Reference Archive:

I’ve just started playing with this new online interactive visualization tool, but it looks fantastic.

Here are some examples of what other people have produced with it:

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A nice annotated table. Related article.

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Comprehensive visualization of the US Supreme Court. It works best as an office poster, obviously – and can be purchased that way for your lawyer friends. It’s the first project from TimePlots – I look forward to more good things from them in the future

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Would make a good poster. Some of the predictions are questionable, of course. (via)

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Enter an address on the triptrop site and a Googlemap will come up overlaid with subway travel times to various part of NYC. (via)

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Several sites have noted Google’s new “Image Swirl” toy (FlowingData for example).  It’s fun to play with. An example search for “Santa” is below. I would add that the standard Google image search now has a number of really cool options: you can filter by image size, dominant color, and type of image (photo/clipart/drawing – those these categories aren’t always accurate). Filtering by image size, for example, can help exclude pay-for-image library thumbnails.

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Piracy Watch

In: Maps Reference

12 Nov 2009

As a demo for their “visual fusion” software, idvsolutions has produced an interactive map and timeline of global ocean piracy. Not bad, though bing maps seems to be having trouble integrating with it a little.

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This is a bit old (the data ends in July ’08), but I like this animated approach to displaying high frequency data over time. Something like this might be interesting to do for cross-country financial data-series.

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Impressively, Jon Peltier came up with a way to do this in excel (and check out his blog for other really cool excel chart tricks and solutions)

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Available as a print or free PDF file, from Financial Graph and Art. (via Ritholtz)

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Simple instructions on how to break into a Master combo lock in less than 100 attempts (instead of trying all 64,000 possible combinations). (via)

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A wonderful interactive chart showing the frequency range of various musical instruments and how they correspond to human hearing.

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The NYT has a nice tiny tool that provides the most recent data for 25 economic indicators (housing, employment, production, confidence, etc). It appears at the top of their “Economy” page, and an ugly version of the flash tool can be viewed directly here.

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The St. Louis Federal Reserve has an excellent graphing tool called Fred Graph. You can view a variety of economic (not just banking) data over any time period, add/delete series at will, and download the raw data. Below is an example of commercial, consumer, and real estate loans (1940-today); and the same data zoomed in on 2007-today (note the total absence of increased lending). To start, pick a data series from the Fred Page  then click on the graph itself to bring up more design options.

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Call up monthly slivers of data and related news for 6 financial market indicators (dow, treasury yields, libor, commercial yields, CDS spreads, mortgage backed spreads).

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Here is this month’s update of one of my favorite presentations of economic indicators, from Russell Investments. Includes trending, useful popups, drill down links to historical data, and good descriptions of each indicator. It’s really everything an economic dashboard should look like. (ok, maybe they could animate it over time.)

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