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Archive for the 'World' Category
World: The price of beer in 128 countries
How much will it cost you to shout out “Mine’s a pint!” in pubs around the globe? Well, a new online database of beer prices in 128 countries will provide the answer.
With the price of a pint of beer being a similar economic indicator as the BigMac index, there might be more to it then just finding the best watering hole. Pint Price - as the database is called - provides the most data in beer drinking countries like the UK (more than 50 cities listed), US (more than 20 cities) or Germany (4 cities list) but also more exotic destinations like…
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Visualizing the size of the banking crisis
Sizing the issue at hand seems to be the first problem. Banks keep the so called derivatives off their balance sheets (because when looking at it with a sense of black humor these instruments are a bit like the banks’ own print run of casino chips - As long as others exchange them freely for real money that’s what they are worth. When that situation changes their value changes too - well, worst case to nothing or - better said, whatever someone is willing to pay for the illusion of value)…
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Data-Visualization: The world according to newspapers
We always knew that the press and journalists are selective with what story makes it to the cover pages or even receives a few paragraphs to be mentioned. But nobody has visualized this so far and shown how unbalanced some newspapers are regarding world news.
The two heatmaps below show news coverage by geographical region from the Daily Mail and The Economist during 2007. They are part of a series of heatmaps created within a project by French journalists Nicolas Kayser-Bril and Gilles Bruno. The two are planning to…
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Data-Visualization: Country Codes of the World
Currently more than 260 top level domains are in use on the Internet. While the .com domain still remains the most popular, many country domains are now widely used as well.
On the map below each country is represented…
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Time: Cold War Calculators
Those who still remember slide rules from the time before pocket calculators or learned flying a plane before GPS devices became so common will love this site. Others who remember the atrocities of the cold war might have a different approach to these relics from a time we all hoped that it would have long passed…
But whatever approach or understanding for that time you might have the web site “Cold War Calculators” - a site dedicate to radiac calculators slides - might show you some new “instruments” seemingly necessary during this dark period…
We didn’t know there were that many kinds of different calculators for these strange purposes - radiation dosage calculators, bomb damage effect computers, nuclear effects estimators, causality slide rules, weapons effects rules and calculators, fallout predictors, burst calculators…
Anyway - bang you’re gone…
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Internet: Lights go out on two fiber backbones
A reminder on how dependent we already are on global communication networks and how quickly these can fall apart has again been provided yesterday afternoon.
Close to the Egyptian harbor of Alexandria, ships that could not enter the harbor due to weather conditions have stripped apart underwater fiber network cables for Internet and telephone communications with their anchors. The damaged cables are part of the “SEA-ME-WE 4″ fiber backbones reaching from Europe to Asia and into Africa. As a result from these damages Internet connectivity in Egypt has dropped to about 30% of the normal bandwidth and also Arabian countries as well as India have reported substantial impairments within data traffic to and from these countries…
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Data visualization: Leading surveillance societies around the world
Since 1997 two NGOs - the US-based Electronic Privacy Information Center and the UK-based Privacy International - have surveyed and assessed the state of surveillance and privacy protection in 47 countries. The annual Privacy & Human Rights Report compiled from their findings has by now become one of the most comprehensive surveys of global privacy and citizen rights.
Their “most recent report” published a few days ago has been created with the help of more than 200 experts from around the world and has grown to 1,100 pages. It shows trends of
“…an overall worsening of privacy protection across the world, reflecting an increase in surveillance and a declining performance of privacy safeguards…“, and
“…an increasing trend amongst governments to archive data on the geographic, communications and financial records of all their citizens and residents. This trend leads to the conclusion that all citizens, regardless of legal status, are under suspicion…
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Data visualization: Supercities of the 21st century
Have a look at the 19.20.21 (19 cities in the world with 20 million people in the 21st century) web site.
It introduces a study on key aspects of the phenomenon of supercities. The project is managed by Richard Wurman who is also the author of one of the most stylish fact-books called “Understanding USA“. Already included are a few pages on the development of the world’s largest cities from 1000 to 2005…
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Data Visualization: Doctors of the World
The image below was created as a poster for Dutch doctors to hangs on the wall of their waiting rooms. With 170 inhabitants per doctor Cuba is still the world leader on that chart. Not unsurprising other (former) communist countries follow on the next positions (in some of those countries the numbers have already started to deteriorate).
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Virtual Worlds: 3D Berlin in Google Earth
Since this week Germany’s capital Berlin is available as a 3D model within Google Earth. In difference to other 3D worlds already available in Google Earth the buildings within the virtual Berlin have detailed architectural representations including their photorealistic facades. Some buildings can even be visited or entered virtually. So far the present model covers about 10% of the area of Berlin - only a small sample of the official three-dimensional city model of Berlin. The model consists of some 44,000 buildings in the centre of Berlin shown in…
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