Earlier this year, the mobile phone (or cell phone for many Americans) turned 40. Today’s infographic comes from the National Post and looks at the history and the near future of the mobile phone market, mobile phones, and related technologies. A nice touch is a actual-scale drawing (best seen in print) comparing a modern iPhone to an “old school” mobile phone, as shown in the cropping of the original below.
Credit for the piece goes to Mike Faille and Kristopher Morrison.
Terrorism is not new to the United States. As this graphic from the New York Times shows, even in recent decades, we experienced quite a lot of it. In 1970 there were over 400 attacks. However, since 2001, the United States has seen far fewer attacks. Fortunately the Boston Marathon bombing is not as bad as it could have been. But even then, thankfully the bombing is a relative anomaly.
Credit for the piece goes to the graphics department of the Times.
Keeping with maps, they can be useful, but all too often people fall back upon them because it is a quick and easy way of displaying data for geographic entities. This graphic from the New York Times on ADHD is not terribly complex, but it uses a map effectively.
The article discusses how ADHD rates among states vary, but are still higher in the South. The map supports that argument. Consider how it would be different if every other state were darkened to a different shade of purple. There would be neither rhyme nor reason as to why the map was being used.
A subtle point worth noting is that only the states falling into the highest bin are labelled. Those are the states that best support the story. The remainder of the states are left unlabelled so as not to distract from the overall piece.
Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times.
Monday was an odd day, both 1 April and the start of baseball. I had a tough decision to make: Do I post a serious baseball-related piece or a humourous April Fool’s Day one instead? If you recall, I went for the serious baseball option. But that leaves me with Friday, where I try to post work that is a bit on the lighter side of life.
So here is EagerPies, published by EagerEyes on 1 April. It’s in the style of the EagerEyes site, a blog with posts about data visualisation. This selection is EagerPies work to improve upon Minard and the layering of data sets. But if you worry about complexity, fret not for they realised that encoding data in transparency would be a step too far.
Credit for the piece goes to EagerPies.
I am a fan of the Boston Red Sox and have been since 1999. The first (and sadly only) Red Sox game I saw at Fenway was the day after Nomar Garciaparra hit three home runs in one game. Two of them were grand slams. For you non-baseball folks (NBF) reading this, that is majorly impressive. Anyway, the Red Sox traded him in 2004 to acquire some pieces they needed to make a run for the World Series title that had eluded them for 80+ years (also significant for NBF). The result? My favourite player traded to the Cubs, but my favourite team won the World Series.
But now it’s Opening Day, the kickoff for the baseball season—that reference is for you American football fans. (To be fair, there was a game last night between two Texas teams, but today’s the de facto start.) Since that 2004 trade, however, the Red Sox have not had a consistent, long-term shortstop of the same offensive calibre of Nomar. How bad has this revolving door been? My infographic today looks at the shortstop replacements for Nomar Garciaparra.
Cyprus has been in the news over the course of this past week because its financial system almost brought the country to bankruptcy. And that has meant trouble for European markets. So now it’s time to look at the economies of Europe once again. And the National Post has done a great job using clear and concise small multiples to examine key metrics for the ten largest European economies—not necessarily EU economies mind you. But at the end of each row, they summed up the country’s outlook in just one or two sentences.
Credit for the piece goes to Richard Johnson, Grant Ellis, John Shmuel, and Andrew Barr.
The Republican Party has a problem. Its policy platform appeals to “angry white guys” and they are not being bred fast enough. And as the quotes indicate, that isn’t my idea. That comes from no less than Lindsey Graham, Republican Senator for South Carolina. The Wall Street Journal looks at just four states previously safely Republican that are now trending Democratic.
Credit for the piece goes to Dante Chinni and Randy Yeip.
Women are half the population, but only twenty percent of the upper chamber of the United States Congress. As this great interactive timeline from the New York Times shows, at least that inequity has been narrowing over the last several elections.
The infographic comes in two main views. The first highlights women in the Senate and assigns them chronologically and then colours them by party. Important or notable senators are annotated appropriately. This view also shows the breakdown of women in the Senate at any one time in the small chart in the upper-left. Mousing over senators then provides a little bit of information about the woman in question.
But to put it in perspective, by selecting All Senators, the user can see the whole elected history of the US Senate—remember, prior to the 1920s you did not directly elect senators. That makes for a lot of grey bars, i.e. a lot of men.
Credit for the piece goes to Hannah Fairfield, Alan McLean and Derek Willis.
I don’t often get to share printed infographic work because so much of the data visualisations and the narratives I see are seen through the interwebs. And since I cannot live in every city in the world and troll through all their newspaper pages for good infographics, I have to see online/digital versions.
That’s why this work by Hyperakt for the Italian weekly La Lettura is a great find. Hyperakt included a photo of their work in its natural environment, i.e. the printed page. The immediate drawback is that I do not speak Italian and can comprehend very little of the piece. Thankfully, Hyperakt did include a translated version on their page.
Credit for the piece goes to Deroy Peraza and Eric Fensterheim.
Reality is never what you think. Over at the Washington Post’s Wonkblog I found a post about a YouTube video looking at wealth inequality in the United States. It looks at a study that compared what Americans thought the distribution of wealth in the United States is vs. what they think is an ideal distribution. And then the video compares that to the actual distribution.
The video is rather solid and does a fairly good job at explaining its point. And those unsure about wealth inequality and how it is different from and sometimes more meaningful than income inequality should read the post along with the video.
Credit for the video goes to a YouTube user named Politizane.
