Movie site Little White Lies has announced the winner of its latest competition, in which readers were asked to condense a favorite film into a six-frame comic strip. The winning entry by David Rigby–a highly-detailed Zombieland (pictured above)–along with other notable submissions (Total Recall, American Psycho, and Adaptation among them) are now available on the Creative Review site.  While it’s fun to compare each result to your own recollection of a particular movie, it’s also interesting to think about what each artist decided to include and, perhaps more important, what to leave out–a key step not only in creating comics, but also diagrams and PowerPoint decks.

Read more about Lederer’s project: http://www.industriepalast.com/

[via Flowing Data]

We constructed five model algorithms for evaluating women’s postabortion status, each using a different assortment of data. Four of the algorithms (algorithms 1–4) rely on data collected by the woman and on the results of the low-sensitivity pregnancy test. Algorithm 5 relies on the woman’s assessment, the results of the pregnancy test, and follow-up physician assessment (sometimes including bimanual or speculum examination).

A sponsor of the study, Gynuity Health Products, asked Dynamic Diagrams to visualize the data. Our explanation shows the results for the current standard of care and five algorithms tested by the researchers. For each approach we show the total number of cases, the number of women returning to a clinic for a follow-up visit, and the number of women receiving a follow-up ultrasound. In contrasting colors we show specific additional treatment cases in two columns; those identified by the protocol on the left vs. those not necessarily identified by the protocol on the right. In large type we provided the percentage of the number of follow-up ultrasounds to the total number of cases. This combination of rich data points and a key percentage makes it easy to compare the effectiveness of each algorithm. A sample of this visual language (without labels) is shown below:

While we cannot reprint the full text of article, we can provide the visual explanation used as Figure 2: Algorithms identifying women who received additional care after medical abortion (PDF, 409K).

Sometimes the simplest visual explanations are the most powerful.  Case in point:  David Liittschwager’s series of photographs in which he shows how much life can be found in one cubic foot. Liittschwager’s team visited five diverse environments including Central Park, New York and Moorea, French Polynesia.  At each location, the team used a 12-inch metal-framed cube to carve out a mini-ecosystem, then observed the plants and animal life that moved in and out of the space, down to one millimeter.  In all, more than a thousand individual organisms were photographed.  Says Liittschwager: “It was like finding little gems.”  Seeing the inhabitants of each environment assembled together, the sheer volume of the collection is awe-inspiring.  One improvement I’d like to suggest: to give each environment some context, I’d like to see the specimens arranged by groups or the layers in which they were found.  Be sure to check out the videos that show how the team documented each eco-system.

MetaCrawler and WebCrawler are still around. They look like Google.

The site is designed around a tight core of informational pages about the facility, while a new CP Blog provides an ongoing venue for current news, training videos, and links to the top stories at the separate blogs maintained by Eric Cressey and staff nutritionist Brian St. Pierre.

Rattle offers its first blog post on developing the user experience strategy for “A History of the World,” the companion web site for the BBC Radio 4 series of the same name.  Written and narrated by Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, the radio program travels through two million years to tell the history of humanity through 100 handmade objects from the Museum, ranging from a stone chopping tool to the cell phone.  The web site enables exploration of these objects in detail, but also gives users the opportunity to participate by commenting on the collection or uploading images from their own personal collections.  Rattle’s initial post walks us through general principles from their brief (e.g., “some use of participatory media”), the resulting strategic goals (e.g., “focus on attracting, rewarding, and promoting a small minority of contributors”), and its initial brainstorm of features (e.g., “select 10 objects to represent the History of Me”).  Now that the site is live, it will be interesting to read future installments to see how these initial high-level goals and blue-sky thinking compare to what was actually developed.

Reporter Drake Bennett leads with the fact that “shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names.” He continues:

Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process – even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it – can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author (my emphasis).

However, the flip side of easy equals true — or “an instinctive preference for the familiar” as Bennett defines the concept — is that to generate reflection or curiosity, you may need to make things less familiar. It’s a good thing we know how to do both.

You can view larger versions on Paukner’s Flickr page.

The title of my post comes from the Popular Science URL: see-space-debris-cloud-surrounding-earth-rendered-neat-circles. Ironically, this summarizes the problem with the visualization. Despite the attractiveness of the graphic, the neat circles show linear values by area, making precise comparisons completely impossible.

The donut shapes created by the overlapping circles also confuse comparison. Take a quick look at the darkest circles– that for space debris — around the United States and Russia. The United States is bigger, but by what order of magnitude? We see a lot more black — a thicker torus– but the actual ratio is just 1.2 to 1.