Monthly Archives: October 2006

Away for a bit

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Fam­ily med­ical emergency.

Update, Nov 7 2006: It’s dif­fi­cult, espe­cially when there are loved ones gravely ill, to find the time to pay the bills and feed your­self, let alone opine on ephemeral pub­lic affairs or join in with the self-​​created world of aca­d­e­mic discourse.

I had the oppor­tu­nity to attend and present what turned out to be a slap­dash talk at a fas­ci­nat­ing con­fer­ence in Chicago these last three days, but in light of fam­ily stresses I’m afraid it played out less as an oppor­tu­nity and more as a dis­trac­tion from Real Life. I will try to recount and respond to the many fas­ci­nat­ing con­ver­sa­tions I had — it’s my pro­fes­sional respon­si­bil­ity, of course. It’s what I do for work, this conference-​​attending, this col­le­gial engage­ment and gen­tle inter­dis­ci­pli­nary aca­d­e­mic prod­ding, this insis­tence on thought­ful­ness among my col­leagues and bet­ters in the world.

But inso­far as I need to be away from work to care for fam­ily, it will be a while before I’m able to thought­fully respond and recount here. In the mean­time, Im hope­ful that some of my new cor­re­spon­dents might stum­ble along to my blog (Google will send them). So let me add some links to pre­vi­ous work that still applies, and that may help frame things I’ve said for those I met in per­son these last days, who in most cases I’m sure are not reg­u­lar blog readers:

There are oth­ers. I’m busy, I’m ragged, but I’ll be back.

Gradual Unveiling #6: Extending Fowler’s “New Methodology”

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For one of the best overviews of and intro­duc­tions to the prin­ci­ples and state of the cul­ture of Agile Soft­ware Devel­op­ment, with some ven­tures into Agile Prod­uct Design and Man­age­ment (why is all this stuff Cap­i­tal­ized?), I rec­om­mend Mar­tin Fowler’s The New Method­ol­ogy.

Read it, think­ing of the Acad­emy. Of sci­en­tific and numer­i­cal work — not pro­gram­ming as such, and not prod­uct design surely. Research. Explo­ration. Dis­cov­ery. The steady cycle of adap­tive think­ing and doing. Key­word: “adaptive”.

Influential data visualizations

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A col­lec­tion of graphs, charts, and other visu­al­iza­tions of ideas and rela­tion­ships, in draft and pub­lished form. Some impres­sive exam­ples, which impress in many cases not just because of face value, but back story and impli­ca­tion as well:

All 1,943 Cor­nell Fac­ulty were asked to respond to the fol­low­ing question:

Of the many charts (graph, map, dia­gram, table and “other”) you have seen in your life, which has been the most impor­tant, remark­able, mean­ing­ful or valu­able?

On the archival paper pro­vided, they were asked to cre­ate a copy of the chart and in the remain­ing space anno­tate notable attribute of the data and the image, describe what they remem­bered about first see­ing this image and com­ment on why they chose this image.

(Via Infor­ma­tion Aes­thet­ics.)