties gives you a justification of why their relation has that tag. Within this small visualization, it conveys the message equivalent to what most writers must fill up pages to do the same.

Drawbacks-

Undoubtedly the dashboard is an enlightening one yet there are few shortcomings in it. Firstly, a single color cannot define the same level of hatred or love that all countries have for each other. Just because one party might not like the other party does not make them hate each other within the same context as parties who do hate each other. Seeing a red emoticon would make the viewer believe that two countries must be arch rivals due to the red emoticon even though their ties might not be that bad. Secondly, the yellow emoticon does not provide much information as it leaves the viewer in the same state he was in before viewing it. Just how complicated the situation is cannot be shown with the use of a single emoticon.

Modification-

1.       The visualization shows the picture of all countries involved today however, it would have been better if they could portray it in a yearly manner just to give the viewer an idea of who joined the crisis and at what time. This would also help in understanding how the problem from a civil war became global with time.

2.       More variety of emoticons could be used to show different levels of hatred or friendliness that two parties have with each other. Countries that do not hate each other but support different parties or stand on different grounds could be shown with an emoticon that has lighter shade of red and same goes for green emoticon as well. With different shades of colors, use of the yellow emoticon would lessen thus, conveying a more powerful message with lesser confusion.

3.       Syrian crisis not just involves these countries but also the people of its own country and all who have died in this war. It would have certainly given way more depth in knowledge had the author somehow managed to depict the people who lost their lives along with refugees who seek asylum elsewhere.

Conclusion-

 We can clearly see relations of all countries involved in the Syrian crisis and how it has been on the rise ever since it came into being. Nearly half the population of Syria has had to flee to survive. Families are broken apart with no knowledge of their loved ones. It is high time the world comes to the aid of Syrians as today it is them but tomorrow it could be you.  

References:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-23849587

https://www.worldvision.org/refugees-news-stories/syria-refugee-crisis-war-facts

https://www.clickz.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/06/munster.jpg

 

Often than less we get euphoric while viewing dashboards of today with fancy editing and what not thus overseeing the true meaning that some dashboards tend to portray due to their simplicity. All through our childhood we are taught history as a subject to learn from the past and here we have an old visualization, simple yet powerful, depicting how a few images can change our thinking for better.

Munster, a town in Germany, produced this visualization back in 1991 to encourage bus use. It beautifully shows impact of same number of people (72) on bicycles, cars and a bus and the relative space that each occupies on a road.

Traffic related issues are growing day by day as the number of cars are increasing at a staggering pace. The day is not far when we’d run out of roads only to be succumbed by the daily traffic jams. This issue is not just for the future but a lot of cities like Delhi are currently facing an uphill task to overcome this menace.

What I really love about this visualization is how quickly in a single glance you get the message loud and clear. It is certainly ahead of its time when there weren’t much of editors or applications that helped you build such epic dashboards.

One of the changes I could suggest for its time is for the middle one to show the complete picture of the impact of 72 cars on a road. Also, the message could have been portrayed with a greater depth by creating a series of pictures with more number of people in each series than the previous one to scale the problem at an increasing pace because the space taken by two buses is nothing compared to the space taken up by 150 cars.

Despite such small shortcomings, this visualization enlightens us in many ways than one can think of. To conclude, a dashboard need not be fancy to portray something simple yet meaningful.

I still remember my childhood days that were full of joyful moments coming without any smart phones or similar technical appliances. Yet, it is hard to believe how soon technology has captivated the world over. Not a single moment passes by when we aren’t hooked on to our iPod or lazing around with an X-box or even chatting over the phone.

This visualization depicts just how expeditiously social media has surrounded everything we know about. Data shown here only goes on to prove the basic claim of how majority of our time is spent over the wire. This visualization shows all popular social media platforms and their impact on us. One can easily feel the current numbers to have increased at a rapid pace and even though they increase day by day yet it is impossible for anyone to foresee or predict such numbers for the future.

What I really like in this visualization is how quickly it gives you a glimpse of 16 popular applications and how vast they have become today. Most of us have been using such apps for quite some time now while forgetting just how much everyone around us are equally hooked onto them as well. Hence, talking about such huge numbers enlightens us to see the impact internet in general has over us.

Despite getting the message loud and clear it still lacks a few fundamentals. Firstly, there should be additional numbers to show the percent increase in users from last year that goes on to help us understand the pace of change. Moreover, it could also have shown the country where each app is most popular in, giving us an insight as to how different apps are favored by different cultures and what may become a trend for the future. These numbers are certainly the average usage of each app computed in a minute however, it could have been more useful had they differentiated it with respect to different times of the day just to follow what time suits most people the best. Also, real-time updating of these numbers, even though it is quite a tough task to achieve, would have given a new depth to this dashboard.

To conclude, we can see how visualization concepts and tools can be used to depict anything in a powerful manner. Users should not only be able to make sense of the message being delivered but also use different measures to extract meaning out of each dashboard.

http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/2009/12/07/50-excellent-scholarly-literary-criticism-blogs/