Which nations consume the most water?
May 25, 2012 01:50 am • Permalink 
This Scientific American article and infographic by Mark Fischetti detail the consumption of water usage throughout the world. Mark used a Sankey diagram to show the top 10 water consuming countries and how their water was being used. One of his first points is that population is the largest factor of water consumption. So I wonder why he didn't choose to use population adjusted numbers. Many of the article's commenters felt the same way. One posted a few of the countries per capita water use:
China: 2781 lts/day, India: 2591 lts/day, US: 7175 lts/day, Japan: 3752 lts/day
The way you display your data depends on the story you're trying to tell. In this case, I wonder if the message could be better by using per capita.
[via @ChristiansenJen]
More infographic software
May 25, 2012 12:07 am • Permalink 
Recently there's been a spate of infographic tools popping up (e.g., easel.ly, venngage, and infogr.am). Okay, I'm not sure if 3 qualifies as a spate, but it sure seemed like a lot in a short period of time. I gave Infogr.am a whirl, and it appears to be the front runner in terms of capabilities. Unlike easel.ly, you can *actually input data* into your infographic! What a novel concept. Venngage was hit and miss in terms of it accepting the data I entered. Infogr.am also has a bug in that you can't have the number 0 in your data. Go figure.
I took Nathan's data for Rambo kill counts and used a bit of it for my example image. These are the number of kills in the various Rambo movies where Rambo was wearing a shirt, wasn't wearing a shirt, and the sum of both. You can check out the live version to see it in all its animated glory. Unfortunately, you can't change how ginormous everything is.
Like the other tools, it lets you select from a few templates to get you started. It also lets you create just an animated chart if you don't want to go the full infographic route. Right now there are only 5 chart types (including one very odd frog chart), but they've been very actively updating the tool in the last couple of days.
It's still a bit buggy, but worth keeping in your bookmarks for future reference if you're a beginner or non-programmer.
[via infosthetics]
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