xBlog: The visual thinking weblog
20th April 2006

Junk Charts

“Edward Tufte has declared chartjunk as an enemy of clear, informative graphics of data. Chartjunk is everywhere, particularly in mainstream media. I am a junk artist dedicated to recycling chartjunk as junk art. Please come in and see my collection.” (Thanks kottke.org!)

posted in Information graphics | Permalink | Comments Off

20th April 2006

listography, your life in lists

“The place to share creative lists of every kind: wishlists, top tens, autobiographical, photo lists, favorites, to-do lists, and more!”

posted in Et cetera | Permalink | Comments Off

20th April 2006

Why face-to-face still matters!

We email. We wiki. We blog. We IM. We convince ourselves that as long as we can write well, these are all good forms of communication. Perhaps in some ways even better, since we’re not distracted (blinded, biased, seduced) by the person’s physical presence. And we are wrong. According to the neuroscientists, anyway. I’ve just come back from a couple of days at the Conference on World Affairs, and attended a couple of different presentations where Dr. Thomas Lewis spoke. He has a particular interest in neurobiology (including the neurobiology of love), and what the brain does and does not want and need. One of the key points he made was that we are fooling ourselves into thinking that text is even half as effective as face-to-face at communicating a message.”

posted in Communications | Permalink | Comments Off