It’s about that time again, the annual anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers & the Pentagon. As part of their coverage, the New York Times has an interactive visualization of the many aspects of the financial impact, showing data varying from physical damage to war funding and homeland security budgets.
Al Qaeda spent roughly half a million dollars to destroy the World Trade Center and cripple the Pentagon. What has been the cost to the United States? In a survey of estimates by The New York Times, the answer is $3.3 trillion, or about $7 million for every dollar Al Qaeda spent planning and executing the attacks. While not all of the costs have been borne by the government — and some are still to come — this total equals one-fifth of the current national debt. All figures are shown in today’s dollars.
The New York Times has a nice interactive viewer of the tornadoes that have ripped across the southeast United States.
The death toll was high in several Southern states after devastating storms ripped through the region, spawning deadly tornadoes. The map shows the locations of reported tornadoes each hour (Central time) across the eastern United States since April 21.
Unfortunately they don’t have the April 12th weather that nearly blew my house away.
The New York Times has a collection of breathtaking photos from various satellites before-and-after the recent Tsunami and Earthquake. Each photo-pair is connected to a slider so that you can wipe back and forth between the two and get a glimpse at the incredible damage mother-nature wrought upon Japan.
The New York Times has taken Census Bureau data from from 2005 to 2009 and created a nice series of maps. You can zoom in to browse by state, county, and even Census district. You need to be aware that the dots in the above map are randomly scattered within the Census district, and do not map exactly to an address. Still, it is a pretty useful tool to see where different racial groups live.
The New York Times has a nice writeup on the visualization of slave populations that resulted from the 1860 Census, which is believed to be the first time shading was used to indicate the concentration of slavery. Regions like the Mississippi River are almost entirely black, while states like Missouri and Tennessee are almost entirely white.
The map reaffirmed the belief of many in the Union that secession was driven not by a notion of “state rights,” but by the defense of a labor system. A table at the lower edge of the map measured each state’s slave population, and contemporaries would have immediately noticed that this corresponded closely to the order of secession. South Carolina, which led the rebellion, was one of two states which enslaved a majority of its population, a fact starkly represented on the map.
Unfortunately, the NYTimes “blowup” of the map obscures it’s natural beauty with some interactive icons and features. I managed to find a slightly higher-resolution version at JimZellArt.com , shown below.
FlowingData brings us this great presentation from the New York Times’ own Amanda Cox at the recent New Media Days 2010.
It’s about an hour long, but a great glimpse inside the mind of one of the world’s busiest and most visible information visualization professionals. Fair warning tho: As much as I’ld love for you to stay here on VizWorld to watch it, it seems they don’t allow any kind of nice embed feature (I’ve embedded it below, but it won’t scale to my 600px-wide format), so you may want to go watch it on the original site.
The New York Times has a great article about the growing field of biomedical animation, specifically Molecular animation. They talk to some of the big names in the field like Rober Lue, Janet Iwasa, and Drew Berry to learn how they do it and what the benefits of molecular animation are to researchers.
“All that we had before — microscopy, X-ray crystallography — were all snapshots,” said Tomas Kirchhausen, a professor in cell biology at Harvard Medical School and a frequent collaborator with Dr. Iwasa. “For me, the animations are a way to glue all this information together in some logical way. By doing animation I can see what makes sense, what doesn’t make sense. They force us to confront whether what we are doing is realistic or not.” For example, Dr. Kirchhausen studies the process by which cells engulf proteins and other molecules. He says animations help him picture how a particular three-legged protein called clathrin functions within the cell.
Nate Silver earned some internet celebrity during the Obama Presidential election for his daily election predictions on FiveThirtyEight.com . During this election cycle, he’s publishing his efforts at the New York Times complete with commentary and his usual collection of statistics for the Senate, House, and Governor’s races.
Hit his NYTimes page for all the election numbers you can shake a stick at.
A surprisingly good graphic from the New York Times today shows what’s happened to the airline industry since deregulation in 78, with each bar representing the total percentage of passengers in the US. Currently, Southwest seems to have the slight lead with 17%, while classics like American Airlines have dropped down to 12.2%.
The deregulation of the airline industry in 1978 led to a wave of mergers that continues to this day. But even as the legacy carriers have been consolidating and growing, they have been losing market share to low-cost carriers. Two of them, SouthWest and AirTran, have just agreed to merge and carried the most passengers in 2009 combined.
It’s a great representation, the “growing bars” do a great job of not only representing the information, but symbolizing the growth of the companies in a quick overview as well.
It’s about that time again, the annual anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers & the Pentagon. As part of their coverage, the New York Times has an interactive visualization of the many aspects of the financial impact, showing data varying from physical damage to war funding and homeland security budgets.
The New York Times has a nice interactive viewer of the tornadoes that have ripped across the southeast United States.
The New York Times has a collection of breathtaking photos from various satellites before-and-after the recent Tsunami and Earthquake. Each photo-pair is connected to a slider so that you can wipe back and forth between the two and get a glimpse at the incredible damage mother-nature wrought upon Japan.
The New York Times has a nice writeup on the visualization of slave populations that resulted from the 1860 Census, which is believed to be the first time shading was used to indicate the concentration of slavery. Regions like the Mississippi River are almost entirely black, while states like Missouri and Tennessee are almost entirely white.
FlowingData brings us this great presentation from the New York Times’ own Amanda Cox at the recent New Media Days 2010.
The New York Times has a great article about the growing field of biomedical animation, specifically Molecular animation. They talk to some of the big names in the field like Rober Lue, Janet Iwasa, and 
Nate Silver earned some internet celebrity during the Obama Presidential election for his daily election predictions on FiveThirtyEight.com . During this election cycle, he’s publishing his efforts at the New York Times complete with commentary and his usual collection of statistics for the Senate, House, and Governor’s races.
VizWorld.com 
Comments