The series airs on Wednesdays at 10/9c. Although it looks like the full series ran already. It wouldn't make much sense to go over the making-of in the middle. On the upside, four episodes are available online.

Had I known this existed, maybe I wouldn't have subjected myself to the monstrosity of a show in United Stats of America.

Related

• United Stats of America series premiere tonight
• MacGyver recipe book – All 7 seasons of diversions and mischief
• Investigation of top secret America

Location data typically stays within the realm of online maps and digital check-ins, but in many ways it's the most personal data that you can find. It represents where you are, where you've been, and where you're going. Meshu, by Sha Hwang and Rachel Binx, is a project that takes this sentiment to heart.

Select and enter locations on a map or grab your check-ins from foursquare to create your own piece of unique jewelry — necklace, earrings, or cufflinks. Once you've got your design, you have your choice of acrylic, wood, nylon, and silver and you can pick from a variety of colors for each material. Hit complete, they'll fabricate it, and you've got your own personal snapshot of life.

[via infosthetics]

[Thanks, Kevin]

My many thanks to Kim for holding down the fort while I'm gone. Be sure to follow her at @krees and check out Periscopic for your information visualization needs.

So what'd I miss?

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• Sit Back and Relax with Casual Information Visualization
• Back to the Future trilogy timelines
• Back-of-the-napkin personal financial advice

Open data is everywhere. However, open data initiatives often manifest as mere CSV dumps on a forlorn web page. Junar, Lunfardo (Argentina slang) for "to know" or "to view," seeks to help government and organizations take the guesswork out of developing their own software for such efforts.

Their open data platform allows organizations to collect and select their data, publish it, create reports and dashboards, and share their data online. The solution can be hosted or integrated into the organization's website, and the data can be made open or for internal use only. End users can "follow" live data on the site, download it, or embed it. There's also a built in API, so the organization doesn't have to develop one of their own.

Junar looks like it's ready to fill the gap in open data publishing with its soup to nuts approach. With lots of great features and an easy to use interface, it seems like a welcome change to the alternatives.

I'm a little dense when it comes to astronomy, but I think I understand this image. Simply entitled "Sky Map," it was created by Polish designer, Paulina Urbańska. It shows various constellations and where their stars begin in the early evening. It then follows the path created by the earth's rotation, illustrating where the same stars end up in the morning. Colored areas of the paths are daylight hours.

This map is just begging for some interaction to make it more useful, but it's beautiful as is. Be sure to check out all of Paulina's other lovely works.

[via @visualloop]

Network diagrams are notoriously messy. Even a small number of nodes can be overwhelmed by their chaotic placement and relationships. Cody Dunne of HCIL showed off his new work in simplifying these complex structures. In essence, he aggregates leaf nodes into a fan glyph that describes the underlying data in its size, arc, and color. Span nodes are similarly captured into crescent glyphs. The result is an easy to read, high level look at the network. You can easily compare different sections of the network, understand areas that may have been occluded by the lines in a traditional diagram, and see relationships far more quickly.

I love the elegance and simplicity of Cody's work. He details every step of the new layout in his paper, and it's definitely worth a read. The code for it will be pushed to NodeXL, an open-source tool for Excel, in the coming weeks.

Last week I attended the 29th annual symposium at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland. The HCIL is famous for a little thing known as the treemap, created by the founder of the lab, Ben Shneiderman. It's famous for lots of other visualizations and people too, but it's best known for the treemap.

The annual symposium is put on by the lab to showcase it's latest and greatest research. I sometimes forget that HCIL focuses on things other than visualization, so I had to sit, confused, through a few talks before I realized they weren't about visualization ("Where's the viz?" I was thinking). I won't fault them for not being all about dataviz; the Social Network Analysis Strategies for Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse by lab Director, Jen Golbeck, was thoroughly entertaining and insightful work regarding social networks.

HCIL is very kind and generous in that it puts all of its 25+ years of papers and talks online, and many of its projects are open source. You can also go to each individual's page (faculty/student) to find every talk and paper they've completed.

My favorite talks were:

• Event Flow by the hilarious Megan Monroe
• Reflections of Ourselves: Sensing and Feedback to Inform Everyday Human Behavior by Jon Froehlich
• Automatic translation of 2D textbook figures into 3D tactile models for blind students in STEM education by Tom Yeh (make a shorter title, Tom!)
• PairFinder: Identifying and Measuring Temporal Associations from Temporal Event Sequences by Hsueh-Chien Cheng
• TreeVersity: Interactive Visualization for Comparing two Trees using Topology and Node Value Differences by John Alexis Guerra-Gomez
• Motif Simplification by Cody Dunne (which I'll be reviewing in detail tomorrow).

The work coming out of HCIL is inspirational as well as practical. The lab clearly works from the premise that they can have a direct impact on everyday lives in a very meaningful way.

I also have to give a shout out to Justin Grimes, PhD candidate, for giving me a great tour, long walk, and fantastic discussion on the quantified self, quantified babies, and outdated medical devices.

John Nelson of IDV Solutions put 56 years worth of tornadoes on a map. John plotted each tornado's path and used brightness for its F-scale (level of intensity). He also added secondary charts for deaths and injuries and frequency by F-scale.

It makes a gorgeous map. I would love to see the data incorporated into the wind map.

So... practically speaking, if you live in the Midwest or Southern US, you should probably put this on your reading list.