Studio NAND and Moritz Stefaner, along with Jens Franke explore FIFA development programs around the world.

The FIFA Development Globe visu­al­ises FIFA’s world­wide involve­ment in supporting foot­ball through educa­tional and infra­struc­tural projects. Using a 3D globe in combin­a­tion with inter­con­nected inter­face and visu­al­iz­a­tion elements, the applic­a­tion provides multiple perspect­ives onto an enormous dataset of FIFA’s activ­ities, grouped by tech­nical support, perform­ance activ­ities, and devel­op­ment projects.

The globe itself is an icosahedron, or essentially a spherical shape made up of triangles. Triangles in each country represent programs and are colored by the three above categories, and you might recognize Moritz’ elastic lists in the sidebar to filter through programs, by country, organization, and type. There’s also a timeline view, which shows program development over the past five years.

Give it a go here. I should warn you though that it runs in Flash (a client requirement), and it could run sluggish depending on your machine. Sometimes I was disorientated by the interaction and animation, especially when I clicked and nothing happened until a few seconds later.

After seeing a timeline on future events as described in novels, designer Giorgia Lupi put it in visual form.

Basing on speculative fiction captions collected by Jane Hu, the visualization analyses 62 foretold future events. For each event the visualization highlights typology (are they mainly social, scientific, technological, political?), year of the prediction, genre of the book and age of the author, while dividing them into positive, neutral or negative events. In the end, good news: in 802,701 the world will exist and everything will be more or less ok.

The vertical bars represent how far in the past a future was described, icons in the middle represent type of event, and the rows underneath provide descriptions of said events.

The sheer amount of fiction makes this a fun one to look at. Although, I wish Lupi spaced events by time instead of just listing them in chronological order. I mean, it’s a giant graphic already. Might as well go all the way with the timeline framework.

The Floor Charts tumblr shows actual charts used on the United States Congress floor. Some of the paper signs aren’t so flashy, but then there are ones like the Republican Wheel of Giveaways used by Edward Markey that leave you wishing you’d thought of it first.

Remember when Netanyahu used that bomb diagram and we thought it was ridiculous? I guess he was just following the high high standard set by governments around the world.

R comes with a lot of datasets, some with the core distribution and others with packages, but you’d never know which ones unless you went through all the examples found at the end of help documents. Luckily, Vincent Arel-Bundock cataloged 596 of them in an easy-to-read page, and you can quickly download them as CSV files.

Many of the datasets are dated, going back to the original distribution of R, but it’s a great resource for teaching or if you’re just looking for some data to play with.

You know those songs that you love so much that you cry because they’re over? Well, cry no more with the Inifinite Jukebox by Paul Lamere. Inspired by Infinite Gangnam Style, the Infinite Jukebox lets you upload a song, and it’ll figure out how to cut the beats and piece them back together for a version of that song that goes forever.

With The Infinite Jukebox, you can create a never-ending and ever changing version of any song. The app works by sending your uploaded track over to The Echo Nest, where it is decomposed into individual beats. Each beat is then analyzed and matched to other similar sounding beats in the song. This information is used to create a detailed song graph of paths though similar sounding beats. As the song is played, when the next beat has similar sounding beats there’s a chance that we will branch to a completely different part of the song. Since the branching is to a very similar sounding beat in the song, you (in theory) won’t notice the jump. This process of branching to similar sounding beats can continue forever, giving you an infinitely long version of the song.

I’m not sure what these digitally rendered Lego blocks by JR Schmidt represent, other than the geography of New York, but the image sure is pretty. This may or may not also have to do with me loving everything Lego.

In a beautiful rendition of the galaxy, Google visualized 100,000 stars, starting at the sun and out to a view of the Milky Way. Start with the tour, which takes you through an overview of what there is to see, and then explore on your own. Specifically, once you zoom out over four light years away from the sun, you start to see other known stars. Click on the labels for information and a closer look at what looks like flaming balls of lava. [via @pitchinc]

Since 2000, the Hewlett Foundation has made over 7,000 grants summing $3.86 billion, to support communities around the world. Periscopic broke it down by area and amount. Each section is a heat map with years on the horizontal and amount on the vertical. The darker the shade of green, the more grants given that year for the corresponding amount. Click on a rectangle, and you can see the details of any individual grant. [Thanks, Kim]

RStudio, the folks behind the IDE for R released last year, continues to expand their offerings for current and future R users. Shiny is RStudio’s most recent release, and it aims to make R web applications easier to make and share.

The main advantage is that you can create user interfaces that show R output, without HTML and JavaScript. There are essentially two parts to each app that you write: the client and the server. You load the Shiny package, create a client and server, and you’re off to the races.

However, don’t get too excited about R on the Web yet. The apps are meant to run locally, so to share an application with someone, you have to send them the code for them to run on their own. RStudio is working on a paid service that lets you host your apps online. Or, because Shiny is open source, you can try running it on your own, if you like.

If you go to the Facebook page for Mitt Romney, note the number of likes, wait a few seconds, and then refresh the page. The number of likes is decreasing fast enough that you can see the change over a short period of time. Disappearing Romney charts the change in real-time.

Tick, tick, tick.

See also Who Likes Mitt, with the quick API hack on github. [via @moebio]

Meta. Is it people’s interest, or is it actually 50 percent of statistics in the news are worthless numbers that were plugged in to make a story sound more factual?

I knew things were bad, but I didn’t know they were this bad. Obama has his work cut out for him. [Thanks, @adamsinger]

After seeing this post that highlights racist tweets after the election, Floating Sheep took a closer look at the geography. Using an estimate that takes into account number of tweets per state, the southeast came out green.

So, are these tweets relatively evenly distributed? Or do some states have higher specializations in racist tweets? The answer is shown in the map [above] (also available here in an interactive version) in which the location of individual tweets (indicated by red dots) are overlaid on color coded states. Yellow shading indicates states that have a relatively lower amount of post-election hate tweets (compared to their overall tweeting patterns) and all states shaded in green have a higher amount. The darker the green color the higher the location quotient measure for hate tweets.

I wondered about Asian remarks after seeing this, but a quick search was depressing and I stopped. [Thanks, Matt]

In 1979, Joy Division released their album Unknown Pleasures, and the cover was an image of readings from a pulsar. That image grew into a cultural phenomenon. With the kick off of the new Visualized conference in New York, this short video explores the growth of the icon. [Thanks, Eric]

Amanda Uren has a fun collection of map-like scans from the 11th century. Some of them are geographic, but most of them are more like rough sketches of how the individual saw the area the image represents. It’s like those stereotype maps that people like to make, except no one’s trying to be funny.

By way of Rafa Irizarry from Simply Statistics, a plot of Nate Silver’s probabilities for Barack Obama winning a state versus the percentage of vote in each state, as of midnight EST.

I guess that’s pretty (100%) good. Looks like the folks at Princeton didn’t do half bad either. It’s a win for Obama and a win for statistics. Well, good statistics, at least. (Looking at you, University of Colorado.)

Update: Drew Linzer at Emory and the Huffington Post Pollster also did well. All in all, it was a good night for statistics.

As the results roll in tonight, you have plenty of options to keep track of who won what and where. These should cover all of your bases.

New York Times coverage — Up to their old tricks, they have a map, big board, and network calls. The paths to the White House interactive will also be updating live.

NPR big board — Updating every 15 seconds, this is the display that NPR hosts and election staff are watching. And of course, there’s also news coverage.

Huffington Post map — Like the others, updates every 30 seconds. Also indicates where polls have closed.

Is Obama president? — Finally, if all you care about now is the result, the minimalist Guardian and Real Clear Politics collaboration provides that. See also Romney version.

(There are a ton more, but these are the ones I’ll be watching.)

Following their animated and narrated visualization on political contributions over time, VisPolitics maps Boston political donations in MoneyBombs.

This video of the Boston metropolitan area reveals the geographic distribution of political donations made by individuals throughout 2012. We identify two types of temporal bursts of campaign contributions. We call both “moneybombs” because they reveal a temporal clustering. The first type occurs when many small donations are given on the same day to a candidate. We call this a grassroots moneyb omb. The second are bursts of extremely large donations, that take advantage of campaign finance laws and allow individuals to donate more than the traditional $5,000 limit. We call this the Joint Committee moneybomb.

Like in the first project, the narration provides a clear view of the data in front of you. There are also videos for just presidential donations and Republican and Democratic donations.

[Thanks, Mauro]

With the election tomorrow, Mike Bostock and Shan Carter for the New York Times map the 512 possible paths to the White House. Select state wins, and the paths update accordingly. For example, select an Obama win in Florida, and it doesn’t look good for Romney.

If Mr. Romney loses Florida, he has only one way to victory: through all the other battleground states. He has led most polls there, however, and is the favorite. If Mr. Romney wins Florida, he has 75 paths open to him.

The interaction feels game-like.