MetaFilter posts tagged with information

This is just getting embarassing!

Pope Guilty — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:35:41 -0800

You know, if I ran the BNP, I think I would think twice about this whole "trusting people with the members list" idea.

Scrimping on the Future

kliuless — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 09:12:03 -0800

Information is stimulus, confusion is contraction.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

Toekneesan — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:08:37 -0800

"Then there are the classification errors, which taken together can make for a kind of absurdist poetry. H.L. Mencken's The American Language is classified as Family & Relationships. A French edition of Hamlet and a Japanese edition of Madame Bovary are both classified as Antiques and Collectibles (a 1930 English edition of Flaubert's novel is classified under Physicians, which I suppose makes a bit more sense.) An edition of Moby Dick is labeled Computers; The Cat Lover's Book of Fascinating Facts falls under Technology & Engineering. And a catalog of copyright entries from the Library of Congress is listed under Drama (for a moment I wondered if maybe that one was just Google's little joke)." —Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg on Google's little metadata problem.

Search Patterns

netbros — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 08:06:48 -0800

Peter Morville is widely recognized as a father of the information architecture field, and he serves as an advocate for the critical roles that search and findability play in defining web user experience. His recent project titled Search Patterns, is a sandbox for collecting search examples, patterns, and anti-patterns; for example spime search, the ability to query objects in motion and find things in the real world. Morville is also on the editorial board of the new Journal of Information Architecture.

Question Box (no internet required).

languagehat — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 08:59:43 -0800

Question Boxes "bring information to people who cannot or do not access the Internet directly. Question Boxes leap over illiteracy, computer illiteracy, lack of networks, and language barriers.... Question Box users can use their mobile phones to call our call centers, or they can use the physical Question Box Units to call for free." The program was started by Rose Shuman, a young American entrepreneur. You can see the questions here.

Twenty Times a Day

shoesfullofdust — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:57:07 -0800

...the Department of Transportation will not keep secret the data we collect on birds striking airplanes. - Ray LaHood, United States Secretary of Transportation

From the dreaded mourning dove to the nefarious Canada goose to the humble armadillo, the FAA's recently released National Wildlife Strike Database ON-LINE contains information on aircraft/wildlife strikes from over 100,000 reported incidents between 1990 and 2008. The database was referenced previously in the Birdstrike in the Hudson thread, but until this week the the F.A.A. provided only aggregate data about wildlife strikes - collisions by state, not by airport. Submit your query here or download the current version(15 MB MS Access format) from this page. Federal Aviation Administration - Wildlife Hazard Mitigation Home Page. Wildlife Strikes to Civil Aircraft in the United States 1990 - 2007 - A comprehensive analysis of the database (pdf format). Sharing the Skies (TP 13549E) is an online book about the subject of aircraft/wildlife strikes from Transport Canada.

The World of 100

fourcheesemac — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 22:05:18 -0800

The World of 100 -- 20 Posters by Toby Ng (via Daily Dish and Made in England) Toby Ng: This is a self-initiated project based on the scenario – If the world were a village of 100 people. There are a few different versions of this text in circulation about the world’s statistics. I found the data very striking and neatly summarises the world that we live in. So I used information graphics to re-tell the story in another creative way. I designed a set of 20 posters, which contain most of the information. I used simple vector graphics that related to a statistic in order to present the information in the simplest and most accessible way.

Map of Science

homunculus — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 20:55:29 -0800

Knowledge, in Real Time. "A new picture of science — and possibly future innovation — comes into focus with the mapping of scientists’ online research behavior."

Asymmetrical Information and Hooker-nomics.

chunking express — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:03:53 -0800

Asymmetrical Information and Hooker-nomics.

Open Platform

netbros — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:31:11 -0800

Somewhat quietly within the past couple weeks, two major newspapers, on each side of the Atlantic, have opened up their data and content APIs. Last month, on their Open blog, the New York Times introduced their Developer Network. Then just yesterday, on their DataBlog and OpenPlatformBlog, the Guardian launched Open Platform. Insiders at the Guardian are talking about the Data Store and the Content API. Even Members of Parliament are duly impressed. The Times will be at SXSW this week to talk about opening up as an information platform. The Information Age is truly coming of age.

interactive feature highlights

krautland — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:50:15 -0800

Journalism may be going through a painful period but thanks to the web the once lowly information graphic is finally growing up to be all it never could on paper. Especially the New York Times seems to currently stand out in how frequently and quickly they build amazingly detailed and insightful interactive features. Consider the tracking of US Airways Flight 1549 or the piece on raising its engine from the Hudson. Other recent highlights: 9,955,441 parking tickets issues in NYC mapped by street, The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986 — 2008, Ansel Adams's Yosemite, the view from the 10-meter platform explained, A look at the language of presidential inaugural addresses 1789 to the Present, A Map of the number of medals that countries won in summer Olympic Games, Going to the End of the Line, The 44 Places to go in 2009, an explanation of how the Pentagon responded to criticism of then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, The Soyuz Spacecraft, How the Towers Stood and Fell and many, many, more. I am of course aware that it's not just the NYT that's doing great interactive work these days. one example I particularly like is the Los Angeles County Homicide Map but they closed down the accompanying blog. please do feel free to add more great examples. I'm merely trying to get the ball rolling.

Pushing to the Future of Journalism

netbros — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:10:36 -0800

The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age. At Harvard they are working with the Business School on new business models, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society on understanding online life, and the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations on one potential path for news organizations.

Extending the Mind

homunculus — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:50:55 -0800

How Google Is Making Us Smarter: Humans are "natural-born cyborgs," and the Internet is our giant "extended mind."

The Agrippa Files

Blazecock Pileon — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 01:32:36 -0800

The Agrippa Files presents a fairly expansive overview of the original and very rare 1992 art book Agrippa (a book of the dead), a collaboration between artist Dennis Ashbaugh, author William Gibson, and award-winning journalist Kevin Begos, Jr. that presciently explored the ephemeral nature of and decay of memories and information. The comprehensive site includes selected pages from handmade and other editions of the book, along with a simulation of disappearing ink-printed pages, as well as the source code, bit-level copy and emulation of William Gibson's self-destructing work of poetry, which can be read once before it irreversibly encrypts itself. The Agrippa Files also collects scholarly essays on the artworks, exploring meaning and impact.

visualizing data

nickyskye — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:01:53 -0800

20 Useful Visualization Libraries from the excellent A Beautiful WWW. Well, not entirely limited to libraries. Useful stuff for visualization practitioners sounded a little non-specific, though. These are all freely available. A Beautiful WWW created by Todd Holloway.

2008 AD: Horace Rumpole makes an FPP

Horace Rumpole — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:18:53 -0800

70,000 BC: The Earliest Known Examples of Paleolithic Art
668 BC: Ashurbanipal Attempts to Collect all Knowledge
150 BC: Earliest Analog Computer
593 AD: First Mention of Printing in China
1454 AD: The Gutenberg Bible
1964 AD: Creation of ARPANET
From Cave Paintings to the Internet, a timeline of the history of information technology. In addition to a straight chronological order, the timeline can be explored along categories such as Artificial Intelligence, Book History, Censorship, Human-Computer Interaction, and Writing.

World Mapper

y2karl — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:21:45 -0800

Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest. There are now nearly 600 maps.

Worldmapper

Information Design + Politics = WIN! (Hopefully)

piedrasyluz — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:31:12 -0800

Sean Tevis Takes On Intelligent Designer with Some Intelligent Design of His Own... Sean Tevis is running for State Representative in Kansas, against an opponent he describes as a proponent of intelligent design. Short on name recognition (and campaign funds) he took it upon himself to use his skills as an information designer to connect to his "constituents" - could he be the first true candidate for a generation that grew up on the Internet? Very clever xkcd-style infographic deployed against the agents of doom... (I donated, couldn't help myself) via BoingBoing

A google a day?

pearlybob — Mon, 19 May 2008 14:04:15 -0800

Google Health launched today.. Mega-giant Google now offers a way for people to store their medical records and information all in one place online. It will help search for health-care providers and even remind you to take your medicine. They are also partnering with CVS to streamline the whole health process from being seen in a CVS clinic to renewing your prescriptions through Google. More about the service at the Google Health FAQ.

Some readers will appreciate their typographic form, while others will see further strategies at work — informational, strategic, philosophical, literary. There are odd, even anachronistic cultural references, gestures that date these books in a manner oddly soothing.
The Next Page: Thirty Tables of Contents I found the Design Observer setup to be a tad cumbersome, so here's one of the editors' flickr photoset.
Bonus link from the same user: 33 Covers from Poetry Magazine

TMI LOL

nasreddin — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:35:22 -0800

"When you have a TV at full blast, and there's a talking head, you hear his intake of breaths in between sentences really, really clearly. Ha-ha! And if you listen carefully for those, as though that was the important part of communication, you wind up not really hearing anything else! It is just a person gasping for breath! Ha-ha. The effect is especially great with Nancy Pelosi." Gene Weingarten spends a day with the media firehose. "Pundustry," incidentally, now returns 1,120 results.

Interactive 3D concept mapping...does your brain work like this?

Miko — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:04:06 -0800

Family Tree of the Greek Gods is a site using a visual organizer (now in beta) called Spicy Nodes. They call it a "natural and inviting" way to present information in "nuggets" that move in virtual space as you view them one by one. Another example: Daylight Savings Time.

Search Engine on Acid

dhammond — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:20:11 -0800

Oamos is a "metasearch engine" that generates a sprawling cornucopia of sound, text and images based on your query.

Web2.0 vs. the 4th Dimension

carsonb — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 08:03:39 -0800

Miomi (beta) is taking all the world’s information—including the personal history of as many people as possible—and putting it all in a big fat timeline. Miomi's stated goals are to

conquer the fourth dimension – time
move oral history online
and create a user-generated history of the world.

Not as subtle and intricate as AskMefi. But way faster.

mdn — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 16:17:44 -0800

Ask 500 (or 100) people: Random participants answer each other's polls on prayer in school, the bible, philosophers, iraq, social habits, love & marriage, materialism, freedom of speech, or whatever topic of interest someone wants to open up for a very momentary spotlight, and reasonably accurate data. I just found the questions people choose to ask kind of interesting - often you learn as much from the way they frame their issue and the choices they offer as from the numbers that come back. Not sure if the current audience is skewed, but be warned results are occasionally depressing :)

MetaFilter posts tagged with information

This is just getting embarassing!

Scrimping on the Future

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

Search Patterns

Question Box (no internet required).

Twenty Times a Day

The World of 100

Map of Science

Asymmetrical Information and Hooker-nomics.

Open Platform

interactive feature highlights

Pushing to the Future of Journalism

Extending the Mind

The Agrippa Files

visualizing data

2008 AD: Horace Rumpole makes an FPP

World Mapper

Information Design + Politics = WIN! (Hopefully)

A google a day?

ToC

TMI LOL

Interactive 3D concept mapping...does your brain work like this?

Search Engine on Acid

Web2.0 vs. the 4th Dimension

Not as subtle and intricate as AskMefi. But way faster.