Networks: knowlegde in the age of interconnectivity
Excelente video com o Manuel Lima, o cara do Visual Complexity.
Alguns trechos:
We´re really facing a paradigm shift in the sense that trees are no longer able to acomodate the complexity of modern world.
Neste trecho, ele comenta que, historicamente, a metáfora da árvore muitas vezes foi utilizada para representar o conhecimento, sempre de maneira hierárquica e harmônica. Esse conceito começa a mudar no século XX, com a emergência dos estudos da complexidade e do caos.
The network is an alternative concept of beauty.
A beleza não necessariamente deve estar na harmonia ou no reconhecimento de padrões - apesar de ser algo que sempre buscamos. Não é de maneira fortuita que muitos artistas apontaram para esse caminho da abstração (inclusive Pollock, que Manuel cita em um trecho do vídeo).
The story in the data
It is not enough to simply suply people with gigabytes of data, though. Not everyone is a statistician or computer scientist, and not everyone wants to sift through large data sets. This is a challenge that we face frequently with personal data collection.
While the types of data collection and data returned might have changed over the years, individuals’ needs have not. That is to say that individuals who collect data about themselves and their surroundings still do so to gain a better understanding of the information that lies within the flowing data. Most of the time we are not after the numbers themselves; we are interested in what the numbers mean. It is a subtle difference but an important one. This need calls for systems that can handle personal data streams, process them efficiently and accurately, and dispense information ton nonprofessionals in a way that is understandable and useful. We want something that is more than a spreadsheet of numbers. We want the story in the data.
YAU, Nathan. Seeing Your Life in Data. In: SEGARAN, Toby; HAMMERBACHER, Jeff (org.) Beautiful Data. Sebastopol, CA.: O’Reilly Media Inc., 2009.
Boas ideias nascem em cafeterias
The interface is the message
“The presentation of data is an opportunity for us to make some amazing interfaces that tell great stories.”
The Return of Walled Gardens
More than a decade later, walled gardens appear to be making a comeback. Facebook, for example, is one such garden where everyone who plays within it—members, merchants, and developers—plays by the rules set forth by a single company. Apple’s iOS applications constitute another type of walled garden: apps for magazines and newspapers present the content in a format designed for a specific piece of hardware and display. Some consumers and usability advocates applaud the clean and elegant user experience, but the trade-off is that merchants and publishers must again play by the rules of a single intermediary—in this case, Apple.
For all their benefits, walled gardens limit competition and choice. In a recent commentary for Scientific American, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, warned against the rise of these “closed worlds” because they give control of content to individual companies, rather than keeping it open and universally available, as web addresses are.
Trecho do relatório “ePayments: Emerging Platforms, Embracing Mobile and Confronting Identity“. (O’Reilly Radar. Tim O’Brien, Dave Sims, and the O’Reilly Radar Team.)
Esse trecho dialoga com a análise de Chris Anderson sobre a “morte da web” e a força dos aplicativos.
What stories can it tell?
“But great information visualization never starts from the standpoint of the data set; it starts with questions. Why was the data collected, what’s interesting about it, what stories can it tell?
The most important part of understanding data is identifying the question that you want to answer. Rather than thinking about the data that was collected, think about how it will be used and work backward to what was collected. You collected data because you want to know something about it (…)
One of the most important (and least technical) skills in understanding data is asking good questions. An appropriate question shares an interest you have in the data, tries to convey it to others, and is curiosity-oriented rather than math-oriented.”
Voltei a estudar o livro da coruja, do Ben Fry. O trecho acima está na página 4.
Here, there and everywhere
200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes
Super Mario Galaxy 2
Comprei um Wii. Por que demorei tanto? Estava tentando me manter adulto, gastando dinheiro com contas chatas e burocráticas.
Ainda não comprei esse jogo aí de cima, justamente porque meu lado adulto ainda acha proibitivo gastar R$250,00…
Desacostumei com video games. Na época do NES, a long long time ago, era comum alugar cartuchos para jogar no final de semana. Pena que não era possível salvar os jogos, com exceção dos que tinham opção de password.
The hidden influence of social networks
Se tiver um tempo, veja até o final. Aborda muitas coisas interessantes, principalmente a influência das redes sociais em nosso comportamento, nossas emoções ou mesmo em nossa condição física. O que me agrada muito nesses estudos, além disso, são as referências às propriedades emergentes e teoria dos sitemas dinâmicos (o conjunto é maior do que a soma das partes individuais).
