German Energy Landscape: Where and How Is Its Energy Created?

The German Energy Landscape [geblogs.com], designed by Gregor Aisch, reveals some important facts and statistics about the German energy generation and consumption. Germany is one of the frontrunners regarding energy generation, having recently decided to close down all its nuclear reactors, in order to further emphasize the development of renewable sources, such as solar, wind, biomass, water, and geothermal power. The interactive graphs show Germany's different energy sources (such as oil, gas, and renewables), energy resource dependence (e.g. whether these resources originate from within the country, or from somewhere else), and predicted energy mix (how the sources will change in the next 40 years according to 3 different and independent organizations). The visualization makes use of the so-called streamgraph technique, originally invented as ThemeRiver, which was probably best popularized by the NYTimes movie revenue infographic back in 2008. The technique was also used to represent music listening habits (later also called WaveGraphs), Tokyo living statistics and news memes. Interestingly, Gregor made available all the source code to create such StreamGraphs in Actionscript here. It's original Processing version can be downloaded here.

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138 Years of Popular Science Magazine in a Single Infographic

Jer Thorp and Mark Hansen recently have published the design process behind a beautiful infographic (yes, they do exist!) titled "138 Years of Popular Science" [blprnt.com], which was custom designed for the magazine Popular Science (PopSci). With a history consisting of 1,563 issues spanning almost 140 years, PopSci proposed to summarize quite some material in a single visual representation. The resulting graphic follows the metaphor of a molecular chain, with decades forming clusters which in turn contain clusters that represent years. Accordingly, each 'atom' stands for a unique PopSci issue, which is colored according to the average color values of the appropriate historical issue cover. In addition, the size of each 'issue-atom' is determined by the number of words in each issue. Lastly, about 70 different word-frequency histograms surrounding the main graph reveal the usage of different terms per issue. If you are still hungry after looking through all these design iterations, Jer calls "dead-ends, messy errors and bad decisions", a poster-sized version of this graphic has been made available for sale.

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NYTLabs Magic Mirror Reveals News and Health Statistics

The Magic Mirror [nytlabs.com], developed by The New York Times Research & Development Lab (with Alexis Lloyd, among others) has just been selected as one of Time's "50 Best Inventions" of 2011. It is probably the best gadget to fullfil those urgent craves from the data addicted, during those few moments they cannot reach their smart phones. At first sight, the mirror looks like any normal plain, reflective surface. However, next to showing one's reflection, this mirror is also able to deliver daily news and weather details while brushing your teeth or combing your hear. It combines a Philips Mirror TV with a Microsoft Kinect camera to allow you to access all sorts of information while admiring your own reflection. For instance, the mirror can check one's daily calendar and social feeds, and displays all sorts of statistics regarding one's health, including historical sleep patterns or walking activity. Also at Niemanlab, Engadget, and many others. Via Time Newsfeed. See also Miragraphy. Watch the movies below.

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CNN Ecosphere: 3D Ecosystem Globe Grows on #cop17 Tweets

The goal of CNN's Ecosphere [cnn-ecosphere.com] by Minivegas and Stinkdigital is a real-time Twitter visualization that aims to reveal how the online discussion is evolving around the topic of climate change. More specifically, the visualization aggregates all Twitter messages on the topic of #cop17 (in case you wonder, this is an abbreviation for "The 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)". The online visualization consists of an interactive 3D globe, described as a "lush digital ecosystem" that closely resembles the look and behavior of real plants and trees in nature. In practice, the virtual plants in the 3D Ecosphere grow from those tweets that are tagged with #COP17. Each tweet about climate change feeds into a plant representing that specific topic or discussion, causing it to grow a little more. The result thus becomes an mesmerizing, real-time visual representation of how the world "sees" climate change (try clicking on one of the tweet messages), or... an interactive Tron-like Lindenmayer forest, whatever you fancy the most. Reminds me of Ecotonoha.

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Mapping One Week of FourSquare Check-Ins

Some people who work at data-rich companies have the privilege to access some quite revealing datasets. For instance, a few months ago, Matthew Whealy, who works at FourSquare, revealed how and when people reported their physical location to the location-based social networking website. A Week of Checkins [matthewhealy.net] simply animates time-lapsed check-ins across a global map, which are color-coded according to the venue categories. Watch the 1 minute of meaningfully flickering dots in the movie below. See also A Week on FourSquare (by the Wall Street Journal) and archipelago (by Anil Bawa-Cavia) for some other beautiful Foursquare-based visualizations.

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Dencity: A Map of Global Population Density

Dencity [fathom.info] by Fathom Information Design shows the distribution of global population density in the world. The map consists of a collection of geo-located circles of varying size and hue value. Maybe counter-intuitively, larger, darker circles show areas with fewer people, while smaller, brighter circles highlight crowded cities. However, as a consequence, denser areas are represented with smaller circles , allowing for additional geographic detail on locations where there are more people, while sparsely populated areas are more vaguely defined. For people residing in the US, the map is available as a print. Via @moritz_stefaner.

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