Great talk by Anant Agarwal making the case for "Divide and conquer" as an engineering principle for the next generation of pervasive computing platforms.
“There’s a movement in engineering where simple things are put together to make a powerful big thing. Look for things like that in life; it’s a good engineering principle.”
Great project by Jeffrey Warren from MIT Design Ecology group. Cartagen draws maps dynamically on the client side, maps are drawn dynamically as opposed to downloading tiles for every zoom level as most other mapping applications work nowadays. This means a huge improvement in flexibility and data speeds for mapping applications, only layers of data to be displayed are downloaded.
Vector mapping is done in native HTML 5, which runs on the iPhone and the Android platforms. The styling of Maps is done using GSS: geo style sheets.
Just like CSS for styling web pages, GSS is a specification for designing maps. Adapted for dynamic data sources, GSS can define changing geographic elements, display multiple datasets, and even respond to contextual tags like "condition:poor".
In addition to the technological advantages it provides an API for String-based geocoding making "semantic geocoding" available to a huge range of devices that rely on GPS networks.
String-based geocoding (i.e. "map Bhagalpur, India") allows users to produce their own maps from in the field with only a basic cell phone. This widens participation to 4 billion cell phone users worldwide, as well as to rural regions outside the reach of the internet. Geographic mapping with text messages has applications in disaster response and health care.
really lovely typographic prints at Ork Posters
Great collection of information visualisation spreads from GOOD Magazine Oil: A History
Just Landed - 36 Hours from blprnt on Vimeo.
People share a lot of information in their tweets — some of it shared intentionally, and some of it which could be uncovered with some rudimentary searching. I wondered if it would be possible to extract travel information from people’s public Twitter streams by searching for the term ‘Just landed in…’.
more info at blprnt