I majored in computer science. I hated it. I ran from it like the black plague. That was then though. This is now. It turns out that programming can actually be fun, and when you know how to program – if even just a little bit – it completely changes the way you deal with and visualize data, which is why Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art is next up on the giveaway.

The deadline for this one is the end of today: Feb 20 at 8pm EST.

Prize Description

Processing is a programming language that can help beginners do stuff with code they never thought possible. The learning curve is pretty shallow, and you get a lot of bang for your buck with surprisingly very little effort. That doesn’t mean it’s limited in what it can do though. Built on top of Java, Processing lets you do pretty amazing things when you know what you’re doing.

Processing: Creative Coding and Computation Art will help you in your path to coding enlightenment. “Create code, art, visualizations, and interactive applications with this powerful yet simple computer language and programming environment / Take a creative and fun approach to learning creative computer programming.” I think that sums it up nicely.

How to Enter

Leave a comment below that answers this question: What is data visualization? Make your answer an essay, a paragraph, a sentence, a word, a picture… OK, pretty much anything. The winner will be randomly selected at the end of today. Good luck.

Find giveaways still in progress here, here, and here.

UPDATE: This giveaway is now closed. The winner will be receiving an email shortly. Thanks for participating all. Keep watch for more giveaways on Monday.

Dan Meth plots out the trilogy meter – a series of charts that show his level of enjoyment of each movie in the trilogy:

These are rated purely on my enjoyment level on each film and nothing else. Frankly I’m surprised by how many sequels were better than the original. And I’m not surprised that the 3rd movie is never the best.

Perhaps more surprising is that Dan’s actually seen so many full trilogies, especially after the second in a series sucking so bad.

[via Dan Meth | Thanks, Chris]

Where does all of our tax money go? Well, here’s your chance to find out. Graphic designer Jess Bachman from WallStats has kindly put up three Death and Taxes posters for our 10k giveaway. This one ends Sunday, Feb 22 at 8pm EST.

Prize Description

After the popularity of the 2008 Death and Taxes poster, naturally there had to be a Death and Taxes: 2009.

“Death and Taxes: 2009” is a representational poster of the federal discretionary budget; the amount of money that is spent at the discretion of your elected representatives in Congress. Basically, your federal income taxes. The data is from the President’s budget request for 2009. It will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress by October 1st to begin the fiscal year.

The poster provides a uniquely revealing look at our national priorities, that fluctuate yearly, according to the wishes of the President, the power of Congress, and the will of the people. If you pay taxes, then you have paid for a small part of everything in the poster.

Here are a couple of shots:

Check out the full, zoom-able, pan-able version to get the full effect. Jess goes into tremendous detail on how our tax money is spent and it’s one of those posters where you’ll see something new every time you look at it. It was even featured on Martha Stewart:

How to Enter

Like I said, there are three posters up for grabs in this round of the giveaway. All you have to do is promise that you will tell at least one person about WallStats in the comments below. Easy enough. Three winners will be randomly selected at the end of Sunday. Needless to say, make sure you enter a valid email address so we can contact you when you win. Good luck!

Stay tuned. There are some book giveaways coming up.

UPDATE: Finito. If you haven’t received an email from me yet, keep an eye out for more giveaways this week. The other WallStats poster, 389 Years Ago, is coming up very soon.

Seed Magazine, a publication dedicated to cool things in science, give us The Universe in 2009:

In 2009, we are celebrating curiosity and creativity with a dynamic look at the very best ideas that give us reason for optimism. Rethink your assumptions and post better questions about the future.

The Universe in 09 is essentially a simple mosaic where each tile is an idea. There’s something that resembles a bar graph up top. Each bar represents a category, and as you scroll over a category, the height of the bar represents the numbers of ideas in that category (I think). It’s not meant to be analytical really. It’s mostly for fun, and they did a pretty good job at accomplishing that goal. The interaction is pretty entertaining. Check it out for yourself.

This is a special edition of Visualize This. Why? I’m glad you asked. Since our FlowingData 10k giveaway is now underway, it seemed fitting that we put up some prizes this time around. InfoSoft Global has generously donated three FusionCharts Professional Licenses valued at $499 each. This Visualize This will go the length of the 10k giveaway, so you’ve got lots of time to enter. Get your entries in by March 3, 8pm EST for your chance to win a FusionCharts Professional license.

Prize Description

FusionCharts lets you create animated and interactive Flash charts for online or desktop. Couple FusionCharts with InfoSoft’s other products like FusionWidgets and FusionMaps, and you’ve got yourself the necessary tools to create a very worthwhile information dashboard. Use it in your web applications, personal data collection, in your business, or anywhere else you need to visualize data. FusionCharts can be integrated with just about all the major web technologies (e.g. ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails, Python, HTML, MS SQL, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, CSV…) and the FusionCharts group has aimed to make things easy with very little code. Is that enough to whet your appetite? You’re good? OK.

How to Enter

Unlike previous Visualize This projects, I’m not going to post a specific dataset. Instead, create a dashboard using the no-restriction trial version of FusionCharts on the theme of education and then post a link to to your entry to this thread in the FlowingData forums. If you haven’t registered in the forums yet, you’ll want to do that first.

The trial version of FusionCharts has all the same functionality as the licensed one, so go wild. You are also welcome to use any of other of the InfoSoft products in your dashboard. Make it clean, make it sexy, and most importantly, make it informative.

Feel free to focus on education data for just your area or make a dashboard for your entire country. Look at elementary schools, colleges, private schools, or all of the above. The key is to make a dashboard for a branch of education that interests you.

Here are some education data sources to get you started:

• National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
• International Archive of Education Data
• California Department of Education
• Education Data from United Nations Database

Got any others? Please post them in the comments.

The three best dashboards (chosen by me and readers) will each be awarded a FusionCharts Professional License. Good luck! I’m looking forward to seeing what you all come up with (and can we please make it more active than the last one?? By the way – thanks, Hadley).

Download the trial version of FusionCharts here.

Stay tuned. Awesome infographics posters coming up tomorrow.

UPDATE: The 10k giveaways is no finito. Thanks for participating everyone.

The Barack Obama administration is clearly making an effort to get information out to the public. We saw the plan to distribute billions of dollars to help our economy. Obama has now launched Recovery.gov as a way for you to keep track and understand where $787 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is used.
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It’s time for the first competition of our 10k giveaway. Not only is this first prize super awesome, but we’ve made it extremely easy to enter to win. This one’s going to be open until March 2, 8pm EST, so you’ve got PLENTY of time to enter.

Prize Description

Tableau Software aims to make “databases and spreadsheets understandable to ordinary people” with an emphasis on statistical visualization and visual analysis. It’s won a number of awards and has applications in business intelligence, web analytics, database marketing, university statistics, data analysis, and the occasional FlowingData Visualize This challenge. Also, one of the co-founders was a founding member of Pixar. Need I say more? Take a look at what you can do with Tableau in their Visual Examples section. The Tableau Personal Edition is valued at $999.

How to Enter

This is super easy. First, follow Tableau on Twitter. Second, go to this page. How many days is the Tableau trial version functional for? Send the answer and oh what the heck, your favorite color in an @reply to Tableau on Twitter in the following exact format:

“@tableau @flowingdata 10k giveaway answer: <some number> <favorite color>”

Of course replace <some number> and <favorite color> appropriately. Please only send your answer once, and it has to be via Twitter. Don’t post your answers here. On March 2, a winner of a brand-spankin’ new Tableau Personal Edition will be randomly selected. Good luck!

UPDATE: That’s a wrap! Thanks for participating, everyone.

Alright, let’s get this giveaway going. I hope you’re all as excited about this as I am. Below are the prizes that will be given out over the next two weeks in no particular order – most provided by generous sponsors and a few books thrown in by myself.

The contest sponsors were very generous to donate all these prizes, so I hope that you will return the generosity and give them a big, fat thank you by visiting them.

The Prizes

• Tableau Software Desktop Personal Edition – Tableau Software
• (3) Death and Taxes 2009 Poster – Jess Bachman from WallStats
• 389 Years Ago Poster + Limited Edition Color Variant – Also from WallStats
• SiSense Standard, one-year subscription – SiSense
• (3) FusionCharts Professional License – Infosoft Global
• Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data
• Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Again, thank you, FlowingData readers for spreading the word, leaving comments, and participating in forum discussions. I’m proud of the community that we’ve developed together, and look forward to whatever it is to come. Also, thank you to FlowingData sponsors for helping FlowingData reach its full potential.

Let the games begin! Don’t forget to subscribe to the FlowingData feed to stay updated on the giveaway.

I know next to nothing about the economy, stocks, and investments, but I do know a little bit about charts and graphs. The above area circles were prepared by someone at JP Morgan. I don’t know, you might have heard of ’em. The circles are based on data from Bloomberg and meant to show the change in market value from 2007 to 2009. The problem here is that the creator sized circles by diameter instead of area, so the difference looks ginormous. I mean, the value change is significant but not that big.
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Earlier last week, FlowingData reached a long-awaited milestone – 10,000 subscribers. This obviously wouldn’t be possible without FlowingData readers (b/c uh, then there would be zero subscribers), so over the next two weeks, as a big thank you, I’m going to give away over $3,000 worth of prizes in the FlowingData 10k giveaway!

Yeah, $3,000. Some really great prizes have been donated by generous sponsors to help me celebrate the occasion, and every item is going to you. What’s got me most excited is that I would be thrilled to get any one of the items up for grabs – and that’s saying something. Prizes range from books to limited edition posters to valuable visualization software licenses. Definitely worth getting excited about.

How it’s gonna go down…

First thing’s first. You’ll want to make sure you’re subscribed to the FlowingData RSS feed. This isn’t a requirement to win, but it’ll keep you up-to-date on the prize & competition announcements. Secondly, you’ll want to register in the FlowingData forums since a few of the competitions will involve posting to a thread. Don’t worry, it’s easy.

The details:

• Prizes will be won in a series of competitions over the next two weeks that will range in criteria. For example, it could be a simple post to a thread in the forums or something like creating your own visualization dashboard.
• The giveaway will officially start tomorrow. I will announce the prizes and sponsors and post the rules for the first competition.
• Some competitions will be really quick, lasting only a few hours, while others will last for the whole two weeks.
• To keep things fair and to make sure as many people as possible win something, you can only win one prize.

That’s all for now. Keep an eye out for tomorrow’s post on the prizes up for grabs and the start of our first competition!

Subscribe to the FlowingData feed to stay up-to-date on everything to come, and if it isn’t too much trouble, please share this link via Twitter, del.icio.us, email, etc. with anyone who you think would be interested in FlowingData. Thank you :)

Valentine’s Day can be tricky. Do you get her flowers? Chocolate? Is it time for jewelry or a corn dog and a blow pop? This graph helps you decide what to do for your special someone tomorrow. Don’t get stuck in the dog house this Valentine’s Day. Follow the chart wisely. If you’ve got cash and care for her a lot, it’s time for more than a matinee and Olive Garden.

[Thanks, Jason]

Google recently released Google Latitude, which is an online application that lets you share your location with online friends:

Of course when any application shares where you are at any given time, people start to feel like Big Brother is looming in the background ready to sneak up on us from behind a giant bush. Some call it a real danger, but is it really? I put this question out to all of you:

Is Google Latitude a danger to anyone who uses it?

My take on things is that people are already doing it anyways, so why not make it easier for those who are interested? Sure, if some stalker got a hold of your location, that could be bad, but that’s true for a lot of data… credit card statements, cell phone logs, Twitter… As long as the proper security are put in place, I don’t see what all the fuss is about.

Playboy playmates continue to be a point of fascination. Remember that study on Playmates and the state of the economy? Anyhow, Wired Magazine visualizes Playmate BMI and US average BMI over the years. While the US average BMI shows an increasing trend, Playmate BMI shows a decreasing trend. Yikes.

The graph, however, is a little misleading. The decreasing trend isn’t especially significant-looking from 1976 on, but then again, that’s just me going off a tilted head glance. If anyone wants to figure out the actual trend (please), the data is available on the Wired page. In any case, it’s amusing.

[Thanks, Ken]

OK, so we saw CreditLoan’s representation of Obama’s stimulus package. Here’s Washington Post’s take on the breakdown with a combination of bar charts, bubbles, and a stacked graph chart for time – and the numbers seem to all add up correctly. I don’t like the bubbles that look like dangling ornaments though. CreditLoan’s is more readable, but maybe that has to do with the Post’s version being made for print and the other made for online. What do you think – which version works best for you?

[via The Big Picture]

President Barack Obama has a $800 billion+ economic stimulus package in the works. That’s a lot of dough. Where’s it all going? CreditLoan provides the breakdown in bubbles, bubbles, and more bubbles. Fill color indicates what the money will be used for (e.g. tax cuts, human capital) and border color shows where the money goes to (e.g. government, people, business).

The information is organized nicely and the graphic is attractive, but it probably needs a good bit of fact checking. Some quick calculator work indicates a lot of the numbers don’t add up right. I’m sure there are some rounding errors, but there are some pretty big discrepancies. Ideas anyone? I don’t have the patience to go through all the comments on the original post to find out, but I suggest you take the graphic with a grain of salt.

[Thanks, Pavan]

While on the topic of job losses, USA Today provides a look into job forecasts from Moody’s Economy.com. While the new forecast shows U.S. employment growing in 2010-2012, the outlook for different sectors and states varies quite a bit. Take a look at different job sectors via bar chart and map and then filter down by state.

[Thanks, Juan & Ron]

There are so many ways that you can cut a dataset whether it be big or small. Cut it by time, different chunks of time, categories, etc., and you just might get a different story out of your graph. Over on Barry Ritholtz’ blog, The Big Picture, debate over the extent of job losses and this recession led to these four depictions of, well, job losses and recessions.
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MIX Online, a community of designers and developers, released Project Descry – a series of four open source web-based visualizations.
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A quick reminder – there are about 5 days left for Visualize This: Piracy Edition. You know, something to do since you’re not really working today anyways :).

We’re quite addicted to data pr0n here at Flickr. We’ve got graphs for pretty much everything, and add graphs all of the time.

— John Allspaw, Operations Engineering Manager at Flickr

[via O’Reilly Radar | Thanks, Jodi]