The Center for Graphic Facilitation

GOOD Transparency: Drinking Water

GOOD is a great source of ideas for change and global improvement. Their series of animated information graphics make complex data sets humane and understandable, showing the human impact behind the global statistics. See more>>

About this animation on the effects of inadequate drinking:

It's the source of life but it's also the cause of a lot of unnecessary death. In places where clean water isn't available, water-related diseases like cholera cause massive diarrhea, dehydration, and thousands of deaths each day. Affordable water-treatment solutions exist. We'd like to see them flourish.

Worldchanging's Graphic Series: Earthly Ideas, Biochar

Click image to enlarge

Worldchanging Editor's note: This post is part of a series featuring Worldchanging ally Andy Lubershane's original graphics. While many of the issues covered in the comics have been discussed on Worldchanging in the past, we hope that you'll be able to use this new medium in a different way … whether it's in your classroom, on your office wall, or to help explain ideas to friends and family.

Andy Lubershane researches, writes and cartoons about sustainability from his home in Boston. Check out more of his illustrations here

NPR: Bored? Try Doodling To Keep The Brain On Task

From NPR:

ABOVE: President Obama's doodle, sketched as part of a "National Doodle Day"

Bill Gates is a doodler, and he's not alone. Lyndon Johnson doodled. Ralph Waldo Emerson doodled. Ronald Reagan drew pictures of cowboys, horses and hearts crossed with arrows. Most of us doodle at one point or another. But why?

To understand where the compulsion to doodle comes from, the first thing you need to do is look more closely at what happens to the brain when it becomes bored. According to Jackie Andrade, a professor of psychology at the University of Plymouth, though many people assume that the brain is inactive when they're bored, the reverse is actually true.

"If you look at people's brain function when they're bored, we find that they are using a lot of energy — their brains are very active," Andrade says.

The reason, she explains, is that the brain is designed to constantly process information. But when the brain finds an environment barren of stimulating information, it's a problem.

FULL ARTICLE >>

The Hive Group: Visualizing the Stimulus Honeycomb

This interactive "honeycomb" diagram by The Hive Group was generated from publicly available data on the breakdown of the Federal stumulus package. 

(Thanks to M.Frisse who blogs on health IT and policy at http://www.markfrisse.com/policy/)

NPR's Marketplace Whiteboard

Another manifestation of the latest trend in experts + whiteboards + video, NPR's Marketplace senior editor, Paddy Hirsh, explains complex economic trands, terms and causes of the current crisis--as if you wanted to hear more!

Toxic assets from Marketplace on Vimeo.

Toxic assets

If you've been following the problems encountered by the banks, you've probably come across the phrase "toxic assets." They've poisoned banks' balance sheets and brought them to the brink of failure. But what is a toxic asset, exactly? 

See other easy-to-understand explainations:

• The credit crisis as Antarctic expedition
• Why 'Fallout' for the financial crisis? 
• Untangling credit default swaps
• A look inside hedge funds 
• Leveraging and deleveraging 

Subscribe to the Whiteboard video podcast in iTunes

Add the Whiteboard widget to your site. 

Approximately once a week, a new Marketplace Whiteboard video will be released. As these videos are released, they are added to the this Marketplace Whiteboard video widget. 

Obama by Diane Durand

This graphic facilitator has been off-the-road and home-with-kids for a couple of years. But she grabbed the closest avaialble drawing tools and captured the speech! (Send your version to peter@alphachimp.com)

Obama by Steph Crowley

From Stephanie Crowley of Chrysalis Studios:

Visualizing Obama's Inauguration Text

Several cool tools have emerged on the Web 2.0 tech horizon that enable swift data visualization of numbers and text. Below are examples of Obama's speech as parsed by two such on-line utilities.

Wordle.Net creates remarkably well organized text constructions remeniscent of the graphic works of Russian Constructivists and the Dutch De Stijl Movement. 

ManyEyes is the “shared visualization” site run by the Visual Communications Lab at IBM Research. This utility allows for more data formats, including bubble charts, scatter plots, networks, word trees, and block charts. See more versions of President Obama's speech here.

(via PopTech Blog)

Obama's Inauguration Speech by Brandy Agerbeck

I wanted to share my image with you all. This morning I drew Barack Obama's inauguration speech:

 

There's a page for it here, including a PDF to print. 

I'm usually drawing conversations, not a single, succinct speaker. I normally map in real time, but the density of Obama's point made me take very quick notes on what stood out to me. I quickly found a transcript of the speech online to reference. One way I help groups is by summarizing and synthesizing their words into brief points. In this case, getting our new president's words verbatim was important. I compared my notes to the transcript, giving me a chance to really decide what to pull out for the drawing. Next, I took to drawing those points around the main banner of Obama.

In my drawing, I really focused on the ideas of work and responsibility, that's what resonated with me. I wish I had colleagues drawing the same speech so I could see what surfaced in their drawings.

Blagojevich Corruption Network Map

Spotted by Der Networkmeister, Valdis Krebs on  The Washington Post:

A Tangled Web

Operation Board Games - the sprawling public corruption probe that led to the recent arrests of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff - has already brought eight convictions, and it is far from over. Here's a who's who of figures ensnared and how they are connected.