Unusually, Paris-based dissident financial pundit and gonzo broadcaster Max Keiser spends much of his latest podcast [mp3] speaking in a disturbing faux-MSM accent — discussing subjects as diverse as YouTube comments critical of his voice, “Peak Marijuana”, ice hockey tactics, Anderson Cooper’s reptilian heritage — and even a seemingly-sincere endorsement of this blog (!).

Perhaps better known to media-watchers in Europe (PressTV, Russia Today, BBC, and Al-Jazeera), Keiser and Stacy Herbert currently create two half-hour international TV shows and 120-mins of podcasts per week, in addition to other projects and occasional Euro MSM. Recent appearances on France-24 have been explosive, and scored well online — the French producers seem to be having fun picking lettuce-leaf academics for him to debate.

The last couple of years have seen the dramatic rise of a handful of pundits — let’s call them “The Brat Pack of Doom” — who are marginalized in US MSM for their criticisms of financial propaganda and the financial-political nexus.

[I know, I know: Faber is too old to be a "brat", he and Taibbi aren't shut-out of MSM, and Celente isn't a financial journalist. You could include other non-financial dissidents like Wester Tarpley or Wayne Madsen in this group.]

Hard to categorize — he once described himself as a “financial anarchist” — Keiser could possibly be described as a “progressive libertarian” of the sort emerging in the West these days. [A demographic without proper representation: Business-lobby-libertarianism dominates political branding in this area: e.g. Ron Paul, ACT Party NZ, etc.]

A Guardian hack attacked Keiser as “Mad Max” in 2005 after he teamed up with Zac Goldsmith to “pursue a fantastical scheme for making money by shorting Coca-Cola stock and distributing the proceeds to ‘victims of Coke’s business model in places like India and Cambodia’“. [KarmaBanque.] “What is it about the off-spring of the super rich?” the columnist asks, and suggests a reasonable penalty for class-traitors: “Trial without a jury, no right to silence and an unlimited fine at the end of it.” (This is the Guardian, remember!)

The most inaccurate slur is that Keiser is “anti free market” — as he and his guests frequently attempt to expose market manipulation, and Keiser often speaks to the effect that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with markets as price-finding mechanisms. By contrast, he appears to take umbrage with things like fiat currency, fractional reserves, bankster shenanigans, infinitely-leveraged zero-risk trades, profit-driven ecocide — and what he terms the “casino gulag economy“.

American Policy Center founder Max DeWeese wrote a column attacking Keiser as “a new kind of terrorist”, saying: “Keiser and his ilk hate business and they hate free enterprise and are using these tactics to redistribute wealth and cause chaos in the market place.” (Four years later, such a statement made openly would easily draw the addendum “…just like Goldman Sachs.”)

Says Keiser’s web page, “Karmabanque describes its audience as ‘Activists, Anarchists, and Hedge Funds.’ It’s a stock exchange of sorts, but with a brilliant and maniacal twist: it trades on the strength of boycotts.” To put it in the simplest possible terms, Keiser targets companies that are vulnerable to boycotts, such as Coca Cola, which relies heavily on daily consumer buying. Once the boycott has begun, Keiser tells his minions to buy options on the targeted company’s stock — options betting that the stock price will go down. As the boycott drags down the company’s stock, Keiser and his followers make a quick buck on the options.

Clearly projecting, DeWeese only sees self-interest in Keiser’s activism. Kinda reminds me of St. Augstine’s “City of God” story about Alexander and the Pirate, which goes something like this…

Once upon a time, a famous Pirate Captain was captured by Alexander the Great’s navy, and brought before him — and Alex is all like: “Hey dude, what’s your problem? Why do you think you own the seas?” And the Pirate Captain goes: “Why, the very same reason you lay claim to the entire motherfucking Earth! …I get my conquest on with a little ship, and you call me a “pirate”. But you do it with armies, corporations, banks and bureaucrats — and you’re called Emperor! …I’d like to speak with my legal counsel now.”

Lo stato del Web mappato sulle linee della Metro di Tokyo.

È questo l’ambizioso progetto che i ragazzi di iA (information architects) hanno pensato e realizzato attraverso una bellissima e minuziosa infografica.
Il progetto, che si rinnova e aggiorna ogni anno, è arrivato alla quarta versione. Quattro anni di monitoraggio costante e report finale attraverso un elaborato poster.

Linee concettuali che collegano i più grandi e visitati siti di tutto il web. C’è la linea delle news, quella della creatività, quella dell’intrattenimento, quella della conoscenza, quella dei soldi e molte altre. Ogni linea si snoda per collegarsi ad altre. Ogni “fermata” è connessa.
È la rete.

Il risultato del monitoraggio? Un web più provocatorio-curioso-ironico.

Tra gli italiani, nella parte alta della mappa, si può scorgere: i siti de La Repubblica, de Il Corriere e Beppe Grillo come Trend setter. Gli altri trovateli voi.

La Web Map Trend 2009 è acquistabile sul sito iA in formato A0 (84,1 cm × 118,9 cm) per 49 dollari.

Per visualizzare il progetto in alta risoluzione, clicca QUI.

I keep reading articles that state how companies don’t get social media. As I look for solutions for my personal social media organization I think I realize why. There’s a lot out there to keep up with and figure out. I plan to write more on the topic, but for now I think this map from Brian Solis’ PR 2.0 website is a good start at trying to make sense of it all.

There’s been a lot of talk about how (and where) the Red Sox should upgrade their offense.  This visual paints a picture of the Red Sox lineup compared to the rest of the American League.

Läckert producerad framtidsvision, iaf om man diggar infographics. Dock Microsoft som är avsändaren, så då känns den genast inte lika angelägen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dact-1Tdgz0

En mer (t)rolig version.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0USn7eufXps

To play Thanksgiving crossword puzzle (to kill 30 sec worth of time) click here.

so…I found out today that the flaps on turkey’s beak/neck/throat turn red when they are upset or during “courtship”.

A few days ago I posted some visuals showing the seasons of Zack Greinke, Felix Hernandez, and CC Sabathia.  I’ve made some changes to these visuals and wanted to share all three of them in succession.   I’m experimenting with something called the “Rank-o-meter,” (a bit cheesy, I know) which presents a simple concept: How hot (or cold) was a player relative to his peers.  Check out these three charts and let me know what they tell you about these three pitchers?  Did the Cy Young Award voters get it right?

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Baseball has been around for awhile.  Over a hundred years, with a VAST treasure chest of information and history.  As a baseball fan I’ve often wondered why there was so little visualization of stats and other information.  It seems like most of baseball’s rich history has been communicated through rows and columns of data.  Not that I have anything against numbers, but shouldn’t we have progressed beyond this approach by now?  I got curious about progress, and looked back at how things have changed in our society since baseball was invented.

Take a look at how little the box score has changed since 1876!  It’s really the tip of the iceberg in terms of how little innovation there has been in the sport’s design and communication of information.  My hope is to be part of a revolution in changing the way baseball is viewed and understood by its fans.

My project “is the new” has had many lives. It first appeared here. Later, it was reworked here. That, in turn led to its appearance in the Boston Globe here. It sat dormant for a while but has been reworked yet again, this time by David McCandless and it now appears as “X is the new black” in his book The Visual Miscellaneum.

Looking at CC’s 2009 season, and comparing it to the same visuals for Felix Hernandez and Zack Greinke (below), it’s not even close.  CC was great down the stretch and in the postseason, but WAY too inconsistent to win a Cy Young award.

Maybe.  Despite the award being a landslide, looking at Felix’ season visually (in the same way I did for Greinke earlier today) makes you wonder.  His season is eerily similar to Greinke’s -5 months of pitching like a #1, and one month of pitching like a #3.  Same level of sustained excellence.  In fact, for the last 4 months of the season, he was better than Greinke.

Here’s a visual breakdown of Zack Greinke’s 2009 season.  If you’ve seen past posts from me, you’ll notice that I am interested in exploring new ways to view and understand the game of baseball besides looking at numbers.  And while I’ve shown the actual numbers for Greinke’s monthly ERA on the left, the point of this graphic is to demonstrate his performance visually and relative to the rest of the American League starters.   Think of it as a performance bar chart.   Some conclusions from this visual? First, we see that with the exception of June, Greinke was at the very top of all American League starters in ERA each month.  He was amazingly consistent – if you look at other “aces” throughout baseball, it’s rare to see them pitch like a true #1 (the first cluster in each month column) EVERY month.  So Greinke pitched like an ace for 5 months, and a #3 starter for one month.  He also started and finished strong – as THE best starter in the American League.  If you’re interested in comparing Greinke to his CY Young competitors (CC Sabathia, Felix Hernandez, and Justin Verlander), you can look more closely at the names above and below Greinke each month and you’ll see none of them came close to his relative excellence and consistency.

As we get ready to eat too much next week, many of us will travelling at some point. As you do, the following is a handy reference from Eating the Road.

One of my favorite Michael Jackson songs is “You Are Not Alone.” It’s almost tragically poetic that he could write such a beautiful song but not be able to hear his own lyrics. Isolated from the outside world after decades of controversy, it took his death for the country to really show how much they still loved and embraced Michael. But I’m straying from the real topic of this post, as I often do. The point is that everyone needs to be reminded that they are connected. As alone as they feel, there are people out there going through the same thing.

A while ago I stumbled onto this website called “We Feel Fine.” The system searches out blog entries that include the words “I feel (insert emotion),” or “I’m feeling…” When found, it records the full sentence and categorizes it according to the feeling expressed. It then organizes it into an interface with floating tons of particles, each representing a feeling posted in the blogosphere. Things like color, size or shape of the particle indicate the nature of the feeling. When you click on a particle it reveals the full sentence and any information it has about the author. You can also filter the particles by feeling, author’s sex, age, weather or location.

But more that just the random particles careening across the screen, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar have created six different movements (Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds) to categorize and display the information in real time. Basically it’s an infographic  paradise.

During his TED talk, Harris said, “”I think people are very similar, but I also think we have trouble seeing that. As I look around the world, I see a lot of gaps, and I think we all see a lot of gaps. We define ourselves by our gaps: language gaps, ethnicity gaps, age gaps, gender gaps, sexuality gaps, wealth and money gaps, education gaps, religious gaps…but I think that actually despite our gaps, we really have a lot in common.”

Otto Neurath, designer and sociologist, made beautiful pictograms that invoked the data he displayed. If his units represented unemployed people, they might take the form of hunched, depressed silhouettes, hands in pockets. Days of travel across the ocean might be expressed as jagged ocean waves.

We often forget that information graphics need not be cold and clinical.  The book “Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis” serves as a tonic to that tendency.

The blurb for the book: “Austrian sociologist Otto Neurath was a seminal Modernist figure. Much attention has been given to his achievements in the fields of graphic design and philosophy (Neurath was a member of the Vienna Circle, founder of the Museum of Society and Economy, inventor of the ISOTYPE pictorial system and champion of the Unity of Science movement), yet his involvement with urbanism and architecture has been all but ignored. From 1931 onwards, Neurath collaborated with the International Congress of Modern Architecture and its chief exponents–Cornelis van Eesteren, Sigfried Giedion, Le Corbusier and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy–to develop an international language of urban planning and design. More experimentally, throughout the 1930s a fascination with visual media led to an attempt to franchise the Museum of Society and Economy by establishing international satellite museums. This volume contains a text by curator and writer Nader Vossoughian, which offers a fresh perspective on one of the most versatile intellectuals of the twentieth century.”

Using “Adobe Illustrator and a lot of Math” Johathan Gosier of Uganda designed an infographic focusing on “infrastructure improvement and capacity building in Africa, particularly in the area of the internet and cost.” According to The New York Times Freakonomics, “The completion of three major marine cable projects this year is expected to decrease international bandwidth costs by 90 percent and support further Internet penetration.”

Illustration: ©Bradley R. Hughes, Men's Health

New work; a detailed manual on how to get her feelin’ frisky for the Essential Guy Skill in the Jan/Feb issue of Men’s Health magazine. Each month, the “Ask Men’s Health” section shows you how to do something cool with an illustration. Click on image for a larger view.

infographics or my new obsession under the motto: ‘I love pies. I hate pie-charts.’ amen.

2012: the end of the world? sceptics VS believers, une infographie sur les données et les croyances (ou non) autour de *voix grave* DEUUUUXMIIIILLEDOUUUUZE
via information is beautiful

Here’s a look at the difference (psychologically) between being baseball’s best and worst teams.  A Yankee player leaves the ballpark with a high probability of a win (and a smile on his face).  In stark contrast, a guy toiling away for the Nationals leaves the ballpark with a frown on his face two-thirds of the time.  What’s interesting to note, though, is that even the very best teams still lose a lot, supporting the old adage that baseball is truly a game of failure.

Giant global bank HSBC — sorry, I mean “the world’s local bank” — are positioning themselves as leaders in the global institutional response to climate change, i.e. cap-and-trade. Their “flagship environmental program” — the Climate Confidence Model — is now in its third year of collecting “data”. My guess is we’ll be hearing a lot more about this report in the months leading up to the next UN Climate Conference (COP 15) in Copenhagen this December.

The 2009 Climate Confidence Model (pdf) is a collaboration between HSBC, WWF, The Climate Group [an international corporate "think-tank"], Earthwatch Institute, and Smithsonian Tropical Research. Their humble goal: “to understand consumer attitudes towards climate change.” Presumed methodology: (1) Survey a tiny population from 12 major nations; (2) draw conclusions about the thoughts and feelings of 3.4 billion people; (3) Produce slightly sinister video featuring Lord Stern; (4) Email CNN. (5) Take learjet to Hawaii and hit the links.

• Sir/Lord Nicholas Stern is HSBC’s “adviser on economic development and climate change.” He was the author of a 2006 report [here] for the UK Treasury on “the economics of climate change”.

SOUNDBYTES & KEYWORDS

First, lets note that rather than talk about “global warming”, HSBC are using the more “progressive” term “climate change”. [See my post on "Global Warming Memes and Trends".] The angles they’re playing — and solutions they’re proposing — should be sadly familiar to many:

• The central involvement of “business” [translation: elite financial institutions & corporations] in designing policy.
• “Green growth” and “Green jobs”…
• Sustainability is a matter of “revolutionary” significance [carbon trading = environmentalism].
• The key factor is “leadership”. With strong leadership the crisis can be averted. [Send in your favourite translation!]
• Consumers are important. We just want to understand consumers better so we can “work together”, etc. ["Serve the people."]

The most obviously bogus thing about this is that their soundbytes and keywords will be picked up and repeated by MSM, so the Climate Confidence Model will end up influencing — rather than merely observing — public opinion. Granted, taken on it’s own it’s not the strongest example of a media feedback-loop out there — but it’s just one of many officious pseudo-statistical reports. It’s too bad HSBC hasn’t made the survey datasets public, and that there are almost no decent notes on methodology. On the other hand, there is a very attractive (and nominally interactive) infographic here.

A quick primer on media-seeding for large institutions: (1) Keep it vague, keep it simple, stay on message. (2) Appear confident and in control, while flattering “consumers” with your attention to their concerns. (3) Simulate accessible and objective debate and/or “democratic” processes…

• Lord Stern: “What we need is clarity in policy, and strong policy. That understanding must be shared by people in government, because many people in government don’t have that clarity on what businesses need.” Therefore, Stern reasons, “business” must “collaborate with government to explain what’s necessary.”
• Francis Sullivan [The Climate Group]: “The survey shows that seven out of ten support governments spending money on climate change — just as much as spending money on saving their national economies.”

MAIN FINDINGS OF THE ‘09 REPORT:

• The very first paragraph of report reads: “The majority (65%) of people believe it is very important to reach a deal at the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen and 79% are in favour of emission reduction targets.”
• A worldwide decline in “optimism” about “stopping” climate change, especially in the richer nations (US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, France).
• An increase in “optimism”, “concern” and “personal commitment” in the six “emerging markets” (Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Malaysia, Hong Kong).
• A section on spending priorities is the most suspicious. The chart below asserts that, on average, 92% of people around the world consider spending on “tackling” climate change of equal-or-greater importance than healthcare! …And only 17% feel that government spending to support their local economies is more important than (intra-national) spending to avert the apparent climate crisis.

Search volume from Google Trends suggests that since the 2007 Rugby World Cup defeat, New Zealand web-surfers have lost interest in sex — a traditional off-season pursuit — and gotten into porn:

Visitors, please respect our cultural traditions
and familiarize yourself with this chart.

Using Google Trends and Insights, it’s possible to build up a rough picture of the scale and geography of “global warming”-related search-terms over time…

First up, it’s “global warming” vs. “climate change” vs “al gore” vs “inconvenient truth”:

• “Global warming” is still the dominant term, but surprisingly seasonal.
• Going by the last few months’ volume, “climate change” seems to have about 65% of its “strength”. [A chart here gives a combined reading for these two terms.]
• The “Inconvenient truth” meme broke-out with the release of the film, and fell away in mid-07 — about 12 months of solid interest. Similarly, “Al Gore” searches — which showed truly dramatic spikes during ‘07 — have dwindled.

In 2004, strong interest in “global warming” seemed limited to the Anglosphere, plus India. Turkey, the Phillippines, China, Sth Africa, Japan, Germany, France, and Malaysia were next. Then the global explosion of interest in the first half of ‘07:

• In the following months, “global warming” search breakouts would be detected in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. The latest was Kenya in early ‘09.
• “Climate change” currently shares equal status with “global warming” in just two parts of the world: NSW, Australia, and Ottawa, Canada.
• “Al Gore” remains unexpectedly popular in northern Europe, but — aside from some additional interest in Argentina, Portugal, and India — he was only an international memestar for those twelve months after the film.

Now lets move on to the lower-end of the keyword-volume scale…

• Interest in “global cooling” broke-out in late-05 in the US — and despite some interest in Australia, Canada, UK and India, it remains a vastly more popular search term in the US.
• “Carbon credits” became a popular search term in late-06 in India and Australia — and New Zealand, Sth Africa, Singapore and Hong Kong were all proportionately higher than the US, where interest is relatively low.
• “Carbon tax” rose to become a significant search-term in Canada during the first half of ‘08. Interest remains high in New Zealand, Australia, Ireland and Italy.
• Terms referencing “skeptics” [separate chart] appeared on the scene in the US as an apparent knee-jerk reaction to the ‘07 spike in non-skeptical interest — and have been breaking-out during recent months. Australia is “leading”, followed closely by the US, then Canada and the UK. Surprisingly, no other nations registered significant search volume for these terms in English.

• In the chart above, we see that skeptics have increasingly come to see “global warming” as something more sinister and man-made than a simple “myth”. (A trend which begins after the early-07 spike).
• This clip (Lord Monckton’s warning before the Copenhagen Climate Conference) caused associated break-outs in late October. Monckton is touring the US, speaking against the globalist institutional “response” to climate change: the clip was taken from this 90min talk at the Minnesota Free Market Institute.

Of course, I’m just searching English-language terms, so despite the massive weight of English-language content online, this is a little deceptive. The final charts show “global warming” in some other languages, first at a lower order of magnitude — and then higher for Japanese, Spanish and Indonesian. (Portugese, would be yet another magnitude higher.) See them here alongside English results — they are puny!

• “Global warming” in French — which showed strong early interest — and in German has fallen more dramatically than the English term.
• The Indonesians are late-adopters, and the Chinese surprisingly early. Russian interest has grown more strongly than in the West.
• Spanish-language interest has not leveled off significantly since ‘07.
• Japanese results are surprisingly even.

To be continued…