Examining How We Measure Our Lives
Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation
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Read on…: Drawing the World
The inability of people to understand geography beyond their own borders is not new. But today’s post uses that to create a new map—albeit from a limited sample. The creator of this map merged 30 different, hand-drawn maps into one to reveal the world as imagined by his sample. Credit for the piece goes to Zak Ziebell.
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Depicting Radiation
Read on…: Depicting RadiationToday’s post is more about a means of illustrating radiation, less about quantifying it. Unfortunately the article is in German and I speak none of it. But, the context is that of the Fukushima Disaster. Make sure you click through to see the illustrations in action. Credit (I think) goes to Interactive Things and Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
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It’s Cold Outside
Read on…: It’s Cold OutsideI have spent this past week in Lithuania for work. And it was cold. But it was colder still in Chicago. Thankfully on a Friday we have xkcd to put all this cold into a bit more perspective. Although his example uses St. Louis, I presume it holds for most cities. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
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Migration within the European Union
Read on…: Migration within the European UnionToday’s post comes via one of my coworkers. She sent me this graphic from Thomson Reuters that uses a Sankey diagram to show the movement of European Union citizens within the EU. As with my post yesterday, I feel this piece would benefit from even limited interactivity. Exploring individual countries or individual flows by touch or by mouse would be…
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Wealth and Education
Read on…: Wealth and EducationToday’s post looks at education across a set of 65 countries from a standardised test backed by the OECD, basically a group of wealthy countries. The test results found that some poor countries have surprisingly good education systems whereas some of the world’s wealthiest countries—here’s looking at you, United States—perform poorly. The Huffington Post created this graphic to plot the…
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Don’t Worry, You’ll Be Long Dead…
Read on…: Don’t Worry, You’ll Be Long Dead……before any of this occurs. Courtesy of BBC Future and the New Year, welcome to the end of the world as we know it. (Sing it, Michael.) Credit for the piece goes to iibStudio.