Meet The World, Infographic Flags

Meet The World is an infographic project that uses the colors of eight national flags to represent some of the current issues in the world.

Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, João Roque, Andrea Vallenti and João Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail.

I found the link to this on rc3.org.

Who has the Nuclear Weapons?

An infographic video from GOOD Magazine, a quick 3-minute video that shows who has the nukes, how many they have, and how much damage would one nuke hitting the Empire State Building cause.

Found on tunequest.org

Clarifying Cloning

From The Genetics and Public Policy Center, an infographic demonstrating the difference between research cloning and reproductive cloning.

One Year in Iraq

New infographic from nytimes.com depicting the 2,592 deaths in Iraq over the course of the entire year of 2007. The graphic is credited to Alicia Cheng, a graphic designer at mgmt. design in Brooklyn.

The chart below — compiled from data provided by the American and Iraqi governments and news media organizations (the independent Coalition Casualty Count in particular) — gives information on the type and location of each attack responsible for the 2,592 recorded deaths among American and other coalition troops, Iraqi security forces and members of the peshmerga militias controlled by the Kurdish government.

I think this is an improvement over the "31 Days in Iraq" graphic because the new graphic identifies every death as a separate figure instead of grouping some together. There are also some differences in data, as the new graph doesn't include the Iraqi civilian deaths. So the "31 Days in Iraq" graphic showed over 1,900 deaths in January 2007, this new graphic only shows 163 deaths in January.

And, sadly, civilian fatalities in Iraq last year were simply too numerous to represent on a single newspaper page.

I'll keep an eye out in early February to see if they publish one for the month of January as they have the last couple of years.

Who has the Oil?

I caught this on Digg, it's a map from civicactions.com. There's some good debate in the comments on Digg about the accuracy of the map.

The size of the country represents the relative amount of oil reserves in each country, and teh color of the country represents how much oil is consumed by that country.

The World Freedom Atlas

The World Freedom Atlas, offers many different views of the world. Developed by Zachary Forest Johnson, his blog is here. The one above is the Raw Political Rights Score (darker is better) based on data from the Freedom House. Offering a bunch of datasets from a number of different sources, the interface is fantastically easy to use. Depending on the dataset, you can also view the data by year from 1990-2006.

The President's Entourage

Found on Digg, a quick graphic showing the massive entourage that travels with the President.

Lotteries Profit, but Do Students?

Interactive graphic, from the NYTimes:

Lotteries in 42 states and the District of Columbia rake in billions of dollars, but much of the cash from ticket sales gets channeled back into prizes and lottery administration. States earmark the profits for programs like education, but the lottery dollars contribute only a small percentage of the total education funding.

Americans Remain Woefully Ill-Informed

Wired magazine calls infographics like this "infoporn". I guess you could call this a version of a bubble chart, but it shows a comparison of what people knew in 1989 vs. 2007. Separately it shows knowledge of three questions based on the respondent's usual source of news.

I can't tell how big the sample size was, or what type of people they interviewed. It quotes the source as the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, but that alone isn't enough to make it credible.

31 Days in Iraq

This map of Iraq from the NYTimes.com visually shows the over 1,900 people killed in Iraq during the month of January 2007.

"The map, based on data from the American, British and Iraqi governments and from news reports, shows the dates, locations and circumstances of deaths."

The number has doubled since they did this for January 2006 which had around 800 deaths. Each figure represents an individual of the American forces, coalition forces, Iraqi forces, police officers or civilian death. The larger figures have numbers showing how many people they represent (which I think diminishes the visual impact). A smaller icon shows the cause of death. All the figures are connected to a location in the country.

I would have added some color coding too, but I'm guessing the NY Times had to keep it in black & white to print it in the newspaper.