Each Friday we share some favorite reporting on, and examples of, data driven visualizations and embedded analytics that came onto our radar in the past week.
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Air Speed: Nate Silver and the team at FiveThirtyEight has done it again: They’ve made an incomprehensible volume of data instantly accessible and meaningful. In this case they’ve analyzed six million U.S. airline flights and created an intuitive, fun interactive map (we’ve included a static image above, but be sure to click through) with route performance from of each airport and to each destination, color-coded for speed and noted (by thickness of line) for frequency. Enter your starting point and destination (by typing or clicking) to compare performance of competing airlines. There’s a lot more nuance than we can explain in a paragraph, so read the accompanying articles, How We Found the Fastest Flights and A Better Way to Find the Best Flights and Avoid the Worst Airports for details.
Diverse Stats: We at OpenText celebrated International Women’s Day with a proclamation from our CEO, Mark Barrenechea and a moving video tribute. Diversity in technology is the subject of a comprehensive infographic, courtesy of Information is Beautiful; we’ve posted a snippet above, but click through for the entire piece and links to the underlying data. The infographic shows gender and ethnic diversity among employees at many prominent social media and technology companies, and compares them with the top 50 U.S. companies, a few other notable organizations (such as Congress) and the population as a whole.
In the Zone: It’s Friday; are you still adjusting to Daylight Savings Time? (#DaylightSavingsProblems trended across social media platforms this week.) To show that time zones are a human construct, Stefano Maggiolo of Poor Man’s Math charted the difference between clock time and actual solar time around the world — that is, he compared when timepieces read 12:00 noon and when the sun is at its highest point in the sky. He put the data on a color-coded map, so blue tints show areas where solar noon precedes 12:00, and red tints show areas where the opposite is true. Click the map for a larger version, and read Maggiolo’s commentary here.
Got a favorite or trending resource on embedded analytics and data visualization? Share it with the readers of the OpenText Analytics blog. Submit ideas to blogactuate@actuate.com or add a comment below. Subscribe (at left) and we’ll email you when new entries are posted.
Recent Data Driven Digests:
March 6: Political pizza, smartphone use, House of Cards, data visualization contest
February 27: Meditation, immigration to the U.S., geography of data science
February 20: Lunar new year travels, mapping sounds, winning poker hands