fromcomplextosimple

The UK calls them Stag and Hen parties.  Here, we call them Bachelor and Bachelorette parties.  So, Redseven, the leading hen and stag company, put together this infographic to show the trends on hen and stag parties in the UK.

Most Popular Locations

In the UK, hens favor London and stags favor Bournemouth.  Overseas, hens favor Marbella and stags favor Riga.

Biggest Expense

Booze.  No big shocker there.  Stags spend more money all around, but the food to booze ratio is smaller for hens than it it is for stags.

Surprise?

Hens like suprises.  44% of hen parties keep the destination secret, while only 14% of stag parties keep the destination a secret.

Fancy Dress

Hens spend more on fancy dress and gifts than stags.

Who is In Control?

15% of stags organized their own weekends, while 25% of hens controlled their own.

Flirting?

39% of stag parties admitted to flirting on their stag weekend, while 8.6% of stags admitted to some kissing.  21% of hen parties admitted to flirting, and 4.6% of hens admitted to kissing.  Shame.

Celebrity

When asked which celebrity stag or hen party they wished they’d attended, 34% of surveyed stags said Wayne Rooney and 62% of hens said Coleen Rooney.  The Rooneys, apparently, are very popular.

Scorecard

Design: B+

The black, white and red is striking, and the images are clean.

Information:  B+

It’s nice to know what they’re doing on the other side of the pond.

Source: Stag weekends by Redseven.

Have you even heard about this?  It’s not a new thing – a factoid at the top tells us that the General Motors Futurama exhibit at New York City’s 1939 World’s Fair featured a driverless electric car.  It was controlled by radio and powered by circuits embedded in the roadway.

It’s Coming

Now they tell us that Google has been testing vehicles equipped with driverless navigation systems, and that the cars tested have driven 1000 miles without human intervention and another 140,000 miles with a little bit of human intervention.  Incidentally, 140,000 miles equates to driving around the globe 5.6 times.  That’s a lot of driverless (or almost driverless) driving.  Nevada is on board with this, having recently passed legislation removing legal barriers around driverless technology.

It’s Safe?

They state the fact that 93% of all automobile crashes are caused by driver error, be it intoxication, texting while driving, etc.  Of all the Google driverless miles that have been driven, there have only been 2 crashes, and both times a human was behind the wheel.

Think of All Those Books You Can Read

“40 minutes of drive time becomes 40 minutes of ‘do something else while your car drives you where you need to go’ time.”

Efficient?

When you think about the fact that the average car is immobile for 96% of its lifetime (sort of like people), a driverless car can increase efficiency.  Your car can be doing something while you’re doing something else.  The examples given are both about sending your car to take your kid someplace or pick your kid up from someplace.  How do you feel about that?

Lost Jobs

There are 232,300 taxi drivers and chauffeurs in this country.  AND there are 647,500 bus drivers, 70% of whom work in school districts.  But then, would you put your kid on a driverless bus?  Who tells them to sit down?

Lost State Revenue

I’ll just quote their example directly.  “If each of California’s 22.6 million licensed drivers opted to get a $25 ID card instead of a $31 license renewal, the state would loose $135,943,728.”  Yeesh.

Reduced DUI

10,228 people died from drinking and driving-related accidents in 2010.  Those lives could have been saved if nobody was driving, and the cars drove themselves, right?  112 million people drive drunk every year.

And Parking…

When the car drives you, it can just drop you off wherever you are going, so you don’t have to park.  You just program the car to come get you.  In New York City, for example, you could save $10,000 per year on parking costs.

Scorecard

Design:  A+

This is a really good-looking infographic.  Seriously.  I have no criticism.

Information:  A

I’d give it a + but I’m afraid of technological advances like this.  What if the cars turned against us?  Kidding….

Source: Driverless Car from Life Insurance Quotes

From Anytime Fitness has released the Weight of the Union 2.0 infographic to coincide with the U.S. State of the Union Address this week.

Last night, the President gave his State of the Union address to members of Congress and the general citizenry to report that our nation is moving in the right direction. But today we want to address what the President didn’t mention in his speech to the union. We want to discuss our nation’s biggest health concern: obesity. We are offering its own barometer for measuring progress — the second annual report called the “Weight of the Union.”

There’s a lot of data shown in this design, and a good blend of different data visualizations, illustrations and text descriptions. 

My biggest complaint is that many of the data points are just listed in text, and they could have been visualized.  For example, the dollar values showing that “Being Fat is Expensive”, should have been scaled so they could be easily compared to each other or some outside comparative spending values.

The other major issue I have is the shading of the silhouette as a stacked bar chart doesn’t work accurately.  Readers see the “AREA” of the colored sections as being representative of the values.  Because of the odd shape, you can’t just color by height.  The boots are showing the biggest value “Sleep”, but because that part of the silhouette is narrow, “Work” actually visualizes as a much bigger portion of the whole than the data really shows.

I like the inclusion of the QR Code at the bottom as a promotion tool for Anytime Fitness.

Thanks to Amanda for sending in the link!

So here we are again with another QS101 post. I thought today I would walk you through a concept* that you may find useful for getting started on the path to self tracking. As a behavioral scientist I get a lot of people asking me about goals – how to set them and how to achieve them. I always fall back on a course I taught as a graduate student aptly titled, “Psychological Skills for Optimal Performance.” During that course I taught undergraduates different concepts related to sports and exercise psychology, and one of those was the SMART system. I think this system, beside being a clever use of an acronym, could be useful to your self-tracking practice.** So what does SMART stand for?

S is for Specific. When you decide to track something it is best to choose something that is specific rather than general. For example, you might be interested in your cardiovascular health and you decide you want to start tracking exercise. Well, exercise is a very broad category and can include activities like gardening to training for ultra-marathons. In this example you would be better served to track a specific type or method of exercise. For instance, you could use apps like RunKeeper to track your running or cycling, or you could use a pedometer to track your steps. The great thing about making a goal specific is that it allows you to find the right tool for the job. While you would be hard pressed to find one tool that tracks exercise, you can easily find a method for tracking your strength training activities or your swim laps.

M is for Measurable. You would think this would be a no-brainer, but it happens to the best of us – we forget that what we want to track has to be, well, trackable! Quantified Self is all about using the power of data to help you learn about yourself. When you decide to start along the path of self tracking it is vital to make sure that what you have decided to track can be measured in some way. In future posts we’ll talk about objective and subjective data collection, but for the sake of brevity let’s assume that you decide to use a tool or method that assigns numerical values to your behavior. Great! But, that is only the first part of making it measurable. You also have to take a step back and take a look at the data output(s) and decide if they make sense to you. For example, Gary likes simple 3-point scales to rate his feelings – good, bad, and okay make sense to him. Make sure that your measurement make sense TO YOU, because in the end YOU are what matters in this adventure.

A is for Attainable. Making your self-tracking attainable is a concept that is related to our previous QS 101 post on Keeping it Simple. So let’s assume you have the specific behavior down and you’ve decided how to measure it in a away so that it makes sense to you. It is now time to take a look at what it would mean to you and your daily routine to implement the tools/methods and data collection necessary to engage in your self-tracking plan. Simply put, is this something you incorporate into your life given all of other personal and social commitments. I, for instance, would love to track all of my writing for 2012 (email, twitter, research papers, etc.), but at this point the effort to engage in that task would take enough time that it would take away from more productive and enjoyable endeavors.** Making sure that your self-tracking practice is actually attainable is a good way to ensure that it remains enjoyable as well as informative.

R is for Relevant. The main focus of a self-tracking practice is to generate self-knowledge (look at our header it’s right under our logo). Knowledge generation for the sake of knowledge generation, while interesting, pales in comparison to knowledge generation that benefits you. You want to make sure that when you decide to engage in self-tracking that the insights you are looking for are helping you become your better self. For instance, I could track the number of times I open and shut my refrigerator and freezer doors. While this might give me some insight into what kind and type of food I consume (fresh vs. frozen) that data is probably less relevant to learning how to be my better self than tracking the types of food I consume by using a food diary or food image capture.

T is for Time-bound. This is probably one of the most overlooked and misunderstood aspects of self-tracking. By making your practice time-bound you are not necessarily stating when you start and stop your tracking-practice for a particular behavior of interest. Rather, you can use the idea of time-bounding to set parameters for when it is appropriate to delve into the data and go through the process of analysis and reflection. Setting this time parameter is very specific to you as a individual and the behavior you’re tracking. You may, for example, only need a week’s worth of food diary data to start to make some conclusions about how your diet is affecting your mood. On the other hand you may need to track your anxiety levels for a month to really understand how they correlate with your boss’s travel patterns. The actual time you decide to start the process of analysis and reflection isn’t important because you can always continue tracking after your first, second, . . . nth pass. What is important, is that you decide a priori (before the fact) when you will do it and then stick to that plan.

So there you go. Now that you know all about SMART you can starting using it to “optimize” your self-tracking practice. To get you started with conceptualizing your current or new self-tracking practice within the SMART framework I’ve created a simple worksheet you can use. It is available here for download here or you can access the google doc here. As always, feel free to post questions in the comments!

*This is only one concept for helping you think about self-tracking. We’ll be highlighting other methods and processes in the near future!

**I prefer calling my self-tracking a practice because it is an ever evolving process of doing, learning and refining.

***If you know of a way that I can accomplish this tracking task, capturing everything I write, in a simple and non-time consuming manner please let me know. You can email me here.

Ok, there’s not much charting going on here, but there is a whole lot of fascinating data on Google ad revenue, as compiled by search marketing company WordStream. It is stunning what companies are paying per click for some of these keywords. In revenge for years of mediocre service (and because it was fun), I just went and searched for “high speed internet deals” then clicked on Comcast’s ad – supposedly costing them >$20. That’ll teach ‘em!

Design wise, this is pretty good. I might have shrunk (or killed) some of the clipart, made the fonts bigger, and tossed in a bar chart at the top instead of those “kind of looks like a chart but isn’t” ribbons – but overall, it works.

The USDA has upgraded it’s plant hardiness map, which is based on average annual extreme temperatures. Horticulturists and gardeners use the maps as a gauge of what types of plants to grow. Some people think the new data indicates that temperatures are rising, and having visible effects on growing seasons and plant diversity. The USDA is (probably wisely) dodging the climate change aspects, pointing out that the methodologies used weren’t quite the same in the two versions. If you want to have fun, do a google news search for “plant hardiness” and see how different media coverage is of this (Chicago Sun Times, ThinkProgress, MSNBC).

The Washington Post used an interactive slider design on their map to let you flip between views of 1990 and 2012:

You can view static and interactive versions at the USDA site, as well as download the dataset.

There are a number of compelling State of the Union visualizations online that highlight President Obama’s most commonly used words and themes, the time in the speech during which they were used, and how they compare to his past speeches. 

One of the most compelling, from NPR’s State Impact, features a word cloud of the President’s speech compared with a word cloud of the Republican Response, delivered by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels.

Here is the State of the Union:

Easily, the biggest words are American, America, and jobs.  A few others that pop out are tax, get, and energy.  The biggest focus of the President’s speech, the economy, is clearly visible through this word cloud.

This is Governor Daniels’ response:

Here, we see Americans, Republicans, and government pop out, with national, wrong, and must as close seconds.  Predictably, Governor Daniels focuses on the Republican strategy for addressing the President’s proposals.

For those of you who watched the State of the Union, did the featured words surprise you?

Similar to the original approach in 2011, this year's State of the Union was made available online in a so-called 'enhanced' version, which basically consisted of a split-screen video that shows President Obama giving his speech on one side, and a large collection contextual information and facts, as well as infographics, on the other. In other words: 1 hour and 5 minutes worth of high-level political facts, captured in 102 unique slides, of which about 26 can be labelled as visualization of some kind.

You can watch the 'enhanced' version of the State of the Union 2012 below or at the White House website [whitehouse.gov] itself.

Importantly, there are already some critical reviews available, about this year's infographics [thewhyaxis.info], but also about those of last year [fastfedora.com]. These reviews are quite worthwhile to read, as they point out some potential discrepancies in terms of the graphical representation, and the narrative it tries to convey.

See also Obama Presidency by Numbers: Contrasting Statements with Statistics and Obama Loves Infographics.

Any time is a good time to start saving.  Obviously, the sooner you start, the more money you will have when you really need it.  This infographic reminds us that there are a lot of things to save for – retirement, emergencies, personal goals, and more.  So what are the savings trends among people of prime savings age (25-34), and why aren’t more people saving money?

Saving Money…In Theory

A small graph in the upper left corner shows the most likely New Years Resolutions among 25-34 year-olds, and the number one choice is to save more money.  That’s followed by losing weight, spending more time with friends, and volunteer work.  In reality, only 4% of this demographic saved 20% or more, 24% saved about 6-9% of their income, 32% saved 1-5%, and 40% saved nothing.

Desirability vs. Affordability

This section reviews some of the things that people spend money on, and how money can be saved.  For instance, you may need to have a smartphone with a data plan, but you could save a lot of money if you only buy what you need.  For instance, everyone wants the latest and greatest, but that costs the  most.  A basic phone with limited features costs the least for a data plan, but might not offer the functionality you need.  If you go with a middle of the road free phone with a 2-year contract, you could save while still getting what you need technology-wise.

Similarly, people spend a lot of money on their home entertainment.  A cable package with the works, including a DVR, can cost $200 per month, while streaming web service only costs less than $10 per month.  Basic cable costs about $30 per month, so you could have that and the streaming web service and still be paying a lot less.

As for eating, everyone likes a nice meal out every now and then, but it is so much cheaper to cook at home.

Generally, if you use common sense and a little self control, you can save money without sacrificing too much of your comfort.

If You DO Start Saving

This graph is the best part of the whole infographic.  It shows you, based on how much you save per week, how much you could have in 5, 10, and 30 years.  It’s inspirational and makes you want to start saving, even (ahem) if you’re older than the demographic targeted in this infographic.

Scorecard

Design:  B

The design is clean, but there are a lot of tiny words that make the eyes swim a little.  Other than that, the colors and fonts are good and the background is quite nice.

Information:  A

Good information for everybody, and puts data in an easy-to-understand way that packs a punch.

Source:  FeedthePig.org

In the current age, we tend to think in time rather than absolute distance when estimating our itineraries. Accordingly, the beautiful Timemaps [timemaps.nl] by Vincent Meertens of Graph[s]ic shows the required travel times within The Netherlands by public transportation through morphing its silhouette along a colorful, circular time measure.

Users are able to select any train station location (by clicking inside the map), and time of day (via a slider). As a result, the map will expand at night, and shrink in the morning due to the availability of trains. The color coding corresponds to the number of hours (see legend below the map). If all goes well, the map should even be made available on iOS and Android.

See also Travel Time Tube Map and Worldmapper.

Via @ajdant.

In the current age, we tend to think in time rather than absolute distance when estimating our itineraries. Accordingly, the beautiful Timemaps [timemaps.nl] by Vincent Meertens of Graph[s]ic shows the required travel times within The Netherlands by public transportation through morphing its silhouette along a colorful, circular time measure.

Users are able to select any train station location (by clicking inside the map), and time of day (via a slider). As a result, the map will expand at night, and shrink in the morning due to the availability of trains. The color coding corresponds to the number of hours (see legend below the map). If all goes well, the map should even be made available on iOS and Android.

See also Travel Time Tube Map and Worldmapper

Via @ajdant.

B2B marketers use LinkedIn and B2C marketers use Facebook. That’s only logical, right? Conventional wisdom says that B2B marketing simply doesn’t work on Facebook because prospects are socializing. But does this really make sense?

Sheer numbers point to Facebook as a better opportunity for B2B marketers. Facebook blows LinkedIn out of the water in important states like users, minutes, and even users over the age of 35. That certainly seems like a good reason to use Facebook for B2B marketing, especially if no one else is.

At first glance, it seems counter-intuitive to market B2B products when prospects are in their “at-home” mode. But is it really? B2B marketers like Southwest Airlines and United Parcel Service of America are major advertisers on NFL programming. If people will listen to B2B marketing messaging while they’re watching football, why wouldn’t they listen when they’re chatting with friends and family?

Infographic provided by: San Diego Web Design & Marketing Agency and San Diego Small Business Marketing

Related articles

• Google Likes Twitter & Facebook Links (bsfreemarketing.com)
• Don’t Overlook Facebook (bsfreemarketing.com)
• Trade Show Displays & Trade Shows Infographic (infographicsinspiration.com)

An interesting (ok, quick poll: should I stop calling things interesting? I only post stuff I think is interesting – seems a bit redundant, no?) long term look at new technology. At first look, it’s a bit boring and geeky – but the interactive popup descriptions really flesh it out. It would be easy to quibble about where things fall on the timeline, but overall I really enjoyed reading about all the hypothetical tech. Now that we have realized most of the science fiction from the 1900s, it was nice to see that we still have ways to dream and imagine. (via)

An interesting algorithm based method of creating accurate globe projections. (via the Volume Project and NewScientist)

Mapping the earth is a classic problem. For thousands of years cartographers, mathematicians, and inventors have come up with methods to map the curved surface of the earth to a flat plane. The main problem is that you cannot do this perfectly, such that both the shape and size of the surface are depicted properly everywhere. This has intrigued me for a long time. Why not just take a map of a small part of the earth, which is almost perfect, glue neighboring maps to it, and repeat this until the whole earth is shown? Of course you get interrupts, but does this matter? What does such a map look like? To check this out, we developed myriahedral projections.

Anyone have a better idea of how to visualize this data? It feels like there should be one – but maybe sometimes a table is the right tool for the job.

Right now, while you are reading this article, billions of your cells are busy replicating your DNA information. Although molecules are smaller than the wavelength of light, and thus we have no way to directly observe them, can we still somehow visualize these processes?

Biomedical animator and MacArthur Foundation nominee Drew Berry of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research presents in a recent TEDx talk of less than 9 minutes, the state-of-the-art in molecular animation. He shows an accurate representation of the actual biological processes that happen on molecular scale, even at the correct speed2.

Next to a movie that originates back from around 2003 that focuses on the replication of DNA, he also shows a newer version that has been accomplished through "updated science, updated technology", revealing how DNA mitosis through a nifty process of some quite 'mechanical' signal broadcasting system. At the end, he highlights the processes behind a malaria infection of a human child via a mosquito bite, through invasion of cellular tissues including the liver and blood. malaria spreads in your blood.

More biological visualization videos can for instance be found at WEHI-TV and Harvard's BioVisions Lab.

Watch the TEDx talk and some of the full versions of the shown movies below.

QS founder Gary Wolf speaks at the Silicon Valley QS meetup group, giving a meta look at what Quantified Self is about, followed by a personal show&tell about his meditation data.

Aesthetically this is obviously quite nice. The roll-over data is snappy quick. The color selection is clear and intuitive. But there’s something about these nested arc charts that I just don’t like – they don’t seem like a very good way to illustrate historical data. It was created as a simple example of the Axiis data visualization framework – which offers several other Flex based graphic tools. (Hat tip to Ryan C for sending this along!)

ForestEthics created a survey & asked people, “Why Do Forests Matter to You?” This is the word cloud infographic they created from those responses.

Source: http://forestethics.org/wfdsurvey

Conquest Graphics asks some great questions about why recycled paper is so important in the printing industry.

• What are the issues involved in using recycled paper?
• Why is it important that you deal with companies that are FSC-certified?

These are questions which may be viewed as separate issues, but in fact they are related. It’s important that you as a responsible buyer of printed products understand these issues and why they matter to you.

Let’s start with the basics. FSC stands for the Forest Stewardship Council, and companies such as Conquest Graphics which have earned the FSC certification are those who have proved to this independent certifying organization that they meet critical standards in using paper products which come from forests which are responsibly managed, and that they use a significant percentage of post-consumer (recycled) paper in their products.

What does this mean to you, the buyer of printed materials, in practical terms?

It means that in many if not most of your buying decisions, the use of paper which contains some recycled material may lead to cost savings without reducing the quality of your product. Some printed products may require virgin pulp, and you may not be in a position to compromise on that. But wherever possible, if you can save money and use partially-recycled paper, it may well make sense to do so.

Conquest Graphics will work with you and make sure that you are able to use paper which meets your needs from a pricing and quality point of view. We do have the leeway to use paper which does not contain recycled material, and this usage does not affect our certification.

There are plenty of companies you can find to do business with which claim to be FSC certified but are not, or which make no claims along these lines and are not concerned with the issue. The fact that you are reading this brief article on the subject means that you are probably conscientious enough to want to understand the issues and make the right decision.

And so this brings us to the second question. (See above.) Why is it better to deal with us, and who is it better for?

The second part of that question is easy: it’s better for the environment, and if it’s better for the environment that means it’s better for everybody. Does this point need any further elaboration ? Probably not. If you are in favor of making business choices which favor the environment, then you will want to work with companies such as Conquest Graphics which have already made that commitment.

Now that we have established that we are committed in this direction, and that this direction helps the environment, why is it better for you to deal with us? What do you get out of it?

Simple: for whatever product or service you offer, you can legitimately say that you too are doing your part to help the environment. That makes you a steward of the environment, an environmentally-oriented company. And you can use that fact in your own marketing efforts, and you would be perfectly justified in doing so.

And since there are millions of consumers who prefer to deal with companies who are environmentally conscious, then you reap the benefits, as you should.

Contact Conquest Graphics today to join forces in printing brochures and other paper products which are environmentally friendly.

Check out the Cool Infographics 2011 Gallery!  I’m trying an experiment using Pinterest to create a one-page, visual gallery of the infographics I post.  On this board I have pinned every post from the Cool Infographics blog from last year, and it makes a really nice, visual way to browse through the infographics I have shared.  One of the reasons I wanted to play around with Pinterest is that it displays the entire (sometimes very long) infographic, not just a square thumbnail like many galleries.

In general, I keep the 10 most current posts on the front page of the blog.  Once they scroll off the front page, of course their traffic and visibility drops off dramatically.  I’m looking for a way to create a live, growing gallery of the infographic images so these great examples of design can continue to be easily discovered.

Because infographics is, by definition, a visual media, I think people would be more likely to find examples they like and inspiration for their own type of design if there was a better way to browse.  I’m not sure that Pinterest is the answer yet, but it’s certainly worth trying.  On the down-side, I haven’t been able to integrate the Pinterest PinIt button into the blog along with the other social sharing buttons.  Their button doesn’t seem to work with the Squarespace platform I use for the blog.

I am absolutely looking for feedback, so please leave your thoughts in the comments.

Cheers!