Yoda Pie Chart - there is no Try

Love it, from Flowing Data.

Jesus and spending a trillion dollars

Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration has put together some information on just how big the number one trillion actually is, in human-sized terms. We have heard a lot about trillions of dollars in the context of credit crisis and, more recently, in the debate over the US budget deficit. Not to mention that Facebook recently reported that their total number of page views has passed the one trillion mark.

Agarwal started by reporting the following Biblical metaphor

If you start spending a million dollars every single day since Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have spent a trillion dollars by today.

And in terms of a diagram, Agarwal starts with takes a single 100 dollar US bill, and represents larger values as

Extending further, a trillion dollars then requires a football field of space, as shown below, with our human-sized man dwarfed in the bottom left corner.

All Eyes on Facebook

A recent social media report from Nielsen’s shows, amongst other things, that Facebook dominates our attention on the Internet, larger in terms of minutes of face time than the four next most popular social media sites. Business Insider produced the following chart based on Nielsen’s data

It was recently (and widely) reported that the number of page views on Facebook passed the 1 trillion mark, but that figure has been disputed. In any case, all internet path seems to lead to Facebook one way or the other.

DIPK Graphic

From Flowing Data

Mark Johnstone uses a cake metaphor to represent data, presentation, and what you gain.

Don’t like the last shot for knowledge. Perhaps lots of smaller cakes?

iPad Competition is Toast

Business Insider recently reported that the iPad is outselling the competition about 4-to-1. So as security professionals the iPad is the platform to focus on for risk assessments.

Internet Privacy as a Venn diagram

From Flowing Data:

Cool A5/1 back-clocking graphic

Below is part of a graphic which depicts the A5/1 state space generated when checking if the correct key has been determined from a rainbow table lookup. Once a key candidate has been found using the rainbow tables, the A5/1 cipher needs to be advanced (forward clocked) and undone (back-clocked) to verify that the candidate key is correct.

The grey paths represent states that are not accessible through forward clocking, and the green paths have many ancestor states leading to the same key stream. Red paths have few ancestor states leading to the same key stream. The graphic is from the A5/1 rainbow table generation project led by Karsten Nohl.

Infographic on Afghan scenarios with Prezi

I, like quite a few other people, posted on the recent NYT article which showed a horrendously complex PowerPoint slide created to depict the situation in Afghanistan, and the challenges facing US military decision makers.

Another more informative view of the Afghan predicament can be found at a German site called The Afghan Conflict, which appears to be the result of collaboration between Marc Tiedemann and several colleagues to produce a visual map of possible scenarios in the conflict. From the site

When we started researching this topic we very quickly saw, that the debate whether to pull out the troops, staying or even enforcing is not too much about arguments, it’s a battle of possible scenarios. Every side seems to have their own positive and negative visions of how things will happen in the future if certain steps are done. The resulting map The Afghan Conflict - A Map of Possible Scenarios is the attempt of a summary of the most popular possible scenarios around the afghan conflict, according to a pullout or stay of the Allied troops. And is based on interviews with journalists, politicians and political foundations.

The resulting scenario map is quite large and the authors have not tried to compress it onto a single PowerPoint slide for convenience of presentation (double click the image below to see a larger version).

The scenario map is available as a poster but also as a Prezi animation which allows you to navigate across the scenarios and zoom in and out of detail (I cannot find a way to link to the Prezi animation directly so you will have to view it from the The Afghan Conflict site). I will have more to say about Prezi in future posts, and it appears to be a good navigation tool for complex “infoscapes” like the Afghan situation. In the meantime please take a look at the showcase presentations at the Prezi site.

When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war

The title is a comment reported in the NYT by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, when shown the PowerPoint slide below (see a larger version here)

The slide was meant to depict the complexity of American military strategy in Afghanistan, and it seems to have over-succeeded. Apparently PowerPoint is not just an obsession with business managers but also with senior military commanders as well. But behind all the PowerPoint jokes are "serious concerns that the program [PowerPoint] stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making”. The following observation is quite insightful

[PowerPoint] slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs.

But even with mounting reservations over the ability of PowerPoint to usefully represent military situations, no one is forecasting any change – it is just too embedded in the military, as it is elsewhere. And while “no one is suggesting that PowerPoint is to blame for mistakes in the current wars”, it takes a great deal of time with PowerPoint to keep a war going, let alone end it.

Map of a Tweet

Raffi Krikorian, a developer on Twitter's API/Platform team, has produced a map of the information required to represent the status of a Tweet in JSON format, and its perhaps more complex than you thought (way more than 140 characters). Great graphic, and already 30,000 views on Scribd.

Related articles by Zemanta

• This is What a Tweet Looks Like (readwriteweb.com)
• Anatomy of a Tweet (inquisitr.com)

NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration in Excel

Microsoft Research has released a new Excel 2007 add-in for rendering network visualizations

NodeXL is a powerful and easy-to-use interactive network visualisation and analysis tool that leverages the widely available MS Excel application as the platform for representing generic graph data, performing advanced network analysis and visual exploration of networks. The tool supports multiple social network data providers that import graph data (nodes and edge lists) into the Excel spreadsheet.

The graph visualizations seem stunning for Excel. An example is shown below from Visual Business Intelligence, where the graph depicts shared Board memberships of major US companies.

More information on using NodeXL and the external people Microsoft collaborated with to create the tool can be found here at CodePlex.

When to use Pie Charts

from Emergent Chaos.

An Anonymity computation using R

Back in August 2008 I posted on some research I did on traffic confirmation attacks. Traffic analysis is a collection of techniques for inferring communication relationships without having access to the content that is being communicated. Traffic confirmation is a special sub-case that attempts to infer communication relationships amongst users whose communications are mediated through an anonymity system.

The graph below shows two curves representing the observed frequency of recipients from a MIX anonymity system. The attacker is targeting a particular user Alice, and the red curve represents the minimal number of times her communication partners are observed, while the blue curve represents the maximal number of observations for all other recipients. The graph is created from an anonymity system with N = 20,000 users, using a MIX of batch size 50 and assuming Alice has 20 communication partners.

The graph shows that after the attacker has observed about 250 messages from Alice, each of her recipients has been observed more often than any of the other recipients. Therefore an attacker can conclude that the 20 most frequently observed recipients are the recipients of Alice, and the anonymity of her partners has been broken. The details are explained in the previous post.

What surprised me was how easily the data for this graph could be programmed in the R programming language. The native vector operations of R makes this all very simple, and the code is below.

b = 50
N = 20000
m = 20
Nset = c(1:N)
mset = c(1:m)
N.plot = 0
m.plot = 0
m.min = 0
N.max = 1
s = sample(N, b, replace=T)
s = c(s, sample(mset,1,replace=T))
for ( t in c(1:500) )
{
    s = c(s, sample(Nset, b, replace=T), sample(mset,1,replace=T))
    ts = table(s)
    m.min = min(ts[c(1:m)])
    N.max = max(ts[-c(1:m)])
    N.plot = c(N.plot, N.max)
    m.plot  = c(m.plot, m.min)
}
plot(m.plot, type="l", col = "red")
lines(N.plot, col = "blue")

AON 2010 Political Risk Map

Here on Scribd.

Google Maps and Crypto Laws Mashup

Simon Hunt, VP at McAfee, has a great Google map mashup application that visually maps crypto laws to countries around the world, including individual US states. The map was last updated in September.

Visualisations of Data Loss

The detailed data collected by DataLossDB.org has been uploaded to two of the popular sites for visualization of data. The first is Swivel, and the graph from here shows the number of breached records as a percentage of the TJX incident where 45 million records were compromised (this is represented as 100% on the graph)

The “spikey” nature of the losses was identified by Voltage Security as the log-normal distribution. The DataLossDB data has also been uploaded to Many Eyes (several times it seems), and searching on data loss gives several graphs, like this one for data loss by type

You can use the loss data set at Many Eyes to produce other graphs of your own choice. Lastly, Voltage has a great graphic showing another representation of the relative size of data losses, which has a fractal feel to it

Navigation map of the Cloud Ecosystem

Appiro has created a nice RIA map for navigating through the cloud computing ecosystem. The map is a 3 x 3 grid with applications, platforms and infrastructure on one axis, and public private or hosted cloud solutions on the other. The complexity of the ecosystem does not bode well for decision makers, and the support to be provided by risk management. Still, it looks positively friendly as compared to the details of SOA.

See ReadWriteWeb for more commentary and background on Appiro.

Growth of Wal-mart across America

There is a great visualization of the spread of Wal-mart stores across America at FlowingData. The visualization starts with the first Arkansas store in 1962 and plots the sprouting of additional locations all the way up to 3176 stores in 2006. The data for the visualization can be found here, researched for the paper “Diffusion of Wal-Mart and Economies of Density”.

How to Choose a Good Chart

There is a nice 1-page guide to chart selection on Scribd as shown below. Seriously, I can't emphasize enough what a resource I find Scribd to be.

Choosing a Good Chart

Publish at Scribd or explore others: How-to-Guides & Manu flow charts Business

Algebraic Group Visualization

There are some quite interesting visualizations of groups at a blog called Alice and Bob in Cryptoland. What the author has done is to add colours to the group table for several mappings so as to give you some idea about the inherent structure of the mapping.

The diagram below represents multiplication modulo 509. Each number 1, 2, ..., 507, 508 is assigned a colour. Then the multiplication table is formed from a 509 x 509 table where the entry in the i-th row and j-th column is (i*j) mod 509, then its value substituted for its defined colour. A definite quadrant structure is present.

A second visualation is given for an elliptic curve group defined over GF(503). This group contains 503 elements, which are assigned colours and then represented in a 503 x 503 addition map (elliptic curves are additive rather than multiplicative as the group above).


The result is far more random-looking mapping, which you would expect since elliptic curves exhibit less inherent structure than numeric groups. You can obtain the code for these graphs from the orginal post.