When you spend more than you make, you get debt. For the Washington Post, Youyou Zhou, with illustrations by Kyle Ellingson, visualized the difference over time for the United States.

A long stacked bar chart provides a backdrop of revenue and spending, and the animations give a little something to highlight significant spikes.

The debt has been running up for decades. It’s as if the government doesn’t even care.

Tags: debt, government, revenue, spending, Washington Post

This is issue No. 402 of the Process, where we look at data from all the angles. I’m Nathan Yau. This week is about changing perspectives so we can find and visualize new insights.

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Google’s winning bid in the auction was priced at $10 million, outbidding Mercor, an AI training data giant. According to a notice published on the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York’s docket, as the winning bidder, Google is now the proud owner of more than 100 million company emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 30 million lines of code, development metadata, software models and algorithms, as well as revenue, aircraft operations and employee productivity data.

Companies continue to spread their tentacles to wherever data resides. The AI training models need to be fed, and they already ate all the data on the internet.

Tags: Gizmodo, Google, Spirit Airlines, training

For the Wall Street Journal, Peter Rudegeair and Peter Santilli report on the trillions (with a t) of dollars slated for later spending by big tech:

Nine top tech companies had some $3 trillion of off-balance-sheet commitments mostly related to AI, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of footnotes in their most recent securities filings. Those obligations are growing faster than traditional “capex,” which totaled about $600 billion over the past year they reported, and were about triple what the companies owe under their outstanding leases and long-term borrowings.

That is a lot of money.

Mostly, the triangle Voronoi treemap caught my eye. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one of those. I wish they had shown all $3 trillion of commitments to match the headline instead of just the four companies. The math threw me off for a second.

Tags: spending, technology, Wall Street Journal

Suspecting that an anonymous order of 1,000 books was headed to an AI company to scan for training data, 404 Media stuck an Apple AirTag in the shipment to track its location. The books landed at an Amazon training facility in Las Vegas called VGT3. Emanuel Maiberg reports:

That employees are scanning the barcodes or ISBNs on books — a unique serial number given to every published book — before scanning their content gives further credence to another theory put forth by booksellers: AI companies are trying to methodically scan every printed book in the world by working through the list of ISBNs. One bookseller told me they suspected this was the case because the very large orders they were getting never included very rare books that do not have ISBNs.

Amazon (and probably other AI facilities) strips the binding to make scans easier, so the books are destroyed in the process. Not ideal.

Tags: 404 Media, Amazon, tracking, training

To avoid heavy solar tariffs, China allegedly moved manufacturing to other countries. When the U.S. caught a whiff, they’d impose new rules to the other countries, and imports would plummet, but then China would move elsewhere. For Bloomberg, Nadja Popovich and Mark Chediak report on the practice and a new effort to address the challenge.

Tags: Bloomberg, China, solar, tariff

For NYT’s the Upshot, Eve Washington, Larry Buchanan, and Claire Cain Miller examined the most commonly used emojis and how it changes by generation.

reached the top by leapfrogging and on the leaderboard. A big reason: Young people decided the other emojis were overused, according to linguists and a New York Times analysis of Reddit posts.

The new data comes from an anonymous sample of 665 million emojis used by people worldwide on Gboard, a Google keyboard built into most devices using Android, the most widely used operating system. Google shared the data with The Times, with 2025 being the latest available.

My emoji usage sadly reflects my age apparently. I mostly only use or with a sprinkle of . My emoting evolution kind of stopped at :).

Tags: emoji, New York Times

There’s automated code, message boards, and bots teaming up, just like every animated movie about AI foretold. In truth, it’s negligence on OpenAI’s part. I hope they actually take security seriously going forward.

Tags: attack, bot, OpenAI

This is No. 401 of the Process, where we aim for visualization beyond defaults. I’m Nathan Yau. This week, we talk flimsy results and how to work on things that build trust over content.

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In the early 1900s, Henry Gannett cataloged the origins of city names in the United States. For the Wall Street Journal, Carl Churchill made a searchable map to see where your city’s name came from.

The herculean effort, by famed geographer Henry Gannett of the U.S. Geological Survey, sheds light on America’s past. First published in 1902, then updated in 1905, the report reveals the country’s linguistic history spanning colonization, independence and westward expansion.

If Gannett’s name sounds familiar, you might recall he headed the Statistical Atlas of the United States in 1880 and 1890, which is cherished work around these parts.

Tags: cities, Henry Gannett, history, names, Wall Street Journal

... 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.