After a sluggish launch by police.uk to unleash local crime data, the Guardian and Doug McCune teamed up to provide a tool that lets you compare crime rates in different England cities:

The government’s recent launch of police.uk saw a phenomenal public reaction. Within hours of going live, millions of users had attempted to gain access to maps permitting street-level scrutiny of crime incidents across the UK. Dogged by “technical problems”, the site was reported by many to have failed in the face of public interest. Although the servers now seem much more capable of dealing with ongoing demand, we couldn’t help but wonder if we could offer people some alternative ways to compare and contrast crime levels around the country.

Turnaround time: four days, completely with SpatialKey.

[Guardian | Thanks, Doug and Simon]

With Google’s recent data-related offerings, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that they’ve opened up their Public Data Explorer so that you can upload your own data. Previously, it was only available when you searched for something like “GDP” and a related dataset was supplied by an official provider.

[W]e’re opening the Public Data Explorer to your data. We’re making a new data format, the Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL), openly available, and providing an interface for anyone to upload their datasets. DSPL is an XML-based format designed from the ground up to support rich, interactive visualizations like those in the Public Data Explorer. The DSPL language and upload interface are available in Google Labs.

In terms of visualization, there’s isn’t anything new. You’ve got your maps, bar charts, and time series line charts, with the checkboxes on the left (like the snapshot below). Then there’s the chart types available via the charting API.
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To encourage the integration of broadband and information technology into local economies, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (with some help from Stamen) now provides an exploratory tool for broadband in your community:

The National Broadband Map (NBM) is a searchable and interactive website that allows users to view broadband availability across every neighborhood in the United States. The NBM was created by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), in collaboration with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and in partnership with 50 states, five territories and the District of Columbia. The NBM is a project of NTIA’s State Broadband Initiative. The NBM will be updated approximately every six months and was first published on February 17, 2011.

There’s a lot of data to look at, but you can search for the city or zipcode that you’re interested in, and get information on what’s available, as shown below. You can also see how your city compares to other locations in the country.
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Sunlight Labs continues its work for a more open government with its recent release of the Real Time Congress API.

Today we’re making available the Real Time Congress API, a service we’ve been working on for several months, and will be continuing to expand.

The Real Time Congress API (RTC) is a RESTful API over the artifacts of Congress, kept up to date in as close to real time as possible. It consists of several live feeds of data, available in JSON or XML. These feeds are filterable and sortable and sliceable in all sorts of different ways, and you can read the docs to see how.

There are seven data types the API will report:

• Bills
• Votes
• Amendments
• Videos
• Floor Updates
• Committee Hearings
• Documents

Now someone has to do something with all of this data coming in. Can you think of a useful application for what is essentially an automated government Twitter feed?

[Real Time Congress API]

There’s something very strange about the anonymity of the Web that brings out the worst in some people. I don’t get it, but it’s something we have to deal with for now. Courtney Stanton, who wrote a couple of posts that drew the ire of a bunch of trolls, had a look at the troll comments versus the sincere ones.

I should warn you that the following content does contain adult themes, but it’s the contrast between the groups that’s most interesting (and the good use of Many Eyes).
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Sudhir Venkatesh, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, along with his students, has been studying the sex work industry since the 1990s. In a recent article for Wired, Venkatesh describes how the business has changed over the past couple of decades.
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We’ve seen this sort of thing before, but it doesn’t ever seem to get old. Peter Ørntoft takes some data and puts it into physical context:

The project deals with data from a list of the social related interests of the Danish people. The list is the result of an opinion poll from a major consultancy company in Denmark. I have used the context of specific opinion polls within each interest to shape and design diagrams. By doing so the receiver understands more layers of information about the data.

The graphics above and below show Danish opinion on whether it’s ethical to wear religious symbols in public professions. At their core, they’re just pie charts. Embed them on clothing relevant to the topic though, and somehow they become more than that.
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Television actors can make boat loads of money. Some more than others. Hugh Laurie makes $400,000 per episode while Ashley Tisdale makes $30,000. TV Guide compiled a list of TV’s top earners a while back, so luckily we can take a look by the numbers. Here’s your chance to visualize the data.

You can download the data in CSV format or in Excel. There are four columns: actor name, show, pay per episode, and show type (comedy or drama). I entered this data by hand to get it in a manageable format, so keep an eye out for typos (just like in real life!).

The challenge here will be that there’s quite a few names on the list, so it’s a bit too much to show every value at once. You’ll have to decide what you want to show and what story you want to tell. Do actors in drama or comedies make more? What kind of distribution do you see? How do top actor salaries compare to that of the average actor?

One more time, here’s the link to the CSV and Excel files. Leave links to your graphs in the comments below.

Deadline: February 22, 2011

It’s that time of year again. Obama recently released his 2012 budget proposal for how to allocate $3.7 trillion. It’s complicated no doubt, but Shan Carter and Amanda Cox of the New York Times make it easier to understand with their interactive treemap. Rectangles are sized by proposed spending and colors indicate percent change from previous year. Darker red rectangles represent bigger drops from the 2011 budget and darker green greater increases. Zoom in and pan as you please.
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Tonight on Jeopardy, the first day of the IBM Watson challenge, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter will go up against IBM’s super computer in the historic match of man versus machine. In place of a person, a computer screen with an animated graphic will stand representing Watson, but it’s not just some random icon.

The avatar is actually a work of generative art designed by Joshua Davis and implemented by Automata Studios. The avatar changes based on a number of factors such as confidence in an answer and question type for a total of 27 states. For example, when Watson enters an answer correctly, the swarm around the sphere flows to the top and turns green. When Watson answers incorrectly, the swarm turns orange and flows to the bottom.

Get the full description and a sense of the process in the video below.
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Pedro Cruz puts a twist on the traditional map approach to visualize traffic in Lisbon as blood vessels:

In this work the traffic of Lisbon is portrayed exploring metaphors of living organisms with circulatory problems. Rather than being an aesthetic essay or a set of decorative artifacts, my approach focuses on synthesizing and conveying meaning through data portrayal.

Vessels swell and wiggle as traffic picks up during the rush hour and then relax and shrink as traffic goes down. More useful than an actual map? Probably not. Fun and engaging? Yes. Catch the short animation below.
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I got a chuckle out of this one. By Brandon Schaefer. Check out the full-sized version here.

As we all know, the iPad has changed how many people interact with online content as well as provided interaction designers with a new vehicle to mess around in. Your hands aren’t glued to mouse and keyboard anymore. They’re all over the place, depending on what application you’re using or game you’re playing. George Kokkinidis, of Design Language News, has a brief look at these differences through his fingerprints:

My method involved cleaning the iPad’s surface with a microfiber cloth, using an app for a short amount of time, then turning the screen off. Next, I photographed the iPad, positioning a light source and some black matte board to limit distracting reflections. I then brought the photographs into Adobe Illustrator, and created vectors of the iPad and the fingerprints to emphasize the data.

The method is so simple but super effective. I’m sure just about everyone recognizes that pattern on the bottom left.

[Design Language News via Waxy]

As you might expect, people who play sports video games tend to play with teams when those teams are winning in real life. Anyone who plays online via their Playstation or Xbox can tell you this. I play NBA 2K11 sometimes, and it can get pretty boring playing the Lakers over and over again. Kevin Quealy for the New York Times investigates the phenomenon with data from Madden NFL, the most popular football video game of all time, and small multiples. I sense R and ggplot.

A team loses, and there’s a dip in gameplay. A team wins or gets a new star player, there’s a spike.

OkCupid continues their analysis on the mysteries of the dating world, this time on the best questions to ask on a first date, or rather, the best questions to ask when you actually want to find out something else. Will your date have sex on the first date? Ask your date if he or she likes the taste of beer, because:

Among all our casual topics, whether someone likes the taste of beer is the single best predictor of if he or she has sex on the first date.

Well, okay, not entirely correct. The question is if they would consider sex, not if they’d actually do it. I’ve considered buying just about every Apple product, but all I have is the one Macbook. Still interesting though.

I’m still waiting for LinkedIn to start doing this sort of analysis. I mean it’s more or less the same thing, except you’re trying to find a company to work for rather than a partner to, uh, have beer with. Who’s with me?

Jer Thorp, who has a knack for creating stuff that’s both useful and beautiful, continues his string of impressive work with this visualization for Boing Boing (video below). It shows possibly habitable planets, according to Kepler data. For those unfamiliar, the Kepler mission is to find possible habitable planets, or more precisely:

The challenge now is to find terrestrial planets (i.e., those one half to twice the size of the Earth), especially those in the habitable zone of their stars where liquid water and possibly life might exist.

The visualization imagines if all the exoplanets were orbiting a single star, which is physically impossible, but allows for comparisons for size, temperature, and path. There are a few views, starting with the exoplanets orbiting and then the animation transitions to something that sort of looks like an exoplanet mountain and then into a bubble plot.
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The sold out O’Reilly Strata conference was a success down in Santa Clara, California, with the next one already scheduled for 2011 in New York. There were lots of interesting talks and lots of interesting people to talk to. I was only there for one day and didn’t nearly get to meet everyone I wanted to, but it was great seeing so many people who are excited about data packed into one place.
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People are getting fatter everywhere. You know this. But there’s nothing like the numbers to actually show how we’re growing outwards and by how much. With this interactive, Wilson Andrews and Todd Lindeman, for the Washington Post, report:

With a few exceptions, the average body mass index in most countries has risen since 1980, according to a project that tracked risk factors for heart disease and stroke in 199 countries over 28 years.

Each circle represents a country, plotted by men’s BMI on the horizontal axis and women’s BMI on the vertical. Countries above the diagonal are countries where women have a higher BMI than the men, and vice versa for dots below the diagonal. Press play, and watch how BMI has changed from 1980 to 2008.
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Designer Gregor Aisch has a look at energy usage in Europe. Click on a number of topics on the bottom to see how each country compares, or mouse over a specific country to get its details. Bubbles are color-coded according to relatively high or low levels (I think) and sized by population (I think). There isn’t a whole lot of explanation of what you’re actually seeing, but it has some interesting interactions in there. Maybe our European readers can add some context. Don’t forget to take it fullscreen and put it on autoplay.

[publicdata.eu via @moritz_stefaner]