http://www.nickdiakopoulos.com Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:15:14 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Inspired by the recent Design for America contest, I've been advancing the notion of Game-y Information Graphics with Rutgers Ph.D. student Funda Kivran-Swaine.  Using data published by the HHS Community Health Data Initiative we designed a game-y info graphic called Salubrious Nation. The idea is pretty simple really: we're exploring ... http://www.nickdiakopoulos.com/?p=152 In the last couple of years Mechanical Turk has gained more and more traction as a tool for doing HCI work, from Kittur et al's seminal paper in 2008, to papers this year looking at crowdsourcing visual perception studies and at assessing worker quality. In fact there seem to be ... http://www.nickdiakopoulos.com/?p=148 Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Open Government Workshop at Princeton University. The three main topics on the table were defining, designing, and sustaining transparency in government: all important aspects of fleshing out the Obama rhetoric of an open government especially as the technologists struggle to make ... http://www.nickdiakopoulos.com/?p=128 Much of my prior work in the field computational journalism has focused on building tools that could either be used by journalists or readers in their respective capacities as information producers or consumers.  And the recent Duke CJ Report heavily emphasized the role of computation in informing discovery tools to ... http://www.nickdiakopoulos.com/?p=120 No this post isn't about some kind of military tacit or even a chess strategy. It's about what PhD defenses are like in Norway, which I thought was interesting since they're so different than in the U.S. A few weeks ago I had the chance to attend a PhD defense. It's ... http://www.nickdiakopoulos.com/?p=96 This past summer I had the opportunity to be embedded in the newsroom of the Sacramento Bee as a AAAS Mass Media Fellow. The AAAS places a number of scientists and engineers at mass media outlets every summer to help promote the communication of science with the general public. I got ... http://www.nickdiakopoulos.com/?p=95 There are just two countries in the world where Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) advertising is allowed for pharmaceuticals: the US and New Zealand. The ostensible motivation? To educate consumers, to raise awareness of medical conditions, to get people talking to their doctors, or to reduce the stigma associated with certain conditions (e.g. ... http://www.nickdiakopoulos.com/?p=93 Last year I volunteer taught some salsa classes with my girlfriend, Kat, at the Georgia Tech Salsa Club. What we found was that one of the hardest parts of picking up salsa for many beginners is hearing the beats in the music. Of course there are other hard things about ... http://www.nickdiakopoulos.com/?p=92 How are people interacting in news games? What kinds of decisions are they making? And what game elements and relationships are players most interested in? These are the types of questions that an observant journalist might answer, or at least pose, if they began to think of games as informal ... http://www.nickdiakopoulos.com/?p=91 Games and Journalism both evoke their own cultural images; the Ramen and Dorito stained gamer on one hand and the hard nosed, gum shoe journalist on the other. It's not immediately obvious that oil and water can mix, nor am I going to argue that they should. But there are ... http://www.nickdiakopoulos.com/?p=90