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Archive for the 'USA' Category
Data Visualization: Impact of the Subprime Crisis
We always love the data visualizations from the New York Times. Their designers are really doing an outstanding job.
Yesterday they have published another great one on a topic that is very hard to visualize - a graphic showing how regions throughout the United States are hit differently by the Subprime Mortgage crisis and the level of foreclosures resulting from that.
More information and the full size graphics at the “New York Times”.
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Weekend Activity: Browse the National Archives with Digital Vaults
The National Archives have put 1,200 of its 20 Billion documents online for access through an 2D search interface. Digital Vaults as the Adobe Flash interface is called allows you to explore photographs, documents and video clip plus the connections between them.
Once all interface elements are loaded, the application presents you with a series of starting point, click one and the image for the selected topic will be shown in the center of the window surrounded by related items.
Additional information is available for each of the items by clicking on them and…
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Image: Why choose if you can combine?
The best two versions we found of the more and more popular Barack O’Clinton images on the web.
Why choose if you can combine ?
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Data-visualization: Charting The Banking Crisis
The web log “And Still I Persist” has made two interesting implementations available that demonstrate how data-visualization tools similar to “Gapminder’s Trendalyzer” can be used to show patterns in vast amounts of data.
They used OSG’s Boomerang technology to show changes in banks’ mortgage portfolios based on the data the banks have reported to the FDIC. The first chart / animation shows the amounts of 90+ days late mortgages and the second one visualizes the changed amounts in mortgages that…
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Animation (Politics): On the quest for the Democratic Messiah
This little animation shows the struggle of the US Democrats to find the right candidate for the next elections in a “kind of” humorous way. Who will be the chosen one to lead the Democrats out of the desert after more than seven years?
Well, I guess we might know tomorrow but latest in November…
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Humor: Voting machine accidentally leaks results of 2008 election early
Great video with very dark humor from one of our favorite web sites “The Onion”.
Check the echoed lines on the voting machine in the video.
…ERROR: segregation fault…delete file: voter data…
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Opinion: Olbermann timeline or the Nexus of Politics and Terror
Last Thursday night during “MSNBC Countdown” Keith Olbermann presented a timeline of what he calls the “Nexus of Politics and Terror” in the USA. Events are clustered together into 13 time groups starting 18-May-2002 to show how the government and administration in the US has put spin on old, untrue or hold-back information to suppress other stories or influence news and the public towards their political agendas.
The video starts with an intro on the most recent FISA voting…
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Opinion: Obamania or Change You Can’t Believe In?
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There is an interesting opinion piece at Spiegel Online - the web site of Germany’s leading political weekly magazine - on Barack Obama’s run for the presidency.
It compares Barack Obama’s campaign to the Dot-Net boom of the 1990s when for companies key economic indicators like profit, sales and numbers of employees, or experience and realism of the management team were replaced by momentum of the rising stock price.
Interesting read and for those who know the realities of dealing with Multi-Billion organizations or of international diplomacy some quite intriguing comparisons…
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Internet: Wikileaks.org ordered offline by US court
The BBC today has an article online about Wikileaks.org, a website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents.
The “BBC reports” that “…following a California court ruling, the site been taken offline in the US…” Well seemingly that’s not completely true. You won’t get access to the site via wikileaks.org but that’s because the DNS server entries have been deleted.
But hey - there are other ways. You can access the site’s content at other servers on the Internet (see image below). We suggest searching for the web site’s name and DNS and you might find it yourself. Popular bookmarking sites might also turn out helpful.
While you can question the motives why people upload documents to this site or even question the content of some of them, Wikileaks.org definitely had a rough ride the last days.
Within days they endured a fire in their server room, massive DDoS attacks and censorship threats…
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Time: Cold War Calculators
Those who still remember slide rules from the time before pocket calculators or learned flying a plane before GPS devices became so common will love this site. Others who remember the atrocities of the cold war might have a different approach to these relics from a time we all hoped that it would have long passed…
But whatever approach or understanding for that time you might have the web site “Cold War Calculators” - a site dedicate to radiac calculators slides - might show you some new “instruments” seemingly necessary during this dark period…
We didn’t know there were that many kinds of different calculators for these strange purposes - radiation dosage calculators, bomb damage effect computers, nuclear effects estimators, causality slide rules, weapons effects rules and calculators, fallout predictors, burst calculators…
Anyway - bang you’re gone…
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