Sarah Cohen, a Knight professor at Duke University and former reporter at the Washington Post, and Visual Hint bring you Time Flow. Time Flow:

rethink[s] timelines, striving to always show as much textual detail about the data as possible…

TimeFlow offers five different viewing options: timeline, calendar, bar chart, table and list. There is also considerable flexibility in filtering values, combining filters, and re-arranging points on the screen.

Great idea and good to see Calais grow from black-ops internal project to an open-API service.

Big congrats to the Roundarch team for launching the Bloomberg Sports fantasy football app. The visualizations are beautiful and the whole UI is easy-as-pie. I conducted the draft for my fantasy league last night and immediately referred to the app to see who I should start week 1. Now let’s see if it’s accurate! Great job Mulvey and the rest of the Roundarch team!

From an info aesthetics article…

I read an article in Zero Hedge a while ago about how the “flash crash” in the stock market was a direct result of “quote stuffing”, a fraudulent practice designed to manipulate stock prices in predictable directions enabled by the over-automation of the market through algorithmic trading.

Recently I stumbled upon a daily blog dedicated to revealing patterns in stock data that aims to visually show patterns that are most-likely intentional and purposeful – not the truly random movements of normal market chaos. They call these visual phenomena “crop circles”.

This reminds me of a flex-coded, corporate version the machine in Darren Aronofsky’s Pi. Only with fewer ants creating the special sauce (sorry for the spoiler but I think 12 years is past the statute of limitations). Seriously though, data-mining and trend-spotting algorithms are big business in todays T.I.A. world. And that’s fine – the data’s out there let’s make sense of it. But exploring “the past, present and predicted future of almost anything”? You’re gonna need the ants on this one because there’s nothing mystifying about a plain vanilla flex skin with cloud tags and timeline scrubbers. Here’s an example of where good brand & interaction design could help bring the truly special information (if there is any) to the user with maximum impact.

This has gotten a lot of attention lately, but I think it’s worth a re-post. So sexy.

Digging in the Crates from WE AIN’T PLASTIC on Vimeo.

(from combustion)

Edward Tufte Presidential Appointment

Edward Tufte, March 7, 2010:

I will be serving on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. This Panel advises The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds:

“The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board was created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 with two goals:

1. To provide transparency in relation to the use of Recovery-related funds.
2. To prevent and detect fraud, waste, and mismanagement.

”
…

I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I’ll learn something. The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary.

Absolutely beautiful personal data visualizations are now available to view in Feltron’s 2009 Annual Report. Don’t forget to buy a copy. Someone tell Mulvey his designer-crush just turned a new page (literally).