workspace

Design of Communication Conference

ACM’s Design of Communication SIG has posted their 2013 conference call for participation. The theme is “Simplifying Complexity.” They’re looking for research and technical papers, project reports, posters, and workshop proposals on these topics:

• How do you identify complexity in an interactive system and simplify it for the people who use it?
• How do you capture complexity in a domain and simplify people’s understanding of it?
• How do you simplify complex person-to-person interactions?
• How social media and new media (rss feeds, analytics, streaming, user-contributed content, mashups, wikis, and blogs) simplify or increase complexity, and social implications of using these media.
• Simplifying the design, development, and delivery of interactive instructional media, including content management, website development and use, e-instruction and e-learning, and technical communication.
• Using responsive design methods and tools to simplify multi-platform issues.
• User research in all of these areas.

Inbox Zero

This only lasted about a nanosecond but it still felt weird, like a disturbance in the force.

Anyone who receives this bill…

ANYONE WHO RECEIVES THIS BILL WILL BE BLESSED WITH ALOT OF MONEY BUT ONLY IF YOU COPY THIS MESSAGE ON TEN OTHER BILLS

[larger version]

Error 404

I like Boing-Boing’s minimalist take on the Error 404 message: “We’re as confused as you are.”

Which, now that I think about it, is also the foundation of Google’s minimalist aesthetic. “Let’s go see what asking the whole web at once gets us!”

The Art of Glitch

[via Laughing Squid]

Breaking All the Rules

Sometimes attributed to John Cage, but actually written by Sister Corita Kent, the 10 Rules are pretty much universal to student/teacher relationships.

[via Brain Pickings]

Interactive 3D Scores for Music

IanniX is a graphical sequencer, open source for Windows, Linux, and OS X. Works with MIDI devices, a range of controllers (including Kinect), and software (Ableton Live, MaxMSP, PD, Processing, and more). Cool.

Create Digital Music has an interesting review.

[via createdigitalmusic.com]

Spam Fail

Eschaton

Marjorie Foley unpacks The Decemberists’ tribute to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in their video to Calamity Song (above) (duh). The video (loosely) tells the story of the Eschaton, a multi-court tennis match that combines elements of adolescence and global war.

The subject of the video is Eschaton, a fictional tennis game played by Hal Incandenza, one of the main characters in Infinite Jest, and his peers at the Enfield Tennis Academy. The game is played in a futuristic world in which years are no longer numbered but rather sponsored (the Eschaton bit happens in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment), and much of the Northeastern United States is destroyed due to a nuclear “accident”–the area is now known as the Great Concavity (into which catapults launch hazardous waste and where babies are born without skulls).

Eschaton, a word which means something akin to “end times,” is played across multiple tennis courts, with various areas of the courts corresponding to parts of the globe. The highlighted areas represent the teams, and the combinations of countries, with nuclear capabilities– North America (AMNAT); the former USSR (SOVWAR); China (REDCHI); India & Pakistan (INDPAK); “the wacko but always pesky” Libya & Syria (LIBSYR) or Iraq, Iran, Libya & Syria (IRLIBSYR), and the somewhat weak South Africa (SOUTHAF). Sometimes, depending on the number of players, one may have other teams “like an independent cell of Nuck insurgents with a 50-click Howitzer and big ideas.” Players fire 5-megaton nuclear tennis balls at enemy areas, creating playful worldwide chaos, massive civilian casualties, and juvenile tennis rivalries.

Amazon Recommendation Networks

Christopher Warren created a program for visualizing Amazon recommendation networks (Windows/Mac/Linux). Jill Walker Rettberg points out that it’s an excellent guide for deciding what to read next in an area.

[via jill/txt]