Still have a lot of work to do on the site as a whole (including the blog), but at least we're in our new home -- ready to paint the walls and unpack the boxes.

Cell T-Shirt

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The idea came from long-time sponsor of GalaxyGoo, Chocolate Covered (on 24th Street, San Francisco). They generously donate chocolate to our events.

Basically, existing bars will be given our packaging. The chocolate will be available by special order.

What:
Artist/Scientist Julian Voss-Andreae will give a slide presentation titled "Protein Sculptures: Life's Building Blocks Inspire Art" at a public meeting of YLEM, a group of artists using science and technology.

When:
Wednesday, May 10, 2006 at 7.30pm

Where:
RX Gallery and Bar (21 and over)
132 Eddy St. , San Francisco , CA 94102
Two blocks from Powell St. BART Station. Suggested donation sliding scale $5-10.

Information from the event flyer follows...

For information on confirmed cases of avian influenza: WHO.

These Seven Donor Newsletter Flaws Are Killing You

I would argue not to go too far with these issues, though. While you shouldn't just throw statistics and charts into a newsletter, they can be used effectively to communicate important information. They should illustrate a point you're trying to make. But if it's just filler, put in a pretty picture instead.

I'm not the only one who appreciates their work. Rob Simmon (of NASA GSFC) just emailed me that they're up for two Webbys. Two! Congratulations!

Science category: NASA Ozone Hole Watch

Education category: NASA's Earth Observatory

They've got some tough competition in their categories (Education and Science). I was especially impressed with the BBC Springwatch for their mobile data collection and use of Flash to display data.

You can add your vote to the Webby Awards: People's Voice

Globular data is more challenging to work with. An example of globular data would be mathematical notation and MathML . Why globular? The term came into my vocabulary in molecular biology classes, when describing protein shapes. When thinking about data, a path through the data bends and folds back on itself just like a strand of globular protein. Rendering this data requires multiple passes through the schema and recursive loops.

I also see data as having fluid mobility, when handled properly. A catch-phrase to describe this would be "client-side logic" for rendering data. Like water, the data takes the shape of the container that holds it. This could be a database, with each data point in it's own little compartment of an ice-cube tray. With a query, I can melt many cubes, use client-side logic, and combine them into a comfortable view for the user interface. The same data set can be used to create many different views and can be collected from many different inputs. Data flows in, data flows out.

Yes, the sessions were good, but it's really the people who make a conference. It was great to meet up with old friends, and to make wonderful new friends....just too many to list in a blog post. Two new and very dear friends (Mario and Alexandra) were so much fun throughout the conference. It was all such a whirl-wind that I didn't get to spend enough time with lots of people, especially Stacey and Ann-Marie. Robert, Keith, Aral, Simon...the list goes on and on. Really great people.

I had to tend to business as well, and may have a new sponsor for GalaxyGoo. I also got some good advice on the book-writing front, including the possibility of developing courses or workshops.

Even on the flight home, the conversations continued. Paul Ortchanian and I talked for a good portion of the flight. He's now based in San Francisco, but we'd never met before.

I can hardly wait for the next FITC.

With a pirate store! Yep, that's right, they run a store full of eye patches and pirate hats to fund their literacy projects.

For years now, while making small-talk at parties, the pirate store comes up almost every time the nature of my work is mentioned. The first time I heard of 826 Valencia and The Pirate Shop, was at a conference for non-profits. It was a session on the emerging earned income strategy, in the world of dwindling traditional funding sources. The whole idea of a store selling pirate-themed toys to support a program was crazy and brilliant. It works! Can it be duplicated? Maybe not, but it can inspire new ideas.

The key is to connect something that people want with something they want to support -- make it easier to satisfy the drive to "do good". Along these lines, I've been looking for things GalaxyGoo could offer to the feel-good market space.

This past November, we organized an amazing art show with works inspired by math and science. It was a successful show, but didn't raise a large amount of money or stir up a buzz in the local media. Why? I think that perhaps the ticket price on most of the pieces was outside the budget of our community of supporters. The Pirate Store is filled with inexpensive items, and they sell a lot of them.

But why no media buzz? Maybe we need to work on a smaller scale and get people more familiar and comfortable with the intersection of art and science. Reach out with something that they can hold onto. One thing we could do is to offer appealing products through services like lulu.com and cafepress.com.

I'm really looking forward to this conference. I'm especially hoping to meet up with people who are active or interested in the OSFlash movement. Be sure to introduce yourselves! My talk is at 10:15 am on Saturday, in Pier 2 & 3, and is titled Beyond Usability: Building Meaningful Learning Applications.

I'd only been there for a few minutes when I spotted the new pop-up book by Sabuda and Reinhart: Encyclopedia Prehistorica Sharks and Other Sea Monsters: The Definitive Pop-Up.

This book is fantastic! I thought the dinosaur pop-up was great, but I have to say that this one is even better. It's as if they really let their creativity free. They've even incorporated some see-through plastic or mylar (I'm not sure what the material is) into the pop-ups, to give the impression that you're looking through water. Very cool!

This image shows the topography of the region using data from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. Several faults, including the San Andreas, are clearly indicated. As you can see, the fault does not actually go through San Francisco, but just to the west of it.

The talk went ok, but it was in a very big room with few people in it. As a speaker, this is an uncomfortable setting. It's difficult to connect with an audience that is so spread out.

The fun part, for me, was after the talk when I got to see how some of the NASA images are prepared. I also had an expansion of my mental model of data. In my experience, both in scientific research and database programming, data comes in discrete packets or data points and text fields. To me, data is fluid and can travel from container to container. As with water, the data can take the shape of the container that holds it. With the satellite data I was shown, however, the visual image is a representation of a very large set of data points. I still think the NASA data is fluid, it just needs much bigger containers than most of the data I usually work with.

Next stop: Toronto for FITC