Fontography of the Candidates

clipped from www.onthemedia.org MotherPie/flickr The fonts that presidential candidates select for their campaign logos reflect an important act of political branding. Sam Berlow of The Font Bureau Inc. says the logos all speak volumes about the candidates they represent. The Bush/Cheney was great. It just had that incredible NASCAR feel with the slanted sans serif saying, "We're going really fast. Hang on." If you look at Hillary’s campaign, it’s really a throwback to Reagan and Bush. It has that feeling of old typography from the '70s and '80s. It’s serif. It’s sort of highwaisted, as if the lower case, the pants had been pulled up too high. It feels sort of like a bad Talbots suit. Doesn't quite fit right. Well, there are several oddities about the Huckabee design. The six stars that sort of floating down like snowflakes are a bit odd, and the swash that reminds me of Coca-Cola. And then there’s this yellow element in the type.

How I Live: A study of an ethnographic self-study

Graphic facilitator and all-around cool kid, Brandy Agerbeck, sent out this bit of real world documentation of her compact, creative domicile. She writes: " Oh, remember my shiny, pretty apartment in the Reader last year? Well, here's how I really live."

She documents almost everything she does or creates on her website and has just jumped into audio podcasting, too.

clipped from www.loosetooth.com I needed to clean the apartment. Instead of cleaning the apartment, I took pictures of the mess in the apartment. It's a colorful mess. A muffin tin holding plastic bags of beads and some jewelry tools. Haven't worked on jewelry in a long time, so this has been sitting out for a long time. Da guys on the shelf next to the movie chair, owl, creature from the black lagoon, Stripus McGreenley the sock monkey, water bottle, more Mr. Sketch markers, Good magazine.

Kindle: Future Book

See what Amazon's Kindle is like. Besides being wireless (with no service plan!), the display uses electronic ink instead of backlit displays, allowing for easy reading outside in any light.

An electrophoretic display is an information display that forms visible images by rearranging charged pigment particles using an applied electric field.

clipped from www.amazon.com

The Smart Pen: The Past and Future of Pen and Paper

Check out these video demos of the pen that records what you write while recording the audio of the conversation. It also imports both the audio and visual notes into your computer.

Smart Pen uses the Livescribe Paper-Based Computing Platform that turns a spiral notebook into a user interface. The pattern of simple, micro-dots enables a patented dot-positioning system to precisely track the smartpen’s movement on paper. As a result, anything you write – words, numbers or drawings – can be stored, recognized, and intelligently responded to by the Pulse smartpen.

clipped from livescribe.com

From prehistoric cave walls and charcoal to the modern notebook and fountain pen, the human need for spontaneous self-expression through drawing and writing has endured. People have actively used writing tools and paper, in one form or another, for thousands of years.

Livescribe Chief Executive Officer Jim Marggraff introduces a new solution to this age-old problem and a long-term vision on how paper-based computing will advance the next chapter in mobile computing. Livescribe’s intelligent writing system includes an innovative smartpen and dot paper that together bring traditional paper to life.

By developing a paper-based platform, Livescribe will fundamentally change the way people capture, use and share information with pen and paper, making the possibilities of pen and paper endless. With Livescribe, people will no longer have to settle – they can have the best of both the paper and digital worlds.

Nokia's Nanotech Morph

The future may be here already (and just not evenly distributed) but I want to know where to buy i!

clipped from www.engadget.com Why is Nokia always trying to outdo everyone with its fancy-schmancy concepts and designs? Why can't they just get in line and keep it simple? We may never know the answer to those questions, but what we do know is that the company is presenting a new concept device called the Morph that would be right at home... in the year 3000. The unit is included in the MoMA's "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition catalog, and boasts the ability to stretch and flex to almost any shape a user could think of. The nanotechnology-based device would deliver transparent electronics, self-cleaning surfaces, and the malleability to transform into any number of configurations. Of course, the actual technology required to put this together is years or even decades away, though Nokia expects to see some of these innovations making their way into high-end products within seven years. See the device doing its thing in some photos after the break.

What’s Next, Scooby Doo Reads the News?

It's with a mixture of pride and confusement that I post this article on the recent use of graphic facilitation on a prime time news broadcast.

At least it was bubbly Katie Couric, who giggled, and not, shouty Bill O'Reilly. I do think that the Daily Show should incorporate the methodology for full effect.

clipped from tvdecoder.blogs.nytimes.com Monday’s New York Times noted that CBS News recently introduced the “Fast Draw,” an animated series using dry-erase markers that tries to shed light on news developments. The feature, created by two new CBS employees, debuted on “CBS News Sunday Morning” last month and appeared on the “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric” on Feb. 8: But “Fast Draw” is not the only instance of animation on television news, as several readers noted. Three days before the CBS segment, the ABC correspondent Robert Krulwich used cartoon drawings to explain the delegate rules for each party. Andrew Tyndall, a television news analyst, said he preferred the illustrations used by ABC to the metaphors used by CBS. The Fox Business Network has also dabbled with animation. Each Friday on the new business network’s “Happy Hour” show, a pair of computer-generated characters named Hoofy and Boo present a short cartoon newscast. The segments are created by a financial entertainment Web site called Minyanville.

Thanks to Jarrell McAlister.

Gene studies confirm "out of Africa" theories

clipped from www.reuters.com Two big genetic studies confirm theories that modern humans evolved in Africa and then migrated through Europe and Asia to reach the Pacific and Americas. The two studies also show that Africans have the most diverse DNA, and the fewest potentially harmful genetic mutations. One of the studies shows European-Americans have more small mutations, while the others show Native Americans, Polynesians and others who populated Australia and Oceania have more big genetic changes. The studies, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, paint a picture of a population of humans migrating off the African continent, and then shrinking at some point because of unknown adversity. Later populations grew and spread from this smaller genetic pool of founder ancestors -- a phenomenon known as a bottleneck. Populations that remained in Africa kept their genetic diversity -- something seen in many other studies.

Tech Solutions on a Shoestring

Want to get up and running on very little capital? OpenSource and web apps are the way to go. This is advice to social entrepreneurs (and entrepreneurs in general) from Jeff Skoll's foundation. Open Source solutions like Ubuntu for free and OpenOffice give an instant operating system and Office suite of productivity tools. Online solutions for websites, shared documents, collaboration and customer relationship management include: PBwiki, WetPaint, Google, Zoho, 37Signals

clipped from www.socialedge.org Almost all start-ups run into limitations in two critical areas - time & money. You can never have enough of either. Technology is supposed to help you save a bit of both, but it always seems to end up taking more time and more money than it ever saves you. Even when you find a solution that saves you money, it almost always takes more time than you have to give, and vice versa. What choices are available to help swing things back in the intended direction? Open source tools are free, but expensive in terms of time lost to implement. There are free web services available that allow you to utilize their capabilities - sans your own branding. Gmail is great, but how long can you get away without having your own domain associated with your email? Same goes for free wikis and other collaboration tools.

Just When I Thought Pro-Wrestling was Awesome

This just in...

"Teens who watch wrestling take more health risks"

clipped from www.reuters.com Teenage fans of TV wrestling are more likely than their peers to be aggressive or take chances with their health, a study suggests. Researchers found that among 2,300 16- to 20-year-old Americans, those who watched professional wrestling were more likely to be violent, smoke or have unprotected sex -- and the more they watched TV wrestling, the greater their odds of taking such risks. The findings, reported in the Southern Medical Journal, do not prove that watching wrestling alters young people's behavior. "It may be the case that kids who have a personality that leads them to be aggressive also gravitate to watching wrestling on TV," noted Dr. Mark Wolfson, one of the researchers on the study and an associate professor at Wake-Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Of the teenagers in their survey, just over 22 percent of males said they had watched pro wrestling in the past two weeks, as did 14 percent of females.

Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don’t Read This in Traffic

In many daily tasks, of course, a lost second is unimportant. But one implication of the Vanderbilt research mentioned below is that talking on a cellphone while driving a car is dangerous. A one-second delay in response time at 60 miles an hour could be fatal.

clipped from www.nytimes.com The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways. “But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,” said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University. Mr. Marois and three other Vanderbilt researchers reported in an article last December in the journal Neuron that they used magnetic resonance imaging to pinpoint the bottleneck in the brain and to measure how much efficiency is lost when trying to handle two tasks at once. Study participants were given two tasks and were asked to respond to sounds and images. The first was to press the correct key on a computer keyboard after hearing one of eight sounds. The other task was to speak the correct vowel after seeing one of eight images.