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
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.
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.
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)
The Good Sheet, which hits Starbucks (SBUX) counters each week leading up to the election, tackles one election topic per issue: energy, carbon emissions, health care, immigration, education, etc. Starbucks' goal is to get people talking about the issues that matter.
"We had been looking at ways to bring a little bit of those conversation-starters into the Starbucks environment," said Terry Davenport, the senior vice president for marketing at Starbucks. SOURCE
The long newsprint sheets fold down into a compact 5" x 5" square, but when unfurled they are packed with statistics and detail that illuminate the complexity within each topic.
The project brings together an innovative publication (100% of your subscription goes to a charity of your choice) and America's version of cafe culture (the proverbial "third place") in order to seed the conversations that will face the next US administration and congress.
View each GOOD sheet on-line at: http://good.is
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.
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The power and flexibility of a network--whether a simple group of casual neighbors or a complex next generation communication network--depends not just on the number of connections, but on the quality of the nodes, and more important, the type of nodes. Below is a fantastic intro to the concept of graphs and networks. It helps in understanding the a social graph and how it differs from a social network.
Christian Nold thinks we should pay more attention to how our environment shapes our emotional and physiological states.
His work with Bio Mapping—which measures people’s responses to their environment and connects those feelings to their physical location—suggests that a map of emotional landscapes represents a powerful tool for analyzing the relationship between place and broader social issues.
