What's in a Surname?

A new view of the United States based on the distribution of common last names shows centuries of history and echoes some of America's great immigration sagas. To compile this data, geographers at University College London used phone directories to find the predominant surnames in each state. Software then identified the probable provenances of the 181 names that emerged.

via ngm.nationalgeographic.com
(To examine the map more closely, click above link)

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In Investing: When You Start And When You Finish

This chart shows annualized returns for the S.& P. 500 for every starting year and every ending year since 1920 — nearly 4,000 combinations in all. READ ACROSS THE CHART to see how money invested in a given year performed, depending on when it was withdrawn.

via www.nytimes.com

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What's Next for WikiLeaks?

The news about WikiLeaks is developing every day. good.is's latest infographic should give you all you need to know about the major players in the quest to either keep the site running or shut it down.

If you don't know what is WikiLeaks?. Sweden's public service television, SVT, is releasing this one-hour documentary chronicling the history of WikiLeaks.

via awesome.good.is

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Google Ngram Viewer Gauges Word Popularity Over Centuries

Google launched Ngram Viewer, an experiment to let lay users and researchers search and study the waxing and waning of phrase instances over 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008 that Google has indexed in its cloud computing system. There's a whole community of Ngram collection going on over at Ngrams.Tumblr.com.

via ngrams.googlelabs.com
(Click above link to check your favourite word popularity)

EXIT Festival

Exit (also known as State of Exit) is an annual summer music festival in the Petrovaradin Fortress of Novi Sad, Serbia. It is staged annually since 2000 and usually lasts four days.

This infographic is about statistics of EXIT Festival from 2000 to 2010. Next year Exit Festival will be held for the twelfth time, and between July 7 and 10, 2011, the two-millionth visitor will pass the festival gates :)

via Exit Festival

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The Evolution of Writing and Printing from 3000BC to 1500AD

Although nobody knows the true origin of writing and printing for sure. Charles Kantz a aspiring graphic designer from San Francisco Bay Area tried to point time and place of some remarkable discovery in history of writing and printing.

This is an infographic map he created in his History of Graphic Design class. It shows the evolution of writing and the development of printing from 3000BC to 1500AD.

via Charles Kantz

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Isarithmic History of the Two-Party Vote

Using county-level data, this is spatially and temporally interpolated presidential vote returns for the two major party candidates in each election from 1920-2008. The result illuminates the sometimes gradual, sometimes rapid change in the geographic basis of presidential partisanship.

via James B. Duke

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History of Social Media

Social media has become an integral part of modern society. There are general social networks with user bases larger than the population of most countries. There are niche sites for virually every special interest out there. There are sites to share photos, videos, status updates, sites for meeting new people and sites to connect with old friends. There are social solutions to just about every need.

via blog.skloog.com

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