Dataviz by Sunlight

Are NFL Football Hits Getting Harder And More Dangerous?

Super Bowl XLVII will kick off Sunday with its typical bombastic fanfare: Beyonce will wow us with her live halftime show, and “space baby” commercials will overload us with cuteness.

But this year, there’s a gray cloud hanging over the Super Bowl: the mounting anger about devastating injuries to players’ brains and bodies.

sciencecenter:

What would a city’s CO2 emissions look like?

One ton of CO2 would fill a sphere 33 feet across. The office of the mayor of New York City decided to take this information and, given the city’s overall CO2 emissions, visualize exactly what New York’s CO2 emissions would look like if all of the gas was condensed around the center of Manhattan. The screenshots above are taken from Michael Bloomberg’s video, and the visuals are dramatic - the emissions after only an hour tower over nearby buildings, and after just one day, the Empire State Building would be swallowed by CO2. The scariest part of the whole project? New York is only the 5th worst city in terms of per capita emissions.

A Campaign Map, Morphed By Money

Explore political ad spending through creative cartography. This animated map shows where superPACs and other outside groups spent their money — over a six-month period during the general election — to air political ads aimed at influencing the presidential race.

npr:

Infographic — ELECTION 2012: EARLY VOTING BY STATE
George Mason University professor Michael McDonald runs the United State Elections Projects and expects about 35 percent of voters to cast their ballots early this year. Find out your state’s voting schedule and registration deadlines here.
— rachel

npr:

Infographic — ELECTION 2012: EARLY VOTING BY STATE

George Mason University professor Michael McDonald runs the United State Elections Projects and expects about 35 percent of voters to cast their ballots early this year. Find out your state’s voting schedule and registration deadlines here.

— rachel

The 47 Percent, In One Graphic

Mitt Romney’s comments regarding the 47 percent of Americans who pay no income tax is getting lots of attention today. Our colleague Mark Memmott explains the context.

Here’s a closer look at the numbers.

Odd Things Happen When You Chop Up Cities And Stack Them Sideways

Take away the bums, the fashionistas, the food carts, the cabs, the colors, the smells, the sounds, cut it up and stack it on a table, New York’s grid system seems more than a little monotonous.

Fire forecasts across the United States

As megafires in the Southwest are becoming the new normal, NPR reports in a five-part series.

100 Years Of Immigrants In America, In Two Graphs

Immigrants make up roughly the same share of the U.S. population today as they did a century ago.

But changes in the global economy, and in U.S. immigration law, have dramatically shifted where U.S. immigrants are coming from.

Track all immigration related issues coming through our government using Scout.

austinkleon:

The Process of Radiolab

Above is a screenshot of a Radiolab episode in ProTools and their wall of sticky notes from planning episodes, all from a pretty fucking delightful piece by Jad Abumrad about the origins of Radiolab and what he’s learned about process and pushing things forward.

Now that Radiolab is nine years old, and now that we’ve found an audience, a strange thing has happened.

There’s now a pressure to NOT do the very thing that got us here – not experiment, not play with forms, not take risks.

If I could identify my one constant source of gut churn right now, it’s this: how do I keep the quality high but NOT repeat myself?

It’s way, way easier to keep the quality high if you choose to solve the same old problems over and over. But if you do that, you risk becoming a caricature of yourself.

So what do you do?

Paying For College: Financial Aid In America, In 2 Graphics

Tuition has gone through the roof in the past decade. But so has financial aid.

Grants — scholarships and other money that doesn’t have to be paid back — have risen by more than 50 percent, to nearly $7,000 per student per year. (That’s after adjusting for inflation.) Student loans have risen by a similar amount.

How The Poor, The Middle Class And The Rich Spend Their Money

How do Americans spend their money? And how do budgets change across the income spectrum?

The graph below answers these questions. It shows average household spending patterns for U.S. households in three income categories — one just below the poverty line, one at the middle of the income distribution and one at the top of the distribution.

npr:

(via What America Spends On Groceries : Planet Money)

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR

npr:

(via What America Spends On Groceries : Planet Money)

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR

The Most Popular Month for Birthdays

Amitabh Chandra, a professor of public policy at the Harvard University, earlier published a data table detailing how many babies were born in the United States on each date between 1973 and 1999. September 16th happens to be the most common birthday while December 25th is the least popular birthday

Matt Stiles, data journalist at NPR, converted this NYT table into a static heatmap for easy visualization (the darker the color, the higher the probability of births happening on that date) and Andy Kriebel made an interactive heatmap of the same data using Tableau – this version lets you hover over any cell and you can see the underlying data.

50 Years of Government Spending, In 1 Graph

Of each dollar the federal government spends, how much goes to defense? How much goes to Social Security? How much goes to interest on the debt? And how has this sort of thing changed over time?