Photo Timeline
Using Google Images, enter a search term and a year to construct a visual timeline on anything.
(via jonportfolio)
Source: hirmes.com
“What is it about animation, graphics, illustrations that create meaning?”
— Tom Wujec
One of the first watercolors for the book! Unlocking the Right Brain will features images made with a mix of traditional and digital techniques.
Quite a lovely brain illustration! Even better, the type in the book will be printed letterpress!
— Visual Turn
Source: rightbrainbook
Philosophy posters by Genis Carreras.
Click through for full set.
Irene’s spiraling cloudtops are displayed in vivid detail in this image taken just after dawn on Friday from the GOES East satellite.
TV commercials are annoying. TV commercials for insurance companies are annoying squared. TV commercials for Progressive Insurance featuring the ever-perky Flo character are annoying cubed.
So I totally surprised myself by laughing out loud when I looked up at the TV and caught part of this commercial. Even with the sound off the gag still worked. I was still laughing when I typed a search into YouTube to locate the commercial. Yes, I went looking to watch a commercial purely for its entertainment value, even though the commercial franchise is one that makes my hair stand on end. In this case, that was part of the gag.
Producers know a large number of TV viewers turn the sound off for commercials, and work hard to make the video communicate the message even without an audio track. Since TV commercials are usually created by a storyboard, it is often the case that the commercial IS the visuals, and that the audio is secondary. This is the case with most Flo commercials, since the audio consists mostly of banal chit-chat between Flo and her customers (or so I’ve been told). With the exception of commercials based on jingles — which saw their heydey 50 years ago and are used today almost exclusively when a radio buy is also part of the advertising campaign — few commercials today rely on audio to carry the message. TV is a visual medium (gee … ya think?), but even more importantly, we live in a visual world where advertising competes for space in our kaleidoscopic visual field across broadcast TV, cable, print and outdoor advertising, Internet, and increasingly on mobile devices.
I’m sure advertisers think in terms of devices, demographics, markets, and all the rest, but one of the reasons visual advertising is so seductive is because of how our brains work. The visual cortex is the largest system in the human brain, and it is not just a mental home theater system. It is deeply connected with systems throughout the brain involved in cognition, emotion, and motor activity. The visual system is a highly complex and adaptive system, not designed simply to accurately reconstruct the visual characteristics of the external world (strictly speaking, everything the eye sees is “external,” even when it is part of our own bodies). If that is all the visual system was required to do, it would not require nearly as much horsepower as it does. Instead, the visual system actively constructs the world it sees from immediate sensory input combined with prior experience in an elaborately choreographed dance with other brain systems to create a meaningful interpretation of what is seen. If you have ever struggled to make sense of an optical illusion, you have experienced the power of the visual system to perform its ultimate task of interpretation. Seeing is the easy part. Understanding is hard.
So how did I get sucked in to Flo’s gag? It’s because this commercial is scripted differently from most Flo commercials. Instead of featuring Flo immediately to establish a connection with all prior Flo commercials, the only visual hint in the first 15 seconds of the spot that this is another episode with Flo is the bright white lighting and the studio set with shelves of familiar blue “packages” of insurance, but this time shown at a hazy distance.
Instead the camera observes a scene familiar to anyone who has ever been on a group motorcycle ride: bikes and riders of various descriptions rolling into frame and stopping side by side, as kickstands touch the ground marking the end of a long ride. As helmets are doffed one by one, men and women expose the rider’s badge of honor: wildly unruly helmet hair.
Flo is not seen at all until 0:16 of the 0:30 spot, and even then it is not until 0:18 that the familiar red lips and dark hair clearly establish her character’s identity. Even as she removes her helmet to reveal her perfect makeup and makes a quick glance in the mirror to fluff her perfect hair, her spiky-haired male and female comrades look on with envy. “Perfect hair … every time,” one male sportbike rider — with short but nonetheless disheveled hair — utters with amazement, while a female rider with shoots Flo a “how did she do that?” look from under her own tousled mane.
So I get sucked into the gag because I ride motorcycles, I like looking at motorcycles, and I make an immediate emotional connection as the riders in the commercial enact a scene that’s part of everyday experience for the target audience of this motorcycle insurance commercial. While my emotional system is activated by the connections my mind makes to memories of my own similar experiences, the sight of the lighting and the set begin to recall associations with the series of commercials. My mind unconsciously connects the familiar feeling of satisfaction at the end of a ride with the familiar context of the advertiser and its product.
Helmets come off while one bike in the scene slowly rolls to a stop — notably a bike painted in the sponsor’s signature color blue. I start picking up the set-up and my mind starts to imagine (or more accurately, construct) the possibilities of where this is heading. It is precisely at this point that even though I know I find Flo absolutely irritating, there’s a payoff coming that I know I don’t want to miss. The least satisfying outcome would be to have Flo step up from behind the shelves and engage in chit-chat with her bike-straddling clientele about the virtues of affordable insurance coverage. Better, I might get to see Flo appear from under a helmet as disheveled as her companions, which would certainly be a kick. But before I can even articulate those possibilities, I realize I’m already anticipating exactly what makes this gag so funny. Flo arrives on her own beautiful bike with nary a hair out of place, which is as funny as it is improbable. The reaction shots of the other bikers with their hair standing on end turns my giggle into a belly laugh.
So you got me, Progressive, but I enjoyed it, and got a chance to think a little bit about how hard the mind works make sense of the continuous stream of data that arrive at our sensory doors. If our visual system were just for seeing, there would have been no reason to laugh. Laughter is a uniquely human trait, and humor exists only because the human mind is capable of doing more than just seeing — it is capable of understanding.
Working memory: "the bottleneck is not in the remembering, it is in the perceiving"
That quote is probably the most important sentence I have read in a year.
Working memory refers to the number of things a person can actively hold in memory at once, such as numbers or colors. Most people can remember about four things at once, and some can remember more.
MIT neuroscientists have found that the limitations on working memory do not come from limitations on remembering. Instead they come from how many things can be accurately perceived at once. We bump up against limits in visual perception in the process of encoding things into working memory even before we try to recall those things.
It gets better. The study also found that we do not have a working memory, but actually have working memories — two of them — one in each of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. The researchers concluded that the typical limit of four items in working memory at once was actually a limit of two items in the working memory of each of the two hemispheres.
“The fact that we have different capacities in each hemisphere implies that we should present information in a way that does not overtax one hemisphere while under-taxing the other,” said Timothy Buschman, the researcher who conducted the study.
I’ve been aware of the limits of working memory, and how this impacts the design of learning content in instructional technology, from research by Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer. The two ideas from Buschman’s study, though, raise some interesting additional questions.
What does it mean to balance the cognitive load between the left and right hemispheres? How should the visual design of instructional content reflect this idea? What could be done in content presentation that might increase the capacity or accuracy for visual perception in each hemisphere? How does pedagogy change if we recognize that perception is more important than recall in the capacity of working memory?
We already know that content delivered simultaneously through multiple modalities — such as visual and auditory — can increase the capacity of working memory. Does working memory related to other modalities also function as a dual system? Could this mean we actually have four (or more) distinct working memories that operate as an integrated system?
Education focuses so heavily on recall and pays so little attention to perception. This suggests that we really ought to consider whether we have things backwards.
“Poverty is a more powerful influence on test scores than value added by teachers and schools.” University of Texas physics Prof. Michael Marden’s visualization of the correlation between low SAT scores, poverty, and race.
Sal Khan keeps amazing me with his enthusiasm and brilliant analysis of new ways education can work. This talk with the MIT Club of Northern California is a bit long (1:23:28), but worth every minute of it. The potential for the future of teaching and learning is fascinating.
Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival
South Louisiana has had two main industries for many years: the seafood industry, and the petroleum industry. The people of Morgan City, Louisiana have celebrated this fact since 1936 with what is surely one of the most curiously named gatherings anywhere. This year they are scheduled to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival in early September during Labor Day Weekend. No word on whether there has been any change in plans for this year.
The visual rhetoric of global environmentalism vs. global corporatization.
Imagine how bad the disaster would be if the tidal surge from an early season hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico pushed the gulf oil spill onshore. Hurricane season begins June 1, and late May storms are not unusual. They usually originate in the gulf (instead of the Atlantic or Caribbean) and so give little warning.
via campaigncc.org
le tour du monde en quatre-vingts secondes
“Around the world in 80 seconds. Directed by Romain Pergeaux & Alex Profit. A project done in only 3 weeks. This route is a tribute to the famous Jules Verne’s book “Le tour du monde en 80 jours”. The making of the video, pictures of the trip and an interview of Alex Profit can be seen at http://www.tourdumonde80.fr Tour included stops in London - Cairo - Mumbay - Hong Kong - Tokyo - San Francisco - New York - London.”
Play it full screen. Worth every pixel.
Whether your interest is history, architecture, technology, art, or education, this video offers a glimpse into a fascinating work-in-progress at the Imaging Research Center at the University of Maryland.
Scholars and artists are collaborating on a digital 3-D model of the nation’s capital as it may have looked in 1814. The project shows the dramatic change over 200 years from the pastoral landscape along the Potomoc River to the present day center of politics and power.
The visual presentation is impressive, but the research is even more so. As the site notes, “The task of visualizing early Washington, D.C. has proven to be more challenging than anticipated. Technology is not the problem; the problem is lack of reliable historical evidence.” The video describes how scholars are attempting to interpret the available clues to reconstruct history.
The video teaches on multiple levels. Viewers learn something about the early city of Washington, about the process of historical research, and about how modern graphic technology is creating visually rich immersive learning systems.
This fun and highly visual web site takes a humorous look at the American political landscape. The illustrations are by Kevin Kallaugher, political cartoonist for The Economist, and artist-in-residence at the Imaging Research Center at the University of Maryland, home of the project.
“Cartoons are often used in textbooks and school texts to digest the world in a way people can understand and is inviting,” Kallaugher told Wired Campus. The project is aimed at teens, but also plays to an election-weary adult audience.
The educational philosophy of the site is nicely summed up in its Latin motto: Veni. Risi. Percepi.
I came. I laughed. I learned.
