In response to the the 9/11 attacks, the United States government created a highly secretive set of organizations with zero transparency and very little oversight. How much money do these secret programs cost? How many people do they employ? The Washington Post reports on Top Secret America:

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The series of articles, video, and graphics, allow readers to explore the information themselves.

Of main interest: a network diagram shows organizations and their top secret activities and a map shows the geographic distribution of government organizations and companies within Top Secret America.

Click on a specific organization for within group breakdowns. At this point it gets a little confusing with drill-down pie charts, especially if you’re just browsing, and a spiral view is also offerred which feels extraneous. The overall story and heavy research, however, makes it worth clicking through the clunky at times set of interactives.

[Thanks, Erika]

In the same spirit of the original coffee drink infographic from a few years ago, Plaid Creative describes the perfect pour, or as I like to call it, the citizen’s guide to fancy pants coffee drinks. At its root, its a series of pie charts where each wedge represents the percentage of ingredient in a given fancy pants drink. But the subtle stylings make it look so much more delicious, from the pattern fills out to the mug-like border.

[via thisisnthappiness]

I know you secretly love all information in periodic tables. It’s okay, you can laugh. I won’t tell anyone. In the latest to the ever-growing list of non-element tables, Modern Toss has a look at all the lovely four-letter words and expressive phrases at your disposal.

[via Boing Boing]

Peter Barber, head of Map Collections at the British Library reports for the The Daily Mail ten of the greatest maps that changed the world. The number one listed (above) is Be On Guard! from 1921:

The infant USSR was threatened with invasion, famine and social unrest. To counter this, brilliant designers such as Dimitri Moor were employed to create pro-Bolshevik propaganda.

Using a map of European Russia and its neighbours, Moor’s image of a heroic Bolshevik guard defeating the invading ‘Whites’ helped define the Soviet Union in the Russian popular imagination.

Others include Google Earth, Charles Booth’s map of London poverty, and the earliest known Chinese terrestrial globe from 1623.

[via @krees]

Just when you thought the path to lifelong happiness was uber simple and you had it all figured out, someone slaps you in the face and complicates things. The nerve. [Thanks, Dustin]

Tim O’Reilly and Aneesh Chopra, Federal Chief Technology Officer sit down for a chat on the US government’s goals on open data and information accessibility. Disregard the infomercial feel to it. There’s some interesting tidbits in there, albeit pretty broad.

Uses for data

Chopra brings up two examples on how the government is getting involved, and what’s interesting about them is that it’s not what most have in mind. It’s not about money matters or policy-making.
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You’ve seen the presentation. You’ve seen the motion graph tool. But up until now, the data exploration tool, Trendalyzer, has always been in the browser. Now you can download the desktop version, and keep everything on your own computer with Gapminder Desktop:

Gapminder Desktop is particularly useful for presentations as it allows you to prepare your graphs in advance and you won’t need an Internet connection at your lecture or presentation.

In the “list of graphs” you will get at preset list of graphs on the left side, but you can also very easily create your own favorite examples. Simply arrange the graph the way you want it and click “bookmark this graph”. Your example will the appear in your own list of favorite graphs. Perfect when you want to prepare a lecture or presentation.

Basically, it’s the exact same thing as the online version as an Adobe Air application, which is handy for all you motion graph fans out there.
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Time Warner Cable explains how a picture travels from Jeff’s phone to Vijay’s laptop. Obviously it is a bit simplified. I spent a full semester on step four alone back in my electrical engineering days, and still don’t know what the heck happens there. That was a rough semester.

Thanks again, everyone for your retweets, likes, and stumbles. Every little bit helps FlowingData reach a wider audience. I still have some stickers left, in case you want to flaunt your data love. Those who already ordered should have gotten or will be getting your stickers soon. I have one batch left to mail out tomorrow.

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

1. Glasses: the ultimate image changer
2. Do Movie Sequels Live Up to Their Originals?
3. Imported World Cup players
4. Evolution of the World Cup ball
5. Meet iPad’s competition
6. How to beat Mario Brothers 3 in 11 minutes
7. History of the United States in a circle
8. Interactive World Cup schedule
9. Context to underwater depths
10. Where Americans are moving

From the Forums

Like I said, I’m in the dissertation city right now, so if you’ve got a visualization question, I highly suggest post it to the FlowingData forums over emailing me, for the next few months. It’s where all the cool people hang out. Here are some goodies from the past month.

• Looking for Data Visualization Expert (by MIrecruiting) – Seems like everyone is these days.
• World of Programming Infographic (by EllieK) – Does it work for you?
• Dorling Algorithm Cartogram – Can you help out cealigbe?

The secret to lifelong happiness. If only it were so easy. [Typcut via swissmiss]

Technology and investment group HackFwd describes what it’s like to work with them in a flowchart. In a nutshell: start with inspiration, work hard, impress people, work hard, and reap the rewards. And then start all over again.

Augmented reality, a computer trick to place the virtual within the real world, has barely cracked its way into most of our lives, but it’s easy to see how such a tool could get out of hand. At some point, we’re going to have to raise our hands and say, “Okay, stop that’s enough information. My head hurts.” Or will we? Recent architecture grad Keiichi Matsuda explores the possibility of an augmented (hyper)reality where information is everywhere you go (video below). Read More

Prospect Magazine takes a look at how Britain has changed by the numbers from 1997 to present:

Richer, fatter, living longer, more indebted, drunker, better connected, politically disillusioned: there’s no metric that can describe whether we are happier or living better lives after 13 years of Labour. But there are plenty to show how we have changed during a period of fulsome spending, borrowing and technological transformation.

The four pages of graphics are well-organized with just the right balance of color and iconography, to keep the reader engaged without going oatmeal on the numbers.

Take a moment and think off all the data you put other there on separate Web services. Email, photos, status updates, documents, location, contacts, and the list goes on. Many of the services are really good, but what if they went down? Where would are your data go? Or what if you could bring all that data into one place, so that you didn’t have to login to Flickr, Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook. Poyozo tries to get all your data in one place – on your own computer – and help “make life make sense.”

Poyozo gives you your own data back by downloading the information you’re currently giving to the web on to your own computer. You can opt-in to importing your data from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Last.fm, Google Calendar, any email service, any RSS feed, Flickr, Wesabe, Listit, Skydeck, Dopplr, your Firefox browsing history, the local weather, and your location, allowing you to access all of this personal data as easily as the companies that run these services can.

Simply install the Firefox plugin, choose what services you want to scrape, and you’re good to go. Poyozo then provides an API that you can use to access and query your data. Visualize it any way you want. Read More

I can’t count how many times I’ve googled a programming-related question and found myself at Stack Overflow, the question and answer site for programmers. MetaOptimize is like a Stack Overflow for data geeks:

You and other data geeks can ask and answer questions on machine learning, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, text analysis, information retrieval, search, data mining, statistical modeling, and data visualization.

Here you can ask and answer questions, comment and vote for the questions of others and their answers. Both questions and answers can be revised and improved. Questions can be tagged with the relevant keywords to simplify future access and organize the accumulated material.

Those with some data munging under their belt might find MetaOptimize useful. If you’re a n00b, you might want to stick to the FD forums.

[Thanks, John]

Visualization in JavaScript is all the rage these days. Just a couple of years ago, this would’ve seemed ridiculous because the engines were too slow, but no more of that. To that end, Nicolas Garcia Belmonte just released his JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit 2.0. It’s got your treemaps, stacked area charts, pie charts, weighted graph, so on and so forth. You can see all the demos, plus code examples to get the full picture.

This is not dissimilar to Protovis from the Stanford visualization group. Although, I’m told the JIT is fully functioning in Internet Explorer. Protovis only partly works in IE right now.

internet.artizans reflects on the usefulness of open data:

I’m inspired by the idea that nuggets of opened data could seed guerilla public services, plugging gaps left by government, but i don’t see any of that in the data.gov.uk apps list. The reasons aren’t technical but psychosocial – the people and communities who could use this data to help tackle their own disadvantage and marginalisation don’t have the self-confident sense of entitlement that makes for successful civic hacktivism.

The groups that really need it also often don’t have the tech or know-how to make use of – or even collect useful data – to make a case for anything. People like us, the data and tech-savvy can help.

[via migurski]

I always know when something exciting happens in the World Cup when my Facebook stream is flooded with announcements of a goooooooaaaal. On any given day, certain players are more talked about than others. The New York Times explores the day-to-day fluctuations of player mentions in Facebook status updates. Read More

I’m in the fifth year of my statistics PhD, and the time has finally come where I need to lock myself in my office and write a thesis. It’s going to be amazing fun, I assure you. I’m hoping I’ll reach true nirvana somewhere along the way.

Since I’ve all but finalized my thesis defense date for the end of this summer, it’s going to be a hectic three months. This month, I’ll be working hard to roll out a usable and useful application that some of you will be able to use. There will be more details, but it has to do with memories, calendars, and it’s in the same spirit of your.flowingdata.

After that, I’ll write.

I’m telling you this, because my brain is going to be in another place for the next few months. I fully intend to regularly update FlowingData. I’m too OCD not to, but if I happen to miss a day, you’ll know why.

Email responses will also slow to a snail’s pace. But please do keep sending in suggestions to [email protected]. Your post ideas will help the flow coming since I won’t be able to stay on top of things as well as I’d like to.

Finally, if you have any visualization-related questions, you should definitely post it to the forums before emailing me. There are nice people who hang out there sometimes, so you’re more likely to get a response through there than through my neglected inbox.

Alright. Here we go. Let the fun begin.

GIS guy Jonah Adkins maps the geography of Lost (the tv series). It looks like I missed out on quite a bit. Unfortunately, I only got up to the point in the first season where they saw a dead person hanging in a tree. I could not deal with all the insane cliffhangers.

I’m sure many of you were fans though, so you can stare at the maps for a while to temporarily fill the gaping hole in your life since the show ended.

[via We Love Datavis]