by Randy Krum.
The new 2014 Death & Taxes poster has been released, and it is fantastic! Visualizing the President’s proposed budget for next year, each department and major expense item is represented with proportionally sized circles so the viewer can understand how big they are in comparison to the rest of the budget.
You can purchase the 24” x 36” printed poster for $24.95.
Great poster, even if I disagree with some of the arrangement of agencies. Homeland Security, for example, should be grouped with the military on the left side of the poster.
If you are an interactive graphics type, it would be really cool to have sliders for the agency budgets and display the agency results for changes.
Say we took 30 $Billion from the Department of Homeland Security and gave it to NASA. What space projects, funding for scientific research, rebuilding of higher education would that shift fund?
I’m not sure how you would graphically represent fewer delays at airports, no groping of children (no TSA), etc.
Also interesting from a subject identity perspective.
Identifying specific programs can be done by budget numbers, for example.
But here the question would be: How much funding results in program N being included in the “potentially” funded set of programs?
Unless every request is funded, there would have to be a ranking of requests against some fixed budget allocation.
Another aspect of Steve Pepper’s question concerning types being a binary choice in the current topic map model.
Very few real world choices, or should I say the basis for real world choices, are ever that clear.