Power of Data Visualization

When measuring the impact of the Exxon oil spill over the US coast the result is not influencing only the surface of the water and the deep water impact is far greater than we could imagine.

via www.thenewecologist.com

Communicating with a submerged submarine has always been difficult, and since the submarine has to come up to periscope depth it has also been risky. Now a new buoy developed by Lockheed Martin should enable stealth submarines to send and receive text messages while remaining safely at depth.

via www.physorg.com

Infographic and new alerts on government spending.

The graphic does a beautiful job of providing a quick read on the regional distribution of poverty, while maintaining a scaled representation of the data values.

via densitydesign

Foreign-born labour: Alien invasions

As economies across the developed world fell into recession in 2008, legal permanent immigration to the mostly rich members of the OECD declined by 6%, after five years during which growth averaged 11%. Despite the slowdown in the arrival of new migrants, the number of foreign-born workers in most OECD countries rose in 2008 from a year earlier. In 2007 one in every four workers in Australia was born abroad; in 2008 that share rose further, to 26.5%. Among the 18 OECD countries for which 2008 data are available, the share of the foreign-born in the labour force fell only in Luxembourg (not shown), Austria, Belgium and France. The number of foreign-born workers in America rose by 308,000 in 2008, to 25.1m.

via www.economist.com

Check out the infographic above and you’ll see www.freshbooks.com looked at activity based on country, and the findings are certainly thought provoking. Here are some highlights; you draw your own conclusions and interesting theories:

via www.freshbooks.com

This Infographic charts fans’ use of Twitter hashflags (like #esp or #usa) in their Tweets during the 2010 World Cup, with a background showing Tweets-per-second (TPS) over the same period (June 11-July 11, 2010).

When you look at this graphic, think of it like a soundwave -- the louder and more consistent the “noise,” the bigger the impact in all directions. Countries’ flags represent use of their hashflag. The size of the flag “waves” fluctuate with the frequency & consistency of tweets containing each country’s hashflag.

via www.flickr.com

The vast majority of subsidy dollars to fossil fuels can be attributed to just a handful of tax breaks,

Note: Almost half of the subsidies for renewables are attributable to corn-based ethanol.

via www.ritholtz.com

"Aquatic Dead Zones" or "dead sea areas" is the following map (based on data from the MODIS sensor aboard the Aqua satellite), released today by NASA Earth Observatory , shows an overview of "dead sea areas." Following the reasoning used in drawing the map, is taken as the dead area  occupied by waters in which the ability to hold dissolved oxygen is so low that hardly a marine organism survive in them.

The size and number of marine dead zones—areas where the deep water is so low in dissolved oxygen that sea creatures can’t survive—have grown explosively in the past half-century. Red circles on this map show the location and size of many of our planet’s dead zones. Black dots show where dead zones have been observed, but their size is unknown.

via earthobservatory.nasa.gov