How do you visually communicate a $50 billion fraud? The Financial Times has a simple, but effective tile chart that provides a picture of Bernard Madoff's recently exposed scheme.
The tiles provide details of each investor, with the largest tile -- about half of the whole chart -- representing the $26+ billion of unaccounted for losses.
The interactivity allows the viewer to get more information, show losses within a specific range, or search for a particular investor. FT built the visual with Visokio's Omniscope engine.
[Added 12/31/08] The Wall Street Journal has an alternative take on visually communicating elements of the Madoff scheme, mapping the circle of friends and connections who invested in the pyramid.
Of the two, I think the FT's visual is more informative. I get more of a feel for the magnitude of the investment losses and less of the paparazzi delivered in the WSJ multi-media.[Added 1/7/09] The mapping feature at Muckety.com has an impressive whiz-bang dynamic diagram of the Madoff web, doing a visual "six-degrees" on the scandal. [Left-click on "Map Tools" in the graphic below to change info and sample the dynamic graphics.]
0 comments:
Post a Comment