iPhone gets all the glory, but there are plenty of Android phones activated every day, worldwide. This quick visualization (below), from the Android Developers themselves, shows just how that growth has gone over the past few years. It starts with a worldwide view and then zooms in on countries for a closer look. Keep an eye on the top left corner for phone launches.
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Big thanks to the FlowingData sponsors. This little blog of mine wouldn’t be possible without them. Take a look at their data schtuff. They provide data and help you make sense of it.

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Moki takes a page out of the OkCupid social media playbook and analyzes movie ratings over the past two decades. They looked at the 20 most popular movies for each year, and then plotted them by “polarization,” or rather, standard deviation, or in other words, movies that had a wider spread of ratings were more polarizing than those where reviewers came to a consensus.
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WiFi is everywhere, floating and whirling around us somehow, but where is it really? In Immaterials: Light painting WiFi, Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen use a rod of blinking lights to visualize signal strength in their college town.

In order to study the spatial and material qualities of wireless networks, we built a WiFi measuring rod that visualises WiFi signal strength as a bar of lights. When moved through space the rod displays changes in the WiFi signal. Long-exposure photographs of the moving rod reveal cross sections of a network’s signal strength.

The stronger the signal strength, the more lights that illuminate in that specific spot, updating as the walker/carrier moves. Then using long-exposure photographs, the lights are recorded for beautiful results. Super simple concept, yet very effective. See the device in action in the video below.
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William Briggs and John Briggs examine the differences between movies that have won Best Picture and those that were top at the Box Office, based on money, gender, age, and genre. “There was only one Oscar winning movie with a leading actress older than 50: Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy. Eight women were at least 40 in Oscar winning movies, e.g. Myrna Loy, Bette Davis, Sandra Bullock. However, half of these were just 40 or 41.”

[via]

Along the same lines of the happiness flowchart, this graphic by Moritz Resl shows a simplified life cycle between happy and sad. Let’s not forget though that sometimes doing stuff you like leads to sad, and more importantly, doing stuff you don’t like can lead to happy. Have a nice weekend!

[Moritz Resl via swissmiss]

We saw the true size of Africa, relative to the world’s largest countries, by Kai Krause last year. Taking it in the other direction, xefer shows the true size of Vatican City, world’s smallest state, with an area of approximately 110 acres. That’s just big enough to house a handful of national formations and man-made structures.

[xefer via Map of the Week]

Need music data? Get all the data you want and more from the freely available million song dataset, offered by LabROSA at Columbia University and Echo Nest. There’s lots of metadata on song features and your standard stuff like year and artist. There are also several code wrappers and samples to help researchers make use of the data right away.

[Million Song Dataset via @MacDivaONA]

The list of one-off applications that visualize your digital life, whether it be your Twitter feed, Facebook updates, or Foursquare checkins, has been growing for a short while. Ben Cerveny and Tom Carden, both Stamen Design alumni, aim to take this idea to the next level with Bloom, with elements of game design.
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FYI: Freakonomics, the Movie is available to watch instantly on Netflix right now. It is of course based on the highly recommended first book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. I just watched it last night, and it’s not as good as the book, but still an interesting watch. If anything, it’s worth watching just to see Levitt talk about data. The exchange between Levitt and Dubner is also pretty entertaining.

I haven’t read the second book, SuperFreakonomics, yet. Thoughts?

What and how much people drink depends a lot on what country you’re in or what culture you’re exposed to. Personally I grew up in a low-alcohol family. It’s not that we thought it was bad, but just because, well, it didn’t really occur to us to do that. The Economist shows these differences via this world map on average alcohol consumption, according to a recently released report by the World Health Organisation.

The world drank an average of 6.1 liters per person in 2005, but it was significantly more in Europe and the Soviet states. Hey, you gotta stay warm somehow, right?

Have a look at this map for legal drinking age. Is there any relationship? Doesn’t seem to be a very strong case.

[Economist | Thanks, Elise]

Charles M. Blow has a look at some metrics for the International Monetary Fund’s “Advanced economy” countries. As Americans, we like to think that we’re the best at everything, but in many instances, that just isn’t the case. Sometimes we’re the worst.

[New York Times via @charlesmblow]

If you love baseball and have an iPad, you need Pennant, a project by Steve Varga. The app lets you explore every game and play since 1951. See the numbers for your favorite player or team with just a few taps or swipes while you’re plopped on your couch watching the game. Imagine: one hand with an ice cold beverage, iPad on your lap, and the game on in front of you.
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NASA briefly explains the water cycle:

Water regulates climate, predominately storing heat during the day and releasing it at night. Water in the ocean and atmosphere carry heat from the tropics to the poles. The process by which water moves around the earth, from the ocean, to the atmosphere, to the land and back to the ocean is called the water cycle.

The three animations above show hourly evaporation, water vapor, and precipitation, based on “data from the GEOS-5 atmospheric model on the cubed-sphere, run at 14-km global resolution for 25-days.” I’m not even going to pretend like I know what I’m talking about, but it is fun to watch the simulated global water movements. Remember, these are based on actual data. They are not closeups of lava lamps.

[Video Link via Data Pointed]

I can’t resist. It’s about food and those chickens are just so cute. View the full guide to eggs on culinaut.

Here’s something to chew on while you wait for the 2011 slam dunk contest to get a move on already. It’s a score history of all of the dunks from 1984 to 2010, complete with video. From the commentator after Michael Jordan’s first dunk in round 3 in 1988: “I like to call that the Chinese Superman dunk. He goes in slanted.”

[Hoopism via @infochimps]

A Grammy win is worth way more than a little trophy and some short-lived fame. It’s worth actual cash. As shown in this graphic by Wilson Andrews and Mike McPhate for the Washington Post, album sales two weeks after winning shoot up from two weeks before the awards show.

Last year, album sales only went up 56 percent for the Taylor Swift album Fearless, compared to a plus 891 percent bump for the 2009 winners, Alison Kraus and Robert Plant. However, considering the relative obscurity of this year’s winner, Arcade Fire, I suspect a bump more like the latter.

[Washington Post]

After a sluggish launch by police.uk to unleash local crime data, the Guardian and Doug McCune teamed up to provide a tool that lets you compare crime rates in different England cities:

The government’s recent launch of police.uk saw a phenomenal public reaction. Within hours of going live, millions of users had attempted to gain access to maps permitting street-level scrutiny of crime incidents across the UK. Dogged by “technical problems”, the site was reported by many to have failed in the face of public interest. Although the servers now seem much more capable of dealing with ongoing demand, we couldn’t help but wonder if we could offer people some alternative ways to compare and contrast crime levels around the country.

Turnaround time: four days, completely with SpatialKey.

[Guardian | Thanks, Doug and Simon]

With Google’s recent data-related offerings, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that they’ve opened up their Public Data Explorer so that you can upload your own data. Previously, it was only available when you searched for something like “GDP” and a related dataset was supplied by an official provider.

[W]e’re opening the Public Data Explorer to your data. We’re making a new data format, the Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL), openly available, and providing an interface for anyone to upload their datasets. DSPL is an XML-based format designed from the ground up to support rich, interactive visualizations like those in the Public Data Explorer. The DSPL language and upload interface are available in Google Labs.

In terms of visualization, there’s isn’t anything new. You’ve got your maps, bar charts, and time series line charts, with the checkboxes on the left (like the snapshot below). Then there’s the chart types available via the charting API.
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To encourage the integration of broadband and information technology into local economies, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (with some help from Stamen) now provides an exploratory tool for broadband in your community:

The National Broadband Map (NBM) is a searchable and interactive website that allows users to view broadband availability across every neighborhood in the United States. The NBM was created by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), in collaboration with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and in partnership with 50 states, five territories and the District of Columbia. The NBM is a project of NTIA’s State Broadband Initiative. The NBM will be updated approximately every six months and was first published on February 17, 2011.

There’s a lot of data to look at, but you can search for the city or zipcode that you’re interested in, and get information on what’s available, as shown below. You can also see how your city compares to other locations in the country.
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