Ideas With Legs

[insideenergynow]

When you look at your monthly electricity bill, you probably focus on the number with a dollar sign in front of it. But there’s another value listed: how much energy you actually used.

If you are a perfectly average American living in a perfectly average household, your monthly...

[jordanwb]

And here's a screenshot of the interactive visualization of my electricity usage Xcel Energy gives me:

[jordanwb]

Shared via @awbjs (thanks!).

What I like about this video:

It does a great job of visually showing distribution, with a combination of color, size and space.

It emphasizes the differences between perception and reality.

It uses narration and storytelling, along with data (it's not just a series of visualization).

What I would like to see, in addition to what is in the video:

How were the questions posed to people who participated the study? Was it multiple choice, did they select different curves and choose the one they thought was most representative of actual and idea economic distribution, or did they come up with the curves themselves somehow?

Were the participants in the study coming from everywhere along the economic spectrum?

How does individual perception versus reality stack up? So, if you asked people "at what percentile does your own income rank," how far off the mark would they be?

[newschallenge2]

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

Enable anyone to add narrative clarity to static data visualizations with a web-ready, no coding required, interactive annotation tool.

2. How will your project make data more useful? [50 words]

Information is abundant; clarity is rare. Narragraph...

[jordanwb]

Post Race Feed There will be a post race feed. It will begin at around 1:00 pm on Saturday. Once again, buffalo stew, so here’s the deal. Everyone attending the race and planning on eating after needs to bring ONE can of veggies of some sort. We really don’t care what it is (although the RD is not a big fan of olives or mushrooms so any of those will not be going into the stew). Also, come on people, please don’t clean out your pantry on us. Don’t bring stuff unsuitable for a stew, don’t bring stuff that’s expired either. If you don’t want to eat it, what makes you think the rest of us do? Stop by the store and spend less than a buck on something we can use. There’s a WalMart on the way to the island. What we’ll do is dump it all in a big kettle with the buffalo meat and stir it up. The stew has turned out pretty good every year, should be pretty good again, especially on a cool day in March.

Antelope Island Buffalo Run

[jordanwb]

They are random associations that our brains try to form into narratives.

[jordanwb]

But I think doodles are more like dreams.

[jordanwb]

I've also been asked (frequently) what I'm drawing.

[jordanwb]

Some people have posited that there might be meaning in doodles.

[jordanwb]

I like doodling in and around the notes I'm taking.

[jordanwb]

Also Feb. 7... It might look like I'm distracted, but usually I'm paying better attention when I'm doodling

[jordanwb]

Another doodle (from Feb. 7).

[jordanwb]

So I doodle a lot during meetings. This one is from a Feb. 3 phone call.

[datalab-blog]

[jordanwb]

Race directors are the craziest...

I can't wait to be one some day so I can get up before sunrise to send out e-mails like this.

Rouge Orleans is less than 3 week away!

[jordanwb]

Also, don't worry about Daniel Deronda. I've been reading it for a year and am still only at 82 percent. I think it is a book that doesn't actually end, or maybe that it's sneakily as long and awesome as all the unexpurgated versions of the Ramayana you hear about.

My brother (still the funniest person in the world -- to me, at least)

[datalab-blog]

In the Atlantic/Cities, Levitz writes about the often tricky process of naming and identifying neighborhoods in cities. The article references a report from the Urban Institute studying how residents in 10 Making Connections cities identified their neighborhoods: “Denver ranked highest in place identity, with 58 percent of its residents calling their neighborhood the same title as the official name.”

[jordanwb]

When readers ask about a word, Wordnik provides definitions on the left-hand side of the screen. But it is the example sentences, featured on the right-hand side, that are crucial to a reader’s understanding of a new term, she said.... To do this, the site processes a vast reservoir of language, keeping tabs on more than six million words automatically, said Tony Tam, Wordnik’s vice president for engineering. “But the numbers change every second,” he said. “It’s not a static list.” Where does all this text come from? “You’d be amazed how fast people write articles on the Web,” he said.

From an article on Wordnik, "Defining Words, Without the Arbiters" by Annie Eisenberg in the Times, Dec. 31, 2011.