I'm a sucker for anything cute and bubbly, and the U.K. Energy Consumption Guide created by Epiphany is no exception. It combines a vertical scrolling site with a lot of data visualization about different types of fuel and how they've been used historically. Most of the charts are solid and the interaction adds an even higher level of clarity and understanding.

While I like this circle packing chart, I'm sure there will be doubters. It's very similar to McCandless' natural gas visualization that received a lot of flack. But generally speaking, anything that is engaging and welcoming garners a little extra time from the visitor to make sense of it.

I warned Nathan that I was going to drop a pie bomb on Flowing Data. Well, here it is; it's labeled by its creator as a "feather chart." I really hate to pick on people. I truly think Jon made a valiant attempt to use pie charts innovatively. However, this chart is not effective.

The chart uses 11 million ACT records (for international readers, that's a standardized test in the US). It's trying to show the relationship between ethnicity and test score and income and test score.

I created the y-axis as the ACT composite score, and then used self-reported income bands as the x-axis. Both are discrete, categorical values, even though ACT is numeric. ACT increases bottom-to-top, and income bands increase left-to-right. At the intersection of each variable is a pie chart, sized by the number of students in that group, and colored by ethnicity

The only problem is that the overlapping pie charts occlude one another. Unless one section of the pie chart dominates and allows the other sections to peek out over the top of the previous pie, then the chart is useless. For instance, in the first feather, there's no way to know if the orange section is 40% or 60% for most of the chart.

This chart has really good intentions, but the data would be better served with a bean or violin plot. If you're a subscriber, you can check out Nathan's great tutorial from last week about visualizing distributions.

Gundega Strautmane, a Latvian textile artist and designer, visualizes social and physical networks in a show called Relational Ornaments. The networks are created using various sized pins to depict nodes and threads connecting them to show relationships. Bringing visualization into the tactile world lends it a weight not able to be achieved on a computer screen. It allows the viewer to pause, spend time with the information, feel it, sense it in a more holistic way. The placement of pins and threads is imprecise because they are placed by hand giving the work a very natural, organic feel rather than the rigidity of the exact calculations of programming.

[via The Network Thinkers]

This Wall Street Journal graphic shows who's selling (or sold) a percentage of their Facebook stocks and who's holding steady.

This graphic is the perfect example of why I'm a proponent of the pie chart. First, they stuck to two values per pie chart. That makes it easy to read. Next, they used the size of the pie to denote the number of shares. Finally, they used small multiples to easily compare both the shares owned by each entity as well as change in percentage of shares being sold.

I'm sure bar charts would be fine too, but WSJ really used all aspects of the pie chart very effectively.

[via Barry Ritholtz]

Washington Post's Ezra Klein busts on the filibuster. Gone are the days of Mr. Smith when invoking the filibuster was seen to serve a greater purpose. The filibuster has its roots in Ancient Rome, and apparently even then it had its critics.

This chart is a great example of providing a lot of information in a concise area. All of these data points are relevant to the topic and helps us inform our opinion about the matter.

[via @hfairfield]

The New York Times does it again with this succinct look at tech IPOs. It begins with looking at everything through the lens of when Google's IPO in 2004, which, at the time, was considered huge. The next screen adds Facebook to the mix which dwarfs everything prior. It continues on to show the first day of trading pop and where things landed long term (3 years post-IPO).

It's a very interesting view of IPOs and could actually be a good financial analysis tool with a few more features.

Help is a drug company that offers you less. Less active ingredients, less waste, less confusion, less greed. Its tongue-in-cheek website has a map of its latest sales data called "What's wrong U.S.?" A bar chart for each state shows how many people are buying products for particular maladies.

So why are the inner northwest states having problems sleeping? My guess they're up late worrying about gay marriage.

Garbage in, garbage out the old adage goes. Nigel Hawkes, Director of Straight Statistics, describes a sort of statistical whistleblowing letter to the British Medical Journal.

A team from Imperial College found that in 2009-10, nearly 20,000 adults were coded as having attended paediatric outpatient services, and 3,000 patients under 19 were apparently treated in geriatric clinics. Even more striking, between 15,000 and 20,000 men have been admitted to obstetric wards each year since 2003, and almost 10,000 to gynaecology wards.

It's hard to put your faith in analysis, visualization, policy, and anything else that comes out of data with reports like these. With human error being a known issue, we have to find better ways of inputting and double-checking data. Unfortunate mistakes at the outset only lead to bigger problems down the line.

The unassuming little Descriptive Camera made me rethink data. This project by Matt Richardson was on display at the ITP Spring Show. The basic premise is that you take a photo and the camera spits out a textual description of what it sees. The results are remarkably accurate, detailed, and humorous.
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What is Missing? by Maya Lin seeks to raise awareness about the mass extinction of species. It has a beautiful interface. The world map is black on a sea of black. Your mouse acts as a sort of flashlight layered between land and water, showing you glimpses of familiar coastlines and allowing you to select dots that tell the stories of extinction.
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Yesterday I visited the ever popular NYU ITP bi-annual show which is a showcase of the students' experimental and ingenious interactive work.

I stopped to talk to data visualization student and self-tracker, Doug Kanter, about his work. His first and smaller piece was about the war in Iraq. The image above depicts the number of wounded US soldiers by state (and territory) using the red stripes. The stars show the number of soldiers killed. I'm sure we could quibble about labels and where the bar chart starts, but to me, the tattered appearance of the flag created by data about war is very arresting.
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I'm going to be away for a couple of weeks, with little to no Internet access most of the time, so I've asked Kim Rees to step in while I'm gone. She's the co-founder of Periscopic, one of my favorite information visualization firms, and she was the technical editor for Visualize This. You're in good hands.

You can follow her at @krees.

Be good, and see you all when I get back.

She's all yours, Kim.

Nicolas Rapp dives into the patterns and growth of worldwide shipping in a six-page spread for Fortune Magazine.

Nearly 90% of all goods traded across borders travel, in part, by sea. Typically a ship will undertake six voyages a year. The fastest-growing routes are between ports in Asia, while goods moving out of that continent account for 43% of all maritime trade, according to IHS Global, an economic forecasting firm. Today the most heavily trafficked sea route is between China and the West Coast of the U.S. The total value of goods that travel from China to the U.S. is four times that of those on the return trip—a clear symbol of America's trade deficit.

Despite a gap of a few centuries, the routes today still look a lot like the ones from the 18th century.

I'm pretty sure I'm not in their target audience, but my main takeaway from this video is that now, with easel.ly, you don't need time, money, or skill to make quality infographics. And the prezi-like video seems fitting.

Maybe I'm just stuck in my ways, but I'm having trouble getting on board with these tools. Easel.ly, for example, provides themes, such as the one on the right. There's a guy in the middle with graphs around him and pointers coming out of his body. You get to edit however you want.

So in this case, you start with a complete visual and then work your way backwards to the data, which I'm not sure how you can edit other than manually changing the size of the graphs. (Working with the interface takes some patience at this stage in the application's life.) It's rare that good graphics are produced when you go this direction.

Instead, start with the data (or information) first and then build around that — don't try to fit the data (or information) into a space it wasn't meant for.

Or maybe there's a lot more in store that we can't see yet. Either way, right now, the application is rough at best.

Robert Groves, director of the U.S. Census Bureau, on the Appropriations Bill:

The Appropriations Bill eliminates the Economic Census, which measures the health of our economy. It terminates the American Community Survey, which produces the social and demographic information that monitors the impact of economic trends on communities throughout the country. It halts crucial development of ways to save money on the next decennial census. In the last three years the Census Bureau has reacted to budget and technological challenges by mounting aggressive operational efficiency programs to make these key statistical cornerstones of the country more cost efficient. Eliminating them halts all the progress to build 21st century statistical tools through those innovations. This bill thus devastates the nation’s statistical information about the status of the economy and the larger society.

A lot of the negative comments following the post are from people who have never used Census data, or any substantial amount of data for that matter, and have no clue how a dataset can feed into a model to make other estimates. Then there's the people who don't want to answer questions about their toilets. I wonder what their Facebook profiles look like.

Princeton history graduate student Benjamin Schmidt explores changes in language through TV anachronisms. In Schmidt's most recent analysis, he examines Megan's use of "callback" in the last episode of Mad Men. Above is the ratio of modern use to period use. Notice callback sticking out in the top left.

The big one from the charts: Megan gets "a callback for" an audition. This is, the data says, a candidate for the worst anachronism of the season. The word "callback" is about 100x more common by the 1990s, and "callback for" is even worse. The OED doesn't have any examples of a theater-oriented use of "callback" until the 1970s; although I bet one could find some examples somewhere earlier in the New York theater scene, that may not save it. It wouldn't really suite Megan's generally dilettantish attitude towards the theater, or the office staff's lack of knowledge of it, for them to be so au courant. "call-back" and "call back" don't seem much more likely.

Other anachronisms include the use of "pay phone" and a frequent use of "on the phone with" which didn't peak until the 1970s.

Don't miss the look into Downton Abbey anachronisms. Also, more details from Schmidt on his methodology.

[via Revolutions]

Music visualization with stop motion board games. You can't go wrong.

[via @jcukier]

Jerzy Wieczorek, a statistician with the U.S. Census Bureau, explains why the American Community Survey is worthwhile.

Besides the direct estimates from the ACS itself, the Census Bureau uses ACS data as the backbone of several other programs. For example, the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates program provides annual data to the Department of Education for use in allocating funds to school districts, based on local counts and rates of children in poverty. Without the ACS we would be limited to using smaller surveys (and thus less accurate information about poverty in each school district) or older data (which can become outdated within a few years, such as during the recent recession). Either way, it would hurt our ability to allocate resources fairly to schoolchildren nationwide.

Similarly, the Census Bureau uses the ACS to produce other timely small-area estimates required by Congressional legislation or requested by other agencies: the number of people with health insurance, people with disabilities, minority language speakers, etc. The legislation requires a data source like the ACS not only so that it can be carried out well, but also so its progress can be monitored.

Last month Republicans were pushing a bill to get rid of the American Community Survey, an 11-page questionnaire about housing, education, and other things. Yesterday, a bill passed to cut the survey in a 232 to 190 vote.

Republicans, acknowledging its usefulness, attacked the survey as an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, arguing that the government has no business knowing how many flush toilets someone has, for instance.

"It would seem that these questions hardly fit the scope of what was intended or required by the Constitution," said Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), author of the amendment.

"This survey is inappropriate for taxpayer dollars," Webster added. "It's the definition of a breach of personal privacy. It's the picture of what's wrong in Washington, D.C. It's unconstitutional."

The ACS is the picture of what's wrong in Washington? This is idiocy.