Results from the Survey of Consumer Finances for 2025 were recently released, which means it is time for another rendition of seeing who has a higher net worth.

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Stephen Follows counted the number of shots in movies, from 1920 through 2025. The overall number of shots increased, and so has the range.

Between the 1930s and 1950s, films averaged between 550 and 580 shots. The median started to climb in the 1960s and didn’t slow until the current century. In recent years, the increase has been minimal, sitting at 1,479 for the 2010s and currently 1,559 for the first half of the 2020s.

Follows used TransNet V2 for transition detection and shot count.

Tags: movies, shots, Stephen Follows

More big numbers coming in. For NYT’s the Upshot, Aatish Bhatia demonstrates the millions of trillions (octillions!) of calculations required for training AI.

During its training, the A.I. is fed a portion of a sentence, and the knobs are adjusted using a series of math calculations to improve its guesses for the next word. This process is then repeated over trillions of words of training data.

It takes only a few additions and multiplications to adjust a single knob. But when trillions of knobs are adjusted trillions of times, the math quickly adds up.

And this is just the first step in training a language model, known as pre-training. It’s followed by additional steps of calculations that hone the A.I.’s behavior and improve its ability to code and solve math problems.

All those calculations require energy, data, and time. The big companies are taking what they can get with the first two things in efforts to reduce the third.

Tags: Aatish Bhatia, calculations, scale, training, Upshot

This is fun, or I guess very serious depending on your point of view. Georgios Karamanis adapted the Show Your Stripes project, which visualizes average temperature each year as a stripe, into a screensaver that runs in macOS.

It is fascinating how a simple view of data can fit into different spaces.

Tags: climate change, Georgios Karamanis, screensaver, stripes

There is a proposition on the California ballot this year to impose a one-time tax for billionaires. The result would be a 5% tax on their net worth, which includes investments. For New York Times Magazine, Nicholas Konrad illustrates the scale of this tax on 250 individuals in the context of their wealth, the taxes they typically pay, and their spending to oppose.

For us regular people, one billion dollars is difficult to imagine, so the transitions between tiny and giant circles provide a sense of how big these numbers are. By absolute counts, the tax dollars are a lot, but by percentage, the tax rate doesn’t seem like that much all things considered.

Tags: billionaires, California, New York Times, Nicholas Konrad, scale, taxes

This is No. 410 of the Process. I’m Nathan Yau. Getting started with a new dataset can be confusing, because there are so many entry points and possibilities. This week, I walk through my own thinking as I poke at fresh data.

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

This is really going to surprise you, but the wealthy people in the United States became wealthier over the past three years. For the Wall Street Journal, Rachel Louise Ensign and Justin Lahart report on these changes with some charts.

The roughly 137,000 households who make up the nation’s top 0.1% had already become richer in comparison to everyone else in recent decades, thanks to higher incomes and lower tax rates. Now the stock-market boom, driven by strong corporate earnings and highflying tech stocks, is powering their wealth even further.

By comparison, the rest of the top 10% of richest Americans gained $38.2 trillion in wealth over the same period, but it was split among nearly a hundred times as many households.

This is based on fresh Federal Reserve data from the Survey of Consumer Finances.

Tags: rich, Wall Street Journal, wealth

In reference to the xkcd comic that illustrates the internet as a stack of blocks propped up by a small project, sheets.works shows development history of real open source projects that our devices depend on. It is not uncommon for a single developer to maintain widely used open source software on a volunteer basis.

Tags: Internet, open-source, sheets.works

The registers were created by the British government after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, and were designed to prevent illegal trading of enslaved people and to monitor the enslaved population.

Researchers say people were recorded in the registers with chilling precision. Entries include names, ages, physical descriptions and family ties, as well as births, deaths and transfers of ownership. Some distinguish whether a person was born in Africa or in the Caribbean.

Nicka Sewell-Smith, a professional genealogist and senior story producer at Ancestry, said it was not lost on her that records originally created to count enslaved people as property were now being used by their descendants to reconstruct their family histories.

Tags: database, Guardian, Legacies of British Slavery, slavery

This lead/associate orientation makes sense for life after graduation. Once a student is in the workforce, they will use AI to produce products: new ideas, reports, and so on. A guiding principle of “Use AI, but let me see your work” makes sense.

This is not, however, an optimal guiding principle for students. Students produce products, but the product is seldom the point. No one wants to read the papers they write, and the math problems they solve have no practical value. Teachers have them do these tasks because they provide practice in cognitive abilities that we think matter.

I remember pulling all-nighters in the computer lab in college, with only Pop-Tarts and a fear of a failing grade to keep me going. What it must be like for students and educators these days knowing that the answer is only a prompt away.

I just keep telling my young kids (while they still listen to me) that we need to know how to do things and how things work. Things will break or need to get better, and that requires people who can think for themselves.

Tags: Daniel Willingham, education, students

... 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.