Use the links after each section or scroll.
More than just "Draw me a Picture" is "Run the Movie" backwards and forwards in the fascinating area of Scientific Visualization of data. Last night I saw a wonderful animation of Per Capita Wealth vs. Life Expectancy for countries from 1810-Present. It was presented in a programme by an English Statistician, probably for the BBC in which he is seen inside the animated plot as it steps through time. It clearly shows how generally the lot of all mankind has improved in the period and differences between the parts of the world. The Industrial Revolution is an overriding factor in this as technology makes it easier to give humans what they need for a quality life. An interesting result of the demonstration is that the underlying complexity is made appearent by looking at provinces of China over time, where the results very widely. The big urban areas progress up the distribution almost as well as entire industrialized nations do, but the rual provinces are more like third world nations being poor and unhealthy. There is the statistic cited by ABC News that there are 700 million Chinese living in poverty while a small middle class lives in the big cities. So details such as how countries change in the time period are evidant but do not seem to interfere with the trend, but such differences can be teased out.
I have seen several such demonstrations of data visualization usually as You-Tube Videos. They are usually compiled from statistics of general interest and easily understood and explained, such as the history of nuclear tests by country from 1945 to present given as flashes sized by yield and the location of the explosion on a world map, or the history of asteroid discoveries and reacquistion on a solar system model. In this latter the earth sweeps a light, as it were, onto the objects of the asteriod belt.
There are many more examples of charts constructed to reveal some facts visually, some as examples of graphical designs, some as well conceived cartoons. I know much about cartoons as a way to explore data, as drawings are an important part of the geological sciences as a way to explore models for geospacial data. One such idea that has come to me is to make a movie of the tectonic history of the San Andreas system in California and in particular a planiplastic reconstruction of terraine emplacement, pull apart basins and large scale movements and deformations. Such a movie would be a cartoon used to generate discussion as the details of the history of certian areas is uncertian or interpetable in different ways.
Another idea that springs to mind is to animate the chemical evolution of magmas and metamorphic suites in phase diagrams or in geologic section to model geochemical evolution of a terraine.
If I could find some interesting statistics that are more readily understood and make a movie, that would be cool.
This reminds me of a series done by NASA animating mathematical relations in plain geometry, trigonometry, and algebra, that used computer graphics animations to "turn the crank". literaly, on functions, animating relations. I don't recall the name of the series, only that I remember seeing some of the programs a few years ago, and computer graphics were much more expensive to do back then.
TopOn the news a couple of days ago I saw a piece on Projet Hired's efforts to get disabled people employed even in one of the worst job markets ever. I am skeptical. and I think de facto discrimination of all sorts is reiff and especially now. People who sell training in job hunting and teach what they think are useful skills for the job seeker know this and proceed to elevate false hope that the behavior of employers is reputable, it isn't. About the only thing the law on discrimination does is to train HR people on what not to say, rather than discourage discrimination of all sorts.
One area that is overlooked is that employers discriminate against people on the estimate of what it is going to cost them for healthcare, that means that many people who are not disabled get treated the way obvioulsy disabled people are treated. This also is a big factor at layoff time as well. I am convinced that employers taget people for layoffs who have used their healthcare benefits and get away with it by being secret about it. I am convinced that I saw this directly in the group I was working for in 2004 at Sun Microsystems based on a tally of who was layed off, all had medical expenses. When I sought to ally concerns about a proceedure I needed done to the manager of that group, he reacted as though he was embarrased because he knew that people who used the medical plan were being targeted. I was laid off soon afterward. Now, it is worse, employers look at credit risk and health, and generally you have fewer rights than you have under the Bill of Rights.
This is why I mistrust the Republicans much, they are uncritically pro-business, and anything that can be done to stop them, such as getting the heath care bill, is fine with me, such as wikieleaks of their corrupt business connections, and it is because of the incident I cited above that I feel this way.
TopA program I saw last night about immigrents, who wants to come to the U.S. and how hard it is to get citizenship. People are still flocking to our shores because this country has so much more freedom and opportunity than most of the rest of the world, so many new commers say, and they are right. We who were born here and became U.S. Citizens that way take alot for granted, certaintly of material wealth and working infrastructure, as compared to people who come from elsewhere, especially the Third World,
But the advantages of living here are continually under assult and not just by foreign enemies, but also from within, by people who hate diversity and by people who want to keep ammased power and wealth to themselves. Being Free is a dynamic and is always under test and whereas traditions say we are free here, actually being a citizen and not being oppressed are continually under pressure from forces that would take those porogatives away. It is not simply that freedom is self-determination without restraints, there need to be restraints on it as part of living in a society, it is that unless we are vigilant about exercising freedom there are organized factions in society that would take it away. Some of theses are easy to identify, hate groups and authoritiaian political factions, but some are less easy to see as the threat they really are, the emerging plutocratic faction and Capitalism with not enough restraints on it, and the Government which acts at times to defend its vested interests against scrutany. Politics is a dynamic, but too many people see the political dialogue as between the two major parties rather than being about the underlying tension of rights whose basis is not balance of power but fundemental in the rights of every person on earth. The new citizens are amazed that the right to vote is not conditional except that it is granted by becoming a citizen, so they vote with pride, and good for that. I get disgusted with the political rhetoric and am tempted at least once to pass by the franchaise, but I have always found at least one issue worth expressiing my will on, and so have never missed an election even though I think that larger political choices are often rigged.
Top