Three firms own 89% of your sugar water.

(Hmmm, this needs a bit of design IMHO. I might have a chop at it)

Research and visualisation by Dr Phil Howard of Michigan State University. He’s done some other, great visual explorations of key industries including organic food and seeds.

Check out their great, ingenious work in this post for The Guardian.

Here’s the full bus-heatmap mentioned in the piece.

What colour is happiness in China? Or good luck in Africa? Or anger in Eastern Europe? Are any colour meanings universal across cultures and continents?

A visualisation of the meanings of different colours in different cultures by David McCandless and AlwaysWithHonor.com.

• EXTRA A short photo story about how a version of this image ended up as the 91st and final cover design of our book, Information is Beautiful. Yes, 91 versions!
• HELP We’ve painted with a pretty broad brush. So there’s likely to be local variations or glitches. So if you spot any, or have you have references and sources for other colour meanings around the world, please send them over or comment below.

If you like this image, you can order an amazing full-colour print of it.

Much was proclaimed about how these new laws would protect musicians and artists revenue and livelihoods.

But how much money do musicians really get paid in this new digital marketplace?

This image is based on an excellent post at The Cynical Musician called The Paradise That Should Have Been about pitiful digital royalties. (Thanks to Neilon for pointing that out). I’ve taken his calculations and added a few more.

As ever, this was incredibly difficult to research. Industry figures are hard to get hold of. Some are even secret. Last.Fm’s royalty and payment system is beyond comprehension. (If you can explain it to me, please get in touch)

Note: these figures do not include publishing royalties (paid to composers of songs). The full spreadsheet of data does though. You can see all the numbers and sources here:http://bit.ly/DigitalRoyalty

If you have any experiences, data or royalty statements to share, please post below!

Now that Google and China are engaged in deathmatch, we’ve enhanced our visualisation of banned keywords and censored websites on the Chinese interwebs. (As ever, our data is here for your to peruse).

Thanks to amazing feedback from visitors, we’ve been able to update and regrow our ‘living image’ of the evidence for nutritional supplements. Both the interactive version, the spreadsheet of data and the still image have all been re-versioned. See this changelog for the exact differences.

Some highlights:

• Omega 6 has risen up. But Omega3 has taken a huge demotion. It may soon be restored above the ‘Worth it Line’ however due to new studies. Just part of a large evidence war going on behind the scenes. Stay tuned.
• Cocoa has been thrust into the limelight after evidence for beneficial effects on the cardiovascular system have surfaced.
• CoQ10, a much requested ‘super-supplement’, has been added. See where it appears.

This week, we were spooging over Wilfred Castillo’s luscious Tide Prediction graphic but gnashing at the small size of the sample images. Lo – a beautiful full sized version to be pored over. (Thanks Wilfred)

I’ve long been an admirer of London-based data artist, Stefanie Posavec. So, when I started working on the Information Is Beautiful book, she was the first person I sought out for collaboration. By happy coincidence she lived around the corner from me.

The result is the awesome (and controversial) Left vs Right concept map.

Now available as a limited edition poster!

Literary Organism

Stefanie’s personal work verges more into data art and is concerned with the unveiling of things unseen. ‘Literary Organism’ is an amazing visualisation of the structure of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.

Here the lines divide into chapters, bloom into paragraphs, sprout sentences, and spread out into words. All are colour-coded according to the key themes.

The process involved intense mark-up of the original text.

And the creation of a series of awesome visualisations.

Take a look at them in high resolution. These small screens don’t really do the detail justice. [via Notcot]

Ok Go

I’m sure you’ve seen US rockband Ok Go’s amazing Mousetrap-esque video. Here, Stefanie teamed up with Microsoft research ecologist, Greg McInerny to create a visualisation design for the album cover. They worked from the text of the album namesake ‘The Influence of the Blue Ray Of the Sunlight and of the Blue Colour of The Sky‘ by General AJ Pleasonton.

Their works in progress sprang some nice side images based on the lyrical rhythm of the album.

Entangled Word Bank

Here Stefanie produced a visualisation of the evolution of the various editions of Darwin’s opus, The Origin Of Species. I loved the organic feel of the image, like specimens pressed under glass. And the number crunching of over a million words, again by Microsoft ecologist Greg McInerny (using statistical package ‘R’, nerds).

I actually wrote a piece about this in Wired UK. (Nepotism? Je?). So you can find out more there.

Each visual approach was generated from a different ‘seed’ of DNA code. This produced a entire species of organisms, from which the final one was chosen.

Lefts Vs Right

Stefanie did a beautiful job illustrating how political notions may percolate down from government, into society, families, individuals, beliefs and back around into institutions. This concept map has courted much controversy. Left vs Right is perhaps a old and limited way of perceiving the spectrum. But it’s mostly how it’s presented via the media – left wing vs. right wing, liberal vs. conservative, Labour vs Tory. And so maybe in our minds too…?

Get A Limited Edition poster

I love the Left vs Right. I think visualising concepts is one most exciting potentials of the information design movement. So I’m proud to announce that we’ve made a limited edition print of it.

We’ve got just 200 of the US version and 200 of the World version to sell – all numbered and signed by Stefanie Posavec and myself, David McCandless.

They’re printed on 300 gsm, FSC-certified art paper at A1 size (60 x 81 cm). (Translation: they’re gorgeous!).

You can find out more details on our Information Is Beautiful Big Cartel page. It has secure ordering.

25% of the profits will go to Ganet’s Adventure School, a children’s charity in Malawi.

You can also get some prints of Stefanie’s work here. Check out her site at itsbeenreal.co.uk

In Your Dreams
I really liked this visualization from Kailie Parrish. Not just for the stylish look. But for the subject matter. Stepping out of the info-, data-, stats-sphere into the deeply personal and a little bit magical-sphere. Nice! (I’d also love to see a version that was actually readable.)

[via DataVisualization.ch]

How Do I Get My Girlfriend To Shave?
Type a phrase into Google and it will attempt to auto-complete the phrase for you. An incidental feature but always hilariously revealing about the deep concerns of the group mind. I had a go at visualizing the query “How do I get my girlfriend / boyfriend to…” using the sweet tool Web Seer. See what you think.

How Safe Is Your Password?
A few visuals about the weakness of most peoples’ passwords have been doing the rounds. I like this one best as it adds an extra layer of sociological categorization. Due credit to Robin Richards.

As ever, if you find anything worthy of being breakfasted upon by hungry info-nerds, please pass it on.

A generative data-visualisation of all the scientific evidence for popular health supplements by David McCandless and Andy Perkins.

I’m a bit of a health nut. Keeping fit. Streamlining my diet. I plan to live to the age of 150 in fact. But I get frustrated by constant, conflicting reports and studies about health supplements.

Is Vitamin C worth taking or not? Does Echinacea kill colds? Am I missing out not drinking litres of Goji juice, wheatgrass extract and flaxseed oil every day?

In an effort to give myself a quick reference guide, I dove into the scientific evidence and created a visualization for my book. And then worked with the awesome Andy Perkins on a further interactive, generative “living image”.

Play with interactive version | See the still image

This visualisation generates itself from this Google Doc. So when new research comes out, we can quickly update the data and regenerate the image. (How cool is that??) Hopefully then this should be a useful web resources for years to come.

About the image

This image is a “balloon race”. The higher a bubble, the greater the evidence for its effectiveness. But the supplements are only effective for the conditions listed inside the bubble.

You might also see multiple bubbles for certain supps. These is because some supps affect a range of conditions, but the evidence quality varies from condition to condition. For example, there’s strong evidence that Green Tea is good for cholesterol levels. But evidence for its anti-cancer effects is conflicting. In these cases, we give a supp another bubble.

The evidence

We only considered large, human, randomized placebo-controlled trials in our data scrape – wherever possible. No animal trials. No cell studies. Many of the health claims made by the $23 billion supplements industry are based on non-human trials. We wanted to cut through that.

This piece was doggedly researched by myself, and researchers Pearl Doughty-White and Alexia Wdowski. We looked at the abstracts of over 1500 studies on PubMed (run by US National Library Of Medicine) and Cochrane.org (which hosts meta-studies of scientific research). It took us several months to seek out the evidence – or lack of.

You can see our key results in this spreadsheet. (It’s the same spreadsheet that generates the interactive image).

Generation Game

This is our first interactive piece here on Information Is Beautiful. We’ll be doing more generative pieces over the next few months so stay tuned!

Updates

UPDATE 1: 6th Mar 2010 - We’ve updated the spreadsheet (changes in bold) and the viz after great feedback and new evidence and corrections from our amazing visitors. Thank you all so much.

Quick summary: We’ve added CoQ10, cocoa, capsaicin, L-Lysine and hyaluronic acid to the chart. And adjusted entries for Magnesium, Tumeric and Omega 3 (part of a massive downgrade of Omega 3 in fact). Read the change-log for full details

UPDATE 1: 10th Mar 2010 - Omega 3 has been downgraded in almost every category. See the spreadsheet (changes in bold) for more details.

See the visualisation | Check out the spreadsheet

Feed Us Back

As ever, we welcome your thoughts, crits, comments, corrections, compliments, tweaks, new evidence, missing supps, and general feedback. Thank you!