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.


↳Share Mar 18  link  notes reblogged from DataViz art  technology  communication  PowerPoint  design  humor  critic  interaction  human  computer 

Do you admit to this certainty: that we are at a turning point?
―If it is a certainty, then it is not a turning point. The fact of being part of the moments in which an epochal change (if there is one) comes about also takes hold of the certain knowledge that would whish to determine this change, making certainty as inappropriate as uncertainty. We are never less able to circumvent ourselves then at such a moment: the discreet force of the turning point is first and foremost that.
✖ Via Maurice Blanchot, quoted as the epigraph for Bernard Stiegler’s first volume of his trilogy Technics and Time, tr. R. Beardsworth and G. Collins, Standford University Press, [1994]1998, p. 1 [Amazon]

Here’s the French version:

— Admettez-vous cette certitude : que nous sommes à un tournant?
— Si c’est une certitude, ce n’est pas un tournant. Le fait d’appartenir à ce moment où s’accomplit un changement d’époque (s’il y en a), s’empare aussi du savoir certain qui voudrait le déterminer, rendant inappropriée la certitude comme l’incertitude. Nous ne pouvons jamais moins nous contourner qu’en un tel moment : c’est cela d’abord, la force discrète du tournant.


↳Share Mar 16  link  notes communication  lost  space  critic  crisis  history  modernity  author  time  Blanchot  Stiegler 
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✖ Via Matt Robinson: Superheroes in the Recession

Artist’s statement:

“This photography project looked at childrens’ dream jobs, projecting the current employment problems onto one of the few timeless themes throughout childrens’ fantasies; Superheroes.”

Previously on Skandalon


↳Share Mar 07  link  notes art  photo  photographer  hero  critic  alcool  loneliness  model  desintegration  fall 

Joseph Stack had barely finished flying his airplane into a Texas office building when the battle over his legacy began.

Bloggers on the left asked why people — especially people on the right — weren’t calling him a terrorist. “If this had been done by a brownish-looking Muslim guy whose suicide note paralleled Islamist political themes,” wrote Matthew Yglesias, then right wingers would be “demanding that anyone who refused to label the attack ‘terrorism’ be put up on treason charges.”

Bloggers on the right, such as Conn Carroll, asked why people — especially people on the left — were acting as if Stack was a “conservative Tea Party nut” when the anti-tax animus that led him to point his plane at I.R.S. offices was only one part of an eclectic ideology.

These are arguments worth having, for two reasons.

✖ Via The New York Times: “The First Tea-Party Terrorist?” by Robert Wright, Feb. 23, 2010

About Robert Wright :

“Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, writes every Wednesday about culture, politics and world affairs. He is editor-in-chief of Bloggingheads.tv and The Progressive Realist. He is the author of The Moral Animal, Nonzero, and, most recently, The New York Times best-seller The Evolution of God. He has written for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Time, Slate, and many other magazines and has taught philosophy at Princeton and religion at the University of Pennsylvania.” (more)


↳Share Mar 04  link  notes communication  technology  critic  revolution  terror  terrorism  destruction  politic  society  plane crash 
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✖ Via Wikimedia Commons: Piper PA-28-236 Dakota

That’s the same model of plane as the one Andrew Joseph Stack III crashed in a IRS building last Thursday.


↳Share Feb 23  link  notes technology  news  terror  terrorism  suicide  lost  loser  destruction  building  plane crash  death  critic 

Perhaps a thorough investigation will reveal the “real” reasons for the murders. Perhaps Amy Bishop is mentally ill, or perhaps she is, quite simply, evil.
✖ Via National Review Online: “Don’t Over-Generalize From the Huntsville Murders” by David French, Feb. 18, 2010

David French starts by arguing against what he believes to be an overstatement published in a post on the Chronicle of Higher Education website:

“Academic life as a “petri dish for madness”? We may have a winner for overstatement of the year. At this point, we don’t even know if Amy Bishop was mentally ill. Nor do we know if academic life had anything to do with her killing spree.”

On one hand, French is right : to suggest that academic life alone can explain Bishop’s behavior is to give way to much importance over this single factor while ignoring others. Though it’s true there has been at least one other similar incident (Valery Fabrikant) one needs to take into account multiple factors when trying to understand Bishop’s behavior (she killed here brother in 1986, was charged with assault on another woman in 2002, etc.)

On the other hand, while French condemns what he sees as the “overstatement of the year”, he goes on suggesting that Bishop is perhaps quite simply evil… Looks like a self-contradictory argument.

More importantly, it’s emblematic of what Dana L. Cloud calls a “therapeutic discourse” that is the “dislocation of social problems into a private, familial or psychological frame”. “Such discourse”, adds Cloud “emphasizes individual responsability for and the necessity of private rather than societal response to social problems.” (“Deranged Loners and Demented Outsiders? Therapeutic News Frames of Presidential Assassination Attempts, 1973–2001” by Kristen E. Hoerl, Dana L. Cloud & Sharon E. Jarvis, Communication, Culture & Critique, vol. 2, no 1, p. 84, March 2009).

Dana L. Cloud’s book Control and Consolation in American Politics and Culture: Rhetorics of Therapy (London, Thousand Oaks: Sage Press, 1998) is available online free of charge.



↳Share Feb 22  link  notes communication  critic  murder  murderer  therapeutic  psychology  individual  society  death  destruction  analysis  study  rhetoric 

English edition (2009)

English edition (2009)

Gleen Beck on  FOX News

Gleen Beck on FOX News

Original French edition (2007)

Original French edition (2007)

✖ Via The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee, translated from French, published by Semiotext(e), [2007]2009

Full English translation available online free of charge. Amazon link. Learn more about it on Wikipedia. Official website of The Invisible Committee

As of today, this book is no17 in the Amazon.com Books Bestsellers list. Explanation ? Glenn Beck hates it (and asked its viewer to read it) :

“It’s undoubtedly the last thing he wanted to happen, but when Fox News’s vocal right-wing presenter Glenn Beck described French anarchist revolution manual The Coming Insurrection as “quite possibly the most evil thing I’ve ever read” he sent it soaring to the top of the bestseller charts.” (Guardian.co.uk)

The Guardian got it wrong on one point : Glenn Beck did ask its viewer to read the book. Here’s what happenned to the book :

“At the time he mentioned the book (5:13pmET on February 10), the edition of the book Beck held up was ranked #432 at Amazon and #20,609 at BN. 24 hours later, the book had moved up to #7 at Amazon and #14 at BN.” (more)

It happens last week, on Feb. 10 (watch it on YouTube @ 3’44”), but Glenn started to talk about this book back in July 2009.

Beck actually use the book as an example illustrating the 20th “global debt time bombs that could go off and change the world” listed by Paul B. Farrell. Here’s the full quotation from the show aired on Feb. 10, 2010:

“20. The Coming Populous Rebellion Bombs: This one I love because those in the media are gonna tell you it’s the Tea Parties. Well let me show you what it really is. It’s Van Jones: […] A 9/11 Truther, radical communist who set up organizations to defend cop killers. He was in the White House and now is going out on a speaking tour with a senator from New York. […] Let me show you what it looks like — the finished product — I told you last summer, to read this book: “The Coming Insurrection” by Invisible Committee. This is quite possibly the most evil thing I’ve ever read. It’s about to play out in the streets of Greece. It’s been played out in France. What’s the story? […] People who are actual communists have been masquerading as Democratic socialists: We’re not Marxists, we’re just like you. They fell into bed with their politicians […] and they were backed, and according to the book […] there was an unspoken understand: Bring the socialist utopia. This is their manifest. Message is: Everyone in government has been lying to you. That’s why they call for an insurrection. This is evil stuff. These are the things that will free the worker.” (the transcript on fox news webiste is inaccurate)

It shouldn’t come as a suprise for those familiar with Tiqqun and the Tarnac affair. One could safely predict that the book will fall off the English bestsellers list in a few weeks. We should just remember that the social phenomenon this book takes (or is trying to take) into account is in no way limited to the sales of the book itself.


↳Share Feb 21 notes communication  critic  revolution  book  economy  society  destruction  people  culture 

Film-makers have got better and better at constructing shots so that their lengths grab our attention,” says James Cutting, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He analysed 150 Hollywood movies and found that the more recent they were, the more closely their shot lengths tended to follow a mathematical pattern that also describes human attention spans.
✖ Via New Scientist: “Solved: The mathematics of the Hollywood blockbuster” by Ewen Callaway, Feb. 18, 2010

Professional website of James Cutting, author of the study. Full PDF of the study (James E. Cutting, Jordan E. DeLong and Christine E. Nothelfer, “Attention and the Evolution of Hollywood Film” Psychological Science, XX(X) 1-8, published online on Feb 5, 2010).

Interesting study (it’s far from being the first scientific attempt at explaining box office success), VERY BAD TITLE from the New Scientist. Nothing was “solved”, for at least two reasons.

1) Some common aspects were observed in 150 movies, after the fact. Therefore, the study could have the value of a good but limited deduction. Its inductive and predictive potential still needs to be demonstrated.

2) More importantly, one won’t be able to find any satisfactory description of what a “blockbuster” is in this study. In fact, there isn’t any mention of the word “blockbuster” in it. Instead, one will notice a normative effort to classify a number a films according to a certain number of criteria :

“We chose 150 films, 10 released in each of 15 years, every 5 years from 1935 to 2005. The Supplemental Material available on-line provides the complete list. Assembled from information in several on-line databases, the films from 1980 onward were among the highest grossing of their year and the earlier films were among those with the largest number of viewer ratings on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb; http://us.imdb.com). The films were also chosen, as best we could, to represent five genres—action, adventure, animation, comedy, and drama— although their distribution could not be uniform because of vagaries in Hollywood production and changes in social milieu and viewers’ taste. Genres were defined by the first-designated category for each film on the IMDb.”

Same problem with the title Neatorama chose for the post they published about the story : “The Code for Making Hollywood Blockbusters”. But Neatorama is no weekley international science magazine



↳Share link   notes reblogged from AUSTIN KLEON : TUMBLR art  communication  film  movie  blockbuster  science  critic  mathematic  study  identity 
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✖ Via

A Journey Round My Skull : “La Critique” from La Danse Macabre by Rene Georges Hermann-Paul, 1919

“René Georges Hermann-Paul (December 27, 1864 – June 23, 1940) was a French artist. He was born in Paris and died in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Recent efforts to catalog the work of Hermann-Paul reveal an artist of considerable scope. He was a well-known illustrator whose work appeared in numerous newspapers and periodicals. His fine art was displayed in gallery exhibitions alongside Vuillard, Matisse and Toulouse-Lautrec. Early works were noted for their satiric characterizations of the foibles of French society. His points were made with simple caricature. His illustrations relied on blotches of pure black with minimum outline to define his animated marionettes. His exhibition pieces were carried by large splashes of color and those same fine lines of black. Hermann-Paul worked in ripolin, watercolors, woodcuts, lithographs, drypoint engraving, oils, and ink.” (Wikipedia, online gallery).


↳Share Feb 20  link  notes art  artist  BW  critic  lithography  print  woodcut 
technology critic girls food diffusion health bw
✖ Via LIFE - Hosted by Google: “DTT sprayed from a TIFA” photo by George Silk, 1948, Jones Beach, NY, United States.
“DDT sprayed from a TIFA (Todd Insecticidal Fog Applicator) around model Kay Heffernon to supposedly demonstrate it won’t contaminate her food (a hot dog and coke)”

Learn more about dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane on Wikipedia

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↳Share Feb 18  link  notes technology  critic  girls  food  diffusion  health  BW 

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