The crisis of credit visualized by Jonathan Jarvis, Crisisofcredit.com

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This is the original, full version.

Generation Y, also known as the Millennial Generation or Millennials, Generation Next, Net Generation, or Echo Boomers, describes the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates for when the Millennial generation starts and ends, and commentators have used birth dates ranging somewhere from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s. Members of this generation are called Echo Boomers, due to the significant increase in birth rates through the 1980s and into the 1990s, and because many of them are children of baby boomers. The 20th century trend toward smaller families in developed countries continued, however, so the relative impact of the “baby boom echo” was generally less pronounced than the original boom.

Characteristics of the generation vary by region, depending on social and economic conditions. However, it is generally marked by an increased use and familiarity with communications, media, and digital technologies. The effects of this environment are disputed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Y

via holykaw.alltop.com

Using a Nokia N8 smartphone and a CellScope, the team behind the Wallace & Gromit series has made the world’s smallest stop-motion animation film.

Follow 0.35-inch-tall Dot as she runs through an obstacle course made of British currency, rides a bumblebee and stitches her way out of trouble. The music is catchy too.

Animators at the UK studio Aardman used a 3D printer to make 50 different versions of Dot, because she is too small to manipulate or bend like they would other stop-motion animation characters. The figurine’s tiny features stretched the limit of the printer — any smaller and it would be hard to make distinct limbs. Each one was hand-painted by artists looking through a microscope.

Directors Ed Patterson and Will Studd attached a CellScope (winner of a PopSci Best of What’s New award in 2008) to a Nokia N8 12-megapixel camera to film Dot’s struggle in her microscopic world. They said Nokia commissioned them to make the film in celebration of CellScope’s potential to improve medicine in the developing world.

CellScope is the brainchild of Daniel Fletcher, a bioengineer at the University of California-Berkeley, who combined a cellphone camera with a 50x magnification microscope.

Watch Dot’s adventure below.

“Created by Brazilian ad agency Loducca, more than 600 balloons were used to create this clever little ‘book’ that tells a story involving Slash and Ozzy Osbourne, among others. About 10 balloons were popped every second.”

This awesome animation was created by Dulcidio Caldeira of Paranoid BR for MTV Brazil. A long line of balloons, each with a sequential picture, is popped by a pin – one after another. Each new picture is exposed fast enough that it looks like an animated sequence – almost like a cartoon flip book made of balloons.

After the failure of Google Waves and Buzz, the web keep talking about Google+, the search giant’s new social initiative and answer to Facebook.

Since Google+ has been out to a small number of people that had some time to assess Google’s social network, Mashable questioned a circle where it hits a home run and where it strikes out.

We’ve already written a review about Google+, but we were curious about what early Google+ users thought about it. So we decided to ask a circle on Google+ about what they believe is good and bad about Google+. And they delivered: we got more than 100 responses about the pros and cons of Google’s new social layer.

Let’s be clear: Google+ is in its infancy, and many of the things they mentioned are part of future releases or bugs that Google intends to fix. Still, the conversation we’ll provide a look into where Google’s social networking is succeeding and where it comes up short against its competitors.

Read here some of the pros and cons of Google+, according to its users.

Interesting Mashable Take: “Google is smart to integrate Google+ into every part of its empire — it creates engagement and reinforces that Google intends to be social. It needs to provide assurances that private emails and private search remain private, though. How to do that may be one of its toughest challenges.”