The New York Times has a pretty sweet interactive map that let's you visualize campaign contributions for the presidential candidates.
You can see how different campaigns take off over time, and you can see where candidates are generating their nest eggs for 2008.
One thing is for sure -- middle America doesn't seem to be too interested in giving money to politicians, and it looks like the Northeast is one big money funnel.
Hans Rosling demonstrates how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He shows us the next generation of his Trendalyzer software -- which analyzes and displays data in amazingly accessible ways, allowing people to see patterns previously hidden behind mountains of stats.
(Ten days later, he announced a deal with Google to acquire the software.) He also demos Dollar Street, a program that lets you peer in the windows of typical families worldwide living at different income levels.
Be sure to watch straight through to the (literally) jaw-dropping finale.
Watching this data visualization allows you to picture the human species as one organism -- as swarm intelligence.
Check out this US Energy Usage interactive graphic which provides data on carbon emmissions per state.
Georgia has a Per Capita Carbon Footprint Score of #25, each person contributes 21 tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year on average. The total Carbon Score of #11, with the 10th highest resident population, Georgia is the #11th highest Carbon Dioxide polluting state in the United States.
A little rough around the edges (e.g. I couldn't find how to zoom back out of the map - it turns out you need to use the right mouse button), but pretty useful.
Note that if you click on the information icon on a state (when it appears) you get to a page for that state with lots of interesting data.
Computer scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology (also known in Georgia Bulldawg circles as the wreck down at tech) and Microsoft Research have developed 4D Cities, a software that shows the evolution of a city over time -- pretty great technology, bad football team and all.
New Scientist writes that you can see the city of Atlanta change in four dimensions.
So far, the team has only modeled Downtown Atlanta by scanning historical photos and then lets some software animate and render the image.
This application will be useful for architects, historians or town planners and the team of scientists already has plans to model other cities.
The Team:
The software has been developed at Georgia Tech by Frank Dellaert and Grant Schindler, with the help of Sing Bing Kang of Microsoft Research.
The team is currently working on “a small 4D-pilot project centered around the Candler building in Downtown Atlanta, which is the trapezoid-shaped building at the center of the map above, using Microsoft’s Virtual Earth API” (Credit: Georgia Tech).
An interactive version of this map is available from the 4D Cities website by clicking on the “4D-Atlanta” link. And here is a link to a larger, standalone map where you can choose between 3 kinds of interactive views (road, aerial and bird’s eye) — and have lots of fun (especially if you know Atlanta).
Here is how they introduce the project on the 4D Cities home page. “The research described here aims at building time-varying 3D models that can serve to pull together large collections of images pertaining to the appearance, evolution, and events surrounding one place or artifact over time, as exemplified by the 4D Cities project: the completely automatic construction of a 4D database showing the evolution over time of a single city.”
Now, let’s return to the New Scientist article for additional details.
To create a model of Atlanta, the researchers scanned in numerous historical photos of the city that had been snapped from similar vantage points. The software is designed to identify the 3D structures within the image and break them down into a series of points. It then compares the view in each one to work out why some of these points are visible in some of the images but not others. Was the building simply out of shot? Or was the view of one building blocked by another? “If we can rule out those two possibilities, then we know that the reason we don’t see a building is because it didn’t exist when the image was taken. Either it was not yet built or it had already been demolished,” says Schindler.
For more information about this project, you should read the talk that Frank Dellaert gave at the 3rd International Symposium on 3D Data Processing, Visualization & Transmission 2006 (3DPVT 2006) (PDF format, 30 pages, 8.32 MB). You also should read a paper named “Inferring Temporal Order of Images From 3D Structure” (PDF format, 7 pages, 1.78 MB), which was presented at the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2007).
Sources: Paul Marks, New Scientist Magazine issue 2610, June 27, 2007; and various websites
They don't have Reggie Ball anymore, but look for Sean Bailey and company to lay it on em' again come November. Go Dawgs!
National Geographic has introduced a geographical & "genographical" world map illustrating when & where ancient humans moved around the world, as a visual explanation about the appearance & frequency of genetic markers in modern people. the interactive application also acts as the basis of depicting your personal ancient ancestors & genetic lineage around the world through the ages, after sending back your own DNA sample.
[link: nationalgeographic.com]
