Ability of enjoyment to be sustained over time

Couldn’t agree more: it always seems like a good idea on the first bite, and then I catch myself. What am I doing? I hate cake. Another graphic:

Unequal frosting distribution is a problem

I grew up requesting pie for my birthday (strawberry rhubarb, thank you very much) instead of cake. This resonates. More importantly (for this site), Brosh cites the enormous impact of pie vs. cake for information design and visualization:

Pie is more scientifically versatile:

Again, you really should read the full post, or the rest of her site for that matter. Her piece on the Alot is alone worth the price of admission.

Here I’m showing the info graphic, which is just one component of telling the broader story. The series does a great job of balancing 1) investigative journalism (an engaging story), 2) participation by a small team (the four reporters plus their producer each pooled $200 apiece), 3) timely and relevant, 4) really understanding an issue (toxic assets are in the news but we still don’t quite get it), 5) distribution (blog with updates, regular podcast), and 6) telling a story with information graphics (being able to track what’s happening with the asset).

I could keep adding to that numbered list, but my hastily and poorly worded point is that the idea is just right.

Perhaps if the papers weren’t so busy wringing their hands about the loss of classified ads, maybe this would have been the norm five years ago when it should have been. But it’s a great demonstration of where we need to be with online news, particularly as it’s consumed with all these $500 devices we keep purchasing, that deliver the news in a tiny, scrolly text format that echoes the print version. A print format that’s 100s of years old.

Anyhow, this is great. Cheers to the Planet Money folks.

(Another interesting perspective here, from TechDirt, which was the original link I read.)

“How Different Groups Voted in the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primaries” by Shan Carter and Amanda Cox:

“All of Inflation’s Little Parts” by Matthew Bloch, Shan Carter and Amanda Cox

And finally, “Turning a Corner?” which is perhaps the most complicated of the bunch, but gets more interesting as you spend a little more time with it.

You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.

A stunning find! And like an overly literal translation of the bible, so accurate — except when it’s not. The horizontal scale, as Edward Tufte would say, “repays careful study.”

Saudi Aramco was originally an American company. It goes way back to the 1930s when two American geologists from Standard Oil of California discovered oil in the Saudi desert.

Standard Oil formed a consortium with Texaco, Exxon and Mobil, which became Aramco. It wasn’t until the 1980s that Saudi Arabia bought them out and nationalized the company. Today, Saudi Aramco is the custodian of the country’s sole source of wealth and power.

Over 16,000 people work at the company’s massive compound, which is like a little country with its own security force, schools, hospitals, and even its own airline.

According to Abdallah Jum’ah, Saudi Aramco’s president and CEO, Aramco is the world’s largest oil producing company.

And it’s the richest company in the world, worth, according to the latest estimate, $781 billion.

I was about to change the channel (perhaps as you were just about to stop reading this post), when they showed the big board:

Jum’ah gave 60 Minutes a tour of the company’s command center, where engineers scrutinize and analyze every aspect of the company’s operations on a 220-foot digital screen.

“Every facility in the kingdom, every drop of oil that comes from the ground is monitored in real time in this room,” Jum’ah explained. “And we have control of each and every facility, each and every pipeline, each and every valve on the pipeline. And therefore, we know exactly what is happening in the system from A to Z.”

A large map shows all the oil fields in Saudi Arabia, including Ghawar, the largest on-shore oil field in the world, and Safaniya, the largest off-shore oil field in the world; green squares on the map monitor supertankers on the high seas in real time.

Here’s a short part of the segment that shows the display:

Since the smaller video doesn’t do it justice, several still images follow, each linked to their Comcastic, artifact-ridden HD versions:

Did rooms like this first exist in the movies and compelled everyone to imitate?

New guys and interns have to sit in front of the wall of vibrating bright blues:

The display is ambient in the sense that nobody’s actually using the larger version to do real work (you can see relevant portions replicated on individuals’ monitors). It seems to serve as a means of knowing what everyone in the room is up to (or as a deterrent against firing up Solitaire — I’m looking at you Ahmad). But more importantly, it’s there for visitors, especially visitors with video cameras, and people who write about visualization and happened to catch a segment about their info palace since it immediately followed the Patriots-Seahawks game.

A detail of one of the displays bears this out — an overload of ALL CAPS SANS SERIF TYPE with the appropriately unattractive array reds and greens. This sort of thing always makes me curious about what such displays would look like if they were designed properly. Rather than blowing up low resolution monitors, what would it look like if it were designed for the actual space and viewing distance in which it’s used?

Sexy numbers on curvaceous walls:

View the entire segment from 60 Minutes here.

Thanks to Casey for the pointer.

The blue is to be expected, given that the size of the win for Obama, but the red pattern is quite striking.

Also note the shift for candidate home states, in Arizona with McCain on the ticket, and what appears to be the reverse result in parts of Massachusetts, with Kerry no longer on the ticket. (The shift to the Democrats in Indiana is also amazing: without looking at the map closely enough I had assumed that area to be Obama’s home of Illinois.)

I recommend checking out the actual application on the Times site, the interaction lacks some of the annoying ticks that can be found in some of their other work (irritating rollovers that get in the way, worthless zooming, and silly transition animations). It’s useful and succinct, just like an infographic should be. Or just the way Mom used to make. Or whatever.

Slate this morning announced the availability of a poll tracking application for the iPhone:

I haven’t yet ponied up ninety nine of my hard-earned cents to buy it but find it oddly fascinating. Is there actually any interest for this? Is this a hack? Is there a market for such things? Is the market simply based on the novelty of it? Is it possible to quantify the size of the poll-obsessed political junkie market? And how is that market comprised—what percentage of those people are part of campaigns, versus just people who spend too much time reading political news? (I suspect the former is negligible, but may be tainted as a card-carrying member of the latter group.)

To answer my own questions, I suspect that it was thrown together by a couple of people from the tech side of the organization (meaning “hack” in the best sense of the word), who then sold management on it, with the rationale of 1) it’ll generate a little press (or hype on, um, blogs), 2) it’ll reinforce Slate readers’ interest in or connection to the site, and 3) it’s a little cool and trendy. I don’t think they’re actually planning to make money on it (or recoup any development costs), but that the price tag has more to do with 99¢ sounds more valuable and interesting than a free giveaway.

Of course, anyone with more interesting insights (let alone useful facts), please pass them along. I’m hoping it’s an actual Cocoa app, and not just a special link to web pages reformatted for the iPhone, which would largely invalidate this post and extinguish my own curiosity about the beast.

Update: The application is a branded reincarnation of a poll tracker developed by Aaron Brethorst at Chimp Software. Here’s his blog post announcing the change, and even a press release.

Much better! Read more about their take, and associated caveats here. (Also thanks to Peter Merholz and Andrew Otwell who also wrote, yet were no match for Nelson’s swift fingers.)

Lots of words have been spilled over the complexities of tax policy, whether in stump speeches, advertisements, or policy papers. But these are usually distilled for voters in lengthy articles that throw more words at the problem. But compare even a well-written article like this one at Business Week versus the graphic above from the Washington Post. Which of the two will you be able to remember tomorrow?

I also appreciate that the graphic very clearly represents the general tax policies of Republicans vs. Democrats, without showing bias toward either. The only thing that’s missing is a sense of how big each of the categories are – how many people are in the “over $2.87 million” category versus how many are in the “$66,000 to $112,000” category, which would help convey a better sense of the “middle class” term that candidates like to throw around.

There is still greater complexity to the debate than what’s shown in this image (the Business Week article describes treasury shortfalls based on the McCain proposal, for instance), but without the initial explanation provided by that graphic, will voters even bother with those details?