Dutch railway network in real-time

The Dutch have put their rail network online so that the positions of all their trains can be visualised in real-time. Using the OpenStreetMap template, this great website shows some of the clear benefits to opendata and is an example to all transport providers.

Infographic: Deaths in American Civil War

A brilliant infographic, designed by Gene Thorp for the Wall Street Journal, paints a harrowing and yet fascinatingly vivid picture of the American Civil War. Using a Google Maps template, the infographic charts the location and time of all the deaths in the American Civil War.

Through the better presentation of long forgotten information such as death figures in the American Civil War, we are able to look at such important, dramatic and horrifying historical events in a new light. When I looked at this infographic for the second, third or fourth time, I began to notice the almost organic detail of war. The ebbs and flows, the importance of geological factors for the movements of troops and inevitably, for the movements of death. I began to recognize troop movements as they left a trail of deaths behind them. The concentration of fighting around rivers revealed the importance of these physical barriers in battle. I noticed the geographical concentration of the fighting in Virginia, Tennessee or NW Georgia. I noticed the lulls in fighting following particularly deadly battles or the letup in fighting during the harder winter months and the terrifying upsurge in deaths as Spring arrived in 1863, 1864 and 1865.

The infographic is truly brilliant. With the ability to zoom into certain areas and to shorten the timeline, one could easily spend hours studying it (I would know!).
With some tweaking I imagine that the deaths could be divided between Unionist and Confederate. This would paint a more strategic picture rather than the human one which is currently displayed.

With a lot of work, a similar presentation could be done for WW1 & WW2. Hell, why not Iraq, or Lybia...hell, why not all conflicts?

Google/UN partnership maybe? Or maybe I should just do it..

Crisis & Information: catalysts for a worldwide budget revolution?

A fantastic "Every Day is Tax Day" infographic designed and developed by Fred Chasen, shows just how much of a US citizen's wage goes to the government and through which department it is spent. This information, revolutionary for the taxpayers' perception of their government spending, may be heralding a new age of greater accountability for government budgets.

With the US seemingly trapped by internal bickering on its budget; with the EU about to announce a new budget increase this Wednesday likely to cause outrage throughout EU Member States that have been forced to make politically suicidal public sector cuts and with the anti-eurobailout party True Finns about to rejoin the Finnish Government, the question I ask: are taxpayers finally getting some of the representation they deserve?