conye – LookingOutwards01

 

Mortality Data Visualization by Nathan Yau:

“…life expectancy is typically quoted “from birth.” It’s the number of years a baby is expected to live the moment he or she escapes from the womb into the wondrous realities of the outside world. This is a good measure for progress in countries and is a fine wideout view, but it’s just so-so for you and me, as individuals.” – Nathan Yau

This is one of my favorite data visualizations of all time! It’s really great how interactive and creative it is, without sacrificing clarity. It’s inspiring to me because I first saw it when I was in my junior year of high school, and it was one of the first examples of computation for a creative purpose that I had ever seen (it’s also really fun to play around with).

It was made by Nathan Yau, who has a PHD in Statistics from UCLA and also writes for the site FlowingData. He notes that he got his data from the Social Security Administration.

Although I am not entirely sure, I think at least parts of his data visualization are written in Javascript.