More Visualization websites

Reflecting on this old blog post I am shocked to notice I didn't mention the grand father of the Visualization websites. Ben Shneiderman has worked in the field of Visualisation for many years as can be clearly seen by the HCIL Projects at the University of Maryland.

For some reason, this blog post update has also made me remember the interesting work of Mark Billinghurst's HITLab in NZ. The work is about visualizing things in a different way than is typical when talking about 'visualization'. The HITLab is more about visualizing in an 'augmented reality' sense than in a 'getting your head around massive amounts of data' sense. The 'Outdoor ART' GPS project is quite an easy way to get your head around what they are getting at with augmented reality.

I still think Florence Nightingale was one of the founders of the field of Visualization. I'm stoked to see that she is now getting recognition for her contribution and love the animation on this site.



services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/app - IBM's Many Eyes Project. Classic information visualization stuff with some interesting new applications. Neat and thought provoking. I like this treemap visualizing highway versus city mileage for cars.

www.visualcomplexity.com - an interesting site showing a boat load of different data visualization examples.

www.swivel.com - "Swivel is a place where curious people explore data — all kinds of data" It has some interesting data and clean graphs but the representations are not especially novel.

infosthetics.com - and don't forget my old favourite, infosthetics.com. Lots of night examples on this one too.

www.joeparry.com/blog/ - Joe Parry is also keeping an interesing blog on stuff like this.

Source: IxDA Discuss and other sources

Deliberate overcharging (?) by Southern Electric

Every month I have a Direct Debit (DD) come out of my account, to Southern Electric, for £35. I have chosen their online billing and have neglected to check the bills over the last year. I quite like the DD approach since companies usually gently move the monthly amount up and down in accordance with how much you actually use.

You can imagine my surprise when I found the following phrases on my last 4 bills:

This is your gas statement for 10 October 2007 until 10 January 2008.
As you are spreading your gas costs throughout the year, we will carry forward the
balance we owe you of £20.74 as payment towards your future bills.

This is your gas statement for 11 January 2008 until 09 April 2008.
As you are spreading your gas costs throughout the year, we will carry forward the
balance we owe you of £54.72 as payment towards your future bills.

This is your gas statement for 10 April 2008 until 09 July 2008.
We owe you £92.33.
In the meantime, we have reviewed your account and the good news is your monthly
payments do not need to change.

This is your gas statement for 10 July 2008 until 09 October 2008.
As you are spreading your gas costs throughout the year, we will carry forward the
balance we owe you of £148.10 as payment towards your future bills.


Notice anything funny? I just did. Every month my amount of overpayment has escalated. I have a growing credit balance with my Gas company and they are getting the interest on that money. Even more insulting is the fact that they reviewed my account in this period and decided to ignore the fact that I routinely overpay and have a large credit balance.

I switched to Southern Electric sold on their customer service. I'm afraid I'm feel rather let down by this. I go to great lengths to reduce my carbon footprint and have achieved something here with my gas bill. My gas company has penalised me for doing this. It's a bit of a cheek done you think?

How to find the RRP of books

I've needed to find the RRP of my books for some tax reasons. I was surprised how hard it was but then I came across the Blackwells website. These folks sell books at the RRP. Quite expensive but rather handy if you need to know those RRPs!

I couldn't find all of the books I needed to find on there with the normal search, but the vast majority came up when I entered the ISBN. Very handy.