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
In the story we can see an ordinary man who have dominating wife and he is not good in ordinary
life. But his mind is full of fantasies in which he plays the role of hero, saves lives, navigates enemy
territory and proves himself that he is a real man.
The main character of this story Walter Mitty is a dispersed, calm person who is unhappy with his life
and domination of his wife. To find a relief from his problems, he escapes the reality, through
daydreaming in which he sees himself as a hero.
Elderly gentleman Walter Mitty spents a few hours alone in town while waiting for his wife, who is
having her hair done. During this time he imagines himself as a main heroic character in various
extraordinary stories.
The story is about a former navy commander that is now an elder man. He is now living a simple life
with his wife but several situations reminds him his past in the navy.
Walter Mitty is a daylight dreamer and gets away from his meaningless life imagining himself as a
hero in different situations. Most of those daydreams makes him forget reality for a while causing
him several problems.
B) 5 sentences
Walter Mitty is a daydreamer who gets away from reality in a profound way. Walter’s life aside from
the daydreams is quite dull. Sometimes he imagines himself as a talented doctor or an aircraft pilot
but in every dream he is the irreplaceable hero. Those daydreams while give Walter’s life some
excitement also makes him absent from reality too many times. Since he is extremely dreamy his
wife is quite tired of him.
Walter Mitty, the main character, is described as the man of various faces and different lives. The
whole story is divided into several parts, each expanding in specific plot. In one of them doctor Mitty
is introduced as a proffesional admired by reputable specialists, who is chosen to be the one to save
VV064 Week 9
life in operating room. Another story describes Mitty as a captain sacrificing himself and fearlessly
getting in a bomber designed for at least two pilots all by himself to dump ammunition needed on
war field. Mitty as defendant at a court, Mitty as a truthful understanding elderly husband.
C) 10 sentences
Walter Mitty is an ordinary man who fulfills the tasks which his wife assign to him. He appears to be
unsuccessful and bored in his real life. He has no job, he is a poor driver and he is so forgetful. His
wife does not respect him. She speaks to him like to a child and permanently leave him to wait on
her. She ordered him to buy overshoes and "Puppy biscuit". So he went looking for a market but
during his trip he decided to escape into his imagination from his poor life. Once he plays a role of a
military officer who inspire and motivate his crew by his high level of self-confidence. In another
fantasies he is a brilliant doctor who perform an operation or killer who sits in the court room or
even a brave pilot. Sometimes he returns to real world when something disturbed him but he returns
to his imagination again and again.
Walter Mitty is a former navy commander. Nowadays, Walter is an elderly man living in England.
While bringing his wife to the hairdresser’s, he starts to act strangely. She notices that something is
wrong. During the haircut, Walter is searching for something, but cannot remember for what. His
mind cannot get focused because he is consistently disturbed by everything. Every sound, every
situation reminds him in past in the navy. He lives in a constant half-dreaming half-awake state.
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.
VV064 Week 9
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.