Student Debt and Income

Here are two interesting data viz related to student debt and income:

1. This app / data viz (using R) allows you to compare several colleges and universities side-by-side in terms of student debt, cost, and other variables.
2. More mundane (maybe) is the most recent college ranking by the Economist comparing actual vs. expected income after graduation.

Both seem to be inspired and driven by a large data set released recently under the auspices of the College Scorecard initiative.

Food Access Mashup

Here's a simple mashup of data layers relevant to the issue of food access - nothing fancy in terms of analytics, but nevertheless a nice and simple way to tell the story. Maybe more interesting is Community Commons and the online mapping tools included.

Using CartoDB

CartoDB is one of these hip new online mapping environments and here is a selection of useful resources:

• Using different projections (i.e. no Web Mercator)
• More about projections
• Visualize 2015 Urban Populations with Proportional Symbols (tutorial)

Mapping Runs

Where People Run in Major Cities is nothing new, but the resultant maps are beautiful. Here's RunKeeper and Strava - these are actually quite useful when looking to discover new areas for trail running and mountain biking.

Of course, you can also have fun with this, for example Running Drawing by Claire Wykoff.

Mapping James Bond

This Esri story map got a lot of attention: The James Bond Travel Map.

Be An Astronaut!

Very Cool! http://bl.ocks.org/maartenzam/raw/1dfc9de0c61eee127b22/

Math!

Refugees in Europe

The flow towards Europe is a pretty amazing map / animation visualizing the origins and destinations of refugees in Europe since 2012. Now combine this detached birds-eye view with a personal narrative illustrated here as a story map in Fleeing Syria for Europe: Safaa's fatal journey and you have a compelling story.

Greenland Is Melting Away

Greenland Is Melting Away is nothing new in terms of science, but a great multi-media viz by the New York Times. Here are the direct links to the two videos:

• Video 1
• Video 2

There is also a nice side story about collecting drone footage over the Greenland Ice Sheet at A Drone’s Vantage Point of a Melting Greenland with this video:

Climate Science: What You Need To Know

Why Leaves Change Color Each Fall

DSCOVR:EPIC

DSCOVR:EPIC are daily full images of our Earth from space using the EPIC camera flying aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite (read more about it here).

Climate Change is here.

Climate Change is here. is an online special by National Geographic organized into three sections: science, mitigation, and adaptation. As you would expect, the visuals are stunning.

Climate Change Calculator

Just in-time for the December UN meeting in Paris comes a nice and simple Climate Change Calculator.

Awesome Data Viz

15 Stunning Data Visualizations is a) a great compilation and b) includes a nice explanation of why a particular data viz is stunning.

The Seasonal Cycle

Nice and simple - just click the Play button and watch the seasons change on County Climate.

Dropchop

Dropchop.io is a browser-based GIS based on Mapbox and Turf.js (according to Maps Mania). There - that's all I know about it. But it seems pretty cool playing around with it - you can actually perform some pretty sophisticated geospatial analysis.

Global Air Quality in Real-Time

The World Air Quality Index Project provides just that: a global map of air quality in real-time:

• Global map
• Local map

Sea Level Rise

The folks @ Climate Central are producing some great interactive maps visualizing the impacts of sea level rise on coastal communities in the USA with their Surging Seas analysis. Here is a simplified version as an interactive and embeddable map:

Urban Sprawl Manila 1988 to 2014

NASA produced an interesting image comparison showing urban sprawl around Manila between 1988 and 2014 using Landsat images. Nothing new here, but a nice example of the benefits of a long satellite image archive,

3D World Elevation

If nothing else: cool! 3D World Elevation

El Nino!

File Conversions

Getting things (i.e. data) from one software to the next used to be much more of an issue...nowadays most software programs have pretty comprehensive import/export options. If all failed - at least for GIS data, there is GPSBabel and now a new online file conversion tool from Golden Software (also free, but requires registration).

Earthquakes in 3D

Nothing really new here, except the earthquake data for the last 100 years is now draped over a 3D globle: One Hundred Years of Seismic Activity. Cool? Yes! Necessary? No!

Landslides!

This is pretty good - except for the title: When Nature Strikes: Landslides

Fleeing Syria for Europe

A beautifully-designed and narrated story map: Fleeing Syria for Europe: Safaa's fatal journey

Diabetes and Immigration

Here are two recent interactive data infographics that combine it all: maps, charts, tables, spark lines, etc. - impressive!

• Diabetes in the United States
• America’s Source of Immigrants

But - what's missing: a link to download the data!

30 Years of MS Excel

Urban Density

There is no such thing as a city that has run out of room is a nice and simple data viz by the Washington Post: scroll-down a bit and compare different urban areas around the world.

Rising and Descending Air

Rising and Descending Air

Undercast Timelapse 10-06-15
Good Wednesday morning! Summit intern Adam Gill captured this timelapse footage yesterday afternoon of clouds rising up over the Northern Presidentials, before descending into the Great Gulf and dissipating.
Posted by Mount Washington Observatory on Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Mars!

Lot's of Mars maps recently - for good reason!

1. Discovering Liquid Water on Mars
2. Where on Mars?
3. The Martian Map
4. Bing Watney Home!

Mapping the USPS

Mapping the USPS Facility Network is pretty disturbing: enter an origin and a destination and see how and where your mail travels as it moves through the USPS network of facilities. I tried, as an example, sending a letter from my home to my office and it traveled 130 miles (compared to the shortest route of 47 miles).

Scale model of the Solar System