Article link: San Francisco startup makes data science a sport by Marcus Wohlsen

"An orange used car is less likely to be a lemon" is just one of the facts revealed through the data exploration of competitive number-crunchers SirGuessalot and PlanetThanet.

Read more on some more of the interesting practical applications of data mining and how data scientists deserve the salaries of athletes here.

Article by Marucs Wohlsen on Bloomberg Businessweek

UK National Heatmap

 "...The data is based on models that drill down to an individual address level, yet did not acquire actual energy bills or smart metering. The map is meant for developers and planners to figure out which areas would be suitable for the development of local heat networks, or to support future climate change strategies..." (From Andrew Vande Moer at infosthetics)

This screen shot shows commercial heat density with regional boundaries.

Have a look at the visualization for yourself and try the different layers describing heat density in different sectors. The view of the entire country shows an expected pattern–highly concentrated areas over the bigger cities–but it is interesting to zoom in to a local level for more detail.

Created by the Centre for Sustainable Energy.

Linked from the Guardian Data Blog and infosthetics.

Kinetic Sculpture BMW Museum Munich

  Read and see more here

Future Times by Christopher Leary and Casey Alt

A beautiful data sculpture. Read more here.

Visualizing the Global Digital Divide By
Mapping Internet And Population
Beautiful visualizations by Gregor Aisch.

"...With this map I tried to visualize the global digital divide. It shows more than 80,000 populated places in blue and about 350,000 locations of IP addresses in red..." [image shown is only a small frame of the full visualization, see the full version here]

See more great work on his blog vis4.

Designing Data Visualizations with Noah Iliinsky

In this talk, Noah lays out a great framework for how to determine what question you are actually trying to answer, what data you need (and what you don't) in order to answer that question, and the steps to take through effective visualization to convey the bottom line.

Need help? Talk to bis²!

Stefanie Posavec: finding data everyday



Stefanie Posavec takes a humanistic approach to data – discovering and depicting the "hidden data" in everyday things. Posavec's illustrations depict the patterns behind everyday objects, helping to portray the familiar in a new light.

See more of her beautiful work here.

Article link: "NASA Creates Insanely High-Res Map Of America’s Trees, And Offers A Lesson In Information Design" from Tim Maly at Co.Design

"According to Robert Simmon, art director of NASA’s Earth Observatory, the best science communication goes in layers. You start out with something striking and relatable, and then you invite your audience to go deeper, revealing more and more with each new layer..."

Head to Co.Design to read more of this fantastic article here.

Article Link: Data analytics driving medical breakthroughs by Esther Shein

Some very exciting times in data analytics – helping the health care system process and interpret data in order to discover break-through patterns in patient care and recovery.

"Thanks to a new technology partnership, the hospital is working to use analytics to predict more accurately than ever before which premature babies are at most risk for disease and infection."

"...The technology is giving UOIT the ability to make sense of the data and analyze it in ways that include, they hope, discovering the onset of sepsis and various other conditions before these problems occur, says Dr. Carolyn McGregor, the Canada Research Chair in Health Informatics at UOIT..."

Read more here.

Article Link: Why data visualization matters
by Julie Steele on Radar

"...The best data visualizations are ones that expose something new about the underlying patterns and relationships contained within the data. Understanding those relationships — and being able to observe them — is key to good decision making..."
Read More