A comparison of interaction records in two group of hens. This figure illustrates the comparison feature of the music notation program showing the interaction records in two groups of hens interleaved in two-hour blocks.
Ivan Chase demonstrates a compelling use of musical notation for visualizing social interactions and (conceivably) networks using musical notation. Chase suggests that:
music notation graphs can be of particular help in a variety of fields interested in social interaction in humans, animals, and machines such as behavioural ecology, behavioural economics, social organization in animals, development of social networks in humans, human conversational analysis, and the coordination of actions in social robots.
Jay Silver is a researcher in the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. I first met Jay when I arrived in Bangalore about ten months ago. While he was there, he made all kinds of cool things that allowed us to interact in interesting and fun ways with our environment! His recent work has been looking at how to make touch, sensation, and interaction with the world around us astonishing, especially for kids! I made this video while discussing his work with him in the Media Lab.
This is a nice compilation of resources assembled for a course entitled MAPPING CONTROVERSIES in MIT’s STS program. The course focuses “…on developing aptitudes for combining multiple ways of knowing: textual interpretation, intensive search in heterogeneous databases, and design tasks; all of which point to the invention of new tools of representation for an increasingly complex environment.
Here is a new visualization of the cell cycle using a combination of Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), Flash, and database-driven graphics. This new version from Chris Landau and Jamie Cope’s nformation design demonstrates the yeast cell cycle in 3D cycle stages along with educational information about the process.
Try zooming in and see changes in the nucleus as the cycle progresses.
Yeast Cell Nucleus During Metaphase
This project started as a collaboration at the University of Michigan with Anuj Kumar’s lab in the Life Sciences Institute and first led to the OrganelleView project.
Here is a sketch I made showing the locations and extent of intellectual property claims on 22 chromosomes and the X and Y. These data are from 2005. The extent is larger today.
I’m leading a lab this semester where two groups are developing new and interesting models for user interfaces and interactive experiences. One of the groups is looking at toys as a model for engaging intimately with science. The other day, we started thinking about toys as knowledge-networks and what that might mean for the design of interactive, tactile systems.
They’ve been using SCRATCH as a platform for development, but they’ve also been moving beyond. The team identified a few core values that they hoped to embody in the toys:
1. Astonishment 2. Play/ Tactile/ Haptic 3. Access 4. Information - Knowledge 5. Relatedness of things 6. Engagement - Belonging
I ran across this today while searching for some mitochondrial gene information. It’s the MitoWheel (re:blogged via pimm). Gábor Zsurka, a mitochondrial geneticist, produced it in flash with actionscript.
…. Because documents are simply points on the map, it is possible for ThemeScape to show thousands of documents at once without overwhelming the user. Zooming into the map reveals greater detail. For any region on the map, a click of the mouse pops up a list of documents with related content. Pointing to any document title displays a short text summary. A mouse click links the user directly to the original document…..
http://www.pnl.gov/news/1995/nws95-07.htm
In Themescape, themes in the documents are layered and appear on the computer screen as a relief map of natural terrain. The mountains in Themescape indicate where themes are concentrated in the underlying documents; and their shapes — a broad butte or a high pinnacle — reflect how the thematic information is distributed and related across documents.
