A third political dimension. Bad political visualizations only include a single dimension (left vs. right); better models include two dimensions (left vs. right; up vs. down). Philosopher John Perry proposes a three dimensional model. Illustrator Leif Parsons made a fun sketch of what this should look like.
A view of human growth, shipping patterns, and migration shown in a video. Continues a long trend of using illumination on a darker earth surface to represent data.
(Source: vimeo.com)
A very nice graph using some time series data. I like how the graph feels “old”, reminiscent of when graphs were hand-drawn. It’s appropriate, given the MLB data reaches back to 1871. Whether it’s caused by the steroids era, shorter baseball parks, or the difference in baseballs, it’s a nice story to see unraveled.
This data seems really interesting. NASA’s view of the ocean currents is a nice, clean implementation of viewing, literally, world-wide time-series geographical data. Typically, these animations are a bit overwhelming, but I get a very clear sense of the data here.
(Source: Flickr / gsfc)
Great use of faceting here and avoids using two vertical axis, which would be a tempting for most people.
The Very Real Economic Dangers of an Aging America
In the future, U.S. growth will be slower. Recessions will be deeper. Recoveries will be weaker. And there’s exactly one thing to blame.
Demographics.
That’s the stark conclusion from James Stock and Mark Watson in this fascinating, and occasionally depressing, new paper. In fact, they say, the future is now. For the last few years, we’ve weathered the beginning of what demographers have called the grey tsunami. “Most of the slow recovery [in today’s job market] is attributable to a long-term slowdown in trend employment growth,” Stock and Watson write.
The authors blame two demographic demons for our uncertain future: (1) the plateau in the female labor force participation rate, and (2) the aging of the U.S. workforce. Their underlying logic is that without continued growth in female workers or a significant boost in population, employment and GDP growth will slow, leaving us vulnerable to recessions with “steeper declines and slower recoveries.” In such a future, jobless recoveries will be the only recoveries we know.
Read more. [Image: Peter Bell, Ryan Morris]
(via sunfoundation)
After the 2012 GOP super Tuesday primaries, New York Times released an interactive chart on the relationship between various socio-demographic variables and support for either Romney or Santorum. It’s a quick way to show data by state, by variable, as a trade-off between two candidates. This could easily work as a static grid or faceting of charts to display on a static page or in a printed booklet.
Leaderboards is a slick, somewhat technical (but not too technical) way of displaying a dashboard display of several variables. Further, it allows you to compare how a particular observation ranks in relation to other variables, giving it a scatterplot-like quality.
Juice always has fun ideas for graphs and they’re also relatively easy to implement.
(Source: youtube.com)
Dot plots! This would normally be a grouped bar chart with three bars to every procedure (42 total!). Here, each row in the graph can show data from each country. Although the country groupings don’t quite make sense (Argentina, Canada, Chile, India ?!), combining countries reduces color-clutter.
Why an MRI costs $1,080 in America and $280 in France
There is a simple reason health care in the United States costs more than it does anywhere else: The prices are higher.
That may sound obvious. But it is, in fact, key to understanding one of the most pressing problems facing our economy. In 2009, Americans spent $7,960 per person on health care. Our neighbors in Canada spent $4,808. The Germans spent $4,218. The French, $3,978. If we had the per-person costs of any of those countries, America’s deficits would vanish. Workers would have much more money in their pockets. Our economy would grow more quickly, as our exports would be more competitive.
A simple, dashboard like interface to explore energy usage in buildings. This particular data viz is interactive, but can also work as a static picture.
The use of a histogram next to the map is very smart.
