While we’re on the subject of flight, ever since that plane landed in the Hudson River a few months ago, the thought of bird-airplane collisions haven’t strayed too far from the media (or my mind each time I fly). In light of all the hoopla, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) finally gave in and opened up their bird strike database to the public.

Below is an interactive exploring this data breaking things down by bird type, location, phase of flight, and time of day. Click through to this post to view.
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5W Graphics, whose work you’ve seen by now, compares lower-cost airlines to “regular” airlines. The infographic is from the Spain group, so the focus is on Eurpoean airlines. Apparently the concept of low fair airlines (LFAs) is fairly new in Europe, only starting in 1990 with Ryanair while Southwest Airlines was founded in 1970. I’m more of a JetBlue guy myself. I cherish my legroom and in-flight entertainment.

[via Cool Infographics]

your.flowingdata (YFD), a Twitter application that lets you collect data about yourself, is now LIVE!

I feel like I’ve been working on this project forever, but it’s finally at a place where I think it’s ready for human consumption. And unlike the previous version, what you track is completely up to you.
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Add another graphic to the list of ways to show consumer spending. Visual Economics displays data from the most recent spending survey (April 2009) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Compare this to last year’s survey results via an NYT interactive.

The biggest difference I’m seeing is that between last year’s spending on housing (42%) and this year (34%). Maybe that’s why my mother-in-law keeps telling me it’s a good time to buy a house. Do you notice anything interesting?

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) makes a lot of world indicators available (e.g. world population and birth rate). Much of it goes unnoticed, because most people just see a bunch of numbers. However, the Factbook eXplorer from the OECD, in collaboration with the National Center for Visual Analytics, is a visualization tool that helps you see and explore the data.

Those who have seen Hans Rosling’s Gapminder presentations – and I imagine most of us have – will recognize the style with a play button and a motion graph in sync with parallel coordinates and a map. Choose an indicator, or several of them, press play, and watch the visualization move through time.

Also, if you’ve got your own data, you can load that too, which is certainly a nice touch.

[via BBC News | Thanks, Lawrie & Liam]

This graphic on religious teachings and sex is making the social media rounds. The source is questionable and the design is a little iffy, but oh what the heck, it’s Friday. Have a nice weekend all.

[Thanks, Brian]

No, this isn’t a bad fungus spreading northwest towards Washington. This map from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (via MSNBC) shows health care costs across the country, and yes, you are included Hawaii and Alaska.

As you can see health care costs are from uniform country-wide.

However, the color scale is kind of funky. I’m guessing it was automatically chosen by the mapping software to even split the number of regions amongst the five color bins, which I think kind of throws off the color distribution. I don’t know. I think as a whole, the map is missing some special sauce.

[Thanks, Christopher]

The brand new version of your.flowingdata (YFD) is coming soon, and of course, as a FlowingData reader, you get the first peak. Newer readers might not know what I’m talking about. Well, it’s an online application that lets you collect data about yourself via Twitter.

Follow @yfd on Twitter to be the first to try it out when it’s ready.
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These ads for Hospital Alemán from Saatchi & Saatchi color code physical items for what parents say and what children do.

It’s not quantitative at all, and a lot of you probably won’t even consider this visualization. It is pretty though, and I could see how this idea might be applied to data.

[via I Believe in Advertising | Thanks, Ken]

Is the economy going to turn around any time soon? How does this economic swing compare to previous cycles? Amanda Cox et al of the New York Times explores these ever so important questions in her recent nine-part interactive series.
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Zum Kuckuck, a design group in Germany, visualizes data interchange and network traffic with Processing in this beautifully executed installation.
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It’s July 4 this weekend. You know what that means, right? It’s Independence Day, and really, there’s no better way to celebrate than to stuff down as many hot dogs down your throat as you can in ten minutes. Or if that doesn’t sound appetizing, you can just enjoy watching the annual Nathan’s hot dog eating contest on Coney Island.
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Contrary to what a lot people might think they know from the movies, the X-Men universe stretches out quite a ways with lots of characters and lots of relationships. This super detailed relationship map for all X-Men characters from UncannyXmen shows just that.

Connections are color-coded to show the type of relationship between a pair of characters. For example, green is a one-sided infatuation, pink is a flirtation by both parties, and a dashed line signifies one of the characters is from an alternative reality. Wolverine sure gets around.

[via VizWorld]

Manolith, in collaboration with InfoShots, tells the story of Twitter. The graphic starts at Twitter’s humble beginnings and ends at present day where you pretty much can’t go a day without hearing about that little bird. I wonder what this Twitter tree will look like next year.

[via Techcrunch]

Visualization on the Web is growing, but a lot of the really good stuff is just sitting around on someone’s computer. So to get a discussion going about how we can get more visualization out there – theory and application – Robert Kosara of Eager Eyes, Andrew Vande Moere from information aesthetics, and myself are heading up a workshop at VisWeek in October. It’s in Atlantic City.

We’ll share some of our experiences, but mainly we want to know what’s on your mind. Submit your one-page position statement and tell us about your experiences, propose discussion topics, or ask questions that you’re wondering about. We’ll review the topics and you’ll hear from us by the end of July. Get your submissions in by July 17.

Find more details here.

This is a guest review by Peter Robinet of Bubble Foundry, a web design company that specializes in building websites for Web startups.

What It Is

RoamBi is a free data visualization application for the iPhone by MeLLmo. You download datasets to the app and it creates visualizations so you can drill down into the data. The app is pitched as a mobile business tool for viewing sales reports and the like, but the sample visualizations included with the app suggest another possibility: RoamBi could easily be a killer app for statistics-minded sports fans, such as sabermetrics devotees!
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Say what you want about Michael Jackson, but there’s no denying the great effect he had on the music world. In honor of the pop king’s passing, practically half of The New York Times graphics department stayed up late last night building this graphic. It takes a look at his majesty’s Billboard rankings over his career compared to other popular music artists.

Decade after decade Jackson produced numerous hit albums. Click through time to see the mountains of each. Timeless.

To the man, to the legend, who no one will ever be able to replace:

[Thanks, Amanda]

The folks over at AllBusinessCards have generously donated 1,000 business cards to three lucky FlowingData readers. Uh, read that as three FlowingData readers will each win a set of 1,000 business cards. Design your own or pick from a template.

How Do I Enter?

All you have to do is pay me one thousand dollars. No, I’m totally kidding. Ten thousand. A million?

Okay, okay, nevermind. I’ll make it easy on all of you. Simply leave a comment at the bottom of this post. If you’re too lazy, just copy someone else’s comment (and let it weigh on your conscious for the rest of your life :).

Do this by today at 11:59pm EST. I’ll randomly pick three winners. One entry per person, and as always, make sure you leave a valid email address so I can contact you if you win. Winners in the continental United States get free shipping and internationals just have to cover shipping. Good luck!

Tufte’s Invisible Yet Ubiquitous Influence – Edward Tufte combines a policy wonk’s love of data with an artist’s eye for beauty and a PR maestro’s knack for promotion.

Look at these &$(*@^@# Statistics – It’s heavy on the swear words and light on the actual data, but I guess it’s amusing. Just don’t click if you’re offended by potty mouth. [Thanks, j2]

Why Making Maps Guides Us to Be Greener – A picture is worth a thousand words, and that’s the case for maps too. Turns out, using some visual mapping helps groups show people their purpose and get the support they need to accomplish their goals.

Financial Responsibility in the United States – In the growing trend of financial applications posting infographics to drive traffic, here’s another one.

Is Information Visualization the Next Frontier for Design? – I don’t know. What do you think?

Two years ago on June 25, 2007, I wrote the first post for FlowingData. It was rambling gibberish, and I really had no idea what I was doing. I was just randomly gibbering to no one in particular. It’s a little different now. Still random at times, but a little less so.

Somewhat surprisingly, I’ve only missed a handful of days over the past two years. This will be the 675th post on FlowingData, plus 5,271 comments and another 644 posts in the FlowingData forums. Oh and let’s not forget the 26,400 caught spam comments. Thanks, Akismet.

Here are the most popular posts over the past year:

1. 27 Visualizations and Infographics to Understand the Financial Crisis
2. 5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year
3. Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis
4. Pixel City: Computer-generated City
5. Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America, Interactive Edition
6. Little Red Riding Hood, the Animated Infographic Story
7. Maps of the Seven Deadly Sins
8. 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe
9. 40 Essential Tools and Resources to Visualize Data
10. 37 Data-ish Blogs You Should Know About

We also just passed We’re also up to almost 18,000 subscribers today, which continues to amaze me. FlowingData had 2,600 subscribers at the one-year mark. I can only imagine what FlowingData will be in another year. As you might remember, I had to transfer FlowingData to a better server to keep up with the increase in traffic. This of course wouldn’t have been possible without the sponsors. Thanks for the support, sponsors.

Finally, a big thank you to all of you who send me suggestions and share links with others via social media sites like Twitter, Digg, and del.icio.us. You’ve all helped shape FlowingData into what it is today.

Here’s to another year of data.