Category: InfoGraphics
Infographics: Map your Twitter contacts
Locate your twitter contacts on an interactive world map with this simple mashup.
Let your cursor hover over the bottom right corner of the map (not the one above, which is just a screenshot, but the interactive map linked to here) and a Twitter Account sign-in dialog will open.
H/T: Nathan Yau
Infographic: Who gets US social support money?
Federal government benefits in the US —chiefly Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, income security, unemployment insurance, and veterans’ benefits—accounted for 17.6 percent of personal income in 2009. The New York Times today published another of its fantastic interactive charts, this one showing where federal assistance has gone over the last 40 years: what counties got what percentage of their personal income from which programs in each of those years.
This screenshot doesn’t do the actual chart justice, so click through to the original.
An accompanying story concludes that, while social support programs once went mostly to the poorest Americans, the middle class has recently become the largest recipient. Americans who complain vociferously about overly generous social programs are themselves recipients.
Wouldn’t it be illuminating to see something similar for Canadian federal and provincial government benefits?
Statistician’s guide to darts – updated
[Update below.] Software designer Nick Barry used the mathematics of probability to calculate the optimal darts strategy for players of varying skills, and turned the results in a series of infographics:
The critical issue is: Which part of the board should players of varying skills aim for?
Should they aim for the triple 20, with a big payout on a success, but a low score from a miss? Or, should they aim for the bullseye?
Alternatively, is there some other optimal location on the board they can aim for that, whilst not the highest scoring region, has a large expanse of middle-of-the-road point values. Would aiming for this region, even with an inaccurate shot, get a reasonable number of points such that, on average, the expected score is the highest that can be achieved?
The true answer to this riddle, as we will see, is that “it depends…”
Infographic: How we got from 300 million to 7 billion
US National Public Radio explains it all in a nifty infographic…
… and in an episode of the NPR program Morning Edition:
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H/T:?? (Can’t remember.)
Coolest business card ever
The format of a standard business card is so inherently boring, it cries out for creative embellishment. In place of the usual 2×3-inch card, games inventer Will Wright (SimCity) hands out worthless paper currency stamped with his contact information.
This bill, which Wright recently gave The Atlantic’s technical editor Alexis Madrigal, happens to be from Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. Fittingly, it features electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla. (That’s the blurred-out stamp on the right-hand side.)
Why didn’t we think of that, dear reader?
H/T: Alexis Madrigal
World’s largest photo library
1000memories.com, a website about organizing and sharing home photography, illustrates Facebook’s dominant role in photographic storage.
Digital cameras are now ubiquitous – it is estimated that 2.5 billion people in the world today have a digital camera. If the average person snaps 150 photos this year that would be a staggering 375 billion photos. That might sound implausible but this year people will upload over 70 billion photos to Facebook, suggesting around 20% of all photos this year will end up there. Already Facebook’s photo collection has a staggering 140 billion photos, that’s over 10,000 times larger than the Library of Congress.
The Chief Electoral Officer responds
Yesterday I complained that Nova Scotia’s Chief Electoral Officer, Christine McCulloch, had impaired the usefulness of her annual tally of political donations by rendering them impossible to search electronically. Ms. McCulloch responds:
I make no apology for doing our utmost to protect the privacy of Nova Scotians while meeting the obligation of full disclosure of political contributions required under the Members and Public Employees Disclosure Act (MPEDA).
The purpose of the disclosure provision of MPEDA is to provide everyone with access to the identity of contributors to recognized parties and candidates and how much they have contributed. That is met in our print report, available free of charge to anyone on request, and in portable document file format (pdf) on our website. There is no requirement under MPEDA to make it available in a searchable or downloadable form for the convenience of journalists or others. In fact, the Nova Scotia government website privacy policy expressly forbids bulk downloading of personal information from a government website.
There may have been a time, when corporations, partnerships and other organizations were permitted to make contributions without limits on the amount, when the analysis of the list of contributors in relation to lists of companies awarded public tenders may have served a purpose. Since the restriction of political contributions to individuals and a limit of $5,000 per individual, such a comparison is impossible and irrelevant. It is very easy to see who has made the greatest contribution to a candidate or party by looking down the amount column. Finding an individual is also relatively simple as the lists are arranged alphabetically.
While not perfect, the Elections Nova Scotia’s publication of contributions as a free book as well as on the Internet fully meets the disclosure requirement while protecting contributors from “data-mining” as far as is practicable.
You know you’re swimming uphill when an official reply to a complaint begins, “I make no apology for…” But Christine McCulloch’s response is disheartening on several levels.
First, “doing our utmost to protect the privacy of Nova Scotians” may be someone’s role, but it’s not the Chief Electoral Officer’s mandate. Her overriding focus should be to ensure that elections are funded and conducted in a manner that is open, transparent, accountable, and fair to all. Competing values such as privacy are, if not incidental, at least secondary. She has her priorities backwards.
Second, her assertion that the contribution limit of $5000 has rendered concern about potential influence peddling “irrelevant” is astonishing. Why bother reporting contributions at all if that’s the case?
Third, Ms. McCulloch seems oblivious to Nova Scotia’s storied history of political corruption, conceding only that “there may have been a time” when comparing contributions and government contracts served a purpose. In the not too distant past, comparing contracts and contributions served the purpose of sending Clarence McFadden and J.G. “Suitcase” Simpson to prison in Nova Scotia’s notorious liquor toll-gating scandal. There’s no maybe about it, and the Chief Electoral Officer of all people ought to be aware of this.
Finally, Ms. McCulloch takes the position that delving into public data in any way beyond what was possible 50 or 100 years ago is a thing to be feared by the citizenry and thwarted by officials. She expects us to content ourselves with data presentation in the format of a 1950′s phone book.
The Chief Electoral Officer really needs to think this through more deeply. The last 30 years have produced a cornucopia of digital tools with enormous citizen-empowering potential. Who knows what sort of mash-ups might be possible with the data trapped within Ms. McCulloch’s locked pdf? Maybe some sharp student in the Community College’s geomantics program could produce heat maps showing which parts of the province donate to which party. Maybe cross-referencing postal code income data with donations or other demographic information will reveal trends and implications we can’t detect from her 50s phone-book approach. Maybe something even better that she and I can’t conceive of because no one has done it yet.
Ironically, Ms. McCullough’s approach precludes this digital bounty while enabling most of the evils she conjures. It won’t stop an unscrupulous employer from identifying and intimidating employees who donate to the wrong party. But it will stop inventive students, journalists, researchers, social and scientists from making the most imaginative, productive, and empowering use of the information she has gathered.
The evolving symbol of accessibility
The International Symbol of Accessibility (ISA), more widely but less correctly known as the handicapped sign, is evolving. The original symbol (far left), designed by Susanne Koefoed in 1968, was pretty much just a stylized wheelchair. The International Commission on Technology and Accessibility (ICTA), a committee of Rehabilitation International, humanized the it by adding a head (second from left). This is the icon we are most familiar with.
Critics complain that its static nature stigmatizes the wheelchairs as instruments of helplessness and passivity. In 2005, VSA, an international organization on arts and disability, produced a more active icon implying self-propulsion (third from left). At least one store, in Cambridge, MA., strengthened this impression by adding cartoon-like motion arcs to the wheel. To date, I haven’t seen these last two in wide use, but I sure like them better.
I was led through this history by Sara Hendren, an artist whose work focuses on disability issues, and who blogs at ablersite.org. For the last year, Hendren has kept tabs on human icons in everyday signage, and found herself “astonished to see how animated and evocative these signs can be.”
Hendren was initially tempted to recreate the ISA from scratch, but instead decided to “edit” it by adding color and motion. Using a mini-grant from the Awesome Foundation (a story in themselves), Hendren and a collaborator, philosopher Brian Glenney, created clear plastic decals that can be overlaid upon existing, old-style accessibility signs, jazzing them up in the process.
“I felt strongly that our decision to edit the image should make its own process visible, resulting in this clear-backed icon that fits over a number of standard, traditional signs,” Hendren wrote recently. “The juxtaposition of old and new draws attention to the comparison, and to the unconscious ways we consume images that drive our ideas about one another.”
If you would like some of these stickers, Hendren will send them free, as long as you promise to document their use. Email her at sarahendren @ gmail dot com.
North Atlantic fisheries, then and now
Scientists at UBC used ecosystem models, underwater terrain maps, fish catch records, and statistical analysis to estimate the biomass of Atlantic fish [large PDF] at various points the last century. David McCandless of the UK Guardian’s Data Blog turned the resulting maps into this animated GIF:
McCandless writes:
These early accounts and data on the past abundance of fish help reveal the magnitude of today’s fish stock declines which are otherwise abstract or invisible.
They also help counter the phenomenon of “shifting environment baselines”. This is when each generation views the environment they remember from their youth as “natural” and normal. Today that means our fishing policies and environmental activism is geared to restoring the oceans to the state we remember they were. That’s considered the environmental baseline.
The problem is, the sea was already heavily exploited when we were young.
So this is a kind of collective social amnesia that allows over-exploitation to creep up and increase decade-by-decade without anyone truly questioning it. Today’s fishing quotas and policies for example are attempting to reset fish stocks to the levels of ten or twenty years ago. But as you can see from the visualization, we were already plenty screwed back then.
Further reading:
- Hundred-year decline of North Atlantic predatory fishes, by Villy Christensen, Sylvie Guenette, Johanna J. Heymans, Carl J. Walters, Reginald Watson, Dirk Zeller, and Daniel Pauly, Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia. [large PDF]
- The Unnatural History of the Sea, by York University Professor Callum Roberts (Amazon|Chapters|Google Books).
The hidden cost of farmed fish
As ocean stocks dwindle, humanity turns increasingly to farmed fish. But does this actually make matters worse? Graphic artist Nigel Upchurch thinks so:
It matters which farmed fish you’re eating, as some species consume more than others. Salmon is the worst, as this table, from a paper by Albert G.J. Tacon and Marc Metian of the University of Hawaii, demonstrates:
The red arcs represent wild fish inputs, the yellow arcs farmed fish output. The numbers inside the circles show the ratio between the two. Numbers greater than one mean more wild fish is consumed than farmed fish produced. Upchurch provides additional fine print.
H/T: Nathan Yau
