President Obama will be answering questions live at a youth town hall today at 4pm EST, with livestreaming on MTV, BET, and CMT. He’ll be taking questions from the audience and possibly from Twitter. If you want to keep track of the conversation, the folks at Stamen have got your back with their visual Twitter tracker:

The visualization is online here, and builds on work that was previously battle-tested at the 2010 Video Music Awards. The idea is that you post messages to twitter with the #ask hashtag, followed by the issue you’re interested in asking the President about. If it’s a good one, he may answer it on the air.

Like the VMA visualization, topics are tracked and ordered by popularity. But instead of showing celebrities, this one shows issues that people on Twitter care about. A bar chart on the bottom left shows trends over time.
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Neil Irwin and Alicia Parlapiano of The Washington Post report with this interactive graphic on why it doesn’t feel like we’re in a recovery:

The nation’s economic woes boil down to this. Compared with a healthy economy, about 7 million working-age people and 5 percent of the nation’s industrial capacity are sitting idle, not producing what they could. The economy is growing again, but at a rate — less than 2 percent in recent months — that’s too slow to keep up with a population that keeps increasing and workers who keep getting more efficient.

A step-by-step guide explains the output gap, the difference between potential and actual output.

[The Washington Post via @hfairfield]

In reference to the wall between reporting data and understanding it, Martin Theus proposes a different one:

Once you start to explore the data, the whole thing stops to be linear but gets to be very iterative, jumping over the wall every now and then. I.e., you may find out that the data cleaning is insufficient, or the model you have in mind needs some other transformation of the data, or you might want to collect additional or other data altogether.

The wall does exist, but I think it is more separating two kinds of people / thinking.

Theus finishes:

One thing is for sure: we won’t succeed if analysts continue to build useful but technically insufficient tools and computer scientists still build fancy tools that merely help the analysts.

Or even better: analyst and tool builder become the same person. That’ll take much longer though, so communication is a good place to start.

[Theusrus]

In collaboration with NBC News and The Gates Foundation, Ben Fry-headed Fathom Design shows you how K-12 schools measure up in your area. If you’re a parent or soon-to-be parent considering a move, this will be especially interesting to you. The Education Nation Scorecard lets you search for your location or a specific school to see how they perform and how they compare to the rest of the country.
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Thousands of people flee their country every year, and the travel patterns are by no means easy to understand. Christian Behrens, in a revamp of a class project, visualizes these refugee movements with three views. The first is a circular network diagram (above), where each slice represents a region or country. Lines represent flight and expulsions.
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Online dating site OkCupid dives into their data for 3.2 million users again, this time to explore gay and straight stereotypes. Many are false. Some are true. Among the findings: who’s gay curious in the United States and who thinks the earth is bigger than the sun.

In a follow up to code_swarm, a visualization to show the development of software projects, Michael Ogawa has another look with Software Evolution Storylines:

My previous software visualization experiment, code_swarm, turned out pretty good. But some wanted a more analytic view of the data — one that was more persistent. I wondered about what this could look like, and came across this XKCD comic. It represents characters as lines that converge in time as they share scenes. Could this technique be adapted for software developers who work on the same code?

The difference between this and the xckd comic is that instead of fictional characters, there are now developers, and instead of characters crossing paths, developers cluster when they work commit changes to the same file. The histogram on the bottom provides information on the type of files that were committed during any given time. Roll over any line to focus on a specific devleoper.
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It seems like all the mobile groups are suing each other these days. Who’s suing whom? What company is suing the most? Who’s getting sued the most? There was a mini-wave of graphics last week to help answer these questions.
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Matt Parker explains why no one should be fooled by a misuse of statistics just like no one was fooled by “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

This guide on how to order dim sum is missing a lot food items, but gosh darn it, I love me some dim sum. Steamed and fried goodness on the cheap is what it’s all about. One small but very important thing I would change is that last bit. There is no such thing as, “Are you still hungry?” It should be, “Can you eat anymore?” When you feel like you can’t eat anymore, you eat a little more, and then fight over the check.

[Dim Sum Pop via @ehrenc]

Everyone’s fascinated with animated graphics, which is cool, but sometimes a series of a whole bunch of maps is just as good. Archie Tse of The New York Times shows the spread of oil over time as several static maps to complement the animated version. Nice, right? You can see the changes from start to finish at a glance.

[New York Times via @mericson]

In his five-minute TED talk (below), Gary Wolf describes the quantified self and why it matters:

The self isn’t the only thing. It’s not even most things. The self is just our operations center, our consciousness, our moral compass. So if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better.

And with personal data stuff like Nike+ and Fitbit doing well, there’s clearly an interest (and a market for it). At what point though does personal data become too much?
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xkcd + numbers on online communities. Need I say more? Along the same lines as the Web 2.0 Points of Control, xkcd maps online communities with fictitious regions sized by the amount of daily social activity. Beware of the Bay of Flame in the Blogosphere and the Northern Wasteland of Unread Updates in Facebook. Personally, I like to hop between the Twitter and YouTube islands.

It’s most interesting when you compare it to the 2007 map where MySpace, Yahoo, and Windows Live ruled the land. I guess things are a little different nowadays.

Make sure you check out the large version.

[xkcd | Thanks, Elise]

Cartography group Axis Maps continues their run of mapping goodness with the announcement of their typographic maps:

Created as a labor of love, these unique maps accurately depict the streets and highways, parks, neighborhoods, coastlines, and physical features of the city using nothing but type. Only by manually weaving together thousands upon thousands of carefully placed words does the full picture of the city emerge. Every single piece of type was manually placed, a process that took hundreds of hours to complete for each map.

Prints are available. Grab the large size for maximum goodness. They only have maps for Boston and Chicago right now, but hopefully the project continues to more cities. I’ll be keeping an eye out for San Francisco.

[Axis Maps via Cartogrammer]

Another month come and gone, and it was a good one. The FlowingData book is on the way, and we’re now 42k strong. Wow. Who woulda thunk it? Not me.

In case you missed them, here are the most popular posts from the month.

1. The Muppets name etymology
2. Europe geographically stereotyped
3. Race and ethnicity mapped by block
4. Faith and poverty in the world
5. Problem solving flowchart (slightly crass)
6. Social life of Foursquare users mapped
7. Journalism in the Age of Data
8. Where your neighbors commute to and from
9. Statistical literacy guides for the basics
10. Music listening preferences by gender

Thanks for reading! And thanks for sharing, tweeting, and liking. It really helps us reach a wider audience.

Do you know who you’ll be voting for this year? It can be tough deciding with all of the different issues and candidates. The commercials on TV don’t exactly help all that much either. VoteEasy, brought to you by Project Vote Smart and developed by Portland-based design firm Periscopic, helps you make an educated decision. Input the issues that matter to you, like abortion, public healthcare, or capital punishment, and VoteEasy will show you the candidates who best match your ideals in your area.
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My many thanks to the FlowingData sponsors. I wouldn’t be able to do what I do without them. Check ’em out. They help you understand your 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.

Zoho Reports — Offers an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that assists you to easily do in-depth reporting and visual analysis of your business data. It is best suited for SMBs using spreadsheets or custom software for data analysis.

Bime — Start small, connect all your data and answer deep business questions in minutes. Then enlight your partners and everyone in your organisation. Bime is a perfect balance of power and simplicity to help your organisation make better decisions.

Want to sponsor FlowingData? I’d love to hear from you. Contact me at [email protected] for details.

Matthew asks:

You say that you blog for fun and out of love for the subject. What kind of infographics give you the most pleasure? Are there kinds of infographics that you look for but don’t see?

How did your love of infographics begin?

Also, the recent documentary on info visualization “Journalism in the age of data” raised the question of how infographics can succeed in being beautiful without helping the reader gain insight into the data. As someone motivated by pleasure in infographics, does this concern you? Do you find yourself taking pleasure in this type of work? Can infographics that fail as knowledge tools succeed as art/design? Or when you speak of relishing infographics, are you referring to the pleasure of insight? To belabor this a bit: do you glean more delight from work that is beautiful or that yields insight?

My interest with data graphics goes all the way back to the fourth grade when I first learned how to make a bar chart in Excel. It was for my science fair project on what surface snails moved on the fastest (it was glass). Nothing fancy, and it was probably all default settings, but for some reason, that was fun to me.
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Since it’s October, all the zombie forces are preparing for attack. Luckily we have this zombie survival chart to help us counter. Be safe out there, folks. [Yahoo via blastr | Thanks, Elise]

Ever notice how pants seem to fit differently from store-to-store even though they’re labeled as the same size? Why does the 36-inch at Old Navy feel kind of loose but the same size at The Gap feels like you had too many fries at lunch? Here’s your answer from the Esquire Style blog. The actual size (from this über-scientific study, I am sure) tends to be bigger than the size as advertised. A 36-inch waistline actually means 41 inches in Old Navy units.
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