It's good to see PBS is teaching strong values to grow up with with Sid the Science Kid and this lovely chart song (below). A chart is a handy dandy scientific tool...it gives you information that you can see with your eyes...a chart that you visualize...you get the picture... so do I... Best kid song ever.
From FlowingData.com
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:
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(Spotted on Dan Roam's Back of the Napkin blog)
Many years ago, then unemployed art director Marty Coleman started to draw simple pictures on the napkins that he included in his daughters' school lunch bags.
Marty put these visual haiku-like sketches everyday throughout jr. high and high school a 5 year period. He found that these disposable miniature artworks not only made his daughters happy with a daily surprise, creating them also helped him get through the hard times.
In December of 2008 Time Magazine published a napkin he drew commemorating the election of Barack Obama!
Read about how this daily gift built a wonderful relationship with his girls that survived a painful divorce and physical separation.
Now you can now get a daily napkin by going to The Napkin Dad Daily blog. Look for the 'subscribe' link on the left. Check out the growing collection of Marty's drawings on his Flickr set.
Check out this fun cross-section of attempts to explain the economic wormhole and how it ripped the fabric of our financial universe! From Dan Roam:
Several visual lessons in what went wrong with Wall Street
The last many weeks have been a field day for people around the world to unleash their inner stick figure. As everyone from market analysts on Wall Street to truck drivers on Main Street struggles to describe what is happening in the global economy, we see more "solving problems with pictures" than at any time in memory.Of the dozens of clips and links that people have sent me, here are my four favorites so far. (Warning: some of these are longer than they need to be, some more superficial, and some more crude, but all are worth the few minutes they take to watch.) Think of this as a fifteen minute crash course in global economics, presentation design, and visual thinking -- all at the same time.
Also check out Xplane's animated Subprime Explaination.
T. Boone Pickens uses live drawing of the facts and concepts behind potential future energy plans for the US is worth watching in its entirety. I have a hard time coming up with a better example of how to create a series of simple pictures to explain a complex concept.
~ From the blog of Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures:
From http://www.xplane.com/subprime/:
This three-and-a-half minute movie by XPLANE shows us the brief history of the subprime crisis.
It takes viewers through the process starting in 2000 and ending in current day, detailing the role that home buyers, mortgage lenders, banks, financial institutions and ultimately asset backed securities played. The production was created by XPLANE’s renowned information design team using Cintiq technology byWacom to allow for live and still animation, and voiceover.
Watch a three-minute movie of the TED2008 BIGVIZ sketches, created by Autodesk animator and compositor Keith Chamberlain, with music scored by TEDster Michael Montes.
The images created by Kevin Richards and David Sibbet during the TED2008 are set to music and animated using gorgeous complexity modeling. The hundreds of individual sketches are transformed into rivers of data, DNA strands, and galaxies of ideas.
Watch a behind-the-scenes view with Sibbet that illuminates the integration of hand-rendered art, Wacom tablets, and the multi-touch wall. Unbelievable, really.
You can download the TED2008-BigViz Book and see more here.
What?! A technology company that hires thousands of engineers used a comic book to explain their new web browser? (No one told me that software engineers liked comic books!) Google Chrome is Google's browser project; this comic book by Google, drawn by comic guru Scott McCloud, is scanned here and shown under its Creative Commons license. I have been test-driving Chrome since it's launch and love it--with the exception that all my Firefox plug-ins haven't yet made the leap, but give'em time.
While watching the "Sunday Morning" news program this morning, I was shocked to see Mitch Butler and Josh Landis, the "Fast Draw". At interest to me: that these techniques are being used to support the evening news. Here is just one link and you can find many others through Googling Fast Draw, Josh Landis and Mitch Butler.
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