How to Make Sense of Any Mess
Did you know that Abby Covert’s book is available online in its gloriously hyperlinked entirety?
Tags: information
Claude Shannon, the Father of the Information Age, Turns 1100100 - The New Yorker
A lovely profile of Claude Shannon (concluding with an unexpected Brighton connection).
The Pain With No Name · An A List Apart Article
This rousing call-to-arms by Abby the IA makes a great companion piece to her interview on The Big Web Show.
Meet Walter Pitts, the Homeless Genius Who Revolutionized Artificial Intelligence
The fascinating story of logic, learning, and the origins of electronic computing. Russell, Shannon, Turing, Wiener, Von Neumann …they’re all in there, woven around the tragic figure of Walter Pitts.
It is a sad and beautiful world.
Thanks to their work, there was a moment in history when neuroscience, psychiatry, computer science, mathematical logic, and artificial intelligence were all one thing, following an idea first glimpsed by Leibniz—that man, machine, number, and mind all use information as a universal currency. What appeared on the surface to be very different ingredients of the world—hunks of metal, lumps of gray matter, scratches of ink on a page—were profoundly interchangeable.
The Eccentric Genius Whose Time May Have Finally Come (Again) - Doug Hill - The Atlantic
A profile of Norbert Wiener, and how his star was eclipsed by Claude Shannon.
Guardian beta · The container model and blended content – a new approach to how we present content on the Guardian
This is what Oliver was talking about Responsive Day Out 2 — a new approach to information architecture.
Cast off your sidebars! You have nothing to lose but your grids!
The Man Who Turned Paper Into Pixels on Vimeo
A short film about Claude Shannon and Information Theory — not exactly as in-depth as James Gleick’s The Information, but it does a nice job of encapsulating the fundamental idea.
NSA: The Decision Problem by George Dyson
A really terrific piece by George Dyson taking a suitably long-zoom look at information warfare and the Entscheidungsproblem, tracing the lineage of PRISM from the Corona project of the Cold War.
What we have now is the crude equivalent of snatching snippets of film from the sky, in 1960, compared to the panopticon that was to come. The United States has established a coordinated system that links suspect individuals (only foreigners, of course, but that definition becomes fuzzy at times) to dangerous ideas, and, if the links and suspicions are strong enough, our drone fleet, deployed ever more widely, is authorized to execute a strike. This is only a primitive first step toward something else. Why kill possibly dangerous individuals (and the inevitable innocent bystanders) when it will soon become technically irresistible to exterminate the dangerous ideas themselves?
The proposed solution? That we abandon secrecy and conduct our information warfare in the open.
Dark Archives in Contents Magazine
A really lovely piece on the repositories of information that aren’t catalogued—a fourth quadrant in the Rumsfeldian taxonomy, these dark archives are the unknown knowns.
As We May Think - The Atlantic
Vannevar Bush’s original 1945 motherlode of hypertext.
disambiguity - » Yes, you should be using personas
Great post by Leisa on the real reasons for using personas (they might not be the reasons you think).
disambiguity - » Waterfall Bad, Washing Machine Good (IA Summit 07 Slides)
Leisa's slides from the IA Summit in Vegas. Looks like it was an excellent presentation, channelling the spirit of Kelly Goto and Jeff Veen.
Happy Cog Studios: Work: Dictionary.com
Happy Cog redesigns Dictionary.com and its siblings.
Card sorting pix
Flickr photo set, AIGA card sorting exercise.