epSos.de – Beautiful Wind Turbine for Renewable Electricity Generator

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Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC) are spreading across the web day by day. The idea of attending free university programs on whatever discipline you like in whatever period of the year you prefer it is genius in itself, but many criticize it for being ineffective. The Ed Techie recently conducted research on the relationships between MOOCs and students’ completion rates. Find out what they’ve discovered here.

Probably each of us has at least one t-shirt is our personal wardrobe, but few of us know that when we put it on we are wearing approximately 6 miles of cotton thread. Even fewer people are aware of the life quality of cotton workers in Asia or how much they earn every month. There is a whole world behind cotton production, and the US NPR News Apps Team has built this website to present it in five chapters, using videos, photos and, above all, data.

Every information designer that loves working with numbers can’t avoid reading Nathan Yau‘s blog Flowing Data. Do it to have a look at Yau’s review of data visualization state-of-the-art in 2013.  If you think you might have missed some important infographic, this is the right link to click.

Sometimes data visualizations are so attractive that one might get hypnotised if he keeps looking at them. This is the case with Cameron Beccario‘s Global Wind Patterns, a nice dynamic graph showing world winds’ directions and intensity, recently published on the Mapcite blog.

According to Philip Bump, “there are two ways to identify when and if someone on social media was close to a news event”: posts with visual (or audio) content and posts tagged with locations. Bump predicts a growth in the last one in the next year. Read why and what will be the consequences of more location data on the web in this article on the Nieman Journalism Lab.

> Resources and events

If you work in an NGO and you’re thinking about restyling the organization website, Pinfographics has published a useful infographic for you. It is called A Non Profit Web Design Process, and it’s better if you scroll it down until the bottom of the page if you don’t want to miss some good suggestions.

d3 (the javascript library for data visualizations) is much easier to learn thanks to Scott Murray, the code artist based at the University of San Francisco. For those of you who live there, you’ve got the opportunity to partecipate to his lesson “From Scattered to Scatter plots: an Introduction to d3.js” on February 11.  It’s better if you register in advance!

Bamboo is open source software created for “adding algebraic calculations to dynamic datasets”. In other words, if you have CSV files or other datasheets you need to update frequently, you can do it by uploading them on the program and it gives them back to you in different formats.

Are you good at making wonderful data visualizations and want to show your talent to the rest of the world? You now have the chance to do it and to win a four thousand dollar prize by registering at “Visualizing the Impact of the World Wide Web“, the challenge jointly promoted by visualizing.org and the WWW Foundation. The Deadline is on January 29. Don’t miss it!

+ Credits

Thanks to @simonrae, @milena_iul for helping us collect news on #dataroundup.