Category: Events

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Driving the Dome

For eight weeks every Wednesday, Brett and I snuck away under darkness and rain to the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium to learn how to make a star show. We learned the ins and outs of the planetarium’s computer controls and presented shows for our family and friends on March 30th in the dome. A fellow classmate called it “playing with the biggest toy in New York City.”

Noreen and the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn
Showing the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn

Brett and the Earth's Magnetosphere
Brett and the Earth’s Magnetosphere



The program, Adult Digital Flight School, is a grown up version of a class that the museum’s education department created for school age children. The software, called Uniview Digital Universe, lets you display objects from moons and satellites to planets and galaxies to the large structure of the universe. It also has time and motion controls that allows the user to fly to selected objects and simulate the motion of the objects in space. You can examine the moon as it passes in front of the sun for a solar eclipse or watch the Cassini satellite make its initial 2004 approach of Saturn and then turn up the speed of time and watch ten years of the satellite’s orbits go by in seconds. It’s dizzying and took a lot of patience (and a little Dramamine) to feel in control of the “flight.”

The class structure included time in the classroom developing a program and time in the dome to test out the feel of the controls as your show is projected to the dome. And of course a lot of time at home researching our topic and writing our scripts. Each student selected very different study subjects. My topic as you may have guessed was the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn. Brett studied aurora activity on the Earth and other planets in our solar system and the effect of the magnetosphere and nearby moons on auroras. We learned from our classmates about stellar distances, constellations, near Earth object collision risk, moon tides and life on the International Space Station. We also found out where the Borg live. [Spoiler Alert] Apparently, the S.S. Enterprise could only have traveled within the Milky Way Galaxy. Warp 8 just doesn’t get you very far.

Hayden_PlanetariumAMNH has a public version of the Uniview software that you can download from the Hayden Planetarium website. It was great fun and highly recommended if you ever get the urge to drive the dome.

If you would like to download the script from my exploration of the Cassini-Huygens mission, be my guest.

Update 06/09/2017: The Best of Cassini: 13 Years in Orbit Around Saturn, By Alan Taylor, The Atlantic, June 7, 2017.

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Introducing Decision Fish

Decision Fish: The Art & Science of Decision-Making is a blog with observations and applications from decision science, behavioral economics, finance, cognitive psychology and philosophy, written by my husband, Brett Whysel. The purpose of this blog is to explore applications of these realms to real world decisions.

I have been working with Brett to refine the brand and digital presence and to scout opportunities to connect with the New York City startup community and present our idea for a new kind of decision-making process to be launched in 2016. I plan to offer my expertise in user experience design and cognitive and behavioral science in developing the application. This evening (November 9, 2015), we will be attending the Women’s Startup Challenge at Microsoft to cheer on Aileen Gemma Smith, who will be presenting Vizalytics’ MindMyBiz app.

The blog’s name, Decision Fish, is inspired by the three-spined stickleback, a fish that appears to rely on crowd-sourcing, consensus decision-making.

Gasterosteus aculeatus aculeatus

 

The logo is a fortune-teller fish made of red cellophane whose curling when placed in one’s palm is said to indicate fickleness, passion, jealousy, etc. Of course, our goal will be to help users overcome these weaknesses to make effective decisions.

Brett Whysel is a Decision Analyst, Financial Product Structurer, C-Suite Influencer and Manager with 25 Years’ Capital Markets Experience. Brett is a guest lecturer teaching Cost-Benefit Analysis at City College’s Colin Powell School of Civic and Global Leadership. You can find out more about Brett on LinkedIn.

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State of the Map Bonus: Satellite Selfie

SOTM Satellite Selfie, CartoDB

June 6-8 was OpenStreetMap’s State of the Map Conference at the United Nations. I volunteered at registration and during morning sessions and was able to attend interesting talks on OSM data in Wikipedia, the Red Cross presentation on OSM in disaster response and developing a GIS curriculum in higher education.

One of the highlights was a satellite selfie. Led by a team from DigitalGlobe, a group of about 20 attendees created a large UN-blue circle on the ground and waited for the WorldView 3 and GOI1 satellites to flyover for a routine scan. Orbiting at 15,000 miles per hour about 400 kilometers above Manhattan, the WorldView 3 was expected to take images that would include UN Plaza. The resulting satellite image collected at 11:44am is available on the CartoDB blog (image above), courtesy of CartoDB CEO, Javier de la Torre. Huge thanks to Josh Winer of DigitalGlobe who took time to explain the physics of satellite imagery and kept us entertained while we waited for our not-so-closeup.

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Information Architecture Wikipedia Editathon at IAS15

I am very happy to announce that I will be presenting an Information Architecture Wikipedia Editathon as an interactive session of the Information Architecture Summit, on April 22-26 in Minneapolis.

As an amateur IA historian and keeper of many things IAI for several years, I have decided to go one step further and present my proposal to the WikiProjects committee to create an Information Architecture group at Wikipedia. I was inspired by Christina Wodtke’s Medium article, Towards a New Information Architecture, from just over a year ago, where she urged those of us in the discipline to recommit to IA and the IA Institute, to “look beyond the title people have and instead at the work being done,” and to “Invite the innovators in understanding in, and make them part of Information Architecture.”

This is exactly what I plan to do with your help. Many artifacts from the initial establishment of the Information Architecture Institute, including the “25 Theses,” ASIS&T’s SIG-IA, and the now defunct IAWiki (via archive.org) hold testament to the evolution and collaboration of practice and community over the past 15-20 years. These are artifacts that deserve to be preserved and made discoverable. And what are we if not uniquely skilled to do exactly this?

This is our livelihood. While we have been defining the damned thing within our own, relatively closed community, Wikipedia editors have been labeling our artifacts “stub” to “start” quality and of “low” to “mid-importance.” Years-old, unaddressed criticism of the Information Architecture article on Wikipedia includes the admonishments that we have no academic conferences or publications, that we use “peacock” terms and unverified claims. Much of this can be easily debunked, but a lot of information on these wiki pages should be edited, sections on academic research and proceedings should be added, and more complete cross referencing of IA practitioners and thought leadership should be included, so that these criticisms can be put to rest.

You can help by joining me and supporting my proposal. To do ths follow these steps:

To join the IA WikiProject:

  1. Sign up for a Wikipedia.org account.
  2. Go to the proposal page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Proposals/Information_Architecture
  3. Click “edit” next to the Support section.
  4. Type ~~~~ on new line. (This is Wikipedia’s simple way to add your account name and time stamp.)
  5. Click Save.


Once you have signed on, and even if you are not ready to add your name to the list, you can use the Talk page (a tab at the top left of the proposal page) to add any comments or suggestions for content.

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Upcoming Events: Agency GIS Forum and Brooklyn Technology Transfer

Two upcoming events brought to you by GISMO and OWASP Brooklyn.

 

Agency GIS Forum

GISMO

Thursday, February 5, 2015
100 Church Street
2:30 – 4:30 PM

atelier-digital-world-map

Join us to hear a round of lightning talks given by GIS directors and managers of City agencies. This will be a great opportunity to learn about innovative GIS projects and programs being implemented across municipal government, and to meet with colleagues from other agencies.

GISMO and the Municipal Information Technology Council (MITC) are co-hosting this event. MITC is the organization of City IT professionals. This get together is a unique opportunity to learn about how NYC’s nation leading GIS program is progressing and to have direct contact with the City GIS leadership and staff.

Registration Required

Attendance at this meeting will be by RSVP only and is reserved exclusively for GISMO members*, MITC members and City agency GIS personnel. Please register early as there are a limited number of seats available, and this event will fill up fast!

* GISMO membership means paid dues for the 2014 – 2015 membership year. People on the GISMO mailing list who do not satisfy the above criteria will have to join GISMO and pay their dues in order to attend.

Register at http://www.gismonyc.org/events/next-event/

 

Technology Transfer – Creating Cultures of Innovation

OWASP Brooklyn

Saturday, February 28, 2015
2:00 PM to 6:00 PM

NYU Poly Pfizer Auditorium
5 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY

To attend this event, you must also register on Eventbrite at this URL to get your ticket: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/technology-transfer-creating-cultures-of-innovation-tickets-15406554419

Description: TBD

Facilitator – Moderator: TBD

Speakers:

Zach Tudor, SRI, Author of Technology Transfer: Crossing the “Valley of Death” – his research on Cybersecurity startups will discuss “Creating Cultures of Innovation” Bio: http://www.csl.sri.com/people/tudor/

Professor Nasir Memon, NYU Polytechnic will discuss NYU Poly’s Technology Transfer. Bio: http://isis.poly.edu/memon/

Brett Scharringhausen, USCENTCOM CCJ8-Science & Technology Chief, Discovery & Integration will discuss CENTCOM Requirements.

Ryan Letts, Veterans Advisor, Brooklyn SBDC CityTech will present and discuss SBA research on Veterans Startups in NY.

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NYPL Open Book Hack 2015

For the 2015 edition of the NYPL Open Book Hackathon, I participated with a team that was interested in pulling poetry out of Project Gutenberg and creating a user dialogue with a goal toward creating a custom book of poems, based on user preferences. We started out calling it “Pandora for Poetry,” but settled on Musapaedia to avoid obvious copyright issues.

Screen Shot 2015-01-14 at 3.48.17 PM.png

Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Musapaedia.pdf

With Musapaedia:

User can (possibilities)

  • Upload/enter a poem and get a set of poems in custom e-book or web“experience”

  • Choose a set of attributes and get a set of poems in custom e-book or web“experience”

  • Use up/down vote system to determine what kinds of poems that come up

User Experience:

  • Poem “mood”, color/image changes with type of poem

Since this year’s edition of the hackathon was one day as opposed to two, we had much less time to complete the project than previous years, but we were able to create a sample user interface and code the processes that extract the poems. Our team will continue to work on this and hopefully release a working application soon.

Final code we completed today is on GitHub!

https://github.com/rossgoodwin/musapaedia

Team:

Ross Goodwin Ross.goodwin@gmail.com

Noreen Whysel nwhysel@gmail.com

Vimala Pasupathi vcpasupathi@gmail.com

Clarisa Diaz clarisadiaz@gmail.com

Rike Franklin rikefranklin@gmail.com

Beth Dufford emdufford@gmail

Stephen Klein stepheniklein@gmail.com

 

 

 

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Semiotics in Mapping and Emergency Response

On November 1, 2014 I participated in a Semiotics Web and Information Architecture meetup at New York Public Library. Mypresentation, “Semiotics in Mapping and Emergency Response,” discusses symbology in mapping as an aspect of semiotics and presents an example of emergency response map symbology and a discussion of applications for first responders and broader uses.

Joining me were Loren Davie on Conversational Architecture – http://telltrail.me/ and CAVE language, Laureano Batista who discussed Steps Toward a Pragmatic Philosophy in the Age of Big Data and Neural Networks and Donald Gooden, the NY Chapter Leader of the OWASP Foundation, who spoke about the OWASP.org.

Read a detailed write up of this event by Nathaniel Levisrael at http://scignscape.appspot.com/meeting1-summary

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Conversations with Richard Saul Wurman

I was having a nice conservation on Monday with my friend, journalist Amanda Robb, about topics that floated in interesting ways from pitching social awareness campaigns to women’s magazines to the role of Twitter and other social media in reporting. The conversation got me thinking about the two different angles that we approach our respective careers in media: she with the words and stories and publications of a journalist and me with the technology platforms, codes and administration of new media operations that bring those words to the world.

So what a treat to find out about Richard Saul Wurman’s newest venture, the WWW.WWW Conference, which will celebrate improvised conversation.

Simply pairings of amazingly interesting individuals prompted by a question, generating a conversation. For 10 minutes to 50 minutes. And so it will go

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Finding IA at the Enterprise Search Summit

(this article originally appeared at iainstitute.org on June 20, 2011)

Last month in May, I had the pleasure of attending the Enterprise Search Summit East in New York City with IA Institute board member, Shari Thurow. Shari and I were on a quest to discover the role of information architecture in Enterprise Search. We didn’t have to look too far, as both days were keynoted by IA Institute veterans: former IA Institute president and CEO of FatDux, Eric Reiss, on Day 1 and IA Institute founder and Principal and Senior Consultant at InfoCloud Solutions, Inc., Thomas Vander Wal, on Day 2 . Institute founder Bev Corwin was also in attendance and I quite was pleased to make a personal connection with a former coworker from PricewaterhouseCoopers, whom I hadn’t seen in ten years.

In Reiss’s keynote, “The Dumbing Down of Intelligent Search,” he challenged search professionals to have the user, not the application, serve as the frame of reference for search. Using Google as an example, Eric showed how the algorithm may not provide the correct context. Those who build the algorithm need to ensure that contextual metadata is available in the CMS. Eric also challenged implementers to understand the business and educate the content providers of those needs. “Matching patterns is not the same as matching needs,” he explained. And lest the users themselves forget their own power, Eric encourages all users to be critical and experiment, learn basic strategies and not to take for granted that the search solution is intelligent.

Thomas Vander Wal’s keynote on Day 2, “The Search for Social,” was a fitting bookend, showing how to deal with all the input once your Enterprise Search team has embraced the user. VanderWal described tools that go beyond searching for artifacts such as documents, emails and image/video content to searching for human resources, knowledge and expertise within the enterprise. Many presenters demonstrated social search tools for finding user profiles, activity streams and Yahoo! Answers-style knowledgebases.


A Common Theme

IA/UX was a prominent theme. Throughout the conference we noted terminology from the information architecture/user experience umbrella nestled within discussion of ECM, SEO, text mining, predictive analytics, policy and governance. Terms like information glut, findability, folksonomy, facets, and rich semantics, as well as a big focus on the user experience.

A major concern in the Enterprise Search community is the question of what exactly is new in search these days? Reiss noted that there has been no major new search engine since Google launched in 1998. Google Search Appliance and Microsoft Sharepoint are still dominant. According to a panel of experts moderated by Martin White, called “The Renaissance of Search,” Enterprise Search has been running on autopilot for a long time and is only now finding innovation coming from places like mobile and social technologies. Panelist Alan Pelz-Sharp of Real Story Group said that consolidation around a product (Google, for example) does not equal maturity of a discipline. Panelist Hadley Reynolds of IDC, pointing to the now established mobile platform, said that the Google model is not ideal for mobile apps. For example, “A playlist model would work better for mobile search applications,” he said. Innovative thinking around search for mobile should be a growth area.

As stated above, user experience was a huge theme at the conference. Panelist Lynda Moulton of The Gilbane Group highlighted improvement in user experience as a major new effort in Enterprise Search. She said that semantic technologies have been built on artificial intelligence platforms and wondered if it will “disappear like AI” or if they just need better UX packaging.

Focus on the user was refreshing but also pointed to a challenge. A theme I found running through many presentations was the sense that after 15 years, the Enterprise Search field is not marketing itself well as a discipline, both to business management and to the users themselves who benefit from search. Search managers feel they have to continually explain the value of search to users, which ”