- From Rétrofuturs @ Flickr

-From bookworm.@Flickr

Dragon Rice Bowl

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 1 large zucchini, sliced diagonally
• 3 tomatoes, sliced thickly
• 8 Marinated Tofu Steaks (see below)
• 6 cups cooked brown basmati rice
• 1 batch Miso Gravy (see below)
• 1 bunch cilantro, chopped
• 1 bunch green onions, chopped
• 2 tbsp. brown sesame seeds, toasted

Directions

1. Grill the zucchini, tomatoes, and tofu steaks in the oven a medium to high heat, until lightly browned.
2. Put 1 1/2 cups cooked brown basmati rice in a large rice bowl.
3. Pour one 4-once ladle of warm Miso Gravy over the rice.
4. Arrange the grilled vegetables and tofu steaks around the inner edges of the bowl.
5. Put chopped cilantro and green onions on the Miso Gravy at the centre of the bowl.
6. Garnish with toasted brown sesame seeds. Repeat for each serving.

Marinated Tofu Steaks

Makes 4 servings

Ingredients

• 1 block tofu (firm)
• 2 tsp. coriander, ground
• 4 tsp. garlic powder
• 1/2 cup tamari
• 2 cups water

Directions

1. Cut the square block of tofu into 1/4-inch-thick slices; then cut the slices diagonally into triangles.
2. Combine the remaining ingredients in a bowl and pour over the tofu triangles. Marinate for 1 hour. Store in a sealed container in the fridge. Keeps up to 5 days.

Miso Gravy

Makes 4 servings

Ingredients

• 4 1/2 tbsp. spelt flour
• 1/4 tsp. garlic powder
• 3/4 cup Engevita (inactive) yeast
• 1 1/2 cups vegetable stock
• 1/3 cup sunflower oil
• 1 1/2 tsp. Dijon mustard
• 3 tbsp. miso paste, light or dark
• 3/4 tsp. sea salt

Directions

1. Put dry ingredients, except salt, in a saucepan over low heat. Whisk in the vegetable stock to make a paste.
2. Let this come to a boil and simmer for 30 seconds.
3. Add the oil, mustard, miso, and salt to the ingredients in the saucepan. Whisk until everything is incorporated and the mixture is smooth. Serve hot.

In about…. one hour, I’ll be defending my Master’s thesis. I’m really looking forward to the opporunity to discuss my research with a group of interesting people and hear their thoughts on the work that I’ve done. Here’s to the summit bid!

- From PantherModem@Flickr

The following is the abstract for my MSc. thesis titled Lark: Using Meta-visualizations for Coordinating Collaboration. Unfortunately, university regulations state that thesis abstracts must  be no more then 150 words, and this one is well over 400. So, before this passage gets significantly reduced, here’s the extended version of what my thesis is about.

Real-world information continues to grow in size and complexity, making the analysis and interpretation of this data an ever increasing challenge. Both information visualization and collaborative team work have been suggested as important factors in addressing these information complexity challenges. Information visualization has the potential to provide different ways of examining and exploring the data. Collaborative data analysis can combine the analytic power of multiple individuals, with the possibility of including varying types and levels of expertise, potentially leading to increased quality of solutions and discoveries. However, while considerable research is being conducted in both the areas of  Information Visualization and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), comparatively less research examines the interplay between them. This is especially true for co-located collaborative scenarios.

In this thesis I focus on supporting small groups of people working together in a synchronous co-located environment who make use of information visualizations in their analysis process. Within this space I am particularly interested in mixed-focus collaboration—team work characterized by frequent changes in collaboration styles, which span the range from loosely coupled, individual work to closely coupled, group work. To facilitate mixed-focus collaboration, I investigate how to support changing collaboration styles within a collaborative information visualization workspace. To this end, I identify three concepts—temporal flexibility, spatial flexibility, and scoped interaction—which play an important role in this type of work scenario.

These concepts form the basis for my research challenges and structure the design and implementation of Lark: a coordinated multiple views visualization environment where the relationships and connections between individual views are illustrated through an integrated meta-visualization. The meta-visualization is modeled after the visualization pipeline and provides several distinct stages in which group members can coordinate their interactions–these stages are identified as Collaboration Coordination Points (CCPs) Making the relationships and connections between the individual views visually explicit supports workspace awareness and the CCP can help empower group members with the freedom to work in concert or independently. Furthermore, Lark shows how a coherent visualization collaboration interaction environment with direct visual and algorithmic support for the coordination of data analysis actions over shared large displays.

In this thesis I present a novel approach to the coordination of interactions between multiple people working together in a co-located collaborative visualization environment. The coordination of interactions can help facilitate mixed-focus collaborative work by supporting both individual and group work, and the transitions between these different levels of collaborative coupling. By investigating the synergy of information visualization and collaborative team work, this thesis demonstrates promising strategies for addressing present day information complexity challenges.

-From etcetcetc

On a cursory glance, The Visual Miscellaneum by David McCandless looks pretty good. The book covers a wide breath of topics and everything is very colourful. However, a more detailed inspection will reveal some serious errors in the visualizations the book contains.

Some of the data items within the information graphics have been intentionally left unlabeled. For example, “Sex Education” on page 62, presents a bar chart and the only entry that is labeled is Studio Art which has no students that are virgins. Having seen this chart before, the bar chart on page 62 emphasizes the original joke. In the introduction, McCandless asks “Can you make jokes in graphs?” Indeed you can, and this is a borderline ok example. However, the joke isn’t clear if you haven’t seen the original chart.

From here, it gets worse. The “Excuse Us: Reasons for Divorce” graphic on page 64 does not have any labels on any of the items in the graphic. Where is the actual content? Or are the data items intentionally left unlabeled?

Similarly, in the “Salad Dressings: All in proportion” graphic on page 118, why aren’t the individual dressings labeled? On the previous page, with “The Poison” and “The Remedy”, the drinks are labeled, so therefore I would expect the salad dressings on the following page to labeled as well (especially since the graphic design of these pages are so similar). However, this is not the case.

In general, it seems like there are more than a few labeling issues in the graphics through out the book, and I was left wondering if this omissions were erroneous or intentional? It wasn’t always clear.

But missing labels isn’t the only problem. The “Not Nice: Food colourings linked to unpleasant health effects” graphic on page 119 contains no mention of health effects in the actual graphic. Is that the point? That there is no unpleasant health effects linked to food colouring? I wasn’t sure after looking at the graphic.

These are just a few examples of some of the problems with the visualization found in The Visual Miscellaneum, and unfortunately these errors complete spoil the entire book. I would agree with Christian Rudder’s Amazon review that this book is an example of how not to present information, and if you’re looking for visualization excellency, consider the work by Edward R. Tufte instead.

Amazing hand printed Valentines Day cards from jazzy Jenn!

From: Turn Of Phrase

Amazing video by director Sugimoto Kousuke. This is about a month or so old, but I ran across it for the second time today and thought it was equally as brilliant.

- From PantherModem@Flickr

For the last month, I’ve been manually recording my automobile fuel consumption. Its been an evolving process, as the amount of recorded data and data acquisition techniques have steadily been refined. This morning when I was inputting a row into my spreadsheet, I though that this process could be greatly optimized with a good iPhone/iPod Touch app. Turns out this has been done. There are a bunch of apps available that help you record your fuel consumption: Gas Cubby, GasHog, greenMeter, and AccuFuel just to name a few. GasHog and AccuFuel are the most basic of the lot, and too basic for my needs. greenMeter is by far the most innovative (see fuelclinic, NYTimes), however I don’t want more flashing lights–or in this case, real-time feedback on my fuel consumption–to distract me while driving. Gas Cubby appears to be the most mature of the fuel consumption apps, with support for lots of data parameters (tire size/pressure, fuel octane, etc.) and great features like online syncing (for more information, see the Gas Cubby manual). At $4.99 Gas Cubby seems like the app for me, let’s see if it works out.

‘los has posted his action shots from Hopu Ka Lewa 2009 via Flickr:

The supplementary video accompanying the i-Loupe and iPodLoupe paper, Getting Practical with Interactive Tabletop Displays: Designing for Dense Data, “Fat Fingers,” Diverse Interactions, and Face-to-Face Collaboration [ PDF ], is now available on YouTube:

Just finished uploading photos from my recent trip to O’ahu, Hawaii onto Flickr–thanks DC for letting me borrow that lens! For the photos, I’ve broken things down into two sets: Hopu Ka Lewa and O’ahu. The former covers the initial impetus for this trip: to attend Hopu Ka Lewa 2009 Ultimate tournament held at the Waimanalo Polo Fields in O’ahu, Hawaii from November 7-9, 2009. This is my first shot at sports photography, so it can only get better from here.The later set covers what happened after the tourney: hiking and beaches. Needless to say, it was an excellent trip.

- From the Hopu Ka Lewa set.

- From the O’ahu set.

Here’s a sneak peak of Stephen Voida‘s Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2009 (ITS ’09) paper titled: Getting Practical with Interactive Tabletop Displays: Designing for Dense Data, “Fat Fingers,” Diverse Interactions, and Face-to-Face Collaboration [ PDF | MOV ]. This paper will be presented in Banff, Alberta, Canada on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 during the “Extending Basic Surface Interaction Capabilities” paper session from 10:30 – 12:30.

Visualization of the Lark paper from Wordle.net.

From: FFFFOUND!

If you’re at Vis Week 2009 in Atlantic City this week, come check out my paper talk titled Lark: Coordinating Co-located Collaboration with Information Visualization. The talk is part of the InfoVis track, during the “Collaborative Visualization” session chaired by Jeff Heer on Thursday October 15, 2009 from 4:15 – 5:55 pm in the Blenheim room. You can check out a copy of the paper and accompanying video here.

Here’s a teaser screen shot of the system:

Over the last week I’ve been updating PantherModem.com bit by bit. I’ve added links to my Innovis publications page, posted my visualization portfolio, and did some general house keeping. I think the renovations are now done, and I hope you like the changes.

Before I go, I’ll leave you with my new favourite picture (and my first HDR photo) which I shot last weekend: