The first downlinked images were published by NASA. The best view of Earth’s night side.

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After demolishing the East Wing of the White House and rushing into construction of a ballroom, the administration was finally ordered to stop until the plans go through the necessary reviews. NYT’s the Upshot made notes on the ballroom design, which is more flashy than practical, such as a stairway to nowhere and fake windows.

I like the enhanced byline: “Junho Lee is a trained architect, Larry Buchanan studied fine arts, and Emily Badger has long written about urban planning.” Apparently NYT has been doing this for a few years.

Tags: architecture, ballroom, Upshot, White House

For those who want to share small datasets in a more straightforward way, Ziptable by Evan Peck makes quick work of the task with a single link.

Ziptable lets you share a small CSV or JSON dataset by sending a single link. The person you send it to opens the link and immediately sees the data in their browser, ready to search, inspect, and download again. No attachments, no cloud storage workflow, and no account required.

Load a dataset. Ziptable compresses and encodes the data. You get a link without the data hitting up a server.

Tags: Evan Peck, small data, URL

Hi everyone. This is issue No. 382 of the Process, where we build towards charts beyond defaults. I’m Nathan Yau. This week is about small things adding up to big things.

Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.

For the New York Times, Ruth Igielnik and Katherine Chui charted presidential approval ratings against gas prices in the United States. The two metrics used to correlate strongly, but it’s grown more noisy over the past decade. That might change back:

Polarization, he said, plays a large role in that change.

“Presidents have fairly unified support from their own party, and unified opposition from the other party, which means they have a higher floor and a lower ceiling,” he said, referring to approval ratings.

Still, the current gas spike could be different. The quick pace with which prices have jumped may be enough to upend that trend.

Gas prices in the U.S. have increased to over $4 per gallon. Here in California, some gas stations are charging over $7 per gallon. Maybe we’ll find out if there’s a threshold for gas prices that lowers the approval floor.

Tags: approval, economy, gas, New York Times, prices

Artemis II launches today, scheduled for 6:24 pm EDT. Die Zeit mapped the journey to the moon and back (paywalled). Illustrated to scale and focused on the spacecraft while scrolling, it feels like the opening to space documentary. It just needs a soundtrack and an even-keeled astronaut to narrate the wonders of the universe.

Tags: Artemis II, moon, scale, space, Zeit

Researchers at Stanford University, epidemiologists Mathew Kiang and Nathan Lo, estimated the number of people who would die or be disabled if vaccines were no longer available in the United States. They did this for four diseases: polio, measles, rubella, and diphtheria. ProPublica illustrated the scale of these estimates, if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got his way.

Not ideal.

Tags: modeling, ProPublica, scale, vaccination

For Bloomberg, Loren Grush, Sana Pashankar, and Stephanie Davidson describe the Artemis II plan for the evening of April 1.

The mission is a critical milestone in NASA’s ambitious Artemis campaign, aimed at landing humans on the moon once again. In Greek mythology, the goddess Artemis is the twin of Apollo – a nod to the predecessor program that put US astronauts on the lunar surface. This time, however, NASA hopes to establish a base there, where humans can live and work.

The rocket was illustrated with Blender and flight paths are shown with Three.js. I always appreciate a bit of 3-D flourish in space-related illustrations.

Tags: Artemis II, Bloomberg, flight, moon, rocket, space

Four astronauts are rocketing to the moon on April 1. They’ll spend 10 days orbiting Earth a few times, head out to the moon, circle around, and then come back. Marco Hernandez and Kenneth Chang, for the New York Times, have the illustrations showing the rocket specifications, flight path, and the crew module with the space of two whole minivans.

Tags: Artemis II, flight, moon, New York Times, space

A so-called shadow fleet of tankers transport oil illicitly around the world. They had been on the decline, but the conflict in Iran has changed things. Financial Times mapped the paths and tactics used by these old ships to avoid detection.

These views from above make me think it won’t be long until ship tracking and detection systems are all just based on satellite images. That’s gotta be a thing by now.

Tags: Financial Times, oil, shipping

... et les négociants suisses jouent des coudes.

La justice soupçonne de corruption le patron du département de la sûreté de Genève Aéroport. Ce département a ouvert les vannes de la sous-traitance au début du millénaire, et les problèmes ont suivi.

Et le nombre de passagers ne croît plus comme avant (voir tableau ci-dessus)! Heureusement, cette semaine, les spotters du canton ont pu se consoler avec l'arrivée de nombreux appareils inédits et d'une nouvelle compagnie à Cointrin, Kenya Airways.

De la concurrence frontalière au rejet toujours plus massif des emballages, les défis s’accumulent pour Migros Genève. Sur l'arc lémanique, la situation est d'autant plus critique qu'en une décennie, Migros Genève et Migros Vaud ont supprimé 1187 postes de travail. Le patron de Migros Genève explique sa stratégie.

Nos articles sur l'affaire Obiang sont ici.

OC Sport, qui commercialise le marathon de Genève, a misé sur un marché en plein essor. L’entreprise ne fait pas l’unanimité.

The custom chore diagram titled Political Influence [brightpointinc.com] highlights the monetary contributions made by the top Political Action Committees (PAC) for the 2012 congressional election cycle, for the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The hierarchical browser 2013 Federal Budget [brightpointinc.com] reveals the major flows of spending in the US government, at the federal, state, and local level, such as the relationship of spending between education and defense.

The circular flow chart United States Trade Deficit [brightpointinc.com] shows the US Trade Deficit over the last 11 years by month. The United States sells goods to the countries at a the top, while vice versa, the countries at the bottom sell goods to the US. The dollar amount in the middle represents the cumulative deficit over this period of time.

Divided into mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds, the interactive bar graph allows users to browse horizontally through the vast amount of species by order and family, and vertically by genus.

Species in risk are highlighted in red, so that dense clusters denote related families (e.g. bears, parrots, turtles) that are specially threatened over the next 100 years.

GitHub is a web-based repository service which offers the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git, enjoying more than 3 million users.

Accordingly, by representing the distribution and frequency of programming languages, one can observe the continuous quest for better ways to solve problems, to facilitate collaboration between people and to reuse the effort of others.

Programming languages are ranked by various parameters, ranging from the number of active repositories to new pushes, forks or issues. The data can be filtered over discrete moments in time, while evolutions can be explored by a collection of timelines.

The mural seems to consist of different parts. A reflective line graph, reminiscent of a sound wave, represents the number Pi (3.14159...) by way of colors that are coded by the sequence of the prime numbers found in Pi (2,3,5,7), as well as height.

Additionally, a golden spiral was drawn based on the Fibonacci Sequence, as an exploration of the relationship between the golden ratio and Pi. The number Pi was represented in a color-coded graph within the golden spiral. In this, the numbers are seen as color blocks that vary in size proportionately within the shrinking space of the spiral, representing the 'shape' of Pi.

"By focusing on the single, transcendental concept of Pi across courses, the mathematics department plans to not only deepen student understanding of shape and irrational number, but more importantly, connect these foundational mental schema for students while dealing with the concrete issues of neighborhood beautification and how proportion can inform aesthetic which can in turn improve quality of life."

A few more similar urban / public visualization projects can be found at Balk's project page, e.g. showing weather patterns, emotion histograms or sound waves.

Via @mariuswatz .

Next to its expressive aesthetic, the interactive features allow users to highlight individual nodes and its direct connections to others, as well as filter between the kind of possible relationships, such as "hate", "strained", "good" or "love".

Reminds me a bit of Mapping the Relationships between the Artists who Invented Abstraction.

The timeline visualization goes beyond the classical pin representation, which tend to overlap and are relatively hard to read. Instead, the data is shown as 'map-timelines', a combination of maps with a timeline that convey location histories as sequences of maps: the bigger the map, the longer the stay. This way, the temporal sequence is clear, as the trip starts with the map on the left and continues towards the right.

A place slider allows the adjusting of the map granularity, reaching from street-level to country-level.

Read the academic research here [PDF], or watch a explanatory video below.

Movies are shown as unique nodes, while their influences are depicted as directed edges. The color gradients from blue to red that originate in the1980s denote the era of postmodern cinema, the era in which movies tend to adapt and combine references from other movies.

Although the visualizations look rather minimalistic at first sight, their interactive features are quite sophisticated and the resulting insights are naturally interesting. Therefore, do not miss out the explanatory movie below.

Via @albertocairo .

The visualization exists of 25 smartly organized pixel plots that are displayed as ordered small multiples. Ranging from Al-Qa'ida and the Taliban to less known organizations like Boko Haram, the plots reveal which ones are more deadly, are more recently active, or have been historically more active. In addition, all data can be filtered over time.

The data is based on the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), the most comprehensive and open-source collection of terrorism data available.

Described as an "atmospheric puzzle action game with a mindset of its own", it's visual style has been completely based on the world of infographics. In essence, the concept of infographics seem to work as a gameplay environment not just because of its pretty aesthetics, but also because of its natural interaction with (visual) data.

Consequently, in Metrico, each action is quantified and explicitly shown, such as the number of times an avatar needs to jump up and down or shoots a projectile. Metrico's goal is thus similar to most infographics: enticing users to make sense of a complex system.

Via Wired. Watch the gameplay trailer below.

The interactive circos graph is meant to demonstrate the complexity of breast cancer causation, in terms of educating the general public as well as possibly stimulating new scientific research in this direction. Users can explore the different influencing factors by domain, predicted correlation strength as well as the quality of the data evidence behind.

See also:
- Health InfoScape: Illustrating the Relationships between Disease Conditions
- Visualizing the Major Health Issues Facing Americans Today

On the topic of sleep, Jawbone also just released an interesting graph revealing how the recent Napa earthquake affected the sleep of local residents [jawbone.com]. Indeed, the distance to the epicenter seems to correlate to the number of people who awoke, and the time it took for them to get back to sleep.

As the visualizations are based on a vast dataset released by Jawbone, the makers of a digitized wristband that tracks motion and sleep behavior, the data is not necessarily representative for the whole general population.

This year, the report focuses on communication data, as it aspires to uncover patterns and insights within a large collection of tracked conversations, SMS, telephone calls, email, Facebook messages and even physical mail.

See also the annual reports of:
- 2012
- 2010 and 2011
- 2010 (about his father's life)
- 2009
- 2008
- 2007
- 2006
- 2005

The migration data is based on Census data, which was used to compare the state of residence versus the state of birth of a representative sample of Census forms. The visualization technique resembles that of organically shaped, stacked area graphs, also coined as stream graphs or ThemeRiver.

See also:
- Ebb and Flow of Movies
- last.fm lastgraph
- 2008 Movie Box Revenue
- What People in Tokyo are Doing on a Tuesday
- Memetracker: Tracking News Phrases over the Web
- DailyRadar TrendMap: Interactive Stacked Line Graph of Popular Trends
- Twitter Activity during the 2012 European Football Tournament

The 5522 Twitter messages are categorized and ordered in 4 different books. Every user is part of each book but dependent on the categorization her position within the book changes.

Accordingly, the book "My Message is..." contains the content of each message, ordered by its language. The size and order of the tweet is derived from the number of followers (recipients).

The book "My Color is..." shows each user's Twitter account color, ordered by the timezone the tweet was send in.

The book "My Description is..." shows how each user describes himself on his profile, of which the size and order is derived from the Klout score.

Finally, the book "My Name is..." lists the avatar that each user chose to represent him or herself, ordered by the number of tweets the user sent.

The animation commences around 600 bc and ends in 2012, and tracks the life of people like Leonardo da Vinci or Jett Travolta -- son of the actor John Travolta. It presents each person's birth place as a blue dot and their death as a red dot. Developed by Mauro Martino, research manager of the Cognitive Visualization Lab in IBM's Watson Group, the animated map is based on data retrieved from the Google-owned knowledge base, Freebase, a community-curated database of well-known people, places, and things.

More scientific information can be found in the Science paper "A network framework of cultural history", which was spearheaded by Maximilian Schich and his team.

Watch the movie below.