The Onion has a great infographic today accompanying a story about a Secret Service agent "taking a question" for President Bush. The graphic diagrams the scene and actions. I'm using a detail here because I hate getting sued. View the full image here or read the story.
Creator Leonardo Bonanni explains:i put up a bus schedule-looking framed piece of paper with my latest results on untimely deaths at mit. it was sparked by the obvious cover-ups and lies that make mit appear like it has normal suicide rates. then chris asked us to place a container in public, one that wouldn’t get taken down. after studying street signage, i settled on the discrete bus schedule format and built a frame for my spreadsheet. it seems to have worked! it’s still up, one week later. i guess if you carefully camouflage something controversial it can become public information without being torn down.More info and photos at the link.
Embracing new technology in political campaigns can be tricky business. Howard Dean pulled it off seamlessly with MoveOn.org in the 2004 primary season. John McCain in 2008? Not so much.
John McCain has a MySpace page. Great idea, right? All the politicians are doing it. But McCain is in the spotlight, and it's not because of anything he has done. It's because his web publishing crew sucks.
First, they ignored a basic rule of web etiquette (I refuuuuuuuse to say the "n" word today). Techcrunch explains:
Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by Newsvine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.
The result (image composite by Techcrunch):
The next day it was fixed - but a spelling error was introduced, along with an atrocious design:
The error was gleefully highlighted on Newsvine this morning. If the error is still up, you can see it here.The first time around this could be laughed off as a simple mistake, although it highlighted McCain’s flip-flopping positions on gay marriage. But now some people are going to question whether the guy can hire competent people to surround him. The original story will hit mainstream press this morning. Lots of people will be going to McCain’s MySpace page. And they’ll see a sloppy site.Behold the power of incompetent spellers (and mishandlers of apostrophes).
"What makes this pipe a (more) socially acceptable place to place trash than, say the ground or gutter?"
Design Researcher Jan Chipchase travels around the world taking photographs and making acute observations in the form of questions about pretty much anything. One of the few places on the net that I visit every day. Highly recommended.
Jan Chipchase - Future Perfect
Juice Analytics has posted a nice presentation on business intelligence. The visual style clearly contributes to their message that they offer a "breath of fresh air" in the community they serve.
Savvy presentation designers use Flickr, Morguefile, or other image-sharing sites, not images from Microsoft clip-art, for fresh imagery that speaks volumes. I like their crediting policy, too - the credit goes on the slide, not in the notes. Just use Creative Commons-licensed photos tagged for commercial use and you're good to go. [Link|Download PDF]
Flickr's wavering policies in the past regarding using Flickr as an illustration portfolio or to show off screen captures of software has been to restrict user accounts and block their images from being included in search functions. When some users responded negatively to these moves, others stepped in and aggressively defended Flickr's status as "for photos only." Flickr fumbled around for a while, sending some pretty mixed signals.
The "photo-sharing" site has finally come around to accept that new user bases are not a bad thing, and is now supporting search filtering for both of those robust types of content, which people have been putting up for years.
Good for Flickr.
[Via|Link]
It looks like the Marines who killed Hashim Ibrahim Awad and have been under investigation for eight months managed to play-act visuals, sound and thermal imprints to fool a military surveillance drone and cover up murder. From Wired:
More at the link. [Via]"These are people who every day deal with such things and understand how the images are gathered, as much as understand other tactical and weapons issues," says defense attorney David Brahms...
The case is remarkable for the fact that the killers nearly got away with their alleged crime right under the eye of the military's sophisticated surveillance systems. According to testimony, at least three times the warriors took deliberate, and apparently effective, measures to trick the unmanned aerial vehicles - UAVs in military parlance - that watch the ground with heat-sensitive imaging by night, and high-resolution video by day.
The images are routinely translated into PowerPoint presentations, systems manufacturers say. The PowerPoint of this particular killing was nearly accepted as proof of a "good shoot" until one of the troops, Navy hospitalman Melson Bacos, stunned investigators with a confession, according to the testimony of Special Agent James Connolly with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, or NCIS.
shared by mikerosebery
Data Mining points to a great interactive visualization by the BBC which maps the ongoing violence in Baghdad. The program draws body count numbers from the Iraq Body Count project, which as of this moment estimates a minimum and maximum number of civilian deaths in Iraq at roughly 59,000 and 65,000 individuals.
From wikipedia:
Apparently Windows Vista ships with some pretty amusing bugs, one of them being an error message which reads "Error. The operation completed successfully." Microsoft will hear that one ringing in their ears for years. Anyway, someone turned this bug into a great bit of culture jamming in Prague...
David Ichioka arranged timed photographs of sleepers at thirty-minute intervals throughout the night.
This rather unasuming photograp is the Tartan Ribbon: the first ever demonstration of colour photography. It was created in 1861 by James Clerk Maxwell, of whom Einstein remarked:
"[Maxwell is] ...the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton."
We published a couple of pieces on TiP's sister blog, Z Recommends, that might interest readers here. The first is an interview with art consultant Lisa Hunter, who gives us tips on how and why parents should engage young children in selecting art for their homes. The second is a set of starting points for finding kid-friendly artwork, with links to group sites and sample works from a couple of handfuls of artists who produce original and limited-edition works on paper and canvas. Prices for the pieces range from $3,500 down to ten bucks.
At left: "Electro-Voice," by Ryan Heshka.
SpY is a graffiti artist from Madrid who has switched over to using stickers, stencils, etc. instead of the traditional spray cans. Although most of his projects seem to me a bit pointless, I really liked his idea of strategically placing small messages in braillie for blind people.
You can see his work here.
via a desgana
CNet delves into the history of the emoticon. From the article:
The origin of the ASCII smiley face is typically traced to September 1982, when Scott Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Computer Science, suggested that the :-) symbol be used in the subject line of an online bulletin board post to denote a humorous or non-serious topic.More at the link."Nobody ever guessed that this would catch on. I certainly didn't," said Fahlman, who is still on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon. But as he recounted, the trend spread, initially to other Internet-pioneering universities like Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then beyond.
"As the Internet grew, it escaped this little closed community of computer scientists and made it into first other universities, a much larger group, and then out into the general public," Fahlman said. "It's been interesting to see (smiley faces) trickle from place to place, and now it's showing up in postings from Russia and China and all over the world. It's been fun to watch that."
Kevin Huizenga has some great comic originals for sale, with prices from $80 to $200. The gallery view isn't a bad way to browse some of his work. Above, one of my favorites. [Via|Link]
Alice in Wonderland from Russia: Part I and Part II.
via peacay's blog/armchair aquarium.
see also, Winnie the Pooh in Russia
Photo by andyket, discovered in the Public Computer Errors pool on Flickr. This is one of those interesting cases where the computer error does not just disrupt meaning, but contributes to a new one. The popup window plays the role of a geisha's fan.
James Park, known to most as xenmate, the force behind one of the best visual blogs I have ever read, has joined Think in Pictures as a contributing blogger after the masterful shuttering of the seminal Spy's Spice in celebration of his 100,000th visitor.
I'm sure he'll make his presence known soon enough.
