Where the Jobs Are

As always, Wired Magazine did a great job with this chart.  It shows growing job categories are around the country.   The Emerging Epicenters of High Tech Industry.  Who knew that Denver was up and coming place for AeroSpace and that Houston has a growing metal manufacturing industry?

 Nothing much in the Dakotas or Montana, but the mid-west and coasts are booming.

Charting Middle East Relationships

This New York Times map shows the various relationships and paths of strife in the Middle East. A second map, below on the same image, shows the influence of Iran and the US. I like the creativity of the artist in coming up with different ways to show strife "Deep Hatred," "Sworn Enemies," "Deep Suspicion," "Range of Hostility," etc.

All the World's Data

A new study has determined that there are now 276 exabytes of data in the world - that is 276,000,000,000 Gigabytes! That data could be held on a stack of CDs "shooting from the top of your desk to 50,000 miles beyond the moon." Explore how that data breaks down with this graphic, or read the whole artilce in the Washington Post.

Photo from the Washigton Post

Moving Data Charts from Google Public Data Explorer

Google brings data to life by letting you roll a moving chart out over time to see how data changes by year. Google's Public Data Explorer uses data from various sources, including Wolfram Alpha and the World Bank, they have created some very interesting moving charts. Here is one example:

The Clock is Ticking - Data Video

I was sceptical of watching a short movie on Long Island, but this is really a movie about data and it is fantastic.  It uses no spoken words or photos, just statistics, charts and data to describe the decline in wealth, and increase in unemployment, taxes and forclosures on Long Island.

If you like data visualizations you will love the way they've done it in this movie.

The Clock is Ticking from Long Island Index on Vimeo.

Health Outcomes Maps

The County Health Rankings website (www.countyhealthrankings.org) ranks the health of people in each county by state.  While this doesn't tell the overall health of people, it shows which counties are healthier, overall, than others in the state.  These interesting maps were created by Forum One, a Web design and communications firm that specializes in socially conscious causes.

In addition to the map, visitors can view the underlying data by county.  This includes data ranging from smoking and binge drinking rates to liquor store density, air pollution days and single parent households.

Visualizing the News

Newsmap.jp pulls data and maps the size of the headline based on how many articles are written about the topic.  The site is customizable by country, type of news, and by period of time.  While not the way I want to get most of my news, it is an interesting way to visualize the news. 

Interestingly this type of visualization would have been nearly impossible 15 years ago.  I remember some students spending hours and hours scouring Lexis-Nexus data to come up with news trends in the mid 1990s... now, it is considered an interesting way to view the news, but few would question that the data is readily at our fingertips.