visualization

Here's the idea. The government recommends a diet for healthy living (right pyramid), but at the same time there are billions of dollars of lopsided subsidies (left pyramid) whose distribution doesn't look anything like the former. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) used the above 3-d pyramids to present this information.
Interesting point. Funky presentation. Discuss (remakes highly recommended).
[via The Consumerist]

Briefly, MSN is now surfacing hyperlocal blog content (originally found in the Local Lens application on Bing Maps) in the Local Edition area of the site. Currently this is only available in the ten cities that Local Lens covers, but that will change...

Sam Loman has taken the subway map infographic style to the human body.  Underskin is an infographic that traces the routes of eight different systems within the body (Digestive, Respiratory, Arterial, etc.), and highlights the major connection points.
You can see Sam’s work on just-sam.com, but the image there is low resolution.  She sent me the image above so you could see the high-resolution details.  Thanks Sam!
Found on VizWorld and Information Aesthetics.

The opening page of We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion reads a quote from "a woman in Maine." It sets the stage for the rest of the book.
I have a problem I'm sure many other bloggers face: I am perfectly comfortable sharing intimate details about my emotions with complete strangers I meet online but shy away from expressing my true feelings to anyone I know in real life.
For those unfamiliar, We Feel Fine is a project from Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar that's been online since 2006. At its core, the goal is to show the emotions of the authors behind millions of blog posts on the Web by looking for sentences that start with "I feel" or "I am feeling." It's an interactive artwork "authored by everyone."
We Feel Fine the book, also by Kamvar and Harris, is a selection of some of the best entries from the database of 12 million emotions, along with some insights into the growing dataset (mostly the former).
Here are some pages from the book to give you an idea.

Want to see more? You can actually flip through the entire book online.
Who Will Like the Book
As a supplement to the online artwork, which I'm a big fan of, the book works really well. It provides lots of good excerpts, and in the end, it's entertaining. The best comparison I can think of is PostSecret. You know the blog/book that features secrets from anonymous people. Similarly, We Feel Fine is a snapshot of emotions from people you don't know; however, even though they're complete strangers, you will no doubt identify with many of them. Basically, if you like PostSecret, you'll probably like this book. There's a slightly greater data spin to it though, which of course I appreciate.
Anyways, you don't really need to hear what I think. Just check out the entire book online and form your own opinion.

pdinnen posted a photo:

Try out the browsable version on the Media Lab Toronto site.

Something I came up with while experimenting with displaying large amounts of Twitter data. In this case all the Tweets about the TEDxWaterloo conference. Using speech bubble images generated live for the Twitter Wall I created for the event.

These are all the public Twitter messages sent during the event that mention the word tedxwaterloo. Each column in this display represents the messages from a 10 minute period.

Built using the very handy Google Maps Image Cutter created at University College London.

Using a mindmap-style visual interface, WhatDoYouSuggest.com shows you the search results from Google in an easy-to-use interface.  Created by Simon Elvery, the interface returns the top words that Google suggests based on your initial query.  By clicking on the relevant words, the search becomes more relevant, and more words are suggested to narrow your search.
Both the order of words and the thickness of the lines are meaningful.  More detailed information is available on the Simon’s blog.
 

What Do You Suggest takes a seed from you (or gives you something random) then guides you on a journey through language and the collective lives of Google users.
Using data from Google to make suggetions on where you might like to go next, What Do You Suggest is an experimental and interactive environment designed to explore how we use language and search on the internet.

The words that appear first in each set of options are the words Google thinks are most likely to be what people are looking for.
The words joined by the thickest lines are ones which will produce the most results if you searched for them on Google.

 
Of course, I had try see what “infographics” cam up with…

Found on Information Aesthetics and Gizmodo.
 

In a follow up to his McDonald's map, Stephen Von Worley of Weather Sealed maps the dominating burger chains across the United States. McDonald's obviously has a stronghold in a lot of areas but not all of them. Most noticeable is Sonic Drive-in with over 900 restaurants in Texas alone. Personally, I'm rooting for Carl's Jr. and In-n-Out.
[via We Love Datavis]

EPCOR, the water utility company that runs the fountains up in Edmonton, Canada released this graph yesterday. It's water consumption during the Olympic gold medal hockey game, overlaying consumption of the previous day. How much do Canadians love their hockey? A lot.
The first period ends. Time to pee. The second period ends. Time to pee. The third period ends. Time to pee. Consumption goes way down when Canada wins and during the medal ceremony.
Finally, when it's all said and done, the rest of the country can relieve itself, figuratively and literally.
[via contrarian | thanks, @statpumpkin]

David McCandless, from Information Is Beautiful created this treemap of selected highlights from the BBC budget for the Guardian Datablog.

Recent controversy about the budget of the BBC here in the UK made me curious about its spending. Here’s the BBC-o-Gram, a visualization I created for the Guardian Datablog, exploring the costs of running one of the biggest broadcasters in the world.

David has also posted the underlying data in a GoogleDocs spreadsheet.

From an article in New Scientist titled “The writing on the cave wall”, this infographic shows that many symbols and figures used in cave-wall paintings have similar forms.

What emerged was startling: 26 signs, all drawn in the same style, appeared again and again at numerous sites (see illustration). Admittedly, some of the symbols are pretty basic, like straight lines, circles and triangles, but the fact that many of the more complex designs also appeared in several places hinted to von Petzinger and Nowell that they were meaningful - perhaps even the seeds of written communication.
A group of 26 symbols crops up at Stone Age sites throughout the world – are these the origin of the written word?

Found on Chart Porn

Big news for all you Edward Tufte fanboys and girls. He will be joining the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel who will advise The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. The Board's purpose is to track and explain how the $787 billion in stimulus funds is being put to use.
I'm doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I'll learn something. The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary.
Whether Tufte will have a direct impact on graphs like these, I'm not so sure, but it certainly won't hurt. I mean the man does know a thing or two about dispersing information.

hackshaven posted a photo:

A work-in-progress 3D recreation of Jess Bachman's amazing poster in Second Life tied to an Ideascale community. More information at www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/