Dynamiteicons: I come bearing gifts. Venice under water. National Geographic's Photography Contest 2010. National Geographic is once again holding their annual Photo Contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 30th.
For the past eight weeks, they have been gathering and presenting galleries of submissions, encouraging readers to rate them as well. National Geographic was again kind enough to let me choose some of their entries from 2010 for display here on The Big Picture. Collected below are 47 images from the three categories of People, Places and Nature. Captions were written by the individual photographers. (47 photos total) Kanana Camp, Botswana. Infographic of the Day: Quality of Life Varies Wildly Across America.
If you call Connecticut home, your standard of living and economic opportunities are almost two times better than that of someone in West Virginia.
That basic inequality shouldn't be news to any American who's spent a day outside. But rarely has it been put in such a stark visual form. The images here are screenshots from a sweeping interactive data visualization by Rosten Woo and Zachary Watson for the American Human Development Project. The infographic maps something called the American Human Development Index -- a rough, one-stop measurement of quality of life across America based on things like education, life expectancy, and income -- and lets you compare it to a raft of other factors, from political activity to local homicide rates.