Offloading and evolution

I just finished reading Carl Zimmer’s very fine book Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea; which is a great introduction to the topic and covers a lot of ground, from Darwin’s life aboard the Beagle to host-bacteria arms races (stop having antibiotics, people!) to man-caused mass extinctions to whales with legs to the invention of [...]

Fun with representations VI - Sharing the load

In Cognition in the Wild, a book I’ll be coming back to later and often in this blog, Ed Hutchins expands on an observation by Herbert Simon, who said that the complicated movements and trajectories of an ant on the beach tell us more about the beach than about the ant.
Simon was emphasizing the importance [...]

Ben Shneiderman on Creativity and Visualization

Ben Shneiderman, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab and author of Leonardo’s Laptop, gave a talk at Ryerson University yesterday and at the University of Toronto today, on two different topics:
At Ryerson he talked about creativity support tools. I was a bit frustrated by his approach to the topic: the creativity [...]

Fun with representations V - Maps of the abstract world

Representing information means mapping it into a particular medium –focusing on certain elements of the original data, ignoring the irrelevant ones, and, ideally, simplifying the process of understanding and using it. Unfortunately, our resulting information ‘maps’ are sometimes inappropriate: they may be ambiguous, unintuitive, or downright misleading. To illustrate what I mean, here are some [...]

Syntax is not sugar

Let’s say we’re representing some information visually with a standard directed graph. We have four nodes (B, C, D, and E) all pointing to another one (A). We have several choices to display the graph. Here are two:
[...]

Fun with representations IV - Chaotic libraries

Alright, moving on with the representation series! This time I’ll start with an old puzzle that I, by coincidence, got from Steve Easterbrook and, separately, from Angelika Mader in Dagstuhl with a couple of weeks’ difference.
We have an 8 by 8 grid such as the one in the picture. We also have rectangular tiles that [...]

Fun with representations III - Hidden in plain sight

A while back, as part of a series of fascinating studies of perception in chess, Simon and Chase showed a chessboard to people with several degrees of chess expertise, for very brief moments, and asked them to reproduce the position of the pieces in the board they saw, using a second board and set of [...]

Fun with representations II - Where is the train going?

Continuing with the last post’s discussion, right now we’re in the business of finding out why are some representations better than others. As a warm-up, then, let’s try to figure out the following:
Which of these representations of geographical data is better?
a) A map of the northeast of the American continent?

b) A city-to-city distance table of [...]

Fun with representations I - Nine numbers

Here’s a two-player game for you to try out:
You need nine cards, numbered 1 to 9. You and your opponent take turns picking cards -each card can only be picked once. The first player with three cards that add up to 15 wins the game.

Before you keep reading, it’s best if you give it a [...]