VV064 Week 9
Student Summaries
Look at the following summaries in A (2 sentences) and B (5 sentences) and then do the following:
1) Quickly read the summaries. What are the differences between them in each group?
2) Choose two summaries in A and one in B, then go through them and make any corrections
or alterations you deem necessary.
A) 2 sentences
1. The story deals with an older man Walter, who is often not paying too much attention to the
reality while daydreaming of being a heroic character. During a common shopping day with his wife,
he imaginary becomes a brave hydroplane commander, a surgeon, an assassin and a pilot, always
inspired by details in his surroundings.
2. The secret life of Walter Mitty is a short novel which describes part of a day of a man named
Walter Mitty, who leads boring life, and so he makes up a lot of imaginary situations in his head. The
story is a mixture of real and made up situations and there is always some connection between real
and imaginary story.
3. Walter Mitty is an ordinary man with unordinary day dreams. One moment he is together with his
wife shopping and few moments later he is likely to be experienced surgeon or WWII pilot.
4. Walter matty a man with nothing special except his imagination goes on a trip to the town along
with his wife. As he driving, shopping and waiting for his wife in the hotel or outside the drugstore,
walter live the fantasies of being once a navy plane commander, a famous surgeon, a brave pilot and
a man facing the firing squad.
5. The short story is about an ordinary man, Walter Mitty, who is drifting of to daydreams inspired by
his surroundings during a seemingly ordinary day. In the daydreams Walter Mitty is performing
different heroic acts such as performing a surgery nobody else could perform.
VV064 Week 9
B) 5 sentences
1. The story is about man Walter Mitty, who drives into Waterbury, Connecticut, with his wife for
their regular weekly shopping and his wife’s visit to the beauty salon and during that time he is
experiencing five heroic dream events. First is as a pilot in the storm, who powering up of the Navy
hydroplane and the beginning is followed by Mrs. Mitty’s complaint that Mitty is driving too fast,
which means that he is dreaming and out of touch with the reality. In the next event Mitty is
excellent surgeon, who immediately follows his taking off and putting on his gloves and driving past a
hospital. Third event takes place in the courtroom, where Mitty is questioned by attorney as an
assassin. In the fourth dream day, Mitty is inspired by the Liberty magazine and he is volunteering a
pilot against WWII Germany and at last Mitty is facing firing-squad while he is standing against a wall,
smoking.
2. Walter Mitty was an USA Navy ex Commander and doctor, who now was retired. One day he was
taking his wife to the hair salon. In their way there, everything reminded him of the past. Driving
reminded him of how he got though the storm with the navy hydroplane, hospital of his job and the
court, time when he was framed for murder. He was stuck in his past and his wife often advised him
to see a doctor.
3. The story tells the reader about an old man who drives his wife to the hairdressers’. He spends the
boring moments creating adventurous stories about himself and playing them in his head.
Sometimes, he is an military officer, in another story, he is a well-recognized doctor. All of these
stories strongly contrast with his ordinary life with his wife in charge. In this real life, his strongest
winnings were remembering what he promised to buy and acting as injured, when he has to ask for a
help with car chains.
VV064 Week 9
David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization
Listen to the presentation and then do the following:
1) What was the presentation’s goal? Did it succeed in putting its ideas across?
2) What was the presenter’s style? Was it formal or informal? Serious or humorous? What were
some features of his language use?
3) Look at the following phrases and try to identify when they appeared in the presentation and
their function.
a. This is the $Billion Dollar o-Gram, and this image arose out of frustration I had with the reporting
of billion-dollar amounts in the press.
b. Let’s take a look. This is Mountains Out of Molehills, a timeline of global media panic. (Laughter)
So, I’ll label this for you in a second. But the height here, I want to point out, is the intensity of
certain fears as reported in the media. Let me point them out.
c. But what I love – and I’m a journalist – and what I love is finding hidden patterns; I love being a
data detective. And there’s a very interesting and odd pattern hidden in this data that you can only
see when you visualize it. Let me highlight it for you.
d. Can you guess what this data set is? What rises twice a year, once in Easter and then two weeks
before Christmas, has a mini peak every Monday, and then flattens out over the summer? I’ll take
answers.
e. So there’s a titanic amount of data out there now, unprecedented. But if you ask the right kind of
question, or you work it in the right kind of way, interesting things can emerge.
f. Let me ask you a simple question with a really simple answer: Who has the biggest military budget?
It’s got to be America, right? Massive. 609 billion in 2008 – 607, rather. So massive, in fact, that it can
contain all the other military budgets in the world inside itself. Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble,
gobble.
g. 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.
h. 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 me because 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 to is
that visualizing information like this is a form of knowledge compression. It’s a way of squeezing an
enormous amount of information and understanding into a small space.
i. So, just to wrap up, I wanted to say that it feels to me that design is about solving problems and
providing elegant solutions, and information design is about solving information problems.