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]

The Eigenfactor Project and Moritz Stefaner collaborate in these interactive visualizations “based on Eigenfactor Metrics and hierarchical clustering to explore emerging patterns in citation networks.” Yeah… or in other words, this series of four visualizations – radial diagram, stacked, clustering, and network map – explore journal article citations.
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FlowingData has seen a lot of new readers in the past couple of weeks, so in case you missed them, here are the top posts of last month.

1. 5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year
2. Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis
3. Why Do Freeways Come to An Annoying Hault
4. Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America, Interactive Edition
5. How to Make a Graph in Adobe Illustrator
6. Visualizing Twitter as Barack Obama Became 44th President
7. 9 Ways to Visualize Consumer Spending
8. Watch the Rise of Gasoline Prices
9. Heavy Metal Band Names Flow Chart
10. Flow Chart Shows You What Chart to Use

The new readers might also want to check out the FlowingData beginner’s guide for some of the top stuff since I started this blog.

Linda Eckstein sent this graphic along to show the main ideas of Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets. In Linda’s words, “[T]he idea was for me to come up with a visual representation of the scope and complexity of Baker’s book. In a way, it’s the unWordle. Wordle only analyzes what is said, sometimes it’s necessary to remind the public of what is NOT said.”

From Vanity Fair:

The editors of VF.com, fascinated by the concentric circles of intrigue and coincidence that connect the Bushes to various nerve centers, nefarious and benign, commissioned information designer Linda Eckstein to concoct a graphic device that would serve as a sort of 21st century Power Crib Sheet. Consider it a modern-day version of those 1960s and 70s conspiracy theory flow charts that sought to drag the apparatus of the oligarchs, the generals, and the spooks out of the shadows. The result is this VF.com exclusive, a loopy, labyrinthine Family of Secrets bullseye—part eye chart, part pie chart, part Otto Preminger-esque movie poster for the Bush-whacked masses.

[Thanks, Linda]

Cincinnati’s local NBC news provides viewers with a customizable weather dashboard. Look up your city, drag and drop the different modules, and look at the weather from your neck of the woods. Unfortunately, it only really shows extensive details for Cincinnati. The dashboard seems to just show regular weather forecasts for other cities. At least I know that there are 79 schools closed today in Cincinnati.

[Thanks, Kevin]

Twitter and maps just go well together. The New York Times maps Super Bowl-related tweets over the course of the game. A control timeline is provided up top and several categories are provided so that you can view certain types of tweets e.g. Steelers vs Cardinals and chatter about the ads. It looks like Doritos, Budweiser, and especially Careerbuilder were big hits. I guess Hulu got some buzz too. Press play and watch who’s talking about what as the game unfolds.

[Thanks, William]

The past couple of months have been pretty exciting here on FlowingData. We hit the front page of some of the big social media sites, and our community continues to inch closer towards the 10,000-mark. I feel like FlowingData is nearing critical mass, and at this point, I’m just along for the ride.

None of this would be possible without the help of FlowingData sponsors. I hope you’ll join me in thanking them by checking out the cool visualization stuff they have to offer, and I’d like to extend a special welcome to FlowingData’s two newest sponsors, InstantAtlas and NetCharts.

Eye-Sys — Comprehensive real-time 3D visualization. Their gallery section in particular is quite impressive.

Tableau Software — Data exploration and visual analytics for understanding databases and spreadsheets that makes data analysis easy and fun.

NetCharts — Build business dashboards that turn data into actionable information with dynamic charts and graphs.

InstantAtlas — Enables information analysts to create interactive maps to improve data visualization and enhance communication.

SiSense — Easy-to-use reporting and analysis. No code required and directly connects to Excel, CSV files, SQL, MySQL, Oracle and SQL Analysis Services

Also, thank you to all of you who continue to share FlowingData on Digg, del.icio.us, Twitter, StumbleUpon, via email, etc, and just helping me get the word out. It’s certainly none of my doing. I’m a horrible promoter. Please keep on doing whatever you’re doing, FlowingData readers. I appreciate all of it.

If you’d like to sponsor FlowingData, please feel free to email me, and I’ll get back to you with the details.

The Mozilla group is starting to dig into visualization to participation within the active Mozilla community, and they’re looking for some input:

If you’re a visual designer, data visualization guru, student or just interested in hacking on a cool project, join us to generate concepts and prototypes that build upon the LizardFeeder, a cool feed aggregator released earlier this year by Les Orchard.

As Les describes it, LizardFeeder brings together and archives different types of activity from across the far reaches of the Mozilla universe and spits them out in a single, dynamic stream. It’s pretty darn cool to watch on its own, but we’d love to further develop a design concept that is approachable, meaningful—or at least entertaining—to virtually anyone who sees it.

Here’s what the Lizard Feeder looks like now:

So basically, there’s a whole lot of data waiting for your ideas. Get to it. I am sure you’ll get a lot of recognition in the process.

After I produced a map that shows the growth of Walmart, there were tons of comments that were along the lines of, “I would love to see this for insert company here.” I was happy to see the enthusiasm, but the hard part is getting the data for all store locations and opening dates.
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The first Visualize This for poverty rate in America was a very good start to something I hope to continue here on FlowingData. There were a lot of good entries and plenty of interesting discussion on what worked and what didn’t. Some used existing tools while others went custom; some used a combination of both. There were entries that went for emotion and others that were built for pattern-finding. My pick for best is Luca Masud‘s take on things with D.C. as focal point.
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Some of the best stuff comes out of student projects. During the Screendesign workshop in Fachhochschule Potsdam last summer, students were asked to collect, analyze, and visualize personal data. Topics ranged from haircuts to movie consumption to telephone habits. The assignment was largely inspired by Nick Felton’s Feltron Report:

I loved every single issue of the Feltron annual report. From the first time I saw it I was convinced it was a great topic for a personal project – or for a university course. So the project setting became “personal annual report”. Since a long time, I’m interested in visualization methods from journalistic infographics to scientifc information visualisation – so I’m convinced it’s a great and important topic to encourage people getting involved with. And it is a field that never stops evolving, where you are never about to reach the ground, no matter how deep you dive (yeah, this is for interactive media or even media in general, but it feels stronger to me when it comes to data visualization).

I really like to see courses like this centered around visualization and then the results from some inspired students. It goes to show how this area is growing. I just wish I got to take these types of courses.

[Thanks, Christophe]

Grid/plane, a studio centered in Portland Orgeon, collaborated with Instrument, to visualize media buzz across various social media outlets. The client? Google.

Working in tandem with Google Analytics, the Flash-based, interactive tools allow users to explore relationships and see the effects of blogs, as well as mainstream and social media over time.

While this particular project wasn’t really focused on Google search results, can you imagine how cool it would be if it were? One day we will get visualization in lieu of listed results. Trust me. We will also have power laces, self-drying jackets, and flying Deloreans. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
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A quick reminder: tomorrow is the last day to put in your entry for the first edition of Visualize This. There have been a lot of interesting visualization entries so far, so even if you’re not planning on making a graphic, make sure you put in your two cents for which one you think is best.