R, the favorite computing language of a growing number of statisticians, is friendly enough that you can get a lot done without being an expert programmer, because there are a lot of packages and built-in functions that can take care a lot of the grunt work for you. Learn how to use a function, prepare your data, and you get some output. However, as you use R more, whether it’s for analysis or just for graphics, there comes a point when there isn’t a package or function that does exactly what you want.

Norman Matloff’s Art of R Programming is for those who want to learn to write their own software in R. This is an R programming book that starts from the beginning — running R, vectors, lists — to the more advanced such as simulations, object-oriented programming, and debugging.
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People upload thousands of pictures to Flickr every day, but the numbers and rates don’t give the picture count justice. For the Future of Photography Museum in Amsterdam, Erik Kessels printed 24 hours of Flickr photos:

As you might imagine, this results in a lot of images, that fill the gallery space in an avalanche of photos. “We’re exposed to an overload of images nowadays,” says Kessels. “This glut is in large part the result of image-sharing sites like Flickr, networking sites like Facebook, and picture-based search engines. Their content mingles public and private, with the very personal being openly and un-selfconsciously displayed. By printing all the images uploaded in a 24-hour period, I visualise the feeling of drowning in representations of other peoples’ experiences.”

[Creative Review via Waxy]

Beautiful time-lapse video using photographs from crew onboard the International Space Station. I think this one’s a hair ahead the Very Large Telescope. Watch in HD on Vimeo for extra flavor.

[Video Link via kottke]

For the map nerds. xkcd says what your favorite map projection says about you. Mercator? “You’re not really into maps.”

If you don’t watch the candidate debates — and let’s face it, that’s just about everyone — you pretty much miss everything, except for stuff like Rick Perry forgetting agency names. Politilines, by Periscopic, lets you see what the candidates talked about each night.

The left column lists top issues, the middle shows words used, and the right column shows candidates. Roll over any word or name to see who talked about what or what was talked about by whom.

The method:

We collected transcripts from the American Presidency Project at UCSB, categorized them by hand, then ranked lemmatized word-phrases (or n-grams) by their frequency of use. Word-phrases can be made of up to five words. Our ranking agorithm accounts for things such as exclusive word-phrases – meaning, it won’t count “United States” twice if it’s used in a higher n-gram such as “President of the United States.”

While still in beta, the mini-app is responsive and easy to use. The next challenge, I think, is to really show what everyone talked about. For example, click on education and you see Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, and Rick Perry brought those up. Then roll over the names to see the words each candidate used related to that topic. You get some sense of content, but it’s still hard to decipher what each actually said about education.

[Politilines]

The November issue of Popular Science is a special on data. There are a couple of original graphics by Jer Thorp and Jan Willem Tulp, along with a handful of interesting articles. I also got to put together a gallery of some of favorite visualization projects over the past few years.

A couple of infographic résumé sites, vizualize.me and re.vu, sprouted up that use your LinkedIn data to show your career stats. Just create an account, connect it to LinkedIn, and you get some graphs that show when and where you worked. It’s a visual form of your LinkedIn profile with a goal to replace the “old” and “boring” résumé that uses just text.

Is this the best way to go though, if you’re applying for a job?
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Designer Stefanie Posavec talks about her process of data collection, analysis, and design. There’s a lot of advantages to knowing how to program, but there can also be value in meticulous manual discovery if you’re willing to put in that extra time.
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Lulu Pinney goes over the subtle art of working with significant digits:

When we say on the phone “I’ll be there in half an hour” it’s quite likely we’ll arrive sometime in the next 25 to 35 minutes. But for the context of meeting up with a friend “half an hour” will do. If you said “see you in 27 minutes” that would raise a laugh being an odd level of precision for the given context. The same ideas apply to numbers in journalism.

Important in both accurate representation of data and readability.

A fun map by Jamie Popkin of Little Earth that animates the use of the F-bomb, C-word, and “regular swear word” over a month. There isn’t much information about where the data comes from, but I’m guessing Twitter. Each circle represents the use of a swear word, and the intensity grows as time passes. Too bad it doesn’t cover the world or the entire United States.

[PottyMouth via @awoodruff]

Note from Nathan: Last week, visualization researchers from all over gathered in Providence, Rhode Island for VisWeek 2011. One of the workshops, Telling Stories with Data, focused on data as narrative and what that means for visualization. This is a guest post by the organizers: Nick Diakopoulos, Joan DiMicco, Jessica Hullman, Karrie Karahalios, and Adam Perer.

“Data storytelling” is all the rage on websites ranging from international news outlets, to political and economic organizations, to personal blogs. Indeed, this trend has captured the attention of those who research and work in information visualization. Scores of both aspiring and seasoned visual storytellers descended on the Telling Stories with Data workshop that we organized this year (the 2nd installment of the workshop) to discuss and learn about visualization storytelling tools, issues, and contexts. The workshop took place in Providence, Rhode Island on October 23rd and was part of the yearly international VisWeek conference which itself drew about 1,000 attendees.

As in many technological fields, those interested in “narrative visualization” face the challenge of connecting with like-minded others across the oft un-negotiated boundary between academic research and practical applications or designs. Yet these groups have much to learn from one another. To bring visualization research in contact with visualization practice, we structured the workshop line-up of speakers to include both academicians (e.g. from Harvard, UC Berkeley, UIUC) and people from industry (e.g. New York Times, Microsoft Research, OECD, Workbook Project). The talks were organized into three blocks: (1) tools for structuring and sharing, (2) communicating with visualization, and (3) storytelling in context.
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In a follow-up to last year’s visions of the future, Microsoft imagines interacting with data and information in 2020. It is the land of big displays, linked devices, and projections in the real world. It’s mostly from a productivity standpoint, but there’s crossover to the everyday.

To be honest though, all I really want are power laces, a self-drying coat, a flying car, and rehydrating pizza. I wouldn’t mind a hover board either, but it’s not urgent. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. I can deal with not being able to flick graphs in the air if it means getting the important things sooner.

[Video Link via @juiceanalytics]

NPR explains how we reached a population of 7 billion. Simply put, the world is making babies faster than people are dying, and with improved medicine and agriculture, people are living longer than before. The video above demonstrates the different birth and mortality rates, where each container represents a continent.

There has been a shift in recent years:

Much of that growth has happened in Asia — in India and China. Those two countries have been among the world’s most populous for centuries. But a demographic shift is taking place as the countries have modernized and lowered their fertility rates. Now, the biggest growth is taking place in sub-Saharan Africa.

[NPR via Graphic Sociology]

Another month, another crazy circular discussion on the chances of answering a question correctly. Thanks again for sharing and tweeting. Always appreciated.

1. Best statistics question ever
2. Where people don’t use Facebook
3. The Venn Piagram
4. Bible sentiment analysis
5. Language communities of Twitter
6. #thankyousteve
7. All numbers lead to one
8. Kill Math makes math more meaningful
9. Nobel laureates by country and prize
10. Venn diagram: Platypus playing a keytar

According to estimates from the United Nations Population Division, there are now over seven billion people in the world. That’s enough people to fill, like, an entire room. Yeah. Visualization firm Bestiario, for The Guardian, shows this growth by country, using their home-brewed visual programming language, Impure.

There are a few options to play with. You can click on the bubble for a country to see the time series on the bottom for population from 1950 to 2010, through a projected 2100 population. Life expectancy for the same range is also shown. To compare geographically, you can also choose the year filters in the bottom right to compare, say, population in 1950 to that of 2010.

India and China of course pop out in that range, whereas many African populations are expected to increase a lot, percentage-wise, during the next century.

[The Guardian]

So many movies, so many creepy crawlies that go bump in the night. Very Small Array continues its ongoing run of charts about movies with this map, just in time for Halloween. Watch out Indiana. Daylight Saving Time is coming to get you.

Speaking of Halloween, my wife bought two bags of handout candy from Costco this year. I predict ten pounds will be going in my stomach next month.

[Very Small Array]

By way of Raymond Johnson, the best statistics multiple choice question ever written on a chalkboard. Try not to think too hard. [via]