[Editor’s note: Kudos to Sean Carter and the New York Times graphics team. Most of these types of visualizations are done using Twitter’s API, unique for Facebook? My only wish is for the timeline to have a play button.]
Republished from the New York Times.
Millions of people around the world have been actively supporting – or complaining about – their favorite teams and players. Below, players are sized according to the number of mentions on Facebook during each day of the World Cup.
[Editor’s note: Travelers might be inconvenienced by the recent volcanic ash plume shutting down air traffic over Europe but lack of transport also affects our global just-in-time food supply chain, as this article from the New York Times highlights. Photo by Jehad Nga. Thanks K!]
Republished from the New York Times.
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN. Published: April 19, 2010
NAIROBI, Kenya — When Kenneth Maundu, general manager for Sunripe produce exporters, first heard about a volcano erupting in Iceland, he was excited. “I thought, ‘Oh, wow, a volcano,’ †he said.
And then reality hit him in the face like a hurled tomato.
Because Kenya’s gourmet vegetable and cut-flower industry exports mainly to Europe, and because the cloud of volcanic ash has grounded flights to much of northern Europe since Thursday, its horticultural business has been waylaid as never before.
On Monday, Mr. Maundu stared at the towering wreckage: eight-feet-tall heaps of perfectly good carrots, onions, baby sweet corn and deliciously green sugar snap peas being dumped into the back of a pickup truck.
“Cow food,†he said, shaking his head. “That’s about all we can do with it now.â€
If farmers in Africa’s Great Rift Valley ever doubted that they were intricately tied into the global economy, they know now that they are. Because of a volcanic eruption more than 5,000 miles away, Kenyan horticulture, which as the top foreign exchange earner is a critical piece of the national economy, is losing $3 million a day and shedding jobs.
[Editor’s note: Saw this black and white illo with the Times opinion piece yesterday and thought it smartly done.]
Republished from the New York Times.
[Editor’s note: As my music prof was want to remind, the only difference between amateur and professional is one gets paid and the other doesn’t. My hope is Google Maps starts offering user-generated geodata back to the community, like OpenStreetMap.org now does. Left image is before community edits, right is after. Thanks Nora!]
Republished from the New York Times.
SAN FRANCISCO — They don’t know it, but people who use Google’s online maps may be getting directions from Richard Hintz.
Mr. Hintz, a 62-year-old engineer who lives in Berkeley, Calif., has tweaked the locations of more than 200 business listings and points of interest in cities across the state, sliding an on-screen place marker down the block here, moving another one across the street there. Farther afield, he has mapped parts of Cambodia and Laos, where he likes to go on motorcycle trips.
Mr. Hintz said these acts of geo-volunteerism were motivated in part by self-interest: he wants to know where he’s going. But “it has this added attraction that it helps others,†he said.
Mr. Hintz is a foot soldier in an army of volunteer cartographers who are logging every detail of neighborhoods near and far into online atlases. From Petaluma to Peshawar, these amateurs are arming themselves with GPS devices and easy-to-use software to create digital maps where none were available before, or fixing mistakes and adding information to existing ones.
Like contributors to Wikipedia before them, they are democratizing a field that used to be the exclusive domain of professionals and specialists. And the information they gather is becoming increasingly valuable commercially.
Google, for example, sees maps playing a growing strategic role in its business, especially as people use cellphones to find places to visit, shop and eat. It needs reliable data about the locations of businesses and other destinations.
“The way you get that data is having users precisely locate things,†said John Hanke, a vice president of product management who oversees Google’s mapping efforts.
People have been contributing information to digital maps for some time, building displays of crime statistics or apartment rentals. Now they are creating and editing the underlying maps of streets, highways, rivers and coastlines.
“It is a huge shift,†said Michael F. Goodchild, a professor of geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “This is putting mapping where it should be, which is the hands of local people who know an area well.â€
That is changing the dynamics of an industry that has been dominated by a handful of digital mapping companies like Tele Atlas and Navteq.
Google is increasingly bypassing those traditional map providers. It has relied on volunteers to create digital maps of 140 countries, including India, Pakistan and the Philippines, that are more complete than many maps created professionally.
Last month Google dropped Tele Atlas data from its United States maps, choosing to rely instead on government data and other sources, including updates from users.
“They have coverage in areas that the big mapping guys don’t have,†said Mike Dobson, a mapping industry consultant who once worked at Rand McNally. “It has the opportunity to cause a lot of disruption in these industries.â€
[Editor’s note: This interactive from the New York Times allows the user to filter a large set of user submitted vacation photos from around the world by country both by map and list interface. Topics like “beaches” and “road trip” focus in farther. Editor’s Picks offers quick way to highlight the “best of”. Filtering is a little slow on display of matched photos for me, but fun concept.]
Republished from the New York Times.
Credit: .
[Editor’s note: Like him or not, Michael Jackson had 30 years of sustained hits, comparing well statistically with other pop music legends as this interactive from the New York Times shows.]
Republished from the New York Times. June 25, 2009.
A timeline of how Michael Jackson’s songs performed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
(Screenshot below) Interact with the original at New York Times . . .
Matthew Bloch, Shan Carter, Jonathan Corum, Amanda Cox and Matthew Ericson/The New York Times
[Editor’s note: This op-editorial art piece (above) from the New York Times shows how a simple tag cloud can show an idea topology in a simple, powerful format. Full op-ed below.]
Republished from the New York Times.
By SCOTT ATRAN and JEREMY GINGES
Orig published: January 24, 2009
AS diplomats stitch together a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel, the most depressing feature of the conflict is the sense that future fighting is inevitable. Rational calculation suggests that neither side can win these wars. The thousands of lives and billions of dollars sacrificed in fighting demonstrate the advantages of peace and coexistence; yet still both sides opt to fight.
This small territory is the world’s great symbolic knot. “Palestine is the mother of all problems†is a common refrain among people we have interviewed across the Muslim world: from Middle Eastern leaders to fighters in the remote island jungles of Indonesia; from Islamist senators in Pakistan to volunteers for martyrdom on the move from Morocco to Iraq.
Some analysts see this as a testament to the essentially religious nature of the conflict. But research we recently undertook suggests a way to go beyond that. For there is a moral logic to seemingly intractable religious and cultural disputes. These conflicts cannot be reduced to secular calculations of interest but must be dealt with on their own terms, a logic very different from the marketplace or realpolitik.
Across the world, people believe that devotion to sacred or core values that incorporate moral beliefs — like the welfare of family and country, or commitment to religion and honor — are, or ought to be, absolute and inviolable. Our studies, carried out with the support of the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department, suggest that people will reject material compensation for dropping their commitment to sacred values and will defend those values regardless of the costs.
In our research, we surveyed nearly 4,000 Palestinians and Israelis from 2004 to 2008, questioning citizens across the political spectrum including refugees, supporters of Hamas and Israeli settlers in the West Bank. We asked them to react to hypothetical but realistic compromises in which their side would be required to give away something it valued in return for a lasting peace.
All those surveyed responded to the same set of deals. First they would be given a straight-up offer in which each side would make difficult concessions in exchange for peace; next they were given a scenario in which their side was granted an additional material incentive; and last came a proposal in which the other side agreed to a symbolic sacrifice of one of its sacred values.
[Editor’s note: The Times produced a fantastic interactive time-based tag-cloud-on-a-map showing twitter chatter across the US keyed to major events in the Super Bowl game between the Steelers and Cardinals. Several thematic channels are available. Kudos to Matthew Bloch and Shan Carter. Thanks Laris!]
Republished from The New York Times.
Orig pub date: Feb. 2, 2009.
As the Steelers and Cardinals battled on the field, Twitter users across the nation pecked out a steady stream of “tweets.” The map shows the location and frequency of commonly used words in Super Bowl related messages.
Interact with the original Flash version at New York Times . . .
[Editor’s note: Following up on the earlier Lego art post, here’s another about coffee from the same New York Times artist.]
Republished from the New York Times.
Christoph Niemann
I like coffee so much that I have tea for breakfast: The first cup of the day in particular is so good that I’m afraid I won’t be able to properly appreciate it when I am half-asleep. Therefore, I celebrate it two hours later when I am fully conscious.
Here’s a chart that shows my coffee bias over the years.
For good measure I have added my bagel preferences over the same period. (1) Drip coffee, (2) Starbucks, (3) blueberry bagels, (4) sesame bagels, (5) poppy-seed bagels, (6) everything bagels
Please don’t hold my brief affair with blueberry bagels against me. I cured myself of this aberration.
Once, after a grueling all-day design conference at a university, I was invited to dinner on campus. To go with the various delicious pastas, salads and quiches, coffee was served.
When you are craving a beer, coffee is the most disgusting drink in the universe.
[Editor’s note: Amusing visual confections created with lego blocks by Christoph Niemann. Thanks Martin!]
Republished from The New York Times.
Christoph Niemann
During the cold and dark Berlin winter days, I [Christoph] spend a lot of time with my boys in their room. And as I look at the toys scattered on the floor, my mind inevitably wanders back to New York.
There are many more lego creations like this one. View more!
