"BERG" entries

Four short links: 20 May 2010

Four short links: 20 May 2010

New Take on Ubicomp, Language Insight, Sexy Viz, and iPad Usability

  1. People are Walking Architecture — presentation by Matt Jones of BERG, taking a new lens to this AR/ubicomp/whatever-it-is-today world. “[Mobile phones are] a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities ….”
  2. Lexicalist — insight into geographic and age distribution of language use, based on Twitter data. (via Language Log)
  3. Advanced Visualization Techniques — nice overview of some non-standard visualization techniques. Short shameful confession: I love polar dendrograms with a passion. These techniques are to visualizers as algorithms and data structures to programmers: each is used in specific circumstances and compromises some things to gain in others. (via Flowing Data)
  4. iPad Usability Report (Nielsen-Norman Group) — 93-page report based on user studies. The iPad etched-screen aesthetic does look good. No visual distractions or nerdy buttons. The penalty for this beauty is the re-emergence of a usability problem we haven’t seen since the mid-1990s: Users don’t know where they can click. For the last 15 years of Web usability research, the main problems have been that users don’t know where to go or which option to choose — not that they don’t even know which options exist. With iPad UIs, we’re back to this square one. (via Andrew Savikas)
Four short links: 26 November 2009

Four short links: 26 November 2009

Ed Data, Robot Talk, Gorgeous Web Layout, and Copyright Laws

  1. 1 in 3 Schools — visual exploration of education data is the latest BERG project, and they’ve found a new application for a cute visualization and they’re calling the result Chernoff Schools. Recommended reading for those interested in visualization or education.
  2. The Robots Podcast — self-explanatory. (via So Where’s My Robot?)
  3. Dive Into HTML 5 (Mark Pilgrim) — absolutely gorgeous layout. The first thing I’ve seen that makes me want HTML 5. (Apparently O’Reilly will be publishing it when it’s finished. Yay, us!)
  4. Copyright Watch — a repository of national copyright laws.