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<dalek voice>Procrastinate</dalek voice>
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2011 (6)
2010 (12)
2009 (38)
2008 (8)
 

Really impressed with Tagxedo - shaped word clouds. Here is a word cloud of my PhD thesis in the shape of a Drosophila:

Thesis_dros
I worked on developmental genetics of Drosophila melanogaster for my PhD. You can find Tagxedo at http://www.tagxedo.com/. A lot of the tools (such as adding your own images for word cloud shapes) are free in the beta, but I guess won't be forever.

 

Posted
 

Analysing the trolls.

Media_httpkirbybitsfi_pimyi
via kirbybits.wordpress.com

Saw this through Flowing Data. Lovely work, contrasting the behaviour of trolls with that of normal, non-mouth-breathing human beings.

Posted
 

7 million images, of 125 million pixels each. That's a lot of pixels. (Sloan Digital Sky Survey)

via youtube.com

Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (Data Release 8) zoom.

"All of the imaging data for SDSS-III DR8 visualized. For the first half of the zoom, you are seeing the calibrated pixels; for the second half, the calibrated catalog.

Construction of the frames involves touching every object in the entire DR8 catalog. The images and video were created with IDL, the SDSS-III photoop system, idlutils, imagemagick and ffmpeg.

The data were taken as part of the SDSS, SDSS-II, and SDSS-III projects, with a 2.5-m Telescope at Apache Point Observatory. For more information see http://sdss3.org/ . Publication credit: David W. Hogg, Michael Blanton, and the SDSS-III Collaboration."

 

Really very cool.

Posted
 

How things have changed...

 XKCD online communities maps for Spring 2007 and Autumn 2010. Things look a bit different now, don't they.

(download)

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Subway Star Wars

via improveverywhere.com

It's the 'audience' reactions that make it.

Posted
 

How long before they have to take it back down?

Times_paywall

The Times paywall is up. I can't believe anyone is going to pay for access to derivative news content.

We'll see.

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New BBC website design?

On my way back from Cambridge last week, I spent the train journey taking a BBC survey to assess a new design for the BBC News website. I have no idea if the site I saw will ever go live, but I quite liked it (some aspects more than others). I cheekily grabbed a screenshot of the design. Since I've not seen it anywhere else, here you go. 

The biggest change is the move of categories from the left-hand side to a banner at the top. The watch & listen panel at the side is also new, along with a features section that they claim contains more in-depth coverage of big stories, but appears to just be populated with puff pieces in the demo site. Finally, when you scroll down, local and world news is given greater prominence with a strongly contrasting box in the middle of the page.

The design overall is very strong, and a relatively big change, especially taken against the last redesign, of about 2 years ago. I didn't like the fact that the features section seemed to persist on the pages of individual stories, it felt horribly out of context there.

(download)

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