Posts Tagged ‘data’
01
Jan
2009
Holiday Economy Examined
What our present economy has to do with 165,300 bathroom visits and 67 million dead large birds.
2008 has come and gone, as has the drawn out celebration of excess, consumerism and gluttony known as the “holiday season.” A time when love and appreciation are exchanged between family and friends, they say, but really a time when money is exchanged between various cogs in the great big machine of Capitalism.
Courtesy of the ever-brilliant GOOD Magazine, this month’s GOOD Sheet neatly sums up exactly how much was exchanged during holiday seasons past and present, putting The Big Spend into perspective.
In case last night’s debauchery has left you too lazy to click and see for yourself, some noteworthy numbers from the holiday season’s economic footprint:
- $19.8 billion spent on computer and video game console and accessories during November and December of 2007. (And with the epic build-up for Grand Theft Auto 4, Resident Evil 5 and Rock Band, we bet the numbers would be much higher for 2008.)
- 67 million turkeys eaten at Thanksgiving and Christmas
- $9.3 billion in jewelery sales during November and December of 2007
- $474.5 billion in retail sales during holiday season 2007, almost $100 billion more than 10 years ago, adjusted for inflation
Sure, after a certain point, numbers become meaningless. We stop seeing the difference between “huge” and “really huge.” (Really, how much do you care if it’s $30 billion or $300 billion or $500 billion? It’s not like you’ll ever truly “experience” either kind of money anyway.) So here are a few handy yardsticks for contemplating the bigness of those numbers:
- You’ll go to the bathroom roughly 165,300 (read “sort of big”) times in your life.
- You’ll breathe around 400 million (read “huge”) breaths in your lifetime.
- The U.S. national debt (read “really huge”) is $10.6 quadrillion (or billiard, if you’re European) — that’s $10.6 billion with three more zeroes — and growing by $3.37 billion per day.
Got the “a-ha” moment yet? We thought so.
Now go, we’ll leave you to your “sensible financial planning” New Year’s resolutions and trying to figure out what to do with all the idiotic holiday presents Capitalism, disguised as Santa, grandma or that Pollyanna-driven colleague, slipped down your chimney this year.
And remember, ain’t no shame in regifting.
Hey there! If you're new around here, grab our RSS feed for the freshest pickings.
03
Dec
2008
Geek Wednesdays: The Ephemeral Web
A modern time machine for data and what we can learn about the web from Victorian toys.
With the constant proliferation of data and its spread across the social web, we’re closer than we think to what Kevin Kelly has dubbed the One Machine. The final leap in information systems lies not in accumulating more and more data, but it in making sense of the information that does exist — which, of course, is increasingly hard the more of it there is out there.
That’s why we’re digging Zoetrope, a breakthrough development by four University of Washington students in partnership with Adobe Systems. It’s a revolutionary visualization system that allows interaction with the evolution of data as it changes across the ephemeral web — a set of operations that analyze content stream and extract temporal data.
And when you think about it, that’s pretty damn novel — after all, we’re used to looking at web pages that are nothing but static snapshots that stay a certain way for a given period of time, then update into another static snapshot.
Zoetrope lets you create a “lens” — a dynamic filter that tracks something you’re interested in as it fluctuates over time.
You can set up a lens for a specific topic, bind two lenses together to explore the correlation between two topics, anchor a lens to a specific portion of a web page and track how it changes over time, or even create a lens for the price point of that shiny new gadget you’ve been dying to get your hands on so you can pick the best time to buy it.
Zoetrope is also brilliantly extensible and data extracted by it is usable in many other information services, like the wonderful Swivel (which we’ve featured before) and IBM’s Many Eyes — systems whose forte lies in representing data in slick ways, but not necessarily in tracking the information in the first place, which is where Zoetrope steps in.
The system’s name is an allusion to the Victorian zoetrope device — a cylinder that creates the illusion of action by spinning static images in rapid succession.
Ironic, since the web is actually the complete opposite — action taking place faster than we can process, forcing us to artificially create static safe spots so we can keep up.
No word yet on when we’re to expect Zoetrope in public beta, but something tells us this one won’t have trouble on the VC circuits.
Subscribe
Connect
Categories
Web Pickings