Latest modern science: graphics

Kamis, 16 Juni 2016

Latest modern science | Search engines for technical graphics - Si Bejo Science

How important are academic graphics? A new pre-print in arXiv argues, �Pretty damn important.� This news summary of the technical article says:

(T)heir most remarkable discovery is that the most successful papers tend to have more figures. By plotting the number of diagrams in a paper against its impact, the team concludes that high impact ideas tend to be conveyed visually.

Lee and co say there are two possible explanations for this: �That visual information improves the clarity of the paper, leading to more citations, and higher impact, or that high impact papers naturally tend to include new, complex ideas that require visual explanation.�

The team has a search engine for scientific graphics called Viziometrics. My first pass, for �crayfish,� gave a mess on non-intuitive results (click to enlarge):

Things improved markedly when I selected only for diagrams and photos, however.

Speaking of searchable graphics databases, Atlas looks promising for some purposes. I tried searching for something that I thought must get plotted a lot in science, �Impact Factor�:

Nothing looked relevant to scientific publication, so I tried a couple of other topics familiar to me. I had success with �lobster�, because I reckoned there would be fisheries data. There was:

Things get good when you drill down to a single graph:

There�s a reference, so you know where the data came from. You can download the image created by Atlas, or download the data yourself in a plain text (CSV) file. Atlas is a product of the Quartz online news outlet. I�m not sure yet if it only includes data from Quartz stories.

These are not going to replace Google Images or Flickr any time soon, but they might be useful for some purposes.

Hat tip to Ananyo Bhattacharya for Viziometrics and to Knight Science Journalism for Atlas.

Kamis, 24 Maret 2016

Latest modern science | Lessons from Skin Wars: Have a focal point - Si Bejo Science

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I�ve been catching up with a show called Skin Wars on Hulu (new season coming on Game Show Network in April). It�s a competition reality show along the lines of Project Runway, Top Chef, and FaceOff: make something really cool, really fast. The cool thing they�re making in this case is body painting.

While watching the show, the judges often criticize a painting for not having a focal point. The artists make very intricate paintings, but when you step back, it�s all a confused mess. Nothing stands out.

I often see this with posters. Because posters tend to include way too much text, everything tends to turn into a uniform gray. Graphs tend to look alike.There�s few things that demand attention.

For instance, here�s a painting with no focal point:

Here�s another example of a painting, by Kadinsky, but this time with a clear focal point:

I�m willing to bet the thing that pops out is the dark circle in the upper left.

The reason is that the dark circle stands in contrast to most of the rest of the painting, which is light and has lots of straight lines and angles. Here�s another example of contrast being used to create a focal point:

It�s a contrasting colour, but a contrasting shape would work too. Imagine an unripened banana in the place of the red apple in the picture above. You�d still look more at the banana, because it is different.

Another simple way to create a focal point is with that most underused tool, white space:

There are lots of blue circles on the page, but the one surrounded by lots of white space is emphasized.

A third way to create a focal point is with lines:

Thanks to perspective, the strong lines of the train tracks, the top and bottom of the train cars, and the treetops all converge onto the vanishing point, which becomes the image�s focal point.

To use a focal point in a poster, you first need to decide what the most important thing on your poster than you want to emphasize. Once you have done that, use the three tips above (and many others besides!) to create a clear focal point on your poster.

External links

Dominance: Creating Focal Points In Your Design
Gestalt Principles: How Are Your Designs Perceived?
Designing with strong simple focal points
How to use focal points to enhance your photography
Top 25 mistakes artists make #2: not adding a focal point

Landscape from here; Kadinsky painting from here; apple picture from here; abstract from here.; mountains from here.