Visualizing World Birth and Death Rates

https://googledrive.com/host/0B2GQktu-wcTicEI5VUZaYnM1emM/

by bflbfl • 13 years ago

52 19 13 years ago

googledrive.com

bflbfl6• 13 years ago

A few initial notes on this are here:

http://www.nowherenearithaca.com/2013/10/visualization-of-wo...

arscan• 13 years ago

Cool! I was actually planning on doing the exact same thing this week, but you beat me to it. I just wrapped up a visualization of github activity -- (http://github-wargames.com), and thought that doing a visualization of simulated worldwide births/deaths would be a cool little project to try next.

D3's mapping support is amazing and makes these types of projects stunningly straightforward (combined with the open map data that is out there).

tectonic• 13 years ago

This is really compelling. I feel like, after watching it for a few minutes, I have a much more intuitive sense of population growth / change. Well done!

a3n• 13 years ago

I would like to be able to choose only births, only deaths, only one country or region, etc.

ahassan• 13 years ago

French Guiana (in South America) is labelled France on this map...

tokenadult• 13 years ago

Isn't French Guiana an overseas department of France?

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1117.html

National statistics for that territory would be collected by the national government of France.

bflbfl6• 13 years ago

@ahassan - good catch. The geometry data file had them together I guess and I need to go through and split that up.

@arscan - that is really cool. I'd say go for making your own. There were already world meters out there before I decided to make this one. It's a great way to learn all sorts of stuff, imo.

@tectonic - I know what you mean about just a few minutes is all you need to kind of get a feel for things. thx

@a3n - fyi - you can hover on a specific country to see what's going on there

femto• 13 years ago

Nice. Is muddy Red/Green the best choice of dot colours for a colour blind person? I'm not colour blind myself, so I can't tell, but I know people that are, and small areas of low saturation red/green are exactly the things that cause trouble for them. (Line graphs with red and green lines against a light background are also another classic.)

crandles• 13 years ago

I couldn't tell that the dots were colored differently at all.

phorese2• 13 years ago

Heh, thanks. I am red/green blind and didn't realize the dots were color-coded. I also would not have been able to tell you the color of any dot -- though I still can't, but now I have a 50% chance :)

bflbfl6• 13 years ago

@femto - that's a good point. That occurred to me, but for the moment I decided to stick with the red/green that was already used for the previous visualization. Well sort of, as I actually use d3.rgb.darker on the actual colors because I wasn't satisfied with the original ones, as they looked too light. Even for red/green, I think there's a lot of room for improvement here to make them stand out more.

I'm not sure off the top of my head what would be best for the rg replacement. Maybe some subtle shape differences, etc.

phorese2• 13 years ago

Some suggestions:

- "O" for birth, "X" (or "+"?) for death

- Filled circle for birth, non-filled circle for death

- Expanding filled circle for birth, Shrinking filled circle for death (might not work well with low fps)

If you decide to go with color change, here's some combinations that I (red/green blind) have trouble with:

- dark red/dark green/brown

- purple/violet/pink/grey

- dark red/dark purple/dark violet

- blue/violet/purple

- yellow/warm green/light brown

- yellow/orange

bflbfl6• 13 years ago

FYI - I saw some weird googlesite errors that might be related to the (moderate) load it's getting at the moment.

The visualization is also on this googledrive site

https://googledrive.com/host/0B_n1OLMaOursX2hsRUhZNElwZmc/

natejenkins• 13 years ago

It would be nice if the color of each country would change over time representing the net change in population.

But very cool as is, nice work!

kadaj• 13 years ago

Service unavailable.

edem• 13 years ago

503.

bflbfl6• 13 years ago

@edem

It's also at these two places

https://googledrive.com/host/0B_n1OLMaOursX2hsRUhZNElwZmc/

https://googledrive.com/host/0B4G_4-zdiD1gU2NoX285dmxpTXM/

alnafie• 13 years ago

The longer I stare at this the more insignificant it makes me feel...

On the bright side, if you are into startups, look at all those new people coming into the world who need things!

bflbfl6• 13 years ago

@phorese - thanks for the suggestions - great color info

For those who might be interested, I have updated things so that * colors are a little brighter (not right yet, but maybe better for now) * the list is always prepended to, not appended this immediately helps convey the "velocity"; if you mouseover an element in the list, it should pause the insertions (although the counters keep going); when you mouse out, all the "backed up" events slide down. Might be some quirks on browsers with that, but not using anything fancy... this has not been tweaked to work well on mobile browsers yet either.

* there is an option to have it append to the list instead of prepend. Not sure this is needed at all, now that I think about it

There might be 503's sometimes. I don't think it's a quota issue, but just that googledrive can do that under load. I think http code 403 would mean a quota issue. Could be wrong, though. I removed an unnecessary 1MB(!) download that might help.

Visualizing World Birth and Death Rates

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