Read-Think-b4-u-Write

Over at Nautilus , Becca Cudmore is puzzled by how the same information can be displayed on charts with two entirely different attitudes, or spin. According to Ruth Rosenholtz, a scientist over at MIT, the way you can tell if a chart is trying to deceive you is by how long it takes you to figure out what that visual is trying to say. "A bad chart requires more cognitive processes and more reasoning about what you’ve seen." Since you are often required to use visuals, including graphs and charts, let's take a look at a couple of Nautilus's examples of what you should NOT do. Puzzling Perspective -  The purple chart is about "labor." It is displaying the same information, so why do these charts look so different? The pie chart on the right puts labor up front and closer to you, so it takes up more space. The chart at left puts the labor information farther away from you, so it takes less space (think vanishing point perspective). In other words, mak...

Existential Calculator Over at Brain Pickings they are featuring a few examples from the newly released, Best Infographics of 2014 . Why study infographics? Do you want to decide whether or not to take a job? Use the Existential Calculator (see graphic). "It organizes the spectrum of possible work outcomes—from pleasurable to spiritually degrading, from well-paying to debt-enhancing, from exciting to 'meh'—and shows where the reader is likely to land, based on what they tell it about the potential job.'" (Kelli Andersom)  Some of the other graphics to linger over are the fears of a cat wandering through San Francisco (LOL, some of those fears resemble my own). Brain Pickings' post mentions one of my favorite creators and chart busters, Edward Tufte, noting that: "Tufte and others have long spoken to the importance of minimalism in information design. But it proved to be more important as design was translated onto the web, where atten...

Reading visuals - even NASA does it. Archaeology, Anthropology and Interstellar Communication is a recent tile released by NASA, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch. Vakoch believes that when ET tries to communicate with us it will not be through sound but via images. All the stuff you had to learn about reading images is going to come in handy. "Vision and the use of images would appear to be at least plausible. Although spectral details cannot be considered universal, the physical arrangement of objects on a habitable planet’s surface will be shaped in part by gravity (the notion of a horizon might well be universal) and thus multispectral images might plausibly be considered worthwhile for messages." So what kind of images do we send out? One message contained the binary numbers one through ten, equations of basic chemistry, human bio chemistry, and DNA.  Another contained a drawing of what we look like, pulsar directives, and a schematic of our solar system. In othe...