We often think of rivers as following a given path for the course of its life, but really, the path changes over time as the flow cuts into the earth. The water flows through old and new and back again. In 1944, cartographer Harold Fisk mapped the current Mississippi River. It’s the white trail. Then Fisk used old geological maps to display old paths. They’re the old colored paths. And what you get is this long run of windy, snake-like things. [Twisted History | Thanks, Michael]

Some people live in areas where a one-hour commute both ways is common, while others practically live across the street from their workplaces. Engineer slash designer Harry Kao has an interactive look at commuting by zip code:

In Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), the author states that commute times throughout history have remained steady at roughly a half hour in each direction. Advances in transportation technology (our feet, horses, bicycles, trains, automobiles, flying cars, etc.) allow us to live farther from where we work. This got me thinking about my own commute from Berkeley to San Francisco, how it compares to those of my neighbors, and how commutes vary across the country.

Using commute data from Census Transportation Planning Package and travel times from the Google Maps API, an interactive map lets you see where people in your area commute to or from. Enter your zip code and explore.
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Your email says a lot about who you are, who you interact with, and what you’re up to at any given time. Maybe it’s receipts from that online travel site or notifications from Facebook. There are lots of tidbits you can extract from your inbox. But how? PhD candidate Bill Zeller provides you with Graph Your Inbox.
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Online dating site OkCupid continues their run of amusing yet thorough analysis of their users. This time: the real stuff white people like. Well actually, the stuff that all races like:

We selected 526,000 OkCupid users at random and divided them into groups by their (self-stated) race. We then took all these people’s profile essays (280 million words in total!) and isolated the words and phrases that made each racial group’s essays statistically distinct from the others’.

Top phrase for white males? Tom Clancy. White female? The Red Sox. Black males? Soul food. Black females? Soul food. Asian males? Taiwan. Asian females? Coz. Yeah, I don’t know what that is either.

[Thanks, John]

In a different take on the infographic, RSA Animate illustrates the ideas and concepts proposed by invited speakers at RSA lectures. A recorded audio version lecture runs in the background a hand, possibly the same hand who played Thing on the Addams Family, draws what the lecturer is saying.

Below is the illustrated version of Professor Phillip Zimbardo’s lecture on the secret powers of time. The original video of Zimbardo speaking at a podium follows. Same message, but very different visuals.
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Blend Interactive maps points of control for the Web 2.0 Summit in the style of the Risk board game. Areas of the Web are shown as continents, and countries are the areas where major players have “claimed.” Click on the movements button to see what areas each company has ventured in to, and click on icons to get more info. A more neutral-colored map might have benefited the paths and icons, but it’s still fun to look at. And yes, the geography of the map is fake.

[Web 2.0 Summit | Thanks, KM]

I know you were confused about Muppet names. I hope this venn diagram helps you figure things out and you can get on with your life. [via | Thanks, David]

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.

—John Tukey

Too many slots. Too many buttons. Spanish bank BBVA and design consultancy IDEO rethink the ATM:

ATMs were first introduced over 40 years ago and since then many features have been incrementally added to the machines, in order to fulfill the dream of a truly “automated teller”. Modern ATMs offer a wide range of banking transactions; nevertheless the actual interaction has remained largely untouched.

Fewer slots. Fewer buttons. More privacy and personalization.

[via]

Foursquare, the location-based social network, lets people share their location with others in the form of checkins. Map all of those checkins, and you get a sense of social hotspots across a city. This is what Anil Bawa-Cavia did in his project archipelago. Based on 845,311 checkins and 20,285 locations, he mapped activity for New York, London, and Paris.

In these maps, activity on the Foursquare network is aggregated onto a grid of ‘walkable’ cells (each one 400×400 meters in size) represented by dots. The size of each dot corresponds to the level of activity in that cell. By this process we can see social centers emerge in each city.

Here are the maps for each city.
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Using data from a recent Gallup report showing a correlation between wealth and faith, Charles M. Blow reports in graphic form. Each sphere, sized by population, represents a country. Spheres are colored by dominant religion in that country.
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There are a bunch of college ratings out there to help students decide what college to apply to (and give something for alumni to gloat about). The tough part is that there doesn’t seem to be any agreement on what makes a good college. Alex Richards and Ron Coddington describe the discrepancies.
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I asked this same question a couple of years back. I wonder: has the software that people use for visualization and data graphics changed at all? Punch your answer in the poll below. If you select ‘other’ let us know your tool of choice in the comments.

P.S. I know many of you use a combination of these. Pick your favorite if that’s the case.
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Physicist Kristian Cvecek hangs out in the forest sometimes to take these beautiful pictures of firefly trails, using slow shutter speeds on his camera. Even better than the long exposure shot of a Roomba. [via]

If you’ve ever created an interactive graphic or anything else that requires that you feed in data, you will love this barebones data conversion tool by Shan Carter. Copy and paste data from Excel, which I feel like I’ve done a billion times, and then take your pick from Actionscript, JSON, XML, and Ruby. Simple, but a potential time saver. [via]

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.

[via]

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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