You can get pretty far with data graphics with just limited statistical knowledge, but if you want to take your skills, resume, and portfolio to the next level, you should learn standard data practices. Of all places, UK Parliament has some short and free guides to help you with basic statistical concepts. They provide 13 notes, each only two or three pages long that can help you with stuff like how to adjust for inflation, confidence intervals and statistical significance, or basic graph suggestions [pdf]. I like.

[via | Thanks, @joemako]

Flowchart Friday, anyone? This one describes the process to solve all of your problems. Unfortunately, sometimes in life, you just end up going around in circles. That’s what Maury Povich taught me.

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A couple of months back, WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show asked listeners who have moved to or away from New York some questions. They asked current zipcode, previous zipcode, year of move, and some other questions. BLS then posted the data and let information and data folk have a go at it. Here are the results.
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I trust we’ve all seen the OldSpice YouTube campaign by now? This graphic from Know Your Meme categorizes videos by who they were directed to and how many views they received. For example, a video to Joe Blow would be in the low-profile category, while responses to Alyssa Milano go to the high-profile category.
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The tennis US Open is in full swing, and since you’re at work, you probably need a way to keep up with all of the matches. In a collaboration between the US Open and IBM, this real-time display shows you what’s going on during any given match.
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A big thank you to FlowingData sponsors for their support. They help me keep the lights on. Check ’em out. They help you understand your data.

Splunk – Leading software used to monitor, report and analyze live streaming IT data as well as terabytes of historical data – located on-premise or in the cloud. More than 1,850 organizations in 70 countries use Splunk to gain valuable insights from their IT data.

Tableau Software – Combines data exploration and visual analytics in an easy-to-use data analysis tool you can quickly master. It makes data analysis easy and fun. Customers are working 5 to 20 times faster using Tableau.

Want to sponsor FlowingData? Email me for details.

Last month we saw sorting algorithms visualized in rainbow technicolor. Now, by Rudy Andrut, here they are auralized.

This particular audibilization is just one of many ways to generate sound from running sorting algorithms. Here on every comparison of two numbers (elements) I play (mixing) sin waves with frequencies modulated by values of these numbers. There are quite a few parameters that may drastically change resulting sound – I just chose parameteres that imo felt best.

It sounds like someone is playing on old Atari game. Warning: may cause seizures. Watch it in action in the video below.
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It’s been a hectic month. With one month left until my thesis defense, there’s no letting up, and it’s time to turn on the after burners. It’s definitely been interesting though, culling everything I’ve learned these past five years.

As it turns out, writing for FlowingData is actually a nice break from thesis-writing every now and then, so I’ve managed to keep things up and running around here. Thanks to everyone who has sent suggestions. You’ve been a big help. And of course, thanks to all who continue to share FlowingData. Much appreciated.

In case you missed them, or you’re new, here are the top posts from this past month.
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Auger Loizeau, in collaboration with Reyer Zwiggelaar and Bashar Al-Rjoub, describe their smart-home project Happylife. It monitors facial expressions and movements to estimate a family’s mood, displayed via four glowing orbs on the wall, one for each member.
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Connoisseur of scaled rounded rectangles, bubbles, and triangles, David McCandless of Information is Beautiful talks data visualization in recently posted TED talk (below). He explains how information design can help us get through information glut on the Web and how simple charts can show patterns that we never would have seen otherwise. He uses his own works and collaborations as evidence.
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This animation by Scott Manley of the Armagh Observatory shows a beautiful view of the past 30 years of asteroid discoveries, using data culled by Ted Bowell and company.

As time passes, asteroids are highlighted white and then colored by how closely they come to our inner solar system. Earth crossers are red, Earth approachers are yellow, and all others are colored green.

What you get is a view of the solar system’s planets and asteroids orbiting the sun and these beautiful sparkles in sky. As automated sky scanning systems come online in the 1990s, we see waves of discoveries. Then starting at the beginning of 2010, we see a discovery pattern as a result of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which has been tasked with mapping all infrared light in the sky.

Watch the full video below.
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Do you know who owns the Arctic? As it turns out, it’s a pretty messy subject:

In August 2007 Russian scientists sent a submarine to the Arctic Ocean seabed at 90° North to gather data in support of Russia’s claim that the North Pole is part of the Russian continental shelf. The expedition provoked a hostile reaction from other Arctic littoral states and prompted media speculation that Russia’s action might trigger a “new Cold War” over the resources of the Arctic.

Luckily things are at least a little more in control now though. Well, sort of. Canada, Denmark and the US still need to define their continental shelf limits. Keep in mind that the shelf can be more than 200 nautical miles from these countries’ coastal baselines.

The International Boundaries Research Unit provides this map [pdf] of claimed boundaries and areas that will potentially be claimed in the future.

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Nmap visualizes site popularity as scaled icons. Favicons, that is. They’re that little icon that shows in your address bar or when you bookmark a site in your browser. If you’re reading this on FlowingData, you should see a little red icon next to the URL. The larger the icon, the more popular the site is, based on Alexa traffic data. In whole, the image is a giant 37,440 by 37,440 pixels image. Google is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels. Facebook is 6,736 × 6,736 pixels. Yahoo is 6,544 × 6,544 pixels.
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Wilson Andrews and Alicia Parlapiano report for The Washington Post on how the fight over tax breaks affects your bottom line:

Tax cuts enacted under former president George W. Bush are set to expire at year’s end, and lawmakers are battling over whether to extend them before the November elections. Most Republicans want to extend all of the cuts, saying that any increase in taxes will hold back the economic recovery. President Obama and Democratic leaders would extend many of the cuts but say tax breaks for top earners should expire to pare down deficits. Each plan would affect average tax rates for income groups differently.

Each row represents an income group, and you can flip between letting Bush’s tax cuts expire, shifting to Obama’s plan, and extending the current cuts. Bubbles on the right show the average tax change per taxpayer for each income group. Switch from the first option (letting all cuts expire) to the second (Obama’s plan), and you’ll notice some changes for top earners.
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What country has the best education? Health? Quality of life? Thomas Klepl and Adam Clarkson of Newsweek take a look at important metrics for the world’s best countries. It’s basically a parallel coordinates plot turned on its side. Each represents a metric, and each circle in a row is a country.

Select a country from the list on the left or by directly interacting with the plot. If a country is top in all categories, like Finland, then all of the scores are going to be on the right. Burkina Faso, on the other hand, is all the way to the left. Of course, this is only the “top” 100 countries.

You can also filter by geographic regions, income, and population groups.

While I’m not totally sure about the ranking system and methodology, it’s an interesting look.

[Thanks, Adam]

Private browsing. All the modern browsers have it. Turn it on, and the browser won’t keep your history during the session. Sometimes it’s used to pay bank bills on a public computer. Sometimes it’s used for other stuff. In an opt-in study looking at a week in the life of a browser, Mozilla looked at how people use private browsing.

Again, it’s worth noting that people opted in to this study (about 4,000 of them), and Mozilla only recorded when users started and stopped private browsing. Nothing in between.

That said, they came up with two basic findings. The first is when people typically use private browsing (above).

They saw usage spikes during the lunch hours as well as just before the work day ended. The other spike is after the dinner hours and then finally, in the late hours of the night.
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It was election night a few days ago in Australia, and News.com.au ran this graphic to show results in real-time during the election:

Instead of presenting the count as a map, we’ve made each electorate into a little ball, which pulses and swings and fights for position against 149 others.

As the votes come in, the balls spring to life, changing colour and moving towards the larger ball representing the party leading the vote. The colour will get deeper as the percentage of the vote counted rises.

At first it displays the primary vote, then when it’s time to call the seat for that party it switches to the two-party preferred or two-candidate preferred vote.

There’s also a scroll bar and a speed option so that you can go back and forth in time. Enter a postal code to highlight specific areas.

I lack the context to fully appreciate this, but several Aussies have sent me the link, so maybe someone can highlight some of the interesting points. It’s easy to see though how this could be fascinating during any election in your country or city, even if the floating animation is more for flash. A lot of the time we don’t care so much about the geography as we do the party splits and our particular area.

[Thanks, all]

When major environmental disasters occur, thousands of people are often affected, but it’s hard to put it all in perspective when it’s not actually happening to you. When the BP oil spill was in full force we saw this simple mashup that placed the oil blob over your area. In the natural iteration to that, BBC Dimensions maps the outcome of other environmental disasters in your neighborhood, including Chernobyl explosion, the 2010 Pakistan floods, and Bhopal chemical accident. Enter your location, and put things into perspective.

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