Visualizing the Wind...

The snapshot I took of the wind map doesn't really do it justice – the real thing is animated and interactive (you can zoom in on any particular area).  The wind data being visualized is realtime, collected from NOAA via publicly available APIs.  The statement on the web page says it's a personal art project, and in fact it is often quite beautiful.  It's also a wonderful example of the power of data visualization: the animated map instantly conveys the current winds in a way we would never get by reading columns of locations, wind direction, and wind speed...

Map of National (and Some States/Provinces) Wealth...

Wealth of a country (or other geopolitical entity) is a notoriously slippery datum to measure.  It isn't enough to convert per capita income to a common currency and compare them, because the cost of living varies tremendously from place to place.  Furthermore, in some political systems (I'm looking at you, Mother Russia, Mexico, China, Nigeria, India, et al), pervasive corruption means that significant fractions of their economies are underground and therefore not even in the official per capita income data.  What's a poor statistician to do?

One possibility is to find a proxy for that which you're trying to measure.  Ideally the proxy would be perfectly proportional to the value you actually want to measure, and could be measured without perturbing the value you're trying to measure.  In the case of the wealth of countries, some scientists have proposed the prevalence of outdoor artificial lighting at night as a proxy.  Their thinking is that the wealthier any country is, the more outdoor artificial lighting they'll use.  And very conveniently, outdoor lighting levels can be easily measured by existing satellites, hundreds of which image the surface of the earth every day.

The map below is the result of an attempt to make exactly this measurement.  As I cast my eye over the map, relatively few of the results look unexpected to me.  For instance, I wouldn't have guessed Greenland was so prosperous, nor Paraguay so poor.

Visualization: Migration Between Countries...

Peoplemovin is a well-done interactive visualization that lets you see migration to or from any given country.  For instance, in the clip below I've clicked on the Phillipines on the right, to see where people migrate to the Philippines from. 

There were lots of surprises for me as I browsed around this visualization.  In the example case, I never would have guessed that the top three sources for immigrants to the Philippines were the U.S., China, and the U.K.  I spent about nine months (in several stretches) in the Philippines when I was in the U.S. Navy, way back in the '70s, and I did run into quite a few U.S. military retirees.  I wonder if that's where most of these immigrants come from?

Alcohol Consumption Around the Globe...

Click on the map at right to see a larger one, or here to see the full-sized original version.  I would only have guessed one of the worst guzzlers: Ireland.  The other three bad boys: Hungary, Moldova, and Uganda.  On the other end of the spectrum (low consumption) was another big surprise for me: Ecuador.  That's so surprising that it makes me wonder if the data has a problem.  Vietnam is also very low, which I also find surprising.  Europe in general drinks much more than Japan, the U.S., or China; no surprise for me there :)

Data Visualization Tools...

A nice, curated collection of data visualization tools...

New York Taxis...

Collect GPS data from 10,000 taxi rides in New York City, over the course of 24 hours.  Then turn them into a movie, and here's what you get:

Public Data Visualizer...

Here's a fascinating tool from Google that lets you visualize quite a few different sets of publicly-available data.  At right is a snapshot of fertility rates for some countries I picked, along with the world as a whole.  Note how the world's fertility rate is falling inexorably toward the “replacement rate” of 2.1 (the point at which the population stops growing).

When you click onto the tool, click on the box that says “Fertility Rate” to change what data set you're looking at.  Pick the countries you'd like to see on the check-box list at the left...