Okay, it’s kind of a given for why we need to make sure great teachers keep teaching America’s children. If you’ve had a great teacher, you know what I mean. If you’ve had a bad teacher, you know what I mean. StudentsFirst argues for the end of last in, first out, which is a firing policy based on seniority. If teachers are going to be fired, the last teachers hired have to go first.
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Los Angeles has a lot of things to do. The trouble is, compared to a city like San Francisco, everything is spaced out and you have to drive almost everywhere you go. There’s also a ton of people and therefore, lots of cars on the freeway. Waze, in collaboration with Gray Area Foundation and Nik Hanselmann, visualize 24 hours of traffic in Los Angeles, a subject that holds a bitter spot in my heart.
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Firefox 4 came out of beta today and is now available for download. As of writing this, there have been about 2.2 million downloads worldwide, and you can watch the action in real-time. Little bits of fairy dusts shimmering worldwide with a counter up top and an hourly time series chart on the bottom.

The new browser boasts faster browsing, a new way of organizing your tabs, and plenty of other updates. Will it be enough to bring former Firefox users who switched to Chrome? I just closed Chrome, and am writing this in Firefox. We’ll see how this goes.

[Mozilla | Thanks, @juaniux]

Since we’re on the subject of US gas prices, let’s take a look at how they compare to the rest of the world. Having talked to some of my international friends a while back, I already knew that gas is relatively cheap here, what with all of the government subsidies and what not.

But of course we still complain. I see $3.90 per gallon and I can’t help but give the stink eye, while our friends over there in the UK are forking over nine bucks per gallon.
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In response to Sarah Palin’s complaints about gas prices around four dollars per gallon, GOOD, in collaboration with Dylan Lathrop and Sara Saedi, takes a look at other things priced per gallon. They probably could’ve done more to show a sense of scale, but the list works fine here, too.

[GOOD via @stop]

As you know, the world wasn’t always how you know it today. Land was discovered, people migrated, and significant events in history played out to shape what society is like now. For a glimpse in this sort of evolution of the world, Gareth Lloyd scraped all geotagged Wikipedia articles with time attached to them, providing a total of 14,238 events. Then he mapped them over time.
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From Maira Kalman’s And the Pursuit of Happiness, this is just too good. It appears that there is in fact enough minutes in the day to get stuff done. What’s your daily schedule?

[New York Times via swissmiss]

Randall Munroe of xkcd, with the help of a friend who is senior reactor operator, puts radiation dose in perspective:

I’m not an expert in radiation and I’m sure I’ve got a lot of mistakes in here, but there’s so much wild misinformation out there that I figured a broad comparison of different types of dosages might be good anyway. I don’t include too much about the Fukushima reactor because the situation seems to be changing by the hour, but I hope the chart provides some helpful context.

Start at the top left (sleeping next someone), to the right, and then down (standing next to the Chernobyl reactor core after explosion and meltdown) for increasing levels of radiation and warnings.
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The New York Times has a set of sobering satellite photos of Japan. Sweep the slider back and forth to see before and after. Bright and sunny to barren, smoky, and flooded. Above shows the area of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant. Below is what it looked like on November 15, 2009.
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Remember when you played Telephone as a kid? No matter how simple the message seemed to be in the beginning, the end result was a garbled mess of nonsense. This is the straight line-drawing version of Telephone by Clement Valla. Five hundred individuals were asked to trace a straight line, but there was one catch:

Each new user only sees the latest line drawn, and can therefore only trace this latest imperfect copy. As the line is reproduced over and over, it changes and evolves—kinks, trembling motions and errors are exaggerated through the process.

Watch as a single straight lines turns into a mess of scribbles.
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A Visual Compendium of Notable Haircuts in Popular Music from Pop Chart Lab has a look at, well, haircuts. Lots of long hair and sideburns.

From the pompadour to the moptop to the metal mane to whatever it is Lady Gaga has atop her head, here is a history of popular music as told through the notable haircuts on this signed, limited edition print.

If you pre-order a print by this weekend, you get 20 percent off.

See also Beatles hair history, trustworthiness of beards, and typographic moustaches.

[Pop Chart Lab via Laughing Squid]

There is so much data available and new data released every day, but not all of it is that interesting. Some is spotty and some doesn’t make sense. However, there is also a lot of exciting data to play with. Have you come across any datasets or sources that you think would be great to see and explore visually?

Mozilla tech evangelist Paul Rouget has a go at Internet Explorer 9 in a series of simple graphs, comparing it to Firefox 4. I think Rouget doesn’t like IE9. Not sure though.

The obvious progression of this series is to compare Firefox 4 to Chrome and Safari. I await the results.

Greg Ross highlights an old school graphic from The Strand Magazine, published in 1906. Authors are sized by how much the public read his or her work at the time.

The giant is Dickens, followed by Thackeray and the now largely forgotten Hall Caine. Lesser mortals, left to right, are Thomas Hardy, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Marie Corelli, Rudyard Kipling, Mary Augusta Ward, J.M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Stanley Weyman, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, Henry James, Charlotte Brontë, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, Charles Kingsley, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Israel Zangwill, Charles Reade, and E.F. Benson.

I’m guessing that the drawing is subjective, or did they have data on book sales back then?

[Futility Closet | Thanks, Craig]

You know those compressed movie barcodes that we saw last week? Here’s a Python script by Benoît Romito to make your own. Run a .avi format movie through, and voila. Free gift idea: digitize some old home movies and make a personalized barcode for your family.

The Web is a game of pageviews, and outlets such as Twitter and Facebook are a way to rack up the counts. The more people who share your posts and articles, the more new people that visit your site. So what kind of articles are shared more often? How do people with interact with these articles? Yahoo! research scientist Yury Lifshits digs into Facebook likes for some ideas, using data collected from 45 sites, 100k+ articles, and 40 million reactions, between October 2010 and January 2011.
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The Society for News Design announced the winners of their annual digital competition. The New York Times, an obvious frontrunner, took home the Gold Award and Best in Show for their coverage of the Haiti Earthquake, as well as a bunch of other awards. USA Today and The Washington Post also earned some nods, but big congrats to the NYT graphics and multimedia desks.

It’s easy to forget just how big some countries are. For example, China:

China is now the world’s second-biggest economy, but some of its provinces by themselves would rank fairly high in the global league. Our map shows the nearest equivalent country. For example, Guangdong’s GDP (at market exchange rates) is almost as big as Indonesia’s; the output of both Jiangsu and Shandong exceeds Switzerland’s.

Select among GDP, GDP per person, population, and exports. There’s a similar interactive for the United States.

[The Economist via Strange Maps | Thanks, Elise]

Typographic maps are all the rage these days. Instead of drawing well-defined boundary lines, you substitute words or names, and the landscape shows up on its own. Nancy McCabe’s maps, Charteis Graphein, are the latest addition to the genre. McCabe uses area names—oceans, countries, cities—for the letterpressed maps.
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Hot off the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Sean Gregory argues for more “stats geeks” on the sidelines and in the huddle during the game.

[S]itting next to your team’s manager, a scruffy baseball lifer, in the dugout is not just another scruffy baseball lifer, spitting tobacco. Instead, by his side is a guy with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, a beautiful mind who can calculate complex probabilities, in real time, in his head. He can tell you the odds of so-and-so throwing such-and-such a pitch to so-and-so on such-and-such a count.

It’s a fluffy article with not much on what the stat person would actually do, so you’ll have to imagine. Honestly, I hope sports statistics doesn’t come to that though. Unpredictability is what makes games so fun to watch.

[Time via @amstatnews]