mathoda.com

The New York Times does a great job presenting interactive visual displays of data alongside the newspaper’s stories. For a story profiling Tiger Wood’s golf game, here’s the interactive display of how Tiger Woods wins majors. For a story on inflation here’s the interactive display showing how Americans spend their money and how that’s effected by inflation.

As Hans Rosling has shown, the proper visual presentation of facts can be illuminating, reforming opinions in a way that pure text often can’t do.

When will websites beyond the NY Times obtain and start to use such capabilities? It may be that displays like this only make sense when the effort put into making the data presentable is sure to reach a very broad audience, but some blogs are already reaching very large audiences.  Here’s hoping more websites develop such capabilities.

Dean Kamen and his group at DEKA are remarkable inventors. Their inventions include the Segway, a wheelchair that can go up stairs, and a water purification device.  They may have made their most amazing invention yet, a nerve reading prosthetic arm that can pick up a water bottle without squishing it:

Link: http://d6.allthingsd.com/20080529/deka/

The NY Times also has a story well worth reading, about how monkeys can control a prosthetic arm through a device implanted onto their nerves: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/science/29brain.html?em&ex=1212206400&en=312f177c2cb3fde2&ei=5087%0A

Saturday was a big day for Microsoft and Yahoo, with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer offering about $33 a share for Yahoo, and Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang stating that the Yahoo board had concluded that undervalued Yahoo by about $4 a share. Microsoft decided to walk away.

A few hours earlier, about 1,700 miles away, Sue Decker, Chief Financial Officer of Yahoo, and Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft, who are both on the board of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, happened to be meeting in front of 30,000 people attending Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting. Given the momentous meeting between Ballmer and Yang that was to happen later in the day, I kind of wondered what they said to each other. Now I’ve found out:

Sue Decker: Should I kiss you hello? Or will people think we’re getting married?
Bill Gates: Don’t!
[stands up swiftly and shakes her hand]

According to Sue Decker, at the time she spoke to Bill Gates she thought Steve Ballmer would accept Yahoo’s higher asking price, and was surprised they didn’t. Here’s Sue Decker stating all of this and describing in insightful detail Yahoo’s past, present and future:

(http://edcorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1975)