The New York Times has a fun new interactive toy on their site that lets you define your family and see how many families are like in in the US. It updates on the fly and shows lots of additional data like median incomes and historical data.
My family is similar to only 0.16% of all households. How about yours?
How Many Households Are Like Yours? – Interactive – NYTimes.com.
The New York Times has posted an interesting behind-the-scenes story and video of Pixar Studios. The story talks about some of the things that Pixar did to prepare for Toy Story 3, such as visiting day care centers. Of course, you might expect that to be normal research for the film. But would you think that they would dump trash in their lobby and have people run through it? It makes for a fascinating read.
Computers are a necessity, but the acting — the voice-over work — comes before the animation. The animators themselves are cast like performers, with some specializing in comedy and others in emotional moments, Mr. Podesta said. And animated moviemaking uses many of the same tools as live action, including costuming, production design and cinematography. As part of their substantial awards push this year, the marketers at Pixar (another category the company excels at) decided to pull back the curtain on the magic factory a bit.
via : Carpetbagger: A Rare Look Inside Pixar Studios @ NYT
via : Animation Advocacy, Pixar Style
The New York Times has taken Census Bureau data from from 2005 to 2009 and created a nice series of maps. You can zoom in to browse by state, county, and even Census district. You need to be aware that the dots in the above map are randomly scattered within the Census district, and do not map exactly to an address. Still, it is a pretty useful tool to see where different racial groups live.
The New York Times is reporting that the iconic subway map for New York City has been redesigned. This will be the first overhaul of the map since it was released in 1998. In the new map, the island of Manhattan is made even bigger, while Staten Island is reduced in size. City Island, which was missing on some of the maps, has been added back in.
There are some changes in the map that I think are very good. For example, the subway lines now have drop shadows added to them to make them stand out. However, there are some changes that make me wonder at the design decision behind them. The water in the map has been changed to be a deeper blue. That is fine. But the parks that were colored in green have now become olive. Which would you rather have, a green park or an olive park? Personally, I prefer the green park.
Next month, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will unveil a resized, recolored and simplified edition of the well-known map, its first overhaul in more than a decade.
via A New Subway Map for New York – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com.
Another election is just around the corner, and the New York Times is covering it with their usual thoroughness. They have recently released an interactive election map infographic for all the House races that are up for grabs. Their site will also show you which Senate races are occurring this year, as well as which states will be electing new governors.
via : House Race Ratings
The New York Times reports that Greece has reached a bailout deal. The deal is worth 110 billion euros, or $146 billion over three years. In return, Greece will have to reduce its yearly deficit to 3% of GDP.
Who benefits from the bailout? Those institutions that hold bonds issued by Greece, of course. For example, Greece owes French banks some $75 billion. That explains why France was pushing so hard for a bailout of Greece. What about the other PIIGS? That is, what about Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain? Who do they owe debt to?
The New York Times has created an interesting visualization just to answer that question. While it is easy to look at one country and see who they owe money to, we see a web of debt appear when the Times graphs the bigger picture.
Banks and governments in these five shaky economies owe each other many billions of euros — converted here to dollars — and have even larger debts to Britain, France and Germany. Arrow widths are proportional to debt amounts.
The New York Times has published an article, and an accompanying chart, on how Social Security is expected to pay out more money this year than it will collect in taxes. The Congressional Budget Office did not think that would happen until 2017. If the CBO missed this target so badly, it makes one wonder how bad they will miss the target on the deficit, or on the cost of health care. While the chart is a simple visualization, it has profound implications on all United States citizens.
The problem, [Stephen C. Goss] said, is that payments have risen more than expected during the downturn, because jobs disappeared and people applied for benefits sooner than they had planned. At the same time, the program’s revenue has fallen sharply, because there are fewer paychecks to tax.
via Social Security Payout to Exceed Revenue This Year – NYTimes.com.
The New York Times has an interactive inforgraphic on the historic health care vote. Click on the link below to see how your representative voted.
via House Vote 165 – H.R.3590: On Motion to Concur in Senate Amendments – NYTimes.com.
The New York TImes has created an interactive map of the Winter Olympic gold medalists. Simply click on a sport, such as Figure Skating, to bring up a list of events. Then select one of the events under that sport – such as women’s figure skating, to see a total of the Winter Olympic gold medal since the inception of the games. You can click the arrows to go forwards and backwards in time to see who won the Olympic gold medal for women’s figure skating in 1976 (Dorothy Hamill, in case your wondering). From the interactive infographic:
Some countries have dominated Olympics events for years. Norway, Sweden and Finland, for example, have won virtually all the gold medals for cross country skiing since 1924. The maps below show the current and previous gold medalists in the Vancouver Olympic events.
The New York TImes has created an interactive 3-D map of the Olympic venues that will be occurring soon in Vancouver, Canada. Like any 3-D application, you can rotate, pan, and zoom into the map. Clicking on one of the four sites will cause you to load up a more detailed map of the venue. You have four sites to choose from, including Whistler Olympic Park, Whistler Mountain, Cypress Mountain, and Vancouver. Once you navigate into one of these four sites, you are able to see the actual places where the events are occurring. For example, you can see the Richmond Olypic Oval building where the speed skating will be held on the second day of the competition.
VizWorld.com Got an idea for a story? Drop us a line at [email protected] or other means.
Comments