When’s the last time you ventured out without your phone? (I mean, on purpose. I occasionally get down the block without mine, and worry that this will be the one time I really, really need to make a call.) If you are like most other Americans, the answer is “not often.” According to Pew Internet … Read more Do You Sleep with Your Phone?
I’ve been fascinated about the potential for crowdsourcing to facilitate human rights and humanitarian work, ever since I read about Ushahidi following the earthquake in Haiti in 2010. Ushahidi, an open source mapping project, allowed anyone to pinpoint trapped people, unsafe buildings, people in need of treatment and more. Anyone with a mobile phone could … Read more Crowdsourcing Crime
Can Inspire make high school chemistry comprehensible? A cool new “intelligent” textbook uses AI to make dense topics more accessible. IA beats AI. Thoughtful TED Talk by Shyam Sankar on human-computer symbiosis. Inside the Haiti Earthquake. A simulation that lets students experience the aftermath of the devastating earthquake and make strategic decisions about how to … Read more Stuff Worth Checking Out
Linda Holliday, founder and CEO of Semi-Linear, has “New media habits with old media tastes.” I have a similar problem, which I usually refer to as “so many books, so little time.” Semi-Linear has released a new product – Citia – that deconstructs major non-fiction works and lets readers (users) peruse the major themes, digging … Read more What’s the Point?
Guidelines for creating good infographics are not hard to find. The guidelines generally cover some configuration of the following: Determine the goal of the infographic — what you want to communicate Analyze relevant data and determine which data sets are most important Design thoughtfully And the graphical representation of data is often wonderful. It can … Read more The Persistence of Bad Infographics
Google Goggles. Making fun of Google Goggles. Fashionware for enjoying The Avengers 3D (even if the only superhero you had previous knowledge of was The Hulk). And now, Truth Goggles. PolitiFact’s Truth Googles (check out this demo), allow users to fact check claims made by politicians and the media. Interesting in itself, it also is … Read more Gogglemania
I admit it. I’m fascinated by hacking and hacktivism. (For the record, I’m not interested in hacking, just in watching the hackfest play out. That said, I do wish I’d figured out how to make my computer available to facilitate communication during the Arab Spring.) Not to date myself, but I read the Cuckoo’s Egg … Read more Hacktivism: Vandalism, Terrorism, Awesome?
Francesco Franchi gets it right. He has a strong vision for infographics — for data journalism — and he knows that at the foundation is good data and good storytelling. Francesco Franchi: On Visual Storytelling and New Languages in Journalism from Gestalten on Vimeo Recently, I’ve been following a discussion on LinkedIn about whether … Read more Not Just Pretty
WEAVE, the Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment, allows users to present large data sets in some really interesting ways. The open source tool from the Institute for Visualization and Perception Research and the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the Open Indicators Consortium, allows users to create dashboards of information for exploration and discovery. Particularly good … Read more Weaving a Visualization
In the quest to improve thought and developing meaningful skills for young learners, I am glad their are people like Bret Victor. He has been thinking deep thoughts about how to create more active readers: readers that are engaged with the material, that question hypotheses and model alternatives. And he’s developed some interesting prototypes … Read more Active Readers