Here’s a great example of how one company takes Big Data and makes it fun.  Help is a drug company that strives to simplify the pharmaceutical choices for customers.  Their website now features a map highlighting sales data from Target and Walgreens called “What’s wrong U.S.?”.  A bar chart for each state shows how many people are buying products for particular ailments versus the national average; you can also click on the state and get region by region details.  For example, Central Texas, home to our home, Austin, TX has a higher than average number of blisters.  Maybe it’s all the running and biking we do!

(via Flowing Data)

We found this great little chart on Chart Porn today and thought it was an excellent representation of the foundations of our company.  Yay, geeks!

As you enter your weekend, consider this, human beings are outnumbered by lots of creatures in this world, including ants, which Harvard biologist and ant expert, Edward O. Wilson claims outnumber us one million to one. I’d personally suspect we are also greatly outnumbered by numerous varieties of insects, arachnids, and in Austin, grackles.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, we are also outnumbered by chickens.  In 2009, we killed 52 billion chickens for food (to say nothing of the ones we kept alive).  Kind of makes you thankful they aren’t fighting back.

Happy Friday!

by NatGeo. Browse more data visualizations.

 

The boundaries of a neighborhood can be a topic of hot contention. Look to a tourist guidebook, a real estate agent, and a local and you’ll get four about whether or not north of 14th Street still counts as “The Village” in NYC.  Livehoods, a project by the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University takes a social spin on answering these questions and uncovers some truly insightful data of neighborhood boundaries, relationships, activity levels, character, and more.

Livehoods offer a new way to conceptualize the dynamics, structure, and character of a city by analyzing the social media its residents generate. By looking at people’s checkin patterns at places across the city, we create a mapping of the different dynamic areas that comprise it. Each Livehood tells a different story of the people and places that shape it.

One thing I found particular fascinating, though not wholly unexpected about the New York City map was the clustering of neighborhoods in New Jersey.  In NYC, with the relative proximity of… everything to everything, it’s not surprising to find that neighborhoods are small areas comprised of a tightly clustered businesses and homes.  In New Jersey, the “neighborhoods” span across a half dozen suburban towns in the same county.

Interested in experimenting with some Foursquare data yourself?  Check out our Foursquare Places API!

Living in Austin, TX, it was pretty obvious that last year with its record number of 100+ degree days without rain, thousands of square miles burned in wildfires, and billions lost on agriculture that we were in the middle of a serious drought. The impact across the state and throughout much of the South since October 2010 is staggeringly reviewed in this simple flipbook-style map from NPR.

The potential solutions to the problem are outlined in the Water Plan. It will be interesting to see how the continuation of this drought will affect job growth, home prices, population, and more throughout the state in the coming years.

Various plans for dealing with future droughts and growing demand for water in Texas exist, but most comprehensive — and accepted — is the state Water Plan. It offers a frank assessment of the current landscape, saying Texas “does not and will not have enough water to meet the needs of its people, its businesses, and its agricultural enterprises.” It predicts that “if a drought affected the entire state like it did in the 1950s,” Texas could lose around $116 billion, over a million jobs, and the growing state’s population could actually shrink by 1.4 million people.

Apparently, April is Stress Awareness Month. Personally, I’m always aware of my stress, but this infographic does offer some interesting stats on our stress and nice reminders of how to let it go.

Browse more Health infographics.

According to research conducted by Column Five, TBWA, and Take Part, social activism is on the rise with an increasing number of young adults (ages 20-28).  And we’re talking about more than just posting and commenting on Facebook here, folks in this age group are actually taking real action in ways companies and organizations should be aware of.  Decisions around employment, shopping, and sentiment are largely influenced by a company’s support of social causes that align with the causes that this group cares about.

So what issues matter most to young adults?

The above are simply the top 8 found in this study; however, it’s worth a deep dive for your industry and customer segments to understand how the issues you support can affect your customers’ support for you.

As seen in Flowing Data today, reposted from the Obama campaign’s Tumblr page yesterday. We’re curious what you think.

Eli Pariser, author of “The Filter Bubble” delivers a compelling TEDTalk on the dangerous unintended consequences of web companies tailoring news and search results to our personal tastes. He argues that this personalization is the internet showing us what it “thinks” we should see, as opposed to what we should or need to see.

Arguably, we already live with a filter bubble with the media we choose to ingest and to ignore. Consider the viewers of FOX News versus the Daily Show and the rare folks that cross over or seek out a broader array of opinions. Most folks take in media that reaffirms their existing views, rather than challenging their perspectives. We do this in our personal lives, with the friends we choose and in our business lives, with the narrow view we take on our own data. We encourage all of our readers to consider making uncomfortable decisions – seek out opinions that oppose yours, get into lively debates with your friends and put your data in the context of the broader world. You can read more about the idea of data in context in Flip Kromer’s posts on Big Data Predictions for 2012 and On Being Wrong in Paris.

Last week, we posted a TedxVancouver talk from Jer Thorp about the humanity in data. Today, we bring you the story of Aaron Parecki, who grew from a geo-data obsessed youth (the above are the detailed logs he kept of his commutes with his parents from 1995-1997) to a digital cartography expert. Co-founder of Geoloqi, Aaron has been tracking and visualizing his location every six seconds for the past three years.  Projects like this have existed in the past, but Aaron’s dedication to self-surveillance throughout his life is impressive.

What comes out of this data is a beautiful visual story of a person’s life – where he spends his time and how this has changed over time depending on where he’s lived. It’s about as personal of a city map as one can get. To read more about this project and Aaron, check out the Co.Design article and Aaron’s website.