Entries in news (56)
Randy
Wikipedia Activity Visualization
From A Beautiful WWW, this image is a pretty good attempt to visualize the article revision activity on Wikipedia. An article explaining the visualization is here, but the image is a combination of images are from the most linked-to articles, and the size of the colored dots represent the amount of revision activity in the linked articles.
A really cool interactive version was made using the Google Maps API so you can zoom in and move around the graphic.
Americans Remain Woefully Ill-Informed
Wired magazine calls infographics like this "infoporn". I guess you could call this a version of a bubble chart, but it shows a comparison of what people knew in 1989 vs. 2007. Separately it shows knowledge of three questions based on the respondent's usual source of news.
I can't tell how big the sample size was, or what type of people they interviewed. It quotes the source as the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, but that alone isn't enough to make it credible.
Breathing Earth
Breathing Earth is a cool website that displays international statistics in real-time, similar in concept to Poodwaddle.com's World Counter. Breathing Earth focuses on carbon dioxide emissions by country and adds population, births and deaths.
Welcome to Breathing Earth. This presentation displays the carbon dioxide emission levels of every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates - all in real-time. Though considerable effort has been taken to ensure that the presentation uses the most accurate and up-to-date data available, please remember that this is just a simulation.Breathing Earth was created by David Bleja (aka Stillwater), whose home website is stillwater-microcosm.net
Found on SimpleComplexity.net
31 Days in Iraq
This map of Iraq from the NYTimes.com visually shows the over 1,900 people killed in Iraq during the month of January 2007.
"The map, based on data from the American, British and Iraqi governments and from news reports, shows the dates, locations and circumstances of deaths."The number has doubled since they did this for January 2006 which had around 800 deaths. Each figure represents an individual of the American forces, coalition forces, Iraqi forces, police officers or civilian death. The larger figures have numbers showing how many people they represent (which I think diminishes the visual impact). A smaller icon shows the cause of death. All the figures are connected to a location in the country.
I would have added some color coding too, but I'm guessing the NY Times had to keep it in black & white to print it in the newspaper.
Human Trafficking
Found on VisualComplexity.com, this disturbing poster examines global human trafficking.
"It depicts each country's level of involvement (from Very High to Very Low) as either a country of destination or origin. The project concentrates on the smuggling of people from one country to another - mainly illegally. In many cases these people are forced to do work that is illegal, such as prostitution or child labor."The poster was created by Taulant Bushi, and the original image is here.
The Bloomberg Makeover
Three design firms took on the challenge of re-designing the Bloomberg terminal interface, and the results were fantastic. The challenge came from Portfolio.com. The original article is here, but the fantasy terminals are here with an interactive interface that lets you highlight and zoom in on particular features. The design above is from thehappycorp.com and is my personal favorite.
Bloomberg claims to be constantly improving their interface design, but it still looks like runs on DOS and is straight out of the 80's.
Here is the desing from IDEO.com:
And one from Ziba.com:
The Wealthiest Americans Ever
From the NYTimes in July 2007, an interactive infographic ranking the Wealthiest Americans after you convert their fortunes to today's dollars using the relative share of G.D.P.
Scrolling your pointer over the photos or the fortune amount shows more detail of the individual. Lots of black & white portraits! Only current rich folk Bill Gates and Warren Buffet made the list with color portraits.
Marumushi News Map
Marumushi.com has a fantastic News Map using the treemap visualization style. This is one of the best implementations of a treemap that I have found. Updated every 6 hours, it groups news stories (from the Google news aggregator) by overall category (technology, world, sports, etc.). You can choose to show the news map from 11 different countries, and the color shading of each block represents how old that particular news story is. Hovering your mouse over any square shows the whole title, and clicking takes you directly to the story.
