Digital Roam

More flying with pictures

Following the posting about learning loops through looking, I had a conversation with my father who is an aerobatic pilot, and it reminded me of my 30-pound visualization problem. My dad flies a Cessna 152 Aerobat, which is a small, 2-seat aerobatic training plane based on the ubiquitous Cessna 152. Unlike most aircraft designed specifically for aerobatics, the 152 has a control yoke instead of a control stick, which means it is slightly less intuitive to fly through complex maneuvers.

I remember the first time I flew loops with dad. Just like in the drawing, we'd dive the plane until we were going about 120 MPH, then pull back the yoke to start the climb. The question for the first time looper is how much to pull back. Dad would calmly say, "Pull back with 30 pounds pressure until we're vertical, then release to 20 pounds, then over the top we'll just let it float".

"Fine", I'd say, "but how the hell much is 30 pounds pressure?" By that point it didn't really matter because we were already upside down, looking UP at the ground. Throughout the loops (which were a lot of fun BTW), I kept wondering what that "pulling thirty pounds" really meant.

Later on I did some research and determined that 30 pounds is equal to 5 bricks. A-ha. Only trouble with that is that I've never pulled 5 bricks towards me while sitting down, so the analogy was still lost on me.

Well, today I weighed by 23 month-old daughter, and guess what? Yup: that's what pulling 30 pounds feels like. Now I have the perfect visual image in my mind for the next time I do loops.

 

Of course, by then she'll probably weigh 40 pounds.

aerobatic flight, ton of bricks

Flying with pictures

My mother has the world's largest collection of flying literature -- thank a career as an air traffic controller for that. She recently moved and asked me to go through the piles of paper and separate the wheat from the chaff. With pleasure.

The best treasure: the 1943 "Student Pilot Handbook" by Jack Hunt and Ray Fahringer (animator of the original Woody Woodpecker). This amazing little handbook introduced wannabe P-51 Mustang aces to the basics of flight -- with pictures.

From the intro: "The handbook is the first step in what is probably the most interesting innovation in flight instruction since the Wright brothers taught their first student. It is the first practical release of VISUAL EDUCATION in flight training."

For anyone who has learned to fly (or any other highly-visual and complex activity) this approach still works. "The illustrations create uniformly correct mental images in student's minds. This makes the instructor's job much easier."

Used far and wide as training material during WWII (by the WASPs among others), I wish I'd had this book when I was learning to fly back in the 80's. Then again, I've got it now. Time to get up in the air.

flight training, visual thinking

Don't quote the bell pepper, but...

It's not really visual thinking, but this just irks me. Xerox's new color campaign supports all of us who like color in documents (good so far) but the ads take as their central point a set of "hard numbers" with no meaning and no attribution (not so good).

Color means: 82% more attention, 73% more comprehension, 80% better brand recognition, 39% more memorable impression -- these are their numbers, I'm not making this up.

Then again, maybe they are. Nowhere in their print or online adds could I find a attribution to what study is being quoted, what the comparisons are made against (black & white? tomatoes?) or context of any sort.

Yes, these are juicy numbers. Too bad we don't know what percent real juice.

(It's really a drag too, cause these would be great numbers to quote in a meeting with publishers.)

bad statistics, dubious data, truth in advertising

Look ma: no equations!

Tatsu Takeuchi says teaching theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory are a lot like standup comedy: you never know what's right until the audience starts laughing. But Tatsu doesn't just get physics students to laugh, he mainly gets them to see.

An Associate Professor of Physics at Virginia Tech, Tatsu teaches Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity with pictures: spacetime diagrams, to be precise. His lecture notes for an introductory class on "relativity for poets" cover the key concepts of relativity without the need for written equations. These notes are truly a model of clear thinking made visible.

Tatsu started taking physics because it he had trouble with it. "I was a bit of an arrogant young man and thought I understood everything... except physics. It annoyed me, so I thought I'd study it for a couple years, figure it out, and move on." That was twenty years, a Bachelors, Masters and PhD ago. "Now I still don't completely understand physics, but little things are starting to become clear."

For Tatsu, creating the diagrams was a breakthrough. "Coming up with visual explanations for something complex doesn't just help your audience 'get it' -- it helps you understand it better yourself."

Even with the clarity of his drawings, some students still struggle... not with the physics as much as their belief in a picture. Tatsu draws an analogy to students learning to read. When he taught reading to young children, the biggest breakthrough came when the kids made the conceptual leap that a scribble on a piece of paper could represent a sound. With spacetime diagrams the leap is to believe that several scribbles on a piece of paper can represent actions over time.

For those who speak Japanese, Tatsu has published a book covering the entire special theory of relativity, again without relying on any equations. I've ordered a copy and am anxious to see how much I can get out of it, language barrier be damned. Pictures are pictures, after all, regardless of language.

theory of relativity, spacetime diagram, physics visualization

Rising sun weather report

Theoretical partical physicist (and recent interviewee, see above) Tatsu Takeuchi mentioned that he had always thought Harvey Balls were based on weather symbols. It turns out that Japanese weather charts use balls very similar to Harvey's. (Not to be confused with the NOAA  balls.) Tatsu graciously provided a translation:

He also pointed out that the ancient Chinese symbol for Sun looks like the Japanese symbol for fog which looks like the Consumer Reports symbol for excellent.

Tatsu had always found it a pleasant thought that products reviewers associated their ratings to changes in the weather. I wonder what Harvey would say about that.

weather symbols, chinese pictograms

Waves + water + cold = insight

My friend John is a long distance swimmer and a member of the Dolphin Club. They are the people who frequently debunk the notion that no inmate could have escaped from Alcatraz by swimming.

As practice for his upcoming swim of the English Channel, John asked me to be his kayak escort on the 6 mile ocean swim from Capitola to Santa Cruz, CA. As escort, it was part of my job to stop every thirty minutes and make sure John drank his nasty energy drink. It was a hellishly windy day, and what should have taken two hours dragged on for nearly four. Throughout, I kept wondering what could possibly be going through the mind of someone battling these endless freezing waves while physically in the water. (It was bad enough in the bloody boat.)

Anyway, at one of the stops, I found out. While slurping Goo, John started ranting about this mathematical vision he was having. "I can see squares!," he yelled, "Squares!". I was tempted to yank him into the kayak and signal for the rescue boat, but he seemed otherwise coherent. Because of huge wax plugs in his ears he couldn't hear a thing I said, so just nodded and let him start back on the swimming. I was kept in the dark about those squares.

Finally at the end of the race, he explained. It turns out that during the endless swim, his mind started to wander, and stumbled onto visualizing numbers. More specifically, his mind's eye started drawing out the quadratic equation in a way he had never thought of before -- and neither had I. Based on what he saw, for the first time I could understand what the heck that equation means. Check this out:
If you forget the equation and just see shapes plotted on a flat grid, the whole thing becomes clear... even that crazy +1 at the end.

During the channel swim, John plans to try the same with the cubic equation.

I'm not going along on that one.

quadratic equation, number visualization

Harvey balls? Harvey who?

In the consulting business, it's a rare day that one does not come across several instances of Harvey Balls. Easy to use, cognitively immediate and highly scannable, these little open and closed iconlets provide a rapid way to assess an otherwise unreadable set of table data. Talk to anyone in consulting and they'll know all about these ubiquitous little symbols. Except for one thing: nobody knows why they're called "Harvey Balls".

With forensic webwork, a couple calls to former consulting colleagues, and a little stalking of a Long Island High School's 50 year reunion, I finally managed to track down the originator and spoke to him at some length. Former Booz Allen Hamilton consultant Harvey Poppel created the first balls way back in the '70's as a way to summarize long columns of numeric data for internal project documents. Mr. Poppel was known as the go-to guy when it came to increasing office productivity, and these balls struck him as a time saver. They were such a hit that quickly all Booz consultants were using them, and the rest is history.

Outside of the PowerPoint decks that are the perennial deliverable of consultancies everywhere, the most likely place to spot Harvey Balls in action is at Consumer Reports. CR has become so attached to these iconlets that they've even added one ot their logo.

Should you feel like making your tables more scannable, here's a good place to download some nice ones. They're free. This day, Mr. Poppel has yet to receive a dime for his visual invention.

data visualization, Harvey Balls

Faster ox, faster!

The perils of attending the M.D. school of penmanship: I saw this on a client's calendar yesterday.
I just really like the term "Action plow".

The hole story: What you don't see will kill you

Parsing through Howard Wainer's wonderful Graphic Discovery: A Trout in the Milk and Other Visual Adventures, I came across my new favorite looking vs. seeing anecdote.

During WWII, Hungarian-born mathematician Abraham Wald undertook a study with the British Air Ministry to use statistical analysis to help protect bombers flying over enemy territory. The data to be crunched included the number and location of bullet holes on returning aircraft, and the goal was to use this information to determine where to best add armor to the plane's structure.

A nifty little chart was created to show where the maximum number of bullet holes were located on returning aircraft. This chart showed the greatest damage not on the main wing and tail spars, engines, and core fuselage areas, but rather on the aircraft extremities. Based on this, the Air Ministry suggested adding armor to those extremities. Wald suggested they were dead wrong.

Wald said more armor should go on the places that had the least holes. Huh? What was he thinking?

Wald was keeping the Air Ministry from falling into the "survivorship bias": they were forgetting the their data did not include the planes that had been lost. If the returning planes had no holes in their wing spars and engines, the better assumption to make is that even a few holes in those places were deadly: no damage was recorded in those areas because those planes were the ones that had crashed. Wald recommended more armor in those data-free areas.

The lesson: the data that isn't there may tell as important a story as the data that is.

PS. Amazon has no more copies of Wald's original study. Does anybody have any idea where to find:
A reprint of "A method of estimating plane vulnerability based on damage of survivors" by Abraham Wald (CRC) (CRC)
by Abraham Wald
Operations Evaluation Group, Center for Naval Analyses (January 1, 1980)
ASIN: B0006Y8P9I

data visualization, Abraham Wald , Howard Wainer

Horse sense II: A failure to ruminate

So many visual analogies, so little time.

Many great business visuals begin with a great analogy, and someone in the room saying, "Wait, I get it! Your data management system is just like a little city!" (or the universe is like a watch, massive data grows like leaves on a tree, a bank is like a Bento Box [or possibly a Happy Meal in less metro areas]). These statements are usually followed by intense white-boarding. Sometimes the outcome is brilliant -- after all, analogies can be great communication aids.

But sometimes the outcome is less stellar. This is particularly true when the clever possibilities of the illustration become more intriguing than the original problem. It's like spiders on caffeine: there's great enthusiasm for the task, but the final web sucks.

I know. I had just such a moment with a client the other day. They asked me to help them make a customer-segmentation plan more intuitive and actionable. The client had come up with four discrete segments and wanted to map how the four might be best approached from a sales perspective.

One of the client's segments was titled "cash cows" and another "the dogs", so naturally a bunch of barnyard analogies leapt to my mind. Since the client company's brand has a western flair, my "four-horses model" emerged.

Thoroughbreds, mustangs, grazers and sleepers: they summed up the segments perfectly. I tested the model and it met all the segmentation criteria, and the horse symbols in particular struck me as perfect icons: simple, scannable, full of meaning.

I should have known I was in trouble when it was four horses that came to my mind's eye. Well guess what? The client didn't like it... and not because they interpreted my chart as representing war, pestilence, famine and death. No, they didn't like it because the cleverness overwhelmed the meaning. And they were right.

I went back and redrew the model with basic geometric shapes and they worked just fine.

*sigh* I really liked that sleeping horse icon, though.

visual thinking, four horses , customer segmentation