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.

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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Enter your household income and see where you rank in 344 areas around the country:

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There’s some interesting behind the scenes information on the news paper version here:

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(via FlowingData)

Here’s an example of how more isn’t always better. Compare the interactive presentation of retail sales data below to the static version – both from the Wall Street Journal. In my opinion the static version presents the information in a much clearer and usable format. The only thing it’s missing is a chart for “total retail sales”. Regarding the interactive version, I’ve never liked stacked bar charts over time unless they illustrate very clear trends – with this many similar segments I think they are pretty silly (though the ability to drill down does alleviate this a smidgeon).  (related article)

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This is pretty damn funny. Thanks to Rebecca Southers for passing it on!

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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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