Data & Stuff

Spotted: March 25th – April 14th:

• @anywhere prototypes from the Guardian – Some interesting prototypes of the @anywhere system, as publically first revealed at SXSW, by the Guardian. Native twitter features, like hovercards, in third party sites. interesting
• 3D Interfaces – Got a set of data, with complex linked relationships. A demo of a strategy to deal with the connections when displayed in a 3D environment
• JESS3 Blog: SXSW Vicarious.ly Visualization – Amazing look at patterns and trends seen when running through location enabled data from SXSW.
• Chart Chooser by Juice Analytics: Download Tufte-compliance Excel and PowerPoint charts – Want to create a graph? Not got a copy of Tableau. Take a look at some of the Excel templates, that are presented in a 'nice way'
• Graphical perception – learn the fundamentals first | FlowingData – When it comes to visualization, especially on the Web, you have to be open-minded, and you should be willing to try new things. There’s no advancing otherwise. However, before you dive into the advanced stuff – like just about everything in your life – you have to learn the fundamentals before you know when you can break the rules.

If the alien race was to visit the UK, where do you think they might go?  The bright lights of London, perhaps upto Edinburgh for some history or maybe in the delights of Wiltshire.

Thanks to the Guardian Datastore we have the list of every crop circle in the UK, for 2009, with grid co-ordinates.  So it’s a perfect opportunity to see which places the aliens love to visit:

So it looks like Wiltshire has a lot of activity, which we can focus in on.

Thanks to the Guardian for the data, in both cases above you can click to see the map in more detail.