Unfounded statement: Cop shows are not good for anyone.
Not even people training to become cops, I’d hazard a guess.
There – I said it. I don’t even have proof. Bite me. Continue reading
what's on telly? Oh, I'll tell you what's on telly…
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Category Archives: Media
Arise : afromedia that works
Afromedia, my pet name for all types of media that claim to have an afro-centric slant, has been a growing phenomenon. It’s been a bit of a slow cooker though; some instances of afromedia just leave you cringeing… because it’s usually over the top, overdone, too self-conscious or worse: reinforces the same unhelpful stereotypes that it seeks to dismantle.
So when I picked up Arise, the big glossy new mag I stumbled upon in Chapters/Indigo the other day, I didn’t know what to expect. It could’ve gone either way. But you know what? This US-based, Nigeria / South-Africa / UK cross-production actually works. And I’m not the only one who thinks so: it apparently won ’launch of the year’ at the APA awards… Continue reading
In which 'the tinuum' may have been confused with a well-researched source…
Imagine my surprise when I logged in to my admin console to today, only to find a pingback from evidencematters.org*, in which some government-backed(?) pdf about futuristic jobs supposedly (for I can find no proof of this in the pdf) points at my own tongue-in-cheek spoutings about ‘Jobs for Futurists’. Certainly would explain the mild google keyword spike. Continue reading
Running scared of 'Precious'?
I don’t know why I’m writing this now, having seen this movie yonks ago… but I was recently thinking about it so I might as well post my thoughts.
The trailer for Precious hides little, and I find that more than a few people have been put off seeing it at all, possibly because of:
1) fear of finding themselves embarassed (yet again) for black people everywhere and
2) fear of witnessing the ‘sanctity of motherhood‘ myth smashed to smithereens. (By a tv set, no less).
The corp and the customer (a clueful resistance)
I came across this old cluetrain manifesto today and it got me thinking. Reading through their (read-only, therefore never-updated?) page, I came to the conclusion that while I could certainly get behind what they were saying, the article assumed that corporations (along with their marketing and sales departments) should /could evolve better ways of communicating with us.
In other words, joe and jane bloggs off the street would like to be treated like humans, if you please… not a bunch of empty statistics or exploitable demographics. Hmm. Well, here’s the first problem right off the bat when appealing to businesses / corporations in this way:
"Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters"
Every once in a while I bump into a certain article (How to Write About Africa), and I recently got pinged with the url to yet another reincarnation of it… I’m taking this as a sign that I should finally blog about this topic…
Now I could get squished by the sheer weight of the entire topic, so instead I’m just going to nibble at the edges of it and leave the heavy lifting to the masters like Binyavanga Wainaina (the original author, pictured at left). Here goes…
District9 vs the 'America under attack' meme
I haven’t seen district 9, [update: saw it, loved it, a bit gappy in backstory but no matter]… but just the fact that it’s NOT set in america is going to be a breath of fresh air… Continue reading
Top 10 annoyances with TV News broadcasts
I’m finding it harder and harder to watch the news on TV. Is it just me or are a lot of the programs devolving into a half-hour or more of deeply unsatisfying reportage? Here’s my personal top 10 list of bugbears… Continue reading
I found my old DMA portfolio…
…while moving! Though I dunno where the hardcopy is right now. But this was a design I came up with for a print portfolio. The recurring motif is from a pseudo-mandala / self-similar thingy I doodled during my wilderness years (in Sarawak, of all places). I call it ‘speciation’ and it was the only decent graphic I had to hand so I re-traced it in illustrator and colored it. Came out okay, methinks… Continue reading
Visualisation of large datasets
Go to http://visualcomplexity.com and check out a rather interesting collection of images based on large / hierarchical data sets. Pretty neat, huh?
None of us can hold thousands of variables in our heads and not get confused. So, with some creative imagery, we can tackle monstrous datasets by offloading some of the information processing to visual centers in the brain, allowing us to grasp the overall structure of the system we’re looking at.
A lot of the ‘radial’ looking graphs are done by mapping hierarchical tree-format data to the unit hyperbolic disc. It is one of my favourite visualisation methods because it lends itself to more user-friendly methods of browsing data – panning zooming and scanning.
With obvious uses in GIS-related (mapping and earth sciences) and biological sciences (think genomics) , visualisation of complex datasets has taken off in lots of other fields – the VC site lists “knowledge networks” as it’s biggest category!