A grudging admission

After removing all evidence of problems that were of my own making...

The Vista laptop is actually running pretty well, and it's a pleasure to use.

Despite having successfully used VMware Fusion for a couple of years now -- basically, a canned Windows XP environment lives on my hard disk and I kick it off whenever I need it (not often) - Carrie and I found ourselves in the absurd position of having a houseful of Macintoshes and being in the market for a Windows laptop.

Some of the software Carrie needs to run to crunch the data she's going to visually interpret is Windows-only.

Some software that I need to stay current on - Adobe Framemaker, for instance - is now available for Windows only. Technical authoring in general is heavily weighted towards Windows; most of the more interesting help and e-learning authoring tools are also Windows-only. MadCap products in particular are Windows-only.

We're not giving up our Macs. But we're a multiplatform household now.

Counting counties

Slate crunches the numbers (the US Labor Department's county-by-county employment figures, in this case) and comes up with an interactive graphic showing job gains and losses from January 2007 to February 2009:

The economic crisis, which has claimed more than 5 million jobs since the recession began, did not strike the entire country at once. A map of employment gains or losses by county tells the story of how those job losses first struck in the most vulnerable regions and then spread rapidly to the rest of the country. As early as August 2007, for example—several months before the recession officially began—jobs were already on the decline in southwest Florida; Orange County, Calif.; much of New Jersey; and Detroit, while other areas of the country remained on the uptick.

Using the Labor Department's local area unemployment statistics, Slate presents the recession as told by unemployment numbers for each county in America.

When did your county's jobs disappear? An interactive map of vanishing employment across the country (Chris Wilson, Slate)

A couple of still screenshots that do not do the animation justice:


January 2007


February 2009

Not afraid to be educational

Carrie explains marginal tax rates and information visualization in the same post:

This does not mean that if you bring in more than $372,951, every single dollar in your entire pile of money is taxed at 35%. Only Dollar #372,952 (plus whatever additional money you may earn) is taxed at that rate. Dollar #372,950 is taxed at 33%. Meanwhile, Dollar #1 is taxed at 10%. Hence the term "marginal": In a progressive tax system, there are margins (i.e., boundary lines) at which the government increases the tax rate on any additional incoming dollar.

So I concluded a little infoviz might help clear up the misunderstanding.

[...]

Here's a graphic depiction:

And here's how that single person's tax prospects compare to those of married people filing jointly, married people filing separately and heads of household:

UPDATED 12:57 PM 8 Mar 2009

Tweets during the Super Bowl

The New York Times builds an information display of Twitter chatter during the Super Bowl.

This one was taken at halftime, obviously

Hat tip: Tarus

Travel Connectivity

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Update, 1 Feb 2009: Carrie analyzes the map at See What I Mean: Information Visualization.

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The world is shrinking. Cheap flights, large scale commercial shipping and expanding road networks all mean that we are better connected to everywhere else than ever before. But global travel and international trade and just two of the forces that have reshaped our world. A new map of Travel Time to Major Cities - developed by the European Commission and the World Bank - captures this connectivity and the concentration of economic activity and also highlights that there is little wilderness left. The map shows how accessible some parts of the world have become whilst other regions have remained isolated. Accessibility - whether it is to markets, schools, hospitals or water - is a precondition for the satisfaction of almost any economic need. Furthermore, accessibility is relevant at all levels, from local development to global trade and this map fills an important gap in our understanding of the spatial patterns of economic, physical and social connectivity.

Travel time to major cities: A global map of Accessibility (European Commission - Global Environment Monitoring) -- via Thomas P.M. Barnett

One of the most astonishing things I learned is how little wilderness is really left - only about 10% of the planet's surface is more than 48 hours travel time from a major city.

I.O.U.S.A.

Last week I finally caught Patrick Creadon's documentary I.O.U.S.A., in which former comptroller general David Walker and former Commerce Secretary Pete Peterson explain why the national debt is 1) so huge, 2) even more enormous than most people realize, 3) not going away anytime soon and 4) actually a threat to the continued viability of the US as a trading partner/solvent nation.

Sobering message notwithstanding, I found the film gripping—in large part because of Brian Oakes's remarkably clear and cogent data presentation throughout.

See What I Mean - Great Moments in Infoviz: I.O.U.S.A.

Worth at least a thousand words

Over at Carrie's new blog, an intriguing post about how good data visualization can help decision-makers and policy-makers:

As part of his larger mission of promoting "fact-based" public health policy, Swedish physician Hans Rosling founded Gapminder.org, which aims to make world health data available and understandable to everyone. Back in 2006, Rosling gave a well-received TED presentation on the principles of Gapminder, showing, among other things, relative historical changes in life expectancy and GDP. (He spoke again in 2007.)

Hans Rosling and Gapminder (See What I Mean: Information Visualization)