"So here we go. This is your senses,pouring into your senses every second.
Your sense of sight is the fastest.It has the same bandwidth as a computer network.
Then you have touch, which is about the speed of a USB key.
And then you have hearing and smell,which has the throughput of a hard disk.
And then you have poor old taste,which is like barely the throughput of a pocket calculator.
And that little square in the corner, a naught .7 percent,that's the amount we're actually aware of.
So a lot of your vision --the bulk of it is visual, and it's pouring in.It's unconscious.
The eye is exquisitely sensitiveto patterns in variations in color, shape and pattern.
It loves them, and it calls them beautiful.It's the language of the eye.
If you combine the language of the eye with the language of the mind,which is about words and numbers and concepts,you start speaking two languages simultaneously,each enhancing the other.
So, you have the eye, and then you drop in the concepts.And that whole thing -- it's two languagesboth working at the same time.So we can use this new kind of language, if you like,to alter our perspective or change our views."
This is just another reason why we should start to use visuals in the classroom in order to help children learn.
Another important idea here:
"But is it true that America has the biggest military budget?Because America is an incredibly rich country.In fact, it's so massively richthat it can contain the four othertop industrialized nations' economiesinside itself, it's so vastly rich.So its military budget is bound to be enormous.So, to be fair and to alter our perspective,we have to bring in another data set,and that data set is GDP, or the country's earnings.Who has the biggest budget as a proportion of GDP?Let's have a look.That changes the picture considerably.Other countries pop into view that you, perhaps, weren't considering,and American drops into eighth."
"But of course, China has an enormous population.So if we do the same,we see a radically different picture.China drops to 124th.It actually has a tiny armywhen you take other data into consideration.So, absolute figures, like the military budget,in a connected world,don't give you the whole picture.They're not as true as they could be."
"We need relative figures that are connected to other dataso that we can see a fuller picture,and then that can lead to us changing our perspective.As Hans Rosling, the master,my master, said,"Let the dataset change your mindset."And if it can do that, maybe it can also change your behavior."
We need relative figure (not absolute figures) that are connect with the context in which they are in, in order to see the whole objective picture of what we are trying to see.
Visualization is important in order to understand enormous data sets that float around the world nowadays:
"Now this image constitutes a huge amount of work.We scraped like 1,000 studies from PubMed,the biomedical database,and we compiled them and graded them all.And it was incredibly frustrating for mebecause I had a book of 250 visualizations to do for my book,and I spent a month doing this,and I only filled two pages.
But what it points tois that visualizing information like thisis a form of knowledge compression.It's a way of squeezing an enormous amountof information and understandinginto a small space.And once you've curated that data, and once you've cleaned that data,and once it's there,you can do cool stuff like this."
TED TALK:David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization
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