The Math of Text Readability

The Math of Text Readability: “An anonymous reader writes ‘Wired magazine has an article that explains The Law of Optical Volumes, a formula for spacing the letters on a printed page that results in maximum readability. Wired’s new logo (did anyone notice?) obeys the law. Unfortunately, Web fonts don’t allow custom kerning pairs, so you can’t work the same magic online as in print. Could this be why some people still prefer newspapers and magazines to the Web?

From Underwire‘s article “Law of Optical Volumes: The Math Behind Wired’s New Logo“:
:”’The same goes for Wired’s new logo”’. It alternates between letters without and with serifs, yet the area between each pair of letters is about the same, thanks to the serifs on the I and E and lack thereof on the W, R and D. This equivalence makes the logo easier to see and read across a crowded supermarket aisle. The alternating fonts also make the letters seem to blink on and off as you read them from left to right, in emulation of digital ones and zeroes.

The story also refers to typography guru Jonathan Hoefler. You can see Hoefler’s work at typography.com.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Via Slashdot.)

Second Life To Open Source Server Code

Slashdot writes: Second Life To Open Source Server Code. This is an ”’excellent step! And ”’resonating with my [http://wiki.aardrock.com/LandONE LandONE]”’ perspective:
:LandONE also results in a flurry of new and serious multi-user games, to be played on-line, on game consoles, mobile phones and media centers. These games leverage the successes of games like The Sims, World of Warcraft and ”’Second Life”’ to the next level as well.
:During the first two years the game scripts are developed and implemented. For the first time in history, game providers (Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft) work together in a co-opetitive way to make sure gamers on each proprietary platform can talk to each other, and form tribes, mobs and communities.
:Game rules mirror the real socio-eco-political rules that govern LandONE, thereby making it a very serious game, a learning environment for potential citizens well as for game rule designers. As a result, game players are excellent candidates to actually migrate LandONE as soon as they have reached a certain level.
:These serious games are a journey through The Membrane. Players get used to the specifics of LandONE, like the gift economy, ”’social credit”’, ”’holacracy”’, etc. LandONE games beat online games like World of Warcraft by orders of magnitude and create wave of goodness flushing over our Earth.
:The competitive and collaborative aspects of these games are excellent inputs to exciting TV series, involving billions of eyeballs globally.
:Also, the concept or format of LandONE and its derivations can be sold to other media companies resulting in another major healing revenue stream.

Second Life To Open Source Server Code: “mrspin writes ‘Having already taken the timid steps of open-sourcing the code for its client software, Linden Lab has confirmed that they’ll be going the whole way, and will soon be opening up the server code for Second Life. This furthers Second Life’s ambitions to be a fully distributed 3D network — built on interoperability and not owned by one company — a bit like the Internet itself. ZDNet’s The Social Web asks: ‘who will be the first to offer Second Life hosting or use the server code for their own internal purposes? IBM would be an obvious candidate, perhaps offering corporate Second Life services. And for the rest of us? GoogleLife, free virtual land — ad supported of course. It’s certainly a possibility.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Via Slashdot.)

De macht van de massa

Ode ziet het Wiki-licht:
:Van de andersglobalisten tot de Wikipedianen: zelforganisatie is het sleutelwoord. Niet doen wat je wordt opgedragen, maar doen wat je kan en wil bijdragen – voor een groter geheel. Marco Visscher beschrijft de opkomende participerende cultuur.

[http://aloha.aardrock.com Aloha] is op de goede weg met haar Wiki voor het schrijven van een schitterend boek.

Apple to design for diabetics


Amy Tenderich writes about iPod design for diabetes care:
:Why, oh why, do consumers everywhere get the most “insanely great” little MP3 player, while we whose lives depend on medical devices get the clunky stuff of yesteryear?

”’Excellent idea Amy!”’ Sure hope that Steve bites. And while at it, diabetes software can use an upgrade as well.

Reminds me of ”’Cheetah”’: First half of 2006 a small team of students have been working on Cheetah—a fully distributed self-learning (smart) peer-to-peer community-based diabetes open source software system.

Oh, how nice it would be for my daughter with diabetes to have the two “marry”.

See:
http://wiki.aardrock.com/Cheetah_Project_Proposal
http://wiki.aardrock.com/Cheetah_Work_Space

Luis von Ahn—Smart Games—Smart Software

Article in Automatiseringgids on [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/ Luis von Ahn]’s [http://www.espgame.org/ ESP Game]—a.k.a. the [http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/ Google Image Labeler]—to smart tag images by human swarms.

Ahn also created the spam-avoiding [http://www.captcha.net/news/ai.html Captcha].

Thank you very much Luis!

Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! Now Support GeoRSS

Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! Now Support GeoRSS: “Lord Satri writes ‘This week, Microsoft announced their new Live Maps, in addition to supporting Firefox on Windows for 3D, now supports the GeoRSS standard. They join Google which recently announced the support of GeoRSS and KML mapping in their Google Maps API.

In short, GeoRSS is a standard supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium that incorporates ”’geolocation in an interoperable manner to RSS feeds”’. The applications are numerous. With Yahoo!’s support of GeoRSS, all the major players are in and the future looks bright for this emerging standard.

As for KML, Google Earth’s file format, this new Google Maps integration is not unrelated to the recent announcement of internet-wide KML search capabilities within Google Earth.

From the GeoRSS website: ‘As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds. To ”’avoid the fragmentation of language”’ that has occurred in RSS and other Web information encoding efforts, we have created this site to promote a relatively small number of encodings that meet the needs of a wide range of communities.’

(Via Slashdot.)

What’s next: PeopleRSS—a standard that incorporates personal information as well as group, team, department, company information. Or communities in general, a singel perseon being the smallest community. Add a touch of ProjectRSS and EventRSS and voilà, peer-to-peer fully distributed open mirrorworlds.

Holacracy and chaorganization on votes

As a member of the Identity Commons mailing list for several years now I find many of the organizational conversations very interesting. Especially the dialogs on principles, articles, bylaws, organization, etc.

I feel compelled to contribute in some way, but force myself not to for the simple reason that I know that I cannot sustain the level of contribution that the IC needs. And I must set and keep these expectations right in order not to disappoint either of us. Please forgive me for that.

Anyway, Eugene’s (again excellent) summary on last week’s (3/28/2007) call mentioned the subject of voting again. This triggered me to send them this article on Holacracy from Drian J. Robertson from the Cutter Consortium. You probably already know about it, but I just want to make sure you wouldn’t miss it.

Please allow me to quote from page 12:

:”’On votes”’
:Another common question is about the “possible votes” in integrative decision making. At first it can sound like there are two possible votes on a proposed decision—”consent” or “object”—though that’s missing a key point. ”’Consent isn’t about “votes”at all”’; the idea of a vote doesn’t make sense in the context of consent. ”’There are no votes, and people do not vote.”’
: People do say whether they know of ”’a reason why the proposed decision is outside the limits of tolerance of any aspect of the system”’, and then decision making continues to ”’integrate that new information”’. This isn’t the same as most consensus-based processes—either in theory or in practice—although it does sound similar at first, especially before an actual meeting that seeks consent is witnessed.

Thoughts?