Archive for the 'The Planet' Category

Visualizing the size of the banking crisis

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Sizing the issue at hand seems to be the first problem. Banks keep the so called derivatives off their balance sheets (because when looking at it with a sense of black humor these instruments are a bit like the banks’ own print run of casino chips - As long as others exchange them freely for real money that’s what they are worth. When that situation changes their value changes too - well, worst case to nothing or - better said, whatever someone is willing to pay for the illusion of value)…

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Animation: Once Upon A Tide

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Telling the story of our dependency on the oceans in beautiful calm pictures (well that’s how it starts). Great video - we like the excellently done mix of animation and real pictures…

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Data-Visualization: The world according to newspapers

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We always knew that the press and journalists are selective with what story makes it to the cover pages or even receives a few paragraphs to be mentioned. But nobody has visualized this so far and shown how unbalanced some newspapers are regarding world news.

The two heatmaps below show news coverage by geographical region from the Daily Mail and The Economist during 2007. They are part of a series of heatmaps created within a project by French journalists Nicolas Kayser-Bril and Gilles Bruno. The two are planning to…

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Data-visualization: Charting The Banking Crisis

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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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Environment: Greenpeace guide to greener electronics

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Environment campaigning organization Greenpeace has yesterday published the 7th issue of its “Guide to greener electronics” that ranks the top 18 manufactures of personal computers, mobile phones, TVs and game consoles based on their policies how to handle toxic chemicals and recycling of their goods.

In the latest version Samsung and Toshiba are leading the group with 7.7 out of 10 possible points for their policies on toxic chemicals use, e-waste amd recycling. While Toshiba took the crown this time for…

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Data-Visualization: Country Codes of the World

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Currently more than 260 top level domains are in use on the Internet. While the .com domain still remains the most popular, many country domains are now widely used as well.

On the map below each country is represented…

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Image: 1300 fluorescent tubes lit by overhead power lines

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An image of 1301 glowing fluorescent tubes powered only by the magnetic field induced by overhead power lines on a field in England.

More information and a DVD of this art project at “Richard Box web site”…

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Animation: MPES STO KLIMA

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Greek design agency “Nomint” was asked by the “WWF” to design, create and produce this animation on climate change…

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Time: Cold War Calculators

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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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Climate Change: Greenpeace EfficienCity

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The UK branch of Greenpeace has put a model of an ideal city of the future online. The virtual town called “EfficienCity” shows with animations, videos and lots of information how a climate friendly city might look like. It generates its own energy decentralized from local renewable resources vs. receiving it from a centralized grid of nuclear or coal power plants. Greenpeace uses this Sim-City of Energy to demonstrate a way to lower greenhouse gas emissions, towards a more secure energy supply, cheaper electricity and heating bills and a whole new attitude towards energy…

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