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Nothing helps an argument like poorly assembled and decidedly misinterpreted statistics (when your opponent starts to point out your flawed reasoning, call him a Nazi). Still, Vali Chandrasekaran of Business Week thinks that we should all be careful drawing conclusions from merely correlated data points. There are several more humorous examples at the link.
Link -via @MarilynTerrell | Previously: The Science News Cycle
If they can take and hold North Dakota, Twilight fans will split the country in two. The booklovers’ website Good Reads crunched some numbers and discovered this trend. Oh, Twilight fans have been discreet about it, but now we can see their plan.
Link -via Ace of Spades HQ
A couple of years ago, someone discovered that websites hungry for content are willing to post infographics. Spammers latched onto the idea, because infographics are easy to create, and an easy way to get links on all kinds of websites. They don’t have to be particularly artful or accurate to get posted, and therefore became less so over time. Alberto Antoniazzi made this infographic that explains the current state of infography in very clear terms. See the full-size version at Flickr. Link -via Laughing Squid
(Image credit: Flickr user albyantoniazzi)
If you aren’t familiar with the show, none of this really matters -but if that’s the case, you should go rent the DVDs from Netflix and then return here promptly after viewing.
Via Geekosystem
Jason Voorhees was a busy boy during the Friday the 13th movies, so it can be easy to get confused about who died in which manner. Thankfully, Andrew Barr and Mike Faille of the National Post put together an infographic summarizing each murder in each movie. Pictured above is a small selection from it. Link | National Post
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If you’ve ever had a hard time keeping track of the companions on Doctor Who, then this handy infographic should be able to help. To view the full graphic, be sure to click on the link.
Think of Mike Knuepfel’s sculpture as an infographic. The height of each letter is greater the more often that a letter is used in the English language:
Idea – I’ve been thinking about and exploring the idea of using 3d rapid prototyping techniques to create sculptural data visualizations. One idea was to have elements or data of the sculpture represent the object itself.
Link via Geekologie
Jose Duarte, a graphic designer, has lately been presenting information using physical objects. These balloons, for example, represent the number of Internet users in (from left to right) China, the EU, India, Brazil, Mexico, and Portugal.
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Should Twilight be among the books that everyone should read? It is according to this infographic by David McCandless of great books (according to popular surveys):
Do Top 100 Books polls and charts agree on a set of classics? I scraped the results of over 15 notable book polls, readers surveys and top 100′s. Both popular and high-brow. They included all Pulitzer Prize winners, Desert Island Discs choices from recent years, Oprah’s Bookclub list, and, of course, The Guardian’s Top 100 Books of All Time. A simple frequency analysis on the gathered titles gives us a neat ‘consensus cloud’ visualisation of the most mentioned books titles across the polls. Do you agree with the consensus?
You can view a much larger version of this image at the link. My wife (a big reader) and I were just discussing this cloud, and she suggests that the list be narrowed to To Kill a Mockingbird and Nineteen Eighty-Four — and to add King Lear, though it is not a novel. What would you add or remove from this cloud?
About 1 in 2.5 adults under the age of 40 has been inked. The Washington Post presents an interactive infographic illustrating the major styles of tattooing that can be found in the United States today. At the link, hovering over any area on the statue’s body shows a closer view of each style.
Link via Nerdcore | Image: Wilson Andrews, Bonnie Berkowitz and Alberto Cuadra/The Washington Post
Dave Fields explains how the rash of internet infographics from the past couple of years differs from …well, from what they should be.
A well done infographic has the power to capture one’s acute attention span and convey information that would have taken longer to simply read (oh no, not reading!). However, for every brilliantly thought out and well executed mashup of art and data, there now seems to be an influx of mundane and formulaic counterparts infesting the very internet that we hold so near and dear.
Here we have an infographic that explores commonalities between the seemingly vast expanse of contrived infographics that appear to have spawned in mass over the past year. If you’re an infographic purest, view at your own risk.
Yep, the rest is in the form of an infographic that manages to be more entertaining than most. Link -via Rue the Day
See also: Infographic
Which movie sequels are better than the originals? Box Office Quant crunched the numbers using the ratings at Rotten Tomato to find the answer. The originals’ scores are on the X-axis, and the sequels’ scores on the Y-axis. Above the line is better than the original; below the line is worse than the first. Only one American film/sequel combo both score 100%: Pixar’s Toy Story and Toy Story 2
Click to Enlarge
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Science Service was a nonprofit news organization that decided to “jazz up” their information releases by adding humorous pictures in the 1920s. Some of these “cartoonographs” are preserved in the Smithsonian Institution. Many of the early cartoonographs were drawn by Elizabeth Sabin Goodwin; see more examples at The Bigger Picture. Link -via Nag on the Lake
At BBC News, Professor Marcus du Sautoy of the University of Oxford writes about diagrams that have substantially changed the way people look at the world or processed information. Pictured above is one created by Florence Nightingale, depicting fatalities among British forces from April 1854 through March 1855 during the Crimean War:
Although better known for her contributions to nursing, her greatest achievements were mathematical. She was the first to use the idea of a pie chart to represent data.
Nightingale had discovered that the majority of deaths in the Crimea were due to poor sanitation rather than casualties in battle. She wanted to persuade government of the need for better hygiene in hospitals.
She realised though that just looking at the numbers was unlikely to impress ministers. But once those numbers were translated into a picture – her Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East – the message could not be ignored. A good diagram, Nightingale discovered, is certainly worth 1,000 numbers.
On the chart, blue areas represent deaths by preventable diseases, red areas represent deaths by wounds, and black areas represent deaths by other causes.
Link via The Presurfer | Image: Dynamic Diagrams
Helpful Figures by Karl Pichotta has plenty of those every-popular infographics you see all around the blogosphere -but these are entertaining! Shown is a small portion of the infographic about food. Look through the archives to find an infographic on a subject that suits your interest. All have interesting “facts”, possibly related artwork, and unclickable sources printed at the bottom, just like all those other infographics. Link -via Metafilter
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The blog Overthinking It created an enormous infographic classifying female characters in movies, anime, literature, comics, and television. The author writes:
Some of the listed tropes might be considered crazy-sexist, and others represent more positive stereotypes. The tropes are subjective, and they exist on a continuum of sexism. Consider Family Guy’s Lois Griffin (who falls under the category of “Perfect Wife”). Lois isn’t a particularly complex female character, and the idea of a fun-loving sexpot wife who stands by her man no matter what he does is kinda-sorta sexist, in that this character is a fantasy fetish figure tailor-made for adolescent male audiences. But as far as sitcom housewives go, I’d much prefer to watch a Lois-type character than a classic sitcom shrew like Debra from Everybody Loves Raymond. At least Lois represents a more positive (and sex-positive) stereotype.
Comedian and graphic designer Doogie Horner took a whimsical look at Facebook portraits. In a large infographic at Fast Company, he presented his analysis of what your portrait photo says about your personality, motivations, and criminal history.
Remember the miners in Chile that were trapped underground on August 5th? They’re still down there. Rescue workers continue to dig toward them while sending essential supplies down a 3.19 inch hole. Newsweek has an infographic illustrating what has been sent down and up this tiny access space. These items include water, an iPod, a tiny projector for entertainment, and blood and urine samples.
The miners have requested cigarettes and alcohol. Their request was denied
Previously: Awkward Moment: Wife and Mistress of Trapped Chilean Miner Learn about Each Other
NMap.org created an infographic that shows the 300,000 most popular websites in the world, represented by their icons, in relative size to each other:
The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its “www.” counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons–those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach–are scaled to 16×16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440. Since your web browser would choke on that, we have created the interactive viewer below (click and drag to pan, double-click to zoom, or type in a site name to go right to it).
It has a search function, and Neatorama’s big N icon is in there.
Link via Geekosystem
Matt Might, a professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah, created a set of circular diagrams to explain the significance and impact of a doctoral degree. He uses them to explain to incoming doctoral students what they’re pursuing. The first, a circle, represents the sum of all human knowledge. Click on the link to view the sequence.
Graphic designer Ellie Koning made a large infographic filled with facts about eBay. Did you know that the first item to sell on eBay was a broken laser pointer? The final price was $14.83.
Doug McCune, who descibes himself as a “data visualization engineer”, created 3D crime maps for San Francisco. They look like topographical elevation maps because raised portions represent reported criminal incidents. Pictured above is a display of prostitution in the city.
Every country is #1 at something. For Finland, it’s the number of female doctors; for Gabon, it’s manganese reserves; for Canada, it’s fruit juice drinkers. Graphic designer David McCandless has a demographic to warm (or disturb) the patriotic heart of every nationality.
Link via Fast Company
Steve Rose created an enormous timeline of the evolution of life on earth, drawn to scale. Once you click on the link, just keep scrolling to the right. Each inch represents two million years.
Statistician Nathan Yau of Flowing Data put together this infographic presenting famous movie quotes as data charts. You can view eight more at the link.
Link via Popped Culture
Channeling a Star Wars metaphor, Stephen Van Worley imagined a McDonald’s empire in black with pockets of rebellion within by its seven largest competitors:
By far, the largest pocket of resistance is Sonic Drive-In’s south-central stronghold: more than 900 restaurants packed into the state of Texas alone. Sheer density is the key to victory!
The rebels already have the numbers – over 24,000 locations in total – but they’ve divided and conquered themselves by strict adherence to the peacetime principles of brand identity and corporate structure. This is war, and for the sake of self-preservation, all must be sacrificed! Kings and Queens: get used to hanging with the common folk. Tone down the sarcasm, Jack. And everyone, please, stop yanking Wendy’s pigtails! Y’all need to work in harmony to succeed with the winning strategy: an Alliance!
Link via Fast Company
Sumedicina is a short story by Jana Lange and Kim Asendorf told with the modern medium of infographics. It’s about a scientist who works for a biotech firm called Sumedicina, which secretly creates and unleashes viruses on the world — and then sells the only cures. The caption for the above infographic reads:
John has worked for 17 years at Sumedicina. His salary rose steadily. But with the increasing responsibility, his hair became measurably less.
The easiest way to read the story is to go to the link, which is the flickr set for the story, and view the slides sequentially.
Link via Fast Company | Official Website
Charting The Beatles is a project by graphic designer Michael Deal to express the history of that band through quantitative infographics. Pictured above is one describing their working activities, divided into touring, filming, and recording. Deal invites anyone to participate by contributing their own infographics to a flickr set.
Link via J-Walk Blog | flickr set
The New York Times has a set of infographics showing the popularity of certain movies distributed in the zip codes of several cities, based on their incidence of Netflix rental. Netflix provided this data on the fifty most popular movies of 2009. Hover over each map to see what movies were the most popular in neighborhoods of a city. The infographic above shows the distribution of Yes Man rentals in Atlanta, Georgia.
Link via Fast Company
Infographics are not new, they are just easier to make and pass around on the internet. BibliOdyssey has a collection of posters, pages, and pamphlets from the Victorian era that make information into an art form. Pictured is the Tableau De L’Histoire Universelle (History of the Universe Chart).
This is a fold-out print depicting all of human history from the time of creation (4693 BC = Adam & Eve; the great flood = 3300 BC) up to the date of publication (1858 by Eug. Pick, Paris). Vignettes of historically significant people, places and buildings etc are arranged along the borders.
The designer has employed something of a metaphorical display choice: civilisations are presented as a series of rivers — the widths likely imply the comparative population level of each group versus the world’s population — which ‘flow’ down through history.
See also graphics on geography, biology, astronomy, and more. The pictures are all linked to larger Flickr versions. Link
