This is a wonderful, whimsical video by Makoto Yabuki. (Via Ismael Chang Ghalimi)

White Box from Makoto Yabuki on Vimeo.

If you’d like a look inside a high-tech chocolate factory, as well as an update on what’s been going on with the FXPAL/TCHO research collaboration (hey! you got chocolate on my research!), Timothy Childs of TCHO and I are giving a talk at the PARC Forum tomorrow, May 7, at 4 PM. The PARC Forum is open to the public; directions are here.

Google recently unveiled its public data search that allows people to generate charts of data from public sources. Nifty. But it doesn’t seem to allow the user to customize the visualization by selecting representations, date ranges, etc., or for data to be extracted for further analysis. It would be great if I could run my own statistical analyses on the data, or generate visualizations with, for example, Many Eyes.

Another problem I see with the data is lack of transparency: I couldn’t see any way to browse the various datasets they have indexed. Instead, it seems that you have to stumble onto them by chance. Nice for serendipity, not so nice for exploratory search.