Weather in the private sector is over a $1.5 billion industry, and it’s largely because of the government’s open weather data. You can find what the weather is just about anywhere with just a few clicks of the mouse. It wasn’t always like that though. Clay Johnson, former director of Sunlight Labs, describes the history of open weather data, starting with Thomas Jefferson in the late 1700s.
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In a collaboration between GOOD and Hyperakt, they come out with a bold statement: driving is why you’re fat. They follow with a graphic that shows rankings by state for amount of driving, walking, biking, and use of mass transit.

Each state is represented by a four-square grid, colored so that lighter indicates more physical activity. Each grid is complemented with a fat/skinny icon, which represents rank for obesity.

I like how the grids are geographically-placed, but I’m not so sure about coloring by rank. Would it have been better to color by the actual metrics the ranks were based on? Does driving a lot really lead to obesity or do obese populations collectively prefer to drive more? Sound off with your constructive comments below.

Wired has declared that the Web is dead in their September cover story, and they lead off with this stacked area chart showing the decline of browser-based consumption. Each layer represents a way to consume media via the Internet. Instead of the browser, the majority of US traffic, as estimated by Cisco, has shifted towards peer-to-peer, video, and tiny apps over browsers. Data accuracy questions aside, let’s not forget though that the number of total users is still growing, and that smaller portion using the Web is still billions of people.

My main concern is that the graphic only goes up to 2005. That’s ages ago by Internet time. What do the numbers look like now?

[via TechCrunch]

Update: Graphic now has correct timespan labels. So now it’s back to the debate of relative vs absolute values. [thx, Joanna]

Update again: What if the article had been about the growth in the number of ways we can interact with online media? Would we see this distribution differently?

When I first got in to graduate school, I really had no idea what I was getting in to. I thought it’d be like undergraduate studies, but harder. Not really. You definitely do a lot more unguided, independent work. You don’t have someone telling you what to do, so it’s up to you to figure out what you need to read and what you want to work on.

This illustrated guide to a PhD from computer science professor Matthew Might sums it up nicely.

By the end of high school, you know a little bit, by the end of a bachelor’s degree you start to specialize, and towards the end of a PhD, you’ve made it to the edge of human knowledge in a very small area of all there is to know in the world. Your job is to push that edge out some by the time you finish.

It’s all so clear to me now.

[Thanks, Max]

Add another toy to Stamen’s bag of tricks. The recently launched prettymaps by Aaron Straup Cope uses shapefiles from Flickr, urban areas from Natural Earth, and road, highway, and path data form OpenStreetMap, for an interactive map that’s well, pretty.
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I’m late on this, but remember that volcano eruption in Iceland a few months back, and all the European airports had to shut down because of the giant ash cloud? DataMarket mapped the Iceland earthquakes in 2010, leading up to the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull.

This visualization shows earthquake activity leading up to eruptions in Eyjafjallajökull in South-Iceland in March and April 2010.

Each bubble represents a measured earthquake and the size of the bubble represents its magnitude. Deeper earthquakes are represented with darker colrs while shallow earthquakes are brighter. An earthquake slowly fades out as time passes. Yellow stars indicate eruptions.

Like you’d expect, it’s a stagnant in the beginning, then rumble, rumble, and boom. Eruption. Watch it unfold in the clip below.
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“1945-1998” by Isao Hashimoto – Nuclear explosions conducted around the world between, um, 1945 and 1998. A counter on the top keeps track of explosions in each country. [thx, bernd]

Wikipedia’s Lamest Edit Wars – David McCandless looks at some petty back and forth. Rectangles represent documents, and are sized by number of edits.

Mood on Twitter – Cartograms representing mood on Twitter over time. Highest level of happy is early morning and late night. Not sure what measure of happiness is though. [thx, sune]

Radiolab and NPR Present Words – Beautiful video from the always entertaining and informative Radiolab. Similar to Moments.

I used this diagram to convince my wife to marry me (j/k).

Buy the print by Nick Schmitz here. Have a good weekend!

[via swissmiss]

Update: Sheldon Comics has a slightly different take.

Carl Richards, a financial planner and a regular on The New York Times’ Bucks blog, uses graphs and diagrams to explain personal finance. And as you know, sketches are always twice as charming when they are on the back of a napkin. Together, the collection provides sound financial advice, so that you don’t end up poor and bankrupt, chasing the next Google or investing in entertainment.

[via Chart Porn]

My wife is an ER doc, so I hear about this sort of stuff all the time. Hospitals are going all-digital, and the exchange of data from doctor to doctor, from hospital to hospital, from patient to doctor, and doctor to patient is only going to get easier.

This expedited exchange of information will bring advantages such as fewer prescription errors, easier hospital transfers, and through sensors and mobile devices, professional health practitioners will be able to provide better care to those with chronic health conditions. This illustration from Chris Luongo explains a bit more.

Naturally, with all these benefits come plenty of challenges. Data privacy is huge here. Can you imagine if your medical charts ended up in some random hacker’s hands and then sold to the highest bidder? At least we might get more useful spam. I want big discounts on mis-spelled drugs that I actually need.

Seriously though. Data is blowing up, and there’s going to be monster demand for data scientists in the next ten years. See that wagon? Better jump on it while there’s still room.

[via Smarter Planet]

I should just automatically bring the OkTrends feed into FlowingData. In their never-ending quest to understand humankind, the group from online dating site OkCupid analyzes 11.4 million opinions on what makes a “great” photo – as in makes people want to date you. Some of the findings include: photos from Panasonic Micro 4/3s were best received, “photo attractiveness” decreased by age, and the Flash adds seven years.

There’s one finding that’s got everyone buzzing though. iPhone users have more sexual partners. See the graph above and below for the numbers.
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Martin Wattenberg, who with his associate Fernanda Viégas, was just snatched up by Google, talks data and visualization in a lecture at MIT. For the most part, he focuses on past projects, which I am sure you’ve seen. However, even if you have seen all of Martin and Fernanda’s work, it’s still worth a watch as he highlights the interesting tidbits that each tool or piece can reveal. The rundown makes you appreciate the work that much more, in the same way you appreciate art when you know the story behind the picture.

The great thing about Martin and Fernanda is that they’re able to switch back and forth between art and science, which in turn gains the respect of the academic visualization world and attention from the masses.

Watch the full keynote below. It’s on the longish side, at about an hour, so you might want to bookmark it for later.
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I’m still not comfortable sharing my location with strangers, and my friends are all really low-tech, so FourSquare has never appealed to me. But if you are an avid FourSquare user, you’ll like this one. Geo startup, Movity, built Weeplaces over the weekend. It’s a simple idea to visualize your movements via FourSquare check-ins.
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There’s a lot of history behind the New York City subway map, but despite all the revisions, people (especially out-of-towners) still find it hard to navigate the underground. Designer Eddie Jabbour took his frustrations and put that energy towards a heavy redesign. After the MTA rejected it, he put it up in the Apple Store as KickMap, so that people could at least make use of his map on their iPhone. So far, a quarter of a million of people have downloaded it.
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Alex Rodriguez became only the seventh player in MLB history to hit 600 home runs, at a younger age than any of the previous six by far. Amanda Cox and Kevin Quealy of The New York Times visualize home run counts for Rodriguez and other big hitters. It’s similar to the graphic NYT designed when Barry Bonds passed Hank Aaron back in 2007, except with this new one, you can sort the home run lines by season or by age.
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A simple question from GOOD magazine: where did the money to rebuild Iraq go? In 2003, the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) was established for the benefit of the country’s people. The Department of Defense (DoD) managed that money. According to a report [pdf] from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction:

Weaknesses in DoD’s financial and management controls left it unable to properly account for $8.7 billion of the $9.1 billion in DFI funds it received for reconstruction activities in Iraq. This situation occurred because most DoD organizations receiving DFI funds did not establish the required Department of the Treasury accounts and no DoD organization was designated as the executive agent for managing the use of DFI funds. The breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss.

That’s 96% of 9.1 billion dollars that we apparently have no clue about how it was spent. What?

[Thanks, Elise]

Here’s another timeline of Inception from deviantArt user, dehas. This one has the kicks in it. Start on the bottom left, and follow the character lines counter-clockwise. Lines end as characters die off in each level.
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You know I can never resist a good Back to the Future reference. Also from graphic designer Sean Mort, the trilogy timelines are displayed in parallel. Important events from each year are marked, starting at the original flick up top and moving down to the lesser, but still great, Western finale.

This flowchart from Watermark Design helps you decide if you need a new logo. Oddly enough all paths lead to Watermark’s logo design services. That is unless you think designers have no concept of reality and scream when someone tells you art is important to business, and you happen to be an international spy. Hm, interesting. [via]