Posts filed under ‘visualization’
hoods-map
“The Washington D.C. Neighborhood Guide breaks down D.C. into neighborhood groupings with names like C-SPANistan (Capitol Hill-area), Banana Republic Republic (Georgetown named after all its yuppie stores), Sacramento (the Catholic area of Brookland, get it… Sacrament-o), and many others. link
Each neighborhood section gives census information, cultural background, a little history, and a good description of the activities to do there. The paper does not hold back any punches when it discusses the problem neighborhoods of Washington but it also shows the good each one has to offer, thus avoiding the stereotypes that blind many. Even the “good” neighborhoods recieve their just fill of faults. Where else could one read about the African-American Black versus African Black battle going on at Liquorridor or why Catholicgauze wants to live so badly at C-SPANistan.
I cannot possibly describe how great this is for anyone who wishes to know about all of Washington. In the print edition business ads for the neighborhood are grouped with the article adding an extra umph of geographical evidence. For the heavily blue blood, liberal Episcopal part of town there is an advertisement for a church whose masses are “pet friendly.”
China as an island
A look at China
Its size and its penchant for (self sufficiency) dictate China’s three main geopolitical objectives:
* maintain unity of the Han heartland;
* maintain control over the non-Han buffer zone;
* deflect foreign encroachment on the Chinese coast
Clearly isolationist, these objectives also condemn China to poverty: as a densely populated country with limited arable land, China needs internatioal trade to prosper. The paradox is that prosperity will lead to instability. Prosperity will tend to be concentrated in the areas trading with the outside world (i.e. the coastal regions), creating economic tensions with the poorer interior. This might destabilise the Han heartland.
What tag clouds are good for
David Boyd said he didn’t find tag clouds useful for navigation and questioned the meaning of the colors (they have none assigned). Here’s what I responded: what they are good for is seeing what’s all in there; the chock full of nuts view. you don’t follow them. not navigation. you see what’s big and what’s inside. its great for understanding the ingredients and their relative size when you have a lot of information you want people to work a little bit at, to look at a little more deeply and make the connections. it’s like a class picture with names and the names are relative to the success of each of the class of ’68.
It’s about a gestalt view when that has value. not navigation or laden with specific meaning but a kind of aggregate sense of meaning. We’re using it on cards for Socap08. One side is the tag cloud from all the words on the front page of the site. The other is logo, dates, venue (October 13-16, Fort Mason SF), etc.
mytag cloud
great new stuff from wordie, and Jonathan Feinberg made my tagcloud of my deli tags, put it in his gallery printed to a pdf, opened graphic converter, made it a jpeg, then into iphoto and then to flickr, then to my blog. Sorta easy, if you figure out all the steps.
Wireless salt mines,
Radio waves are kind of like minerals in that they don’t care about property lines. The pattern of extracting salt in Detroit looks a lot like the pattern of Wifi access nodes. That’s why the salt mine’s operations are actually an interesting example of the kind of negotiation that happen between industry, landowners and city governments when trying to provide a city service based on a low-cost commodity resource, says Orange Cone’s Mike Kuniavsky
things fall apart
Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah a Ghanian technologist working in Berkeley is somebody I’m finding interesting, from his blog to his flickr feed to his deli feed. As a Mississippian, I have my own take on things that fall apart, and those that don’t ever seem to get fixed.
tiny protest
The power of influence. From my newest flickr contact; people are adding me as contacts a lot these days. Not sure why. But when they do, I sometimes put one of their pieces in my photostream if I like it, or seem to like them. I’m not seeking it out and don’t particularly want it.. but… it’s ok.
Mountain of fear
East london violent crime depicted as accretive ant hills, piles of violence over time
newsmap saved
Google wanted to pull the plug on newsmap. Three hundred plus comments helped save the day.
google earth activism
pretty amazing movie and google earth presentation at net2 about using google earth for good.
Kevin\'s New Projects 
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