Assorted websites

Please Rob Me [don't post on Facebook that your houses are empty for the weeken]

Graphy Your Inbox

Assorted on Personal Productivity

Assistive Technology

Mind2Chart: MindManager add-in for project planning

Peace of Mind

Recommended Books


Tips 'n Tricks for Windows: Simplicity of Using MindManager Pro 7 as a Single Dashboard

US Elections links for the Day

A visual comparison of the four acceptance speeches

The Rhetoric and the Reality

City at the end of Time

Cool link of the Day

Britain from Above

Should we make condoms a free good?

via Presentation Zen

Data Visualization of the Week

All of Inflation’s Little Parts

Cool Visualization

Data from the U.S. Federal aviation administration is used to create animations of flight traffic patterns and density

Related;
In terms of distance, flying to a distant location is much safer than driving to that location. Flying in an airplane, however, remains slightly more dangerous than driving to a nearby airport.

Election Link of the Day

The Electoral College’s Subtle Math

Be sure to check their multimedia feature on the topic

Logistics of a Communion

New York gets ready for the Pope's visit;

Among the profound — and mundane — questions they are confronting: How do 530 priests and deacons give communion to 57,000 people in 14 minutes?

Five years of Iraq lies

Assorted on Iraq;

Bush: The battle in Iraq is noble, it is necessary and it is just


Juan Cole's latest column;

But the troop escalation has failed to stop bombings in Baghdad, and the frequency and deadliness of attacks increased in February and March, after falling in January. In the first 10 days of March, official figures showed 39 deaths a day from political violence, up from 29 a day in February, and 20 in January. Assassinations, attacks on police, and bombings continue in Sunni Arab cities such as Baquba, Samarra and Mosul, as well as in Kirkuk and its hinterlands in the north. On Monday, a horrific bombing in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala killed 52 and wounded 75, ruining the timing of Vice President Cheney's and Sen. McCain's visit to Iraq to further declare victory.

Moreover, Turkey made a major incursion into Iraq to punish the guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers Party from eastern Anatolia, who have in the past seven months killed dozens of Turkish troops. The U.S. media was speaking of "calm" and "a lull" in Iraq violence even while destructive bombs were going off in Baghdad, and Turkey's incursion was resulting in over a hundred deaths. The surge was "succeeding," according to the administration, and therefore no mere attacks by a third country, or bombings by insurgents, could challenge the White House story line.

Bush's five big lies about Iraq powerfully shaped press coverage of the war and have kept the mess there going at least long enough to turn it over to the next president. As he campaigns for the White House, John McCain, Bush's heir apparent in the Iraq propaganda department, has been signaling that "complete victory" in Iraq will be his talking point of choice for Year 6. If the mainstream media and the American public don't wake up to the truth about how the war has gone, they'll find themselves buying into an even longer and deeper tragedy.

Robbing the cradle of civilization, five years later

Photo Essay: Five Years of Fighting

Iraq By the Numbers

Five years on: media's role in Iraq

Five years in Iraq: a deep disquiet in the US

The Arab Conscience and the 5th Anniversary of the Iraq War


Interactive Features
Casualties of War

Iraq 5 Years In

Audio slideshow: One woman's war

Iraq violence, in figures

Iraq key players, then and now

Timeline: Iraq after Saddam

Story of the War

Iraq survey: key results in graphics

Reuters- Bearing Witness

Management Lesson of the Day- ‘You go with what you have’

One way to look at a ComStat meeting is as a live audit of overall police performance, one in which the leadership’s goals sometimes borders on the unreasonable because that’s the only way to ensure at least reasonable results. But before that, a ComStat meeting is a way of sharing crime data that recognizes why the first step to crime reduction itself- the gathering and analyzing of accurate, timely intelligence- has to be quickened by the heat of accountability.

The reason is simple: Most people in the world learn things faster when they know they’re going to be tested on them. Cops are no different. If we had been satisfied to just sit in a circle and chat about the intelligence we all had (which is the way some departments run their knock-off versions of Comstat), a lot of cases in New York would never have been solved and a lot of more people would have been victimized….

When the process started, kids in the suburbs were doing their homework on Pentium machines, but Yohe was punching in crime data from all seventy-six precincts and writing his own code for a simple spreadsheet into a borrowed 386. When we started moving from hand maps to computerized mapping, Yohe quickly found out even the best mapping software around couldn’t plot multiple crimes at any single address. Here we relied on Yohe’s creative ability, because he was able to devise a way to get around the software’s logic and make out hot spots look like real hot spots...

In New York City, we were eventually able to establish drug motive in about 25 percent of all the city’s murders, but we knew that a lot of other people were being gunned down in street disputes in which the drug connection was never firmly established. In the end, the consensus was that, at the very least, 40 percent of the city’s homicides were by-products of the drug trade.

-The Crime Fighter: How You Can Make Your Community Crime Free
by Jack Maple , Chris Mitchell

Emerging-Disease Hot Spots

First Map of Emerging-Disease Hot Spots
Map of zoonotic pathogens from wildlife, shown from lowest occurence (green) to highest (red)

Photo of the Day- African Bush

President Bush in Tanzania

Related;
Africa Conflict Zones (interactive)
What You Need to Know About Africa and Why It Matters

As Bush Heads to Africa, Radelet Grades the President's Efforts
New Developments in Uganda Civil War
What we do in places like Malawi matters to people in places like…Miami

Would the following Tanzanians react differently if Barack Hussein Obama was the American President?

Op-Art for the Day

You Are What You Spend

Idiots Guide to Subprime Crisis

The US sub-prime crisis in graphics, from BBC via CrossingWallStreet

Cool Interactives

The Economics of the Presidency

Crude Variations

Capital Index

Your President's travel entourage

I think they forgot to mention Mr. Barney and Miss Beazely

via Boing Boing

The life of typical teenage student in the west

via information aesthetics

The Minister of Information

Profile of Edward Tufte, NY Magazine