By Francisco Javier Aragón Artacho, "This is a walk made out of the first 100 billion digits of pi in base 4 with the following rules for the steps: 0 right, 1 up, 2 left, 3 down." [via]
Visualization
-
Random walk on pi
-
Five years of traffic fatalities
I made a graphic a while back that showed traffic fatalities over a year. John Nelson extended on that, pulling five years of data and subsetting by some factors: alcohol, weather, and if a pedestrian was involved. And he aggregated by time of day and day of week instead of calendar dates.
Continue Reading -
Women as academic authors over the years
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a look at the percentage of academic papers published by women, over the past five centuries.
The articles and authors described in this data were drawn from the corpus of JSTOR, a digital archive of scholarly papers, by researchers at the Eigenfactor Project at the University of Washington. About two million articles, representing 1765 fields and sub-fields, were examined, spanning a period from 1665 to 2011. The data are presented here for three time periods, the latest one ending in 2010, and a view that combines all periods.
Percentage of female authors is on the horizontal, and each bubble is a subfield sized by total number of authors. The graphic starts with publishing for all years, but be sure to click on the tabs for each time span to see changes.
The data is based on the archive of about two million articles from JSTOR, and a hierarchical map equation method is used to determine subfields.
The gender classification they used for names seems like it could be nifty for some applications. Gender is inferred by comparing names against the ones kept by the U.S. Social Security Administration, which includes gender. If a name was used for female at least 95 percent of the time, it was classified as a female name, and the same was done with male. Anything ambiguous was not included in the study.
-
Time of travel in the 1800s
From the 1932 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, these maps paint the picture of transportation in the 1800s. Each line represents how far one could travel in some amount of time, starting from New York. For example, it took about a month to get to Louisiana.
Continue Reading -
Wood charts reveal layers of underwater world
Below the Boat produces beautiful laser-cut wood maps:
Starting with a bathymetric chart (the underwater equivalent of a topographic map), the contours are laser-cut into sheets of Baltic birch and glued together to create a powerful visual depth. Select layers are hand-colored blue so it's easy to discern land from water, major byways are etched into the land, the whole thing's framed in a custom, solid-wood frame and protected seamlessly with a sheet of durable, ultra-transparent Plexiglas.
They should go all the way with it and do "above sea level." [via kottke]
-
Wine industry network in the US
A group of researchers at Michigan State University, led by Phil Howard, explored the network of wine in the United States.
No other section of the supermarket offers as many choices as the wine aisle. A typical retailer is likely to have hundreds of unique wines on its shelves. Just three firms, however, account for more than half of the wine sales in the United States. What impact does this industry concentration have on consumer choices? To answer this question we conducted an inventory of wine offerings at 20 retailers in Michigan. We recorded more than 3,600 unique varieties of wine, and traced their relationships with more than 1,000 different firms.
So there's a ton of variety, but like the beer and soda industry, sales are dominated by a handful of firms. Want to play with the data yourself? That's available here.
-
Map of every person counted in 2010 US Census
In the 2010 United States Census, 308,745,538 were counted, and Brandon Martin-Anderson from the MIT Media Lab mapped almost all of them (308,450,225 points to be exact). I like the flow-like pattern in the east, which you can see matches the terrain by comparing against a geographic map.
See here for more on the methodology. In a nutshell, he used block-level data as the starting point, uniformly filled blocks with points, and the rest was image processing.
-
Map: Laconic history of the world
Cartographer Martin Elmer made a truncated history map of the world:
This map was produced by running all the various countries’ “History of _____” Wikipedia article through a word cloud, then writing out the most common word to fit into the country’s boundary. The result is thousands of years of human history oversimplified into 100-some words.
More on the map here.
-
NFL video screens compared
On news of the Houston Texans getting ready to build the largest video screens in professional sports, Reddit user dbeat compared the sizes of current NFL screens to the future giant. It's just slightly bigger than the one in my living room. [via Deadspin]
-
Evolution of Batman logo, 1940-2012
Available in print. See also: a video version. Still no confirmation for whether or not if Batman in fact does smell or if Robin laid an egg.
-
Earth as Art book from NASA
The Earth as Art is a compilation of NASA satellite imagery that shows the planet from a new perspective. The sensors on the satellite measure light outside the visible range, which makes for beautiful and unexpected pictures.
In 1960, the United States put its first Earth-observing environmental satellite into orbit around the planet. Over the decades, these satellites have provided invaluable information, and the vantage point of space has provided new perspectives on Earth. This book celebrates Earth’s aesthetic beauty in the patterns, shapes, colors, and textures of the land, oceans, ice, and atmosphere.
Available as PDF or as an iPad app. I'm glad the world didn't end.
-
Your tax rate in 2012, and past rates since 1913
What is your effective tax rate now versus years past? Ritchie King made an interactive to show you.
Having not been alive in the '50s or '60s, let alone filing taxes, I was struck by the high top income tax rate—exactly double the highest tax rate today. It made me wonder: what would my income tax be if I had earned the equivalent of what I earn now several decades ago—or even in 1913, when the current federal income tax program was first introduced? What would the history of income taxes look like through the collective eyes of people in my exact financial situation over the past 100 years?
Just enter your taxable income and filing status, and you get a time series of what your tax rate would've been years ago. It's kind of fun to mouse right to left to see your inflation-adjusted income.
See also the New York Times piece from last month, which makes for an interesting contrast. Similar data was used, but the views are quite different.
-
Longer life expectancy, more years of disease
Bonnie Berkowitz, Emily Chow and Todd Lindeman for the Washington Post plotted life expectancy against percentage of healthy years. Although life expectancy is increasing, the percentage of years living without disease isn't quite keeping up.
People are living longer lives, but the time they are gaining isn't entirely time with good health. For every year of life expectancy added since 1990, about 9 1/2 months is time in good health. The rest is time in a diminished state — in pain, immobility, mental incapacity or medical support such as dialysis. For people who survive to age 50, the added time is "discounted" even further. For every added year they get, only seven months are healthy.
On the other hand, total number of expected years in good health is still on the plus-side, and I think most people would choose years in poor health over fewer years. So it's not all bad news.
-
National Rifle Association grades for Congress members
The New York Times mapped ratings for members of Congress, as given by the NRA.
The National Rifle Association gives members of Congress a grade ranging from A to F that reflects their voting record on gun rights. But in response to the school shooting, some pro-gun Democrats have signaled an openness to new restrictions on guns, and the N.R.A. released a statement that said it was "prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again."
-
Animated growth of an organization
A company grows, it shrinks, people come and go. Justin Matejka, a research scientist at Autodesk, visualized the changes for where he works.
The OrgOrgChart (Organic Organization Chart) project looks at the evolution of a company's structure over time. A snapshot of the Autodesk organizational hierarchy was taken each day between May 2007 and June 2011, a span of 1498 days.
Each day the entire hierarchy of the company is constructed as a tree with each employee represented by a circle, and a line connecting each employee with his or her manager. Larger circles represent managers with more employees working under them. The tree is then laid out using a force-directed layout algorithm.
Each second in the animation is about one week of activity, and acquisitions are most obvious when big clumps of people join the company. The long-term changes are a little harder to see, because the branches in the network fade into the background. Recomputing the layout each week might be good for the next round.
[Thanks, Justin]
-
An introduction to diagrams
As a teaser for a larger project on diagrams, Jane Nisselson describes how they exist in the real world.
Diagrams are everywhere — from the established conventions of highway signs to the newly emerging visualizations appearing on social networking websites. Most people have a personal experience of diagrams whether drawing directions or figuring out how to operate a new computer. Yet very few people are familiar with how we read or construct diagrams.
This short film introduces the language of diagrams and their role in visual thinking and communication. As only a film can do, it reveals the vocabulary "in the wild" and in the context of making and using diagrams.
I'm looking forward to the rest if this is any indication of what's to come.
-
An ideal bookshelf
Thessaly La Force, with illustrator Jane Mount, recently published My Ideal Bookshelf, which is a look into the books that some people of interest, including Judd Apatow, Chuck Klosterman, and Tony Hawk, would like to have on their ideal bookshelf. La Force's boyfriend took a more data-centric look at the collections.
In the network above, each node is a person who listed their ideal books, and connections represent people who named the same books. Those in the center of the network had more book similarities than those on the edges. For example, James Franco named a ton of books and as you might expect has a bunch of connections. [via @shiffman]
-
Get a visual recap of your year on Twitter
As 2013 nears, let the recaps, reviews, and best ofs begin. Twitter put up their 2012 year in review of top tweets, trends, and such, which is mostly pictures and lists, but in collaboration with Vizify, they also have a section to visualize your own tweets. Click on the "View year on Twitter" button in the top right. Here's mine, for example. (Surprise, I mention maps, data, and charts often.)
It's a word frequency chart that shows usage over the year. Scroll left to right or mouse over bubbles to see specific tweets. Mostly, it's just fun to look back. [Thanks, Todd]
-
Relationships and kills in Game of Thrones replayed
This one's for you Game of Thrones fans and aficionados. Jerome Cukier visualized groups of people, from Lannisters to Starks, and kills throughout the books. Each circle represents a character and is sized by number of appearances. Color represents status, and connecting lines are killer-killee relationships (aw, so sweet). The best part is that this all plays out over time.
-
An infographical look at Walking Dead kills over three seasons
Andrew Barr and Richard Johnson for the National Post took a detailed look at the who, what, and when of Walking Dead kills.
While AMC lets The Walking Dead gang take a short mid-season break — the Post's Andrew Barr
and Richard Johnson look at a few of the key statistics of two-and-a-half season's worth of undead mayhem. They find noteworthy — the gradual increase in the body count, the increasingly creative means of Zombie dispatch, and the fact that every character seems to have developed a clear enjoyment for putting the ambulatory cadavers down for good.They also included weapons used, ranging from handgun to tree branch. See the full version here. Somewhere there's a piece of paper with a ton of tally marks on it.
[Thanks, Thomas]
New FlowingData Book
-
Data Points
Visualization that Means Something
Available: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Wiley
Visualize This