Archive for June, 2009

In honor of World Refugee Day (which was Saturday). Roll-overs provide additional detail.

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CHANGES in global food prices are affecting some countries much more than others. Despite a big fall from peaks in 2008, food-price inflation remains high in places such as Kenya and Russia. In China, however, falling international commodity prices have been passed on to consumers faster.

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THE oil market is behaving like a bucking bronco again, and politicians are once more blaming speculators for careening prices. It is difficult to assemble a definitive explanation for the rally: a weak dollar helps oil prices, but evidence for improving supply and demand remains thin. Positions held on NYMEX, the New York commodities exchange, have indeed soared.

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Have a nice weekend everyone.

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Homicide data cut, chopped, sorted, and mapped in all kinds of interesting ways (especially if you live in NYC). Supposedly will be updated regularly. Related article. Hat-tip to Information aesthetics for the find.

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I wish I could find a larger version of this. seems to be lacking a scale too. Strangemaps noticed a few other problems – check out the comments.

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Rochester NY Subway?

In: Maps

19 Jun 2009

I grew up in Rochester, so this was pretty fascinating to me. I’ve seen references to the abandoned tunnels and always wanted to do some urban spelunking. Originally from rochestersubway.com.

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Monthly interactive survey of 54 economist on a number of indicators and issues.

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A good chart of US bubbles. The print version (p.A8, 6/18/09) had much better aesthetics. but the data are the same. Related article.

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Some chart-junk here (raining data points? really?).image

Infectious greed has another version, with historical annotations and some interesting comments:

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Not too bad. of course, these numbers are affected by all kinds of factors (people not listing because they’re underwater, etc). Source: Infectious Greed.

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A table summarizing the oversight reforms proposed on Wednesday. Related Washpost article.

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Ok, I know we’ve all about had it with visualizations of the history, market share, sales, brands, blah blah blah, concerning the US automotive industry — but here’s one last one from NPR. In addition to the map of Chrysler dealership closings shown below, there are several others of moderate interest if you click on the drop down menu in the upper right.

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I should probably send this over to Junk Charts for a proper critique. The transition animations are pretty, and the topic is interesting, but damn there just isn’t anything actually informative popping out at me here that seems worth all that effort. Maybe the data just wasn’t “deep” enough in detail.

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