Information Design Watch
May 19, 2009, 11:16 am
Twitter as Public Art
By Lisa Agustin
Check out “Visible Tweets”, a visualization of Twitter intended for public spaces or, as creator Cameron Adams puts it, “a Twitter visualizer for rock concerts.” Simply enter whose tweets you’d like to see, and choose one of three animation styles to see the tweets letter by letter, rotating as they are linked to each other, or as a tag cloud that morphs from one tweet into the next. Adams’ allusion to rock concerts stems from his assertion that Twitter is normally about the chatter that takes a back seat to the main event (but doesn’t have to):
Twitter gives a voice to an audience who for many years have played a subservient role to those who were officially there to speak. But who says they have less to say?
May 18, 2009, 8:53 pm
Logo Fun
By Henry Woodbury
Designer Sean Farrell offers a gallery of logos that incorporate a visual pun or hidden image. Here’s an example:
Pakuy is a packaging company.
May 18, 2009, 12:21 pm
This is Not a Painting
By Henry Woodbury
Take a look at the Art of Science 2009 Gallery for some stunning images generated by researchers in a wide variety of scientific disciplines.
The image above is an unusual example in that it starts with an artistic representation. Researchers loaded a bitmap of the Mona Lisa into the memory of a test computer, then examined it after power interruptions of increasing lengths.
The title “The Persistence of Memory” is both literally descriptive of the experiment and a clever reference to Salvator Dali’s most famous painting.
May 12, 2009, 2:47 pm
Enhanced ipHandbook Web Site Launched
By Lisa Agustin
Dynamic Diagrams is pleased to announce the re-launch of the ipHandbook of Best Practices web site. Developed for practitioners of intellectual property management, the site first launched in 2007 with a comprehensive printed Handbook and Executive Guide serving as core content. Now, thanks to a new collaboration with the Concept Foundation and funding by the Rockefeller Foundation, the site has expanded to include multimedia content and tools that collectively result in a more dynamic experience. New offerings include:
- A growing collection of online video presentations, including several prepared specifically for the ipHandbook site
- Distance learning courses, including one prepared by and for the ipHandbook community in collaboration with UNIDO’s e-Biosafety Training Programme
- Integration of a Twitter feed for timely updates
- Integrated Google translation on each page
- Advanced search functionality
Over the next six months, additional features will be released, including networking functionality, discussion boards, and a feature for posting comments and uploading original content to the site. These enhancements will not only grow the site as an online resource, but also encourage the creation of a global virtual community of IP and innovation managers, policymakers, scientists, and R&D leaders.
May 11, 2009, 8:39 am
War Games with Firewall
By Henry Woodbury
The U.S. Defense Department graduates about 80 students from its cyberwar schools. Here is a very cool article about how they are tested:
…the young man in battle fatigues barked at his comrades: “They are flooding the e-mail server. Block it. I’ll take the heat for it.”
These are the war games at West Point, at least last month, when a team of cadets spent four days struggling around the clock to establish a computer network and keep it operating while hackers from the National Security Agency in Maryland tried to infiltrate it with methods that an enemy might use.
My grandfather served in World War I running telegraph lines from balloon observation posts. Today he would be writing code.
May 7, 2009, 2:28 pm
Logicomix
By Lisa Agustin
Madness! Magic! Heroic quests! No, it’s not the latest release from Marvel, but rather Logicomix, a graphic novel on the nature of mathematical truth. According to the book’s web site:
[Inspired by the epic story of the quest for the Foundations of Mathematics,] this was a heroic intellectual adventure most of whose protagonists paid the price of knowledge with extreme personal suffering and even insanity. The book tells its tale in an engaging way, at the same time complex and accessible. It grounds the philosophical struggles on the undercurrent of personal emotional turmoil, as well as the momentous historical events and ideological battles which gave rise to them.
Told from the perspective of logician, philosopher, and pacifist Bertrand Russell, the book weaves together the trials and tribulations of thinkers such as Frege and Wittgenstein while exploring topics as diverse as logic, the institution of marriage, and predicate calculus. The web site is worth a look, particularly its Behind the Scenes section, which includes information on the team’s approach to character research and examples of pages in production.