The Lovely Charts and Graphs Thread

[Count Bobulescu]

[Dr. FIVE]

[Ephilant]

In Germany, driven by pressure from campaigners against food speculation, several financial institutions have withdrawn investment vehicles that allow investors to speculate on the price of food.

Al Jazeera, 22/08/2012

[Count Bobulescu]

[Count Bobulescu]

[Dr. FIVE]

[20 yards of linen=1 coat]

http://i.imgur.com/DxWer.gif

The animated .gif above shows the rise of high-frequency trading across several U.S. stock exchanges over the last five years. You'll notice that there's relatively little activity in 2007, followed by spikes in activity at the opening and close of the market starting in 2008. And then, sometime around the start of 2010, activity becomes much, much more frenetic and erratic. The image was originally posted by Nanex, a company that provides market data to traders.

Algorithmic trading lets financial firms to spot and exploit market patterns at lightning speeds. This can bring a tidy profit, but it also puts computers in charge of making decisions that can cost a company millions, and that may have an unpredictable effect on the rest of the market.

The ascent of high-frequency trading has long been a concern within the financial industry (see “Trading Shares in Milliseconds”). But criticism reached a fever pitch last week when Knight Capital Group, a well respected and fairly conservative trading firm, suffered catastrophic losses when one of its algorithms went haywire for 30 minutes. Reuters’ financial blogger, Felix Salmon, suggests that the chart above shows that algorithmic trading is already out of hand:

The stock market today is a war zone, where algobots fight each other over pennies, millions of times a second. Sometimes, the casualties are merely companies like Knight, and few people have much sympathy for them. But inevitably, at some point in the future, significant losses will end up being borne by investors with no direct connection to the HFT [high-frequency trading] world, which is so complex that its potential systemic repercussions are literally unknowable.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view...rserk/?ref=rss

[Baron von Biffo]

[Count Bobulescu]

[Dr. FIVE]

[Dr. FIVE]

[Count Bobulescu]

When it comes to book publishing, not all countries are created equal, as this distorted map of the world by the International Publishers Association shows. The sizes of the countries on the map are based on the value of their domestic publishing markets and visualized using a tool by viewsoftheworld.net. IPA and Rüdiger Wischenbart Content and Consulting, a book publishing consultant firm, used data from national publishers' associations and government export statistics.

As you can see, places like the U.S., Europe, and parts of Asia are engorged in illustration of their strong publishing industries. Meanwhile, Africa and the Middle East are tiny slivers, meaning that the number of books published in those places is extremely low compared to the rest of the world. As per the map some countries have significantly stronger global voices through books; the report aims to show where book publishing can grow.

"The map demonstrates the way that books and the industry behind them reflect access to knowledge," according to the creators of the report. "The strategic goal going forward is certainly adjusting this map so that in the future, the world of publishing more closely resembles that standard map of geographers and demographers."
Map from IPA via Digital Book World

[Count Bobulescu]

J.R.R. Tolkein put a lot of detail into the world of Lord of the Rings, and one avid fan has cataloged all of those details to produce lots of charts, like this one of Middle Earth's population by race and sex. Emil Johansson, a chemical engineering student at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden's complex interactive documentation of the books is called The Lord of the Rings Project. It includes data on 923 characters from The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and posthulously published books.

As you can see, almost all of them — whether humans, elves, hobbits or dwarves — are male with just 19 percent of all Tolkein characters being female.
"The low number of females is not due to lack of females in Middle-Earth but due to the fact that Tolkien did not describe many of them," Johansson explains. In other words, ladies existed, Tolkein just didn't write about them.
To see the rest of the extensive project, go to lotrproject.com.

[Count Bobulescu]

Cyberattacks are happening constantly across the globe, and now you can see what that looks in real-time with this map by the Honeynet Project that shows so many attacks, it looks and feels like it's straight out of an apocalyptic war movie.
Each red dot that pops up when you go to the map represents an attack on a computer. Yellow dots represent honeypots, or systems set up to record incoming attacks. The black box on the bottom says where each attack is coming from as they come in. The data comes from the members of Honeynet Project's network of honeypot sensors that choose to publish the attacks. Not all of members of the project, which has more than 40 chapters around the world, chose to push data, which is why more red dots show up in Europe.

That said, if all the attacks showed up in real-time, there would be a lot more red dots popping up in more places. Even though it only offers a taste, the map gives an astounding sense of how much malware is attacking computer networks.
To see the chart in action, go to map.honeycloud.net.

[Count Bobulescu]

Budget forecasting may be an imperfect art prone to lots of error, but when researchers looked at how forecasts and reality measured up, the errors ran mostly in one direction. Jeffrey A. Frankel and Jesse Schreger from the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at the one-year projections for the deficit or surplus in the government budget for 17 Eurpoean countries from 1999 and 2008 (so, setting aside the volatile years since the financial crisis) and then compared them to what actually happened. To compare countries, they put the error as a percentage of GDP.
As you can see, all but four of the 17 nations were too optimistic about their national budgets. The seven most optimistic countries include a who's who of the European debt crisis: Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Italy all were among the most optimistic. But Switzerland and Germany, both of whom have strong currencies, also tended towards rosy predictions.