Source: WSJ Archive:

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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The percent of people unemployed greater than a year is scary. (related article)

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Flowing Data created some nice charts about trends in marriage based on the just released census survey data on Marriage and Divorce.

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The original report has some very interesting tables, and includes data on divorces, for which the median length of the marriage was 8 years. The below chart indicated some surprising(?) differences in divorce trends between racial groups.

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In related marriage research, the authors of the book "Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage and Dirty Dishes", created the below infographic based on a survey of 1,100 married people.

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Consumer prices are moving unevenly across the world. Economic growth, supply and demand, currency values and a variety of other factors drive consumer prices up — inflation — or down — deflation. Bars and figures show change from a year earlier in consumer price indexes.

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The Wall Street Journal has pulled together some interesting differences between the sexes concerning marital, educational, and employment trends.

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Sure, inflation in January was only 1.6%:

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but there’s a lot of variation in the products that make up the CPI (butter was up 19.6% y-y, for example), which this tool from the WSJ lets you explore:

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Want to know how the CPI weights all of these goods? Check out this oldie but goodie:

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In 2010, total compensation and benefits at publicly traded Wall Street banks and securities firms hit a record of $135 billion […] The total is up 5.7% from $128 billion in combined compensation and benefits by the same companies in 2009.

The interactive tree-map has a nice introduction of how it works, but it would have been nice to be able to drill down further to firm level data. On the two bottom graphs, they could have combined them using the same scale so it was easier to view the revenue/profit/compensation ratios. (related article)

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An interactive heatmap of inflation across the globe, from the WSJ. Well done, but I would have expected some 2010 data in there by now.

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A beautiful data visualization of retail sales by type of business. I usually hate stacked bar charts because you really can’t compare what’s happening to any stack except the bottom and the total. The WSJ solves that problem by letting you click on any individual sector, which smoothly animates into a chart of just those bars. Well done! It would be interesting to see this done for the components of GDP.

Interactive Bar chart of retail shopping by category from WSJ

Update: Philip Izzo pointed out to me that the WSJ’s interactive area chart of the Fed’s balance sheet (below) also allows the same kind of drill-down. In addition, both of these are updated regularly as new data is released.

Interactive area chart of Federal Reserve balance sheet

You may have heard that Gawker (home of Gizmodo, Lifehacker, and other terrific blogs) had its user database hacked and posted online. The WSJ used that data to take a look at people’s revealed password stupidity.

50 stupidest passwords revealed by hack of gawker website

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