UBC CPSC 436V Midterm
12 Mar 2020
Closed book, no electronic devices. Cell phones must be turned off and put away. Place your photo ID
face up on your desk.
One single-sided sheet of notes (8.5"x11") is allowed, keep it so that you can reuse it for the final.
Do not open the exam until told to do so. Answer the questions in the space provided. Do NOT write on
the back side of the pages.
There are 75 points, you have 75 minutes.
Name ___________________________________________________
Signature _________________________________________________
Student Number____________________________________________
5-digit CS userid _______________________________________________
Please write your 5-digit CS id in this box
Q1: Attribute types [8 pts]
What type of attribute are the following? Circle only one of the three choices.
1. Type of cheese (eg Swiss, Brie) categorical ordinal quantitative
2. Eye color (eg brown, blue) categorical ordinal quantitative
3. Class mark (eg C, A, F) categorical ordinal quantitative
4. Tire pressure (eg 60 psi, 70 psi) categorical ordinal quantitative
5. First name (eg Alice, Bob) categorical ordinal quantitative
6. ISBN numbers (eg 978-1-4665-0891-0) categorical ordinal quantitative
7. Unemployment rate (eg 6%, 3.72%) categorical ordinal quantitative
8. Starbucks drink sizes (eg venti, grande) categorical ordinal quantitative
Q2: True/False [12 pts] Circle only one of the two choices.
1. T F The color channels of luminance and hue have similar characteristics because they both convey magnitudes
2. T F The combination of {FirstName, LastName} is a suitable unique key in a table with 10K items representing people
3. T F Showing a distribution requires multiple attributes
4. T F A continuous colormap to show sequential quantitative attributes should have fully saturated hues on each end
xxxxxxxxxand a zero point in the middle with a desaturated color such as white or grey
5. T F Temporal data may have both cyclic and hierarchical structure
6. T F The {action, target} pair of compare shapes describes an appropriate task for tabular data
7. T F Scatterplots are an appropriate visual encoding for the task of showing correlation between two quantitative
xxxxxxxx attributes
8. T F The strategy of deriving new data can be combined with the strategy of a single view that changes over time
9. T F Aligned area is the most accurately perceived visual channel
10. T F Roughly 3-4 bins of categorical color are discriminable when the colored regions are small and scattered
11. T F Position and color hue are fully separable channels, but size and color are not
12. T F The human perceptual system is well suited for delivering relative judgements for the hue channel and absolute
xxxxxxxx judgements for the saturation and luminance channels
13. T F Line charts are well suited for the task of assessing trends
14. T F Heatmaps are compact and highly scalable but need to have their rows and columns reordered.
15. T F Radial layouts are particularly suitable for cyclic data
16. T F Choropleth maps can be misleading when there is a lot of variability in region size
17. T F Segmented rainbow colormaps are suitable for categorical data because they are highly saturated
18. T F Rainbow colormaps are suitable for spatial data and quantitative attributes in tables because they are continuous
19. T F Bivariate colormaps are often misinterpreted because 8% of men are red-green colorblind
20. T F Animated transitions can be used for constrained navigation
21. T F Partitioning data into juxtaposed small multiple views is suitable for tabular data but not spatial data
22. T F Linked highlighting provides a way to show the connections between items across multiform multiple views
23. T F Blue-orange colormaps or redundantly encoding both hue and luminance are both suitable alternatives to
xxxxxxxx red-green colormaps for colorblind users.
24. T F Interactive navigation uses a camera metaphor with a changing viewpoint.
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Q3: Water usage three ways [15 pts]
Credit: https://www.forthgo.com/blog/2019/12/18/bar-mekko-chart-study/
ater use (area) = population (height) x per capita use (width)
A. Water usage by source. w
Ordered by total water usage. Source: fao.org AQUASTAT. Dark grey - groundwater. Light grey - surface water. X-axis is liters
per person per year.
B. x-axis is percent of country’s usage
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C.
Above are three different visual encodings of the same dataset (A, B, and C). State one disadvantage for
each approach, analyzing in terms of how the channels of length (horizontal), height (vertical), area
(length x height of segments/bars), and color are used to encode the attributes of water source (ground vs
surface water), water usage, and population.
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A disadvantage:
B disadvantage:
C disadvantage:
Q4 Maps and Multiples [14 pts]
Credit: https://github.com/jwoLondon/30dayMapChallenge
For each of the two visualizations below (A, B), answer the following questions:
● What type of view coordination is used (single view, multiform, small multiples, overview/detail multiform, overview/detail same
form)? Justify your choice very briefly in terms of whether the visual encoding is same or different, and whether data is shared
between views or subsetted.
● For each kind of mark used, state the mark type and which channels are used to encode what attribute on that mark.
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ach small map represents a single state’s out-migrants, showing where in the US they
A. US State to State Migration, 2018. E
moved. Darker grey indicates larger numbers of people moving. Black squares represent those who did not move.
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7,346 tweets containing the phrase “x% of statistics are made up”.
B. I’m Made Up For You. 2 Sized by the value of x. Content
from tweets posted between 2007-2017. Geolocations are made up.
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Q5: Sketching Electronic Health Record Interface [26 pts]
You are given an electronic health record dataset consisting of events that may have a single timestamp, or
they may have both start and end times. Events also have geographic locations. Each patient may have up to
100 events associated with them. There are up to 100 patients in the dataset. The event type attribute has 5
levels: 4 main types of events (emergency, clinic, home, medication), and one catch-all 'other' category for the
rest. The task is to assess whether patients who use clinics for routine health care are less likely to use
emergency services, and whether this tendency is different for patients with complex medication needs vs.
simple or no medication usage. Sketch two views: an overview showing all patients, and a detail view showing
the data for only a single selected patient. Explain interactive functionality with words and arrows. Briefly justify
your design choices with respect to alternatives.
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