Limited to 1000 attendees a year and priced far beyond academic budgets, TED is a premier forum for rising leaders in their respective fields and their new ideas. They say it better than I could:

Each year, TED hosts some of the world’s most fascinating people: Trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses. The talks they deliver have had had such a great impact, we thought they deserved a wider audience. So now, for the first time, we’re sharing them with the world at large… Each week, we’ll release a new talk to inspire, intrigue and awaken the imagination. For best effect, plan to listen to at least three, start to finish. (They have a cumulative effect.) If you have a curious soul and an open mind, we think you’ll be hooked…

The videos are available here.

Beautiful Evidence, by Edward Tufte, the most recent of his self-published tomes to information architecture.

It not only contains information about Sparklines (mentioned in a previous post), the table of contents cites:

• Mapped Pictures: Images as Evidence and Explanation
• Sparklines: Intense, Simple, Word-Sized Graphics
• Links and Casual Arrows: Ambiguity in Action
• Words, Numbers, Images – Together
• The Fundemental Principles of Analytical Design
• Corruption of Evidence Presentations: Pitching out Corrupts Within
• Sculptural Pedestals: Meaning, Practice, Depedestalization
• Landscape Sculptures

It appears available for order on Amazon.com, and on the Tufte website.

Hardcover: 213 pages
Publisher: Graphics Pr (July 2006)
Language: English
ISBN: 0961392177
Product Dimensions: 1.0 x 8.8 x 10.8 inches

The book has arrived and it is as beautiful as the others. Though it is the only one of Tufte’s books in my collection he has not autographed.

UPDATE: Nice article, ‘Beautiful Evidence: A Journey Through the Mind of Edward Tufte‘ can be found here.

As a long-time fan and follower of Edward Tufte, information design Guru, I ran across Sparklines again. Described as ‘Intense, Simple, Word-sized graphics’ often appearing in-line with descriptive text. What caught my eye this time was a link to a Sparklines PHP module that allows the easy inclusion of these documents into websites. Perhaps the best implementation can be seen on the information aesthetics site.

I am investigating including these in-line graphics to support user and usage reports for CCGB systems and services. Though much of the projected data will be in a tabular format, in-line graphics such as these would be useful to display trend data. Disk space consumed per user, jobs submitted to the SGE cluster queues, hours connected to systems, etc.

For the moment, I’ve added the SparkStats WordPress module to track posts and commentary on this blog. It appears in the right column, just beneath the Search text field, currently with little to now explanation.

There is even a Sparklines graph library for Ruby, my new language.

Update: Check out Andreas Flockermann’s sparkline implementation for Excel. The gallery contains several impressive variations on sparklines and dynamic systems for Excel and Server dashboard displays.

I have had variable success with JAVA applications in general. Specifically JAVA apps that run in a browser window are problematic, it doesn’t matter what client platform or browser I use. That said, there are some tools that only exist in this form.

Recently, I found a version of a visualization tool I use to display interrelated ideas in a paragraph of text. If the paragraph of text is sufficiently large the tool explodes with the following error:

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java Heap Space

It took me a while to find a cure for this on my Macintosh laptop.

Open the “Java 1.4.2 Plugin Settings.app” in the Utilities/Java folder. Add the following to the “Java Runtime Parameters” code box:

-Xmx256m

This fixed my problem for this tool, so far. Your mileage may vary.

Read ChiRunning, by Danny Dreyer and Katherine Dreyer. It was highly recommended by several on-line fora and I found myself agreeing with the philosophy. I hoped for a light-bulb moment of clarity that would allow me to run with effortless joy. Currently I find the joy, but only after considerable effort.

It turns out I ‘ChiRun’, mostly. Over the years I have developed a rather smooth ‘style’, preferences for shoes and routes. Friends who run, favorite events. An authentic running lifestyle. I don’t always enjoy running. It gets very cold in Minnesota. But I do enjoy the health and joy running brings to my life.

Good Chi.