Our Reliance on Plants is Increasing

A representation of the pressure local populations put on their ecosystem, this map shows how much plant matter people need for food and other products compared to the amount of plant material produced in each region (but not per capita use). For example, in the United States, each person uses 5.94 metric tons of carbon (vegetation) per year, while in South-central Asia, people use 1.23 metric tons per year. However, the United States produces more than it requires, so the ratio between usage and vegetation is low. South-central Asia, on the other hand, uses less per person, but it has a high population that collectively require more carbon than the land produces, and so must import products from other regions.

via earthobservatory.nasa.gov

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Climate Change and Malaria, Scenario for 2050

With climate conditions changing in the future, due to increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, conditions for pests also change. The primary Malaria agent, the falciparum malaria parasite, will be able to spread into new areas, as displayed in this map, by 2050 using the Hadley CM2 high scenario. Other areas, not displayed in the map, will be uninhabitable by the parasite, and thus free of the pest.

via maps.grida.no

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Visualizing 10 Million Facebook Friendships

When the data is the social graph of 500 million people, there are a lot of lenses through which you can view it. One that piqued Facebook intern Paul Butler curiosity was the locality of friendship. He was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. He wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them.

He began by taking a sample of about ten million (about 2%) pairs of friends from Apache Hive, Facebook's data warehouse. He combined that data with each user's current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then he merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city.

via www.facebook.com

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