Blogs
DNA ARG
Even though it's aimed at a younger audience, it's good to see game play and genetics coming together, especially in Darwin's 150th anniversary year. Routes is an online adventure following comedian Katherine Ryan as she tries to find out whether her genes or her environment have given her cancer and lupus by the age of 23. Developed by Channel 4 Education in association with the Wellcome Trust it aim to explore wht information is hidden in one’s personal genome and how dangerous is it to divulge such data. The fun begins late January.
Objectified Film
Starting the new year on a good note. I've been tracking Objectified for a while as it comes from Swiss Dots, who are the same people who made the design porn feature that is Helvetica.
Win Tickets to RA Christmas Party
Our good friends at Resident Advisor have given us 5 pairs of tickets to their awesome Christmas party this Saturday at Matter. I know it's a long way away, but this is the best line-up the club has had and we're not just saying that because they are our mates. Fancy winning? Simple, first five people to hit us up with a good enough reason gets to go. Good luck!
JS-909
Boom! Forget the fact it looks awesome and works like a dream, the above JS-909 is entirely built in javascript which means it's iPhone friendly and therefore good for some mobile beats at your next house party. Sweet.
TCIBR podcast: A discussion about Fandom with Sharon Ross
This edition of TCIBR is brought to you by IndieFlix - In recent years fans have brought TV shows back from the dead, helped films get made and protested when they felt that the stories and characters they loved where being mistreated.
Protein® Presents Dante Fried Chicken
We're doing a little Christmas jam this Thursday with our man Dante Fried Chicken as part of Mutate Britain at Cordy House. We're bringing him over from NYC to cook up a fine feast and then leave it to the Patchwork Pirates & Co to kill it on the decks. It's open invite for all Protein peeps, but you *must* RSVP as the list is supatight. More details here and this is how his last party went down out.
Brooklyn Go Hard
New dopeness by Evan Roth of Graffiti Research Labs for Hov’s latest cut off the up-coming Notorious film soundtrack.
Infosthetics Takes a Break...
On this side of the planet, the summer has just started. Hence infosthetics is finally taking a long break to get away from it all, and will enjoy the western side of its spectacular host country in a +2,500km (+1,500 miles) motorhome road trip. Naturally, postings will be dramatically less for the next weeks, unless you really want to hear about some gorges, beaches, dolphins, whale sharks, and the inevitable sunburn.
Friday = Fun Stuff
Someone said recently they missed all the fluff on my blog. (There used to be more).
FeedVis RSS Feed Tag Cloud Generator
FeedVis [jasonpriem.com] is an online tag cloud generator with some additional interactive features. Users can select specific time periods, common blog themes or individual blog feeds. Individual tags can be further explored to read specific blog posts of interest.
Tags are ordered by frequency and frequency change. Frequency denotes how many times a word is used per 1000 words.
POLLINATE: Participants vs Passive Users: A Radiohead Case Study
Lisa Salem reports -
Interesting post over at Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog about how your project can still be a raging success when only 1 - 0.1% of your audience participate in your content in the way you’ve set out for them to - because the number of people the internet makes potentially accessible is so vast.
SpatialKey: Time and Location Based Information Mapping
The next geographical mapping startup, SpatialKey [spatialkey.com] is marketed as a "next generation Information Visualization, Analysis and Reporting System". It is specifically designed to help organizations quickly assess location-based information to allow for decision making processes and reporting requirements. There are several online demos available, ranging from "Wal-Mart store openings (1962 - 2005)" to "San Antonio prostitution arrests (January, 2006 - July, 2007)"
In practice, users can view and overlay all sorts of "geo-temporal data" (data with recorded location and time information) and generate time slices of the data, much like a moving weather map.
Growth of a Twitter Graph
Burak Arikan is an artist and researcher who focuses on creating networked
systems that evolve with the interactions of people and machines. He has
also been previously featured in VC. One of his latest
pieces has been an experiment with the Twitter API, where he tracked the
growth of his Twitter network over a period of 3 weeks. Burak was trying to
understand how connections and particular clusters might expand or contract
over time.The first image is a portrait of Burak's Twitter graph on the
first week of the experiment, when he was following 80 people.
Random Lissajous Webs
Keith Peters is a generative artist who works mostly in ActionScript 3.0. The images shown here are just part of a growing body or remarkable work which he showcases on his website Art From Code. The quality of the work is almost as impressive as Keith's unpretentiousness. As he explains: "Sometimes I make something that looks nice and put it up here. I call it 'generative art' (...) Other people have different ideas on exactly what generative art means, or what a piece has to consist of or what should have gone into it in order for it to merit that title. So it's up to you what you want to call it.
2008 City Railway System
According to the authors, each city's various subway structures and railway
systems should reflect somehow the character of that city. In an effort to
infuse the city's identity into its subway map, while also trying to
simplify and beautify the original diagram, Kim Ji-Hwan and Jin Sol produced
a series of original maps for three city subway systems - the Seoul Railway,
Tokyo Railway and Osaka Railway. More cities are in the design phase and
others are being planned.The first image depicts Tokyo's intricate
network of subway, lightrail and monorail, with more than 1500 stations
covering the metropolitan area. Placed in the city center is the Imperial
Palace, the residence of the current Ten-no (Japanese Emperor). Subway lines
circumvent the expansive ground claimed by the Imperial Palace.
The Tax Map
The Tax Map is a graph of the United States Tax Code, represented as a
network. In the network each node represents a section of the tax code,
while each edge represents a reference from one section to another. As the
author explains, the project was born by a desire to better understand how
the complexity of this mass of rules and exceptions would bear out if one
were to "look at the mere structure of the tax code, stripped naked of its
rules and semantics."Each colored circle represents a section of the tax
code. Size is determined by how many times that section of the tax code is
referenced by other sections of the tax code; while color is determined by
the ratio of references to a particular statute, by references made by the
statute itself. This ratio is then calculated against a color range from
blue to red to determine the final color.
Complexcity
The Complexcity project explores major cities around the world focussing on
how their urban sprawls have evolved over time. Using the patterns formed by
roads in each city, Korean born designer Lee Jang Sub creates complex
graphic configurations, combining the idea of natural and man made systems.
In the process he finds a concealed aesthetic within the convoluted pattern
of urban networks. He started with his hometown Seoul, and has already
completed Paris, Rome, and Moscow.
Semantic Graphs of French Intellectual Property Rights
These work-in-progress maps are part of a study produced in the spring of
2008 for economist Yann Moulier-Boutang, law professor at the French
engineering school UTC. They represent the
linked terms of vocabulary used on the Web to talk about the intellectual
property rights in French. The datasets came from the search engine Exalead SA.Each node is a term
and each edge exists when two terms or expressions are co-cited on a
sufficient number of web pages, over more than 120,000 pages. 1283
expressions and 4984 co-citing links have been selected, assuming a
representative approach against an exhaustive one. The first image is a detail of the
general map where semantic clusters are represented with different
color-nodes.
2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: Job Titles of Donors
With thousands of donors for McCain and Obama, the authors wanted to analyze the types of people donating by examining the top 250 job titles for each candidate and trying to determine how much influence they
have on the overall donations viewed in their previous visualization.Since the donation information must be disclosed to the public, they turned to the Federal Election Commission to find a data set containing all donors, the amount they donated as well as other information the authors may try to explore next (i.e. occupation, zip code, employer).The first image represents all donations made to Obama, and the second to McCain. The job titles (on the left side of the arc), start from the most common (Retired for both) on the left to the least common (of the top 250 titles)
on the right.
