Jay Gordon has created a mesmerizing visualization of the daily flows of London commuters. Spatial.ly notes how:
It combines the 16 million or so daily transactions made with London’s Oyster cards with vehicle-location data from the city’s 8,500 buses to infer journeys of approximately 3.1 million Oyster users. After inferring the times and locations of each bus boarding and alighting, bus and rail transactions are combined to reconstruct each cardholder’s daily travel history.
From more check jaygordon.net.
Lee Armstrong of planefinder.net video showing live air traffic over Europe in November 2012. Their related app had its best day of sales following a Daily Mail claim that it was an ‘aid to terrorists’.
(via broadsheet)
The folks over at Google Maps have crafted a nifty infographic outlining the summer search activity on maps.google.com in various countries. From the end of May to the beginning of September, the infographic highlights some of the top-rising searches and most often-searched landmarks on Google Maps.
From the blog post:
North Americans sought out the best local beaches to help cool off from the summer heat. In comparison, many more people from Spain, Italy and France searched for community swimming pools. In cooler areas of the U.K. the rising Google Maps searches included many indoor activities such as squash, bars and going to the gym. And, as expected, travel was a clear choice for the summer, as indicated by a surge in searches for lodging in almost every region.
As part of his PdD research at the University College London’s Geography Dept., James Cheshire has produced a series of interactive maps of London show the relationship of common surnames to different London neighborhoods.
This map shows the 15 most frequent surnames in each Middle Super Output Area (MSOA) across Greater London. The colours represent the origin of the surname (*not necessarily* the person) derived from UCL’s Onomap Classification tool. The surnames have also been scaled by their total frequency in each MSOA.
He concludes:
The more you study these maps the more interesting, and perhaps complex, they become. My final thoughts therefore appear a little contradictory. The first is that a surprising number of Londoners share the same name (especially with their immediate neighbours). The second is that despite the dominance of relatively few surnames at the top of the rankings, the further down the rankings you get the more you see of London’s population diversity.
(h/t boingboing)
Ruslan Ekineev created what he calls “The Internet Map,” an interactive visualization charting 350,000 websites from 196 countries. Each website is represented as a “planet”, with size is determined by traffic, and color by national origin. Ekineev explains:
Every site is a circle on the map, and its size is determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. Users’ switching between websites forms links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to arrange themselves to each other.
A screengrab from the map below shows Ireland’s Internet Map, with the largest website being google.ie. No surprises there.
(via boingboing)
Amitabh Chandra of Harvard University provided the data for a New York Times article back in 2006 based on babies born in the United States on dates between 1973 and 1999.
The data (visualized on the headmap below) shows Sept. 16 was most common with Feb. 29 (only in a leap year) obviously the least common.
Data source: NYTimes.com, Amitabh Chandra, Harvard University.
For more check How Common Is Your Birthday – Pt 2.
(via broadsheet)
Norwegian developer Even Westvang created a beautiful animation illuminating how 300,000 of his compatriots move around their country. The visualization (created using a C++ application called Deluge) is based on 4m publicly available Norwegian tax records detailing birth date, income and address details. The underlying data was generated by cross referencing records from 2006 and 2007 to find changes in postal codes.
Deluge from even westvang on Vimeo.
(via Infostethics.com)
Tripso have created a short animation of photographs taken across the world over a 12 month period. The movie shows a world map in which pixels light up according to the relative amount of pictures taken. Some tweaking had to be made however, due to their observation that:
There are more pictures taken in the city of Paris alone on one day that in all of Africa in a year so we corrected for the average.
The original article on the animation highlights more information on a series of snapshots describing some interesting trends and anomalies.
(via Infosthetics)
Pingdom.com have created an animated GIF illustrating the development of the world’s online population over the past 20 years. The data comes from the World Bank and shows that there are now an estimated 2 billion Internet users as of March 2011, representing about a third of the world’s population.
Regarding the animation:
Some statistics from the Pingdom blog post:
(via Pingdom)
Infographics