Transparency International has released their annual report on state corruption. Click on the above map for an interactive sort that reports the corruption index for each country moused over.

The bottom end of this scale are the usual suspects of late, Somalia, Myanmar, Sudan and Iraq. The upper echelon include New Zealand, Denmark, Singapore and Sweden. The US scored a rather lack luster 19th placing out of 180 countries measured, with a 7.5 out of 10 (ten being the best.) No doubt various comedies being played out in Chicago and South Carolina lent their weight accordingly.

Amazing map of ship and port traffic using AIS and accurate up to one hour. Brought you by the U of A Department of Product and Systems Design Engineering. This project is so amazingly useful, I don’t know what to say. Zoom in and check out some of the individual ships. See full size here.

Infographics designer Theo Deutinger maps out a speculative world of successful non-states. For more Microstate Madness see our posts in micronations and unrepresented states.

Link via Shloky who has a whole mess of interesting graphics from Theo.

The New Scientist features a map of the remote. Researchers at the EC’s Joint Research Centre and the World Bank plotted road, rail and river networks to find the world’s most remotest places. From the New Scientist article:

Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10 per cent of the world’s land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What’s more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20 per cent of the land is more than two days from a city – around the same proportion as Canada’s Quebec province.

It’s a small world in 2009. See the gallery.

ADDENDUM: The New Scientist also has a gallery of a map made out of geotagged Flickr photos. Apparently the most photographed city in the world is New York.

iA has released the gold master of its latest map of web trends. The map takes the most influential domains and people on the Internet and overlays them onto the Tokyo subway system based on a number of factors. Great execution and brilliant insight into what is happening on the web today. Best of all, it illustrates that the web is really just a series of tubes.

View Larger Map

Airplane Graveyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

Everybody needs a 84,000×168,000px hi-res image of the Earth right?

Via boingboing.net