skandalon

art technology communication powerpoint design humor critic interaction human computer reblog

✖ Via Mark Goetz: “Every time you make a PowerPoint, Edward Tufte kills a kitten”, Nov. 17th, 2009

“Here’s my new wallpaper at work – something I’ve been working on in OmniGraffle.”

“My name is Mark Goetz, and I am currently a second-year Master student at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. I’m specializing in Human-Computer Interaction, and hope to begin a career in user research and interaction design after I’ve finished.” (more)

Visit his portofolio over at http://markandrewgoetz.com

Previously on Skandalon: PowerPoint, Edward Tufte.

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In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies.

✖ Via White Noise by Don DeLillo, Penguin Books, [1985]1986, p. 46

White Noise won the National Book Award in 1985. Learn more about it on Wikipedia.

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But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.

✖ Via Wired: “How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web” by Steven Levy, Feb. 22, 2010

Or how Ludwig Wittgenstein helped to improve Google.

First spotted via Kottke.

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art technology book cover design vintage computer how_to obsolete

✖ Via Awful Library Books: I Can Be A Computer Operator by Catherine Mathias, 1985

Look it up on Amazon

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Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and his partner Choi Mi-sun, 25, fed their three-month-old baby only on visits home between 12-hour sessions at a neighbourhood internet cafe, where they were raising an avatar daughter in a Second-Life-style game called Prius online, police said. Leaving their real daughter at their home in a suburb of Seoul to fend for herself, the pair, who were unemployed, spent hours role-playing in the virtual reality game, which allows users to choose a career and friends, granting them offspring as a reward for passing a certain level. The pair became obsessed with nurturing their virtual daughter, called Anima, but neglected their real daughter, who was not named. Eventually, the couple returned home after one 12-hour session in September to find the child dead and called police. The pair were arrested on Friday after an autopsy showed that the baby died from prolonged malnutrition.

✖ Via Telegraph.co.uk: “Korean couple let baby starve to death while caring for virtual child” Mar. 5th, 2010

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I’ve been watching with bemused interest as US geeks (apparently 120.000 of them, although I’d take any initial figures with a large grain of salt if I were you) rushed to pre-order their iPads and, deprived of the thrill of actually using it until it arrives, gushed forth on the details of their purchase and reasons thereof as if they were boasting about the pedigree of a puppy that is yet to be weaned and handed to them in a little basket.

✖ Via The Tao of Mac: “Undercurrent” Mar. 13th, 2010

The Tao of Mac is Rui Carmo’s blog:

“I’m someone with a Systems Engineering degree, a decade and a half of overexposure to the Internet, and (horror of horrors to the uninitiated), Marketing experience – as well as social graces that allow me to mediate between geeks and “regular” folk. I’ve pretty much done it all where it comes to the telco world, having been immersed in Wi-Fi, 3G (UMTS) and IP-related stuff at a major GSM operator for several years (ten, actually, going on eleven at the time of this writing).”(more)

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technology art design movie film computer pixels

✖ Via I Am Paddy: “4 Pixels or Less” by Paddy Donnelly

About the project:

“Well, feeling inundated with the amount of fonts, brushes, images, patterns, gradients, drop shadows and copy I generally squeeze into each day, I set myself a little minimalistic design challenge. The challenge : represent a range of movies in 4 pixels or less.” (more)

About Paddy Donnelly:

“Anyway, I am an Irish web designer, blogger, interviewer and illustrator currently living in Belgium. My official title over at Nascom is somewhere between ‘user experience designer’ and ‘information architect’. I’m a big fan of my own little mini projects and I generally spend way too much time on the Internet. I learned most of what I know from my degree in Interactive Multimedia Design, my Masters in Multi-Disciplinary Design and Wikipedia.” (more)

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✖ Via OMG Posters: “Knitting Factory” giclee print by iso50 (Scott Hansen)

About Scott Hansen:

“I am a San Francisco, California based musician (Tycho) and artist (ISO50). I created the ISO50 site originally to house my design work in a portfolio format but over the years it has grown to encompass a shop, clothing line, and blog.” (more)

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As many others have noted, the release of the iPad might be the cannonball into the consumer device pool the iPhone dipped its toes in. It’s also been referred to as a thing that sits between that iPhone and your laptop. I see it as more of a fork in the road. It’s the thing many people will get INSTEAD of a laptop.

The iPad isn’t the future of computing; it’s a replacement for computing.

✖ Via Mule Design Studio’s Blog: “The Failure of Empathy” by Mike Monteiro, Feb. 3, 2010

Mike founded Mule Design in 2001 along with Erika Hall. Follow him on Tumblr.

First discovered via The Daring Fireball.

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[The Magnum photo archive] was quietly sold to MSD Capital, the private investment firm for the family of Michael S. Dell, the computer tycoon. And the new owners have reached an agreement with the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin to place it there, for study and exhibition

✖ Via The New York Times : “News Photos, on the Move, Make News” by Randy Kennedy, Feb. 1st, 2010

“In the middle of December two trailer trucks left New York City bound for Austin, Tex., packed with a precious and unusual cargo: the entire collection of pictures amassed over more than half a century by the Magnum photo cooperative, whose members have been among the world’s most distinguished photojournalists.

[T]he archive was quietly sold to MSD Capital, the private investment firm for the family of Michael S. Dell, the computer tycoon. And the new owners have reached an agreement with the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin to place it there, for study and exhibition, for at least the next five years. It will be the first time that the archive, which for the last several years had been crowded onto shelves at Magnum’s modest offices on West 25th Street, will be accessible to scholars and the public.”

Visit MagnumPhotos.com. Learn more about the Magnum Photos cooperative on Wikipedia.

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