Presidential candidates have raised $186 million up to now, according to the Federal Election Commission. The New York Times lets you compare the amounts raised by each candidate, over time and space. Simply select a candidate on the left, and another on the right to see how they match up. Fundraising by candidates from previous elections, at the same time of year, are also included for context.

While not the focus of the interactive, the distributions for donation size at the bottom seem to be especially telling.

[New York Times via infosthetics]

Jonathan Corum for The New York Times examines word usage by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union addresses and the words used by Republican candidates in their debates. Many of you will be happy to know that no word clouds were harmed in the making of this graphic.

[New York Times]

Nicolas Rapp and Anne Vandermey with a straightforward look at new jobs added at the top 100 companies to work for, according to Fortune.

Fat paychecks, sweet perks, fun colleagues, and over 70,000 jobs ready to be filled — these employers offer dream workplaces. Like Google, which reclaims the top spot this year to become a three-time champion. Meet this year’s top 100, network with the winners on LinkedIn, and more.

Number of new jobs added or lost is on the horizontal, and number of employees at the start of the year on the vertical. Bubble size represents number of job applicants.

There were 7.6 million applicants to Starbucks last year. That's insane.

[Nicolas Rapp]

If you play darts just trying to hit the bullseye, you aren't playing for maximum output. Don't fret though. DataGenetics is here to help with mathematical advice on how to play the game based on your skill level (Update: This is very similar to the dart work by Ryan Tibshirani, et al.):

The optimal strategy for aiming depends on your skill as darts player. A very skillful player should aim for the middle of the triple 20; Much of the time he will hit his target, and the times he misses will be few enough that his average score will still be high.

A very poor player should aim close to the bullseye, as just hitting the board will be an achievement (and a scoring one at that!). Aiming for the center maximizes the chances of hitting something.

But what happens between these two extreme?

I was a kid the last time I threw darts, and I was more interested in throwing them as high as I could in the air watching them stick into the grass. Maybe it's time to try it the right way.

See also optimal gameplay for Battleship, Risk, and Candyland.

[DataGenetics via infosthetics]

From Yanni Loukissas of the MIT Laboratory for Automation, Robotics, and Society, comes the story of the Apollo 11 lunar landing told via multiple time series running in parallel and the back and forth between astronauts and mission control.

The Apollo 11 visualization draws together social and technical data from the 1969 moon landing in a dynamic 2D graphic. The horizontal axis is an interactive timeline. The vertical axis is divided into several sections, each corresponding to a data source. At the top, commentators are present in narratives from Digital Apollo and NASA technical debriefings. Just below are the members of ground control. The middle section is a log-scale graph stretching from Earth (~10E9 ft. away) to the Moon. Utterances from the landing CAPCOM, Duke, the command module pilot, Collins, the mission commander, Armstrong, and the lunar module pilot, Aldrin, are plotted on this graph.

Climax hits around the 4-minute mark. Too bad it doesn't get to the one small step for man part.

Transparency International released annual data for the Corruption Perceptions Index. The Economist plotted it against the UN's Human Development Index:

Comparing the corruption index with the UN's Human Development Index (a measure combining health, wealth and education), demonstrates an interesting connection. When the corruption index is between approximately 2.0 and 4.0 there appears to be little relationship with the human development index, but as it rises beyond 4.0 a stronger connection can be seen. Outliers include small but well-run poorer countries such as Bhutan and Cape Verde, while Greece and Italy stand out among the richer countries.

Interesting, although I suspect that the indices have some factors in common.

[The Economist via @mikeloukides]

Famed statistician John Tukey created the boxplot in 1970. It shows a distribution summary in a small amount of space. Hadley Wickham and Lisa Stryjewski look back on the old standby and its evolution up to present. Keep it in mind, while still used today, the boxplot was created with pencil and paper.

One of the original constraints on the boxplot was that it was designed to be computed and drawn by hand. As every statistician now has a computer on their desk, this constraint can be relaxed, allowing variations of the boxplot that are substantially more complex. These variations attempt to display more information about the distribution, maintaing the compact size of the boxplot, but bringing in the richer distributional summary of the histogram or density plot. These plots can overcome problems in the original such as the failure to display multi-modality, or the excessive number of "outliers" when n is large.

Alright, computers are useful. I guess.

[40 years of boxplots]

After a certain point in math education, like some time during high school, the relevance of the concepts to the everyday and the real world seem to fade. However, in many ways, math lets you describe real life better than you can with just words. Designer Bret Victor hopes to make the abstract and conceptual to real and concrete with Kill Math.

Kill Math is my umbrella project for techniques that enable people to model and solve meaningful problems of quantity using concrete representations and intuition-guided exploration. In the long term, I hope to develop a widely-usable, insight-generating alternative to symbolic math.

As part of the early project, Victor developed a prototype interface on the iPad to help you understand dynamical systems. It probably sounds boring to you, but the video and explanation will change your mind:

Statistics has the same problem with concepts, and is one of the main reasons why people hate it so much. They learn about curves, hypothesis tests, and distribution tables, and the takeaway is that there are some equations that you plug numbers into. Sad. Of course there are plenty of people working on that, but there's still a ways to go.

[Kill Math | Thanks, Matthew]

Since 1955, Fortune Magazine has published a list of America's 500 largest companies. What companies have risen to the top? Which ones have fallen? Ben Fry, of Fathom Information Design, visualizes the companies of past and present and how their rankings, revenue, and profit have changed.

The interactive piece lets you select companies, which highlights an individual time series as well as provides a sense of distribution over time with the light gray marks. As you switch between measures and turn inflation adjustment on and off, smooth transitions let you keep track of what you're interested in.

Because this is more of a proof of concept that Fry sketched during a train ride, there are a few kinks. For example, it's hard to see the individual values for a single company, because the dots are too small for the time series. You just end up selecting another company. You're supposed to be able to press the left and right arrow keys to move back and forth, but it doesn't work for me. It's easy to see though how, with a bit more development, this could be useful for other data and how a bunch of numbers can be made easily digestible.

[The Fortune 500]

Martin Dittus, a former Last.fm employee, grabbed listening data for staff, moderators, and alumni, and visualized 8.7 million scrobbles in an extended calendar format.

At its most basic level this visualisation shows how frequently someone has been scrobbling over time, which in itself probably isn't that interesting. But the particular layout reveals some patterns in everyone's listening habits that aren't obvious from just looking at a timeline. Lunch breaks, dinner, the commute — as long as it happens regularly and interferes with one's music listening you should have no trouble finding it in the graph. In a few graphs you can even see seasonal effects!

There is a row for each year from 2005 to 2011, and each wide column represents a month, hence 12 across. Each small row, within an annual row, is an hour per day, and each small column, within each monthly column, is an hour of the day. Days of the week were aggregated for each month, so each month is a 7 by 24 grid. Make sense?

It's like a calendar view, but instead days, the interest is centered around hours of the day. Deeper orange indicates more activity.

There are about 180 graphs, one for each person Dittus produced a graphic for. Most likely you aren't one of them or know any of them, but I like the use of the calendar-like grid to look for temporal patterns. It's an under-utilized layout that should be played with more.

[Last.fm Scrobbles via infosthetics]