§ : stemstudious

A lens for stem

[stemstudious]

"All Black Everything: A Brooklyn Nets Style Guide" by Alicia DeSantis New York Times (September 26, 2012)

I realize it's probably not kosher to go after an infographic on STEM grounds when it's buried in the Style section of a newspaper site. Buuuuut I will mention one little thing about this Times interactive that deconstructs (pretty well, IMO) the new Nets logo...

The bottom caption describes the typography used on old subway roll signs that were hand-cranked. (Most of these have been phased out of New York City transit, although you occasionally see them). If you look at the image of the roll sign in the infographic, you'll notice that each station name is listed twice -- first right-side up, and then, two lines later, upside-down.

If you imagine the sign as a belt that loops around a set of rollers, you'll understand why. But I would have liked the designer to have taken a stab at illustrating this. How do you show (in one tiny graphic) that the sign has two "faces" (interior and exterior). It's not that easy...and perhaps it's unnecessary. But at the very least I would have animated this particular image. Instead of showing the sign as a flat, static rectangle, why not let the words scroll down and back around in the same herky-jerky, hand-cranked fashion they did when the Dodgers were still in town?

[stemstudious]

Digital Dinosaur: Dryptosaurus A Kickstarter project by paleoartist Tyler Keillor

Textbooks often include sidebars or features about careers as a way to sell the career-readiness angle. (Here's a typical example from McGraw-Hill.)

It's an idea with good intentions, but I'm not sure of the payoff from the student's point of view. Let's say I'm a kid who can't figure out where iodine is on the periodic table. Do I really care what a cosmetic chemist's career prospects are?

So how could you reboot this idea? Instead of pulling back to give a broad overview of a career, you could zero in on a project. Instead of assigning a generic sidebar feature to read, you take the learner straight to a Kickstarter or a Petridish project page, or better yet straight to the project owner.

Many of these projects have a built-in learning experience, so I could see project owners licensing it to schools as content, in exchange for a pledge: "If you pledge X amount of dollars, I'll do a Skype chat with classrooms in your district so they can see the kind of work I do, how the project is going, the data I'm getting, etc."

How do you model a dryptosaurus from a partial fossil skeleton? No idea, but I'm sure this guy could tell you -- and I think a lot of kids would want to listen.

[stemstudious]

"Where the Heat and Thunder Hit Their Shots" Analytics by Kirk Goldsberry Design by Goldsberry, Jeremy White, Joe Ward, and Matthew Ericson New York Times (June 12, 2012) 

I missed this when it first came out on NYTimes.com -- an interactive adapted from the data visualizations that Goldsberry publishes on his CourtVision site. (Cool stuff if you're into hoops analytics.)

Screen caps from the "shot map" for James Harden are posted above. There's some nifty interaction design here; you start with a hexagonally pixelated image of the player, and once you scroll over it the pixels disperse into the player's shot-mapping data.

Each hexagon on the map represents shot volume; the greater its area, the more shots taken from that location of the court. If you scroll over any hexagon, you can see the total number of attempts and the total points scored. Highest points-per-shot values are coded in red; the lowest are in green.

Above each map you get the aggregate data; below, you get a brief here's-what-the-data-means analysis. Overall, a slick and fun design that conveys a lot of analytics data without being overwhelming. 

But the color-coding of the data markers seems a little off. You might recognize the map's color palette from a standard weather map (red means "hot temperature," i.e., a "hot hand"; yellow and green denote "cooler" areas).

So the dark green is equivalent to "Dude is throwing up bricks." I'm not sure the color does the data justice. I mean, if you throw up five bricks in a row, your shot is ice cold. 

Cold as...cyan? Aqua? Blue ice, maybe. But not green. Green, after all, means "money."

[stemstudious]

Curvy, slightly creepy, and occasionally vertigo-inducing sandstone walls at Upper Antelope Canyon.

Six bucks to park in the lot, and another forty for a ride on the back of a pickup truck plus a guided tour that lasts an hour and a half. Crowded, rushed, claustrophobic -- but worth it.

How much would it cost to create a 3-D map of the canyon and a flood simulation that allows you to see (1) how fast the water rises during a flash flood and (2) a time-lapse animation of how erosion will alter the shape of the canyon over the next hundred thousand years?

Not sure, but it would probably be worth it.

[stemstudious]

Fifty Years of Exploration* by Sean McNaughton and Samuel Velasco National Geographic (2009) ↬ Explore

Speculative remix potential: how about hire Margot Trudell to merge this with OMG Space (which is to scale)?

-- *images not to scale 

[stemstudious]

"Solidaga vigaurea, Helianthus annuus, Paeonia lactiflora (Chinese), Citrus × limon" by Louisa Howard Dartmouth College Electron Microscopy Facility

That spiky one in the middle -- the cause of all my misery today.

[stemstudious]

Wonderful Life with the Elements: The Periodic Table Personified by Bunpei Yorifuji (No Starch Press, 2012) ↬ Laughing Squid

Cute idea -- each element drawn as a unique character -- but I'm not crazy about turning cross sections into charts and graphs. The two charts at bottom right show composition data for Earth's crust and seawater, but the illustrations are weakened by two misconceptions: (1) that each element is found in pure form, and (2) that each layer in the "stack" has uniform composition. A lot of kids would come away from these charts thinking that somewhere in the middle of the Earth's crust is a layer of pure silicon.

I still like cute. But I like clarity better.

[stemstudious]

"The Deadly Tin Inside Your Smartphone" by Cam Simpson Businessweek (August 23, 2012) Photograph by Kemal Jufri ↬ The Verge

In recent years about one-third of all the tin mined in the world has come from Bangka, its sister island Belitung to the east, and the seabeds off the islands’ shores. Because almost half of all tin is turned into solder for the electronics industry, a dominant force in the global tin market today is tablets and smartphones bought by consumers in the U.S. and elsewhere.

This is a good example of how regulations governing one raw material (lead) have pushed a boom (with obligatory trade-offs) for another (tin) -- and how you can tie it to something that your students use every day. In K-12 we're required to teach properties of matter, but we don't always talk about the consequences of demand for the more desirable properties. 

Article includes a 9 minute video, photo slideshow of illegal mines in Indonesia, and charts and tables on tin and its uses. 

Some follow-up resources on tin and solder:

Minerals Commodities Summaries: Tin (2012) by USGS; includes data on production, reserves, recycling.

Minerals Yearbook: Tin (2010) by USGS; more in-depth statistics.

Lead-free Electronics Reliability (August 2011) by Aerospace Corporation; a presentation to NASA that covers history, trends, and issues of transitioning to Pb-free solders.

Solders in Electronics: A Lifecycle Assessment (2005) by EPA/Design for the Environment

[stemstudious]

Theo Jansen goes for a walk with Animaris Umerus, one of his Straandbeests. (Also available in XS.)

-- Ian Frazier, "The March of the Straandbeests" The New Yorker (September 5, 2011)

[staceythinx]

This red lake in Camargue, France, caught photographer Sam Dobson’s attention while driving by. Intrigued by the red color, an effect of unusually high salt content, he documented the surreal scene.

[stemstudious]

Slide show for a future solubility lesson plan.