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Design Education Milwaukee Reading Technology

Latest read: Beautiful Evidence

The holiday is a perfect time to catch up on reading and must admit Beautiful Evidence from Edward Tufte is a very refreshing look at aspects of visual evidence we simply overlook in everyday life.
Beautiful EvidenceWith so many amazing lessons regarding the presentation of data I found Chapter 6 the best as it addresses PowerPoint.

The issue Corruption in Evidence Presentations: A Consumer’s Guide to Effects Without Causes, Cherry Picking, Overreaching, Chartjunk, and the Rage to Conclude. Considering we all sit through too many PowerPoint presentations that corrupt the truth…this should be mandatory reading.

To maintain standards of quality, relevance, and integrity for evidence, consumers of presentations should insist that presenters be held intellectually and ethically responsible for what they show and tell. Thus consuming a presentation is also an intellectual and moral activity.

So the next time you sit in a presentation – be truthful! I must admit to drifting into Chartjunk myself at times (yikes) before reading The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within last year. This learning forced me to approach communicating via PowerPoint…Keynote more accurately as defined by Tufte. And this began with eliminating all the bullets. His chapter on Sparklines is pretty impressive as well.

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Design Education Globalization Network OpenSource Technology

The best of open source

opensource living

There is a new web resource pointing to some of the best open source software (free software) available today for Windows, OS X and Linux platforms. Its worth a look.

Tags: open source, education, globalization, network, trends

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Education Globalization Internet2 Network Technology WiscNet

Internet2 – Peering Milestone

Internet2Internet2’s Commerical Peering service has announced a peering milestone: connecting to 70,000 routes. Participants in this service now see more than 50% of their commodity traffic needs being met with I2’s peering service.

This service continues to expand the number of private and public peering connections, now to over 70 000 commodity Internet routes by connecting to major ISPs and content hosting providers over a virtual private network (VPN)

For Internet2 Network Connectors with available traffic headroom within their Internet2 IP Network connection, the CP service is available at no additional cost and can offer a significant total cost reduction to their overall Internet expenses.

Tags: Internet2, peering, education, globalization, network, trends

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Education Globalization Network Rich media Smartphone Technology

NBC: Reconsider iTunes

NBC logoSo NBC has been forced to refund advertisers an average of $500,000 each due to low ratings. One hopes they will workout an agreement with iTunes to again sell their TV shows.  NPR news article here.
At some point someone at NBC Universal will realize all those millions of dollars really add up to something….What were they thinking?

Tags: NBC, iTunes, low ratings, trends

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Design Education Globalization Network Technology

Open Yale

Have you ever wanted to take a class on Modern Poetry taught by a distinguished scholar?

Yale University has joined MIT and select institutions of higher learning by placing academic courses online, inviting anyone around the globe (this means you) to participate. Today seven courses are available with additional courses on the way.