Reference Archive:

Interesting diagram and article on knowledge management.

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I love how people will spend hours reading yelp to find the best tacos in town, searching for the cheapest flights for their next vacation, looking for costume accessories on etsy, comparing reviews of their next phone upgrade or amazon purchase, yet base their vote for leader of the free world on facebook rants and memes. The reviews are in. The information is available. Go read it. I will try to post some well designed site and tools to help below.

Vote411
Find personalized info on your voting locations, view down-ticket matchups, and any referendum items.

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Ballotpedia

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FiveThirtyEight
Want to know how the latest polls look? 538 has the most reliable analysis

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Draw Your Own Electoral Map (CNN)
Try your own hand at allocating electoral votes.

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I always get confused by this shit. I grew up with my dads cousins kids and can never remember how to reference their relationship.

 

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Flowingdata also has a version:

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More awesomeness from xkcd. It needs a third axis to factor in how annoying the task is.

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I am always googling these, so it’s nice to have them all in one place. Of course, they will probably change in a week. Here’s an older one that includes sizes for additional services (google+, twitter, youtube, etc). Anyone know of a permanent repository?

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Some basic demographic data on the United States and the World. Besides being able to drill down into the numbers several different ways there are a couple of interactive charts – like the population pyramid where you can watch the baby boomer bulge move over the years.

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Very nice and intuitive, from sblattindesign.

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They also have one on knives:

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Some of the data points here are interesting, but I think it throws together too many different data types. Mass fatalities count as “Human Gatherings”?!? The colors are beyond drab, and the spiral just adds to the confusion. In summary: Ick.

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Gold

In: Global Economy Maps Reference

12 Jan 2012

Some pretty interesting facts about gold.

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We could probably critique a few things here, but it’s so nice to see an infoposter where they actually put in a lot of useful data – in charts! – that I think we can let those slide.

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Daniel Rathbone created this tool to aggregate used car prices from Craigslist. Besides being a useful way to shop for cars, it’s also interesting to see how different brands and models hold up in value over time. For example, check out the Accord vs Corvette below.

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Here’s one for all you DJs out there. A map of where different instruments fall on the sonic scale.

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Not quite as comprehensive as the version we posted in 2009 below:

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Visualization of several United Nations indices on education, income, and health. I’m not quite sure what the point of using a “tree” is, but they obviously put some thought into it: The height of the tree trunk is proportional to the total value of the HDI. The size of the three branches are proportional to each sub-indicator. The branches are ordered in increasing order from left to right. The color of the trunk is the average of the color of the components.

Here’s a tree “legend”:

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and a comparison of the United States and China:

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I’ve praised Hipmunk’s slick airline reservation interface before. Now they’ve added hotels – and it’s awesome. Besides mapping out locations and allowing filtering on prices and amenities, you can also overlap heatmaps for food, tourism, shopping, nightlife, and “vice”.  The map below is for Washington DC’s nightlife, and is pretty damn accurate.

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Useful reading if you are a human being:

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(via)