Carbon output. We want to reduce it, but some countries have a longer way to go than others. Pitch Interactive shows progress (or non-progress) by country in this interactive for the Climate Institute. Three indices are shown along with an overall score, which is a composite of the three, and countries are sorted by the average score from 1995 to 2008. Higher scores are better.

The interaction makes this graphic. When you switch between indices, the countries are sorted appropriately and the time series for each country are drawn. You can also click on a country to get a closer view, which albeit is only four data points per country and index, but it's still useful.

The lines for each country get thicker from left to right, which was to provide a sense of progress, but I wonder if it would be worthwhile to use thickness to represent an increase or decrease from the previous year. Then again, that's easy enough to see already, so maybe not.

UC San Diego student Cyrus Kiani animates 5,930 front pages from The Hawaiian Star, from 1893 to 1912. Pretty much everything on the page gets bigger — the columns, headers, and pictures — while the physical size of the page stays the same. Too bad it only goes up to 1912. It would've been fun to see the birth of the giant front page photo.

(I thought I saw something like this done for The New York Times front page or online homepage, but I can't find it.)

Remember Bret Victor's live coding talk from last month? He presented an example where he would edit code on one side, and the corresponding visual would automatically update on the other side. It was instant feedback that could help in learning code. Gabriel Florit implemented the idea with D3, and it's called water. Edit on the right and the diagram updates on the left. Try clicking on a number and then holding down the Alt key (or option on the Mac) for slider goodness.

Also, check out Daniel Hooper's interactive JavaScript editor, CodeBook. It's the same idea but a slightly different implementation.

[via Waxy]

Big History is a field of study that crosses multiple disciplines such as biology, natural history, and economics to form a single timeline that starts at the beginning of time and ends in the present. It's the history of everything, essentially. ChronoZoom, a collaboration between UC Berkeley, Moscow State University, and Microsoft Research, aims to visualize this seemingly endless timeline.

You can browse years on top, and rectangles in the main view represent different scopes such as the Cosmos and Earth and the Solar System. Click on one those rectangles, and ChronoZoom, as you might guess, zooms in on the corresponding window of time. Circles within the rectangles provide videos and explanations for significant events in history.

To get right into it though, move your mouse to the top right. There's a thing that looks like a bar graph, which is actually navigation for the scopes. Click on Humanity and watch it go.

My many thanks to the sponsors. FlowingData wouldn't be around without them. Check 'em out. They help you make sense of data.

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Tableau Software — Helps people see and understand data. Ranked by Gartner in 2011 as the world's fastest growing business intelligence company, Tableau helps anyone quickly and easily analyze, visualize and share information.

Periscopic — A socially conscious data visualization firm that specializes in using technology to help companies and organizations facilitate information transparency and public awareness. They do good with data.

Want to sponsor FlowingData? Send interest to [email protected] for more details.

With NCAA March Madness in full swing, the basketball graphics are out in full force. This one by Angi Chau, shows the probabilities of teams winning each game, and eventually the championship, based on simulated bracket rankings. Done with D3, each node represents a game and teams are circled on the outside. Roll over a team, and get all the probabilities for that team going to the end or roll over a game to see the probability of teams winning that game. Sorry, Colorado. You have a 0% chance of winning it all. You, too, Vermont.

Hopefully, Chau keeps updating throughout the tournament. And maybe some color-coding to indicate probabilities would be useful here. Now excuse me while I go place some educated bets. (One million on Colorado.)

Celebrating their 100th birthday, Oreo depicts moments in history with the ever popular cookie of nostalgia and milk dunking. This one showing the first step on the moon is the best. Prohibition comes in a close second. [via]

From Gizmodo, this shows battery size in the new iPad versus that of the iPad 2. The battery in the former is 70 percent bigger than that of the latter. Something's not right here.

[Thanks, David]

At first I thought this map, by David Yanofsky for Bloomberg, was your standard county-level choropleth map of demographics. Select a self-described heritage from the first drop down and you see where all the people are by count. That's only kind of interesting, but you often just end up highlighting big cities.

However, select a heritage from the second drop down menu to compare against the first and you get a relative scale. The above for example shows those of Chinese and Indian heritage. It's a simple calculation that makes a big difference in usefulness.

Aaron Parecki, co-creator of location platform Geoloqi, has collected his location every few seconds for over three years. He put his data on a map.

Approximately one GPS point was recorded every 2-6 seconds when I was moving, and these images represent about 2.5 million total GPS points. Collectively, they represent a data portrait of my life: everywhere I’ve been and the places I’ve been most frequently. The map is colored by year, so you can see how my footprint changes over the years, depending on where I live.

We've seen projects like this a few times before (Hey, Andy, where's your 2011 map?), but the longevity still surprises me, in a good way. (I think I've got this quantified self thing for the masses figured out. Don't even bother mentioning tracking, self-improvement, or the gadgets. Just show them stuff like this and attach some sentimental value, and there you go.)

[via infosthetics]

The Iliad is an epic poem by Homer with a lot of characters and story lines going on at once. I vaguely remember reading bits and pieces in high school and getting totally lost. Santiago Ortiz explores these relationships in his latest work, which draws on the connections i.e. character sentence co-occurrences.
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Jay Jacobs has some fun with roulette simulations and explores the odds of winning for different bets. Above shows a simulation of 250 spins 20,000 times. Or to put it differently, it's like simulating the play of 20,000 people, who each took 250 spins and always bet on a single number.

I'm not sure why it doesn't start to get red until you're $500 in the hole, but bottom line: the longer you play, the higher probability you will lose all your money. That was my main takeaway from Probability 101 in undergrad. The rest is a blur.

Heading towards the 2012 Olympics in London, Quayola and Memo Aktenvia translate athletic movement, which in itself is often considered beautiful, to generative animations. Collectively, the piece is called Forms, which is on exhibit at the National Media Museum.

Forms is a digital artwork that responds to the human body in motion. It focuses exclusively on the mechanics of movement, using footage of world-class athletes to illustrate human movement at the extremes of perfection.

Videos of athletes were processed through custom software to create evolving abstract forms that explore the relationships between the human body and its movements through time and space.

There's also a short Q&A with the artists on the Creators Project that's worth a read.

[via The Creators Project]

Kirk Goldsberry, an assistant professor of geography at Michigan State, applies his skills to the basketball court.

In the quest to better understand the "average" NBA shooter I have begun making composite shooting charts for each position in the league. My eventual goal is to establish a spatially informed baseline and to map every shooter in the league against an average shooter. These charts are not good for that task, but they're interesting nonetheless. Here are composite shooting charts for each of the 5 conventional basketball positions. I combined the shooting data for every player in positional groups. There are some bizarre trends including some fascinating asymmetries.

Above shows points per field goal attempt for all NBA field goal attempts from 2006 to 2011. Red means more points and blue means fewer points, so as expected it's orange-red outside the three-point line and dark red in the high percentage key. It starts to get interesting as Goldsberry breaks things down by player and position. Read the full paper [pdf] to really get into it.

For the record, my personal basketball scoring map would be all red. Don't let my one-inch vertical leap or my low fantasy basketball ranking this season fool you. I can light it up.

[via Slate | Thanks, Kevin]

As a complement to Shan Carter's exit poll dancing boxes, The New York Times provides another view with an interactive triangular scatterplot.

In the dancing boxes, you can see how states are inclined to vote based on exit poll groups. In the scatterplot, on the other hand, the groups within each state are plotted, with an added dimension towards candidates other than Santorum and Romney. The navigation bar on top and clicker on the left let you see tendencies of each state.

Like the dancing boxes, the transitions make the chart. As you browse by state or by category, you're able to see differences between groups when shapes move across the screen.

In somewhat related news, The New York Times graphics department is looking for summer interns. Send your interest to Steve Duenes (duenes [at] nytimes [dot] com) and Amanda Cox (coxa [at] nytimes [dot] com). I interned there a few years ago, so I can tell you first-hand that you'll learn a lot — probably more than in any class you've taken — while working with the best in the business.

[New York Times]

Kitchen Budapest explores local news coverage in Hungary with sound and a bubbling map.

Ebullition visualises and sonificates data pulled from one of the biggest news sites of Hungary, origo.hu. In the 30 fps animation, each frame represents a single day, each second covers a month, starting from December 1998 until October 2010.

Whenever a Hungarian city or village is mentioned in any domestic news on origo.hu website, it is translated into a force that dynamically distorts the map of Hungary. The sound follows the visual outcome, creating a generative ever changing drone.

Next step: show the news causing those bubbles.

[Submap | Thanks, Attila]

Stephen Wolfram examines his archive of personal data from emails to keystrokes to phone calls, going all the way back to 1990. Above shows the hourly distribution of his activities.
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Data exists in digital form, on our computers and spreadsheets, but the exciting part about data is what it represents in the real world. Bits are people, places, and things. This is especially true with social data from places like Twitter and Facebook, where ideas flow and people talk to interact with each other in different ways. It's not just retweets and likes. Bloom Studio, the folks who brought you Planetary, embrace this idea in their just released iPad app, Biologic.

The basic concept: choose a social network from the Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn blobs on the opening screen. You will have to authenticate each one you try (only the first time) and then you will transition into a view of the people you follow represented as microbiological cells.

Glowing shapes inside the cells are activities (tweets, pictures, etc). The bigger the activity, the newer it is. The more the activity is moving, the more retweets/favorites/likes it has. Once you have read an item it gets darker so you can tell what's new.

It looks like another great blend of data, generative art, and game dynamics. I don't have an iPad though, so I'll live vicariously through your comments. Grab Biologic (for free) on iTunes.

[Bloom Studios | Thanks, Tom]

James Cheshire ponders the difference between fast and slow thinking maps, and the dying breed of the latter.

So do the renowned folks at the NY Times Graphics Dept. prefer fast or slow thinking visualisations? I asked them what they think makes a successful map. Archie Tse said what I hoped he would: the best maps readable, or interpretable, at a number of levels. They grab interest from across the room and offer the headlines before drawing the viewer ever closer to reveal intricate detail. I think of these as rare visualisations for fast and slow thinking. The impact of such excellent maps is manifest by the popularity of atlases and why they inspire so many to become cartographers and/or travel the world.

A graphic that takes a little while to understand doesn't always mean it was a failure in design. It might mean that the underlying data is hard to understand. Likewise, a graphic that isn't what you expect might let you answer different questions than from the usual standby.

[Spatial Analysis]