Visualizing Our Aging World

GE released a set of interactive population pyramids that illustrates the population aging in the world. Here.

It allows you to compare the demographic statistics of 8 different industrialized countries (France, Germany, USA, Uniet Kingdom, South Korea and China. Unfortunately, Brazil is not included).

*And an important note related to that: A lot of countries are increasing retirement age (here).

Via Infosthetics

Data on Latin America Urbanization

CEPAL have always been a great supporter of Latin American demographers. The Population Division of CEPAL, the Latin American Demographic Center (CELADE), has been doing an important work gathering and analyzing data on South American Urbanization since 1950.

I'm talking about the Depualc Project (Spatial Distribution of the Population and Urbanization in Latin America and the Caribbean) and you can check the data here.

South American Urbanization Rates, By major administrative divisions, 1950 - 2000

World population and the NY way of life

What if all of Earth’s six billion people were to live at the density of New York City ?

Answer at urbanomnibus: "all of humanity would occupy less than one half of one percent of the earth’s land mass. Only one half of one percent, with the vast majority of the planet left unspoiled".

Leonardo Monasterio did the same exercise with Brazil's population using Copacabana density. Here is what he found.

Air Pollution Visualisation

Another beautiful visualization by CASA (in association with the Environmental Research Group at Kings College London):

Air Pollution Visualisation: Nitrogen Dioxide, London from digitalurban on Vimeo.

Las Vegas Urbanization (1984-2009)

Yes, this is Vegas! A little discussion about it here.

ps1. Would you call it 'urban sprawl' ?

ps2. the historic of rooms and tourists in Vegas here.

Source: NASA images by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, based on Landsat 5 data from the USGS Global Visualization Viewer. Caption by Michon Scott.

Urban sequences captured in time lapse

DigitalUrban caught our attention with a beautiful collection of urban sequences captured in time lapse. Here you can find: London, Toronto, New York, Tampa Florida, Cologne, Boston, Tokyo, Yokohama, Chicago, Dubai (good one), Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon).

So I decided to contribute and post here two time lapse vds focusing Brazilian cities:

Recife:

Recife Night - A Timelapse Experience from Paulo Menelau on Vimeo.

And Rio de Janeiro:

miniRIO (tilt-shift/time-lapse test) from Pawel Grabowski on Vimeo.

Free access to streets information around the world

Geographical data is usually expensive around the world. Google brought a great contribution to that, but still all Google Maps information is copyrighted. So these guys here started a great project: the OpenStreetMap ! This is a collaborative project where people can share public datasets on streets information around the world.

And this is a beautiful animation showing edits to the project during 2008.

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

ps. 1 - I wonder if there is a way to use these data in space syntax studies… Have anyone tried it?

ps. 2 - A guide on how to use OSM Mapper here.

ps. 3 - If you got interested, here you may read almost everything you should know about OSM Mapper.

Isochronic and Isogreenic (!) Maps

Mark Harrower did a great job collecting a wide range of different ways to visualize geographic processes on static maps. Here you can see the greatest Isochronic maps and temporal cartograms he founded.

And this here is my favorite one: the interactive London Tube map (by Tom Carden)

Well, now it’s common sense that time influences our space perceptions. But the talented Xiaoji Chen thought that maybe environmental concerns should distort our spatial perceptions too. So she did not only some isochronic maps for Paris (using different transport modes) but she also did the isogreenic maps for Paris that take carbon footprint into account for using different transport modes.

Many Eyes - How the same data set can tell different stories

Lately a lot of websites have been talking about a Brazilian researcher called Fernanda B. Viegas (nyt, cnn); She’s a young specialist in Visual Communication and together with Martin Wattenberg she created the site ManyEyes where people can share data bases and try a variety of forms to visualize data.

You can see a little demonstration of the site in a special Brazilian TED Talk

or a more complete one in a seminar at Stanford University (download).

Some interesting things available at the site:

• Word Tree for Text Analyses (10^th minute at TED video)
• Social networks visualizations
• A lot of databases
• All kinds of different ways to visualize data and check how others visualize them

As free samples:
US Population Projections by Age 2010-2050

Surnames Scatterplot in the US 2000
*obs. Try to find typical Brazilian surnames

Commuting Time Maps in Great Britain

How long it takes to travel between one particular place and every other place in Great Britain ? These guys here did a useful study to answer that.

This would be the Rail travel to get from Cambridge Station to every other station in the UK:

China's empty city

How sustainable can that be?



Thanks to Leonardo Monasterio

The best stats you've ever seen

A great "talk" of Hans Rosling showing powerful visualization.


Thanks Mark D. Hayward for the tip.

And here you can explore his dataset, or google's dataset here.

American recession told by unemployment numbers

Beautiful interactive map of vanishing employment across USA (here)

Running out of data?

We love when we get access to new databases (like Census, surveys, etc.). Right?
Now imagine an integrated censuses database of over one hundred countries! The Minnesota Population Center can help you with this megalomaniac database.

Take a look at their site: project 'Integrated Public Use Microdata Series'.

Have fun.

Portuguese Urban (historical) Cartography

Here you will find a lot of historical maps of cities colonized by the Portuguese. Great Archive!

Urban History - Rio de Janeiro

A great historical view of Rio de Janeiro here !

Click "ilustrações" and then "um passeio no tempo"


* Thanks Erivelton Guedes for he tip.

San Francisco crimes in 3D

3D density maps to visualize crime spots
Great work from this guy here




Via Flowingdata