Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab brings us Million Dollar Blocks, a series of maps of American cities that show the cost of incarcerating residents of single city blocks. Shown above is Brooklyn, here’s New Orleans.
2009/08/24
“Making Policy Public”
The Center for Urban Pedagogy brings us a series of posters that “use graphic design to explore and explain public policy” in their Making Policy Public project. Their issues so far include one on predatory equity, a guide to street vending in New York (as seen above), a guide to the port system in the United States that helps longshoremen organize, and a guide to social security. They are good looking, and the idea is excellent. I haven’t read the posters (you can’t see the text online), so I don’t know what their politics are, or how well their topics are researched, so keep that in mind.
In a similar vein, John Aloysius Cogan Jr., executive counsel for the Rhode Island Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner, wrote an Op-Ed in the Times on August 19th about making health insurance policies easier for people to understand.
[via Candy Chang]
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2009/08/08
The Lure of the Labyrinth
CJR and I have been playing a game that her dad worked on, Thinkport’s fantastic The Lure of the Labyrinth. I’d come across the game before and never got into it, but on the second go round, I can’t stop playing. It’s supposed to be for ~5th grade kids in math class, there’s a lot of pattern recognition and arithmetic. Games that are explicitly “educational” usually aren’t that interesting to kids, but remove that “educational” tag, and you’ve got kids at at least one Chicago Public Library absolutely loving Labyrinth (CJR, worried about the silly games that the kids in the branch she’s working at were playing on the library computers, introduced them to Labyrinth. It was, and still is, a hit). The game doesn’t need to be played in a classroom, you can just sign up with a Thinkport account and go. It’s also Flash, so no downloading files necessary (except for, ah, Flash). There are some tedious parts and I wish the user had keyboard control of the character, but these are small issues. I’d recommend checking it out yourself and telling the kids you know about it.
[Image is a screenshot from one of the first narrative sections of the game.]
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Hot
It’s really hot in Chicago right now. 97 degrees on the heat index today, 102 – 107 on the heat index tomorrow. Puts a reënactment of last Sunday’s adventure that we were planning for tomorrow into question. [Forecast from Weather Underground, or closer to home from the top of Ryerson.]
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Glass Trackpads
The glass trackpads on Macbook Pros make Photoshop and Illustrator almost unusable. Constant unintended rotation and zoom.
[Original image from Notebook Check]
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2009/08/06
“Putin adjusts his hat”
In this AP photo of Vladimir Putin sitting in a tree adjusting his hat on vacation, he seems to be wearing Salomon water shoes.
More weird photos from his summer holiday here, buy your own Salmon Techamphibians in Russia here.
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