Figures

Twitter and the Heartbreak of PowerPoint

by kt | 3 Comments

mission statement slideIt’s hard to even know where to start. This PowerPoint slide “explaining” Twitter’s new strategy statement is amazingly incoherent. What does the Venn diagram mean? What is the difference between the company’s scope and their competitive advantages? And what could “objective” possibly mean here? How is “be[ing] one of the top revenue generating  companies in the world” a strategy? Could they fit the word “world” in one more time? Dennis K. Berman of the Wall Street Journal points out via Twitter itself that the slide includes “35 words, 62 syllables, 4 clauses, [and] 2 grammatical errors.” (He also retweeted a sentence diagram of it.)

But others have written more detailed reviews of this remarkable sentence. The Washington Post, The Harvard Business Review, and Valleywag have all covered it.

Flickr and the Commons

by kt | 2 Comments

foxtographer

Foxtographer by Megan Lorenz

Flickr was once one of the best places on the internet to find new Creative Commons-licensed photography, but since its takeover by Yahoo!, it is harder to search and to collect attribution for Commons-licensed content. (See this BoingBoing post for more info on how Flickr is broken in this respect.) The “Explore–>the Commons” tab seems to only search public domain images, or resources from institutions or organizations, neither of which are usually properly marked with a useful license type. The bookmarklet in this post from Digital Inspiration does a good job of making attribution easier, and Cory at BoingBoing has an update to another bookmarklet as well, although I haven’t gotten it to work yet. Librarian By Day has a helpful Flickr/CC attribution guide. (NB I have not always properly attributed here, but I’m at least beginning to learn how to!)

Image by Megan Lorenz (Flickr stream) via the Toronto Star.

Maps in the Public Domain

by kt | 1 Comment

SF Bay 1847

Bosqui Print Co.’s Bird’s-eye map of San Francisco in 1847. Image from bigmapblog.

The very useful Public Domain Sherpa has both a post on how to tell if a map is in the public domain and a list of sources for public domain maps.

Wikipedia also maintains a list of public domain map resources. If you need to do a great deal of map data work, another good resource to consider is Natural Earth, whose maps include integrated vector and raster data.

And if you’re looking for spectacular antique map images, Geographicus Rare Antique Maps has donated 2,000 rare maps to the Wikimedia Commons (description and links at the Public Domain Review).

An Image Copyright Rabbit-Hole

by kt | Leave a comment

Image of pulsar waves from PSR B1919+21, Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy, 1977.

This blog post discusses one person’s attempt to find the original creator of the white-on-black image of pulsar waves made iconic by its use on the cover of the 1979 Joy Division album Unknown Pleasures.

(h/t JuiceCake @Metafilter)