visualization

Every once in a while you stumble upon an obsessive hobby niche with some really stunning visualizations. Today’s obsession: Avengers comic books and the work of Jer Thorp. It turns out that there is a massive database of comic book metadata to work with.

The covers of every Avengers issue:

Who appears in each issue, by date:

Jer goes on to look at Avengers by first appearance, sex, robot, gods, and in part II who appeared more, who created the characters, and so on. I only wish he had shared more about how he built the visualization tools.

We're working with Slava Menn and Brad Geswein, the founders of Gotham Bicycle Defense Industries, to create a new piece of urban biking gear. Unlike most products, this one is being developed from beginning to end by the people who will use it. Our network of urban cyclists are helping us decide everything from design to name. We're calling this experiment Product of the People.

Welcome to my favorite part of the product creation process: industrial design. Quora.com designer Rebekah Cox has said, “Companies try to support designers by giving them ‘a seat at the table.’ In practice, however, a designer is sitting at the table well after the important product decisions that influence the design have been made. This is where muddy designs are born.” To avoid a muddy design, we worked closely with our designer, Eric Whewell, for hours. It was a creative tennis match. We passed Eric initial ideas, and he volleyed back a design on paper. This iterative process went late into the night until Eric served up three powerful design concepts, which you’ll see below.

Vote on your favorite design below. Scroll down to read a few of our technical considerations.

The Defender

The Afterburner

The Predator

Which design should we use for our bike light?

As part of the industrial design process, Brad Geswein, my cofounder, made a technical brief for our designer. To write the tech brief, Brad has to think like a mechanical engineer, manufacturing engineer, ergonomics engineer, bike mechanic, and bike light thief. Here are some of the technical considerations he came up with:

• Seat posts have an angle between 69 and 78 degrees. The light mount must angle upward to compensate.
• The light mount should fit seat post diameters from 22 to 35mm.
• We want 180-degree illumination so cars can see the bike from the side.
• We want an aluminum body for light weight and theft-resistant strength.
• We want a custom screw-head to make it theft-resistant.
• We want an easy battery replacement mechanism without easy battery theft.
• The light should be narrow to avoid hitting the cyclists’ inner thighs.

We'll close the poll at 6 p.m. EST on Friday, May 25. In the next stage, we'll refine the design and start working on prototypes.

If the Lorax were to ever actually award a "Certified Truffula Tree of Approval" to a moving vehicle, it'd be a lot more likely to go to a garden-toting truck that brings farms to schools than to a Mazda SUV.

A literal "food truck," Truck Farm Chicago is a nonprofit organization that uses a 1994 Ford F-250 named Petunia to chauffeur a miniature farm. The project, which revved into gear on Earth Day, is a collaboration between sustainable development nonprofit Seven Generations Ahead and eco-friendly book-printer Green Sugar Press, a recent GOOD Maker finalist whose co-founders Shari Brown and Tim Magner were inspired by King Corn director Ian Cheney’s first truck farm in Brooklyn, NY.

While Truck Farm Chicago is one of about 20 truck farms sprawled across the nation, it's set apart by its focus on educating Chicago youth and families about healthy eating. Visits to the truck typically last an hour and consist of a short tour of the farm, plant identification, taste tests, and sensory exploration. Off-truck activities include planting a seed in a newspaper pot to nourish at home and painting their favorite lessons straight onto Petunia. 

"I was excited about this project as a fun, unique and creative way to bring gardening and nutrition education to children all over the city—especially those who may not otherwise get to see how food grows up close,” Brown says. "Making healthy choices can be challenging, especially when good fresh food and education about why it's important and how to cook it is not always accessible. Truck Farm is trying to do our part by using our exhibit to spark these discussions, give youth the tools to make healthy choices, and inspire them to use their own creativity to encourage healthy changes in their communities.""

There’s an enormous need for nutritional education in Chicago, where childhood obesity exceeds the national average: According to the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children, 35 percent of Illinois children between 10 and 17 are obese. In its first year, Truck Farm visited food deserts and underserved communities throughout the city, reaching 2,738 children at 47 schools. This year, with the help of a Kickstarter campaign, they hope to educate more than 3,000 children, strengthen programming opportunities from starting school gardens to follow-up visits, and spread awareness about the importance of good food. 

The community has been instrumental to the organization’s success, Brown says, donating compost, plants, and other supplies. The truck garden was designed and engineered by Chicago Specialty Gardens, which provides Petunia with a raised bed divided into a few sections to ensure the soil stays in place on the road and a drainage system with a permeable layer of landscape fabric. The crew plants seedlings that will sprout quickly, including lettuce, radish, kale, chard, broccoli, kohlrabi, beans, and a variety of herbs. As the weather warms up, cherry tomatoes, basil, rosemary, and eggplants will be added to the mix.

"One of my favorite quotes is, ‘If you don't take care of your body, where will you live?" Brown says. "Every child has the right to know how to care for themselves and to ultimately enjoy a higher quality of life."

Want to learn more about GOOD Maker? Drop us a line at maker[at]goodinc[dot]com, sign up for our email list, or check out the current challenges.

This post is in partnership with CLIF Bar

For city dwellers across America, the car has long-since been the transportation tool for every job. In the U.S., 40 percent of all trips happen within 2 miles—with 90 percent of those made by car. Energy food company CLIF Bar recognized the opportunity to rethink the way it looked at daily transportation. The CLIF Bar 2 Mile Challenge (2MC) was created five years ago, beginning as a fun competition between the company's staffers and their family and friends. Continuing strong, the program is now an avenue by which the Emeryville, California-based company is showing a continued commitment to the future of bikes-as-transportation, calling everyone to join to create more positive impact in communities across the country, one bike trip at a time.

Motivation is the key to leaving your car keys at home—opt instead to go by bicycle. CLIF Bar’s experience running the 2MC finds that biking to work or to the store, joining up with friends for an afternoon ride, or just to take in some fresh air is made easier with a little “skin in the game.” This year, each individual biking effort counts towards real impact. Throughout the rest of 2012, CLIF Bar will give away $100,000 to regional nonprofit organizations that support biking. Sign up for the 2 Mile Challenge (it's free) and every bike trip logged will count as $1 going to helping a monthly featured charity.

Register now and then get on your bike! It’s simple to log your bike trips and help pedal the goodness forward inside 2milechallenge.com or the new iPhone App integration.

May’s featured organization is BikeWalkKC. Learn more about them here, and see how many others have taken the challenge and swapped their car for a bike. Join the ride and help CLIF Bar support those organizations working hard towards a more bike-friendly America!

Steve Jobs' legacy at Apple doesn't include much of an environmental commitment: In environmental rankings, technology companies like IBM, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard have outperformed Apple for years. But under Jobs' successor Tim Cook, the company appears poised to become one of the greenest large companies in the world.

Last week, Apple won approval from North Carolina to build a solar farm on the site of one of its newest data center, then announced that it would include an additional solar farm on the site. The company also plans to install a hydrogen-powered fuel cell, a type of clean energy technology that only utility companies use at the scale Apple is envisioning. These on-site clean energy projects will cover three-fifths of the center’s power needs, the company predicts. The rest of its power will come from renewable energy projects elsewhere.

As companies like Apple build data centers all over the world, it’s vital that they consider how they’ll provide power to these electricity-sucking monsters. “If the cloud were a country, it would have the fifth-largest electricity demand in the world,” Greenpeace wrote in a report last month. And that demand is still growing: from 2005 to 2010, energy used by data centers across the world increased by more than 50 percent. 

Although Apple and companies like it have bragged about the energy-efficiency of their data centers for years, Greenpeace argues that even energy-efficient centers can use huge amounts of dirty energy. In its report, the group dinged Apple in particular for relying on power that comes from coal and nuclear plants. 

Apple’s new solar farms help address the concerns of groups like Greenpeace. But this isn’t a story only about good intentions. Duke Energy, the utility that provides power to North Carolina, and the state’s economic development team worked for years to lure Apple to the area with promises of cheap energy—cheaper than the cheap, coal-fired rates that most consumers pay. Duke has its own incentive to add renewable power to the grid: Under state law, the company must source one-eighth of its power from renewable sources by 2021. Apple won’t necessarily consume all the power it produces: It will sell power from its solar projects back to the utility, The News & Observer has reported. The company also stands to receive a bonus payment for adding renewable power to the grid Duke oversees. 

No matter why companies like Apple are adding green power to the grid, the end result is better than the status quo, where coal powers our ability to access documents, photos, and music wherever we happen to be. As more data centers are built, technology companies must be as willing to imagine a new future for energy as they are for information.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user Johan Brook

In less than a week, more than 125 million people will be watching the 2012 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, the annual competition held among active member countries of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).

An important part of the televised contest is the whole voting process, during which each participating country makes their favorites votes public in about 3 different languages.

For those nerdy people who like to know what country voted when in some particular way, there is now the following information graphic. Eurovizion [site50.net], designed by graphic designer Ben Willers, provides a detailed overview of all voting patterns that occurred during the last 10 years of Eurovision Song Contests.

The top bar graph shows the votes received by each country. The bottom, dot-plot kind of graph reveals all individual votes, where the horizontal axis denotes the 'giving' countries, and the vertical axis the 'receiving' ones.

One can detect some remarkable anomalies that show how the perceived quality of musical songs is quite a cultural affair. Or how can one explain the relationships between Greece and Cyprus (or Albania), and Germany and Israel?

See also: . Eurovision 2009 Results . Visualising the Eurovision

Analysts and designers at Timetric have produced a 'dashboard' of interactive charts covering key inflation statistics. Click on a chart to explore in detail

The OECD's Better Life Index which debuted last year to much fanfare has been updated with some great new features by Moritz Stefaner.

The concept and beauty of the original piece remain intact. However, the experience is made better by the ability to compare to different demographics. For instance, after I adjust my Better Life settings, I can see how my settings compare to other women my age in the US, or to French men. It's fun to compare to different people around the world and watch the flowers readjust themselves to the various comparisons. It invokes a sense of global community and humanity.

It also has better sharing. It offers the usual suspects, plus you can embed your index on your site. Equality between men and women is always a big issue, so that's addressed in the new version as well. You can select to see the split, and it also shows both gender and social inequality per indicator when you drill down to the specific country level.

This is an excellent update to an already great tool. I'm glad the OECD sees the value and continues to invest in it.

[via @jcukier]

When I lived in “bike-friendly” Washington, D.C.—the 68-square-mile District is painted with 48 miles of bike lanes—I rode my bike to work almost every day. My commute was often punctuated with contentious interactions with pedestrians and drivers. Once when I was stopped at a light, a man in a gold Cadillac emptied a bottle of water onto my lap, laughed, and sped away. A woman driving a black Range Rover veered into the bike lane, then rolled down her window to tell me to watch where I was going. Every morning, I rode past a white-painted ghost bike chained to the intersection where a young cyclist had been flattened by a garbage truck. The investigation concluded that no one was to blame. Of course, only one person was dead.

I always wondered why it was so difficult for drivers to just pay attention and not be assholes. Then I moved to Los Angeles and got a car. Here, we do not operate our vehicles so much as we hang out in them. Hunkered in my sedan, I’m now comfortable juggling an iced coffee and the radio dial while “courtesy” honking the car in front of me. Only when I jump back on my bicycle do I become a little bit scared about the person that I become when I’m behind the wheel.

The conversation about “sharing the road” revolves around classes of “drivers” and “bikers” and “pedestrians,” as if we are members of competing tribes. (See our related video on how to share the road and not be a douchebag.) But in reality, a cyclist throws her Schwinn in the back seat and becomes a driver; a driver opens her door and becomes a pedestrian. So why does she sometimes open that door straight into the path of an oncoming cyclist?

Even the experts don’t know for sure. According to Dr. Ian Walker, a traffic psychologist at the University of Bath who rides an AVC Caribou Taiga expedition touring bike he calls “The Mighty Akhbar,” the science of bicycle safety is written only in "hints and incomplete stories.” Cyclists are estimated to be 3 to 11 times as likely to die on the road than drivers—a huge statistical gap. Walker is doing his part to figure out why. In 2006, he strapped a camera and censor to his bicycle and hit the road, testing a variety of controlled riding conditions to see how cars reacted as they passed. He rode with and without a helmet. He hugged tight to the curb and rode out in the middle of the lane. Sometimes, he biked with a feminine blonde wig on his head.

After sharing the road with more than 2,000 vehicles, Walker found [PDF] that cars gave him a wider berth when he rode close to the sidewalk, when he wore no helmet, and when he strapped on that wig. Cars were more likely to whizz by close when he occupied the center of a lane, in a helmet, and presenting as male. Two cars left him no space at all—they just hit him.

Walker’s research raises some interesting theories about why drivers act the way they do toward bikers. Maybe drivers give more leeway to cyclists they perceive as less skilled. Or maybe drivers harbor some resentment for the stereotypical bicyclist—the guy swathed in Lycra, powering down the middle of the road. Perhaps drivers respond positively to novelty—male cyclists outnumber female ones by 2-to-1. Drivers could be chivalrous. Or maybe they’re just horny—last year, a New York City cop was roundly criticized for telling a woman that riding a bicycle in a short skirt distracts male drivers. Hey, at least they’re paying attention.

What does Walker’s data mean for bikers? He has heard from one cyclist who deliberately wobbles on the road to give drivers the perception that he’s erratic, in the hopes they’ll give him a wider birth. Another carted an empty child seat behind his bike, an attempt to encourage empathy. “I like to ride my bicycle, but I cycle to work in regular clothes and don’t follow the Tour de France,” Walker writes on his own personal website. “This is important.”

But attempts to bike different aren’t a sustainable safety solution when many drivers have a problem with all bikes. Resentment toward bikers goes back to the horse and buggy days, when the emergence of the “velocipedler” was met with "open disgust,” Walker wrote in a recent paper. Onlookers jammed sticks in wheels and pelted them with stones. New York and Berlin instituted laws that restricted bicycling. Moscow banned it outright in 1881. Walker says that early animosity toward cyclists was a product of “conservatism coupled with class prejudice,” as biking “was a well-to-do activity, unaffordable to the typical working family.” As bike prices dropped and more and more people hopped on two wheels, popular disgust waned. Then, the car debuted and underwent the same cycle—it was resented, accepted, then popularized.

Now, cycling has come full circle—it’s again seen as a boutique form of transportation for people with the luxury to choose their commuting style not out of necessity but out of environmental, health, or style concerns. And the stakes are higher. In addition to pedestrians’ sticks and stones, cyclists must contend with two tons of metal barreling down the road at 60 mph. (In New York City’s very first automobile accident, in 1896, a "horseless wagon" struck a cyclist.) Today, they also must navigate an infrastructure of roads and sidewalks built to accommodate pedestrians and cars, but not the mid-speed cyclist in between. A particularly troubling phenomenon in traffic psychology is the “looked-but-failed-to-see” collision—drivers are so accustomed to only looking out for other cars on the road that even if they look in a cyclist’s direction, their mind doesn’t register the biker. And this problem only gets worse the more experience a driver has on the road.

This is partly a numbers game—when the number of cyclists on the road doubles, the number of bicycle accidents only increases by a third. Today, only about 2 percent of Americans rely on bikes for transportation. Walker spoke with one professional bus driver who said she could "understand the pedestrians' point of view” on the road because she had personal experience wandering into the street without looking both ways. “I can understand that—I'm always aware of that—because of the amount of times I've done it,” she told him. “I can forgive pedestrians, but cyclists I cannot.”

This is true even though cyclists, unlike cars, are relatively humanized on the road. Their bodies are exposed, their movements necessarily more improvised. Meanwhile, the driver is alienated behind tinted windows, a blasting air conditioner, and stereo sound. When a cyclist and driver meet, Walker says, the “driver largely has the experience of interacting with a person,” while the cyclist is “interacting with a machine.”

When drivers do engage with bikers on a human level, the process can be disorienting. When a cyclist and driver make eye contact, the driver’s response time actually slows under the burden of an “extra, involuntary stage of cognitive processing.” A 1979 study found that drivers do perceive the signals cyclists give on the road—both formal ones (an arm to the left to signal a turn) and informal ones (a dropped foot to signal a stop)—but these signals also slowed drivers' responses. Some drivers keep thinking like cars even after they step out of one. One study discussed the dangerous phenomenon of pedestrians "walking around in the mindset of a motorist”—people who exited their car, “continued to act as if they were protected from other traffic,” and got struck in the road themselves.

Walker’s research does point to one data point that begins to bridge the divide: “When drivers do see cyclists, they do think about it. They make a quick evaluation of that cyclist, and they adjust their behavior,” he says. “It’s just that because most drivers don’t understand cyclists, they’re not always adjusting their behavior correctly.”

I'm still riding my bike, now on the streets of L.A. Every time a driver manages to pay attention, it makes me feel a little bit better about biking on the road. I try to remember that feeling every time I get behind the wheel.

Related video: Don't Be a Douchebag! 45 Seconds to a Calmer Commute

Photo via (cc) Flickr user Chicago Bicycle Program

Get out of your car and ride your bike in the 2 Mile Challenge. CLIF Bar will donate $1 for every trip you log to bike nonprofits, up to $100,000.

We realize it's not always easy for cyclists, drivers, and pedestrians to share the road. So we made a short 'n' sweet PSA to remind us all to calm down as we travel from point A to B.

Related post: What Drivers Really Think About Bikers: The History and Psychology of Sharing the Road

Get out of your car and ride your bike in the 2 Mile Challenge. CLIF Bar will donate $1 for every trip you log to bike nonprofits, up to $100,000.

I recall a master teacher with a golden heart, high expectations of his students, and a somewhat gruff exterior once telling me about how one of his student's parents used their parent-teacher conference to demand that he be more understanding and sympathetic toward their child. They made excuses for their child's disruptive behavior and lack of effort, and the teacher became tired of it.

During the conference, the parents became belligerent, insisting that the teacher worked for them and it was his job to ensure success for their child. "We are the taxpayer, and we pay your salary. You work for us," they said. Knowing that there were thousands of taxpayers in the community, the teacher reached into his pocket, pulled out a dime, and handed it to them, saying, "Here is your share of my salary."

The teacher certainly could have dealt with these parents more tactfully, but many educators become frustrated with the tactics of well-intentioned but often preoccupied and guilt-prone parents. Educators increasingly complain about students and parents who expect success to be given rather than earned. Yet many educational experts, myself included, contend that the best teachers are those who view their students as their most important customers.

How do we treat our students both as important customers and as children who need our guidance, especially when their effort and performance are subpar? The answer lies in understanding what school sells and what its customers need. Like a salesman who persuades a customer that a product or service will improve his life, the best teachers are able to persuade reluctant students that knowledge and skill will enhance their lives and that their effort, not their ability, will determine their success. From day one, effective educators target all their rules and expectations toward two primary goals: success and responsibility.

Success is the demonstration of knowledge and skill—you either know how to spell a word or you don't. Responsibility is an expression of the values needed to achieve success, like effort and practice or showing respect for others. Students are likely to be most motivated to buy the product—achieve success and learn responsibility—when they feel connected, competent, and in control. I call these the "Three Cs" of success.

To create "Three Cs Classrooms," good teachers adjust their teaching methods without sacrificing their goals. They define success as getting better at a skill each day and responsibility as the tool it takes to get better. They let their students know that when they break the rules, the consequences will depend on what will best help them learn better behavior.

These teachers devise assignments to fit the student rather than subscribe to a one-size-fits-all philosophy. If a student can spell three-letter words today, success for that student means lots of three-letter practice and a few four-letter words. Like a good coach who brings out the best in each player, teachers treat each student with respect and dignity.

But with teacher accountability increasingly tied to test performance, consistently supporting the individual needs of students is difficult. It’s not surprising that the teacher who gave those parents a dime would feel stressed by the situation.

It's tough in the moment, but teachers must be open to adjusting their methods based on parent complaints without sacrificing the goal. Instead of handing them a dime, imagine if that teacher had told those parents, "I know the grade Matt received and that is the grade he earned. If you want him to earn a higher grade, he needs to turn in an assignment that is worthy of his ability. I am sure you would agree that neither he nor I should ever be satisfied with anything less than his best." If educators can have those honest conversations—and keep focused on ensuring students leave their classroom having acquired success and responsibility—they've done their job.    

Photo via (cc) Flickr user woodleywonderworks              

Get out of your car and ride your bike in the 2 Mile Challenge. CLIF Bar will donate $1 for every trip you log to bike nonprofits, up to $100,000.

After two years of intentionally losing money in a very smart way, a Mexican cell phone company is set to change the way the country’s consumers use mobile phones to access the internet. If their plan works, it could transform not only the Mexican phone industry, but consumer finance systems in developing countries around the globe.

When you bought your cell phone, you might have earned a few hundred dollars in discounts in exchange for the promise of sticking with your carrier for two years. Those shackling cell phone contracts might seem like a hassle, but they’re a first-world luxury. Mobile plans that bill you later, rather than forcing you to pay upfront, end up saving you money and making your life easier. “When you're 35 years old, you have a job, you have a family, being on prepaid and running out of minutes in the middle of a conversation, or not having access to a data plan because you're buying megabytes on a one-off basis at the convenience store, can be a huge deterrent,” says Gabriel Manjarrez, CEO of Mexican cell service provider Micel.

A prepaid plan is essentially a loan from the cell phone company to the user—the company provides airtime now if the user promises to pay it back later. But that only works if the phone company is confident it'll be paid back. Mexican phone companies have a difficult time maintaining that confidence because 85 percent of Mexicans don’t have a credit card or the kind of payment histories that make for a good credit score. Consequently, 85 percent of Mexican cell phone users have prepaid accounts without consistent search access.

To get a credit card, you often need a credit card. That's a non-starter for most Mexicans, especially those working in the informal economy or without a history of paying bills under their own name—TV companies won't install a cable box for someone without a credit card, for example. Those who do have a credit card often pay twice the interest rates for the same card as an American would, so even some who would be eligible don't enroll.  “Not having a credit card becomes a tax on people,“ Manjarrez says. “So what we've done is we went to the carriers and we said, ‘You don't actually need a credit card in order to give someone a post-paid plan. What you need is someone to guarantee that person's payment.’" 

Micel buys time from cell carriers and resells it to clients who can't otherwise get a contract. The company only uses Android smartphones with data plans, and many of their customers are getting consistent internet access for the first time. Forty percent of clients don’t have email addresses when they sign up, so a Micel agent must talk them through setting up a free webmail account, like Gmail or Yahoo. “It’s like our customers are living in 1996,” Manjarrez says.

Helping them get to 2012 can have a real impact on their lives: One study found that in Brazil, giving people access to internet search increased their personal GDP by 0.5 percent, largely by helping them find cheaper goods and services more efficiently. 

In lieu of a credit history, Micel performs a customized background check, a system that could point to the solution for all kinds of industries and billions of consumers worldwide. The company piloted its method for the last two years, using investment funding from socially minded venture capital firms like the Omidyar Network to give cell phone plans to Mexicans with no credit history. The company is tolerating early losses in order to build a predictive data set it hopes will replace traditional credit scores for people who have never borrowed money. “The best way to understand whether somebody will pay you is by putting them in the position to pay you, and then seeing if they do or if they don't,” Manjarrez says of his gamble.

Micel, originally called Finestrella, collects heaps of data on each user—everything from personal information to user feedback. Manjarrez and co-founder Pedro Zayas, an MIT-trained computer scientist, asked questions about customers’ employers, who they live with, how many children they have, where they live, and more. “This is true big data play,” Manjarrez says. “Plus we gather outside data. So we go into social networks and gather data from them.” But his customers aren’t on Facebook, so when Manjarrez says social networks, he means real life. Micel agents call up customers’ neighbors, school friends, even mothers-in-law. “You would be surprised how many people will give you a phone number of someone and then that someone will say, 'No I don't recommend them, he owed me money and he didn't pay me back,’" Manjarrez says.

Micel also taps publicly available datasets, then combines all the information in an algorithm designed by Zayas to produce a credit score for someone without a credit history—a potential gold mine considering how many new customers the model could create for the banking, credit card, and phone industries, among others.

“We reject about 40 percent of the people” who apply, Manjarrez says, noting that’s down from 70 percent. “Our defaults have gone down significantly.” Micel is still losing money, but Manjarrez expects to turn the corner into the black this year, and then consider expansion into other industries. “Banks are very happy that we exist,” Manjarrez says, fully aware that if his smartphone plan works, he’ll be in position to help finance a large swath of Mexican consumers.

Image courtesy of Micel.mx

When London-based broadcast journalist Ellie Jeffery was diagnosed with breast cancer that had spread to her lungs, liver, and bones, she was told she had only months to live. Not one to give up, Jeffery demanded a second opinion and started working on beating the cancer. Part of that struggle included vowing to get married to her fiancé, Tom Thostrup, despite her condition, and keeping people abreast of her illness via her blog "Written Off," so named because her first doctor had done just that—written her off as dead. Though she put up a hell of a fight, Jeffery died on May 18, 2012, two years after she was initially diagnosed. She was only 29.

Dying of cancer is often a long and painful process. To be able to face that pain every day is an achievement in and of itself. But to face that pain while also inviting others into your life and your story is eminently admirable. With Written Off, Jeffery gave people a glimpse at what cancer does to its victims, their families, and their loved ones. Sometimes it was funny, and other times it was very sad. But with every entry she wrote during the blog's year of existence, Jeffery gave cancer patients, cancer survivors, and others little parcels of inspiration and hope that even in the worst of times, life can be worth leading.

Perhaps no Written Off entry summarizes Jeffery's ballsy, can't-quit attitude better than her last, penned just a month before she died and two months before she was scheduled to be married. She wrote it after a house shopping trip with Thostrup. In retrospect, it's both beautiful and haunting:

Sometimes it doesn’t feel real; how could all of this have happened to me? How did I come to be in such an unlucky situation? I don’t feel bitterness towards others, for what they have, but I can’t help but look around in restaurants and on the Tube and see healthy people with their whole lives ahead of them. I can honestly say I wouldn’t want anyone else’s life but I do envy their health. 

On our way back from a house viewing the other day I had to tell Tom that something had been nagging at me whilst we noseyed around other people’s homes. I was scared that we would find a new place, move in and then if I died he would be stuck in a three-bedroom house on his own. He reminded me, and I know he’s right, that we can’t live our lives like that. If we’d believed the stats we wouldn’t be having a wedding in two months time; if you let the cancer take over completely then you’re letting it win before you die.

The next time you’re walking to the grocery store, biking to school, or taking the bus to work, take a minute to look around and see what natural benefits your community is lacking. Empty lots in need of native plant integration, long stretches of sidewalk calling for shade cover, inefficient water use, the list goes on.

Luckily, organizations like TreePeople are helping turn more and more of these spaces in Los Angeles into eco-friendly oases. In more than 30 years of work, TreePeople has planted more than 2 million trees in L.A., The group has also created Functioning Community Forests, urban communities "where local residents and businesspeople have joined together to transform their neighborhood into a sustainable ecosystem that functions like a healthy, natural forest." And they're just getting started. This summer, TreePeople is looking to the GOOD community to find even more solutions to make Los Angeles green. The TreePeople 2012 Green City Challenge on GOOD Maker is open for submissions until June 25, and the group is looking for your sustainable solutions. Tell us how you would use supplies, expertise, and volunteer support from TreePeople and $500 in cash towards your project. From June 25 to July 14, rally your networks to vote for your idea. The winner will take home all the green: supplies, plants, resources, and grant dollars. Apply at treepeople.maker.good.is Want to learn more about GOOD Maker? Drop us a line at maker[at]goodinc[dot]com, sign up for our email list, or check out the current challenges.

The Guardian University guide and ranking for 2013 is out today. See what the data says and how it's changed since last year • Get the 2012/2013 data • 2011/2012 tables • 2010/2011 tables • More data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian

The latest Guardian University Guide tables show that Cambridge University has retained it's position at the top spot, beating its rival Oxford as the UK's leading institution for the second year in a row.

Oxford and the London School of Economics have been placed second and third respectively, while St. Andrews has dipped to fourth place. Warwick, University College London, Durham, Lancaster, Bath and Exeter make up the top 10 rankings.

Loughborough and Imperial College have been knocked off the top ten, with Imperial making a marked descent from the 2009 rankings that placed it in sixth place. Individual rankings by subject are also covered in the university guide. Jeevan Vasagar writes:

Cambridge dominates across the board, coming top in 16 out of 47 subjects including medicine, veterinary science, biosciences, chemical engineering, maths and computer science. Oxford came top in seven subjects including economics, business studies and law. Oxford also comes top in chemistry and physics.

The tables are based on data for full-time undergraduates at UK universities. The full methodology is explained here.

Of the top climbers, Brunel has reached 44th position from 82nd last year, whilst Chester has climbed from 80th to 52nd. There have been some drops in rankings too. The lowest ranked in the overall list are Bolton, the University of Abertay, Dundee and London Met. Bolton plans to charge a range of fees up to a maximum of £8,400.

The tables were compiled by independent consultancy firm Intelligent Metrix. It's based originally on information collected by Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) and the National Student Survey, published by Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce).

There are 16 English universities appear in the top 20: Cambridge, Oxford, LSE, Warwick, UCL, Durham, Lancaster, Bath, Exeter, Loughborough, Surrey, Imperial College, Buckingham, York, Bristol and Leicester

Four new members - Durham, Exeter, Queen Mary and York - will join the Russell Group in August, so for the 2013 rankings we have updated the groups to reflect this.

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Which countries have the best housing, the highest chance of employment or the best work-life balance?

Visual.ly analyzed the top 30 infographics posted on their site and determined that data visualization doesn't matter:

Data visualization certainly matters when it comes to conveying information effectively, but when it comes to sharing, the answer is no: having data to represent is not a critical ingredient in infographics. More than half, or 53%, of the top 30 graphics do not contain data visualization. And by data visualization, we mean visual objects that are sized, colored, or positioned to represent numerical values.

I think what they actually mean is that data visualization is not the sole factor of a successful visualization. Since they are only analyzing the top 30 infographics, the minority 47% that had data visualization are still very successful. It would be a different story if the 53% of infographics without dataviz were the top successes and the 47% with dataviz were the bottom losers.

My hunch is that the successful infographics posted on Visual.ly are popular because, like other viral content, they strike a nerve, are of the moment, are humorous yet relevant, or have some other je ne sais quoi.

Egypt’s televised presidential debate earlier this month, widely lauded as an indicator of democracy’s triumph in the region, was delayed when one candidate was reportedly caught in traffic. On Twitter, CNN correspondent Ben Wedeman offered one of the night’s most winning observations: “No matter who is running [for president], #cairotraffic always wins.”

For those who haven’t been to Cairo, traffic may seem like a trifle. But in a sprawling megalopolis with a population approaching 20 million, residents schedule everything from workdays to weddings around traffic jams that stretch for miles and ensnare drivers for hours at a time.

That may explain why a Google-sponsored competition seeking Egypt's most promising startup business tapped an anti-traffic app over competitors like Recyclobekia, a company with plans to recycle e-waste like old cell phones; Wireless Stars, whose mobile app is modeled on FourSquare and has 150,000 users (and counting) from Ghana to Pakistan; and GroupStream, a storytelling platform inspired by Egypt’s revolution, whose CEO plans to open a San Francisco office in the coming months. While those startups made it to the finale of the Ebda2 competition, the panel of judges from Egypt’s leading businesses and universities awarded the prize—plus $200,000 in seed money—to Bey2ollak, a company whose free crowdsourcing app allows Egyptians to report on and avoid traffic. Bey2ollak allows drivers and passengers to use smartphones to report whether specific roads and bridges in Cairo and Alexandria are clear, clogged, or impassable. The company is also making a version for tablets and PCs. “Bey2ollak is based on a very simple insight: that there is always someone on the street who knows how horrible [traffic] is or how well it is flowing,” says co-founder Gamal el din Sadek. “It’s always been one-to-one communication, but the information is relevant to everyone. We created a community that is one-to-many.” Bey2ollak is an Arabic term for “it is being said.” El din says he and his co-founders chose the name in order to evoke the way in which frustrated drivers sometimes alert those around them to road conditions by rolling the window down and shouting. The app uses casual, funny language that appeals to young users who choose from a list of options like “sweet,” to indicate traffic is light or “no hope,” which means stay off the roads at all costs. And Bey2ollak has found another niche in post-revolution Egypt, where protests and marches are frequent.: Users can alert travelers—and be alerted—to “khattar” or “danger” if protesters and security forces are clashing in the streets. The technology is simple and adaptable, Sadek says. When fuel shortages in Egypt caused a panic late last year, it took Bey2ollak programmers just a few hours to create a feature that displays the locations of gas stations. The move earned the company positive writeups in the Egyptian press, a coup for a company that has, until now, relied primarily on word-of-mouth marketing. Named for the Arabic word meaning ‘start,’ the Ebda2 competition began in September 2011 with 4,000 entrants. Over the course of nine months, entrepreneurs were put through a punishing schedule of refining and defending their business plans, appealing to investors, and calculating operating budgets down to a fraction of a cent. Along the way, they were mentored by experts in finance, private equity, and marketing. “The problem [in Egypt] has always been that the brains and the ideas are there,” says Fady Ramzy, country manager of Interact Egypt, who served as a mentor, “but the young business owners didn’t know how to monetize them.” Ramzy says it wasn’t just innovative use of technology and positive social impact that gave Bey2ollak a leg up in the competition, but the fact that the company recently attracted advertising dollars from Coca-Cola, which judges viewed as concrete evidence the startup can make money. Starting a new business is particularly difficult in Egypt, where the official unemployment rate hovers around 12 percent, and the actual number is widely believed to be much higher. Around 85 percent of the unemployed are under the age of 30. In the past, business owners with ties to the regime of ousted President Hosni Mubarak had advantages that ordinary Egyptians did not. That has changed. “Entrepreneurship is the solution,” says Gamal el din Sadek, smiling to acknowledge his cheeky play on “Islam is the solution,” the well-known slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group of Egyptian origin that now commands nearly half of the seats in the country’s democratically elected parliament. The timing of the Ebda2 competition suggests that Google appreciates Sadek’s point of view. Google didn’t choose the winner, but executives say their interest in Egypt and the region has intensified since protests swept the Arab world in 2011, toppling strongmen like Mubarak, Tunisia’s Zine el Abedine Ben Ali and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. The competition wouldn’t have taken place if not for the Egyptian revolution, company officials say. “Egypt is a sweetheart of Google,” says Mohammad Gawdat, vice president of emerging markets for Google in South and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. “We’re fascinated by it. We’re not interested in starting revolutions. We have no position. But we know that if you empower people with enough information and knowledge, they will make the right choice.” The contest winners were announced in a ceremony on the roof of Cairo’s lavish Fairmont hotel, which boasts stunning views of the Nile River and overlooks some of the city’s busiest roads and bridges. As the evening drew to a close, several hundred people milled around, high above the city. A few used the vantage point to look out over Cairo, trying to get an idea of how bad traffic might be. Not everyone bothered with the view. The information they needed was already there, on their phones.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user mileusna