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From the wonderful Afrographique comes this visualization of the number of mobile phone users per 100 people in different African countries. There is nothing particularly innovative or complex about this graph; the data could have just as easily have been presented in a tabular format. What I love about it (beyond the colors of course!) […]
03/25/2011
Have you ever been waiting for a bus for half an hour, only for two half-filled buses of the same route to roll up to your stop? Known as bus bunching, this can be an incredibly annoying experience, especially if you see many buses pass by in the opposite direction while you’re waiting. Luckily for […]
03/03/2011
Or, in this case, birds made of 1′s and 0′s. Based off of a flocking algorithm written in 1986 by Craig Reynolds, this visualization shows how collective intelligence can be modeled by giving individual entities simple decision making procedures and letting them interact. The post’s author (Harry Brundage) lists a whole suite of applications, from […]
03/02/2011
Data visualization isn’t limited to the social sciences. As a case in point, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes the journal Science) recently held a competition for data visualization. There were some really cool ideas – a team from MIT tracked where pieces of trash ended up, a Russian team created a […]
02/16/2011
Which countries have the greatest public debts relative to the size of their economies? The IMF has a great data mapping tool, which includes the ability to look at historical data and play back changes over time. The following graph comes from their historical public debt database; the graph below was adjusted using PPP. The […]
02/14/2011
From Scott Sumner, we have a new way of visualizing the political spectrum. I wonder how many people would self-identify as a corrupt democrat or a corrupt republican? I also think that the words ‘idealistic’ and ‘pragmatic’ are slightly loaded, but nevertheless this is an interesting way to distinguish between values and ideology.
02/03/2011
Do advertising expenditures as a percentage of GDP hold constant over time? Some empirical research shows that a rough relationship between these two variables is supported – advertising has contributed to around 2% of GDP over the last century, even as these expenditures have increased (in both nominal and real terms). Advertising can be thought […]
02/03/2011
From Eric Fisher, we have an incredible set of maps showing where tourists and locals tend to take pictures. He used Flickr upload histories to determine whether or not a user was a native to an area or just visiting, and then mapped out their shots in different colors for dozens of cities. From what […]
04/11/2011
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