VizWorld.com

A new infographic from Jess Bachman of Wallstats fame and Mint, the popular financial tracking website, compates 80 occupations in a MASSIVE graphic to show averages and extremes across the nation.

You may have seen our guide to the Best and Worst Places to Work by Salary, and this is a more comprehensive follow-up, which includes a total of 80 jobs, with a comparison of the lowest, average and highest paying cities for each respective occupation. Please note that, due to the diverse range of regional and specialized industries throughout the US, cost of living often isn’t always as much of a factor as you might think in determining your salary, so these figures are not adjusted for cost of living.

via Earning Power: A Visual Survey of 80 Occupations | MintLife Blog | Personal Finance News & Advice.

Graphics employment, financial, infographic, mint, wallstats

A recently popular chart from GE and Ben Fry attempted to show the cost of various illnesses across population, attempting to show the high cost of healthcare.  Robert Kosara (@eagereyes) took issue with the chart (as did many others) and thought he could do better, and recently published his attempts.  His came up with some very interesting visualizations (such as the one to the right), but his biggest discovery was this:

There is something even more concerning that I discovered here than simply a bad chart: a gratuitous visualization. The data is mind-numbingly dull. The pretty, interactive, animated visualization was simply there to cover up that fact. Perhaps if people can play with a rotating pie thingy they won't actually question the data?

This is a rarely discussed problem: Visualization makes unexciting data look interesting.  While not at severe as presenting data to draw incorrect assumptions, it’s still never a good thing to “trick” people into wasting time on uninteresting data.

via Curing A Sick Chart | EagerEyes.org.

Graphics, Science infographic, visualization

TrendStream has a new infographic that shows the penetration of various social networks around the world, based on a survey of 32,000 users across 16 countries.

“The massive impact of China: The vast Internet population coupled with hugely socially active set of web users, makes for a massive volume of content creators. However due to the inward looking nature of Chinas internet economy combined with the language mean that this volume of content does not impact the broader Internet

The full infographic is a static image, I’ve embedded it after the break.

via Awesome Visualization of Social Media Usage Around the Globe [Infographic].

Read more…

Science infographic, social media

InfoJocks and CoolInfographics have partnered up to bring the “Visualize the BCS” infographic contest.

Announcing the “Visualize the BCS” contest from InfoJocks.com! The Bowl Championship Series causes a ton of debate between sports fans over the holidays. We want you to design an infographic about the BCS. What to visualize is completely up to you, but must meet two criteria: 1) relate to the BCS and 2) use statistics. Should be easy, right?

All entries get a Free set of the “Taxonomy of Team Names” gift cards, and the three lucky winners get two posters of their choice and a $50 gift certificate to ESPN’s online store!

via Cool Infographics: Enter the “Visualize The BCS” Infographic Contest!.

Graphics contest, infographic, sports

Microsoft, unhappy with the success of visualization-oriented languages like Processing, has just announced a new language targeted at non-programmers for interactive infographics called “Vedea”.  A sample:

myData = DataSet(“mydata.csv”);
currentYear := slider.Value + 1900;
bubbles := from row in myData
where row.Year :== currentYear
select new Circle()
{
X = row.Latitude,
Y = row.Longitude,
Radius = row.Population * scalingFactor,
Fill = BlackBodyPalette(1., 1., row.DeltaCarbon)
};
Scene["USMap"].Add(bubbles);

In a blog post, Martin Calsyn of Microsoft Research said the second line creates a slider bar, the third line creates a collection of bubble buttons, the next few lines create the bubbles themselves, and the last line adds the bubbles to a U.S. map. I’ll just take Calsyn’s word for it.

The language is expected to be available in early 2010 at the Microsoft Research Vedea Page.

via Microsoft details new Vedea visualization language.

Science infographic, interactive, language, microsoft, programming, vedea

Robert Kosara (known to many as @eagereyes) posted a simply abysmal chart recently featured on Fox News showing approval ratings for various possible 2012 presidential election candidates.  A pie chart is really not the proper avenue for this data, and the presentation really makes it look ridiculous, a strange combination of the Google Chrome logo and bad numbers.

Bring Out Your Dreadful Charts! | EagerEyes.org.

Graphics, Science bad, election, infographic

Perlita Labs has an infographic online comparing the many topologies, visualizations, and data structures available in a wide variety of popular visualization tools.  It’s pretty comprehensive, including about 13 different libraries and almost 20 different features.

Comparing Data Visualization Tools.

Science infographic, library, perlita

This week, Wikileaks published a large dataset of intercepted pager messages from the 9/11 World Trade Center tragedy including messages between individuals and emergency services.  Jeff Clark took the data and analyzed various phrases for important and shares the results.

The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entrance into the historical record will lead to a nuanced understanding of how this event led to death, opportunism and war.

I have taken this data and done an analysis for 100 phrases selected to summarize the events of that horrible day. I have focused on the time period from 8am until 8pm, September 11th, 2001.

He has a sparkline chart showing various phrases over the 12 hour period, with some interested prominent selections like “please call home” and “call your mother” showing up above “plane crash”.  See a world-style animated visualization after the break.

via 9/11 Pager Data Visualization.
Read more…

Science 9/11, infographic

If you’re still looking for your own entry into Infosthetic’s Ugly Infographic competition, then Newsweek has come to your rescue with their latest collection of infographics showing how the US and China view each other.  There’s a bit of useful information in there, but good luck finding it.

I’ve already submitted #4 as my entry to the contest (shown above). I really don’t have any idea what it’s trying to tell me.  Six circles, each one represents a percentage of something in a country.  The caption provided is “A majority of Americans say Japan is an innovative country, not so China and India”.  No legend.  So a few possibilities:

• Is that the percentage of people who say Japan is innovative in each country?
• Is that the percentage of Americans who agree that is an innovative country?
• ??

Submit your own funny captions in the comments.

Innovation: American Ingenuity Is Still Respected | Newsweek Technology | Newsweek.com.

Graphics bad, infographic, newsweek

Fans of the funny green leaf have long stated that if it was adopted by the US and taxed like cigarettes or alcohol, the revenues would be immense and crime would be reduced.  But, just how much revenue would there be?  A new infographic at sloshspot compiled the data and has a nice infographic.

Love it or hate it, people smoke marijuana – lots of it. In some states marijuana consumption and posession have been decriminalized, and even legalized for medicinal purposes. But, have you ever wondered how large the economics of Marijuana were? Us too. As a result ,have decided to put together this graphic, which illustrates the popularity of marijuana consumption, the federal tax dollars spent to keep marijuana illegal, and the possible tax revenues that could be generated if marijuana production were legalized and taxed like any other agricultural product. It is especially interesting, with regards to the Great Recession:

The information is collected from various government agencies and NORML.org.

via If Marijuana Production Were Legal: Projected Tax Revenues, by State | Sloshspot Blog.

Graphics economic, government, infographic, marijuana