Nursing in the United States

Here's a great "graphic post" on nursing from NursingSchool.org, put together by Jess at WallStats.com.

Image provided by Nursing School.org

Ignite Presentations

Have you seen videos from Ignite before?  Ignite is a community of geeks that explain a subject in 5 minutes using 20 slides in front of an audience.  The presentation is recorded and shared on their site and through YouTube.

Here's a great presentation on displaying information visually:

NYC Garbage Art

This is an interesting way of cleaning up litter: New York City Garbage by Justin Gignac -- Thank You for Littering.™

Google Wave

Have you heard about the new app being developed by Google? 

It's called Google Wave.  I first came across it on Lifehacker's post "The Google Wave Highlight Reel".  Lifehacker has eight short YouTube clips taken from the 80 minute preview given during Google I/O 2009.

Here's Google's description of Wave:

Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

I watched through the highlights first and then played the whole demonstration in the background.  It's really amazing. 

The team stated their goal was to answer the question "What if e-mail were invented today?"  E-mail was created 40 years ago simulating snail mail.  It doesn't take into account many of the technologies we use today to communicate: SMS, IM, blogging or social networking, or any combination of these technologies. 

Google Wave is the answer to that question.  And it is open source.  Google wants developers writing code for Wave. 

The demonstration highlights will give you an overall understanding of how the team combined these different technologies into a single real-time collaborative communication tool.  That's a mouth full of jargon, but what it comes down to is that Wave starts off like any other email client, but allows you to reply to specific parts of the message, with that reply posted under that section of the message.  And you get to see the reply real-time like in an IM.  Only it's better than IM because the letters are transmitted real-time... not when the message is complete.  And since it's one message and the replies are kept inline with the thread or "wave", someone who's added later to the thread can see EVERYTHING that everyone else has discussed.  There's even a playback feature that allows a late comer to the thread to play the entire event back, starting with the original message and progressing through each progressive comment and reply.

To top it all off they have redefined the spell-check dictionary.

To start with, check out the short clips of Google Wave: The Google Wave Highlight Reel

Here's the full demonstration given by the Google development team on day 2 of Google I/O:

 

Additional Resources:

• Product:  wave.google.com
• Platform:  code.google.com/apis/wave 
• Protocol: www.waveprotocol.org 

Different Ways of Visualizing Information

This "Periodic Table of Visualization Methods" breaks down all sorts of charts, graphics and other visual methods of displaying information.  What's really great about this chart is that if you hover over an element, a sample chart will display.

 

This chart belongs to Visual Literacy (.org)

Thanks to Austin Kleon for posting this on his blog: http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/103845565/a-periodic-table-of-visualization-methods

Fantastic Creative Blog

I came across a fantastic website and blog today via Mindjet's blog.

The site, www.austinkleon.com, is chock full of informative and creative content.  He has mind maps of events (like SXSW), maps of books, one he's read about Charles Schulz), and poems. 

One of the many creative aspects of Austin's site is his "blackout poems".  He creates poems using newspaper articles as his source of words.   The process begins by outlining the words he wants to use for the poem, then blacking out the surrounding content. 

He's been commissioned to publish a book of poetry in this manner, due out in 2010.

Another great aspect of his site are his analysis of events, books, festivals and other happenings which he mindmaps.  He keeps a gallery of these on his Flickr account and they're also linked from his site.

Flow Charts

Flow charts made easy. :)

 

 

Sent to you by mister_cbond via Google Reader:

 

 

Flow Charts

via xkcd.com on 12/16/08

 

 

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