Graphic novels being challenged by parents

Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 12/21/06
BY DAVID TWIDDY
THE CIATED PRESS

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — When Amy Crump took over as director of the Marshall Public Library in central Missouri two years ago, she decided to build up the library's offerings for young adults by buying the literary world's hot new thing …graphic novels.

"The bulk of our graphic novels are for young adults and they're very popular,'' Crump said, estimating the library's collection has gone from only a handful to around 75.

Among the new acquisitions was "Blankets'' by Craig Thompson and "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic'' by Alison Bechdel, two semi-autobiographical accounts of the respective authors' turbulent childhoods that include ruminations on strict
religious upbringing and homosexuality.

The two novels touched off what Crump said was the first challenge of library materials in Marshall's 16-year history, as parents complained that the books, which include pictures of a naked couple, could be read by children, attracted by the comic book-like drawings. Continue reading the full story

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Scientists study Christie success - Quantification to see true color of words

A Visible Pathfinder for Increasing Blog Traffic in 2007

The wise learn from their own experiences but the truly intelligent will learn from someone else's!" - Benjamin Franklin.

My 2007 resolution for return-on-investments in blogging is to have a two-way traffic. The prescription is, please:
1. post a comment--aka, visual signature--in this blog on whatever subject (spam and phishing EXEMPTED)
2. turn on your blog comments' button; I will reciprocate not once, but every post that you create in 2007. This is my own idea of live and let live. I do reciprocate; my 2006 ledger shows Bloggers, such as, Sukhdev Singh, K. G. Schneider, Nancy White, Nirmala Palaniappan, David Tebbutt, Peachy Limpin, Thomas Brevik, Steven Edward Streight, Neil Patel, Diane Levin, and more.


PUNCHLINE: Increasing Blog traffic is a major concern, even for many Gurus [e.g., Adrian W Kingsley-Hughes' Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days]
Previous post:

Visualizing Comments on Blogs

Visualizing Traffic At My Blog Via Mapping The Pathways

Blog As A Teaching Tool

Idea courtesy: Bloggers Compose Their Yearly Ledgers, By Jeralyn; and How to Pay for Blog Comments, @ usability blog of John S. Rhodes; So what'd you get? by Ryan Block

Technorati Tags: blog comments   2007 blog   blog traffic   2007 resolution   2007 blogging     popular bloggers   popular comments   top bloggers   Reward-program   return-on-investments

Now faces are not deceptive: Advances in information visualization

Your face is the password!

BANGALORE: Lenovo’s new 3000 Y series notebooks Y300 and Y500 launched today in India have incorporated a unique feature of biometric face recognition technology.

This face recognition technology takes a digital snapshot of the user, extracts key features of the users face and creates a digital map that becomes the system’s “password”. Continue reading the full story @ CyberMedia India Online Ltd. (CIOL)

The face recognition feature is supported by veriface software. The technology recognizes multiple users and logs onto the windows operating system and other applications without requiring users to remember a single password. In the event of an unauthorized attempt, the notebook photographs the user and stores the image in a log for verification.

A visual Newsmap

From News clips, and News in Photos (all static and consuming), and then News in Pictures, and to a far more interactive, dynamic, Web-based streaming and information visualization, is a long trip. But that trip is now over.

Visual Newsmap has all in one click, and its your click
concept

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe. Continue reading or LAUNCH

Visual Search Plus

New E-Commerce Search Engine Ditches the Text, November 10, 2006 7:55AM

Like.com uses face recognition technology; it looks inside a photo and creates a digital signature that describes the photo's content and enables a more accurate search for similar looking items.

Now you can search images... i.e., information visualzation re-vitalized by a Web 2.0's team of Indian Guru: Munjal Shah @ Like.com [PS. riya -- Arabic word for hypocrisy, or ostentation or show-off in a egoistic sense; the following is not that riya, rather this is all-ado-about best practices]

What others say:
"AI is also being used at Riya to find photos by matching on characteristics - density, patterns, colours" says Gwen

"Like.com is from the creators of Riya.com,which in short, is a photo sharing storage system with some smart AI(artificail intelligence). You dump in a thousand plus images in, tag a few, and riya starts to recognize images of people, puts them in groups, and automatically tags them over time. Riya recognizes colors, images, text, faces, and much more. The more people that do this and share their images, the better. Imagine seeing all those pictures of yourself from other peoples cameras during those holiday vacations you walked into!" continue reading @ designverb


More in the news:

Star Search: Shopping Site Uses Visuals ECommerce-Guide, United States - 15 Nov 2006

Click it & Ship it Window shop celebrity styles on Like.com Lowell Sun, MA - 14 Nov 2006

Google vs. Guruji.com - A Desi Perspective on Search Engines Desicritics.org, India - 12 Nov 2006

My previous post:

visualization - ebscohost’s cool new integration of grokker

information visualization at eurekster, a swicki search engine

wheels for google, google on wheels

surf maps: visualising web browsing

dontclick.it - web usability visualized

Searching Is Polarized; Will The Five Laws Get a New Revised Version: Every Search Engine Its Searcher

Technocrati Tags:
Visual search
riya.com
like.com
index images
searching_images

Whirling around the blogosphere to see what's up!

Information Visualization - Web of Idea Nodes

I’d like a 3-d, navigable, web of ideas. Much like TiddlyWiki which is “a non-linear personal web notebook”. Only I’d like my creation to be visual. I want to see the nodes connect, like a mindmap (like FreeMind).

This is a diagram (click for a better, larger real example of the diagram):

Each node in the web would be an idea. The highlighted node would be displayed in full. Linked nodes, depending on their degree from the highlighted node, would display limited information.
Each node would contain:

A title
(eg “Changing Media”)
On all displayed nodes
A summary
(eg “Data decay is accelerating man’s fall from the Golden Age by obscuring the Great Conversation [GC].”)
On nodes directly connected to the highlighted node.
The idea explained in full ...

This is a tool that visualizes semantic categories, in a 3D context--title, summary and explanation.

For a librarian it is all about cataloging the content, viz., title of the document, description of the document, analyzing the content.

While these look-alike, but there is creativity in 3D visualization--are librarians also creative?
PS. I do admit that all librarians are not alike.

Information Visualization [Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]

[Michal Migurski of Stamen]

Data Viz: Why Now?

Because the tools and the audience have caught up.

Starting with Map of the Market from the let nineties. This was inspirational but largely alone. This tree map uses size and color.

Our palette of visualization is pretty sparse.

So why now? ....