Distribution of prosperity

THE 5 percent of Americans with the highest incomes now account for 37 percent of all consumer purchases, according to the latest research from Moody’s Analytics. ...
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...and how Taxes has changed...

Link: Tax article

Household debt to income ratio by country

Debt amount to Yearly Income ratio + Monthly Cost of debt to Monthly Income ratio (note: old data).
Link: texterity

Color name survey

Interesting map. Also split by guy/girl names.
Link: xkcd, datapointed

Chart chooser from Extreme presentations

A good idea that is worth expanding. Surpriced it was 4years since I read this blog post.
Link: extremepresentation, pdf, old post

Congressional Conversation Index (CCI)

What problems are discussed (solved)? Do you think it correlates with the annual budget (amount)?
Link: kstreetcafe

Food infographics

Interesting information
Link: foodandtechconnect

Intelligence vs Social ineptness & Human contribution

Also for Nobel prize winners?
Link: myconfinedspace

Idiagram: Problem solving or Confusion

Interactive chart.
Link: Idiagram

US - Tax alternatives (simple visualisation)

Simple visualisation of the different alternatives
Link: Washington post

Eye candy

Source: Slideshare

Sensory Mapping

An interesting way to map out an experience of positive/negative feelings across all five senses.
Source: Here

311 call in NewYork

What are the most common complaints (311 calls) and when are they made.
Source: Wired

Human Development Index - USA

Interactive map. Data from 2010-2011
Source: HDI-USA

WeatherSpark, Historical climate + forecast

The bottom slider can go back until 1973.

Link: WeatherSpark

Swim places in Europe - Interactive map

Source: The Guardian

Streamgraph

 

Also: Linear or log

Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas, just 10%

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.

The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals. As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. "In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks."

"In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to consensus. each of the individuals in the models "talked" to each other about their opinion. If the listener held the same opinions as the speaker, it reinforced the listener's belief. If the opinion was different, the listener considered it and moved on to talk to another person. If that person also held this new belief, the listener then adopted that belief.

Source: Science Daily

How do you measure wellbeing and happiness

The Office for National Statistics in UK was asked by the Prime Minister David Cameron last November to find out - or at least to work out how to find out.

After a six month-long consultation the wellbeing project came to the conclusion of a crucial difference:

* happiness is one intangible thing.

* wellbeing is - they say - measurable in the same way our economy is.

The project leader said:

It is essential that the set of measures of well-being is relevant and well-based in what matters to people, both as individuals and for the UK as a whole

So, how will they do it? The study has been split into a search for two types of indicators - subjective ones about how we feel and objective measures of things that affect our wellbeing.

On top on 4 extra questions in the Integrated Household Survey (IHS), they plan to investigate four major areas:

* Childhood

* Economy and inequality

* Health

* Work/life balance

The first results are expected back in July 2012.

Source: The Guardian

Google statistics

"I guess Google Correlate [googlelabs.com] is a dream come true for any person appreciating statistics and social science (or just likes to explore which line graphs match up). It is Google's newest addition to its already rich and powerful collection of data tools, which already include Google Data Explorer, Google Trends, Google Insights for Search, Google Fusion Tables, Google Visualization API, Google Chart API, or Google Wonder Wheel."

Link: Infosthetics

Best Expat country

The interactive, geo-located bubble world map is based on a large survey of about 4,000 expats conducted in 2010.
Link: Expat explorer

Microsoft ExcelWebApp - Online Slicer Graph

Source file: ferrero consulting

Also upgrade from Excel 2003 to Excel 2010, with an Excellent free pdf book. Learn a bit more PowerPivot, at powerpivotpro.

Difference in Pay

Does this reflect inequality or not?

24h body clock - groundbreaking discovery

A group of Cambridge scientists have successfully identified the mechanism that drives our internal 24-hour clock, or circadian rhythm. It occurs not only in human cells, but has also been found in other life forms such as algae, and has been dated back millions of years.

"The implications of this for health are manifold. We already know that disrupted clocks – for example, caused by shift-work and jet-lag – are associated with metabolic disorders such as diabetes, mental health problems and even cancer."

A second study identified a similar 24-hour rhythm in marine algae. This groundbreaking research shows that body clocks are ancient mechanisms that have stayed with us through a billion years of evolution.


Source: Gizmag, Ancient body clock discovered that helps to keep all living things on time

Försäkringskassan

Så mycket betalas ut av Försäkringskassan till andra länder. Vore intressant att ställa det i relation till hur mycket som betalas ut inom Sverige.

Källa: DN:Miljarder hamnar utomlands

Recession - Time to recover

This is an intersting graph comparing the time to recover from a recession. I think it would be equally interesting to view the opposite; Boom - Time to turn. Also it would be interesting to see how the stockmarket reacted. Their job is to know what will be known, soon.

Source: NY Times - Comparing recoveries: Job changes
Normal salary: Levels of income

State of the Union Address 2011

U.S. President Barack Obama has released his State of the Union Address of the year 2011, with Infographics - like a mixed video & ppt slide presentation.
The speach in itself is impressive but the edited version makes it is far better.
Since the best companies usually has the best leaders, when USA now has probably the best leader it is going to be very interesting to see what will happen. I sincerly hope he can keep his job long enough to change the world.

Source: information aesthetics

SlimScan - Wallet sized receipt scanner

A receipts scanner to keep a record of your daily expense.
Don't expect to scan too many receipts. Their pen version has a battery time of max 200 scanned pages and a transfer rate of  about 10pages/minute.
Links: PlanOn SlimScan, Engadget
Current price: US$119.99

Exoplanets Atlas (infographic jpg poster)

Interesting map. Even though the negative temperature scale is wrong.
Source: Wired


Updated 2013-01:

In the media

Source of picture: link

Source of picture: link

Source of picture: link

Unsorted

Analytics
https://www.openanalytics.com.sg/tour.aspx, http://www.openmeasures.com/, http://blog.analysis-one.com/

GDP/captia trends
GDP/captia trend: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/07/gdp-projections-china-us-uk-brazil
Taiwan: http://www.economist.com/blogs/asiaview/2010/11/taiwan_and_japan?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/breakingformation

Graphics
How to tell a story: http://infosthetics.com/archives/2011/01/research_telling_stories_with_data.html
Dataquilts: http://infosthetics.com/archives/2010/11/geneaquilts.html
Media hypes: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/mountains-out-of-molehills/
School reform: http://infosthetics.com/archives/2010/11/explaining_education_reform_through_interactive_infographics.html

Structures
Pyramid of needs: http://brilliantgem.blogspot.com/2007/05/maslows-hierarchy-of-needs.html
Pyramid of wisdom: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/data-information-knowledge-wisdom/comment-page-1/#comments
Definitions: http://www.businessballs.com/maslow.htm
Taxonomy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_Taxonomy
Human Development Index: http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/mpi/

Software
Defrag only files: http://wincontig.mdtzone.it/en/index.htm
Remove in picture: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2010/12/27/inpaint-serial-key-free-download-to-remove-unwanted-objects-in-photo/
Map ftp drives: http://www.netdrive.net/index.html
Right clikc: http://www.moo0.com/
Academic edition of Office 2010: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/about-time-office-2010-academic-edition-microsoft-actually-listens/3560, http://www.microsoft.com/student/en/us/techg.aspx, http://store.digitalriver.com/store/msshus/DisplayStudentHeroRegistrationPage?resid=TAIWhwoHAi0AADaYHCgAAAAM&rests=1291670179836
Pregnancy tester: http://www.gizmag.com/duofertility-ovulation-temperature-monitoring-system/16718/

Creating Value - 4 cornerstones of Corporate finance

In this 40min video presentation, McKinsey partner Tim Koller explores the four guiding principles of corporate finance that all executives can use to home in on value creation when they make strategic decisions.
I found the 2nd part 'Core-of-value principle' and the last part of 'Best-owner principle', most interesting.

Global Property Guide

Property trends: Sweden, South Korea, ... see Data left hand side.

Most expensive appartments

Global Property Guide

Energy map

On EnergyMap.dk you can find information about the latest energy and climate related technologies, projects, solutions, cases and events. EnergyMap is the national Danish internet portal for energy and climate related solutions.

On EnergyMap Danish companies, organisations, institutions and public authorities are given the opportunity to present their work and ideas on technologies and programmes that may help combat climate change and improve energy-efficiency

PhD, what do you know

This is what you know, when you really know what you are talking about.
Source: 1, 2

Religion and GDP/capita

Interesting correlation between religion and GDP/capita.

Source: Religious Outlier

Self actualization

The questions to self actualisation (what, why, how, where, when, who, ...):
If someone don't do it for you: http://www.justspotted.com/map/
You can do it yourself: https://www.google.com/latitude

A good way to find new sites, similar to your own.

Source: ...

The World's Best Countries

Newsweek: The world's best country, New Hansa countries

Links

How to Disable, Remove or Hide IE8 Search Box

ItsHidden Free VPN Tunnel Service for Anonymous Surfing and Torrent Downloading 

Toucan - sync, backup and secure, all in one place

Smart defrag

Recorded Future

Interesting.

Source: GizMag

Kno - Dual iPad

Interesting new Pad.

Source: GizMag

World statistics - interactive time

StatPlanet looks like a Trendalyzer clone; similar categories, with ticking time scale.
It's is a free software that is very easy and intuative. As they say "StatPlanet can be downloaded as a stand-alone application and used as free educational software. It comes with up-to-date world statistics in the categories shown below."

Source: Wikipedia, Trendalyzer

Personal Finance

How much does a normal house hold spends per month.

Categories I found interesting: the 2010 report, couples with/without children and spending per age group.

The data comes from "Our data comes from the U.S. government, from anonymous and aggregated spending transactions from Citi, and from third party data providers."

Their philosophy is: "the Bundle philosophy that people can become more aware of their everyday spending and saving choices. And it’s our way of leveling the playing field for people: companies have been paying millions of dollars for this kind of data for years in order to get you to buy more stuff. Now you can see it, too, and it won't cost you anything."

Source: Information Aesthetics

Excel 2010 & PowerPivot

This will grow
* PowerPivot team blog, other
* Excel 2010 compared to 2007 and 2003
* Old Comparisons

Data visualisations

Primary Data sources
* New: The Guardian, NewYorkTimes
* Old: Information is beautiful, Information aestatics

Articles
Subway map of Human Discoveries
Top Secret America Blog
Retirement Ages in OECD countries
Time to reverse a recession
Factors that influence the Political views
Can President tame the Business Cycle?
Misery index - unemployment & fisical x
Health care spending
Time to turn of a recession
Costs of living compared
The cost of old people
The world in Oil resources and consumption
National debts of OECD countries

Scientific
Ocean heat driven vehicles
10x better heat exchanger

Feelings
Feelings Quatified (research so far, feelings in life, beauty in all), old link

Save energy with Infrared map

A good idea to make a "Infrared save energy map".
The house owner can see how well his/her property is insulated.

World Map Of Touristyness

Great places-to-avoid heatmap using distribution of photos on Panoramio. Nice idea! By BlueMoon.ee

Source: InformationIsBeautiful.net

Microsoft Live Drive - 50Gb free

Microsoft Live Drive offers 50Gb storage space for free.

With the free SDExplorer addin the space is available direct in Explorer (without login).

Source: Freewaregenious

Stockmapper

The picture says all. Click and try the interactice charts

USA report - More than 1 of 10 is starving

Feeding America reports that the number of people that receivs food support during 2009 is now more than 37million of their population of the 310 million. The increase is nearly 50% in just 5 years time. (source: DN)

Few of those can afford a private medical health plan and less likely to make pension savings. Food and house (Morgages) are the two primary priorities (Maslow). There is a tipping point but I hope the 50% increase is not a early warning sign.

If a major natural disaster - like an earth quake in the Bay area - would strike, the Stockmarket would collaps. The hungry, and social security needy would increase dramatically. In contrast to many other countries, the social security sector rests heavily on Private organisations. Social security can be said to be, not a legal obligation/institution but a free choice*.

Americas debt in now mainly owned by China. They are worried about the state of USA, and are bound to ask USA to take necessary measures to stabalize their country. They are not yet ready to take up the butan as the World leader. They need all power/focus on their domestic events.

Paradigm shifts have happen previously in the history of man kind - often followed by great movement, instability and realignments. I can look at it from trade and ideas as rejuvenating. I can look at from values/ideology and legality, with fear. Especially since IT is a powerful tool in the hands of law enforcers. History has shown us that it takes very few people to control many.

* The free choice selection process is intresting. We get more choices and are required to take spend more time to select. Now if the selection process could be automated, it would free our time. For instance, when I select energy supplier it is now based on a number of simple criterias, and done automatically and instantanious (elskling.se). Same thing when it comes to selecting internet service supplier etc.

The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures

"Hello, old friends. I am back from dark months of data mining, here now to present my ores. To write this piece, we cataloged over 7,000 photographs on OkCupid.com, analyzing three primary things:

• Facial Attitude. Is the person smiling? Staring straight ahead? Doing that flirty lip-pursing thing?
• Photo Context. Is there alcohol? Is there a pet? Is the photo outdoors? Is it in a bedroom?
• Skin. How much skin is the person showing? How much face? How much breasts? How much ripped abs?

In looking closely at the astonishingly wide variety of ways our users have chosen to represent themselves, we discovered much of the collective wisdom about profile pictures was wrong. For interested readers, I explain our measurement process, and how we collected our data, at the end of the post. All my bar charts are zeroed on the average picture. Now to the data."

Read more: The 4 Myths

Copy from blog.okcupid.com

Personal 3D Food Printer - MIT-media lab

Cornucopia is a concept design for a personal food factory that brings the versatility of the digital world to the realm of cooking. In essence, it is a three dimensional printer for food, which works by storing, precisely mixing, depositing and cooking layers of ingredients.

Cornucopia's cooking process starts with an array of food canisters, which refrigerate and store a user's favorite ingredients. These are piped into a mixer and extruder head that can accurately deposit elaborate combinations of food. While the deposition takes place, the food is heated or cooled by Cornucopia's chamber or the heating and cooling tubes located on the printing head. This fabrication process not only allows for the creation of flavors and textures that would be completely unimaginable through other cooking techniques, but it also allows the user to have ultimate control over the origin, quality, nutritional value and taste of every meal.

This project is currently starting, at MIT-media lab.

Other interesting projects: electronic popables

Target Point - Chart wars & What is rich income?

A great, short talk by TargetPoint's VP and Director of Research, Alex Lundry, at DC Ignite. He addresses the issues of subjective messaging through visualization, the emergence of open data, some ideal data visualization tools, a set of quick lessons in graphic literacy, and a short list of recommended visualization books, all within the time span of 5 minutes.

Watch the movie below.

Copy from: Information aesteatics

"What is rich income"

- Another interesting article fromTarget point -

The most frequent response, the mode, was $100,000. The median response was $250,000 – that is, half of the country gave an answer above $250K and half were below. The mean is too heavily influenced by extreme values and is a correspondingly inefficient measure of the midpoint. We can also estimate a nationwide consensus at the 75th percentile, where ¾ of the country defines rich below the $500,000 mark.



Still despite the fact that all demographic effects are subsumed by income, we can’t help but point to a number of interesting and fun significant differences in the crosstabs. For instance:

• GENDER: men’s median response is $250k, while women’s is 200k.
• IDEOLOGY: conservatives have a higher “rich” threshold, $250k, than liberals, $200k, and moderates line up with conservatives with a median response of $250k.
• 2008 VOTE: mirroring ideology, “rich” to a McCain voter means an annual income of $250k (median), while an Obama voter sets the bar at $200k.

Finally, it’s important to put these numbers into their proper perspective: median annual household income in the United States is about $44,389 (from 2005 Census Bureau data); if we were to arbitrarily define the rich as the top 20% of household incomes the lower limit would be $88,030 a far cry from our survey’s median of $250,000. Even the top 5% of household incomes begin at $157,176, nearly $100,000 short of our survey’s median response.

Copy from: Target Point

Knol - Ethics theory

An Introduction the Ethical Reasoning

This knol provides an introductory overview of ethical reasoning as a foundation for professional ethics. It presents some of the philosophical background to ethical thought and attempts to answer the question - "How can we know the difference between right and wrong?".

While the knol is aimed primarily at students in higher education and young IT professionals , it is equally relevant to other disciplines and professions.

Contents

• How Can We Know the Difference Between Right and Wrong?
• The Golden Rule
• The Utility Principle
• An Important Philosophical Distinction
• Discussion
• Bibliography

We all have a sense right and wrong - or good and bad. There are things that we feel we (or others) ought to do, and other things that we feel we (or others) ought not to do. Ethics is the study of how we distinguish between these alternatives.

This knol is intended to familiarise students and young professionals with the basic concepts of ethics and ethical reasoning in order to equip them for the responsibilities that accompany professional status.

Read more...

Other interesting links:
* Knol
* "How to Use the Harvard Style of Referencing"
* Gold
* "Laying a house foundation"
* ...