Motel Kids

Last night's 60 Minutes presented a heartbreaking reminder of how the Great Recession has hurt those who can least protect themselves. Scott Palley's story crystalizes just how bad things have gotten with a report on Florida families forced to live in motels and with neighbors after losing (nearly) everything in today's economic doldrums. I know it's a cliche, but this piece will draw tears. And it will inspire hope. Seriously, you've got to see this: Hard times generation: Homeless kids

Praise for Prezi

Thanks to a tip from Justin Lloyd, I've recently started playing with a web-based presentation tool called Prezi. It's a relatively new app created by a Budapest-based startup that, since its 2007 launch, has grabbed the attention of folks who are frustrated with the limitations of traditional presentation software. If you give talks - in academic settings, corporate venues, wherever - you should take a look at Prezi. Here's why:

Traditional presentation software (I'm a sucker for Keynote, but I also used PowerPoint for years) is organized around the slide. You can think about the larger narrative, and there are many ways to connect slides to broader themes, but the slide view seems to inspire a sort of silo approach toward information: "This slide contains these facts; that slide contains those facts. Let's look at them one at a time."



In contrast, Prezi allows me to put all the information on one broad canvas, enabling audience members to see how all the pieces fit together. Additionally I can inspire retention by displaying information spatially as well as chronologically. Doing so, I can prioritize information through the depiction of physical scale not easily replicated with traditional presentation software.

Sure, PowerPoint allows me to display a headline for main ideas and smaller sized font for secondary points. But Prezi allows me to create informational groups and the zoom out to show surprising connections or zoom in to reveal details. This malleable "big picture view" helps audience members grasp the whole without getting bogged down by the parts.

Best of all, while I can use Prezi to create a path from node to node (zooming into and out of the canvas as needed) I can also click anywhere I choose, reorganizing the narrative on the fly. So if an audience member wants me to return to a particular point, I can reorganize the flow of ideas to accommodate the impromptu need.

Prezi is really cool, but it's hardly perfect. The "zebra" interface takes some adjustment, and the choice of fonts and features is relatively limited when compared to PowerPoint or Keynote. Oh, and the Flash-based app can occasionally glitch up on you, requiring some patience and even an occasional restart during Prezi-creation (no problems during delivery, though, thank goodness). Yet whether you're using the desktop or web-based version, you're sure to find that Prezi inspires new ideas about making presentations flow.

The pricing structure feels about right - with free options and educator-discount options available. I went ahead and splurged on the pro version, and I'm glad I did. So take a look at Prezi - and see whether it helps you rethink your next presentation.

Cityville Update

J.P. Mangalindan has written an interesting article about Zynga's Cityville phenomenon by interviewing Yick Kai Chan, the architect hired to help design the game's buildings. As you'd imagine, this fellow faces some bewildering constraints when trying simulate a complex and dynamic urban environment on a computer screen:

"It's about exaggerating the important real-world elements, blowing up the gestalt of the building, like a caricature artist would do when drawing people."

With an estimated 95 million monthly active users (a drop from a recent high of around 100 million) Cityville continues to draw attention for its clever intersection of fauxcale and easy altruism.

Read the entire article: Meet CityVille's Frank Gehry

BTW, here's the current iteration of my city. It's change a lot since I first wrote about this game.

In Praise of the Tourist Trap

Recently a Facebook pal (Michael Hirsch) shared Jeffrey Tucker's blogpost entitled "In Praise of the Tourist Trap." This is one of those essays that grabbed me from the start. I found myself notating phrases from each paragraph until I realized that I must share the whole thing.

Tucker's essay, as the title indicates, recommends that critics of the built environment complain a little less about the ersatz nature of modern places and focus a little more on the pleasures they offer. We may all be tourists in our own worlds, and the fauxcales we inhabit may indeed be fake. Yet we suffer a myopic loss when we fail to account for the momentary smiles they inspire. Thus:

"In the airport, you can stand in one spot and choose to walk twenty feet in any direction and find yourself in a Spanish or Thai restaurant, or grab a book from a literary looking place, or have a Starbucks, or eat a decadent cinnamon roll, or pretend to be on Savile Row at a high end men’s store, or perhaps get a massage or toss down a martini or two, trying on the high life for as long as it lasts."

The alternative, Tucker proposes, is a kind of Bauhausian sterility reminiscent of a DMV office. From this perspective the divide sets bureaucratic functionalism against corporate boosterism. Yet more importantly, the debate calls to mind a question of authenticity.

We presume some value to experiencing things "as they really are" - but what precisely does that mean? Just because a cheesy Texas 10-gallon hat found at a DFW gift shop might force an embarrassed grimace, must we therefore conclude that this ephemeral piece of consumable culture is necessarily less meaningful than a memento earned through some supposedly more authentic encounter with culture? Does dust make it real? Sweat? Pain?

Perhaps the definition of authenticity resides in discursive construction rather than ontological meaning. Put more directly, authenticity might just be a matter of taste.

Read Tucker's post: In Praise of the Tourist Trap

Punctuation as Culture

Thank goodness for Pico Iyer's essay, "In praise of the humble comma." Here's a quote:

"A world that has only periods is a world without inflections. It is a world without shade. It has a music without sharps and flats. It is a martial music. It has a jackboot rhythm. Words cannot bend and curve. A comma, by comparison, catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table."

I can add nothing, but this: Read it twice.

In praise of the humble comma

Don't like your review? It's time to sue!

I'm gobsmacked.

An Israeli lecturer named Karin N. Calvo-Goller is suing a German law professor named Thomas Weigend for his temerity to pen a less than glowing review of her book, The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court. Calvo-Goller is also suing the book U.S. review editor for not taking down the offending evaluation.

Writing in the New York Times Adam Liptak crystalizes the craziness: "France is an odd place to adjudicate a claim concerning a review written in English by a German professor of a book written in English by an author living in Israel. The book was, moreover, published by a Dutch firm. The review was published on a Web site in New York. True, Ms. Calvo-Goller is a French citizen. But still."

The French court that accepted the case will announce its verdict on March 3.

Read the NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/us/22bar.html

Toy Worlds

Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, CA

I spent a bit of time this weekend tweaking my skills at producing tilt-shift photography effects via Photoshop. Using Receding Hairline's Fake Model Photography tips, I experimented with various settings until I began to gain some confidence in my technique.

Las Vegas, NV

Tilt-shift photography stems from a mechanical process available to users of certain kinds of cameras. It's often employed to ensure that parallel lines in the real world do not converge in the camera lens (a well known problem to anyone who has dabbled in architectural photography). A related effect of this technique is the ability to produce extremely shallow depth of field.

Reno, NV

With some practice, a photographer can create delightfully miniature-looking scenes using an optical or software-based tilt-shift effect, as if the viewer is looking down upon a child's diorama. Given my fascination of that sort of thing, I've been hoping for the opportunity to figure out this process. After plenty of false starts I think I'm getting the hang of it.

Ocean Speedway, Watsonville, CA

These images come from my archives, but my next goal is to shoot some new photos with tilt-shift technique in mind. I'll search for overhead shots that possess interesting foreground, middleground, and background elements - yet aren't too busy with detail. Natural views can work, but I think that human-made scenes are better for the ideal "toy world" effect. Check back for updates!

West Edmonton Mall, Edmonton, Canada

Follow-up: Here's my first attempt at setting up a tilt-shift. I took this from the top of the Fourth Street Garage in San Jose. I'm not sure I've got the effect quite right, but I like the direction that this image takes me...

San Jose, CA

(Photographs by Andrew Wood)