This chart correlates life expectancy and number of children per woman for each country in the world. The bubbles are sized by population and colored by region. Over time, most countries have moved towards the bottom right corner of the chart, corresponding to long lives and low fertility. Note the progression of the bubble for China- in the late 60's and 70's life expectancy rose quickly, then the implementation of the one-child policy caused a drop in the number of children per woman.

The economic power structure is changing according to forecasts by the Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures. Measuring GDP, the value of all goods and services produced in an economy at purchasing power parity (adjusting for price differences across countries), the top 3 economic powers in 2060 will be China, the US, and India- pushing Europe from the throne.

In 2006 the OECD asked 15-year-olds whether they aspired to work in computer science or engineering by age 30. The graph ranks the results by country for female students, with the colors showing the corresponding values for males. The dataset shows that the next generation of software engineers may be coming from Eastern and Southern Europe; Estonian students, in particular, are the most open to a technical career.

Iceland, Ireland, Greece, and other countries have all made news due to their increasing debt levels. Other trends have been less reported on, though; notice, for instance, the high debt levels that Japan has sustained over decades or the outcome of the drastic measures taken in Argentina after that country's 2002 economic crisis.

Spain and Ireland have the highest rates of unemployment in Europe. Both of these countries have experienced dramatic swings in this metric over the past few years. Spain reported its lowest ever numbers to Eurostat in June 2008 (below 8%) and stands above 20% 3 years later. Ireland enjoyed unemployment below 5%, one of the lowest in Europe, for almost 8 years until the world economic crisis started to hit the country in early 2008.

What about that 2% inflation target in the Euro zone? While the Euro-area average was usually close to the target, some individual countries have shown high deviatiations. In late 2009, all of the countries listed in the chart went below 2%; since then, however, inflation has crept up above the target again in Luxembourg, Belgium, and Spain.

Many European countries set minimum wages for gainful employment; these vary from slightly above 100 Euro per month in Bulgaria to more than 1700 Euro per month in Luxembourg. As low as the Bulgarian minimum wage is, however, this number has increased by more than 4x (in absolute terms) since 1999 as the standard of living in the country has improved.

Broadband penetration, or the percent of households with access to high-speed Internet, is one way of measuring the development level of a country's telecommunications industry. Note that smaller countries with dense population centers, like the Netherlands and Denmark, are often able to roll-out infrastructure improvements more quickly. They have, however, begun to show signs of flattening out.

A government's deficit and total debt, relative to the size of the economy (% of GDP), are core indicators of whether it can afford its current level of spending. With the implosion of the banking sector, the Icelandic government had to increase spending while overall GDP shrank; this led to debt and deficit levels rising in 2008 after being at very moderate levels before. Greece has always had a comparatively high level of debt, which only got worse with the 2009 financial crisis.

They're clearly in Eastern Europe. The road death rate is more than 100 deaths per 1 million inhabitants in countries like Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Latvia compared to half that number in Germany (no speed limit!), the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Malta.

Half of all infectious disease outbreaks occur in Africa, but the trend suggests that fewer and fewer of these outbreaks occur with each passing year- both in Africa and worldwide.

South Koreans do, according to Ookla- the average South Korean Internet connection is more than 3x faster than the average connection in the US. Eastern European countries like Latvia and Lithuania are also at the top of the pool. Within the US, there is tremendous variation by state. Delaware, a very small state, has the fastest connections (comparable to those in Belgium), whereas Alaska, the biggest state, has the slowest connections (comparable to those in Serbia).

Coal is the predominant energy source in the US. That was not always the case, though- until the late 1970's gas and oil were the main sources, but after 1985 coal gained in importance, while energy from oil decreased significantly. Renewable energy production has been relatively stable over the past two decades and was surpassed by nuclear energy in the early 1990's.

This chart shows the level of flu-related searches on Google, which are highly correlated to actual flu activity. Flu seasons differ between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres; within each, the seasonal flu "travels" across the globe from one country to the next. Observe, for instance, the progression of the flu across Europe from Spain to Poland in January 2005 or the flu trends in South America in June 2009.