art, science and tech.interactions

3D Printed Model of a Virus Self Assembles When Shaken

2011-10-16T23:04:00.000-07:00

Professor Arthur J. Olson of the Scripps Research Institute demonstrates a 3D printed model of a virus that self assembles when shaken. Olson is head of the Molecular Graphics Laboratory, which uses 3D computer models, 3D printing, and augmented reality to create tools for life science researchers and educators. He is also the project leader of Fight Aids at Home, a tool that allows home computer users to share their resources as part of a massive project to find new HIV drugs.

"suitably-shaped proteins with an affinity for each other - conferred by structural and charge complementarity - can self-assemble into quite complex structures, simply by random collisions"

Bitcoin P2P Cryptocurrency: Reinventing the finance system

2010-09-05T22:05:00.000-07:00

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network based digital currency. Peer-to-peer (P2P) means that there is no central authority to issue new money or keep track of transactions. Instead, these tasks are managed collectively by the nodes of the network. Advantages:

Transfer money easily through the Internet, without having to trust middlemen.Third parties can’t prevent or control your transactions.
Bitcoin transactions are practically free, whereas credit cards and online payment systems typically cost 1-5% per transaction plus various other merchant fees up to hundreds of dollars.
Be safe from the instability caused by fractional reserve banking and bad policies of central banks. The limited inflation of the Bitcoin system’s money supply is distributed evenly (by CPU power) throughout the network, not monopolized by the banks.

Bitcoin is an open source project created by Satoshi Nakamoto, and is currently in beta development stage. Bitcoin development is hosted at SourceForge.

Mag+: R&D into the experience of reading magazines on handheld digital devices

2010-07-29T21:39:00.000-07:00

>This conceptual video is a corporate collaborative research project initiated by Bonnier R&D into the experience of reading magazines on handheld digital devices. It illustrates one possible vision for digital magazines in the near future, presented by their design partners at BERG.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

This conceptual video is a corporate collaborative research project initiated by Bonnier R&D into the experience of reading magazines on handheld digital devices. It illustrates one possible vision for digital magazines in the near future, presented by our design partners at BERG.

The concept aims to capture the essence of magazine reading, which people have been enjoying for decades: an engaging and unique reading experience in which high-quality writing and stunning imagery build up
immersive stories.

The concept uses the power of digital media to create a rich and meaningful experience, while maintaining the relaxed and curated features of printed magazines. It has been designed for a world in which interactivity, abundant information and unlimited options could be perceived as intrusive and overwhelming.

The purpose of publishing this concept video is first and foremost to spark a discussion around the digital reading experience in general, and digital reading platforms in particular. Thus, we would be more than happy to hear what you have to say regarding the concept and ideas expressed in the video: the magazine reading experience, digital browsing, text versus images, as well as hear about your own digital reading experiences and thoughts. We are all ears.

Follow the discussion in the Bonnier R&D Beta Lab:
http://www.bonnier.com/en/content/digital-magazines-bonnier-mag-prototype

For additional information, please contact Sara Öhrvall at sara [dot] ohrvall [at] bonnier [dot] se (+46 (0) 8 736 4009) or Pontus Schultz at pontus [dot] schultz [at] bonnier [dot] se

Photos and screenshots are available on Flickr at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bonnier_rd/sets/72157622918954909/

or downloadable in a zip-file here (23MB):

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/302248/Bonnier_MagPlus_HiRes_Photos.zip

All videos and photos from the Mag+ project are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence. This means you may use all the material, as long as you follow certain conditions.

Read more about the licence here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en

Sourcemap is a platform for researching, optimizing and sharing supply chains

2010-07-11T22:13:00.000-07:00

Sourcemap is a platform for researching, optimizing and sharing supply chains.

We built Sourcemap so that everyone can access the information needed to make sustainable choices and share them with the world. The project is free, opensource, and volunteer driven.

Neri Oxman at Business Innovation Factory

2010-03-13T02:02:00.000-08:00

By letting materials tell their own stories, the form-finding (not form-making) artist, architect and material ecologist shares a few brilliant examples of her work.

Neri Oxman is a designer and researcher whose work establishes a new approach to design at the interface of computer science, material engineering and ecology. Her research promotes the aesthetics of material formation and behavior as a scientific contribution to ecological activism. She is the founder of an interdisciplinary design initiative, MATERIALECOLOGY and is currently pursuing her PhD at MIT as a Presidential Fellow. In June, 2009, she appeared on the cover of Fast Company magazine featured as one of the 100 most creativ people in business.

http://www.businessinnovationfactory.com/iss/innovators/neri-oxman

Natalie Jeremijenko at Business Innovation Factory

2010-03-13T01:48:00.000-08:00

Blending biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering, the artist shares some creative experiments from her environmental health clinic.

Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist whose background includes studies in biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering. Jeremijenko’s projects—which explore socio-technical change—have been exhibited by several museums and galleries, including the MASSMoCA, the Whitney, Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt. A 1999 Rockefeller Fellow, she was recently named one of the 40 most influential designers by I.D. Magazine. Jeremijenko is the director of the environmental health clinic at NYU, assistant professor in Art, and affiliated with the Computer Science Dept. Jeremijenko directs the xDesign Environmental Health Clinic. The Environmental Health Clinic develops and prescribes locally optimized and often playful strategies to effect remediation of environmental systems, producing measurable and mediagenic evidence and coordinating diverse projects to effective material change.

FULL STORY
www.environmentalhealthclinic.net/

c-base Open Moon: fly me to the moon!

2010-03-12T10:31:00.000-08:00

c-base Open Moon will demonstrate that the community creating wikipedia is able to fly to the moon.

Join the revolution.

Turn community into commoonity!

We deliver tools helping everyone realize their vision.

We shape new collaboration standards.

We will define a new industry standard for innovation methods and tools.

To turn things true c-base Open Moon participates in the Google Lunar X Prize.

Winning the Google Lunar X Prize is only the first step. [...more mission...]

Our team is open for community, open source and innovation. Be a part of us and/or send us your ideas for the right way to fulfill the mission and what will follow. We are looking forward to your technical and technological contribution to built our space future.

Commoonity into space means: Your engagement defines our future in space.

How I can participate

electronic warfare: TOYWAR.COM

2010-02-13T19:03:00.000-08:00

TOYWAR was the most expensive performance in art history: $4.5 billion dollars

THE TOYWAR-STORY: the TOYWAR.com resistance shelter was installed in november 1999 to protect etoy from aggressive take-over attempts and to recruit TOY.soldiers and journalists for the historic domain name battle between the etoy.CORPORATION (legendary internet art giant, incorporated 1994) and eToys Inc. ( market cap. at this time: more than 8 billion dollars). after the etoy.SHAREHOLDERS (art collectors and fans) rejected a ridiculous offer of $516,000 for the etoy.BRAND (registered TRADEMARK for experimental entertainment and cultural business operations), eToys Inc. filed a naive lawsuit against etoy. the toy retailer accused etoy of unfair competition, trademark delusion, security fraud, illegal stock market operation, pornographic content, offensive behaviour and terrorist activity.

this strategy failed terribly: the etoy.SHAREHOLDERS, specializing in and awarded for surreal incubations, cultural viruses and impact management decided to fight and turned the case into a TOY.harbor of e-commerce: the first TOYWAR.mission was to establish global alliances and to spread the information. long term business associates like rtmark.com, the thing.net or hell.com immediately started to promote the crisis alert. 1798 activists, artists, lawyers, celebrities and journalists were selected and recruited between november 1999 and february 2000 to join the playful TOY.army. TOYWAR worked on the base of self organized, multi-level intelligence - possible only on the net ...like a swarm of bees, hundreds of well-informed people, industry insiders, kids and legal experts contested the aggressor on every level (filing counter court cases, infiltrating customer service, pr departments, the press, investor news groups and also on the level of federal trade commission etc.). more than 300 articles (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, CNN) reported the story and 250 resistance sitesand net-shelters were established. result: within 2 months the eToys Inc. stock (NASDAQ: ETYS) dropped from $67 (the day the battle started) to $15 (the day eToys Inc. finally dropped the case). TOYWAR was the most expensive performance in art history: $4.5 billion dollars. a glorious victory for the etoy.CORPORATION which compensated activists with etoy.SHARES (INTERNATIONAL ART MERKET SYMBOLS EYA / EYM - postmasters gallery new york): in march 2000 hundreds of brave TOY.soldiers transformed into etoy.CO-OWNERS with voting rights.

http://toywar.etoy.com/

Social engineering-Knowledge Database

2010-01-22T19:13:00.000-08:00

SKDB is a method for sharing hardware over the internet. By “hardware” we mean not just designs for circuit boards, but also biological constructs, scientific instruments, machine tools, nuts and bolts, raw materials, and how to make them.

You don't need to reinvent the wheel every time you begin a new project. Someone out there has probably already done most or all of the work for whatever you are trying to do, and then released the plans on the internet. There are many common tools and parts involved in making things. If only we could just “get” everything automatically from the web, DIY manufacturing would be much easier. Essentially we want to do something like “apt-get” for Debian or “emerge” for Gentoo, the Linux software package managers. SKDB simplifies the process of searching for free designs, comparing part compatibility, and building lists of materials and components and where to get them. You could even say SKDB is “apt-get but for real stuff”.

In SKDB, hardware is organized into packages. Packages are a standard and consistent way for programs to find data. Packages may contain CAD files, CAM parameters, computer-readable descriptions of product specifications, product-specific code, and bill of materials. For each part in a package there are a number of interface definitions, which describe how the part can connect with other parts, even parts from other packages. Each package also lists dependencies which have to be bought or built in order to successfully carry out a project. For example a drill press is required to make holes with a certain level of accuracy. SKDB downloads all of the dependencies automatically and compares them to your existing inventory, and generates instructions for your CNC machinery if you have any.

http://designfiles.org/dokuwiki/skdb

Fab@Home

2010-01-22T18:18:00.000-08:00

Fab@Home is a project dedicated to making and using fabbers - machines that can make almost anything, right on your desktop. This website provides everything you need to know in order to build or buy your own simple fabber, and to use it to print three dimensional objects. The hardware designs and software on this website are free and open-source. Once you have your own fabber, you can also download and print various items, try out new materials, or upload and share your own projects. Advanced users can modify and improve the fabber itself.

Fabbers (a.k.a. 3D printers or rapid prototyping machines) are a relatively new form of manufacturing that builds 3D objects by carefully depositing materials drop by drop, layer by layer. With the right set of materials and a geometric blueprint, you can fabricate complex objects that would normally take special resources, tools and skills if produced using conventional manufacturing techniques. A fabber can allow you to explore new designs, email physical objects to other fabber owners, and most importantly - set your ideas free. Just as MP3s, iPods and the Internet have freed musical talent, we hope that blueprints and fabbers will democratize innovation.

Most commercial 3D Printers today are limited to one material at a time, and their proprietary technologies limit experimentation. Moreover, their price range - tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands of dollars - is typically well beyond what an average home user can afford. Our goal with this open-source, multi-material printing is to explore the potential of universal fabrication: Machines that can use multiple materials to fabricate complete, active systems.

The Emergence of Open Design and Open Manufacturing from We-Magazine Volume 02

2010-01-22T17:33:00.000-08:00

Michel Bauwens

Readers of this magazine will be familiar with the emergence and proliferation of a new form of value creation, peer production (as first defined by Yochai Benkler), in which communities of volunteers (but also in fact mostly paid creators and programmers once a project is successfull) create (open) content or (free) software, that is usable and accessible by everybody. Typical for peer production is that the producers create products (with both concepts being essentially misleading in this case!) in such a form that they form a commons which can be used and modified by others, who return it improved to the same common pool. These producers can be volunteers or paid programmers or authors, often both operating as a cooperative ecology between communities and the companies that create market-based spin-offs from that same commons. As a typical example, Linux and its derivatives come to mind, which have created a $36 billion economy.

It is very tempting to limit such emergence to the field of immaterial production, but we want to show in this article that the same method of production that has come to dominate the world of open source software and freely available (often user-generated) content on the internet, is now also deeply influencing the way we think about designing and even making things.
Before we describe this emergence, a few definitions as well as a basic explanation of why the peer production makes so much sense.

The Emergence Of The Internet As Enabling Peer Production
Before the advent of the internet as a tool that can now be used by at least one billion humans, there were already three ways to conceive of production. The first is the, now almost-defunct, state-based system that was typified in the Soviet system, in which the productive resources were state-owned, and where the state organized production and allocated resources based on centralized planning. The second is of course, market-based capitalism, in which the means of production are privately owned, corporations are internally organized as hierarchies, and resources are allocated through the signals that are given through market prices. If the profit is interesting enough, corporations will allocate resources in that direction and pay the necessary staff. The third and minor form was cooperative production, in which workers or other members would own the collective capital, and have some form of internal and more democratic decision-making. However, such cooperatives would still generally operate in the marketplace and subject to the same external dynamics as corporate firms. In our context, I will therefore not consider it as a separate mode of production, but rather as a variant to the market.
Peer production however is a genuinely new form of production, which is based on what I call permission-less self-aggregation around the creation of common value.

To read the complete article go to:
http://www.we-magazine.net/we-volume-02/the-emergence-of-open-design-and-open-manufacturing/

Future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.

2009-06-29T22:44:00.000-07:00

What’s a Concept?

Concepts may take the form of Ideas, Mockups or Prototypes.

Ideas It all begins with an idea. A sentence, paragraph, or even bullet-points kick-start the process. Ideas can be simple and non-technical. It should be easy for anyone and everyone to help shape the future of the Web. So throw your notions, inspirations, dreams and visions out to the community.
Mockups Turn your idea (or someone else’s) into an image, sketch or video. Words are great, but you know what they say about pictures. Mockups offer up a visual and communicate ideas in terms that are just a bit more polished and real. They draw the next person in, tempting them to pick up the concept and run with it.
Prototypes A prototype is interactive. Feel, touch and play with developing concepts. Prototypes get ideas across by showing off the moving parts. They aren’t always fully functional or pretty, but they’re more than a static image or two. They’re a dress rehearsal of sorts, with minimal programming. Make a prototype in HTML, Flash, or whatever puts things into action.

Mozilla Labs concept series: Aurora Concept (Part 1)

2009-06-29T22:36:00.000-07:00

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Aurora is a concept video exploring one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept series. For more, visit http://adaptivepath.com/aurora

Jessica Banks & Ayah Bdeir: Open Source Snobs (from SEED Magazine)

2009-06-19T23:05:00.000-07:00

Jessica Banks & Ayah Bdeir: Open Source Snobs

The duo from OpenLab at Eyebeam explains why the future of cutting-edge design — such as a robotic lamp that senses its environment and a Jell-O-like levitating chair — relies on the free flow of information and ideas among individuals lovingly referred to as "snobs." More on Jessica Banks More on Ayah Bdeir

See MoMA's Design and the Elastic Mind online exhibit.

Lisa Strausfeld: The Space of Information

2009-06-19T22:52:00.000-07:00

Lisa Strausfeld: The Space of Information

Hear how the modern-day detective generates stunning visual representations of large data sets to investigate financial markets and thwart terrorist plots. More on Lisa Strausfeld

See MoMA's Design and the Elastic Mind online exhibit.

Natalie Jeremijenko: Environment Design (from SEED Magazine)

2009-06-19T22:37:00.000-07:00

Imagine a city free of pollution, where citizens wearing spring-loaded shoes stride along roadways overgrown with vegetation. Sound like science fiction? Listen to the environmentalist inventor explain how she is working to turn this vision into reality and save our ailing planet. More on Natalie Jeremijenko

See MoMA's Design and the Elastic Mind online exhibit.

Get Code Henry Markram: Designing the Human Mind (from SEED Magazine)

2009-06-19T22:34:00.000-07:00

gracias ...

2009-06-18T15:34:00.000-07:00

entropias.semiurbanas

2009-06-02T08:48:00.000-07:00

En medio de la marejada urbana de la complejidad infinita, en la sinfonia de colores, en la metapoiesis de la ciudad, en esa agridulce danza mezcla de seres vivos y maquinas, protegidos bajo el manto de las estrellas, llevando millones de mensajes, transportando flujos casi infinitos de informacion, sueños, acciones y más.

En donde se entrelazan estocasticamente objetos en una danza compleja, en una poesia permanente y milenaria, que quizás culmine con el último ser humano de la Tierra, donde se funden los electrones con el asfalto, con los sueños y con los besos, con la poesia y con la entalpía, con los edificios y el mar ...

yo, te pregunto ...
como llegaste a este blog???

Democratizing Innovation

2009-05-29T14:14:00.000-07:00

About the Lecture

If you have ever come up with a work-around or improvement for a balky product only to find that it performs better than the original, you are not alone. Eric von Hippel proffers multiple examples where an ordinary user, frustrated or even desperate, solves a problem through innovation. His research found innovative users playing with all manner of product: mountain bikes, library IT systems, agricultural irrigation, and scientific instruments. Often, manufacturers keep at arm’s length from these inventions. He describes the Lego company “standing like a deer in headlights” when technologically adept adults discovered they could design their own sophisticated Lego robots. User communities arise, freely communicate with each other, advance ideas and sometimes even “drive the manufacturer out of product design,” according to von Hippel. This widely distributed inventing bug is a good trend, believes von Hippel, because users “tend to make things that are functionally novel.” Not only is it “freeing for individuals” but it also creates a “free commons” of product ideas, parallel to the more restrictive world of intellectual property governed by less creative manufacturers.

About the Speaker

Eric von Hippel SM '68

Professor of Management and Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group, MIT Sloan School of Management

von Hippel researches the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. Prior to his professorship at Sloan, he was the Sir Walter Scott Distinguished Professor at the Australian Graduate School of Management, and a Fellow at the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. He was a co-founder of the MIT Entrepreneurship Program, and served as a consultant for McKinsey and Company. He was also a co-founder and manager of R&D for Graphic Sciences, Inc.

von Hippel received his B.A. from Harvard College, his S.M. from MIT, and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.

Great Leaps, Persistence, and Innovation: The Evolving Story of Hyundai (from MIT World)

2009-05-27T09:33:00.000-07:00

About the Lecture

In 1986, Hyundai’s first export to the U.S, the $4995 Excel, developed embarrassing quality problems, and the company found itself grist for late night talk shows. But John Krafcik recounts with pride Hyundai’s turnaround, from laughingstock of the American auto market back in the 1980s, to seventh best-selling brand in the U.S., and fifth largest car maker in the world.

By 1998, Hyundai’s name was so tainted in the U.S. that its market share fell to .4%, and the company was on the verge of pulling out altogether. But instead, says Krafcik, Hyundai determined to redeem itself, and win back car buyers with a focus on quality design and manufacturing, and with “America’s best warranty.” The 10 year, 100 thousand mile power train guarantee the company put in place, says Krafcik, was “an incredible clarifier for the engineering team,” forcing them to design systems for “infinite life.” Hyundai’s “top down, hierarchical management approach” proved critical, too. Chairman Chung Mong Koo combines “Bill Gates, Barack Obama and the Pope,” and “when he says we must do something, the company aligns well around that goal.” In 2001, Chung declared that Hyundai needed to beat Toyota’s quality standards in five years.

Unlike BMW’s approach of challenging the car owner, says Krafcik, the more “humble” Hyundai engineers focused on ergonomic engineering. An “obsessive customer focus” meant getting cars at early stages in the hands of real drivers, and using feedback to improve designs. Indeed, unlike Toyota, which imposes an engineering freeze at a certain point in development, Hyundai resolved to adapt to suggestions even late in the car development game: “If there’s an imperative for a late quality change, the system is adaptable to that change.” Also, Hyundai chose to design and build cars where it sells them. The result speaks for itself, say Krafcik: Hyundai’s achieved strong, consistent quality performance, rivaling the industry leaders globally.

About the Speaker

John Krafcik SM '88

Acting President and CEO, Hyundai Motor America

John Krafcik previously served as Vice President of Product Development and Strategic Planning for Hyundai. Krafcik joined Hyundai in April, 2004. Prior to that position, he had worked at Ford Motor Company.

Krafcik holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and earned a Master of Science degree in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1988. Krafcik began his career in the auto industry at the GM/Toyota joint-venture NUMMI, and later became an industry consultant on lean production.

InfoVis Keynote: Command Post of the Future (from Information aesthetics)

2009-05-19T10:58:00.000-07:00

Greetings from the InfoVis conference in Columbus, Ohio! Today we heard a compelling keynote presentation by Jake Kolojejchick, Chief Scientist at Viz / General Dynamics. Jake is one of the creators of the "Command Post of the Future" system, currently in active use by the U.S. military.

Jake talked a bit about the system itself, which is geared for realtime collaboration in situations that are, to say the least, stressful and demanding. But his main messages were lessons learned during the system's design and deployment. Three points struck me as particularly interesting.

1. Jake noted that his users were extremely smart and resourceful, which ironically made testing tricky. Given simple tasks, users were too good at figuring out even hard-to-use software. To get around this, users were given extremely difficult test tasks, so that they had no extra brain energy to solve interface problems.

2. Military commanders have always loved maps. Jake speculated that this wasn't just because maps convey information clearly, but they also convey possibilities for action. A bridge almost begs to be crossed, for example. Jake then showed a slide of various visualizations of the current financial meltdown. All of these charts showed how bad things are, but none held any hint of what to do next. (Alas!) Is there a way we can create visualizations with map-like "affordances for action?"

3. The part where I really sat up and took notice was when Jake said that he viewed visualization "as a medium." This is something I've heard (and occasionally said) before, though usually in the context of artistic or social software--so at first it was a surprise to hear the same message from someone talking about a military system. The viewpoints people choose and the annotations they make on visualizations tell you a lot about what they're thinking... and apparently this is as true on the battlefield as it is on a Web 2.0 social network.

Guest blogger Martin Wattenberg is the group manager at the IBM Visual Communication Lab. He is known for several successful visualization projects such as Many Eyes, Baby Name Voyager and Shape of Song.

TreeViz: Visualization of Large Tree Structures (from Information aesthetics)

2009-05-19T10:09:00.000-07:00

TreeViz: Visualization of Large Tree Structures

Posted: 15 Jan 2009 12:49 AM PST

TreeViz [randelshofer.ch] is an amazingly small and elegant application (working on all OS platforms) that is able to visualize large data structures organized in a tree by 7(!) different interactive data visualization techniques: Hyperbolic Tree, Circular Treemap, Rectangular Treemap, Sunburst Tree, Icicle Tree, Sunray Tree and Iceray Tree. The project currently consists of a file browser demonstration, which visually represent your computer system's file structure.

The Sound Advice Project: Speech Messages as Bracelets (from Information aesthetics)

2009-05-19T09:17:00.000-07:00

The Sound Advice Project [thesoundadviceproject.com] converts voice recordings into sound waves that are then rendered into wearable bracelets. The ultimate aim of this project is to remind children of the dangers of drugs, by rendering the advising words of parents' into physical form which then accompanies them at all times. Parents can choose the bead and cord colors and purchase the custom bracelet for $18

Thnkx Amb and Rebecca. Via Boing Boing Gadgets.

iFree3D: Visualize Data inside the Browser in 3D (from Information aesthetics)

2009-05-19T09:16:00.000-07:00

The new startup iFree3D [ifree3d.com] allows users to retrieve data from different sources inside the browser and display it in 3D (if you, like me, struggle with the demo: try using the search text box at the top of the interface). iFree3D is a tool designed for technical people, developers, and users who would like to explore data in a three-dimensional fashion. There also exist an open API (XML) which enables "any" data to be represented in a 3D manner as a widget in websites, without the need for any plugins or downloadable programs other than using Flash or Adobe Air.

Currently the functionality is limited to Google Search for websites, images and videos. Results are presented as 3D-like floating boxes against a black background, based on relevancy, so that the most results are located closer to the viewer. One can manipulate the frames, drag and drop them, or hit the ALT-key to move objects around. One can use the mouse wheel to bring the rest of the results closer or click on the "next set/forward" button to get the next set of Google results.

I personally doubt visualization "tools" that adopt a "random view" as a features. Do you too? More information can be found at TLG View (the company) and TechCrunch.

Social Collider (from Visual Complexity)

2009-05-19T09:14:00.000-07:00

The Social Collider reveals cross-connections between conversations on Twitter.

With the Internet's promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.

This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter. One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that didn't resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.

The Social Collider acts as a metaphorical instrument which can be used to make visible how memes get created and how they propagate. Ideally, it might catch the Zeitgeist at work.

You can read more about the project here.

Synchronous Objects: Visualizing Choreographic Information in New Ways (from Information aesthetics)

2009-05-19T09:08:00.000-07:00

Posted: 02 Apr 2009 02:17 AM PDT

Synchronous Objects [synchronousobjects.osu.edu] is a beautiful project that aims to visualize choreographic information in "new ways". It focuses on revealing the interlocking systems of organization in the choreography of William Forsythe's "One Flat Thing". These systems were quantified through the collection of data and transformed into a series of objects that aim to reveal patterns and structures.

The data includes Spatial Data, tracking a single point of each dancer in three-dimensional space, and Attribute Data, built from the dancers' first hand accounts, such as when the gave or received a cue, what alignments they followed, when they were improvising and what themes they were performing in every second of the dance.

The collection of data visualizations is surprisingly sophisticated and interdisciplinary, as it crosses the realms from traditional data statistics to explorative data art. It is so rich that one cannot fully describe it in detail. Available visualizations range from "Movement Density" (where did the dancers spent most of the time?) over "Difference Marks" (compressing the dancers' motion over time) to a 3D "DataFan" (a series of geometric operations that fold and twist determined from the sync-up data).

OECD eXplorer: Online Tool for Analyzing Regional Statistics (Updated)

2009-05-19T09:05:00.000-07:00

OECD eXplorer: Online Tool for Analyzing Regional Statistics (Updated)

Posted: 06 Apr 2009 01:44 AM PDT

The OECD, short for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), recently announced a new OECD eXplorer [stats.oecd.org], a very powerful web-tool for analyzing regional statistics. The new online geographic visualization is unique because of its focus on regional and states (versus national) statistical data, its large amount of features (from the choice of the color scale to deciding a percentile or uniform distribution) and its slick visual design. The data is based on OECD Regional Database, containing 30 indicators measuring demography, economic and labour market performance, education, healthcare, environmental outputs and knowledge-based activities. As Hans Rosling lectured before, the economic performance and social indicators can vary within countries every bit as much as they do between countries.

The preliminary version has already been posted on infosthetics about half a year ago, but the current application has several new features, including the ability to present the full set of OECD regional statistics as interactive maps, the possibility to explore trends over time (time animation), to view the structure of regional economies through a scatterplot and a parallel coordinate panel, and several novel functions for presenting stories about the statistics embedded with interactive visualization.

Interestingly, the interface even features the possibility to load and explore your own data, write your own stories and share them with others.

Simon Woodroffe: Let's rock the hotel industry (from Infonomia)

2009-05-19T09:03:00.000-07:00

«Yo me veo como una persona bastante convencional», afirma Simon Woodroffe mientras entramos en una habitación de hotel de 10 m² situada en la Terminal 4 del Aeropuerto de Heathrow para entrevistarle sobre su último proyecto YO!. Sin embargo, este empresario autodidacta que finalmente ha hecho realidad su sueño infantil de llegar a ser millonario está muy lejos de ser convencional, como mínimo en lo que se refiere a la emprendeduría clásica. Simon dejó la escuela a los 16 años; durante los salvajes setenta trabajó como road manager y más tarde como diseñador de escenarios para Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin y otros grupos de música. En 1997 llevó a Londres el sushi sobre cintas transportadoras mediante una cadena de restaurantes llamada YO!Sushi, que tuvo un éxito fulgurante. Una década más tarde, este emprendedor inconformista, que recibió la Orden del Imperio Británico de manos de la reina Isabel en 2006, está a punto de hacer temblar los cimientos de la industria hotelera mediante un nuevo concepto de pequeños pero lujosos hoteles de diseño a un coste reducido.

Tres de estos YOTEL ya se encuentran en pleno funcionamiento: uno en Gatwick, otro en Schiphol, Amsterdam, y un tercero en Heathrow. Este tipo de hoteles están destinados a pasajeros de negocios o viajeros en tránsito que quieren descansar o trabajar antes de coger un avión o entre dos vuelos. Las habitaciones son diminutas, pero ofrecen todo el lujo de un hotel de cinco estrellas, y salen a partir de un precio tan asequible como 25 libras por cuatro horas.

¿Cómo surgió la idea de minihoteles de diseño de bajo coste?

Me puse a buscar nuevas opciones que encajasen en el concepto cool de YO!, y me fijé en los hoteles cápsula de Japón, pero pensé que nadie querría hospedarse en un sitio como ése. Así que me pasé meses intentando crear un espacio pequeño pero lujoso. Un día, en un vuelo de vuelta desde Kuwait, me surgió la oportunidad de ir en primera clase con British Airways, donde tienen esos asientos que se convierten en camas planas. Recuerdo que me desperté pensando: «¡Tiene que ser algo así!». En cuanto bajé del avión, me puse en contacto con la gente que había diseñado el interior de la cabina. Así que para YOTEL empleamos a diseñadores de interiores de aviones.

¿Y la idea inicial era ubicarlos en los aeropuertos?

Construimos prototipos y estuvimos dando vueltas al tema hasta que un día la compañía British Airport Authority, que de hecho ahora es de propiedad española, nos llamó y nos dijo que creían que deberíamos abrir en los aeropuertos. De hecho, nunca nos habíamos planteado construir hoteles en los aeropuertos, sino en los centros urbanos. Pero nos dimos cuenta de que podíamos alquilar las habitaciones no sólo por una noche, sino por bloques de horas. Los mejores hoteles del mundo se jactan de tener una ocupación del 98 % al año, pero nosotros la tenemos del 180 %, y nuestro objetivo es llegar al 250 %, lo que significaría que cada habitación se ocupa más de dos veces al día. Eso nos permite mantener los precios a un nivel razonable.

¿Cuál es el paquete más vendido?

La estancia más habitual es la tradicional de toda una noche, excepto por el hecho de que los clientes tienden a coger la habitación muy tarde y dejarla muy pronto. El segundo paquete más vendido es para las personas que entran a las 8, las 9 o las 10 de la mañana y se toman 3, 4 o 5 horas para dormir un poco antes de irse. Pero este tipo de estancia la vendemos a lo largo de todo el día: es un oasis en un mundo estresante.

¿Cómo supo que había mercado para habitaciones de hotel de 7 m²?

Si hubiese hecho una investigación de mercado preguntando a la gente sobre si les gustaría dormir en una habitación de 7 m²sin luz natural, ¡me habrían contestado que ni borrachos! La cuestión es que no se puede realizar una investigación de mercado sobre un mercado que no existe. Hacer algo nuevo representa mil quebraderos de cabeza, porque primero tienes que convencer a la gente para que lo vean a tu manera. Ése es el motivo por el que la creatividad y la innovación suele venir de mano de los emprendedores, y no de las grandes empresas. Si hubiésemos tenido una reunión así en una gran empresa, se me habrían cerrado en banda, me habrían dicho que necesitaba ventanas, porque eso es lo que tienen los hoteles, así como un gran baño. Pero la verdad es que en un espacio tan pequeño como éste hay de todo. Por supuesto, no ha sido fácil, pero hemos conseguido triunfar. La frase más repetida de todo aquel que entra en una habitación como ésta es: «¡Pero si saltaba a la vista! ¿Cómo no se le había ocurrido a nadie antes?».

¿Cobráis poco por el servicio básico y sumáis costos adicionales por otros servicios complementarios, como hacen las aerolíneas de bajo coste?

YOTEL se mantendrá fiel a su filosofía: nosotros vendemos sueño, pero de lujo: unos buenos colchones, algodón de gran calidad, silencio, aire acondicionado, baño propio... Se pueden hacer muchas cosas aquí: comprar comida, ver la tele, trabajar... Todas las habitaciones tienen Internet. Pero la mayoría de la gente que viene, cierra la cortina, apaga las luces y se pone a dormir.

Ahora estamos sentados en una habitación premium; en la puerta de al lado tenemos una habitación estándar. También estamos trabajando en habitaciones económicas, y cuando vayamos a América haremos suites. ¡Será como si diseñásemos una stretch limousine con un Mini! Tendremos suites que serán más pequeñas que cualquier otra habitación, ¡pero aun así las llamaremos suites!

¿Qué expansión se prevé para YOTEL?

Creo que nos moveremos muy rápido, pero de momento no hemos hecho nada público. Pronto abriremos un YOTEL en Alemania, si bien estamos estudiando todo el mundo. Seguro que también nos instalaremos en España.

Parece ser que evalúas tus ideas de negocio basándote mucho en la intuición...

Empiezo el proceso pensando «¿es una buena idea?», y lo acabo diciendo «¿es una buena idea?», y finalmente digo «sí, ¡es una buena idea!» [risas]. Cuando se me ocurrió la idea de YOTEL, no tuve ninguna necesidad de evaluar el concepto, ¡era tan evidente! Ahora bien, ¿cómo se convence a la gente de esa evidencia? La mayoría dirían: «Muy bien, escríbeme un informe de 20 páginas y estudia el mercado». Pero las cosas no funcionan así, y todo el mundo lo sabe. En vez de eso, construimos prototipos a escala real y los mostramos en exposiciones de diseño. Todo aquel que los veía quedaba maravillado; salimos en las noticias de todo el país, en los periódicos, en las publicaciones de arquitectura... De pronto estábamos en boca de todos, y la gente nos preguntaba que cuántos teníamos. Fue entonces cuando se empezó a creer en el proyecto, ¡y eso es mucho mejor que un plan de negocio!

Tú eres el creador de la idea YO!, pero una vez que el proyecto está en marcha, no te implicas en la gestión del día a día, ¿verdad?

Una de las grandes lecciones que he aprendido en esta vida es: descubre en qué eres bueno, y pasa todo tu tiempo haciendo exactamente eso. Yo soy bueno en tener ideas, y en poner en marcha proyectos y construir prototipos. Mis socios, ya sea Robin Rowland en YO!Sushi o Gerard Greene, que lleva el negocio de YOTEL, son buenos en hacer que las cosas funcionen y ocurran. Mi próxima idea es el YO!SPA. Todos los spas del mundo están pensados para señoras muy ricas, y yo estoy preparando un spa para todo tipo de gente; será una mezcla entre una discoteca y un spa, donde podrás bailar junto a las piscinas.

Hacer el lujo accesible al mercado de masas...

Creo que ésa es una gran fórmula: llevar a todo el mundo lo que tienen los ricos.

1hr in front of the TV (from Visual Complexity)

2009-05-19T09:01:00.000-07:00

This is a simple, curious and imaginative experiment. On Christmas 2006, bumblebee (flickr name) decided to build a visual summary of his son, daughter and cat's movements in their living room over a period of an hour.

To have an accurate understanding of their paths in space he used a marked-out equally-spaced grid in masking tape and then filmed the protagonists moving across the grid for one hour. He then reviewed the video and plotted their movements on each minute of the video's timecode onto a 'room map' with corresponsing grid.

Joanna Berzowska, fundadora de XS Labs: Que viene el textil social

2009-05-19T08:59:00.000-07:00

Joanna Berzowska, experta en textiles electrónicos y prendas sensibles a estímulos externos, dirige innovadores proyectos de investigación en los que el principal objetivo es el placer o la belleza, no la productividad o la funcionalidad. Quizás por ello sea en su laboratorio, XS Labs , donde en estos momentos se esté gestando la moda que llevaremos la próxima década

Aparentemente, durante los últimos años se han producido importantes innovaciones en el terreno de los materiales textiles avanzados, pero ¿cuánto tiempo tardaremos en ver estas novedades en las rebajas de unos grandes almacenes junto al algodón, la seda o la lycra de toda la vida?

Es cierto que durante la última década ha habido numerosos avances en estos terrenos, pero a la hora de convertirlos en un producto comercial se ha optado mayoritariamente por sectores como el militar, el de la salud o el deportivo. Así, se han fabricado uniformes de soldado que actúan a modo de antena para facilitar la comunicación con el mando o unas zapatillas deportivas capaces de indicar a nuestro iPod nuestra progresión como deportistas. En mi opinión, estos productos no han acabado de llegar a la calle porque su valor añadido está centrado en la productividad, y la moda es un fenómeno cultural que no entiende de productividad, sino de placer, de tener una buena apariencia, de sentirse bien, de divertirse, y de hacer todo ello en compañía de otra gente.

¿En qué tipo de funciones o capacidades se deberían aplicar entonces estos avances para poder llegar a la calle?

Apenas hace un par de años que algunos pocos diseñadores han empezado a utilizar estas tecnologías para proponer en sus colecciones piezas capaces de cambiar de color o de forma respondiendo a estímulos externos. La introducción de estos elementos en la alta costura supone un importante punto de inflexión respecto a una futura aceptación general. Creo que las nuevas aplicaciones tomarán forma principalmente, por una parte, en relación con la posibilidad de personalización y de individualización y, por otra, en relación con la conexión a nuestra red social en el plano físico de la misma manera que en un plano virtual lo hacen Facebook o MySpace. Imagino, por ejemplo, una prenda que reacciona de una determinada manera ante la cercanía de otra persona con la que me une alguna circunstancia sin yo saberlo hasta que así me lo indica un movimiento en el cuello de mi camisa.

¿Es éste el tipo de aplicaciones en las que trabaja XS Labs?

En XS Labs trabajamos a la vez en un montón de proyectos de diversa índole. Pero precisamente el último de ellos ha sido una colección de trajes y vestidos que no suponen un prototipo tecnológico sino que han sido diseñados exclusivamente desde el punto de vista de la moda y las tendencias. Hemos utilizado la aleación Nitinol con memoria de forma para dotar a estos vestidos de comportamientos dinámicos y orgánicos protagonizados, por ejemplo, por pequeñas ventanas de tela que se abren y se cierran, o una especie de visera acoplada que actúa a modo de sombrilla y que decide por ella misma cuándo se repliega o no para proteger la cara. En otro plano más tecnológico estamos realizando también diferentes investigaciones encaminadas al aprovechamiento energético del movimiento de nuestro cuerpo.

¿Es esta variedad de proyectos fruto del enfoque diferencial de innovación con el que se suele presentar el estudio?

Ciertamente. Y la razón principal de este enfoque es que XS Labs está ubicada en Canadá, país en el que existe un entorno socioeconómico muy diferente al existente en Estados Unidos e incluso en Europa. Canadá ha tenido históricamente un gran interés por las llamadas industrias culturales, por lo que resulta relativamente sencillo encontrar financiación para proyectos de investigación de carácter social o cultural. XS Labs ha conseguido para este tipo de proyectos más de un millón de dólares en los últimos cuatro años. Eso nos permite jugar y experimentar sin la presión de tener que producir algo en el que resulte inmediatamente obvia la manera en la que puede ser transformado en un producto comercial. Disfrutamos del gran lujo de trabajar en áreas de investigación, como la moda, cuyo principal objetivo es el placer o la belleza, no la productividad o la funcionalidad.

¿En qué proporción forma parte la hibridación de la fórmula de innovación de su trabajo?

Siempre he creído en los resultados positivos de un enfoque multidisciplinar de la innovación. Con un título universitario en Matemáticas Puras y otro en Arte y Diseño, yo misma soy fruto de esa hibridación. Curiosamente, este concepto está ya hoy generalizado y las dos diferentes universidades en las que realicé mis estudios cuentan hoy en sus programas con cursos en los que resulta obligatorio estudiar conjuntamente, por ejemplo, programación de ordenadores y diseño artístico. En todo caso, lo importante es tener una mentalidad abierta y una comprensión básica de muchos otros campos diferentes a aquél en el que uno está especializado.

¿Cómo aplica esta idea en XS Labs?

Creo que la innovación más interesante nace en lo que yo llamo áreas de incomodidad, aquellos espacios o situaciones en los que nos vemos forzados a encontrar soluciones fuera de la comodidad con la que actuamos cuando creemos dominar un determinado tema. Por eso empiezo por hacer que los ingenieros de mi equipo se pongan a coser y por obligar a los diseñadores a construir circuitos integrados.

Mapping the Energy Usage Distribution in New Zealand

2009-05-19T08:50:00.000-07:00

Mapping the Energy Usage Distribution in New Zealand

Posted: 08 Apr 2009 10:47 PM PDT

As one of the very few examples of government organizations being interested in involving the general public in data, the aim of Energy in NZ [neri.org.nz] was to map energy usage data within New Zealand in a simple, engaging and interactive way. The data was gathered with the help of the National Energy Research Institute of New Zealand, and based on a "database of figures and a poorly plotted, very very confusing graph of flows".

The graphs show how energy is sourced, transformed and used within New Zealand. The 4 top bars show how energy is used by different sectors of society. The middle bar highlights the amount of each type of energy that is available for use. Finally, the bottom bar represents the energy sourced in or imported into the country. A future visualization project will map the power generation and pathways to consumers within New Zealand based on their location.

World Builder: the Future of Interacting with Holographic Tools

2009-05-19T08:48:00.000-07:00

World Builder: the Future of Interacting with Holographic Tools

Posted: 15 Apr 2009 02:04 AM PDT

A strange man uses a set of sophisticated holographic tools to build a world for the woman he loves, like SketchUp on steroids. This award winning short was created by filmmaker Bruce Branit, widely known as the co-creator of '405'. World Builder was shot in a single day followed by about 2 years of post production.

Microsoft, are you seeing this?

Watch the video below.

Thnkx Pwakman!

Process for Crisis Management Based on System Thinking − With Focus on North Korea’s Rocket Launch

2009-05-19T08:41:00.000-07:00

Process for Crisis Management Based on System Thinking − With Focus on North Korea’s Rocket Launch

BAHNG Tae-Seop
Apr. 13, 2009

I. Frequent Occurrence of Complex National Crises

National crises are becoming increasingly frequent and extensive in their impact. They have occurred simultaneously in multiple and complex forms, ranging from natural disasters caused by global warming to the global financial crisis triggered by the US subprime mortgage debacle.

In the case of Korea, crisis management has become all the more important after having had to address many crises since 2000: a national security crisis, natural disasters, an energy crisis, a financial crisis and social disturbances. In particular, it has become essential to be able to respond effectively to the growing security threat that North Korea poses, including through rocket launches. More generally, there is a need to attain the ability, in normal times, to comprehensively assess potential crises, including any ripple effects, and to formulate effective responses to such crises. Otherwise, at some point the country may find itself mired in a devastating crisis.

Synchronous Objects / Narratives 2.0 / NodeXL (from Visual Complexity)

2009-05-19T08:38:00.000-07:00

Synchronous Objects

Posted:

This is a remarkably original and impressive project. It not only exposes a detailed quasi-scientific approach to the art of dance, but it also emphasizes the benefits of data visualization in the understanding of a fundamental form of human expression.

A joint project of choreographer William Forsythe and Ohio State University's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) and the Department of Dance, Synchronous Objects is an extensive and unique resource. This project aims to create a large set of data visualization tools for understanding and analyzing the interlocking systems of organization in the choreography of William Forsythe's "One Flat Thing, reproduced" (2000). These systems were quantified through the collection of data and transformed into a series of objects - synchronous objects - that work in harmony to explore those choreographic structures, reveal their patterns, and re-imagine what else they might look like. As the authors explain: "Our goal in creating these objects is to engage a broad public, explore cross-disciplinary research, and spur creative discovery for specialists and non-specialists alike."

The images shown here are from a section called Cue Annotations, aiming at visualizing how dancers give and receive visual cues to and from each other. A cue is an indication that one or more dancers can initiative a specified movement phrase. You can watch an explanatory video or watch four annotated videos (with dancers and annotations).

There is a lot to digest on the site, and in the beginning, the amount of (great) content can be a bit overwhelming. But it's certainly worth every minute. You can see a video about the project, featuring interviews with the authors, and the project's photo gallery.

Narratives 2.0

Posted:

Matthias Dittrich is an interaction design student at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Germany. In his website he showcases a variety of fresh and promising work, accessed through a dynamic interface. Shown here are images from his "Narrative 2.0" project, a series of music track visualizations from different artists, such as Queen, The Chemical Brothers, Moloko and Beethoven.

As Matthias explains: "Narrative 2.0 visualises music. The different music tracks were segmented into single channels. These channels are shown in a fanlike structure where lines move away from the centre with the flow of time. The angle of the line changes according to the volume, and when reaching a higher level, the channel becomes highlighted in orange. The visualisation does not necessarily return exact information, however, the order and uniformity of the song can still be perceived."

Image 1 is a visualization of "Familiar Feelings" by Moloko, while image 2 shows "Apache" by Ennio Morricone.

NodeXL

Posted:

NodeXL is a network overview, discovery, and exploration add-in for Excel 2007. The tool allows for a quick, alternative way to visualize directed graphs and social networks within Excel. It provides several network metrics and manipulation features which can serve as an important testing tool for many Social Network Analysis (SNA) enthusiasts. Networks can also be directly imported from Twitter and personal email.

New York City's Administrative Code Book as Infographics

2009-05-19T08:33:00.000-07:00

Posted: 15 Apr 2009 11:36 PM PDT

The Street Vendor Project, in conjunction with The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) and designer Candy Chang, has put together an informative and visionary guide about vendor regulations, rights, history and what a more just system would look like.

According to a story in the New York Times, for many (foreign) street vendors, understanding the regulations that govern their trade is a really difficult prospect. Instead, the group attempted to design a brochure that uses as little language as possible to spell out the most critical pieces of the city's administrative code book. This graphical poster is the 3rd in a series of similar handbooks published by Street Vendor. The others are a guide to Social Security and a map of cargo shipping networks in North America.

A sample of this code-book-as-infographics can be found here [streetvendor.org, PDF]. Which brings me to the question: are such infographics really "universally" compelling, engaging and understandable?

Thnkx chino.

Emotional Cartography: Implications of Visualizing Intimate Biometric Data

2009-05-19T08:32:00.000-07:00

Posted: 20 Apr 2009 02:13 AM PDT

The (freely downloadable) book Emotional Cartography - Technologies of the Self [emotionalcartography.net] is a collection of essays from artists, designers, psycho-geographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualizing intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology. The theme of this collection of essays is to investigate the apparent desire for technologies to map emotion, using a variety of different approaches.

Probably the best known emotion maps are the ones resulting Bio Mapping project, a community mapping project in which the Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), a simple indicator of the emotional arousal, is recorded in conjunction with one's geographical location. By combining the emotional responses of over 1,500 people over a period of 4 years, several "Emotion Maps" were generated of the city in which the participants roamed around.

Interspersed throughout the book, are the images of the printed Emotion Maps as well as photos of the participatory process. As mentioned before, the book can be freely downloaded and includes some compelling examples of mapping the subjective views of our daily experiences in a visual form.

Thnkx Bonnie.

Watch the Data Visualization Talks & Designing for "Big Data" (from Information aesthetics)

2009-05-19T08:31:00.000-07:00

See Conference #4: Watch the Data Visualization Talks

Posted: 22 Apr 2009 04:09 AM PDT

The prestigious annual See Conference #4 was held last weekend in Wiesbaden, Germany.

The presenters included Eric Rodenbeck (clearly on a grand world tour preaching visualization as a medium), Julian Oliver (known from Packet Garden), Gijs Joosen (from the Dutch interactive architecture office ONL), Sebastian Oschatz (part of interaction design firm Meso), Aaron Koblin (of Google Creative Lab and the world-changing Radiohead clip).

All of this to simply inform you can watch any of the talks at the See Conference Livestream [see-conference.com] (although somehow not when using Safari 4 Beta on Mac).

Some blog reports about the conference can be found at Data Visualization, Slanted (German), Visual Attitudes and Ideenverteiler (German).

Jeff Veen Talk: Designing for "Big Data"

Posted: 21 Apr 2009 06:03 PM PDT

A 20-minute talk by Jeff Veen from Small Batch, Inc., also known from WikiRank, which was originally given at the Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. During the talk, he focuses on some of the classic examples of information visualization (John Snow pump, Minard's map, the tube map, and so on), the issue of "decorating" data versus making it accessible, and the emerging challenge to empower lay people to participate in visualizing and analyzing their own data.

Considering the examples and his focus in the democratization of data visualization, I sincerely hope he reads infosthetics.

Watch the video below.

Thnkx Christina. Image taken from Anita Hart at Flickr.

Blue Brain Project (Videos) & 5 years Designerlist (from Information aesthetics)

2009-05-19T08:28:00.000-07:00

Blue Brain Project (Videos)

Posted:

This is the third entry on VC [1, 2] for the remarkable research effort by IBM and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, entitled Blue Brain Project.

On January 2007 they released 3 videos showing a simulated animation through a cortex's neuronal network. The cortex, the convoluted "grey matter" that makes up 80% of the human brain, is responsible for our ability to remember, think, reflect, empathize, communicate, adapt to new situations and plan for the future. The cortex first appeared in mammals, and it has a fundamentally simple repetitive structure that is the same across all mammalian species. This structure lends itself to a systematic modeling approach. And indeed, the first step of the Blue Brain project is to re-create this fundamental microcircuit, down to the level of biologically accurate individual neurons. This microcircuit can then be used in simulations like the one shown here.

5 years Designerlist

Posted:

To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the design mailing list at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Germany, Matthias Dittrich, an interaction design student at the institution, developed a series of visualizations of the current email dataset. The aim of the work was to show when, and how fast were emails being replied. All emails of a particular weekday were shown in a 24-hour time strip. The replied emails are represented by an arc linking to the original email source. Shown here are snapshots of two different days analyzed in the study.

Dynamically Changeable Physical Buttons on a Visual Display (from Information Aesthetics)

2009-05-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

Posted: 30 Apr 2009 11:46 PM PDT

One can be easily impressed with large-scale projections, single-touch screens, multi-touch mobiles (think iPhone), interactive tabletops and the like. However, while such screens allow for "virtual" buttons and keyboards to be popped-up, panned and rotated anywhere, they lack obvious low-attention and vision-free tactile qualities. Instead, they require continuous visual attention to know *where* to press or click.

So is it possible to merge these new display technologies with physical buttons that dynamically appear and disappear, depending on the actual interface that is shown on the screen? Chris Harrison, a Ph.D. student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, recently proposed it can be done in the research project titled "Providing Dynamically Changeable Physical Buttons on a Visual Display" [chrisharrison.net]. (One might note Chris is not unknown on this blog. He is also the author behind data visualization projects like Digg Rings, Amazon Book Map, Google Trigrams, Visualizing the Bible and many more)

The outcome of his investigation is a working visual display that contains specific deformable areas, able to produce physical buttons and other interface elements. These tactile features can be dynamically brought "into" and "out of" the interface, and otherwise manipulated under program control. The surfaces provide for the full dynamics of a visual display (through rear projection) as well as allowing for multi-touch input (though an infrared lighting and camera setup behind the display).

See this innovative display in action in the video below.

Just Landed: Visualizing the Tweets of People that have "Just Landed" (from Information aesthetics)

2009-05-19T08:11:00.000-07:00

Posted: 12 May 2009 02:28 AM PDT

A compelling animated map visualization that focuses on revealing interesting data hidden in a social network information stream, here the travel information gathered from people's public Twitter streams by searching for the term 'Just landed in...'.

The idea is relatively simple: a Processing application finds those tweets that contain this particular phrase, parses out the mentioned location the people just landed in, along with the home location that has been listed on their Twitter profile. With this information, the individual travel itineraries are then mapped out as 3D curves placed on a flat world map.

Watch the video below, or read more relevant information at Jer Thorp's blog.

Visualizing all the Commercial Flights within 24 Hours (from information aesthetics‏)

2009-05-19T08:08:00.000-07:00

Posted: 13 May 2009 03:25 AM PDT

Two relatively similar tips recently arrived in the infosthetics suggestion box.

Anna points to a small movie [.wmv, radar.zhaw.ch] created by Swiss air traffic engineers that shows all the flights within a timespan of 24 hours. Each airplane is represented as a moving yellow dot on a world map. One can clearly perceive the changing dynamics from daytime to nighttime.

Mario points to Air Lines [lx97.com], an art project showing worldwide airliner routes on a world map. Every single scheduled flight on any given day is represented by a fine line from its point of origin to its port of destination. As a result, a net is formed out of thousands of lines. Hubs like JFK, FRA or DXB turn into dark knots where lines meet, lesser served local services are only are a subtle hint. The maps is also commercially available as a poster.

If you like this sort of thing, be sure not to miss Aaron Koblin's famous Flight Patterns, Daily FedEx Airplane Routes, Britain Seen from Above and yesterday's Just Landed.

Extracted from:

Information Aesthetics

Imported Oil and U.S. National Security (from RAND)

2009-05-19T08:07:00.001-07:00

Imported Oil and U.S. National Security

By Keith Crane et al.

Paperback • 126 pages • ISBN: 978-0-8330-4700-7
List Price: $38.50
Discounted Web Price: $34.65

In 2007, the United States imported 58 percent of the oil it consumed. This book critically evaluates commonly suggested links between these imports and U.S. national security and assesses the economic, political, and military costs and benefits of potential policies to alleviate imported oil-related challenges to U.S. national security.

Managing innovation: Pages from Alessi’s handbook

2009-05-13T18:46:00.000-07:00

Managing innovation: Pages from Alessi’s handbook

In February, we published an interview with Alberto Alessi, head of the iconic houseware design firm in Italy. Alessi talked with the Quarterly about how the firm manages to sustain innovation over decades.

The multimedia interactive featured here offers a behind-the-scenes look at the design and operational processes of one of the world’s best-known design firms. The feature showcases Alessi’s formula for evaluating the risks and rewards of new product designs. It also includes video commentary by Alberto Alessi and a narrated slide show on the design firm’s roots in open innovation.

Voices on Transformation

2009-05-13T18:25:00.001-07:00

The articles in our Voices on Transformation series are based on our work with companies, our discussions with CEOs around the world, and our research to offer perspectives on how companies can fundamentally change themselves. We encourage you to read our latest work on performance transformation

China’s ‘sticky floor’. Video from The McKinsey Quarterly

2009-05-13T16:24:00.000-07:00

China’s transformation to a market-oriented economy has been accompanied by a significant increase in the pay gap between men and women. In many industrialized economies, gender-based differences are most pronounced in white-collar jobs, creating a “glass ceiling” for women who work in the office. But as China industrializes, gender pay differences are most striking among blue-collar workers. In this video interview, economists Li Bo and Chi Wei from China’s Tsinghua University consider whether China’s female factory workers labor on a “sticky floor.” The professors are the recent recipients of the first McKinsey Economics Award issued by the McKinsey China Council of Business Economists. Janamitra Devan of the McKinsey Global Institute conducted the interview in February 2009.

Watch the video, or read the transcript below.

If the World is Flat, What are We Still Doing in Cambridge?

2009-05-11T08:58:00.000-07:00

About the Lecture

At the very moment when “we have to confront the opportunity or challenge of globalization,” says Allan Goodman, higher education appears woefully unprepared. The world is not ‘flat’ for the vast majority of college students.

Only 30 of 192 U.N. member states boast enrollments of international students at levels that exceed 1%. In the U.S., it is a little over 3%. Of the 2.7 million international students, 600 thousand come to the U.S. -- most hoping to end up at Harvard, according to Goodman. They are distributed among just 150 schools, usually in very small numbers. This is bad news, because “never has there been a more difficult time for us in the world,” says Goodman, and education exchange broadens not just the “knowledge enterprise” but enhances the image of both host and origin country.

Goodman worries about a shortfall in capacity, as developing countries graduate students from secondary schools with no, few or bad choices for college. The U.S. has 4000 accredited higher education institutions, 1/3rd of all such institutions in the world, and employs 2/3rds of the world’s faculty. Cairo University has 250 thousand students, many of whom have never seen a professor or entered a classroom. By the end of this decade, one university in Nanjing will have a million students, but won’t have enough space to educate them. It’s no wonder there’s increasing pressure to come to the U.S. for an education. Who is going to teach the 200 million or so people who will be trying to attend universities by 2025, wonders Goodman. That will be the “single biggest challenge for educators everywhere, whether you’re in Cambridge, Chile or China.”

Sociable Robots

2009-05-11T08:39:00.000-07:00

About the Lecture

Cynthia Breazeal makes social robots, machines with the capacity to interact with people on psychological terms. She says they “open up a new world of questions.” But these increasingly sophisticated devices make Sherry Turkle uneasy, since they challenge the idea of human relationships and the very “purpose, importance, of living things.”

Since inventing her famously expressive, anthropomorphic Kismet, a robot that engages and learns from people through auditory, facial and social cues, Breazeal has evolved her work using robots as a scientific tool for social understanding. Her labs are putting robots through the paces of major child development milestones, such as appreciating the mental states of others. For instance, robot Leonardo has rudimentary object permanence, inferring from a tricky human’s behavior where a Big Bird toy has been hidden.

Planet Water: Complexity and Organization in Earth Systems

2009-05-11T08:36:00.000-07:00

About the Lecture

Rafael Bras, a professor of civil and environmental engineering who pioneered the field of hydrologic science, is MIT's James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award winner for 2008-2009. If he doesn’t have the whole world in his hands, Rafael Bras certainly grasps more pieces of the gigantic puzzle than most of us. Often credited with launching the science of hydrology -- the study of water’s crucial role in Earth systems -- Bras has developed passions for pretty much the rest of the Earth sciences as well. In this fond, valedictory lecture to MIT (he’s recently taken the post of Dean of Engineering at UC Irvine), Bras describes some of the research problems that have long fascinated him.

Bras enjoys wrapping his mind around big things, such as the size of the world’s oceans, whose numbers are in the billions of cubic kilometers. What interests Bras even more are the ways huge amounts of water cycle from the atmosphere as rain, into the soil, as runoff to the sea, and back again. He says “a lot of what we depend on is the result of differences between large numbers. It is those differences between very large numbers that makes it so uncertain, variable and so sensitive to our intervention or changes.”

Distributed Leadership in the Obama Campaign (from MIT World)

2009-05-11T07:16:00.000-07:00

The Obama campaign owes its victory not to a single charismatic candidate, but to the efforts of a disciplined and motivated organization whose roots go back to landmark movements of the 1960s. Marshall Ganz, who cut his teeth on civil rights work and with Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, describes how the principles and practices he learned around organizing and leadership played out in the most recent presidential election.

For Ganz, our time represents the end of “40 years of wandering in the desert,” the end of “the politics of disappointment.” We’ve arrived at an extraordinary moment of rapid change -- a time of both possibility and uncertainty -- with commensurate challenges to political leaders. But Ganz’s take, after years with progressive movements, is that leadership involves “taking responsibility to enable others to achieve purpose in the face of uncertainty.” Leaders recruit, motivate and develop others, constructing a community around common interests, and building capacity from within the community. And unlike businesses, which tend to rely on rigid hierarchies, and systems and procedures, effective volunteer-based organizations must engage and enable lots of people to become innovators, adaptive in the face of uncertainty.

About the Speaker

Marshall Ganz

Lecturer in Public Policy, Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Harvard Kennedy School of Government

In 1964, a year before he graduated from Harvard College, Marshall Ganz left to volunteer as a civil rights organizer in Mississippi. In 1965, he joined Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers; over the next 16 years he gained experience in union, community, issue, and political organizing and became Director of Organizing. During the 1980s, he worked with grassroots groups to develop effective organizing programs, designing innovative voter mobilization strategies for local, state, and national electoral campaigns.

Don't Kill Projects; Morph Them

2009-05-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

"We're Linux" Video Contest Winners!

2009-04-22T12:18:00.000-07:00

The origin...

The Origin... from Agustin Eguia on Vimeo.

Video made for the "We are Linux" contest. The hole thing was made in 5 days, everything was created using Pixelmateor, After Effects and Soundbooth for audio mixing.

I hope you people like this spot.

Linux AD - What does it mean to be free?

The Origin... from Agustin Eguia on Vimeo.

Video made for the "We are Linux" contest. The hole thing was made in 5 days, everything was created using Pixelmateor, After Effects and Soundbooth for audio mixing.

I hope you people like this spot.

ALL ART BURNS : a design journal and sketchbook

2009-04-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

After some 15-odd years in the tech industry doing everything from programming parallel supercomputers to developing secure applications for consumer electronics I decided to go back to school for a BFA in Industrial Design. This journal, “ALL ART BURNS”, is as a public design journal and sketchbook. It might turn into my pro designer blog after I graduate or it might continue to be a journal and sketchbook. Either way, I hope this will be of use to other people interested in design or who are also on the path to becoming a designer. The name comes from one of the fire/art themed stickers I made back in 2002 for Burning Man.

http://www.allartburns.org/

The map of complexity science

2009-04-20T23:36:00.000-07:00

Brian Castellani of the Sociology and Complexity Science blog and the art & science factory website has created a nice diagram entitled "the map of complexity science." The map is a conceptual and historical overview of complexity science from the 1940s to the current day. Not only does the map highlight important players in the field (such as Stuart Kauffman) but also demonstrates how agent-based modeling, cellular automata, and genetic algorithms are linked together and more generally with complexity science. The map is well worth exploring as it has many hyperlinks to other sites.

The map of complexity science

Pedestrian modelling of Oxford Circus redesign

2009-04-20T23:23:00.000-07:00

Oxford Circus in London is a busy intersection between Regent Street and Oxford Street with more than 200m visitors a year (BBC). Work is to begin on a £5m project to pedestrianise part of Oxford Circus. Based on crossings in Tokyo, the new design will stop all traffic in all directions, and allow people to cross diagonally as well as straight ahead. Street clutter and barriers at the junction of Oxford Street and Regent Street will also be removed.

Graphic showing the Oxford Circus redesign

Why blog about this? The movie below created by Designhive shows how Atkins' two-dimensional traffic and pedestrian models can be coupled with 3D Studio Max in such a way it is difficult to distinguish the model from a real piece of video footage. Combining the models in the simulation in this way makes the finished product particularly compelling. Furthermore it has the benefit of being based on the technical models developed to test the proposals prior to their implementation (such as the removal of street clutter).

The pedestrian model is a particle-based system controlling 5000 agents to match up the data produced by Atkins Intelligent Space. When the final simulation was rendered, the 'particles' were replaced with animated people, programmed to walk while the points were moving and idle when the points stopped for traffic lights.

Thanks to Duncan Smith for flagging this. Further information:

Röyksopp Style Reinterpretation of the Little Red Ridning Hood Fairy Tale

2009-03-25T05:46:00.000-07:00

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

School assignment to reinterpret the
fairytale Little red ridning hood.
Inspired by Röyksopps Remind me.

Music: Slagsmålsklubben, Sponsored by destiny
smk.just.nu
Animation: Tomas Nilsson
tomas-nilsson.se

Project Management for Fun and Profit

2009-03-17T07:17:00.000-07:00

Project Management for Fun and Profit

View more presentations from Crystal Williams.

miniideas for prototype #9: biologically inspired information systems

2009-03-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

the standard way to produce a computer based information system is based on the design paradigm rather than on the evolutionary approach.
the viable system on the design paradigm is the algorithm, but the viable system on the evolutionary paradigm could be the artificial life.
on one side you have the traditional approach engineering-based of conceptualize, design and build a thing, on the other hand the approach is more stochastic based, swarm oriented, and seems like to grow a plant.

miniideas for prototype #8: emotion based user interface design

2009-03-13T10:14:00.000-07:00

emotion based user interface design

http://www.livefaceonweb.com/
http://redzee.com/

how can be triggered an emotional based response via the user interface design of a website? it can generate a deep engagement of the user while its exploring the site?

the organic-like movement generates a neuroemotional correlate on our minds? the mimetics of a life suggest life on our mind?

miniideas for prototype #7: personal information complexity

2009-03-13T09:42:00.000-07:00

on to what extent we deal with the information complexity stored on our hard disk drives? we really remind all the stuff that is stored there? how can be a new interface created/applied to increase the operational knowledge of this data/information on a way that allow us to create/apply more knowledge/action on life?

resources:
Reducing the Semantic Distance http://www.deepamehta.de/docs/talk.html

miniideas for prototype #6: subjective search engine

2009-03-13T09:25:00.000-07:00

if google is a "objective" search engine, how could be a "subjective" search engine? how it can be created? it can be created on a wiki-based approach or as how can be the mechanism to create it? maybe a human powered engine? maybe a directory?

miniideas for prototype #5: lima city urban traffic very small system simulation using swarm bots

2009-03-12T21:29:00.000-07:00

use the bots on http://www.swarmrobot.org/ and representing them as the vehicles on the city (as a swarm intelligence), simulate the urban traffic and test some solutions to increase the flux.

miniideas for prototype #4: stochastic pricing

2009-03-12T21:13:00.000-07:00

imagine to set the price of an item in a stochastic way, so it can be changed randomly beetween certain ranges, maybe it can be used as a way to increase the flux of sales, because the novelty of the concept, but it also can lead to explore the way that we set cost and prices and relate the to the demand, an example of such a concept can be see on the Bar La Bolsa at Barcelona, according to the folks of Derivart.info: A bar where drinks are traded.(PDF)

miniideas for prototype #3: what is a heart?

2009-03-12T21:08:00.000-07:00

instructions:
use with extremely care =)
net content:
its pure hemodynamics, a regulator of the blood flux
counterindications:
too much use or misuse can cause a heart attack or a broken heart.

¿love come with instructions?
¿it has an expiration date?

barcode and instructions

also you can ask Google.

miniideas for prototype #2: the "datero" as an autonomous agent of traffic regulation

2009-03-12T21:00:00.000-07:00

the traffic of the city of lima as an emergent system, linked to information markets on which the "datero" provides regulation/control over the system, thus reducing the noise, and allowing feedback of the urban public transportation system over the route.

emergence
information markets
complexity
feedback

miniideas for prototype #1: minivacuum with fuzzy-logic

2009-03-12T20:42:00.000-07:00

will be a minivacuum, can-sized and that cleans your all house without the need of any human intervention, maybe fuzzy-logic powered.

Minimax: Sistema de Entrenamiento en Innovación y Creatividad

2009-03-12T16:09:00.000-07:00

Sistema de Entrenamiento en Innovación y Creatividad

Experiencia de Transformación Personal que rompe nuestros límites y nos desafía a vencer todo obstáculo de nuestra mente y nuestro medio y nos forja como “Homo-innovadores”… seres capaces de autotransfomarse para transformar el mundo con pasión e ingenio!

Organiza: Minimax I Escuela de Innovadores

Ingreso Libre – Capacidad Limitada

Fecha: Jueves 19 de Marzo
Hora: 10 a.m a 3 pm
Lugar: Auditorio FIC -UNI.
Facultad de Ingenieria Civil.
Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria. Lima. Peru

Informes e inscripciones en: info@minimax-ei.com / minimax-ei.com

Open Now: Apply for a RHIZOME grant!‏

2009-03-11T06:42:00.000-07:00

Dear Rhizome Friend,

The Rhizome Commissions Program is now open! Rhizome is accepting applications to our Commissions Program for grants ranging from $1,000 - $5,000 for the creation of new works. The deadline is now a month away: midnight, April 2, 2009!

All program information, including details on guidelines, voting and a list of the jury, is online:

http://www.rhizome.org/commissions

Please let our staff know if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

the Rhizome staff

Software Innovation—Do You Think the Last 20 Years Were Exciting? The Next 20 Years Will Blow Your Mind

2009-02-27T11:21:00.000-08:00

About the Lecture

In a trip down memory lane, Brad Feld regales us with the pre- and recent history of electronic innovation, with a rapid-fire delivery that achieves vaudevillian pitch.

Via a slide-laden PowerPoint presentation -- and, by the way, Feld claims to hate PowerPoint, because as a venture capitalist “I’ve only received about 6,723,000 of them” -- he narrates landmark moments in the evolution of the computer age. He touches on the room-size ENIAC computer, and pays tribute to the Jetsons cartoon as embodying his view of the future as a child. He cites his first programming language (APL, 1976), and first computer (Apple II, 1978). Feld speaks sentimentally of the familiar A> prompt as a quaint relic of the DOS operating system era.

Jump to the late ’80s, when Hypercard on the Macintosh was a pre-web foreshadowing of distributing data through multiple applications…“a major breakthrough.” Windows 3.0 heralded the ’90s and subsequent leapfrogging of Microsoft and Apple on the personal computer frontier. He cites the renegade Linux operating system (1991), then the ignoble Michelangelo virus (1992)…“the first time the mainstream media got crazy about computer security.”

Feld detours from history to recount naming his software consulting firm Feld Technologies; whenever anything went wrong “people called up and asked for Mr. Feld.” Therefore, he warns “lesson #1 of entrepreneurship is don’t name your company after yourself.”

In the mid-’90s, the emergence of the Internet in mass culture made ubiquitous such terms as Mosaic, Yahoo!, Java, Explorer, and other iterations of web browser, search engine, and email protocol. In 1999, E-commerce and the Y2K scare entered common parlance. Around 2000, OS X and iTunes burst on the scene, in spite of post-Internet bubble depression. Feld credits Apple with changing “the way we think about digital content.” Catching up to recent times, he invokes social networking, the astronomical Google IPO, and the notion of Web 2.0.

As a venture capitalist, Feld seeks new paradigms in software development as investing prospects for 10 to 20 years – “the next big thing.” He is interested in “immersive experience” that alters human interaction with the computer. His attention is also drawn to decoupling mouse and keyboard from control of the computer toward methods requiring no tactile input. Lastly, he speaks of “cloud computing” where “everything is disconnected from what is on your desktop” and “you don’t have to worry about…data storage and equipment.” Then, elliptically, he reprises a slide of a 1960s room-size computer, suggesting it resembles a latter-day incarnation of a server farm. Full circle.

About the Speaker

Brad Feld '87, SM '88

Co-founder and Managing Director at Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital

Brad Feld has been a self-described nerd since boyhood, an auspicious beginning to his trajectory from software developer to tech consultant to entrepreneur to venture capitalist.

MIT proved a natural melding of Feld's longtime and evolving interests in computer science and business. Even before completing his graduate degree, his first company, Feld Technologies, was established. Since then he has had a hand in more than 100 companies, including serving on the boards of over a dozen. Feld is also a member of the Dean's Advisory Council at MIT Sloan.

Feld is an insatiable reader, dedicated blogger, art collector, and forward thinker. As a marathoner, his goal is to participate in races in all 50 states and on every continent before age 50. Not least, Feld is a philanthropist, supporting causes in education, environment, arts, and women’s issues. He makes his home in both Colorado and Alaska.

MIT Professional Education 2009 Short Programs Schedule

2009-02-27T10:55:00.000-08:00


	There is no substitute for an MIT educational experience Dear Friend, MIT Professional Education - Short Programsformerly called the MIT Professional Institute, is pleased to announce that we are now accepting applications for the 60th year of our summer professional programs. Now is a good time to consider adding to your education & marketable skills. 2009 Course Schedule Visit our website to view / download the 2009 course schedule Featured New Courses: Crystallization Science and Technology in the Pharmaceutical IndustrySynthetic BiologyGraphic Cards for Technical ComputingReal-Time Reliable Simulations for Heat Transfer and Contiuum Mechanics: Educational ApplicationsEnergy in the Context of Climate Policy: Strategic Challenges and OpportunitiesGeological Carbon Sequestration: Science, Technology, and Policy Architecting the Future EnterpriseLAI Lean Healthcare Academy™Nanostructure FabricationProject and Product Lifecycle Management Tips For Applying: Submit applications early to reserve space - class sizes are limited.Request company approval for training as early as possible. International applicants: please start the visa process at least 3 months in advance of course date. To view the entire 2009 summer course schedule, including dates, descriptions, travel information, and on-line registration forms, visit our website at http://shortprograms.mit.edu/. Sincerely, The Short Programs Team MIT Professional Education

From IT to Cleantech: New Sources of Innovation (from MIT World)

2009-02-27T04:21:00.000-08:00

About the Lecture
Imagine a response to oil dependence and climate change that offers people around the world a new and improved version of the car, premised on redesigning infrastructure top to bottom with green technology in a way that recharges ailing national economies. Applying both an entrepreneurial spirit and a systems engineering approach, Shai Agassi has devised just such a visionary plan for cracking these vexing global challenges.

A recent World Economic Forum asked participants how to make the world a better place by 2020. Agassi felt an engineer’s compulsion to respond. He describes a process “like a fractal problem…opening up a cascade of questions.” First came the notion of running a country without oil. He seized on, then dismissed, the idea of bio- and hydrogen-based fuels. He then experienced the seminal insight that “you need to go down from molecules to electrons if you want to change the world.”

This realization meant addressing both economic and engineering problems. He’d need to offer consumers not a vehicle limited to two seats, three wheels and 28 mph speeds -- but one that could go faster than gas cars, with all the requisite bells and whistles. To move his plan along, he also determined to use available electric car battery engineering. This raised significant issues of convenience: where to recharge and how frequently. Agassi envisioned charging docks in parking lots and home garages. He devised a simple battery replacement method.

Then came the issue of affordability, which Agassi solved by applying a familiar business model, though not one associated with cars: cell phone minutes. Sell consumers an electric car with a subscription for miles: the longer the subscription, the greater the discount (or rebate check). In Europe, Agassi notes, where gas costs $7 to $8 a gallon, a five-year subscription pretty much gets you “a free electric car.”

The model’s complexity and infrastructure requirements imply government backing, which Agassi has already secured. In Denmark there’s a 180% tax on gasoline, and gas-powered sedans costs 60 thousand euros while electrics go for 20 thousand. North Sea windmills will provide clean electricity for charge stations. Israel’s building a desert solar field to “drive every car,” and a smart grid to monitor battery charging. The U.S. is hosting pilot programs in Hawaii and the Bay Area.

His is not a plan to phase in gradually: The time is now, he says. “We must do the right, moral thing,” to contend with climate change and brutal oil regimes, and “to create the biggest expansion in U.S. history.”

NET.ART (SEGUNDA ÉPOCA). LA EVOLUCIÓN DE LA CREACIÓN ARTÍSTICA EN EL SISTEMA-RED (from LIMINAR)

2009-02-25T05:11:00.000-08:00

NET.ART (SEGUNDA ÉPOCA). LA EVOLUCIÓN DE LA CREACIÓN ARTÍSTICA EN EL SISTEMA-RED
3er Encuentro Inclusiva-net en el Centro Cultural de España en Buenos Aires (AECID): del 2 al 6 de marzo de 2008.

Entrada libre previa inscripción.

Dirige: Juan Martín Prada

www.medialab-prado.es/inclusiva-net
inclusiva2009@medialab-prado.es

El net.art, iniciado a mediados de los años 90 como exploración creativa y experimentación crítica de la red Internet, es uno de los campos de la creación artística contemporánea que más ha contribuido en el replanteamiento de las formas de producción y experiencia de lo artístico. No obstante, sus aportaciones no sólo se han concentrado en la investigación de las posibilidades estéticas, lingüísticas o interactivas de las tecnologías de la red, ni en lo que éstas permiten para el replanteamiento de lo que podemos entender como arte. De hecho, y considerando a la red como un nuevo espacio público en el que intervenir críticamente, las aportaciones de mayor interés del net.art han profundizado a lo largo de esta década en una reflexión acerca de los usos dominantes de las redes telemáticas, de los procesos de producción de significados y subjetividad que en ellas operan, de sus políticas, de sus exclusiones. El devenir
“social” de la web actual, con su énfasis en las redes sociales y en un modelo de negocio basado en los principios de participación colectiva y abierta, opinión y comentario, conforma un nuevo marco en el que reflexionar acerca del papel social y crítico del pensamiento artístico.
Este primer seminario se celebrará en Medialab-Prado (Calle Alameda, 15, Madrid) los días 16 y 17 de febrero de 2009, en horario de 19:00h a 21:00h. Entrada libre.
Posteriormente se celebrará el 3er Encuentro Inclusiva-net en el Centro Cultural de Buenos Aires (Argentina) del 2 al 6 de marzo de 2009. En este encuentro se abordarán en profundidad las líneas de reflexión planteadas a través de un conjunto de seminarios, una serie de comunicaciones seleccionadas en convocatoria pública y por sesiones de debate. A lo largo del encuentro se abordarán, entre otras muchas cuestiones como: ¿es posible hablar de una segunda época del net.art? ¿qué rasgos la caracterizan? ¿qué aportan las nuevas formas artísticas basadas en la hibridación on/off line? ¿qué reflexión crítica nos proponen las nuevas manifestaciones de la creación digital en red?, etc.

Para más información:
www.medialab-prado.es/inclusiva-net
inclusiva2009@medialab-prado.es

Podéis inscribiros en la siguiente dirección:
http://medialab-prado.es/article/programa_del_seminario_inclusiva-net_netart_segunda_epoca_la_evolucion_de_la_creacion_artistica_en_el_sistema-red#inscripcion

Fibonacci sequence goes technoir, gets lagged

2009-02-25T04:59:00.000-08:00

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Industrious experimentalist Eric Archer shares more of his synth dreams made real with this sequencer based on the Lagged Fibonacci number generator -

Fans of the Golden Ratio know that it is built-in to the Fibonacci Sequence, being the ratio of S(n)/S(n-1) when n is very large.
But lets make it more complicated.

The Lagged Fibonacci Generator is a generalized version that looks at a wider "history window"; instead of the two previous numbers, it lets you go back farther in the list with parameters j and k.

S(n) = S(n-j) + S(n-k)

These numbers are limited to whatever bit depth you choose to represent them. Whenever the addition generates a "carry", it rolls over at zero again and outputs a carry flag. For example, if you're using 8 bits, the m value is 2^8, or 256. What happens then is magic because instead of an ever-increasing string of numbers, you get a set of numbers that hop around back and forth between zero and m. The complexity of the sequence grows rapidly with larger j and k values, but its never random or chaotic.

You might remember Lagged Fibonacci from it's day job as an encryption algorithm. Enjoy the relevant handdrawn circuit diagram and further explanatory text here.

And if you haven't yet had your daily dose of hypnotic oscillography, take a moment to stare into the violent beauty that is the LFG algorithm -

http://ericarcher.net/devices/fibonacci-generator/

Visualizing the number of links on 98 popular websites (via MAKEzine)

2009-02-25T04:54:00.000-08:00

Visualization of of the # of links on the homepage of the top 98 websites (MAKE is in there!).... via Waxy

2008: La Ofrenda

2009-02-20T07:40:00.000-08:00

Ofrenda 2008 from isaac robles on Vimeo.

Video convertido de un powerpoint desarrollado como una especie de resumen vital de ideas y conocimientos sobre una amplia gama de temas.

Lovemap: mapping two variables on deciding your couple

2009-02-13T22:15:00.001-08:00

You can make use this information visualization technique to map each and everyone of your potential love partners. Try putting a few names based only on two variables (intelectual and physical) in a 0-5 scale, where 5 is a top, and then see if the patterns emerge.
Just for fun. Happy Valentines Day!

Concept: Beno Juarez / Paul Giron

Google PowerMeter from Google.org

2009-02-11T14:33:00.000-08:00

Google PowerMeter, now in prototype, will receive information from utility smart meters and energy management devices and provide anyone who signs up access to her home electricity consumption right on her iGoogle homepage. The graph below shows how someone could use this information to figure out how much energy is used by different household activites.

Extracted from: http://www.google.org/powermeter/howitworks.html

	Analyze: Get better information about how you use energy and what you can do to be more efficient.
	Save: Reduce your energy bills and carbon footprint by making smart decisions about your energy use.
	Share: Strike up a little friendly competition to see how your energy consumption compares to your friends and neighbors.

proyecto combi | urban reprogramming laboratory

2009-02-07T17:23:00.000-08:00

Proyecto Combi.
Urban Reprogramming Lab

ERROR 2. SIMULACION HUAYCAN
19, 20 y 21 de febrero de 2009

El presente Curso Taller propone el estudio complejo de la ciudad como alternativa al análisis urbano tradicional.
El Descanso de Ate, ubicado en el Km. 16.5 de la Carretera Central, representa un atractivo escenario de estudio debido a su ordenado origen y caótica evolución. La metodología plantea vivenciar el reconocimiento de las temporalidades del micro y macro entorno así como la interacción con los involucrados relevantes, para finalmente reflexionar y discernir sobre la forma óptima de propiciar la evolución deseable de un medio socio-económico-ambiental urgente, a través del desarrollo de Proyectos de Inversión bajo la lógica de “mínima intervención, máximo resultado”

http://combi.emprendedores.pe/2009/02/proyecto-combi-url-huaycan.html

Leading with Information Technology

2009-02-03T06:23:00.000-08:00

Marshall Carter leads an MIT class through a case study on corporate transformation, highlighting tips he believes are as salient for engineering students as for those focused on business services.

Don’t turn to the best-seller lists for advice on change, advises Carter, since most books pick up the story after a business has made the strategic decision to remake itself. Carter’s decade (1991-2001) with Boston’s venerable State Street Bank helps illuminate the thinking that comes before the decision, and the steps necessary to fulfill it.

State Street, Carter recounts, had focused primarily on processing transactions, such as the purchase or sale of stocks and bonds, only to watch its key products age, and revenues drop. At the same time, “customers were asking us for more and more information,” such as the IBM pension manager’s request for the geographic distribution of his plan’s mutual funds. State Street did not then have a sophisticated enough network to provide such data. So the bank came to realize it needed “a new vision and operating model.”

Source: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/581/

Array and Constellation projects create forests of light in public space

2009-01-21T20:31:00.000-08:00

"Array" is an art installation at the Yamaguchi Center for the Arts and Media (YCAM) consisting of a field of columns that create a light and sound array that shifts with viewers movements through the space. This project is similar to the "Constellation" project in Covent Garden, London that contains 600 custom designed LED mirrored tubes which is featured at the link below. Interesting use of space and custom circuitry to control both sets of lights.

United Visual Artists

In the Air: Madrid Air Quality Visualization

2009-01-21T20:08:00.000-08:00

"In the Air" [intheair.es] aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents contributing to Madrid's air quality (e.g. gases, particles, pollen, diseases, etc) to investigate how they perform, react and interact with the rest of the city.

The project, developed as part of the Visualizar'08 workshop, consists of 2 complementary parts. First, a web-based dynamic model interpolates and relates different datasets in a 3D geographical overlay that can be interactively navigated. Secondly, a physical prototype titled "diffuse façade" acts as a massive indicator of the air´s components through a changing cloud. The colors and spray rhythms of the clouds emitted by a series of water vapor diffusors inform passers-by of the levels of several chemical air components (e.g. nitrogen monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, chlorine and carbon monixide), as measured by a nearby air quality sensor station.

The Effects of Chart Size and Layering on the Perception of Time Series Visualizations (from Infosthetics)

2009-01-21T19:49:00.000-08:00

Data visualization consultant Stephen Few has just posted an excellent article [perceptualedge.com] about a recent time-series visualization called the Horizon Graph. Originally developed by data visualization software firm Panopticon, Horizon Graphs can display about 50 sets of time-series values on a single screen. This particular visualization technique was the focus of a detailed evaluation study described by Jeffrey Heer, graduate researcher Nicholas Kong, and Maneesh Agrawala. The results are described in the scientific paper titled "Sizing the Horizon: The Effects of Chart Size and Layering on the Graphical Perception of Time Series Visualizations" (PDF) [berkeley.edu].

In the paper, 2 different experiments are described. The goal of the first experiment was to determine the impact of the band number and horizon graph variant ("mirrored", flipping the negative values around zero, versus "offset") on value comparisons between horizon graphs. The goal of the second experiment was to compare normal line charts to horizon graphs and investigate the effect of chart height on both.

Want to know the dry results? No significant difference was found in either estimation time or accuracy between the different chart types. However, both estimation time and error increased as more bands were displayed. In the 2nd experiment, the estimation error increased as chart size decreased; layering increased estimation time, and mirroring did not; and lastly, the estimation time decreases with chart height.

More interestingly, from the results, following 3 design guidelines were proposed:

Mirroring Does Not Hamper Graphical Perception. Mirroring a chart (that is flipping the negative values around zero) neither slowed estimation time nor hurt estimation accuracy, but cuts the size of the chart in half.

Layered Bands Are Beneficial As Chart Size Decreases. Dividing a chart into layered bands increased the estimation time and increased the estimation error at constant chart heights. Therefore, the use of 4 or more bands is discouraged, as this resulted in increased time and error, while subjects complained that interpreting 4-band charts was difficult and tiring

Optimal Chart Sizing. For both normal line charts and 1-band mirror charts, they found a chart height of 24 pixels to be optimal.

Via Datavisualization.

Tidal Data as a Table: Physical "Data Furniture" (from Infosthetics)

2009-01-21T19:44:00.000-08:00

Posted: 20 Jan 2009 02:22 AM PST

Tidal Datums [adriensegalfurniture.blogspot.com] is a wooden table whose form is inspired by the formal language of data graphics. The table is intended to be a representation of analytic information through the medium of furniture. Data graphs were gathered from NOAA's historic tide database, more specifically the measurements of tides at San Francisco Bay over a 4 week period, and then translated into tangible material.

The forms modeled from the data not only reveal a dynamic pattern, but also facilitate a "new way" of experiencing information by enabling a physical interaction of tidal patterns with the body. Notably, this particular work will also feature the cover of a new book about tables.

En la frontera del futuro. Especial de Clarin.com

2009-01-13T09:44:00.000-08:00

Professor Walter Lewin, A New Physics Superstar

2008-12-25T14:46:00.000-08:00

Professor Walter Lewin of MIT draws fans around the world with his online physics lectures. Read the full U.S. News article at http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/e-learning/2008/01/10/a-new-physics-superstar.html

DoodleBuzz: Typographically Scribbling Online News (from Information Aesthetics)

2008-12-22T09:09:00.000-08:00

Doodle Buzz [doodlebuzz.com] is an online news aggregator with a visual twist. Users are requested to submit their favorite news theme or topic, and to draw a crazy, chaotic, all-over-the-place, messed-up, scribbled line on the white canvas. The line is then used as the framework to layout the headlines, summaries and related topics. The aim is to create an entirely new way of exploring information, one that allows for a kind of "quiet chaos" that gives people the opportunity to explore unthought of paths and connections along their news gathering journey. The data is fetched from DayPI, a recent service by DayLife that allows a new architecture of online news.

The visually chaotic and more playful approach towards exploring news seems like an interesting alternative to the more scientific-looking network graphs of news already out there, such as News Visual, Muckety, SiloBreaker, Libero, TextMap and CNET News Ontology.

The visual style of DoodleBuzz reminds me of Brad Paley's Map of Science. The idea of "sketching news" is still one of my personal favorites, like Week in Review. More doodle craziness can be found at Icastic Visualizing Time, Doodling Credit Card Statements, Indexed Doodle Graphs and Diagrams and the 4 Block World Doodles.

Extracted from: Information Aesthetics http://infosthetics.com/archives/2008/12/doodlebuzz_aggregating_scribbling_news.html

Growth of a Twitter Graph (from Visual Complexity)

2008-12-22T09:02:00.000-08:00

Burak Arikan is an artist and researcher who focuses on creating networked systems that evolve with the interactions of people and machines. He has also been previously featured in VC. One of his latest pieces has been an experiment with the Twitter API, where he tracked the growth of his Twitter network over a period of 3 weeks. Burak was trying to understand how connections and particular clusters might expand or contract over time.

The first image is a portrait of Burak's Twitter graph on the first week of the experiment, when he was following 80 people. Burak only mapped the interconnections between friends, removing himself from the picture, and then labeled the 6 main clusters: "MIT", "silicon valley", "web programming", "generative art", "Istanbul", and "web business tr (Turkey)". As he explains: "The silicon valley cluster is large and dense compared to others. The MIT cluster is almost like a clique (every person connected to every other). Generative art is quite close to Silicon Valley, mostly bridged through the user neb. Obviously the Turkish web business cluster has many connections to the Silicon Valley, techcrunch being a major bridge here. The web programming cluster is very small, surprisingly it is connected to Silicon Valley only through the user al3x, who works at Twitter".

To test the importance of key bridging users, Burak decided to remove them and see if the graph still hold together. Many of these changes are represented on his map of week 3 (second image) where more bridges and denser clusters are discernible within his network of 158 people.

Apart from a careful analysis of some of the patterns emerging in this experiment, which can be further explored in his blog post, Burak poses an important question worth considering: "Do these people mind about what these diagrams reveal about their privacy, while all the data is public?".

Extracted from: Visual Complexity http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=634

INTERACTIVOS?'09: GARAGE SCIENCE

2008-12-22T08:56:00.000-08:00

INTERACTIVOS?'09: GARAGE SCIENCE
International Worskhop-Seminar

Deadline for entries: December 14, 2008 · 12 midnight (GMT+1)
Call for collaborators: December 30, 2008 - January 25, 2009
Dates of the event: January 28 - February 14, 2009 at Medialab-Prado (Madrid, Spain)

Open call for the submission of projects to be collaboratively developed and papers to be presented within the framework of the Interactivos?'09: Garage Science international workshop and seminar. The aim is to design and build experimental and critical prototypes such as mechanical, digital, and biological devices, using open software and open hardware tools, as well as low cost materials.

The medialab will be transformed into a "domestic lab" where a maximum of 8 proposals will be developed with the aid of teachers, assistants and interested collaborators (call for collaborators: December 30). With the participation of the Critical Art Ensemble.

Keywords: Garage science, critical design, bioart, mechanical devices, automatons, robots, impossible machines, Rube Goldberg's machines, pataphysic, energy, physical computing, free hardware, fabbing, recycling, biocomputing, biology, biohacking, biopunk, "license to fail".

Interactivos?'09 also includes a Seminar (January 28 and 29, 2009) with lectures by artists and experts where selected papers will be presented.

More information and access to the online submission form for projects and papers:
http://medialab-prado.es/article/taller-seminario_interactivos09_ciencia_de_garaje

Contact: interactivos@medialab-prado.es

Organizer: Medialab-Prado

MEDIALAB-PRADO
Plaza de las Letras
C/ Alameda, 15
28014 Madrid (Spain)
+34 913 692 303
www.medialab-prado.es

Creative destruction and the crisis (from McKinsey Quarterly)

2008-12-22T08:41:00.000-08:00

Creative destruction and the crisis

The economic forces of “creative destruction” described by Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 are hard at work in the current business environment. This latest installment of McKinsey’s analysis of the crisis includes a look at innovation during the Great Depression; an interview with Richard Foster, coauthor of the 2001 book Creative Destruction; a snapshot of long-term trends that will influence industry responses to the downturn; and a description of a nascent business—carbon trading—emerging in the hard-hit financial services sector.

Creative destruction and the financial crisis: An interview with Richard Foster

Industry trends in the downturn: A snapshot

Banking on carbon assets

Innovation lessons from the 1930s

dorkbot.mvd // "los dedos en el enchufe" (from Liminar)

2008-12-22T08:24:00.000-08:00

- - - - -
SUPERLUJO! Frasca - Groisman
penúltima presentación de dorkbot.mvd 2008!
- - - - -

- - - - - [1]

Videoinstalaciones
3 propuestas para la puesta en escena electro-digital.

Martín Groisman presenta:
"El cuarto infinito" (2005), "Ba DaDa"(2007) y "Ojo de agua" (2007)

Martín Groisman (Buenos Aires,1960)
Realizador, docente e Investigador en medios audiovisuales y sistemas interactivos. Lic. en Psicología (UBA,1983) Prof. titular de "Medios Expresivos 1 y 2 " en Diseño Gráfico/FADU/UBA. Director del Posgrado en Diseño Digital (PADD - FADU/UBA) Prof. Titular de”Diseño Multimedial
1 y 2 ” en Artes Multimediales/ IUNA. Ha pubicado (en coautoría):
“Apuntes Pixelados” (Ed. FADU/Nobuko,2007), "Cultura digital, comunicación
y sociedad" (Editorial Paidós, 2004) y "El medio es el diseño"
(Ed. Libros del Rojas, 2OO0).

http://weblogs.clarin.com/dsno/archives/2007/07/martin_groisman.html

- - - - - [1]

Los dedos en el enchufe: jugando con maquinitas.

Antes de las consolas, la única manera de jugar videojuegos era ir a
salones de maquinitas, los cuales estaban llenos de gente rara. La alternativa,si uno era un concheto de Carrasco con padres conectados con el proceso militar,era tener acceso a maquinitas de pantallas de LED o LCD producidas en USA o Japan.
Lamentablemente, mis padres estaban en el lado equivocado (el del comunismo internacional) por lo que casi no tuve maquinitas en mi infancia (salvo una azul que me trajeron de Venezuela). Ahora, de grande, me compré un montón en eBay y en esta charla contaré por qué son lo más glorioso del mundo. Además, se hará un panorama de la historia y el diseño de estas delicias portátiles. Traigan pulgares.

Gonzalo Frasca (1972)
Hace videojuegos en PowerfulRobot.com. Tiene un Master en Diseño de Información y un Ph.D. en videojuegos. Trabajó en CNN, Cartoon Network y El Rato de Charoná.

http://www.powerfulrobot.com

MIT Press Winter White Sale!‏

2008-12-22T08:22:00.000-08:00

Visit our Winter White Sale page for additional details.

The fine print:

Sale prices are available to customers with delivery addresses in North America only.
Orders must be placed by December 16 for December 24 arrival.
Distributed book lines are excluded from the sale.
Sale prices apply to in-stock books only, and may not be combined with other discount offers.
Sale prices expire at midnight on January 31, 2009.
This offer is good only for orders made through the MIT Press website. Sale prices are not available at the MIT Press Bookstore.
All websale orders are non-returnable.
Stock is not guaranteed. We apologize if your selection is unavailable at time of purchase.

Mario room will make you want to be a kid again

2008-12-19T07:24:00.000-08:00

"Landscape" by Antoinette J. Citizen is a mockup of the world of Super Mario where the "mystery" boxes even make the "cha-ching" sound when you press a momentary switch underneath them. Pretty fun idea that most little kids today would say is too "low-rez", but would make grown-up kids giggle with nostalgia.

Antoinette J Citizen via DVICE

Bitalizer: Bending Bits into Visual Structure

2008-11-13T23:33:00.000-08:00

A visualization system [random.inwo.com] that aims to highlight the repetitive structure of digital bit sequences. Each "Bitalizer" visualization starts from a small yellow dot. If a bit in the dataset is '1', a line is bent down. If a bit is '0', the line is bent up. Every 8 bits, the color of the line is set to represent the byte that those 8 bits collectively represent (a number from 0 to 255).
People are also invited to upload their own files, ranging from simple text files to software executables. The results can then instantly be enjoyed as an online animation, following by a static screenshot in the online gallery.

Extracted from: information aesthetics Posted: 19 Oct 2008 04:11 PM PDT

Programming DNA

2008-11-07T08:44:00.000-08:00

Biological engineering does not have to be confined to the laboratories of high-end industry laboratories. Rather, it is desirable to foster a more open culture of biological technology. This talk is an effort to do so; it aims to equip you with basic practical knowledge of biological engineering.

Genetic engineering is now a thirty year old technology. For reference, over a similar period of time, modern computing machines went from exclusive objects used to design weapons of mass destruction, to the now ubiquitous panoply of personal computing devices that support mass communication and construction. Inspired by this and many other past examples of the overwhelmingly constructive uses of technology by individuals, we have been working over the past five years to develop new tools that will help to make biology easy to engineer. We have also been working to foster a constructive culture of future biological technologists, who can reliably and responsibly conceive, develop, and deliver biological technologies that solve local problems.

This talk will introduce current best practice in biological engineering, including an overview of how to order synthetic DNA and how to use and contribute standard biological parts to an open source collection of genetic functions. The talk will also discuss issues of human practice, including biological safety, biological security, ownership, sharing, and innovation in biotechnology, community organization, and perception across many different publics. My hope is that the conferees of 24C3 will help me to understand how to best enable an overwhelmingly constructive hacker culture for programming DNA.

Links

Google Video

Visualizar 2008: Database City - Collaborate

2008-11-01T23:12:00.000-07:00

In November 2007, the Medialab Prado Center in Madrid, a space for research on art and new media, started the Visualizar project [visualizar.org]: an exploration of the social, cultural and artistic potential of data visualization as a medium.

The program includes a series of talks and presentations, an international call for papers and projects, and a 2-week intensive workshop where up to ten new projects are developed by interdisciplinary teams made up of designers, programmers and artists with the help of important names in the field. Last year, these included people like Ben Fry, Fernanda Viegas, IBM Visual Communication Lab, Mark Hansen, Gapminder and Spanish datavis company Bestiario.

You can watch some of last year's keynote speeches below (recommended!), or check out some of the projects, such as Cascade on Wheels, Metabolic Visualizer or Casas Tristes (visualizing such different things as traffic flows in Madrid, empty buildings left by the housing bubble or molecular reactions in the organism).

Next week, Visualizar 08 starts again in Madrid. This year there is a common topic to all projects to be developed: the city, city dinamics, and urban processes that can be best understood and interpreted through visualization. We will be joined again by great people like Fabien Girardin from MIT SENSEable City Lab, Ubicomp theoretist Adam Greenfield and Juan Freire, and visualization practicioners Bestiario and Aaron Meyers, among others. People from all over the world will be gathering again in Madrid to form interdisciplinary teams that will approach the nine selected ideas to be carried out during the workshop.

While the projects for 2008 have already been selected, the call to join as a collaborator is still open for a few more days. All kinds of backgrounds are well received; from sociologists to architects, from programmers and designers to biologists or chemists, the wide range of ideas that will be pursued this year require a great network of knowledge. Go to the Visualizar Forum to read the discussions going on around the selected projects to know more about them, and please check the call to know more about all the details. Medialab can offer some support for collaborators, like acommodation.

José Luis de Vicente is a cultural researcher and curator. He directs the Visualizar program at Medialab Prado, Madrid. He has developed along with Bestiario and Irma Vila the Atlas of Electromagnetic Space project.

Fernanda Viegas talk at Visualizar 2007.

Mark Hansen talk at Visualizar 2007.

YouCalc: Interactive Chart Widgets

2008-11-01T22:54:00.000-07:00

The conceptual space created by Widgenie and other visualization portals has got even smaller by a Youcalc [youcalc.com], a new online chart portal that "brings data to life". The youcalc widgets track and combine data from many data sources on the web (e.g. XML, REST, SOAP, JSON, CSV, Excel, Google Spreadsheet, etc.) to create interactive widgets that can be shared and embedded across the web, on desktops, mobile devices, and so on. However, I am still unclear how youcalc is any different from widgenie?

Although it seems the realm of visualization portals has become quite mature, I am still looking for any visualization "widget" that can easily "grab" data from online services, for instance download, anonymize and display my Google Analytics / Feedburner data...

Extracted from: Information Aesthetics. (27 Oct 2008 11:29 PM PDT)

NYTimes Visualization Lab

2008-11-01T22:36:00.000-07:00

The NYTimes has partnered with Many Eyes to create the NYTimes Visualization Lab [nytimes.com]. This Many Eyes version was specifically designed for the NYTimes, to allow newspaper readers to visualize and comment on information and data sets presented by Times editors, share those visualizations with others and create topic hubs where people can discuss specific subjects.

There are currently only 10 data sets available, but they range from Sarah Palin Speech at RNC to Party Affiliation By Religious Tradition.

Via blogs.nytimes.com. Thnkx Tom.

From: Information Aesthetics.

Wikinvest: Collaborative Sensemaking for Financial Data

2008-11-01T22:27:00.000-07:00

Wikinvest: Collaborative Sensemaking for Financial Data

Posted: 28 Oct 2008 08:08 PM PDT

Wikinvest.com [wikinvest.com] has a feature called Wikicharts which allows users to share annotations on financial charts (e.g. Apple stock, Google stock). The annotations are displayed in a similar manner to the ones used to indicate news stories (and more) on Google Finance, however they can also span ranges to help explain changes over time.

Wikinvest's chart is extremely well executed and features the same customary but controversial dynamic axis and multiple time ranges as Google's, as well as their own additions for user-submitted annotations. Like Google, wikinvest chose Flash for their interactive chart, a choice I believe is justified until there is a cross-browser standard for interactive vector graphics in javascript. Despite steady movement in that direction it's still extremely tricky to get a reliable, fast and uniform experience using javascript and canvas (or SVG).

Google's chart is well respected and has inspired at least one credible open source imitation, although wikinvest's version is the first I've seen that exceeds Google's features while achieving the same quality. I'm sure there are many more to come, provided people pay attention to the small details that make it a responsive interactive experience.

The idea of graphical annotation of charts is one of the concepts explored in the sense.us project which fed into the Minnesota employment explorer, some of the work at Many Eyes and the newly-launched New York Times' Visualization Lab. It seems only a matter of time until tools like these converge with software such as Skitch to allow contextual annotation, embedding and sharing for all online content.

Guest blogger Tom Carden is an interaction designer at Stamen Design. He has recently contributed to several successful visualization projects including MSNBC's Hurricane Tracker, Trulia Snapshot and mySociety's travel time maps.

Extracted from:

Infosthetics http://infosthetics.com/archives/2008/10/wikinvest_collaborative_sensemaking_for_financial_data.html

Advances in Biologically Inspired Information Systems

2008-10-26T21:52:00.000-07:00

	Advances in Biologically Inspired Information Systems Models, Methods, and Tools Series: Studies in Computational Intelligence , Vol. 69 Dressler, Falko; Carreras, Iacopo (Eds.) 2007, XII, 302 p. 132 illus., Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-540-72692-0 Online version available This item usually ships in 2-3 business days.
	$139.00

About this book

Technology is taking us to a world where myriads of heavily networked devices interact with the physical world in multiple ways and at multiple scales, from the global Internet down to micro and nano devices. Many of these devices are highly mobile and must adapt to the surrounding environment in a totally unsupervised way.

A fundamental research challenge is the design of robust decentralized computing systems that are capable of operating under changing environments and noisy input, and yet exhibit the desired behavior and response time, under constraints such as energy consumption, size, and processing power.

Biological systems are able to handle many of these challenges with an elegance and efficiency still far beyond current human artifacts. The goal is to obtain methods on how to engineer technical systems, which have similar high stability and efficiency.

With this book, we present a comprehensive overview of the most promising research directions in the area of bio-inspired computing. According to the broad spectrum addressed by the different book chapters, a rich variety of biological principles and their application to ICT systems are presented.

Written for:

Engineers, researchers, and graduate students in computational intelligence and computer science

Keywords:

Biologically Inspired Information Systems
Computational Intelligence

Extracted from:
Springer. Engineering series.
Advances in Biologically Inspired Information Systems
http://www.springer.com/engineering/book/978-3-540-72692-0

Urban Computing and Its Discontents

2008-10-20T23:37:00.000-07:00

Architecture and Situated Technologies Pamphlet 1
Urban Computing and Its Discontents
Adam Greenfield y Mark Shepard

Se pone en evidencia que la sintaxis a través de la cual creamos un mapa mental o una imagen de la ciudad interactuando con las rutas, distritos, bordes y nodos, propuestos por Lynch en The Image of the City se esta replanteando a través de la incorporación de nuevas tecnologías como inteligencia computacional, tecnologías en pantallas del tamaño de fachadas, el geotagging, redes sociales moviles, redes inalambricas públicas del gobierno, realidad aumentada o infraestructura inteligente. ¿Qué sucede cuando interactuamos con espacios y objetos de la ciudad usando Google Maps, un teléfono celular y un GPS o le proporcionamos a 60 personas un GPS y rastreamos la posición y circulación de ellas en la ciudad?, ¿Qué sucede cuando tomamos esos datos para facilitar el acceso a otras personas?. En este primer número de una serie de 9 se reunen y explican como estas tecnologías y conceptos de telecomunicación interactivos se agrupan en el término Urban Computing. Publicado por la Architectural League de New York y co editado por Omar Khan, es el resultado del simposio Architecture and Situated Technologies realizado en el 2006. La versión electrónica del primer número está disponible en PDF (8308 Kb).

Extractado de: Arquitectura e Informatica. http://arquitecturaeinformatica.blogspot.com/2008/03/urban-computing-and-its-discontents.html