Techdirt. Stories filed under "infographics" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories filed under "infographics"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Mon, 4 Apr 2011 17:00:00 PDT DailyDirt: Don't Just Give People Numbers... Draw Charts? Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110204/11534212964/dailydirt-dont-just-give-people-numbers-draw-charts.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110204/11534212964/dailydirt-dont-just-give-people-numbers-draw-charts.shtml
  • XKCD has a chart that illustrates radiation dosages to help folks understand what the sievert unit means. No stick figures were harmed in the production of this chart. (Also, feel free to copy and distribute it because it's public domain material.) [url]
  • A slightly more colorful chart of what a sievert unit means is available for purchase -- with all the money going to help with the disaster relief effort. The logarithmic scale on this one is kind of easy to miss on this chart, though... [url]
  • Here's a chart that's a bit more complicated to read, but it also incorporates exposure time. Unfortunately, Roy G Biv is apparently not helpful for determining the order of severity. [url]
  • The New York Times published a nice table explaining how far the effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster have spread. For the radiation detected near British Columbia, "a person would have to drink 3 million glasses of water at one time to reach a problematic dose in the thyroid." [url]
  • To find more stuff on research & research tools, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  
    • By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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    ]]>     urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110204/11534212964     Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:59:00 PDT Infographic Does A Great Job Misrepresenting Opportunities Of The Digital Era Dennis Yang http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100413/1647599007.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100413/1647599007.shtml infographic depicts the number of sales that must be made in order for a solo artist to make "minimum wage" in a month. The graphic is obviously meant to be a bit shocking, but even the slightest bit of digging turns it into more of a shoulder shrug. First of all, it is a bit misleading in that it compares not quite apples to oranges, but apples to apple slices to apple sauce to apple juice -- all in one chart. It compares albums and singles and streams all on the same scale, which is a bit unfair. If you sell 1 album for $9.99 (that had 10 tracks on it), then of course you would expect to have to sell (roughly) 10 times as many tracks for $0.99 to make the same amount of money -- that's not really much of a revelation. By looking at the data, we can compare apples to apples and get a better sense of what is going on:
    formataverage retail pricemusician revenuesales to earn min. wage
    Self-Pressed CD$9.99$8.09143
    iTunes Album Download$9.990.941,229
    cdbaby Album download$9.997.49155
    Retail Label-backed CD$9.99$0.303,871
    Clearly, it's difficult to make a living simply by selling albums, but it's always been that way. Musicians have long known that in order to make real money, they'd either have to be U2 big, or tour. However, it's very interesting to note that in the new, digital era, artists actually make more off of their album sales in iTunes than they did in the old, physical world. And selling albums digitally through cdbaby, without a label, stands to bring in much, much more money for the artist -- and frees them from the headache of distributing a physical product. The band Pomplamoose, for example, is making a perfectly good living doing just that.

    Moving on, the data claims that to make minimum wage, an artist would need 4.6M plays on a streaming service like Spotify. While that might be technically true, it's a pretty meaningless calculation. It does not take into account the promotional value of streaming -- and unlike selling 143 CDs, getting 4.6M plays of a digital track would certainly lead to significant revenue elsewhere. Surely an artist would be able to translate that much attention into successful live shows or their own CwF+RtB offering. After all, we've seen time and time again that focusing on something as narrow as money earned per track sold (or streamed play) is a limited way to view a musician's earning potential.

    So, while at first glance, this infographic may seem pessimistic, digging a little deeper into the data gives the real story. Exciting opportunities still abound in the world of music for those creative enough to seize them.

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    ]]>     ooo-pretty-charts http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100413/1647599007