Categories

Playing with Text

I’ve recently been inspired by some text visualization methods. Of specific interest to me are Edward Tufte’s Sparklines, simple word sized graphics, which allow their users to get the gist of what’s happening with the data without needing to fully read it all. The graphic below is a 13th century manuscript bible with these amazing [...]

על חוק הטוקבקים ותרבותיות הדיון

הצעת חוק הטוקבקים של ישראל חסון עברה בקריאה טרומית במליאת ×”×›× ×¡×ª ×œ×¤× ×™ יותר משבוע. הצעת החוק קובעת שעל כל אתר בעל תפוצה × ×¨×—×‘×ª אחריות מלאה לתוכן תגובות הגולשים בו. על פי הצעה זו, כל אתר בעל מעל 50,000 ×›× ×™×¡×•×ª ביום יחשב ל”עיתון”, ועורכו ומפעילו ישאו באחריות × [...]

Visualization of User-Generated Comments on US Elections

Here’s a glimpse of a work-in-progress. A little project I’m working on (check out the live version) that takes user-generated comments from the LA-times Campaign ‘08 page into a visualization powered by processing. It looks something like this:

The background red/blue colors are directly correlated to the text => the more written about the democrats, the [...]

My point-of-view on Israel’s new Talkback Law

I’ve been enjoying discussions around the new Talkback Law proposal and following the situation in Israel closely. Currently, all Israeli News Sites allow commenting on every one of their online posts. They are extremely successful, drawing hundreds of people to write their thoughts and opinions for every post. But as one can imagine, having a [...]

displaying Hebrew characters with PHP and MySQL

I’ve been working on a little application that grabs data from Hebrew news sites into a mySQL database.

While working on this mini-project I’ve realized that there is hardly any online tutorials on using the Hebrew font. Here’s my solution which is fairly simple and works effectively.

Step 1) Set the HTML page charset encoding to utf8:

meta [...]

WiMAX – the technology and its implications

Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access – a new technology aimed at providing wireless data over long distances for both point-to-point links and full mobile cellular access implementation. It is effective for enabling the delivery of last mile wireless broadband access as an alternative to cable and DSL. For this reason, it is not surprising that [...]

a day filled with rocket science

Yesterday I was lucky to be given a tour through the JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) facility in Pasadena. It is a NASA research center with projects including the Galileo mission to Jupiter and its moons, the Mars rovers. JPL has sent unmanned missions to every planet in the Solar System and is also conducting extensive [...]

mood through Flickr

Feeling Good

Feeling Angry

[tags] moodmeter, rwjf, flickr, images [/tags]

Project Living Profiles :: the moodmeter

For the past several months I’ve been working with the living profiles team at the Art Center College of Design. The project is part of the larger HealthDesign initiative, designing new open-source methods for keeping personal health records and sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Here’s a framing of our project:

The Art Center College [...]

Controversial Travel to Burma

…500 monks emerged in rows four across. They carried flags and overturned alms bowls. When the first group stopped and chanted a prayer, some people in the crowd dared to clap. It was timid at first, but as more monks emerged to begin their protest, the clapping grew louder until the whole crowd seemed overcome [...]