This infographic from Wired explains how Living Machines work to combine waste management and a garden in an office lobby. Honestly, I'm posting this for one reason only. The title is Déjà Poo. Brilliant. Yes. I am that immature.
This infographic from Wired explains how Living Machines work to combine waste management and a garden in an office lobby. Honestly, I'm posting this for one reason only. The title is Déjà Poo. Brilliant. Yes. I am that immature.
[via Graphic Sociology]
It's Friday. It's summer. It's time to relax in the backyard with an ice cold beer in hand. As you consume your beverage, here are 11 infographics about your beer, because the more you know, the more you enjoy. To start things off is a full history of beer (above). Continue Reading
Andrew Garcia Phillips and Stephen Grocer of The Wall Street Journal compare the financial health of 19 major banks according to recent government stress tests. Each row represents a metric, each bubble represents a bank, and the size of a bubble represents the value of a metric for that bank. Roll over bubbles for more information or select a specific bank in the left sidebar. I know a lot of you don't like bubbles in your viz, but this one works for me.
[Thanks, Vikram]
This graphic, from Mike Arauz, describes different levels of online friendship, starting at passive interest (read your blog but not much else) up to investment (deeply care about your success). I originally thought it was just one of those comic infographics, but there's some good discussion going on in the comments of the original post and the Arauz' response.
[Thanks, @JeffHurt]
While The New York Times continues to produce excellent work, GOOD Magazine has been churning out interesting graphics on the other side of the spectrum. In their most recent transparency graphic, GOOD describes the drugs that pose the greatest danger according to local law officials, when asked by the Department of Justice. Underneath the creative bling is essentially a stacked bar chart. The purists are going to cry bloody murder, but hey, it still gets the point across, right?
Have a nice weekend, everyone. See you Monday.
[Thanks, @joaovc]
Just about everywhere you go there's something in the news about swine flu, and so naturally, when I first heard about it, I waited for The New York Times to put up a graphic. That was the first one. Here's the second (above).
Continue Reading
This graphic from New Scientist shows when certain natural resources will run out in the world if we continue at the current consumption rate. However, reader beware, this graphic feels more like eye candy than real data. I'm no ecologist, but something about these numbers doesn't seem quite right. Completely out of gold in the entire world in 45 years? No more indium (for LCDs) in 13 years? I don't quite get the comparison between world consumption rate vs half of the US consumption rate. Why half? Again, I'm no ecologist, so maybe this is totally normal. I dunno. Maybe someone who knows better than me can chime in here.
Data assumptions aside, the design is interesting. A little scattered - but interesting. Can you think of some ways to make this graphic more informative?
There are over 10,000 street vendors in New York City. But how much do you know about them? The Street Vendor Project, in collaboration with the Center for Urban Pedagogy and Candy Chang, provide a visual guide [pdf] in an effort to show the world of street vendors. Wow, that sentence had a lot of interesting names in it. Um, sorry, I digress.
The guide briefly explains vendor regulations, rights, and what a better system might look like - and with an average $14,000 salary, there's certainly room for improvement. There is also a bit of history and demographics with business that began as pushcarts (e.g. Bloomingdale's) and now celebrities (e.g. Jerry Seinfeld) who at one time or another were street vendors.
There is also a second guide [pdf] for the street vendors themselves. Make sure you take a picture of that smiley, abusive policeman.
[via New York Times]
Designers seem to have taken a liking to the idea of showing world statistics as a village of 100. For example, if the world were a village of 100 people, 48 of them would be men. While we're essentially just looking at percentages, the village metaphor seems to do a better job at humanizing the numbers. Along the same lines, this poster series from Tony Ng, World of 100, uses simple graphics to relate to demographics like money, food, and computers:
This is a self-initiated project based on the scenario – If the world were a village of 100 people. There are a few different versions of this text in circulation about the world’s statistics. I found the data very striking and neatly summarises the world that we live in. So I used information graphics to re-tell the story in another creative way.
A few of the graphics seem kind of random, but hey, it's amusing.
[via The Daily Dish]
Sprint's "now" promotion seems to be in full swing. In line with their dashboard to the universe, they're currently airing this commercial (below) that shows various statistics on things that are happening right now. Apparently, the most common text messaging topic is...diapers?
Continue Reading
The infographics and news design blogs have been buzzing the past few days with the announcement of this year's Malofiej awards, which is essentially the awards ceremony for graphics in the news. There were winners from many papers around the world, but as you might expect, The New York Times shined brightest. The Times took home the Peter Sullivan Award (best in show) for Ebb and Flow at the Box Office (above) as well as the Miguel Urabayen Award (best map) for the Electoral Explorer (below).
Continue Reading
As we learned last week, Facebook has been growing worldwide ever since it began as a private network at Harvard in 2003. From 2004 to early 2006, the Facebook user base was all students, but ever since Facebook opened up to anyone with an email address the social networking site has been attracting an older crowd too. The fastest-growing group is now people over 35. This graphic from Lee Byron of the Facebook data team shows this worldwide growth along with interactions among an example user's network.
[Thanks, Casey]
This interesting chart from Russel Investments shows the current state of the economy and what it typically is according to seven key indicators such as credit risk, corporate debt, and market volatility. The blue bars provide a "typical" range, and the orange pointers show the current values. Above each orange pointer is an arrow that indicates whether we're trending towards or away from the typical.
So for example, corporate debt is much higher than usual and it's trending towards typical. Mortgage delinquencies, however, are trending away from the typical. Scary. The chart is updated once a month. Hopefully all those arrows are pointing towards blue soon.
[Thanks, Max]
Tomas Nilsson, a graphic design student from Linköping University, tells the story of Little Red Riding Hood with animated infographics. The video (below) was inspired by Röyksopp's Remind Me and has that ever so familiar European electronica music moving things along. Covering topics from grandma's nutritional value to the aerodynamics of the traveling bus, the video is very tongue in cheek and totally worth the three minutes of your life.
Continue Reading
Nicolas Rapp and Damiko Morris of Associated Press delve into the AIG bailout. Six months ago, AIG received $173 billion from the government. They have about $50 billion left while the rest has gone to bonds, securities, credit default swap, and some other stuff. I wonder where the other $50 billion will go.
[Thanks, Nicolas]
I've given a few talks on my work with self-surveillance, and there is almost always someone who asks, "What if someone doesn't want to know about _____?" Fill in the blank with weight, health, pollution, or whatever. I usually respond with something like, "Then self-surveillance is probably not for them, and they can continue living in denial." Maybe instead we should just force everyone to bite the bullet and face the facts. That's what the above bus stop ad for FitnessFirst seems to be going for. When someone sits on the bus bench, the ad shows the the person's weight on a big LED. Not only is it looking straight at that person, but it's also up there for everyone else to see. I wish I could get a tape that showed people's reactions.
[via directdaily via kottke]
What do you think about the above graphic? Good, bad? Effective, or not? Sexy, not sexy? Discuss amongst yourselves.
[via Pharyngula | Thanks, Pat]
This video (below) explains how we got into this credit crisis. It's a lot of greedy business folk who borrow, borrow, and then borrow more money. Why do they borrow the money? How do they make money by borrowing money? Watch the animated infographics for an explanation.
Continue Reading
Hannah Fairfield and Graham Roberts from The New York Times show the disparity in salary among men and women. Each dot represents a job and the dark black diagonal line is equal wages. Jobs that appear below the line, are those where women, on average, make less than men in a comparable profession. There are six jobs above or on that line by my count. It looks like the higher the wage, the greater the disparity, but like most things the explanation is a little more complex than discrimination.
Nearly every occupation has the gap — the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between the size of the paycheck brought home by a woman and the larger one earned by a man doing the same job. Economists cite a few reasons: discrimination as well as personal choices within occupations are two major factors, and part of the gap can be attributed to men having more years of experience and logging more hours.
Take note that this graphic could have easily been just a scatter plot; instead the Times annotates and tells readers what they are looking at. There's a story to be told. I also really like the notes on outliers as you select the different occupation groups. What do you think?
You might recall that the United Nations Statistics Division launched UNdata about one week short of a year ago, which was an improvement on the previous United Nations Commons Database. UNdata provides a gateway into 22 United Nations databases and 66 million records. Yeah, it's a lot of data, but what do we do with it? What does it mean? Progress: A Graphical Report on the State of the World is a modest attempt to make some sense of it all; and by all, I mean a small subset.
Continue Reading
Data PointsFlowingData explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better — mainly through data visualization.
As for me, I'm Nathan Yau, and I have a PhD in statistics, with a background in eating.
Visualize This
