However, it is amazing to me how non-opinion based information gets thrown AS opinion. It is even more distressing because it is so easy to find many statistic directly from the source, before they are muddied by political agenda, or distributed in off-the-cuff comments and hearsay.

So, I figured I could help…

The following are just the data & graphs of screen-shots taken from real census data (and yes the URL of where I got the data from is also noted next to each graph.) Feel free to browse the data yourself and make your own observations.

Debate the implications all your want – but below are not news reports or debate notes, they are charts taken from the actual data sources. All I ask, and hope to acheive, is that no matter what side your on, just remember not to include non-sensicle bullet points that just aren’t true and instead try to argue around your beliefs. Do not get caught up in baseless, inflated, skewed, or inaccurate depictions of history as it relates to hard cold metrics.

Important notes on data around first day of office dates

The first day in office for elected presidents is in late January following the election results, coming two months before in November.

The stock market
The stock market shows the amount of money distributed in US corporation. The rich, and anyone investing in the rich wins when this graph goes up. Note 2007 and 2008 were shockingly bad, the worst downswing since the mid 80s. The good news everyone is it has only taken four years to get back from our bubble burst of 2001 which took eight.
http://www.google.com/finance?q=INDEXDJX:.DJI (You want this going up)

Unemployment Rate

This one is a often heavy argument point, but the data is all very easy to lookup. When a single percentage is called out it is hard to know its context. Those that scream and point fingers from he top of a mountain often end up implicating everyone – if those at the bottom of the mountain did a little research…. Again 2007 was the beginning of the frenzy. And if you remember there were many sad days and foreclosures making an “america is shutting down” environment. It was the intense swing from just a year before in 2006 that scared people the most. 
http://goo.gl/2O2zl (You want this going down)

  2007-2009 was the sharpest upswing of unemployment we have seen over 30 years.

Debt

Here is another amazing story of how politicians program you to just repeat what they shout, programming you to have their debate. Again, the data is there to have your own debates and ones that aren’ skewed by anyone. Debt sucks, and gus, we have had it growing for a long time. And this rate back-and-forth argument is again a graph away. You can see the linear growth of date below.
http://goo.gl/d9Wvz (You want this going down)

Personal Income

This is one that people don’t talk much about, because we like focusing on the negatives. BUT your incomes have been growing fairly steadily for a long time. We had a short blip of our first downward trajectory in 2008, actually the only one in recorded history of the US, but it corrected itself pretty quickly after 2009.
http://goo.gl/2CaIc (You want this going up)

I also found interesting that the following census data shows a steady increase in revenue and income in the US for decades.

Disposable Income per capita

This is also a great graph to be going up. Like the income graph we saw our first real blip ever in 2008, but for the most part we have consistently been getting a linear growth.
http://goo.gl/QQOlG

Revenue

This one is a bit less cheerful, but t’s the reality. We had some great years as a country with revenue, but unfortunately the money stopped coming in in 2007 and we have all felt this graph at home.
http://goo.gl/DFMK8

https://www.facebook.com/about/timeline (2011-12-15)

You are introduced to the homepage with a video. A pretty good one at that.

Clicking a button on the bottom quickly scrolls to a new section, so whether you start by scrolling or you are more of a clickster you are taken cre of. And both actions quickly teach you how to interact with ethe site.

As you scroll, the section headers rise to the top and stay there. (much like the other sites I have blogged about, and possibly started form the ios table header design pattern). ALso becoming a standard is the button navigation animates to sync up with where you are scrolled to in the website.

“[when the oppertuity came to produce a movie at first it was a hard descision, but looking back at my bucket list, and seeing it on their, reminded me to take the oppertunity I was given before I die]”

It felt much like finding a time capsule, and one that I forgot I even placed. With so much having happened in the last 4 years, and so much happening in the last week, it offered a pretty perspective on things. As I read through the message in a bottle sent to me by my former self, I was excited to be able to cross of a couple items on the list, and dissapointed at the vast majority of things I could not.

I really encourage those out there to mak a bucket list. It offers perspective into you life as yo find yourself focusing on so manythings over the years. It helps bring you back to a core goal, or reminds you of one you may have forgotten.

From a more technological perspective (I can’t help it, I am a technologist after all,) I encourage you to write it in google docs. I was not obly able to easily find this old list, but since Google Docs are live docs I can see the revision history of the document over time. I can imagine how interesting it will be to check out the changes, and additions I make to this list over the next 20 years.

…

While looking for bucket list-esque pictures for this post on the web I stumbled onto this site (http://bucketlist.org/) that helps people share their bucket list publicly.

Here is an info-graphic my friend turned me onto (click the image to get the full view.)

It shows the exodus from some of the biggest tech companies (facebook, yahoo, google…) that supplied the man power, and brain power, to feul various startups such as: Zoosk, Hunch, Tapjoy, Color, Foursquare, Quara and more.

Want more?

Here is an article outlining the biggest winners and losers involved:

http://blog.topprospect.com/2011/06/the-biggest-talent-losers-and-winners/

The iPad (tablets) is at it again. After all these years Stanford has uped the anti on what the bar is for acceptable braille reading and writing devices. The tablet system shown here calibrates through a swipe and audio queues, and sets the type pad to where ever the users fingers lie. (This solves the problem with the lack of tactile response the flat screen of an iPad provides. In essence, as descried in the video, the input points find the users fingers, not the other way around.)

Check out this cool little tool: Google N-Grams

It shows a graphical representation of the frequency words used in books over a rangeof years. It is based on on all the books google has scanned into their database to date.

This TED talk is what turned me on to the project.

The project, the tool and the lecture are all quite entertaining.
Here are some graphs I created playing with the tool. Graphic data, especially that which is based on sentiment represented by our societies authors,  gives us amazing clues into how perception and reality intersect.

Here are some slides (in case they change the site by the time you read this.)

The main home screen looks pretty standard. But notice the color and the footer….

As you scroll up he page the footer rises from the bottom, revealing a whole other expereince….

As the you scroll up, the color of the back ground fades into white, and the old footer is now the new header. I thought it was a beautiful experience…

I have seen many variations of the concept of scrolling while browsing the internet. Here are some others:

This one is called “Ben the body guard” and it was a website for a game. (http://goo.gl/HG9PQ) In this creative experience, the body guard tells you his story as you scroll down the page. The animation of his walking and the street passing by are all based on your scrolling down the page. After the story and his walk is over, the links are neon signs on the buildings rooftops, and the bottom of the page gives you a link to the appstore and a close up of ben peerig down the edge of the top of a high rise. Well done!

It really is hard to explain the amazing nature of the this technology so I attached a video below showing it in action. It’s is a must see, and probably is THE most amazing technology I have seen in my entire life.

It’s is interesting how many of the representations of people look primarily the same from the minds eye, and how there are strange over laps of data on others at times. Almost like you can see the minds eye wander, or you can see the related emotions that are associated with some visual queues.

You also have to give allot of credit to the impressionist movement. They were way ahead of their time. As you can see they completely got the nature of the difference between what we “see”, and what we remember or interpret even though we don’t realize it. The videos also remind me allot of what it feels like when I am dreaming.

Video: Left side what was actually seen, right side what the technology decoded from the brain:

Just when parents and wives everywhere finally got thier point across to get their loved ones out from in front of the large screen TV and unplugged from their beloved game console, a twist emerges.

As it turns out even our most powerful computers have problems figuring out the right combinations, patters and sequences necessary to solve large complex problems. AN example of these complex problems that baffle our silicon constructed counter parts is defining the model of many viruses, and you can’t defeat what you do not understand. By leveraging the power of crowd sourcing and the serendipitous realizations that only humans can have (so far,) creating a game to engage gamers to figure out the unique characteristics (folds) of  the simian AIDS-causing Mason – Pfizer monkey virus retroviral protease (AKA M-MVP) is having some great success. It’s kind of like Tetris meets chemistry class. Move over xenga, no virtual good in the world will trump the prize of being the person who helped conqore aids!

Even after this gaming experiment ends, the analyzation of the methods and patterms applied to the game by the gamers will be adopted by the computer algorithms, thereby furthering our ability to solve problems at scale.

Check out the video: