Gizmo Parade Addendum LINKS & RESOURCES: A few more happy gizmos:

Do It Yourself Planner 2.0: Why buy a planner when you can print our your own? Use these templates to make a planner that works for you.

Surftp: Need access to your FTP from a public machine? Just don't want to install an FTP program? Well then connect to your ftp using Surftp. Just don't use it for anything important; you are giving them your ftp password remember.  ¶ 2:53 PM 0 Comments

  Mac OSX GUI Tweeks LINKS & RESOURCES: I found a number of promising OSX tweaks on A Guide to "Things MacOS X" on the Net:

• Path Finder: AKA "Finder Pro." It's the perfect tool for those of us that use multiple OSs and miss having the path available at the top of a browser window like in Windows and Linux.


• DropDrawers: An application that gives you little "drawers" (panes that slide on and off the side of the desktop) that hold shortcuts, URLS, documents, etc.


• DragThing: An flexible alternative to the doc.


• TinkerTool: A tool for adjusting hidden GUI options.


• Quitling: A menu that provides you with functions from OS9 and other fun stuff, like killing rouge processes.

While we're on the subject, be sure to check out Paul Graham's, Return of the Mac.

All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.

[...]

The intervening years have created a situation that is, as far as I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end and the high end, but not in the middle. My seventy year old mother has a Mac laptop. My friends with PhDs in computer science have Mac laptops. [2] And yet Apple's overall market share is still small.

Though unprecedented, I predict this situation is also temporary.

So Dad, there's this company called Apple. They make a new kind of computer that's as well designed as a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, and underneath is the best Unix machine you can buy. Yes, the price to earnings ratio is kind of high, but I think a lot of people are going to want these.

  ¶ 1:16 PM 0 Comments

  The God Racket DATA: I really enjoy "The God Racket, From DeMille to DeLay" by Frank Rich in today's Times.

[Polls] consistently show that at most a fifth of the country subscribes to the religious views of those in the Republican base whom even George Will, speaking last Sunday on ABC's "This Week," acknowledged may be considered "extremists." In that famous Election Day exit poll, "moral values" voters amounted to only 22 percent. Similarly, an ABC News survey last weekend found that only 27 percent of Americans thought it was "appropriate" for Congress to "get involved" in the Schiavo case and only 16 percent said it would want to be kept alive in her condition. But a majority of American colonists didn't believe in witches during the Salem trials either - any more than the Taliban reflected the views of a majority of Afghans. At a certain point - and we seem to be at that point - fear takes over, allowing a mob to bully the majority over the short term. (Of course, if you believe the end is near, there is no long term.)

  ¶ 4:21 PM 0 Comments

  Exciting Research / Design INFO VISUALIZATION: Ran across some interesting papers in Info related fields today:

Rendering Effective Route Maps: Improving Usability Through Generalization

Abstract: Route maps, which depict a path from one location to another, have emerged as one of the most popular applications on the Web. Current computer-generated route maps, however, are often very difficult to use. In this paper we present a set of cartographic generalization techniques specifically designed to improve the usability of route maps. Our generalization techniques are based both on cognitive psychology research studying how route maps are used and on an analysis of the generalizations commonly found in handdrawn route maps. We describe algorithmic implementations of these generalization techniques within LineDrive, a real-time system for automatically designing and rendering route maps. Feedback from over 2200 users indicates that almost all believe LineDrive maps are preferable to using standard computer-generated route maps alone.

My take: AWESOME. The maps that most trip-planners give end users are cluttered and often too realistic. Making trip planner results simplified and, um, more like directions drawn on a napkin (in other words, more like a person would give directions and less like a computer would) could be a huge improvement.

Designing Effective Step-By-Step Assembly Instructions

Abstract: We present design principles for creating effective assembly instructions and a system that is based on these principles. The principles are drawn from cognitive psychology research which investigated a person's conceptual models of assembly and effective methods to visually communicate assembly information. Our system is inspired by earlier work in robotics on assembly planning and in visualization on automated presentation design. Although other systems have considered presentation and planning independently, we believe it is necessary to address the two problems simultaneously in order to create effective assembly instructions. We describe the algorithmic techniques used to produce assembly instructions given object geometry, orientation, and optional grouping and ordering constraints on the object's parts. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to produce aesthetically pleasing instructions for everyday objects that are easy to follow.

My take: Come back to this paper if you ever need to do a heuristic eval on an assembly instructions.

Visualizing Time in Social Networks with TeCFlow

Abstract: This paper introduces TeCFlow – A Temporal Communication Flow Visualizer for Social Network Analysis. TeCFlow automatically generates interactive movies of communication flows among individuals by mining e-mail log files and other communication archives. Combining those movies with measures of social network analysis such as the change over time in group betweenness centrality and group density leads to insights into organizational dynamics. In addition we have defined a contribution index, which measures the activity of individual actors as senders and receivers of messages relative to a group.

My take: Very cool. Practical? Eh, maybe not so much. Check out the videos there though, something about animated force-directed layout graphs just makes me happy.  ¶ 2:30 PM 0 Comments

  Case Timeline INFO VISUALIZATION: The New York Times has a great timeline showing how the Schiavo Case has wound its way through the Florida and Federal Court Systems. Yeah, this whole news story blitz is ridiculous -- how is this anything but a personal matter? -- but what I like about this graphic is that it gives you a sense for how the court systems work in general.

  ¶ 11:49 AM 0 Comments

  Search the Commons INFO SCIENCE: The movement to find and create public domain content really is making some huge strides currently. I find myself using more open-source software than ever before (I download more programs from SourceForge than from any other source), using Wikipedia on a daily basis, finding great new music under a Creative Commons license, and even contributing on occasion.

Well, a cool new feature from Yahoo! might help keep this movement going. Now you can search specifically for Creative Commons content using Yahoo!'s new Creative Commons search feature.  ¶ 9:30 AM 2 Comments

  Windows, made of Jell-o UI: Check out a fun interface improvement (ok, that's debatable) to Fedora: Wobbly Windows.

The video makes me smile, but it also makes me a little sick.

Thanks Andy. (Wow, look! A post at Madefaction. Insanity! Is there an election going on or something?)  ¶ 10:32 AM 3 Comments

  Data on Schiavo INFO VISUALIZATION: Mediamaters calls CNN on their flatly stupid representation of poll results on their webpage. Let's give a looksy:



Yes, that's right. Stupid. The difference between the two data points is 8% -- but you wouldn't notice that without paying close attention. The difference is only 1% greater then the margin of error (7%).

Thankfully, CNN later updated the chart on their webpage.

If you want some polling data surrounding the Schiavo issue, check out this CBS article.

An overwhelming 82 percent of the public believes the Congress and President should stay out of the matter. There is widespread cynicism about Congress' motives for getting involved: 74 percent say Congress intervened to advance a political agenda, not because they cared what happened to Terri Schiavo. Public approval of Congress has suffered as a result; at 34 percent, it is the lowest it has been since 1997, dropping from 41 percent last month. Now at 43 percent, President Bush’s approval rating is also lower than it was a month ago.

  ¶ 10:03 AM 0 Comments

  Mother's Day Data DATA: Check out the US Census Bureau's Mother's Day fact sheet for a few interesting bits of data. A few highlights:

• 25.1: Average age of women when they give birth for the first time — a record high. The average age has risen nearly four years since 1970.


• 1-in-32: The odds of a woman delivering twins. Her odds of having triplets or other multiple births was approximately 1-in-540.


• August: The most popular month in which to have a baby, with 359,000 births taking place that month in 2002. July, with 358,000, was just a shade behind.


• Tuesday: The most popular day of the week in which to have a baby, with an average of almost 13,000 births taking place on Tuesdays during 2002.

  ¶ 2:52 PM 0 Comments

  Unicode Poster INFO VISUALIZATION: You have to love Ian Albert. According to his website, he has "an obsession with high-resolution, high-fidelity digital images." He's not kidding either. He put together a, um, poster that displays every unicode character. Size: 22,017 × 42,807 pixels. Downloadable as a Bittorrent.



There are some other gems on his site as well, like the Ultima 7 map. (Never played that game, but now I kinda want to.) Worth a look.  ¶ 3:19 PM 0 Comments

  FedEx Logo VISUAL COMMUNICATION: I ran across an interesting interview with the creator of the FedEx logo today at The Sneeze. They talk at length about the hidden arrow between the E and the x, which I had never noticed before.

Why choose to keep the arrow so subtle? It seems to show remarkable restraint. Weren't you or the people at FedEx ever tempted to make it more obvious with an outline or a different color?

A good question and one that I am frequently asked. An arrow, in and of itself, is one of the most mundane graphic devices in visual communications. Truly, there is nothing unique or particularly strategic (marketing-wise) in using an arrow as a brand identifier. Early on, before the brand rollout in mid-1994, FedEx’s public relations agency was preparing to emphasize the arrow as a secondary graphic to underscore the “speed/precision” positioning. They proposed to leverage this in their FedEx communications. Landor put its foot down and said, “No way.”

  ¶ 10:34 AM 0 Comments

  Nvu LINKS & RESOURCES: I've been looking for a free, multi-platform, XHTML compatible WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web page editor for a while. Nvu is all that and more, I really recommend it. Thank god I never have to open up an XHTML document in Dreamweaver again. That honestly is the most frustrating thing ever.

UPDATE: Link fixed. Thanks Mark.  ¶ 3:30 PM 1 Comments

  500,000 Articles in Wikipedia English INFO SCIENCE: Wikipedia English just hit 500,000 articles:

The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the 500,000th article in the English-language Wikipedia, its project to create a free, multilingual, online encyclopedia. The article was about "Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union." The total of 500,000 articles far exceeds any other encyclopedia project. At the average of 2,500 characters per article, this is 1.25 gigabytes of raw text, which if printed double-sided would form a stack about 66 feet or over 6 stories tall. Other recent additions to its English-language edition include hundreds of full-length songs, almost a gigabyte of new images, and subject-specific portals.

My prediction: One million entries in less than three years.  ¶ 11:47 AM 0 Comments

  Gizmo Parade LINKS & RESOURCES: Random tidbits from around the internets:

Devonthink : A great information management product for OS X users. I downloaded it last night and I've been starting to use it as an open-file; a place where I throw just about everything, from research files, interesting websites, my old tax returns, and just about anything else you can think of. One for the PC is called Net Snippets and is nothing to write home about.

Slogger: A Firefox extension that allows you to make a quick copy of a webpage for future use. (*cough* nytimes.com *cough*)

Celestia: The home page got a much needed and long overdue facelift. Looks great! If you've still never used Celestia, download this badboy asap.

The Apple Motion Sensor As A Human Interface Device: The guy who used the Powerbook motion sensor to make his webpages tilt back and forth is back, and this time you can actually download the program and use it to interact with various applications. Rad!

43 Things: A communal list of what people want to do with their life. (My fav: "give my gmail invites to anyone needing one.")

10 by 10: 100 pictures (well, a LOT are duplicates) that sum up what the news is right now. (Pretty good job -- today is Kofi, Condi, and this Schiavo person Republicans are grandstanding about.)

Winplosion: This little guy adds Apple's Exposé features to Windows. Apple will sue in 5... 4... 3...

Konfabulator: A framework that allows you to download and run a bunch of little random mini-apps that remind me of Tiger's Dashboard, only not quite as cool.

Cute Little Kittens: Webapp of the year?  ¶ 9:12 AM 0 Comments

  The Internet Archive INFO SCIENCE: Check out Brewster Kahle - Universal Access to All Knowledge, a great new lecture posted on IT Conversations. I just listened to it while cleaning the bathroom (finally!), and it's a very engaging talk.

Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive. Until listening to this talk I had no idea the people at Archive were as busy as they are; there are some interesting features in the pipeline. In fact, exploring the Archive might temporarily distract me from that other most exciting .org project, Wikipedia.

Two of the many things I took away from the talk:

• I like his simple framework for analyzing new technology:
  
  
  • Should we (In this case, should we try and collect much of the world's information for future generations?)
  • Can we (Is it logistically possible?)
  • May we (Will congress and content providers (RIAA, etc.) allow it?)
  • Will we
  
  
• DjVu is a cool technology that "allows the distribution on the Internet of very high resolution images of scanned documents, digital documents, and photographs. DjVu allows content developers to scan high-resolution color pages of books, magazines, catalogs, manuals, newspapers, historical or ancient documents, and make them available on the Web."


• Phone companies suck. While most tech works by Moore's Law, bandwidth per dollar spent today is about the same as it was in 2000.

  ¶ 12:40 PM 0 Comments

  Updated Site ASSEMBLEME: Site update:

• CSS cleaned up, moved off main page


• Redesigned header area


• Cleaned up html


• Changed comment settings


• Removed some pointless graphics

In the next day or two I'll be finished with project report on my trip planner which I'll link to from here as well.

I drop shadows!  ¶ 4:38 PM 2 Comments

  The Layers of New York INFO VISUALIZATION: Tansparent New York is a fun little tool for looking at the layers of the city and finding how they interact.

  ¶ 12:39 PM 0 Comments

  A9's OpenSearch - RSS-Based Search Results INFO SCIENCE: How fucking cool would it be if a large amount of websites gave you search results in a standardized XML format, rather then a non-standards based HTML format? Fucking cool, that's how cool. This would allow an awesome amount of integration between local applications and web applications, between existing search engines and black-box websites. Awesome.

Well, A9 (Amazon's search engine) is out to do just that. OpenSearch is a new XML schema, backward compatible with RSS, used for returning search results to a client.

From the site:

Many sites today return search results as an tightly integrated part of the website itself. Unfortunately, those search results can't be easily reused or made available elsewhere, as they are usually wrapped in HTML and don't follow any one convention. OpenSearch offers an alternative: an open format that will enable those search results to be displayed anywhere, anytime. Rather than introduce yet another proprietary or closed protocol, OpenSearch is a straightforward and backward-compatible extension of RSS 2.0, the widely adopted XML-based format for content syndication.

Up until now I thought Jeff Bezos' half-mad face leering towards the search biz was creepy, but if they keep the inovation coming, more power to them.  ¶ 11:13 AM 0 Comments

  Google & OSX, Sitting in a Tree... INFO SCIENCE: Google pays homage to my new favorite OS, OSX, and uses a dock-like bar to manage their different searching tools.



Very cool! Moving the user to a new page when he or she clicks on the dock is a bit disorienting however. My own mental model was that after I clicked on search tool, it would stay big and the following search query would use that engine.  ¶ 11:00 AM 1 Comments

  Free Ringtones DATA: Stop paying your phone company for ring tones.
  ¶ 9:15 AM 0 Comments

  Explorer with Tabs (That's Windows Explorer, not Internet Explorer) INFO SCIENCE: Here's a great new program I just started using. Direct from the horse's mouth:

ExplorerXP is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non - commercial use) file manager for Windows 2000/XP. Unlike the regular Windows Explorer, it displays the total size of each folder and allows you to browse multiple folders from a tabbed interface.

What does Microsoft have against tabs anyway? We may never know.

Now all I need is an explorer / desktop / interface for XP that looks and works like my Powerbook does and I'll be golden.  ¶ 9:05 AM 1 Comments

  Free News INFO SCIENCE: The New York Times has an article about the dire economics of free online newspapers. It's an interesting read.



I had no idea that the New York Times has more readers online then actual subscribers. Seems they are going to have to figure out how to squeeze more money from online readers without scaring them away; a difficult thing to do.

  ¶ 11:35 AM 0 Comments