In this graphic, we take a look at some data on how long you're expected to live.
Live in Hawaii and you just might live a little longer.
Hawaii has an average life expectancy at birth of 80.0 years. It's 72.0 years in Washington, D.C., the lowest life expectancy in the country.
Have you ever rushed to the airport only to find that your flight was delayed or canceled?
In the most recent Data Expo at the annual Joint Statistical Meetings, data heads explored 120 million departures and arrivals in the United States, with the goal of finding "important features" such as:
While there were several interesting entries, here are the first, second, and third place winners. Continue Reading
From Shan Carter, Amanda Cox, Kevin Quealy, and Amy Schoenfeld of The New York Times is this new interactive stacked time series on how different groups in America spend their day. The data itself comes from the American Time Use Survey. The interactive has a similar feel to Martin Wattenberg's Baby Name Voyager, but it has the NYT pizazz that we've all come to know and love.
Explore time use by gender, race, age, education, and employment. View all activities (e.g. work, traveling) or select a specific action to drill down into the graph. From there, you'll find time aggregates that you can compare against depending on what filter you've selected. For example, the data says the unemployed sleep about an hour more than the employed:
That's not entirely surprising. But I was surprised that the average employed person gets almost eight and a half hours of sleep per night. I always thought America was sleep deprived on average. Go figure.
Anyways, check out the interactive for yourself. It's well-executed, very well thought out, and most importantly the material is really interesting.
[Thanks, Michael and Chris]
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) keeps an archive of what British citizens have consumed over the years. The Times Online, in collaboration with designer Marcin Ignac, visualizes this data in their recent interactive. Consumption is by grams with a percentage breakdown up top with the donut chart, and a weekly average (for each year) on the bottom. The donut chart updates when you scroll over a bar in the time series chart. Very nice work I think. What do you think?
From William Couch, Kristen Novak, Michelle Price and Joshua Hatch of USA Today, this tracker tool lets you compare ratings of past current and past presidents according to Gallup polls.
There are two views. The first (above) is ratings in chronological order. Each color represents a different president and a timeline towards the bottom highlights significant events during the presidency. One thing you'll probably notice right off the bat are the giant spikes in approval ratings during war and invasions. Yikes.
The second view lets you compare. Select the presidents you're interested in:
[Thanks, William]
Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge and author of Information Dashboard Design has a new visualization book on the shelves: Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis
If you liked Few's first book, but want something more in depth on the analysis side of things, then this is probably the book you're looking for. What this book is not is a picture book for some light coffee table reading. Now You See It is for those who really want to dig into their data.
The book is split into three main parts with the bulk of the content in the first two:
The first part places a good bit of emphasis on what visualization is and how you should approach it, while part two gets into specific types of data such as time series, rankings, distributions, and correlations.
There are tons of examples throughout with a graph or chart on just about every page, and while Few specifies the software (e.g. a lot of Tableau) used to create each visualization, it's worth pointing out that Now You See It isn't a guide on how to use a specific type of software. Rather it teaches the principles of good visualization that transfer over to whatever tool you're using.
Continue Reading
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) makes a lot of world indicators available (e.g. world population and birth rate). Much of it goes unnoticed, because most people just see a bunch of numbers. However, the Factbook eXplorer from the OECD, in collaboration with the National Center for Visual Analytics, is a visualization tool that helps you see and explore the data.
Those who have seen Hans Rosling's Gapminder presentations - and I imagine most of us have - will recognize the style with a play button and a motion graph in sync with parallel coordinates and a map. Choose an indicator, or several of them, press play, and watch the visualization move through time.
Also, if you've got your own data, you can load that too, which is certainly a nice touch.
Say what you want about Michael Jackson, but there's no denying the great effect he had on the music world. In honor of the pop king's passing, practically half of The New York Times graphics department stayed up late last night building this graphic. It takes a look at his majesty's Billboard rankings over his career compared to other popular music artists.
Decade after decade Jackson produced numerous hit albums. Click through time to see the mountains of each. Timeless.
To the man, to the legend, who no one will ever be able to replace:
[Thanks, Amanda]
As the newest release from Google Labs, Fusion Tables is a tool that aims to make your data more accessible.
Today we're introducing Google Fusion Tables on Labs, an experimental system for data management in the cloud. It draws on the expertise of folks within Google Research who have been studying collaboration, data integration, and user requirements from a variety of domains. Fusion Tables is not a traditional database system focusing on complicated SQL queries and transaction processing. Instead, the focus is on fusing data management and collaboration: merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and Web publishing.
Fusion Tables will feel familiar to those of you who use Google Spreadsheets, but the use is somewhat different.
Where Spreadsheets is meant to mimic much of the feel of MIcrosoft Excel, Fusion Tables is somewhere in the middle between Excel and database (or at least it hopes to be eventually). You can filter data as well as merge your datasets with others, for example, by country.
Maybe the best way to describe Fusion Tables is a cross between Google Docs and phpMyAdmin, which is a user interface into a MySQL database.
Probably of most interest are the visualization options. They're what you're used to seeing with line, pie, and bars, all looking very Google-y. The new ones to check out: motion chart and intensity map (above). There's also a regular point mapping option. Again, we've seen these visualizations before, but Fusion Tables is trying to make it easier to use them.
What do you think of Google's new offering? GIve it a whirl with their sample tables, and come back here and let us know what you think in the comments below.
A large majority of us who have websites use Google Analytics as our traffic monitor, and why not? It's free, it works, and it provides loads of data on traffic, referrals, and our content. We can then make decisions based on that data, but the trouble is there's a fair amount of clicking before we get to the good stuff. Enter Dshbrd by DabbleDB. Yes, that's dashboard with no vowels.
The DabbleDB folks know data, and Dshbrd is no exception. Using data from your Google Analytics account, Dshbrd analyzes and finds the points of interest - and then shows them to you in a clear and concise way. I've grown incredibly tired of overused sparklines, but Dshbrd uses them well to show traffic trends alongside a vertical stacked area chart. The two are linked such that when you scroll over an event (e.g. rise in referrals from Digg), the area on the stacked chart highlights and vice versa.
View traffic from site referrals, search engines, and direct links or content popularity, etc. Basically, you can examine all of your analytics data in Dshbrd that you can in Google Analytics but in this new view. It might take a second to get used to time on the vertical axis, but once you get over that, this alternative interface is quite intuitive and more importantly, very useful.
Now if only DabbleDB would provide a reliable API I would be very happy.
Ultimately, I'm guessing DabbleDB would want to turn Dshbrd into a fee-based service if it gained enough traction. I personally wouldn't pay for it since I really don't need that much outside the usual Google view, but I could see how Dshbrd could be useful to others. What do you think? Would you pay for this sort of premium view into your Google Analytics data?
Axiis, an open source data visualization framework in Flex, was released a few days ago under an MIT license. I haven't done much in Flex, but from what I hear, it's relatively easy to pick up. You get a lot of bang out of a few lines of code. Axiis makes things even easier, and provides visualization outside the built in Flex graph packages. Continue Reading
Roland Lößlein, a media student at University of Applied Sciences in Augsburg, presents meteorological time series data in 3-D in a class project called Synoptic. Rotate and zoom in and out on the different time lines, select different metrics, and compare against the corresponding time series on the bottom. After a few minutes of playing with it, I'm still trying to decide whether or not it's useful, but I think it's more of an experience than it is an analytical tool. It's almost like exploring a map, but instead of rolling hills, you get dips and peaks in a chart. Interaction is smooth and the visualization scores well in aesthetics.
[Thanks, Roland]
While on the topic of job losses, USA Today provides a look into job forecasts from Moody's Economy.com. While the new forecast shows U.S. employment growing in 2010-2012, the outlook for different sectors and states varies quite a bit. Take a look at different job sectors via bar chart and map and then filter down by state.
[Thanks, Juan & Ron]
There are so many ways that you can cut a dataset whether it be big or small. Cut it by time, different chunks of time, categories, etc., and you just might get a different story out of your graph. Over on Barry Ritholtz' blog, The Big Picture, debate over the extent of job losses and this recession led to these four depictions of, well, job losses and recessions.
This first one is from Time Magazine, which shows job losses in recent recessions, and what got the discussion started.
This one takes the natural next step and shows job losses is all post World War II recessions:
Now what if we look at the time it took to recover from job losses? Does that give us a better story?
Lastly, here's a look at the recession decrease in employment from the peak of NFP(?) per household:
I'm no economist, but it's clear from the graphs that there is some serious job loss, and probably why Obama is so focused on creating and saving 4 million jobs. However, the severity of the current recession changes depending on what angle you point your camera. Which viewpoint do you think is right?
[Thanks, Barry]
This is a guest post from Elad Israeli and Roni Floman of SiSense, which specializes in easy-to-use business intelligence.
Pundits joke that Google Adwords is driving Microsoft Excel sales. Two rivals are vying for domination; yet one's desktop software is used to optimize keywords sold by the other. The reason is very simple: the Google AdWords interface doesn't support the rigorous analysis of multiple AdWords keywords and their optimization. Importing the Google AdWords data into Excel lets you do just that… albeit within the constraints of Excel.
Let's try to explain this by looking at the visualization and business intelligence assumptions behind the Google use case and the Microsoft use case.
