The Billboard Wayback Machine

When I was in grade school, the top 40 was a huge part of our family fabric. We were in our car a lot back then, and the AM radio was always on. I started buying singles when I was nine years old, and I’m still proud of the fact that my first purchase was “Right Place Wrong Time” by Dr. John. I’m not so quick to share my first album purchase with friends, however. “Right Place Wrong Time” was on the charts the summer of 1973. That was the summer my family moved from Ohio to Illinois. So many memories and feelings were tied up in those few months of starting over - new house, school, neighborhood, friends. Everything was different, except for the songs. The songs were the same. When we made it to Illinois, the new AM radio station – KXOK in St. Louis- was playing all the same songs as the station we left behind in Ohio.One of the first things my two brothers and I did when we arrived at our new home was get our Dad to take us to the Base Exchange (we lived on Scott Air Force Base) and buy the 45’s of our favorite songs. I got Dr. John and my brother Jeff picked up “The Cisco Kid” by War. I think my little brother Brian grabbed "Hocus Pocus" by Focus. We added to our collection over the summer and played those records to death. We'd listen to them all day and go to sleep to them at night, stacking them up ten high on our record player to create our thirty minute evening playlist. When one song finished, the arm would swing back and trigger the next 45 to drop ~Kathunk ~ and the next song would start. The songs from that summer are still magic to me.

A few years ago (years before the appearance of this game) I developed a trivia board game called “HearShot”. It was an audio trivia game, where a sound byte from a popular movie, song, or TV show was played and the players had to answer a "who, what or when" question which mapped to artist, title, or year. For example, the "who, what, when" for this movie quote: “This was No boating accident!” would be: Richard Dreyfuss, “Jaws”, and 1975 respectively. A common complaint first-time players would make before attempting the game was how impossible it was to have to guess the year something came out. Most people were surprised to discover that they were actually quite good at it. If you have a point of reference in your personal history, it’s not hard to conjure when something was popular. And songs especially can trigger memories. The quick hit one can get from a song can be so powerful that it can transport you back in time - like an aural version of Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine. To this day, when I hear “Alone Again (Naturally)”, I smell chlorine. The song was huge during the Summer of ’72, and I spent every day of that summer at Rona Hills public pool where they played the radio over the pool loudspeakers.

Hearing a song is a common memory trigger for people, but what about seeing songs? Just reading the titles and the artist names? Would that provide the same impact? And if you could group titles and artists together by a range of dates that had some personal significance, how powerful might that be? Billboard has a tool that allows you to browse the Top Ten songs from any given chart week, but I want to see more than one week, deeper than the Top Ten, and more than ten songs at a time.

This visualization contains the 10,000+ songs that were in the Billboard Top 40 between January 1964 (when the Beatles "I Want to Hold Your Hand" entered the chart) and March 2011. The view is pre-filtered to display the 98 songs that charted in the summer of 1973. Among them were "The Cisco Kid", "Right Place, Wrong Time" and "Hocus Pocus". It was a jolt to see those songs and others that I had forgotten about, but remembered instantly upon seeing the titles. Just seeing them brought the melodies and lyrics back, and for a brief moment I could remember what it felt like to be nine years old.

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The viz allows the user to select a specific range of dates using the sliders or entering manually, and see the songs from that period ordered by popularity in the period selected. The numbered ranking is based on performance in the selected date range: chart positions and weeks on the chart. Every song that made it into the Billboard Top 40 in that time period will be displayed. The color coding which indicates a track's peak position overall.

Clicking on one of the songs on the list will display a bar chart for the artist, showing all of their Top 40 hits in chronlogical order, color coded by song peak. Each song makes up a segment of the artist bar - the length of segment denotes weeks in the top 40. So the length of the bar is the total weeks the Artist was in the Top 40.

There is also a line chart which displays each individual song's progression on the chart from entry point, to peak, to exit: one point for each week in the Top 40. Ctrl-click on the chart list and you can see multiple songs at once. Highlight an artist and you can see all of their songs, color coded by peak chart range, and the spread of their chart paths over time.

The viz can also be filtered by artist or track, allowing the user to select a single artist or song or several at once and compare their chart histories.

The Source of the Billboard Chart Data

The data for the visualization came from the Whitburn Project dataset which I discovered through Infochimps. The dataset was not made available by Infochimps specifically, but the dataset description referenced Andy Baio’s blog Waxy.org where he describes the dataset in detail, and does some analysis on the tracks. The dataset is a labor of love of a group of pop-music enthusiasts who have come together to catalog and preserve America’s pop music history.

From Baio:

Named after Joel Whitburn and his authoritative Billboard books, the Whitburn Project began in 1998, when a group of 15 collectors pooled their resources to create an MP3 collection of every single in the top 40. The Excel spreadsheets were created to help them verify their collections were complete, with new versions updated and re-uploaded to the newsgroups weekly.”“For the last ten years, obsessive record collectors in Usenet have been working on the Whitburn Project — a huge undertaking to preserve and share high-quality recordings of every popular song since the 1890s. To assist their efforts, they've created a spreadsheet of 37,000 songs and 112 columns of raw data, including each song's duration, beats-per-minute, songwriters, label, and week-by-week chart

There is some question as to the legality of sharing this data, but I'm hopeful that my re-appropriation of the data here falls under the terms of fair use.

The End of the Swimsuit Wars

(Is it the end of world records, too?)

In 2007, Speedo introduced the first of the "High Tech" full-length body suits - the Fastskin Pro - in time for the 2007 World Aquatic championships. The suit compressed the swimmer’s body to give it a more streamlined shape in the water, and contained polyurethane panels which significantly reduced drag. In 2008, Speedo improved upon the FS Pro design and came out with the LZR Racer in time for the Bejing Olympics. 25 world records were broken during the Olympics - 23 of them by swimmers wearing the LZR suit.

In the wake of the Speedo's success (pun fully intended) other manufacturers jumped into the High Tech suit game, hoping to rival Speedo's results. Manufacturers Jaked and Arena came out with suits made entirely of polyurethane. These body suits reduced drag, compressed the body, and also increased the swimmer's buoyancy. Some swimmers started wearing two suits to take advantage of the added buoyancy.

At the 2009 World Aquatic Championships in Rome, 43 world records were broken, but none more spectacularly than the Men's 200M Freestyle mark. In that race Michael Phelps, winner of eight gold medals at the Bejing Olympics, took second to an unheralded German swimmer named Paul Biederman. Biederman clocked an astounding 1:42.00, beating Phelps and taking nearly a second off the world record Phelps set in Bejing. Biederman also shattered the world record in the 400m freestyle at the meet. Biederman was wearing the Arena X-glide suit, and he admitted that the suit made him faster - perhaps as much as two seconds faster. Biederman also stated that until FINA - the governing body of international aquatic competition - disallowed the X-glide suit, he was going to wear it. Phelps' coach was outraged by the result and threatened to pull Phelps from international competition until something was done about the high tech suit issue. I’m not sure how upset Phelps' coach was when the records were going to those racers in the Speedo LZR, but It was clear that technology, and swimmers’ access to it, was having a significant impact on the results and the history books. In the 200m Freestyle final in 2009, Phelps was in the fastest suit made by his sponsor Speedo, while Biederman was in the fastest suit available.

Following the 2009 World Championships, FINA banned High Tech suits from competition - body-length suits were no longer allowed and suit fabric had to be made of textiles (woven fabric).

Turning Back the Clock

The 2011 World Aquatic Championships took place from July 24 - July 31 in Shanghai. It was the first major international meet since the FINA rule change took effect at the end of 2009. Many assumed times would be slower as a result of the suit ban. I was curious to see "visually" what effect the ban would have on times, so I created the interactive viz below. As expected, the times were slower, some returning to the levels that they were back in 2005 before the tech suits hit the market. While 43 world records were set in Rome in 2009, only two world records were set in the 2011 World Championships in Shanghai: Ryan Lochte in the 200m individual medley and Sun Yang from China in the 1500m Freestyle. Both were set in the finals. These are the only two world records that have been set since FINA banned the suits 19 months ago. The impact of the suit technology on winning times is undeniable. World records will be incredibly hard to come by for years to come.

And What of the Biederman/Phelps Rivalry?

Following his success in Rome, Biederman said: "The suits make a difference. I hope there will be a time when I can beat Michael Phelps without these suits. I hope next year. I hope it's really soon." Biederman got his chance on Tuesday, July 26, 2011. Both he and Phelps made it to the Men's 200m final in Shanghai - and so did Ryan Lochte. In the Phelps/Biederman rematch, Phelps beat Biederman by .09 seconds, but Ryan Lochte beat them both with a time of 1:44.04 to take the gold. As Biederman predicted, it was a full two seconds slower than his world record time in Rome.

The Viz

This viz looks at the bronze, silver and gold medal times in individual events (no relays) from the eight major international swimming competitions over the past twelve years. These meets include three Olympic games and five World Aquatics Championships.

The viz contains two dashboards separated as tabs. The “Events” tab shows the shape of the medal-winning times over the past 12 years. The “hockey stick” shape of the winning times is obvious - almost every event achieved it's fastest (lowest) time at the World Championships in 2009 and then took a left turn into slower territory in 2011. The viz allows you to view multiple events at once (side-by-side) or compare events by gender (stacked). The Y- axis height is determined by the historical time gaps (in seconds) for each event. The viz is pre-filtered to show the 200m freestyle for both men and women. Tooltip hovers provide specifics on the medalist (Name, nationality, time, records set).

The “Swimmers" tab shares the same filters as the "Events" tab and provides a table-view of individual swimmers results. You can see multiple swimmers times by event and meet along with a stack ranking of swimmers medal haul based on the filters. The ranking is based on a weighting (gold-5pts; silver-3pts; bronze-1pt). The Gold/Silver/Bronze color coding is repeated throughout the viz.

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Austin City Limits Popularity Contest

The Austin City Limits Music Festival is taking place this weekend. Browsing the list of performers, a few questions came to mind. First, what were The Eagles doing there? And second, why was Richard Thompson so far down the list? How is the billing order established when there are 125 bands to sort? As it turns out, Richard Thompson probably got better than he deserved.

As is the case with all mega-festivals and Hollywood blockbusters, the billing order is determined by the perceived "StarPower" of the artist. This ranking may also influenced by the demands of the artists, unless you're Spinal Tap, in which case your billing will forever follow the "Puppet Show".

A nice feature for the ACL Festival attendees is the ability to create custom online schedules, filling in the bands they plan to see. The number of fans who are planning to see each artist is visible on the line-up page when you mouse-over the artist's name. So, with a little elfin magic, we can see how the billing order established by the festival organizers matches up with an artist's actual popularity, as voted on by the 40,000 plus attendees (or wannabe attendees) who have taken the time to fill out a custom schedule.

This viz plots the ACL organizers' rank along the X-axis and the Fan rank along the Y-Axis. If the ACL rank and the Fan rank are in agreement, the artist's name should fall on the superimposed trend line. If the artist is more popular than ACL figured, they will be to the left of the line. If they don't have quite the draw that the artist's agent had hoped for, then they will be to the right of the line. The color coding follows the text sizing on the line-up page where Blue are the big names, Orange are the mid tiers, and Grays are everybody else.

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For the most part, the organizers got it right. You can see how the tiers of artists are grouped together: blue on top, orange in the middle and gray at the bottom. When you see the colors overlapping (e.g. When gray is above orange), this is where the billing doesn't match the fan votes.

The most popular artist based on schedule adds is the one closest to the top, which turns out to be the Black Keys. Despite their billing of 18th (Following top/bottom left/right ordering), 53% of of the attendees are planning on seeing them. Unfortunately, Richard Thompson is pushing left. ACL have him 45th - the fans have him at 90.

The biggest outlier is The Verve Pipe who were billed 118th out of 125, but ranked 36th by the fans with 6,120 schedule adds. You may not remember The Verve Pipe's hit from 1996 The Freshmen, but clearly 15% of the ACL attendees remember it (or at least recognize the name). Or maybe half of those people are getting the Verve Pipe mixed up with The Verve. I know I always did.

So with the added benefit of double name recognition/confusion, why are the Verve Pipe so far down the bill? Well, it turns out they've just recently re-formed and are now playing children's music. They are actually performing at the Festival-within-a-Festival: Austin Kiddie Limits. So if the 6,000 fans who are planning on seeing them are disappointed, or if all of the little tiny chairs are taken by the time they arrive, you can't blame the Pipe: they "Won't be held responsible".

And going forward, if you get the two bands confused, you can keep them straight by remembering that the Verve PIPE play children's music, and the Verve were sued by the Rolling Stones.

~kb

The NBA Pantheon - Has Kobe Cracked the Top 12 Yet?

In Bill Simmons' "The Book of Basketball", he undertakes the formidable task of identifying the top 96 professional basketball players of all time and ranking them in order of greatness. He brings an incredible breadth of knowledge to the task, and makes his case for each player based on stats, achievements, interviews, and opinion.

Simmons is first and foremost a basketball fan. He grew up going to Celtics games with his Dad in the 70's and 80's. As such, he's not an entirely impartial judge of greatness, and cops to a few things right out of the gate:

1) He's an unabashed Celtics fan
2) He believes greatness is measured more by team success (exemplified by Bill Russell) than individual stats (exemplified by Wilt Chamberlain)
3) He can't stand Kobe Bryant

So we know going in that Simmons will base his rankings more on rings than scoring titles. And we can assume Larry Bird will be deified while Bryant's achievements will be discounted .

What are the measures of Greatness?

To help make his case, Simmons includes all of the players career stats and accomplishments. It's an exhaustive, season by season list. In order to assist in an objective assessment of greatness, I have taken some of these individual achievements and assigned a point score, weighting each achievement based on relevance to greatness. My point system is a total swag and obviously subjective, but it can be applied objectively to all players. The achievements ranked in order by award amount are:



The achievements with an "*" are long-standing awards which came into existence before 1960 and can be used to compare all players across the last 50+ years. The NBA Finals MVP was introduced in 1969, so can't be used as an objective measure across time. I'm giving an NBA Championship the most points because all of the greats (with the exception of perhaps Wilt Chamberlain) concur that rings matter most. So a Championship should count more than an NBA MVP. "AS_MVP" is All-Star MVP. The 'Seasons Played" marker ("+") does not have any points associated with it, but provides a way to monitor the seasons where a player was active.

Why not include other stats like total points, rebounds, assists, etc in the measure? Because each player contributes differently and fills up the stat sheet differently. The weighting of different stats (rebounds, points, assists, steals) is hard to normalize. Moses Malone was a rebounding machine, Jordan was a scoring machine, Magic was a play maker. Ultimately, how a player's unique talents contribute to the success of their team is what should matter most, and that success can be objectively assessed based on achievement.

So Who Does Simmons Think is the Greatest?

Simmons' Pyramid consists of five levels. The top level is referred to as "The Pantheon" and consists of the twelve greatest basketball players of all time. Those players (as of 2008 when Simmons wrote the book) were:

1) Michael Jordan
2) Bill Russell
3) Kareem Abdul-Jabar
4) Magic Johnson
5) Larry Bird
6) Wilt Chamberlain
7) Tim Duncan
8) Jerry West
9) Oscar Robertson
10) Hakeem Olajuwan
11) Shaquille O'Neal
12) Moses Malone

Kobe Bryant was ranked 15th.

Because The Pantheon is based on achievement to date, it will never be a static assemblage of players. New players will always be knocking on the door. Kobe Bryant has been knocking for a while, but is he in yet? And, more importantly, has he passed Bird yet?

Has Kobe passed Larry yet?

When Simmons wrote the book, Bryant and Bird each had 3 NBA Titles to their names. Bird also had 3 League MVPs and 2 Finals MVPs. Bryant had no Finals MVPs (Shaquille O'Neal was the Alpha Dog on the three Championship teams) and one league MVP. Looking at both Bird and Kobe's careers over the last 14 years, we can see that the Birds placement over Bryant was accurate after 12 Seasons. Bird had clearly achieved more than Bryant up to that point.

Bryant and Bird


The Lakers won the title in Kobe's 13th season and Kobe was the Finals MVP. The Lakers won another championship in Kobe's 14th season (2009-10), giving Kobe five titles to his name and a second Finals MVP award. While Larry Bird was an early achiever, plateauing after 9 years, Kobe got off to a slow start but has continued to climb every year since his 4th Season. After 13 Seasons, Kobe was dead even with Bird, and passed him after 14 Seasons.

It would appear that Kobe is now in the Pantheon


How do you account for different career Lengths?

Longevity plays a huge role in a player's achievement score. While Bird's career was cut short by injuries, Kareeem Abdul Jabbar played for 20 seasons, won a championship in his nineteenth season, and finals MVP awards in both his second season (1971) and his sixteenth (1985). Kareem kept going and kept achieving at a high level. Most players are like Bird, they peak and then level-off.

Bill Walton (Simmons rank: 27) is perhaps the best example of a player who's potential was cut short by injury. He was healthy through 4 seasons. In that time he had racked up a championship, finals MVP, and an NBA MVP. His achievements through 4 years surpassed both Larry Bird and Michael Jordan, and had him fifth all time behind Magic Johnson at that point in their careers.

Some players, like Walton, burn brightly for short periods then quickly fade. At Walton's peak you could make an argument for him being in the Pantheon. Hakeem the Dream had a transcendent season in 93-94 where he won the NBA MVP, Defensive MVP, a championship, and the Finals MVP. No other player accomplished all of that in one season. How do you account for that kind of single season dominance in the all-time measure? Simmons accounted for it by placing Olajuwon in the Pantheon, when his total careers stats don't quite afford him that high of a rank.

Whose Place in the Pantheon Did Kobe Take?

Kobe's clearly in the Pantheon now. But how do you compare someone who's still adding to their achievements to those whose careers are complete?

Most players have reached their peak by their 14th season and then plateau. The 97-98 Season was the 14th Season after Jordan entered the league (but only his 12th complete season as a result of the baseball sabbatical). In the 97-98 Season, Jordan won his 5th NBA MVP, the Bulls defeated the Utah Jazz for Jordan's 6th title and he also won his 6th Finals MVP award. Jordan retired (for the second time) after hitting the championship-clinching shot at the buzzer in game six. Magic, Bird and Russell were effectively done after 13 Seasons (Magic briefly attempted a comeback years later). Chamberlain and West retired after 14. Kareem is the one Simmons Pantheon player who was still going strong after 14 seasons - until Kobe. Assessing all of the Pantheon players at the 14 year mark is one way to see where Kobe currently stands.

The attached viz has pre-selected Simmons Pantheon of 12 plus Kobe. It is pre-filtered to only show the first 14 seasons of each player and only include the achievements that existed prior to 1960. The viz is interactive and can be filtered on player, number of seasons, and achievements. ALL of the awards, seasons, and 96 Players in the Pyramid are available for review.

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Both the player color legend and the Achievements by Year chart are sorted in order. In addition, I'm displaying Simmons Rank next to each players name so you can see where he put them.

Through 14 seasons, Russell is first, Jordan is second and Bryant is in seventh position, just behind Jerry West and just in front of Larry Bird . The player who Bryant displaced in the Pantheon was Hakeem Olajuwan.

If you were to include ALL of the players in Simmons Pyramid using this criteria, 3 other Celtics who were on the championship teams of the 60's jump into the Pantheon: Cousy, Havlicek, and Sam Jones, with Cousy ( a Simmons Level 4 player) jumping from 21st to fifth position all-time. Shaquille O'Neal, Oscar Robertson, and Moses Malone are the Pantheon Players who are displaced (along with Hakeem).

So Who's in The All Time Pantheon now ?

If you filter the viz to include ALL of achievement scores (pre and post 1960), ALL of the Seasons, and ALL 96 Players, the Simmons top 4 are the same players but change order. Kobe is firmly in the middle and still climbing - looking down at Bird. . . But he's still looking up at Jordan.

1) Jordan (1)
2) Jabbar (3)
3) Russell (2) * No Finals MVP
4) Johnson (4)
5) Duncan (7)
6) Bryant (15)
7) O'Neal (11)
8) Chamberlain (6)
9) Havlicek (13)
10) West (7)
11) Bird (5)
12) Cousy (21) *No Finals MVP

Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and the art of Graphical Manipulation

The folks at BP would like you to think they're doing an amazing job of cleaning up their mess. Look at all that positive green growth. Green is growing. Green is good. BP is green.

Stephen Few calls them out on how they are over-stating the success of their clean-up efforts by using a cumulative bar graph. Steve does a great job of showing how the effort has actually slowed over time if you look at the daily amounts collected.

I took Steve's numbers, used an estimate of 15,000 barrels leaked per day which is half-way between current predictions of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels per day, and came up with this view of the spill to date. BP's success in the containment of the spill is not quite as impressive with this view: The oil leaked to date dwarfs the amount that has been captured by BP.

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Note: As "anonymous" points out in the comments, this does not take into account oil that has been collected on the surface - only oil captured by the "Riser Insertion Tube Tool". However, best-case scenarios of experts estimate that only about 10% of oil, once spilled in open water, can be re-captured.

2009 Tour De France Individual Time Trial at Annency

Below is a visualization I put together in the summer of 2009 of the the TDF Stage 18 Individual Time Trial at Annecy. VeloNews posted the complete splits for the riders the day after the race. I took that as an opportunity to "See" what the race looked like. How consistent were each of the riders? How did the riders gain and lose ground throughout the race? Where did certain riders excel and others drop off the pace?


The Viz is interactive and can be filtered by individual rider, team, split, and finish position.

The bar chart (Riders by Position at Split) stack ranks the riders position based on the split criteria. The name field includes their Start Position (Their GC Rank that day - and their final place in the Time Trial). The width of the bar and the bar label tracks the seconds off the leader.

The line chart (Cume Position at Split) has one line per rider and shows their overall position at each of the splits. If their line crosses another line they changed positions on course.

This isn't a great use of color, as there's no good way to encode 160 riders by color in a way that is at once unique and distinguishable ( many colors are used multiple times), but it works well enough when viewing subsets of the entire peloton. I have pre-selected only the top 20 riders for display, but all can be viewed at once by using the slider filter.

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There are 3 filters on the viz. The "Finish Slider Filter" allows you to select a group of riders based on their finish position. The viz is pre-filtered to show only the top 20 riders on the day. NOTE: Modified the viz to show GC contenders in the 2011 Tour. The "Split Check Box" filter on the left applies to both charts and allows you to show any combination of splits. The splits are cumulative. The viz is pre-filtered to show the final result by including all five splits. To see who won the first split, select only box one and the riders in the bar chart are re-ordered based on their place in the split. To see who was leading after the 3 split check boxes 1,2 &3 and the riders are reordered based on their times at the end of the third split. When a bar is to the left of zero it means the rider gained time on the leader. This is most evident in split 2 where a number of riders made up ground.

Clicking on a line or a bar in one of the charts will highlight that rider across the charts. To view just one rider, select the rider from the alphabetic drop-down list above the color legend (Making sure the slider and Team filters are set to include all riders). You can see stats on each rider by mousing over the lines in either chart. Holding down the CTRL key allows you to select multiple riders at once, graying out those that aren't selected.

The line chart can be a bit difficult to interpret. And when including all of the riders at once they become completely unreadable. But when highlighting just a few riders, they really start to tell a story. Who's declining across the duration of the race (downward slope ), who's coming back(upward slope). Certain expected trends are evident - most of the climbers trend up in the third split (the climb) and achieve their highest cumulative standing after the climb - Few were able to hold onto that position over the last 12km.


The Race

The splits were not evenly spaced. The first split didn't come until almost at the halfway point (18 Kilometers into the 40 Kilometer race). The splits, split distances, and riders with the best times for each were:

Split 1 (18km) : Contador -20:02
Split 2 (7 km) : Moreau - 7:49
Split 3 (The Climb- 3.5km) : Evans - 8:25
Split 4 (The Descent - 8.5km) : Cancellara - 7:46
Split 5 (3.5 km) : Pate - 2:52

Contador (Yellow) won it by being strong throughout, posting the fastest time at the first split, and absolutely crushing it on the climb (the third split), beating everyone in the field except for Cadel Evans (Green). Cancellara ( Blue) made a furious charge following the climb, averaging 40 MPH over the final 12KM which earned him the fastest time in the fourth split, and second fastest in the fifth and final split. His late charge ultimately fell 3 seconds short, however. Had the course been 41km instead of 40.5km, he might have pulled it off.

Armstrong (Black ) started strong and faded. He was in fourth place at the first split, but was in twelfth at the second split and continued to fall back at each split, eventually finishing in sixteenth place.

What's as impressive as Contador's performance on the flats is Cancellara's performance on the climb. He placed 14th on the climbing stage, ahead of climbing specialists like Armstrong and Vande Velde. It seems that Cancellara held back on the first two splits, saved himself for the climb, and then "Turned Himself Inside Out" over the last two splits. It's a strategy that almost worked. There were 158 riders on the day and Cancellara was the 77th rider on the course. Cancellara's time held up for 81 riders - until the last rider of the day beat him.

Men And Ladies Figure Skating Results - By Program

The viz below builds on the original Men's Long Program viz that I posted a few days ago. I have added the Women's Long and Short Programs to the viz with radio button selectors on the top left. I'm displaying only the top 6 finishers in each of the individual programs.

The data was pulled from the Vancouver Games Site . The viz contains 3 graphics: a bar chart and 2 heat maps. The skaters always appear in the columns, but the order changes for each component - They are always sorted left to right by score. The Bar chart shows the combined score of each skater in the free skate. Each of the Heat Maps describes a different component of the combined score: Executed Elements & Program Components. Deductions is a third component of the combined score.

I have sorted the Executed Elements top to bottom in descending order by Base Value so that the most difficult elements are at the top. Elements with two different Base Value scores are those that were attempted in both halves of the program - reflecting the 10% bonus.

An element's score is derived by adding (or subtracting) the "Grade of Execution" to the base Value. The displayed score is the addition of the Base value and the "GOE". The color shows whether the grade of execution was positive (Green), neutral (Gray), or negative (Red).

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Trying to cram a lot into a small space in this dashboard. In order to fit it all and have it still be legible I needed to add a scroll bar to the Executed Elements heat map. Need to scroll down to see all of the elements in each program, and to see the total scores for each skater (That are carried over to the combined score).