Reference Archive:

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)

Roll over any nation on this map of the world to see that country’s flag, as well as an explanation of the symbolism of its design.  For example, the colors in Egypt’s flag represent oppression (black), overcome through bloody struggle (red), to be replaced by a bright future (white) – a timeless design, apparently. Thanks to Jack Lucky for the link!

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The Wall Street Journal has a nice article about the weekly ebbs and flows of airline ticket sales. If you want to dig deeper, farecompare.com has done some longer period analysis of this topic.

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Flipping the typical fare question on it’s head, below is a very cool interactive map where you input how much you want to spend and it will show you where you can fly for that much money:

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Kayak.com has also graphed a few charts of average ticket prices, and provides downloadable data:

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Finally, since we’re on the topic, I want to give a Chart Porn graphic design gold star to Hipmunk’s flight reservation site. It’s what selecting a flight should look like:

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It turns out those numbers actually mean something.

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Graph a wide range of World Development Indicators, gapminder-style, using the World Bank’s Data Visualizer. There is also a trade-related version.

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Some airlines (Southwest and Jetblue) have made choosing flights an almost pleasant experience by clearly presenting available flights and costs — most other airlines still suck. Hipmunk is a new flight search tool which applies some simple design techniques to aggregate options clearly. I also love that they have a “sort by agony” option which combines price, duration, and layovers. (via FlowingData)

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The year in a circle. Not sure I agree with a lot of the color choices, but the layout it comprehensive, and includes the lunar calendar. Available as a poster. (via)

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Some really great financial analysis tools here.

Treemaps (for S&P, world, filter by sector, period, drill down as far as you want)

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Same info as bubbles, with roll over graphs:

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Bar, Spectrum, and other performance charts by industry, country, or capitalization:

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Tables of insider trading:

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Futures:

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Foreign Exchange:

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And a crazy filter system for stock tables:

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The World Bank has recently expanded public access to their datasets on a huge scale (many previously only available by subscription). You can view data by country or topic, create a map out of any indicator, download the raw data, and there’s even an iphone app. They are also reaching out to developers to create additional tools and apps. Unlike many UN/WB/IMF online databases, this one is intuitive and easy to explore. (List of available datasets)

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Where do they come from and what do they mean. Note: a complete list of ratings is at the bottom of the same page.

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