 |
|
Tuesday, June 26. 2007
 Nature (.com not .org) is by far one of the most reputed science journals out there and I have friends at the NIH whose career ambition would be to have their papers published in it. Scientists go through a tough process of editorial screening then exhaustive peer reviews before anything gets published in any serious science journal.
So what is interesting is that Nature created a site where it posts all the submissions it has received prior to any peer reviews. They call the site Nature Precedings, with a subhead: "Pre-publication research and preliminary findings". By doing this, it gives the science community a chance to glean over the body of papers that are good but may not make the cut, and the ability to even vote of them. If this takes off, then Nature will also benefit from getting some input into which ones they may focus their attention on (although I am sure they'd have to read them all anyway).
A case of a serious traditional print media taking new media crowdsourcing seriously.
According to Nature's Timo Hannay:
The traditional way for scientists to share their research results is through journals. These have the benefit of being peer-reviewed, citable and archival, but as a communication channel they are also relatively slow and expensive. As a complement to this, scientists also use more immediate and informal approaches, such as preprints (i.e., unpublished manuscripts), conference papers and presentations. The trouble is, these usually aren'teasy to share in a truly globally way (most repositories are institution- or funder-specific), and you can't formally cite them (which is important because citation underlies the scientific credit system).
Nature Precedings is trying to overcome those limitations by giving researchers a place to post documents such as preprints and presentations in a way that makes them globally visible and citable. Submissions are filtered by a team of curators to weed out obviously inappropriate material, but there's no peer-review so accepted contributions appear online very quickly — usually within a couple of hours. The content is all released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and each item is made citable using a DOI or Handle (the same systems used for peer-reviewed scholarly papers).
[via: Joho the blog]
Wednesday, June 20. 2007
 Sunday evening I joined the design geeks in the DC area and went to see a film about a font. This sans-serif font is both loved and loathed. It is Helvetica. Massimo Vignelli says it's one of three acceptable fonts in this world. Stefan Sagmeister says it is uninteresting and screams "I am boring". I say it's clean and legible. It communicates information clearly, thus I love it.
Overview
Because Helvetica is easily read, straightforward, and friendly, it has become ubiquitous in signage and “ power logos” around the world.
Helvetica Stats
- Born: 1957
- Parents: Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann
- Grandparents: Haas Type Foundry, Stempel and Linotype
- Bio: Helvetica was born into a world of hand-lettered type, nuptual scripts, and ornate serif fonts. As a young sans-serif, Helvetica had trouble making friends. With the help of it's grandparents, Helvetica was pushed into the limelight. In it's 20s, Helvetica could be seen with government logos (like NASA), global brands (like Microsoft, Panosonic, and Nestle), and general signage. Helvetica turns 50 this year and is taking life less seriously. Recently, the sans-serif has been spotted on billboards and posters with scantily clad women (American Apparel).
The Film
The producer/director Gary Hustwit started the night off by welcoming the sold out crowd. It went something like this (not a direct quote) – Thanks for showing up. It’s amazing that you people will stand in line and pay $10 to see a film about a font. If I hadn’t made the film, I would be out there in the crowd with you. There’s Q&A after the film. If you are going to ask dumb questions like, ‘Will your next film be about Times New Roman’ you should leave now. Enjoy!
Overall, the film was pretty good. The crew traveled around the US and the UK interviewing designers and getting their thoughts on Helvetica and why it is so ubiquitous. Their personal feelings about the font are often involved in the answers to those questions. Here's the jist of what some of them said:
- Michael Bierut - Helvetica is everywhere. It's like air. You can't help breathing it in.
- Paula Scher - Helvetica is the font of the Vietnam war.
- Erik Spiekermann - Helvetica is awful. It's widely used and carries no meaning.
- Massimo Vignelli - Helvetica is king of all fonts. Everything was fine until this disease called post-modernism spread.
- David Carson - Helvetica has no emotion. It doesn't say caffinated!
The film will be back in DC on September 13 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. This time there will be a panel discussion and Q&A with the director and designers! Check out all screenings.
If you can't make it to the next showing, at least view the trailer/clips.
I Am a Geek Because I:
- Arrived at the movie theater an hour early to get a good seat. I was happy to see that I wasn't the only one.
- Got very excited when I saw (on screen) famous designers whose work shaped my design aesthetic and education. The list includes: Erik Spiekermann, Matthew Carter, Massimo Vignelli, Wim Crouwel, Hermann Zapf, Neville Brody, Stefan Sagmeister, Michael Bierut, David Carson, Paula Scher, Jonathan Hoefler, Tobias Frere-Jones, Experimental Jetset, Michael C. Place, Norm, Alfred Hoffmann, Mike Parker, Bruno Steinert, Otmar Hoefer, Leslie Savan, Rick Poynor, Lars Müller, and many more.
- Laughed and booed when Hustwit said he hoped someone would make a parody film based on Helvetica, but using the dreaded Comic Sans. Hustwit – “The audience focus will be 3rd graders and soccer moms.”
Tuesday, June 5. 2007
So -- you want to run multiple versions of Internet Explorer side-by-side for testing purposes. No problem, it's simple! Oh, wait -- no. It's that other thing. Complicated.
Luckily some other people have done most of the hard work for you, so it's really not that bad. As far as I can tell, you basically have two choices. The first, and the one recommended by Microsoft, is to use Virtual PC and simply run another version of windows through it with IE6 installed. Microsoft has been kind enough to provide a free version of VPC and an image file with IE6 already setup, which you can find here. The version of VPC they provide seems to be time-limited, but they claim they'll continue to provide free versions after the expiration date (seems rather pointless, but who am I to question Microsoft?) I haven't used this method personally, but it seems to be the only way to get IE6 and IE7 running absolutely perfectly on the same machine.
The other way is to use a nifty little program that will allow you to install bare-bones versions of IE. You can find this program and it's description here. After getting IE7 running on my machine I used this program to install IE6 and, for the most part, it seems to work very well. The print preview and a few other functions don't seem to work properly and it's not 100% certain that the way this version draws pages is exactly how a proper install of IE6 would, but I have yet to run into any major issues. This should be more than adequate for most testing needs and doesn't appear to interfere with the functioning of IE7 at all. It'll even let you install multiple older versions of IE, so if you're feeling particularly masochistic you could test your site in Explorer 3.0 as well as IE6. Unfortunately, this program doesn't seem to work under Vista (although they seem to be working on it), so Vista users should stick to the recommended VPC option for the time being.
Please leave a comment if you know of other ways to accomplish multiple IE installations or run into issues with either of these options. Thanks!
Friday, June 1. 2007
 Many Eyes is a neat tool/site provided by IBM Research that allows you to visualize datasets through a set of visualization types and share the results allowing visitor comments.
All the maps are interactive.
Currently there are 3107 (as of 6/1/2007 1:34PM EST) visualization. They say they will be adding rating and other social networking features in the near future.
Here's an example visualization:
|
|
Comments
Wed, 03.09.2008 09:53
FF messages
Sat, 02.08.2008 08:49
Thanks a lot for the help! This technique is really nice.
Wed, 16.07.2008 04:20
Nice article about placing and choosing right matter while desiging a web page.
Sat, 21.06.2008 14:10
very nice
Tue, 03.06.2008 05:13
Hi, Regarding Method #3: You can get rid of the long dashed focus border that shows in Firefox by adding 'overflow: [...]
Tue, 29.04.2008 17:45
Thank you for the assistance. It worked perfectly.
Mon, 31.03.2008 09:38
Ditto what Anna said. Each time a Project Mgr or a biz owner asks me, "when are we doing user testing"? They are [...]
Thu, 27.03.2008 16:35
Your points on the idea that you're testing a site, not the user, are well taken. But I think "user testing" can be [...]