From fresh articles and newly found infographics to books and data-visualizations here's a dash of what I've been reading and viewing online, curtailed for your liking.
Data Visualizations
Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Reciepts, The New York Times
Published in the The New York Times, Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986-2008, presents time series data where the vertical axis of the area represents a particular movie, showing its domestic gross box office revenue. The horizontal axis shows its time in the box office. Darker colors mean higher earnings. See the visualization in action.
*Streamgraphs are somewhat controversial because the differing baseline can make them hard to read and potentially misleading.
Wind Map, by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg.
Wind Map makes the invisible visible using near real-time wind speed forecast data from the National Digital Forecast database. The map is highly interactive, allowing you to zoom in, find the wind velocity at a precise latitude and longitude, and browse wind trends from past events, such as when Hurricane Sandy made landfall. It became a major resource during severe wind events in 2012, rising it beyond beautiful design to a utility that organizations turned to in times of need.
Watching Wind Map has a similar entrancing effect to watching water flow down a calm stream. See the dynamic map flow in real-time as its updated hourly.
Recent Reads
From Values to Action, Harry M. Jansen Kraemer Jr.
Harry Kraemer’s experience as CEO of a Fortune 500 company has provided him with extensive learnings and insights that he’s used to his advantage to better lead others. A story-filled, self-improvement guide, From Values to Actions reviews the core principles of Reflection, Balance and Perspective, True Self-Confidence, and Genuine Humility. Its easy to instantly put these values to work and gain from these tools, based on the examples provided. A solid read for anyone looking to develop and improve their interpersonal and leadership skills.
The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
Launching a new business has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. You write a business plan, pitch it to investors, assemble a team, introduce a product and start selling as hard as you can. Somewhere in this sequence of events, you’re likely to suffer a monumental setback. The odds are against you.
The Lean Startup favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development. Although the methodology is just a few years old, concepts, such as “minimum viable product”, have easily taken root in the start-up world. Eric Ries’s powerful foundation for new product development and small businesses is a must read for all current and would-be entrepreneurs.
HOW SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE THINK, JOHN C. MAXWELL
The book starts off with a question; How inclined are you to change? Accelerating rapidly from this question, the book jumps into sections deep diving questions, getting to the root of your strengths and areas of opportunity. The overall focus of the book, concentrates around key takeaways from those that have been highly successful and how others can implement this thinking themselves. Some takeaways include:
- Thinking is a discipline. If you want to be better at it, you've got to work at it.
- Smart people expose themselves to different ideas and types of people.
- It's one thing to have an idea, another to follow through. "Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date."
- Smart people collaborate with other smart people. Thinking with others yields higher returns, like giving yourself a shortcut. That's why brainstorming sessions are so effective.
Steve jobs, by Walter Isaacson
A juggernaut of innovation, Steve Jobs life had many twisting roads and he never did anything in the conventional manner. The autobiography is an essential Silicon Valley chronicle, with compiling stories well known to tech aficionados, but interesting to a broad audience.
The well known biographer, Isaacson places the stories of Job's life in a well-ordered, if not streamlined, fashion. Beginning with a portrait of the young, rebellious Jobs, following him through his short, yet crucial, college stint through starting Apple in his garage. All of Steve's experiences intertwined with one another, and led to his basic principles, valuing simplicity, utility and beauty in ways that would shape his creative imagination.
A combination of tech criticism and promotional hype, Isaacson describes the arrival of each new product right down to Mr. Jobs’s theatrical introductions and the advertising campaigns. A great read for techies at heart and a must read for everyone else.