Some pages from Willard Cope Brinton's second book (1939), which is about graphic design and visualization.

Millions of Facebook users every day share their status with their friends, acquaintances and the public in general. These updates are tiny windows into how we're doing–brief, to the point and descriptive of what's going on this week, today or right now.

But grouped together, the status updates of millions of Facebook users from every demographic in the nation can work together to say something about how we as a nation are doing. Measuring how well-off, happy or satisfied with life the citizens of a nation are is part of the Gross National Happiness movement. This graph represents how "happy" the nation is doing from day to day, by looking at how many positive and negative words people are using when they update their status: When people are using more positive words (or fewer negative words) in their status updates than usual, that day is happier than usual!

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Germany's most popular women's magazine is banning professional models from its pages and replacing them with images of "real life" women instead.

In what is seen as the latest attempt to stamp out the "size zero" model, the editors of Brigitte said it would in future only use women with "normal figures".

"From 2010 we will not work with professional models any more," said Andreas Lebert, editor-in-chief, adding that he was "fed up" with having to retouch pictures of underweight models who bore no resemblance to ordinary women.

We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images. We also provide a novel image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition.

Each blending result is given a numeric score, allowing us to find an optimal combination of discovered images. Experimental results show the method is very successful; we also evaluate our system using the results from two user studies.

Iglo light café offers light therapy as a cure to sun deprived Stockholmers throughout the dark months of October to March. Using the same technology as hospitals, Iglo provides an informal atmosphere and a place for friends to meet. The coffee shop dresses the visitors in white and is lit by UV-free lighting in the strength of 3000 lux. People relax in the warm environment, sipping on smoothies and other healthy options while soaking up the artificial light.