Randy Krum's Blog, page 6

How to Make Your Next Trade Exhibition COVID Secure

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UK Exhibition Stands explores the impact of Covid on the exhibition business as well as tips to stay safe going forward with the How to Make Your Next Trade Exhibition Covid Secure infographic.

Today we have a useful info-graphic design for you that we have created which will teach you how to make your next trade show exhibition COVID-19 secure and safe for your staff and visitors. In this design we are going to provide some facts about the impact that the Coronavirus pandemic has had on the exhibitions industry globally as well as twelve simple tips to help keep your trade show booth as safe as possible and finally some Coronavirus symptoms to keep an eye out for.

Informational infographics like this can be very successful for B2B communications. Infographics like this are mostly visual explanations and illustrations of concepts instead of a lot of data visualizations. This is a quick an effective way to communicate to customers and business partners.

How we Spent Our Time at Home

2020 was a year of changes. One example is explained in the infographic, How we Spent Our Time at Home by Nathan Yau at FlowingData.

From FlowingData:

We had to do a lot more from home in 2020. Based on the American Time Use Survey, we spent about 62% of our waking time at home. In contrast, we only spent about 50% in 2019. Above is the breakdown by activity on a weekday.

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For each year, I counted the total minutes for each activity and divided by total waking time to estimate percentages. For privacy reasons, the where is not provided for when respondents were sleeping, grooming, or doing personal activities. I suspect the total percentage of time spent at home for both years would increase if these times were included.

For a better sense of how everything shifted, above is a different view that shows the percentage of time spent at home, by activity, on a weekday.

With the exception of household activities, which already happened mostly at home, there was an increase in every category. Work from home went up 142%. Education at home more than doubled. Good times.

I really like using the stacked bars of dots to show the breakdown of different activities. There are so many, the use of categorical colors for each different activity is necessary, but does start to get confusing.

Nature Timespiral

Nature Timespiral is a summary of notable events from the Big Bang to the present day by Pablo Carlos Budassi. The infographic spans 13.7 billion years, each billion being represented by a 90 degree angle on the spiral.

The history of nature from the Big Bang to the present day shown graphically in a spiral with notable events annotated. Every billion years (GA) is represented by 90 degrees of rotation of the spiral. The last 500 million years are represented in a 90-degree stretch for more detail on our recent history. Some of the events depicted are the emergence of cosmic structures (stars, galaxies, planets, clusters, and other structures), the emergence of the solar systems, the Earth and the Moon, important geological events (gases in the atmosphere, great orogenies, glacial periods, etc.), emergence and evolution of hominid species and important events in human evolution.

You can buy a high quality poster, print or high-resolution download of the timespiral on Budassi’s website.

Found on My Modern Met

Drone Privacy Laws Around the World

Do you have a drone? If you do, are you aware of your country’s privacy laws? Surfshark has created the Drone Privacy Laws Around the World map by compiling data on drone-related legislation for 210 countries. The counties have been given a category status based on its legislation as of October 2020.

As the use of drones expands around the world -- according to the Federal Aviation Administration, there are currently 1.7 million drones registered in the United States alone -- lawmakers have been faced with new and complex regulatory challenges to protect the privacy of ordinary citizens. The increased prevalence of drones has raised the prospect of pervasive surveillance by governments, companies, and individuals, and lawmakers are struggling to keep up with the advancing technology.

We found that drone regulation in each country generally fell into one of seven categories:

-Outright ban

-Effective ban

-Restrictions Apply (such as drone registration or licensing, additional observers required, no commercial usage etc..)

-Visual line of sight required

-Experimental visual line of sight (experiments where drones fly beyond the line of sight are allowed)

-Unrestricted (when flying away from private property and airports, under 500 ft/150metres height and with drones weighing less than 250g)

-No drone-related legislation

You can visit Surfshark’s website to see a full size version of the map, or each country individually.

Found on ZDNET.com

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow is a data visualization experiment to trace the emotional waves of the pandemic. Most of the Covid data that we are use to seeing hasn’t taken into account the emotional impact of the pandemic. National Film Board of Canada and Jam3 have put together this interactive visual that lets you explore over 600k tweets (organized by an AI) into the feelings of fear, joy, sadness, and confidence.

This is an experiment to make the emotional impact of the pandemic visible. Explore hundreds of thousands of Tweets, organized by sentiment. Follow the curves, layers, and patterns of our collective feelings. What you’ll see is a story of resilience. People making sense, finding solace, and moving forward.

Watching the pandemic through an epidemiologist’s lens and learning concepts like “social distancing” and “herd immunity” keeps us safe. But it ignores our humanity. It’s more important than ever to remember and celebrate that we’re human. Human feelings, to us, are the defining data of this pandemic.

To honour that human story, we used Twitter to trace the social narrative of the pandemic. Analyzing over 70k tweets per month, we used IBM Watson’s AI to map four unique sentiments: fear, joy, sadness, and confidence.

You can explore our circular timeline to see how major events have shaped the conversation, how our shared humanity has expressed itself in common topics, and how feelings have evolved (and continue to evolve) over time. As the outbreak continues, we’ll keep collecting memories and predictions, and mapping the colour and shape of our experience.

This project is about hardship, hope, and the collective experience. Things that have changed, things that haven’t, and things that may still.

This is an unprecedented challenge, but we are resilient — yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Explore the interactive graphic Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (nfb.ca), and read more About | Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow | NFB.

Visualizing Apple's Release Patterns Accurately Predicted 2021 iPhone Event

Apple just announced the 2021 iPhone event date of September 14, 2021, which is exactly the date that my Apple Release Patterns visualization graphic predicted when I updated them just before the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in May 2021.

I’ve been visualizing the release date patterns of Apple products for many years now, and the pattern for the iPhone is especially consistent year-over-year. So consistent, that I also release a prediction of the date for the next Apple iPhone event. This year the iPhone Release Pattern nailed it! You can see how consistent they have been since Tim Cook moved the iPhone announcement events to September in 2011 in the longer timeline infographic:

I maintain visual Release Patterns for all of Apple’s major product lines, so you can always figure out “When did they last update that?” before you make that purchase decision.

As humans, we like to see patterns in the data, it helps us understand the world around us. It’s often much easier in a visualization than trying to find a pattern in a table of numbers. As a Discovery tool, data visualization helps us find insights in the data.

The Best Way to Ice Drinks in a Cooler

Summer might be wrapping up but we still have time left for a few more BBQ’s! The Art of Manliness shows off The Best Way to Ice Drinks in a Cooler in an easy to read infographic. Store your beverages correctly and don’t let your fun be spoiled by hot drinks or cold hands!

If you’re having a BBQ this summer, you’ll probably ensure your guests’ thirst stays slaked by stocking a big cooler full of soda and beer. While there’s obviously not much to that, there are in fact less and more effective ways of making sure these drinks are cold and accessible.

The less effective way is to place the bottles and cans atop a big mound of ice. They won’t get thoroughly chilled that way. You also don’t want to bury them in the ice; people’s hands will get cold and cut up when they try to dig through the pile to grab a drink.

The more effective method is to fill the cooler with a 80/20 mixture of ice and water. Then put the bottles/cans in so that the body of the vessels sits in the ice, but their tops/necks stick out; this lets your guests grab the drinks without getting their hands wet, cold, and nicked.

What a great use of a simple, easy-to-understand, visual explanation infographic! Definitely falls within my 5-Second Rule! You can understand the key message of the infographic within the first 5 seconds.

Found on The Art of Manliness

Voting-Rights Restriction Bills Sankey Analysis

This was released in June, and I want to share it before we get into the next election season this Fall. Republicans Fall Short in Voting-Rights Crackdown While Adding Hassle at Polls is a data visualization showing how the threat of stricter voting rules was reduced down to a few bills that actually passed. Bloomberg shows that the number of expansive bills that were proposed actually outnumbers the amount of restrictive bills, and the bills that did pass still weigh in the favor of expansive. To get an even more in-depth look, the states and bills are color coded to show Democratic vs Republican control.

A nationwide move by Republicans to tighten voting rules in the wake of Donald Trump’s defeat has largely fizzled into a few additional hassles for voters in the next elections, far short of the sweeping changes described by both the GOP and Democratic critics.

In the name of election security, Republican lawmakers passed dozens of new voting restrictions this year, adding hurdles to mail-in voting, reducing local control over elections and targeting innovations used by large urban counties during the coronavirus pandemic, even as Democratic-led states focused on making voting easier.

Republicans say that the changes are needed to restore confidence in elections after President Donald Trump’s false claims that massive fraud cost him a second term. Democrats argue the laws are aimed at suppressing votes from Black and Latino citizens after record-setting turnout, going so far as to label the moves “a new Jim Crow.”

From a DataViz perspective, I think this is a great use of a Sankey Diagram. This is hierarchical data where each level breaks down the detail from the level above.

From a data perspective, I would say this is a very shallow report. The number of bills is interesting anecdotally, but doesn’t take into account the actual content of the bills. Some of these bills might be extremely restrictive/expansive, and some just a little bit. Were the uber-extreme bills passed? You can’t tell from this view of the data. This is very similar to sentiment analysis, and just gives the reader a very top level view of the data.

Visit Bloomberg.com to see more details. You should be able to view the article, even without a Bloomberg subscription. You may need to use a Private or Incognito window.

Figures in the Sky: Constellations Around the World

Figures in the Sky: Cultures across the World have seen their myths and legends in the stars is an interactive infographic created by Nadieh Bremer on Visual Cinnamon. The infographic compares 28 different “sky cultures” to see differences and similarities in the shapes they’ve seen in the night sky. Above is an example of the star Betelgeuse, one of the brightest stars in the sky, and how it has been used by 17 of the 28 cultures.

No matter where you are on Earth, we all look up to the same sky during the dark nights. You might see a different section of it depending on your exact location, time & season, nevertheless the stars have fascinated humans across time and continents.

Our own creativity combined with stories about local legends and myths have created a diverse set of different constellations. And even though the stars don't change, people have found many different shapes in the same sky. From humans, to animals, to objects, and even abstract concepts.

Brightness doesn’t determine all!

Let's look at all 2168 unique stars that are included in at least one constellation across all sky cultures. The chart below shows the stars according to their brightness from left to right, and the number of constellations the star appears in from top to bottom. A general trend is visible: The brighter the star, the more constellations it's included in. This makes sense, since brighter stars just stand out more.

Visit the original post at Figures in the Sky (visualcinnamon.com) to interact with the full design!

MacBook Setup Essentials for College Students (2021 UPDATE)

It’s Back To School time of year, and if you’re a college student with a new MacBook, or a parent setting up a new MacBook, the MacBook Setup Essentials for College Students infographic is for you. These are my personal Best Practice suggestions for setting up a MacBook for college students, and I’ve updated all of the directions and screenshots for the current macOS Big Sur 11.4. I’d love to hear your tips in the comments!

MacBook are very popular with college students, but a little planning and configuration is required for the best experience. A student moving away to college might be the first time they have full control over their own computing experience: installing apps, protecting their privacy, creating good passwords, avoiding viruses & malware, and backing up their data.

These are my suggestions for setting up a MacBook, MacBook Air or MacBook Pro for any college student to simplify their computing experience.

I tend to be the Apple tech support for my family and friends, and whether you are new to Apple computers, or an experienced Apple power user, these tips will help you with the initial MacBook setup for any college student going away.

NOTE: Most of these tips are good for any MacBook user, but I’ve tailored them specific to college students.

Unlike many of my other infographic designs, this one doesn’t have any numeric data to work with. It’s a How-To informative infographic with step-by-step instructions and suggestions. That makes it a little more text-heavy than I normally like, but in this case I felt it was appropriate.