The New Sick Man of Europe: the European Union. French Dispirited; Attitudes Diverge Sharply from Germans Overview The European Union is the new sick man of Europe. The effort over the past half century to create a more united Europe is now the principal casualty of the euro crisis. The European project now stands in disrepute across much of Europe. Support for European economic integration – the 1957 raison d’etre for creating the European Economic Community, the European Union’s predecessor – is down over last year in five of the eight European Union countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2013.
The sick man label – attributed originally to Russian Czar Nicholas I in his description of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-19th century – has more recently been applied at different times over the past decade and a half to Germany, Italy, Portugal, Greece and France. These negative sentiments are driven, in part, by the public’s generally glum mood about economic conditions and could well turn around if the European economy picks up. Edward Tufte’s “Slopegraphs” After you read this post, you’ll probably want to check out the follow-up, A Slopegraph Update.
Back in 2004, Edward Tufte defined and developed the concept of a “sparkline”. Odds are good that — if you’re reading this — you’re familiar with them and how popular they’ve become. What’s interesting is that over 20 years before sparklines came on the scene, Tufte developed a different type of data visualization that didn’t fare nearly as well. To date, in fact, I’ve only been able to find three examples of it, and even they aren’t completely in line with his vision.
It’s curious that it hasn’t become more popular, as the chart type is quite elegant and aligns with all of Tufte’s best practices for data visualization, and was created by the master of information design. In this post, we’re going to look at slopegraphs — what they are, how they’re made, why they haven’t seen a massive uptake so far, and why I think they’re about to become much more popular in the near future. The Table-Graphic. Facebook Privacy: 6 Years of Controversy [INFOGRAPHIC] Alexander Hotz is a freelance multimedia journalist and public radio junkie based in New York City. Currently he teaches digital media at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Follow Alex on Twitter at @hotzington. The release of Facebook Places raised serious privacy concerns for users of the social network. Places allows users to alert their friends to where they are by checking-in to a nearby location, often via mobile phone.
Critics of the feature point out that under Places’ default setting, a user can tag a friend’s location even if that friend is not physically in that location. This isn’t the first time Facebook has received criticism for its privacy practices. The graphic below was created for Mashable by Lisa Waananen. Steve Job's Life and Career Timeline.