I’m thankful for the opportunity I had to work at Google. I learned more than I thought I would. I’ll miss the free food. I’ll miss the occasional massage. I’ll miss the authors, politicians, and celebrities that come to speak or perform. I’ll miss early chances to play with cool toys before they’re released to the public. Most of all, I’ll miss working with the incredibly smart and talented people I got to know there. But I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.

— Douglas Bowman, Goodbye, Google, March 2009

I feel like I’ve been hearing a lot of this type of stuff recently. Just yesterday, while watching NBA playoff commentary, someone stated that future Detroit Lions quarterback, Matthew Stafford, had something like a 1 in 4 chance of success in the NFL. Charles Barkeley replied that sometimes you gotta forget about stats and just go, or something to that effect. Oddly enough, I agree.

[via TechCrunch]

UPDATE: Kevin Fox, (formerly) senior user experience design lead at Google, responded to Bowman’s post: “I don’t think Google had to be a bad fit for you, but that you were put in to the wrong role.” [Thanks, David]

This graphic from New Scientist shows when certain natural resources will run out in the world if we continue at the current consumption rate. However, reader beware, this graphic feels more like eye candy than real data. I’m no ecologist, but something about these numbers doesn’t seem quite right. Completely out of gold in the entire world in 45 years? No more indium (for LCDs) in 13 years? I don’t quite get the comparison between world consumption rate vs half of the US consumption rate. Why half? Again, I’m no ecologist, so maybe this is totally normal. I dunno. Maybe someone who knows better than me can chime in here.

Data assumptions aside, the design is interesting. A little scattered – but interesting. Can you think of some ways to make this graphic more informative?

What exactly is a doer? Feeling much like a segment on Sesame Street, this ad from Honda explains, “Well, doers do things. Things to move us forward, to make stuff better.” The ad (below) goes on to imagine a world where people and companies are doers who take an active role in making environmentally conscious decisions.

[via Cool Infographics]

There are over 10,000 street vendors in New York City. But how much do you know about them? The Street Vendor Project, in collaboration with the Center for Urban Pedagogy and Candy Chang, provide a visual guide [pdf] in an effort to show the world of street vendors. Wow, that sentence had a lot of interesting names in it. Um, sorry, I digress.

The guide briefly explains vendor regulations, rights, and what a better system might look like – and with an average $14,000 salary, there’s certainly room for improvement. There is also a bit of history and demographics with business that began as pushcarts (e.g. Bloomingdale’s) and now celebrities (e.g. Jerry Seinfeld) who at one time or another were street vendors.

There is also a second guide [pdf] for the street vendors themselves. Make sure you take a picture of that smiley, abusive policeman.

[via New York Times]

I was going to let this one slide, but people kept commenting, essentially trashing FlowingData, and that’s just not cool. As you might recall, I put in my picks for the best data visualization projects of 2008 a while back. They were the fine work of statisticians, designers, and computer scientists, all of them beautiful, and all of them built to tell an interesting story with the dataset at hand. None of them were traditional graphs or charts.
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This is a guest post by Martin Krzywinski who develops Circos, a GPL-licensed (free) visualization tool that can help you show relationships in data. This article is based on a longer writeup which you can find here.

Suppose that you are reading an article and the text refers you to a table on the next page. Before you turn the page, what are your expectations of the table? Chances are, you would like it to communicate trends and patterns. Chances are, too, that it will fail and simply deliver numerical minutiae. You are left hunting around the numbers for a while, only to return to the text in hopes that the table’s data trends will be communicated elsewhere.
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As a nation, we gained jobs every month during 2007 compared to the same month one year before. However, since July of 2008, we’ve seen a loss in jobs nationwide, and up until Februrary of this year, it’s gotten worse every month. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the recession has claimed more than 5 million jobs. This interactive map from Slate Magazine says it all.

[Thanks, @jaybol and @barr]

It’s good to see PBS is teaching strong values to grow up with with Sid the Science Kid and this lovely chart song (below). A chart is a handy dandy scientific tool…it gives you information that you can see with your eyes…a chart that you visualize…you get the picture… so do I… Best kid song ever.

Have a nice weekend all.

[via infosthetics | Thanks, Nick]

FlowingData continues to grow at a faster and faster rate each month, and I have you, FD reader, to thank. Thank you for emailing your friends, tweeting and retweeting posts, sharing via Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc, and sending in post suggestions. FlowingData would not be the same without you and not nearly as interesting.

I’d also like to thank FlowingData sponsors who help me keep this little ol’ blog of mine running smoothly. Contrary to popular belief, FlowingData isn’t a big design firm or even a group of people. I’m just one graduate student trying to finish a dissertation, and FlowingData would not be possible without the sponsors. I hope you will help me thank them by checking out the visualization tools they have to offer.

IDV Solutions — Create interactive, map-based, enterprise mashups in SharePoint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s time for another segment of Visualize This. For new readers, this is something I’ve been running every now and then where I post a dataset and we all put up our own visualizations. It runs for a couple of weeks and we end up with many different views of the data, some inspiration, and we learn something in the process.

The Data

About 28.2% of the average American’s income goes towards taxes, which means the first 103 days of the year is to pay for government. At the end of these 103 days – April 13 – is Tax Freedom Day. However, because of varying state-by-state tax burdens and average incomes, Tax Freedom Day varies by state. Alaska, for example, has the earliest Tax Freedom Day (March 23) because it has low state and local taxes while Connecticut is last on April 30, because of “extraordinarily high federal income taxes.” For this Visualize This we’re looking at the number of days each state spends paying taxes this year (2009).

Your Mission

As with previous Visualize This segments, show us your best shot at visualizing the Tax Freedom Day data in this forum thread. I’ve put the data in an Excel spreadsheet that you can find at the bottom of the forum post. You are welcome to incorporate any other data too if you feel that it adds to the story.

Map? Graphs? Both? Let’s see what you’ve got. Oh, and most importantly, have fun. If you haven’t registered a (free) forum account, you’ll want to do that first.

DEADLINE: April 30, 2009

[Thanks, Alex]

This holographic video by Bruce Branit is completely fictional but oh so sexy. Can you imagine a digital world at that level of interaction – where just about anything and everything is at your finger tips? It’s good to dream.

[via infosthetics]

The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), a research group well-known for its tracking of monetary influence on United States politics, announced some great news. Their expansive dataset is now available to the public via OpenSecrets.

Politicians, prepare yourselves. Lobbyists, look out. Today the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics is putting 200 million data records from the watchdog group’s archive directly into the hands of citizens, activists, journalists and anyone else interested in following the money in U.S. politics.

Yeah, 200 million data records. Correction. 200 million cleaned, formatted, and documented data records. Awesome. They’ve got data on campaign finances, lobbying, personal finances, and 527 organizations, which can be downloaded as CSV files or via the RESTful API. Let the mashups begin.

[via Ben Fry | Thanks, Gegtik]

Designers seem to have taken a liking to the idea of showing world statistics as a village of 100. For example, if the world were a village of 100 people, 48 of them would be men. While we’re essentially just looking at percentages, the village metaphor seems to do a better job at humanizing the numbers. Along the same lines, this poster series from Tony Ng, World of 100, uses simple graphics to relate to demographics like money, food, and computers:

This is a self-initiated project based on the scenario – If the world were a village of 100 people. There are a few different versions of this text in circulation about the world’s statistics. I found the data very striking and neatly summarises the world that we live in. So I used information graphics to re-tell the story in another creative way.

A few of the graphics seem kind of random, but hey, it’s amusing.

[via The Daily Dish]

Elizabeth Currid (USC) and Sarah Williams (Columbia University), collaborate to map the geography of buzz in Los Angeles (above) and New York (below). The two researchers mined thousands of photos from Getty Images which provided a dataset of parties in art, music, fashion, movies, film, etc and created density maps which in turn show the hip places to be.
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This network graph shows common contributions between representatives in Congress:

A relationship exists between two elements in the visual if they share a relationship with at least one member of the other group. For instance, both Bernie Sanders and Sam Brownback received campaign contributions from the the National Association of Realtors.

Line thickness represents number of shared relationships; and color represents Democrat to Democrat, Republican to Republican, and cross-party connections. There’s a zoomable version, but like a lot of network stuff it still feels cluttered. I’m sure some node interaction goodness would do this some good.

[Thanks, @mrflip]

Zappos, the online shoe retailer, maps sales across the United States in real-time. We’ve seen this before in Twittervision and other Google Maps mashups, but the difference here is that every shoe that pops on the map is cash in the bank. Keep that in mind, and this mashup takes on whole new meaning. Disregard the bug that doesn’t reposition markers on zoom.

[Thanks, @noahharlan]

Information Architects, a design firm with offices in Japan and Zurich, release their annual web trends map. This is the fourth one in the series. Popular domains on the Web are mapped to the Tokyo Metro and organized by how they are most related to the cities. Heights represent success in traffic and branding. Subway lines are colored by area of interest. For example, take the orange line to find the creatives. Notice that there are several colors passing through Apple.

Here’s the high-res zoomable version. Go full-screen for the full effect.

While the map would mean a lot more to me if I lived in Tokyo, the designers obviously have taken great care to cover the details, and that’s something I can appreciate.

[via TechCrunch | Thanks, Pavan and Max]

Sprint’s “now” promotion seems to be in full swing. In line with their dashboard to the universe, they’re currently airing this commercial (below) that shows various statistics on things that are happening right now. Apparently, the most common text messaging topic is…diapers?
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The number of Web applications to collect data and information about yourself continues to grow; if you want to track something, most likely there’s an online tool to do it. This is great – especially since a lot of the applications seem to have a lot of users, which means an interest in data. Whether it is deliberate or not is a different question, but you know, that doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that people are taking notice. However, as users, developers, and designers, we shouldn’t be satisfied too quickly with what we have. Want more. Demand more. It’s interesting and oftentimes fun to log data about your life – whether it be when you go the bathroom, your sugar levels, or your mood. You get some nice graphs and charts, it looks cool, and maybe you learn something about yourself.

But all the self-surveillance tools so far are mostly about a single dataset or two at most. You track your weight and what you eat, but it’s more complex than that. Life is complicated and data is an abstraction of life after all. Do you eat when you’re depressed or are you depressed when you eat? Do you feel better if you exercise? What about sleep? How much sleep and exercise is best for you? What days should you exericse and how many days in a row and for how long? What truly makes you happy? I want my self-surveillance application to not only give me the ability to find these answers but to give them to me with very little effort on my part.
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Daniel Catt from Flickr maps 24 hours worth of geotagged photos (about 64,000 of them) on this animated 3-D globe (below). The project was implemented in Processing, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, and we’ve seen this type of 3-D globe thing before. What’s cool here is that all the data came from the Flickr API:

All the data was pulled down (using Processing, of all things) via the API, and probably took around 12 minutes (when it’s behaving itself) as I was being a) gentle with the servers b) was getting it as JSON which takes a while for Processing to parse each page. And then written to a flat file.

I didn’t realize that public Flickr data was so accessible. Although, there wasn’t really any reason for me to think otherwise. Maybe it’s time to consider a little Flickr side project with some Modest Maps.

[via Waxy]