Max Fisher for the Washington Post mapped country emotion ratings, based on the results of a recent Gallup study. Singapore was ranked least emotional, whereas the Philippines was ranked most emotional. The United States was also relatively high. From Gallup:

While higher incomes may improve people's emotional wellbeing, they can only do so to a certain extent. In the United States, for example, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman and Princeton economist Angus Deaton found that after individuals make $75,000 annually, additional income will have little meaningful effect on how they experience their lives. Consider this finding in the context of Singapore, a country with one of the lowest unemployment rates and highest GDP per capita rates in the world, but a place where residents barely experience any positive emotions. This research shows that it will take more than higher incomes to increase positive emotions or decrease negative emotions. Singapore leadership needs to consider strategies that lie outside of the traditional confines of classic economics and would be well-advised to include wellbeing in its overall strategies if it is going to further improve the lives of its citizenry.

I'm curious about what we're seeing here though. The research infers wellbeing, but the survey was done by phone and face-to-face. Did Americans call overseas, or did residents call other citizens? The former might be kind of weird for some.

More importantly though, they asked questions like "Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?" and "Did you experience enjoyment?" Some cultures just don't express emotions, but it doesn't mean they don't feel them. (Read as: I'm not a robot! I have feelings, too!)

[Thanks, John]

In 1979, Atari released Lunar Lander, a game whose object was to land a module safely on the moon. Digital artist Seb Lee-Delisle turned the game into an installation in which you play the game, and your paths are drawn on a wall by a hanging robot. The result, a unique trace of players' paths in the game, is quite nice.

I'm surprised we haven't seen more video game-based pieces likes this. The only one that comes to mind is the Just Cause 2 point cloud, which showed 11 million player deaths. It revealed terrain and gameplay mechanics. There's also this graphic that shows what buttons to push to beat Super Mario Brothers 3, but that doesn't really count. It'd be fun to see the direct path of a Mario expert versus a novice path that doubles back and ends early. Pac-Man might be a fun one to see, too. Yeah, let's do that.

Jer Thorp talks ethics in the data-as-new-oil metaphor:

[W]e need to change the way that we collectively think about data, so that it is not a new oil, but instead a new kind of resource entirely. For this to occur we need to foster a deep understanding of data in society. As it happens, humanity has a mechanism for this kind of broad cultural change: the arts. As we proceed towards profit and progress with data, let us encourage artists, novelists, performers and poets to take an active role in the conversation. In doing so we may avoid some of the mistakes that we made with the old oil.

See also: Jer's talk on the human side of data.

CartoDB mapped every Rolling Stones tour from 1963 to 2007.

The Stones passed the half-century mark as a band this year. An incredible achievement for an incredible band. They also happen to be one of the most prolific touring bands in the world with more than 1,300 concerts all over the world, and over the last 50 years they have have traveled almost 1,000,000 Km (960,000 km actually).

Made with the newly introduced CartoDB 2.0, with added support for MapBox, more mapping capabilities, and a JavaScript API.

A research paper version of Noah Kalina's photo project by Timothy Weninger. Weninger saved versions of the paper at various stages of writing, and strung them together in a time-lapse video. It reminds me of Ben Fry's On the Origin of Species.

I wish I had done this with my dissertation. [via @revodavid]

Mike Bostock, Matthew Ericson and Robert Gebeloff for the New York Times explored changing tax rates from 1980 to 2010, for various income levels.

Most Americans paid less in taxes in 2010 than people with the same inflation-adjusted incomes paid in 1980, because of cuts in federal income taxes. At lower income levels, however, much of the savings was offset by increases in federal payroll taxes, state sales taxes and local property taxes. About half of households making less than $25,000 saved nothing at all.

Instead of trying to squeeze everything into one space, the graphic reads like a story, with changes in different types of taxes and comparisons across income levels.

When you plan pinball, the ball bounces around creating paths for itself and the better you play, the more control you have over those paths. Recent design graduate Sam van Doorn modified a machine so that you can see those paths in his project STYN. A poster is placed underneath the flippers, and the ball gets a douse of paint on the way out, so you get a unique sketch each time you play. [via infosthetics]

With Google's driverless cars now street legal in California, Florida, and Nevada, Gary Marcus for the New Yorker ponders a world where machines need a built-in morality system.

That moment will be significant not just because it will signal the end of one more human niche, but because it will signal the beginning of another: the era in which it will no longer be optional for machines to have ethical systems. Your car is speeding along a bridge at fifty miles per hour when errant school bus carrying forty innocent children crosses its path. Should your car swerve, possibly risking the life of its owner (you), in order to save the children, or keep going, putting all forty kids at risk? If the decision must be made in milliseconds, the computer will have to make the call.

Data analysis seems to be headed in the same direction. Where machines will have to start making human-like decisions, data represents more of the real world and looks less like snippets in time. As the gap between numbers and what they represent shrinks, the more we have to think about ethics, privacy, and whether or not what we're doing is right.

Using the Google ngrams corpus, xkcd sized the days of the year based on usage volume. Lots of firsts of the month and September 11th.

Ben Welsh, Robert Lopez, and Kate Linthicum for the Los Angeles Times analyzed more than a million runs by the Los Angeles Fire Department to estimate response times, based on where you live. The national standard is six minutes. The map shows average response times that are greater in red and those that are under in green (basically, anywhere there is a fire department).

The lead-in mentions that LAFD leaders have said that they routinely fail to meet the national standard, but if you've driven in Los Angeles, it's not hard to imagine why it takes those extra minutes. I wonder how this compares to other high-traffic cities.

Now that we're done giving thanks for all the intangibles like love, friends, family, and drunkenness, it's time to turn our attention to the physical objects we don't have yet. It's the most wonderful time of year! Here are gift ideas for your data geek friends and family. A few of these take a while to make, so be sure to order them now so that you get them in time for Christmas.
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Studio NAND and Moritz Stefaner, along with Jens Franke explore FIFA development programs around the world.

The FIFA Development Globe visu­al­ises FIFA's world­wide involve­ment in supporting foot­ball through educa­tional and infra­struc­tural projects. Using a 3D globe in combin­a­tion with inter­con­nected inter­face and visu­al­iz­a­tion elements, the applic­a­tion provides multiple perspect­ives onto an enormous dataset of FIFA's activ­ities, grouped by tech­nical support, perform­ance activ­ities, and devel­op­ment projects.

The globe itself is an icosahedron, or essentially a spherical shape made up of triangles. Triangles in each country represent programs and are colored by the three above categories, and you might recognize Moritz' elastic lists in the sidebar to filter through programs, by country, organization, and type. There's also a timeline view, which shows program development over the past five years.

Give it a go here. I should warn you though that it runs in Flash (a client requirement), and it could run sluggish depending on your machine. Sometimes I was disorientated by the interaction and animation, especially when I clicked and nothing happened until a few seconds later.

After seeing a timeline on future events as described in novels, designer Giorgia Lupi put it in visual form.

Basing on speculative fiction captions collected by Jane Hu, the visualization analyses 62 foretold future events. For each event the visualization highlights typology (are they mainly social, scientific, technological, political?), year of the prediction, genre of the book and age of the author, while dividing them into positive, neutral or negative events. In the end, good news: in 802,701 the world will exist and everything will be more or less ok.

The vertical bars represent how far in the past a future was described, icons in the middle represent type of event, and the rows underneath provide descriptions of said events.

The sheer amount of fiction makes this a fun one to look at. Although, I wish Lupi spaced events by time instead of just listing them in chronological order. I mean, it's a giant graphic already. Might as well go all the way with the timeline framework.

The Floor Charts tumblr shows actual charts used on the United States Congress floor. Some of the paper signs aren't so flashy, but then there are ones like the Republican Wheel of Giveaways used by Edward Markey that leave you wishing you'd thought of it first.

Remember when Netanyahu used that bomb diagram and we thought it was ridiculous? I guess he was just following the high high standard set by governments around the world.

R comes with a lot of datasets, some with the core distribution and others with packages, but you'd never know which ones unless you went through all the examples found at the end of help documents. Luckily, Vincent Arel-Bundock cataloged 596 of them in an easy-to-read page, and you can quickly download them as CSV files.

Many of the datasets are dated, going back to the original distribution of R, but it's a great resource for teaching or if you're just looking for some data to play with.

You know those songs that you love so much that you cry because they're over? Well, cry no more with the Inifinite Jukebox by Paul Lamere. Inspired by Infinite Gangnam Style, the Infinite Jukebox lets you upload a song, and it'll figure out how to cut the beats and piece them back together for a version of that song that goes forever.

With The Infinite Jukebox, you can create a never-ending and ever changing version of any song. The app works by sending your uploaded track over to The Echo Nest, where it is decomposed into individual beats. Each beat is then analyzed and matched to other similar sounding beats in the song. This information is used to create a detailed song graph of paths though similar sounding beats. As the song is played, when the next beat has similar sounding beats there’s a chance that we will branch to a completely different part of the song. Since the branching is to a very similar sounding beat in the song, you (in theory) won’t notice the jump. This process of branching to similar sounding beats can continue forever, giving you an infinitely long version of the song.

I'm not sure what these digitally rendered Lego blocks by JR Schmidt represent, other than the geography of New York, but the image sure is pretty. This may or may not also have to do with me loving everything Lego.

In a beautiful rendition of the galaxy, Google visualized 100,000 stars, starting at the sun and out to a view of the Milky Way. Start with the tour, which takes you through an overview of what there is to see, and then explore on your own. Specifically, once you zoom out over four light years away from the sun, you start to see other known stars. Click on the labels for information and a closer look at what looks like flaming balls of lava. [via @pitchinc]

Since 2000, the Hewlett Foundation has made over 7,000 grants summing $3.86 billion, to support communities around the world. Periscopic broke it down by area and amount. Each section is a heat map with years on the horizontal and amount on the vertical. The darker the shade of green, the more grants given that year for the corresponding amount. Click on a rectangle, and you can see the details of any individual grant. [Thanks, Kim]

RStudio, the folks behind the IDE for R released last year, continues to expand their offerings for current and future R users. Shiny is RStudio's most recent release, and it aims to make R web applications easier to make and share.

The main advantage is that you can create user interfaces that show R output, without HTML and JavaScript. There are essentially two parts to each app that you write: the client and the server. You load the Shiny package, create a client and server, and you're off to the races.

However, don't get too excited about R on the Web yet. The apps are meant to run locally, so to share an application with someone, you have to send them the code for them to run on their own. RStudio is working on a paid service that lets you host your apps online. Or, because Shiny is open source, you can try running it on your own, if you like.