Red State Socialism

In: Politics

25 Jan 2012

Anyone have a better idea of how to visualize this data? It feels like there should be one – but maybe sometimes a table is the right tool for the job.

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Aesthetically this is obviously quite nice. The roll-over data is snappy quick. The color selection is clear and intuitive. But there’s something about these nested arc charts that I just don’t like – they don’t seem like a very good way to illustrate historical data. It was created as a simple example of the Axiis data visualization framework – which offers several other Flex based graphic tools. (Hat tip to Ryan C for sending this along!)

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This FT map illustrates just how packed things are at the Persian Gulf’s bottleneck. The designers wisely chose to allow viewers to select which layers of information they wanted to see, and also provided useful related information as popups.

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Here is the map with all layers turned on – which obviously would have been a disaster without the interactive filtering.

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(note: some FT features require a subscription to view)

It’s embarrassing how many times I’ve failed to memorize this stuff properly.

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(via CoolInfographics)

Updated for January: one of my favorite economic dashboards. It highlights major macro indicators, what direction they are trending, what the typical ranges are, and lets you drill down to explanations of why you should care. In other words, it’s a very sleek example of how to graph snapshot data while still providing valuable context.

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I’ve loved these types of charts since I first saw them used for insight into the Arab Spring discontent. What’s great about the version linked below is the country coverage that Worldlifeexpectancy.com has managed to pull together – it’s very impressive. If you wander the site, there are a lot of additional maps and charts on global causes of death, life expectancy, and other fun demographic topics. (via)

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On a design note: Wow. I haven’t seen someone attempt a black background and glowing neon fonts in such a manner since the earliest days of the internet. I don’t know whether to applaud the boldness and bust out some glowsticks, or put on sunglasses to prevent a seizure. I suppose since it’s all about death, the black kinda works.

Fuck Your Infographic

In: Humor

21 Jan 2012

Ahhhh, graphic design, how I love you.

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The Fortune Magazine website for this study has lots of related articles and indicators. My favorite it the interactive “Perkfinder” – you select the benefits most important to you, and it tells you which of the top 100 companies provide them:

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Discordianism

In: Culture Humor

20 Jan 2012

An outline of the beliefs and structure of this “religion(?)”.

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Originally in French.

SOPA Opera

In: Politics

20 Jan 2012

Democracy in action? or Congress blowing with the wind?

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A brilliant chart of computer sales. Note the log scale!

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There’s also an animated version (but I like the static one better):

Here’s a look at the same data in terms of market share:

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(via Ritholtz)

A new graphic from HistoryShots, based on Reinhart & Rogoff’s well researched book: This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. The top half of the chart maps financial crises in terms of GDP affected, while the bottom indicates number of sovereign defaults.

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I just ordered a copy. If you’re into this long-term economic history stuff, check out US Booms and Busts (1775-1943).

A new high resolution (down to 30m) map of US forests created using a compilation of data from “space-based radar, satellite sensors, computer models, and a massive amount of ground-based data.” There’s also a detailed article about the project and the decisions that went into it. I guess I knew the midwest was sparse – but I didn’t think it was THAT sparse.

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Ushahidi is a non-profit tech developer of free and open source software for collecting and real-time visualization crowd-sourced information. The project originated in a desire to map post-election violence in Kenya back in 2008 – but it has since expanded into a number of free toolsets that can be set up quickly during emergencies. To be honest, I haven’t dived too deep into this, but I wanted to post it in case others have a need.

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A treemap of the jobs that the 1% are doing – showing a lot of variety. I wish there was more detail about the dataset source. The related article provides some anecdotal examples.

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What is Chart Porn?

An addictive collection of beautiful charts, graphs, maps, and interactive data visualization toys -- on topics from around the world.

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  • Mike Liveright: Two comments, though I do like the look and results... 1) Since $'s are linear, I think that a 2 [...]
  • fatmike182: just a note concerning the photo of the car: it's an actual sculpture by the artist Erwin Wurm. Defi [...]