"visualization of the week" entries
Visualization of the Week: Mobile World Congress’ economic impact on Barcelona
A visualization shows credit and terminal transactions the week before and the week during Mobile World Congress 2012.
Mobile World Congress is going on this week in Barcelona. CartoDB and BBVA teamed up to visualize the economic impact one of the world’s largest tech conferences has on its host city. The team took the credit card transaction data from Mobile World Congress 2012, separated by visitors and locals, and compared it to transactions the week before the conference in a running timeline visualization:
Visualization of the Week: Every meteorite strike mapped
Vizzuality and CartoDB co-founder Javier de la Torre created a heatmap of meteorite impacts and produced a how-to video of the map's creation.
The meteorite that struck Chelyabinsk, Russia, last week — the largest reported since 1908, when a meteor hit Tunguska, Siberia — prompted the Guardian’s Datablog team to pull together data from the Meteorological Society, identifying all known meteorite impacts on Earth, some dating back to 2300 B.C. The initial map the team created with the data seems to be down, but their map inspired Vizzuality and CartoDB co-founder Javier de la Torre to produce a heat map using the same data, which Datablog editor Simon Rogers also highlights at The Guardian.
Visualization of the Week: How people commute
Two visualizations look at how commuters get to and from work.
The Datablog team at The Guardian dug into the recently released 2011 UK census data and mapped how people around the UK get to work — by car, bike, train or walking.
Visualization of the Week: Profits vs Super Bowl ad expense
The team at Quartz compares 3.5 hours of advertiser profits to the nearly $4 million Super Bowl ad price tag. Were the ads worth it?
Commercials have long been a highlight of the Super Bowl (if you missed any, the Verge grabbed the Hulu compilation), but how much do the advertising companies profit from the notoriously expensive ad spots?
Ritchie King at Quartz pulled together a chart to provide context. King reports that ads this year sold for an average of $3.7 to $3.8 million, but as King explains and the chart shows, that dollar figure is a mere “pittance” for the advertising companies. “In fact,” King notes, “some of them make almost as much in profits in an average 3.5 hours — roughly the time it takes to air the Super Bowl itself.”
Visualization of the Week: Identify your insiders, outsiders, connectors and gateways
WolframAlpha's updated Facebook tool visualizes your network (and makes outliers obvious).
WolframAlpha announced an upgrade to its Personal Analytics for Facebook platform that allows users to visualize a number of aspects of their Facebook ecosystem. John Burnham outlines the updates on the WolframAlpha blog, noting that the popular visualization from the tool’s first release has a number of enhancements that allow users to better visualize how their social network fits together.
Visualization of the Week: Pollution exposure by city
Using WHO data, The Guardian Data Blog team pulled together a world map of annual pollution exposure.
The latest reports of severe smog blanketing Beijing inspired The Guardian Data Blog team to dip into World Heath Organization data and design a world map of annual pollution exposure by city. Data Blog researcher Ami Sedghi writes:
“The World Health Organisation (WHO) warns that exposure to particulate matter increases the risk of many chronic and acute respiratory conditions in children and adults. The WHO air quality guidelines indicate that by reducing particulate matter (PM10) pollution from 70 to 20 micrograms per cubic metre, air quality related deaths can be reduced by around 15%.”
Visualization of the Week: 84 years of Oscar nominees and winners
Jerry Vermanen and Chris Helt examined the Academy Awards' full history. And this year's front-runner is ...
Let the Oscar party planning begin — for good or bad, the Academy Awards nominations are out. For insight to help predict which film will win the big award, Jerry Vermanen and Chris Helt at NU.nl pulled together Oscar nominee and winner data from all 84 years of the awards, broken down by release date, film length, IMDb rating, and genre.
The following chart shows nominees and winners throughout the years based on release month:
In which month were most nominated movies released? December, with 21.7% of all nominees. But it’s not the best month to win. November claims that one with 32.5% of nominees released in that month winning an Academy Award. July has had 0 winners and for more than 20 years, the months February, March and April had no nominees. See the full interactive chart.
Visualization of the Week: Australia’s weather and wave forecast maps
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology adds new colors to forecast maps to accommodate rising high temps topping 129 degrees Fahrenheit.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology recently had to update its interactive weather forecasting chart to add new colors. Peter Hannam explains at The Sydney Morning Herald that the previous temperature range topped out at 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) to accommodate forecasted high temperatures. Now, they’ve had to add two new colors, dark purple and bright pink, to represent temperatures up to 54 degrees Celsius (129.2 degrees Fahrenheit). Hannam captured a forecast map for 5 p.m. January 14 that required the new deep purple color.
Visualization of the Week: Your US tax rate, from 1913 to 2012
An interactive chart showing equivalent inflation-adjusted incomes and effective federal tax rates for the past century.
Prompted by Warren Buffett’s appeal to establish a minimum tax on the wealthy and the “fiscal cliff” negotiations in Congress, Ritchie King designed an interactive chart showing historical effective federal tax rates (federal taxes paid divided by taxable income) based on inflation-adjusted 2012 income.
This chart shows the 1963 equivalent income and federal tax rate for a married couple filing jointly and earning 100,000 in 2012. Click here for the full interactive visualization.
Visualization of the Week: Evaluating basketball teams as networks
ASU researchers find the science behind the Lakers' 2010 championship.
Had the Lakers consulted with Arizona State University (ASU) researchers Jennifer Fewell and Dieter Armbruster, they might have gone a different way after firing coach Mike Brown. Nonetheless, current Lakers coach Mike D’Antoni may be wise to consult Fewell and Armbruster’s work. The duo led a team at ASU that used a network analysis model to analyze basketball plays — they applied the technique to the 2010 NBA playoffs to help explain the results.
According to their published research paper, “[t]he study involved more than a thousand ball movements and typically more than one hundred sequences or paths for each team” in the playoffs, which provided enough data to enable them to treat the game as a network.
“Weighted graphs of ball transitions across two games for the (d) Lakers. Red edges represent transition probabilities summing to the 60th percentile. Player nodes are sorted by decreasing degree clockwise from the left.”
Read more…