Archive For February, 2009

‘Yes They Can!’ dynamic global stats (WN0017)

By | February 23, 2009

Yes they can! from Gapminder Foundation on Vimeo.

It’s easy to view statistics as anything but interesting in the way that they are commonly presented – lists of numbers on a page, graph or table are rarely intended to be viewed as dynamic.

There are, however, other ways to view them. Hans Rosling of Sweden’s Gapminder Foundation makes a presentation in the video above that may completely change the way you look at the world.

Using the unique Trendalyzer software developed by Gapminder (and later acquired by Google), this lecture brings statistical data about global development alive and makes a very compelling arguement for altering one’s worldview.

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Greening Tokyo (WN0016)

By | February 22, 2009

Sometimes you come across something on the web that is hard to resist letting others know about. Being an ongoing Tokyophile, I was alerted to these images via a couple of feeds in my Tweetdeck (a tool that lets you keep track of what’s going on in your Twitterverse).

If you count the surrounding prefectures (Yokohama, Chiba, Saitama, etc), the entire Tokyo region is made up of 34,000,000 people. That’s a lot of folks condensed into what is effectively a very small space. Naturally, green spaces are pretty hard to come by and of great value when they do appear.

The Green Island Project have put a contemporary and ecological twist on a popular theme in Japanese creative culture of re-imagining of the city. In these pictures, the streets of Tokyo have been grassed over. For places that I’d come to know so well over the five years I lived there, it puts the city in a remarkably different light.

The picture at the top is of Shinjuku while the one below is of Shibuya. Click here to visit some of my own pictures of the city.

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