Death rates of various diseases visualised

Well I think the graphic below offers an insight into how unbelievably over the top the hype and hysteria surrounding swine flu has been. I have personally become very, very sick (not of any type of flu) of the whole thing and wish the newspapers, news channels and general public would stop giving it so much coverage.

Take a little look at the graph below and make your own minds up about what you want to be afraid of. (You may need to click on it to make it a reasonable size for viewing)

Job hunting in a recession

Here is a presentation from the presentation/career guru Mr. Rowan Manahan on how to hunt for jobs in a recession. Well worth a look!

Job-hunting in a tight market

View more presentations from Rowan Manahan.

Arnie on jealousy

Cheating with charts

Great post at the Duarte Blog (found here) about how people cheat with the charts to make information fit with their version of events.

By simply manipulating the length and height of axis units you can tell what look like very different stories. As Duarte describe it:

"The flexible grid: One of the easiest ways to give more or less movement to the trend of a curve is to expand or contract the horizontal or vertical axis of the chart. The chart below shows a correctly scaled trend and six ways the visual image changes by expanding or contracting the grid layout."

Slideshare competition - How did I get on?

Well the 2009 Slideshare competition is coming to an end, the public vote is now over and the control is now in the hands of the very qualified judges (including one Mr. Guy Kawasaki - who as you might know is a good friend of mine that is to say I met him once).

So how did my presentations do in the public voting I hear you ask with baited breath... well Let me tell you...

Out of the 3,000 entries I had presentations that placed @ 9th, 60th, 94th, 153rd and 167th (all in the top 5.5% for you stats people out there).

I am pretty happy with how I got on although I do realise that the public voting didn't always reflect the quality of the presentations so I will leave it to the judges to decide if any of mine were actually any good!

If you voted for me, thank you, if not... damn you :-)

Steve Jobs: Back in action (for now)

Well Steve Jobs is officially back in action with Apple and he took to the stage this week to launch a few new (but very minor) products.

I am happy to see Steve back on stage again, but I must say that he still doesn't look, or sound, like a particularly well man which makes me a little sad.

Below are two pics of Steve, at the top is one of when he was healthy (albeit a tad overweight), below this we have Steve Jobs in Sept 2009, I think he looks very very frail and if I was an Apple shareholder I might be getting a tad worried.

Images from the road 6

At the edge of Niagara Falls

A gutsy pitch

I read an interesting piece in the great book “The Definitive business pitch” regarding a rather unorthodox and gutsy pitch given to British Rail management in the 1980’s.

The managements at British Rail were holding a day of pitches to try and identify the best marketing agency for their requirements. At the end of the day the final agency hadn’t shown up for their slot...

After 10 minutes had gone by and there were no sign of the presenters the management present decided that enough was enough and started to get out of their seats in somewhat of a “huff”.

It was at that moment that the agency team – who had been waiting outside – strolled into the room... “We know how your customers feel” and by this stage so too did the management: left waiting, with no information and staff who seem uninterested.

Gutsy