• animated population pyramid for Germany
  (tags: visualization demography data)

• Turn any image into a Google Map
  MapLib, via Google Maps Mania
  (tags: geospatial visualization)

Xiao Yisheng has created a handy means to employ Google’s interface to present user-supplied content in an elegant Beta at maplib.net. I tried it out with an old aerial photograph from Nova Scotia, adding a few markers. I anticipate that the app’s features will expand to allow more annotation and maybe even hyperlinks. I also tried it out as a way to annotate a photograph, but I’m not so sure that’s a success. It’s better at flickr:

• Reverse Geocoder
  quickly find coordinates on Google Maps
  (tags: geospatial geotagged web2.0)
• US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud
  thanks to the genius of Chirag Mehta
  (tags: visualization web2.0 time data)

I’ve been playing around with the SIMILE Timeline widget some more, this time exploring more than 8 years of my own activities, as recorded in the logfiles I generated as I pinballed around academia as Science Librarian and Allround Busybody. The fine details are surely Baby Hippopotamuses (only their mother could luvvum), but the general phenomenon of heuristic visualization is clear to even the cursory glance: topics wax and wane, and projects overlap. I’ve also included the oook blog archive in the chronology.

and not just for Engineering/Math/Science Education:

I got to this (as I often get to stuff…) via Stephen Downes. The original Typepad posting is really worth a look for more detail.

I have the faint hope of being the FIRST to blog this puissant word, which may or may not have been coined by Anthony Lane in his review of Borat and Volver in this week’s New Yorker. Lane’s use of the term comes close to being its instantiation (on the evidence of Google, which points to two other uses, one an obvious misspelling of ‘squirmiest’), but I digress… The money quote:

He [Sacha Baron Cohen] is a squirmist: a master of SECS, or Socio-Ethnophobic Comic Simulations, in which he adopts fictional personae and then marches briskly into the real world with a mission to embarrass its inhabitants. (New Yorker November 6, pg. 106)

It’s an illuminating, even scintillating review of both movies and (more important) of the sociocultural stuff that underlies them. Catch this bit of lambent skewerage:

So why send his characters here? Because America, to any filmmaker, is where the money is, but also because, to the connoisseur of hurt pride, it is where the sore spots are. (pg. 109)

Didja miss Ali G [Sacha Baron Cohen] does Chomsky?

Several hours of messing around with XML and examples from David Huynh’s Timeline has produced a fairly basic personal chronology, to which I may eventually add more items, links, images. See dinosaurs and External Uses (2/3 of the way down that page) for some varied examples of features and general utility, especially the Itinerary of King John (not a Good Man, as we recall…)

• SIMILE: XML-based Timeline
  brainchild of David Huynh http://people.csail.mit.edu/dfhuynh/
  (tags: ajax mashup visualization web2.0)

• Zotero Documentation
  “Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.”
  (tags: metastuff tagging web2.0)