From illustrator Stephen Wildish: the pancake venn diagram. Is it Friday yet? [via]

It was bound to happen at some point. Doctor and statistician Hans Rosling, best known for his sword-swallowing TED talk, among plenty of other things, made the Time 100 Most Influential list this year.

What does Rosling make of his statistical analysis of worldwide trends? “I am not an optimist,” he says. “I’m a very serious possibilist. It’s a new category where we take emotion apart and we just work analytically with the world.” We can all, Rosling thinks, become healthy and wealthy. What a promising thought, so eloquently rendered with data.

[Thanks, wife]

We intentionally and unintentionally put data in places like Facebook and Google but most of us don’t think much of it. In an interview with The Guardian, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, says why you should care.

My computer has a great understanding of my state of fitness, of the things I’m eating, of the places I’m at. My phone understands from being in my pocket how much exercise I’ve been getting and how many stairs I’ve been walking up and so on.”

Exploiting such data could provide hugely useful services to individuals, he said, but only if their computers had access to personal data held about them by web companies. “One of the issues of social networking silos is that they have the data and I don’t … There are no programmes that I can run on my computer which allow me to use all the data in each of the social networking systems that I use plus all the data in my calendar plus in my running map site, plus the data in my little fitness gadget and so on to really provide an excellent support to me.

Of course, getting users to see that is easier said than done. And until users see, the incentive for companies to provide such a service is low. In turn, it’s hard for data people to make a case to users, and you end up with a lot of hand waving. Challenge accepted?

NPR has a look at weekly drought figures over the past couple of years. The focus is on Texas, a state that’s been hit hard the past few months. In 2011, there was an estimated agricultural loss of $7.62 billion.

The current drought began in October 2010. Though the situation has improved recently, the drought is far from over — and the conditions that caused it aren’t going away anytime soon.

Texas is a place susceptible to extreme weather, and the last year was no exception. Thousands of square miles were burned in wildfires, billions were lost in agriculture, and its impact could still linger in years to come.

Hit the play button, and the string of images runs like a flip book. Low tech, but effective.

[via Matt Stiles]

Game developer Christopher Albeluhn found himself unemployed, so he started to work on a model of Earth in a video game engine to add to his portfolio. He finished that, and thought, hey, might as well keep on going. He eventually created the Solar System.

Before i knew it, i had all 8 planets (I am SO sorry Pluto), the sun and the Asteroid belt. They all had correct rotations, orbits, locations and speeds; their moons, information regarding the planets and their facts. All of these were fine, but i wanted something more, so i added in the constellations, all 88 of them.

Still though, this was portfolio work — until a link to the video went up on reddit. With some momentum, Albeluhn hopes to turn his side project into a full-fledged application. Fingers crossed for completion.

Brian Hayes for American Scientist discusses science publications’ roots in print and the shift towards digital.

Print publishing has a centuries-long tradition and a rich culture. Generations of illustrators have developed technical knowledge, artistic sensibility and a highly refined toolkit. There’s a huge body of existing work to serve as example and inspiration. In digital publishing, this kind of intellectual infrastructure is only beginning to emerge.

Yet the new computational media offer new opportunities for the exercise of creativity, especially in quantitative graphics, where illustrations are closely tied to data or mathematical functions. On the computer screen, graphs and diagrams can become animated or interactive, inviting the reader or viewer to become an explorer. I find this prospect exciting. But I’m also mindful that we don’t yet have deep experience with the new graphical methods.

Five and a half years ago, Netflix offered data and a $1 million prize to improve their recommendation system by at least ten percent. In 2009, a statistics team at AT&T Labs, BellKor, did that. Unfortunately, Netflix never integrated the algorithm into production.

If you followed the Prize competition, you might be wondering what happened with the final Grand Prize ensemble that won the $1M two years later. This is a truly impressive compilation and culmination of years of work, blending hundreds of predictive models to finally cross the finish line. We evaluated some of the new methods offline but the additional accuracy gains that we measured did not seem to justify the engineering effort needed to bring them into a production environment. Also, our focus on improving Netflix personalization had shifted to the next level by then.

That’s too bad. Netflix knows their business better than anyone, but I sure wish Keeping Up with the Kardashians wasn’t listed in my top 10 right now.

[via Techdirt]

Geography graduate student Derek Watkins has some fun with population densities in an interactive version of William Bunge’s The Continents and Islands of Mankind. The above shows areas in the world where there are at least 15 people per square kilometer. In the interactive, a slider lets you shift that number up to 500 where only a few spots in the world remain.

An interesting thing about this map is that each layer is contained in one 23,000 pixel tall spritesheet to reduce load time. An uninteresting thing is that my workflow was to export black and white density images from QGIS (which I’ve been working with more lately), generalize in Illustrator, export each slice and then stitch them together into one image with ImageMagick. I grabbed the population data from here.

[via Derek Watkins]

Explore weekly earnings between men and women, over the past nine years. There’s more to say about it, but my hands are tired from manually editing parsed PDF files, so I’ll leave that for later.
Basically, three or four articles on the gender wage gap popped up on my radar last week, some focusing on the rise of women as the lead household earner and others on how much less women make. Such contrast. So I took a look.

Women computer support specialists rockin’ it.

Using hand-recorded shipping data from the Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans, history graduate student Ben Schmidt mapped a century of ocean shipping, between 1750 and 1850. The above map animates a seasonal aggregate.

There aren’t many truly seasonal events, but a few stand out. There are regular summer voyages from Scotland to Hudson’s Bay, and from Holland up towards Spitsbergen, for example: both these appear as huge convoys moving in sync. (What were those about?) Trips around Cape Horn, on the other hand, are extremely rare in July and August. More interestingly, the winds in the Arabian sea seem to shift directions in November or so. I also really like the way this one brings across the conveyor belt nature of trade with the East.

The bobbing month label is distracting, but its position actually does mean something. Since seasonality (i.e. weather) plays a role in travels, the label represents noontime location of the sun in Africa. Okay, I’m still not sure if that’s actually useful.

If you really must, you can also watch the century of individual shipments during a 12-minute video.

By the way, Schmidt used R to make this, relying heavily on the mapproj and ggplot2 packages. (Bet you didn’t see that coming.) I think he created a bunch of images and then strung them together to make the animation.

[via Revolutions]