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]

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.

Doug's more developed work dealt with his self-tracked health data. He's a type-1 diabetic and monitors his blood glucose, insulin dosage, and diet among other things. His visualization showed three months worth of data by which he says he was able to see how a low-carb diet helped keep his blood sugar in check. Doug's blog post detailing his process and visualization is worth a read.

The ITP Spring Show runs through this evening at 721 Broadway in NYC. Over 100 projects are on display making this a must see of interactive innovation.

Gay rights vary across states and by region. The Guardian US interactive team does their research and shows this variance, covering several issues, from school to marriage. Segmented concentric circles make the foundation of the interactive where each circle is an issue, and each segment is a state. The states are organized by region, so it's easy to see where areas of the country stand.

Be sure to scroll down for regional breakdowns by issue.

Nice work from both a technical and storytelling standpoint.

Related

• What your state is the worst at – United States of shame
• Abstract maps of the United States
• Map: United States of surnames

With the Titanic anniversary this year, Chiqui Esteban dug up graphics back from the time of the event. This one showing the time to cross the Atlantic is the best. "If only we could fly the Atlantic!"

Related

• Will Dark Knight Beat Titanic for Biggest Movie of All Time? [POLL]
• Notes from Interactive Infographics #interinfo #sxsw
• Plummeting Infographics from I.O.U.S.A – A Nation in Debt

In usual xkcd fashion, Randall Munroe plots the depths of lakes and oceans, including "mysterious door which James Cameron built his sub to reach and open."

The New York Times, in collaboration with the New York University Movement Lab, explains music conducting in this beautifully produced video. It's part interview with Alan Gilbert, music director of the New York Philharmonic, and part rendering of motion capture data, which represents Gilbert's conducting.

To capture the data, the Movement Lab installed high-speed motion capture cameras, and Gilbert put on one of those funny-looking suits with the sensor balls on them. He conducted, and they recorded his body and his hands.

Fantasia will probably come to mind as you watch, specifically towards the end when only conducting trails and sensor spots are left to dance on the screen.

Designer Matt Dempsey explains the storyline of Inception in this fun experiment. There were a few flowcharts that came out when the movie did, including one from Christopher Nolan, but this one takes the cake. Just keep on scrolling down to move through levels, and people (the colored circles) disappear and reappear as people go in and out of dreams and limbo.

Movies are a curious business. There a variety of forces that encourage people to pay for a movie ticket with an ever-increasing cost, one of those being the aggregate ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, but it's not uncommon for well-reviewed movies to profit small and poorly reviewed movies to profit big. Krisztina Szucs takes a look at this relationship between Rotten Tomatoes score and profit.

It's like a parallel coordinates plot, but the second column represents two values, budget and worldwide gross, which creates a spotlight effect. So big spotlights represent high profit, whereas narrow spotlights that point down represent well reviewed movies that had relatively smaller profit. Movies are categorized by year and genre.

See the full-sized version here.

This was an entry for the Information is Beautiful Awards, and the challenge was to make use of this dataset of Rotten Tomatoes scores and worldwide gross, among other things. They announced the winners yesterday, but Szucs' work didn't place even though it was better than the graphic that did win.

The judging comments for the winner: "Beautiful colours. Simple condensed design. Clever use of multiple axis. Intriguing findings." No offense to the winning graphic designer, but whaaaa? I didn't get that at all. The rainbow palette must have blinded the judges into confusion.

[Krisztina Szucs via The Functional Art]

The difference:

In this animated short, the relationship between trend and variation are explained with an excellent analogy to a man walking his dog. There is much more variation in the path that the dog takes as compared with the man, but they are both headed the same way. Similarly, weather can be highly variable and climate means long term trends.

I heard that a kitten dies every time a news anchor debunks global warming with an unexpected day of snow.

[Spark]