Plume and Doom

With the hypothesizing, calculating, and scenario analyzing, regarding the radioactive emissions from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant, I was reminded of a very unusual infographic that ran 65 years ago in Fortune.

In 1946, precisionist painter Ralston Crawford, was dispatched by the magazine to witness the nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll. Among the 124 members of the press to attend, Crawford was the only artist. His observations and reactions resulted in a six-page piece that included photographs, paintings and an infographic.

Although known as a painter, Crawford was an experienced information designer. During WWII, he served in the Army Air Corps Visual Presentation Unit as chief of its Weather Division. There he created maps for Army pilots, and developed a pictorial language of weather symbols to translate meteorological data used in military operations into a more comprehensible format.

The last spread of the Bikini article is about the migration of radioactivity. This is the one Crawford felt was essential, since what it showed was precisely what was not directly observable at Bikini. On the left side of the spread is a photo of the explosion’s cloud column. It is annotated to show how the mass of radioactivity was dispersed by prevailing winds at three altitudes. On the facing page there is a map showing where the plume would have traveled had the atomic bomb been detonated over New York City on that same day. You can see its shape and direction based on wind conditions in the northeast that day compared to the inset map showing how it actually traveled at Bikini.

Below are small versions or the spreads as they appeared, but see and read the whole piece at Full Table.




Sources: Fortune; Ralston Crawford, Barbara Haskell (Whitney Museum catalog)

New Year’s Eve Infographic: Champagne-Glass Pyramid

ChampagneSabering.com offers this diagram along with a table for calculating the number of glasses needed for building pyramids of various heights. Also tips for filling the glasses and all things related to Champagne. They can be hired to build a pyramid for your next event.

There is a page of Champagne quotes, including this one from Art Buchwald: "I like Champagne because it always tastes as if my foot's asleep."

May this be the only kind of Pyramid Scheme you encounter in the new year. Wishing a happy, healthy, and peaceful 2011 to all!

Wealth Distribution For Dummies

Let’s use 100 people to represent one hundred percent of the U.S. population, and $100 to represent the country’s wealth. Now let’s distribute the $100 among the 100 people in proportion to how it is spread out within the population.
What got me going on this, was that as alarming as the statistics are about the disparity between the wealthiest and poorest in this country, the graphic representations tend to feel less urgent. And that, ironically, has to do with the magnitude of the inequality. Charts using equal size increments, say, each 1% of the wealth-holders plotted on a bar chart, or even quintiles, for that matter, simply don’t read. So we need to resort to more abstracted depictions, i.e. charts that compare different size groups.
Above left, is a classic wealth distribution chart that compares the shares of different size groups. Sometimes it will be top 1% vs. bottom 99%, sometimes 10% vs. 90%. This 1-4-15-80 chart is from the Economic Policy Institute. The gradated layers amble across an expanse of years with some gentle dips and rises along the way. The meaning of the chart can only be accessed when you read “Top 1%” in the biggest layer and “Bottom 80%” in the smallest layer, and then mentally process the fact that we are being shown a comparison between different size groups. It always frustrates me, because the image doesn’t provoke amazement and outrage. The visual message is one of even distribution.

Drake Bennett, in a Bloomberg Businessweek commentary, 'The Inequality Delusion', points to a study by Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton about Americans’ perceptions of the country’s wealth distribution by quintile (right chart). Concerning ourselves here with only the top two bars, the top bar shows the actual breakdown, and the second shows the estimations by those interviewed. As the note at the bottom of the chart points out, quintiles four and five on the actual breakdown are not even visible. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pervasive use of different-size-group layer chart (on the left), has graphically reinforced the delusion of those interviewed (on the right).

So I’m throwing this idea of '100 dollars/100 people' out there as yet another way to visualize this information. Yes, it too compares different size groups, but I’m hoping that by using 100 people (an amount we can all fathom), breaking the groups into individuals, and using real money in a way that is familiar (as opposed to $34.60 in pennies or even a stack of dollar bills), we might get a bit closer to getting our heads around, how concentrated the wealth in the U.S. really is.

The really bad news, however, is how much worse off the ‘Nonwealthies' are than they used to be. Bob Herbert’s Election Day column in the New York Times, covers a new book called Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Briefly, the book’s authors, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson explain that the economic struggles of the middle and working classes in the U.S. since the late-1970s have been due to government policies that favor the rich.

Furthermore, the book “explores the vexing question of how this could have happened in a democracy in which — in theory, at least — the enormous number of voters who are not rich would serve as a check on policies that curtailed their own economic opportunities while at the same time supercharging the benefits of the runaway rich.”

In other words, why do so many Americans continually vote against their own best interests? Hint: the answer has to do with the interconnectedness of the superrich, the power of their focused ability to organize, and the amount of influence that extreme wealth can buy. After all, the total wealth of the bottom 80% combined doesn’t even begin to come close to what the top wealth-owners have socked away.

Bennett reminds us of what John McCain said during the Presidential campaign two years ago. "That is what change means for Barack the Redistributor: It means taking your money and giving it to someone else …"

Telling voters that their money was to be taken from them proved so catchy, that Tea/publicans repeated it endlessly throughout the most recent campaign season.

What McCain and the other “anti-distributors” always neglect to mention, is that they are only addressing between 1% and, at most, 10% of the population. The other 90% have been having their wealth “redistributed” for the last three decades.

Worldmapper: On the Grid

You may or may not be familiar with Worldmapper. It's a project that originated from the Social and Spatial Inequalities research group at the University of Sheffield, to create maps where geographic territories can be sized according to a whole assortment of other metrics, like population, literacy, income, etc. The resulting graphics are called cartograms and Worldmapper now offers almost 700 of them. Together they provide a fascinating visualization of global issues.

On a recent visit to the website, I discovered gridded cartograms. A uniform grid is imposed on a geographic territory and then each square is sized according to the value of a particular metric. This gridded mapping creates a way more nuanced representation than the traditional cartogram, which assigns a single value for each country. It also allows for analysis within one territory.

Here are some grid-mapped populations. A country like Italy, say, whose population is rather dense throughout, will look very much like its geographic shape, while Brazil (above), has quite a different story to tell.

Exxon's Layered Bars of Meaning

The cover of ExxonMobil's recent annual report, folds out to reveal a lavish chart illustrated with photos of various types of energy. It shows the history of energy demand in the U.S. by source back to 1850 and projected out to 2030.

Interesting that they chose to show demand with bars all the same height, plotting percentage and not actual amounts. This is completely kosher and correct and this is exactly how to display the data for the story Exxon wants to tell: By 2030, the mix of our energy use in the U.S. will have shifted to cleaner sources. I am posting this because I thought it was an excellent example of “message management” with infographics. Exxon clearly wants to show that oil consumption is decreasing, and that they are being smart and responsible for investing heavily in natural gas (which is cleaner than oil). Keep in mind, however that the segments show demand ONLY AS A PERCENT OF TOTAL.

A few pages into the report, after CEO, Rex Tillerson’s letter to shareholders, we learn that worldwide energy demand between 2005 and 2030, will have increased by 35%. Over that same period, even with all the legislation, technology, and international agreements, energy-related CO2 emissions will still have increased 25%. So as you can see in their much more modestly produced chart, below, when actual amounts are plotted, the picture is not nearly as pretty.

I think that their choice to depict oil in green was carefully calculated as well.

Found Infographic: Vintage Corset Directions

Imagine needing directions with a diagram for getting dressed! Before elastic and stretch fabrics came into regular use for foundation garments, the design and proper fit of a corset took a fair amount of engineering and customization. (See previous post on the Berlei Body Type Calculator.)

I was curious about why the name of a corset manufacturer would be “Camp.” I thought that perhaps the company originally manufactured tents--you know, canvas, cord, grommets, rigging hardware. Not so. It turns out that the name of the corset maker was Samuel Higby Camp. In 1908, he patented the "fan-lacing" system of attaching straps and buckles to groups of laces so that the garment could be tightened from the front, by the corset wearer herself. Before that, women were dependent on a maid/mother/other, to pull the laces tight from the back and tie them. So, what appears to us as a garment of torture and confinement, actually provided women with a level of self-sufficiency, not previous available to them.

And remember, NEVER pull upwards or downwards, always in a straight line!

Ike Liked Golf

A couple of years ago, I was stuck in a room with nothing to read but Golf Digest. So I had no choice but to start looking through it. To my great delight, I was rewarded with this incredible chart. It shows how often President Eisenhower played golf while in office.

The first page shows 1958. Each dot is a day. A red dot indicates that Eisenhower played at least one round of golf that day, blue dots are for days he practiced. The red dots are annotated to show where he played (24 times that year at Augusta National Golf Club). The second page shows all eight years in office, and lists world events occurring in that year.

I’ve kept this graphic because I think it’s a wonderful example of how a lot of information can be clearly displayed and can work elegantly on a number of levels. On the most general level, the density of colored dots is an instant read (it’s pretty clear that once Ike got that second election under his belt, he could get serious about what was really important). The graphic can also be read on a more detailed level of practice vs. play, world events and even includes significant medical events.

Sorry to disappoint anyone who thought this would somehow end up being about Tiger Woods.

Watching the River Flow

You know those amazing National Geographic poster-sized maps that explain everything about Ethnoliguistic Africa or The Ocean Floor? This map of the Colorado River Basin by 5W Infographics, is a recent addition to the NG online map collection.

What’s so cool about this map, is that overlaying the river, is a chart, where the width at any point corresponds to the amount of flow at that point in the river—the wide band shows averages for wet years, the narrower darker blue band shows the amount for dry years. You will also find out, in incredible detail, everything else you might want to know about this river basin that supplies more water than any other river basin in the world. The maps are all zoomable and high-res, but sometimes take a bit of time to render.

Yet another incredible resource from National Geographic.





Here are a few others from the collection

1987 Pinnipeds Around the World Map, 1964 Shakespeare's Britain Map, The Universe Map

Basketball Rules!

The diagram below, is on the back of the 1953 book below it. I don't really know if 'Basketball Rules' had a double meaning back then, but I’m pretty sure it was just the rules for playing basketball.

Malofiej 'Best of Show'

Every year, the Spanish chapter of the Society for News Design hosts Malofiej, an international infographics competition and conference. It is held at the University of Navarra, in Pamplona, Spain and is the “Oscars” or “Pulitzers” for the field of journalistic information design. The awards were announced yesterday at the 18th Infographics World Summit.

‘Best of Show’ went to the Swedish newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet, for the interactive graphic by Thomas Molén, How did Europe vote in last year’s Eurovision Song Contest 2008. It’s a visualization of the voting by Eastern-bloc vs. Western bloc-countries in the song contest, whose outcome is seen as having become more politically, rather than “artistically” determined. I highly recommend the interactive version here. Other award-winning graphics can be seen here.

Crayola's Law

A chronology of Crayola’s chromatic growth from 8 colors in 1903 to 120 colors today (not including metallics and neon). Weather Sealed reports that the average annual growth rate of 2.56% means a doubling of available hues every 28 years. That’s 330 colors by 2050. So every generation’s “standard” box has twice the variety its parents had. Thirteen colors over the years have been officially retired and three colors underwent official name changes.