Source: WSJ Archive:

Where most regions are grappling with the strains of an aging population – Africa is having the opposite experience.

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Explore the 165,068 murders in the US by where, when, how, and the circumstances. The subtotals next to the filter menu saves a lot of time.

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(Except for Florida – who doesn’t use the FBI’s guidelines for reporting homicide details)

A nicely annotated chart demonstrating how Germany’s economic performance compares to the rest of the Euro Area.

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Interesting scatter plot of service and return performance. Grey dots indicate players already out of the tournament. I don’t like that the top players are indicated with bigger circles – I think a color indicator would have been better, but perhaps the intention was to make them easier to click on? Content wise, it appears that you need both a service and return game to win (which I suppose is no surprise).

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There’s are a lot of nonsense charts and projections in Paul Ryan’s new House Republican budget, but rather than get into political arguments, I’ll just post the ones I thought were actually insightful:

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A number of news agencies took a crack at visualizing Obama’s 2013 budget proposal. (If you want to try it yourself, a shocking amount of detailed data is available in spreadsheet form at the OMB website).

Below is the Washington Post’s version. You can click on any box to see a column chart of historical values. It would have been nice to be able to drill down further, but this is a good start:

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The NYT created a beautiful animated – ummm – I’m not sure what this is. A dorling diagram? Well, it looks pretty, and it’s slightly more detailed than the WashPost version, but I think the brain processes square area better than circles.

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The WSJ posted five charts, but they’re nothing special:

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Here’s an example of how more isn’t always better. Compare the interactive presentation of retail sales data below to the static version – both from the Wall Street Journal. In my opinion the static version presents the information in a much clearer and usable format. The only thing it’s missing is a chart for “total retail sales”. Regarding the interactive version, I’ve never liked stacked bar charts over time unless they illustrate very clear trends – with this many similar segments I think they are pretty silly (though the ability to drill down does alleviate this a smidgeon).  (related article)

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A series of excellent annotated charts on the main indicators of the European crisis.

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There are a lot of these graphs out there. What I like about this presentation from the WSJ is that each dot in each bar can be clicked on for a short biography of the person who died – a nice combination of information and gravitas.

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CNN’s tool maps out where they came from and where they died, and provides an area for others to leave memories for each fallen. While information rich, this one felt very sterile to me, and I couldn’t find anyone that had the “memories” section filled in.

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The NYT’s went strangely artsy, with a digitized mosaic menu of the fallen’s faces:

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The Washington Post’s Faces of the Fallen feature does a good job of presenting summary information, as well as photos of each soldier:

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And the Huffington post comes up with the least interactive, self-identified as interactive (ALL CAPS IN THE TITLE!!!), series of charts I’ve even seen. Pretty sad.

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An  interesting comparison of state primary and caucus dates 2000-2012, both for the Democrats and Republicans.  You can watch Iowa and New Hampshire keep moving back the opening day to stay before other states trying to steal the spotlight. The bad news: Super Tuesday isn’t until March 6th – so we have 3 more months to go of lame media coverage of the Republican field.

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I haven’t posted this version in a while, but the WSJ does keep it up to date with the latest data. I think it’s a lovely use of a heatmap.

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Cheap money and slow growth in the advanced countries has led to large capital flows to emerging market countries, as this interactive tool from the WSJ shows. If you mouse over each country you can view countries’ policy responses. I really like these map/graph combo designs – the two go very well together.

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Barry Ritholtz has another great post about the housing market over at The Big Picture.  In addition to his analytical insights, he pointed out two great tools for looking at housing markets across the country.

The first is a Rent vs Buy interactive from Trulia:

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(related Trulia article and methodology)

Second is the Wall Street Journal’s chart of price-to-income ratios (compared to the 1985-00 average).

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(related WSJ article)

Results from the 2010 American Time Use Survey. These look odd to me – and there are two possible reasons for this:
#1: Everyone lies on surveys (ie – they know they SHOULD be getting 8 hours of sleep, so that’s what they report).
#2: I do not have the lifestyle of an average American.

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(via)

Interactive graph of federal crimes. I wish it had better dynamic filtering so you could look closer at some of the more interesting categories.

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