The Eyes Have It

interactive flash illustration

Since taking that Flash MX class a couple of weeks ago, I've been keeping an eye out for interesting examples of Flash animation being used in pharma/medical communications. I found this one by Hybrid Medical Animation. It's visually compelling and very well done, but I can imagine someone from the anti-Flash camp trying it out and wondering why they bothered to make the presentation of this information interactive? What does the Flash flash add to what's being communicated? The creator's commentary doesn't provide much by way of a rationale:

'Using illustrations originally created for the recent Scientific American Nanotech Special Issue, I created a "Flash version" of the illustration for the Scientific American website.

It turned out to be a nice opportunity to expand upon an illustration's original intent/purpose -- and allow for some user-interactivity."

I'm not sure how the Flash version "expanded" on the original but I think the interactivity is the important part.

Science and Society Picture Library: Medicine & Health

"Objects and artwork relating to the history of medicine throughout the world, ranging from iron lungs to Chinese acupuncture figures, plus a selection of images of twentieth century medical practice taken from our newspaper archives."

This is an amazing collection from the UK's Museum of Science and Industry. The medicine and health area currently contains 1462 images.

"We provide transparencies, prints and digital images on loan to our clients for reproduction. A small service fee is charged for the loan of the images. If we cannot currently provide the image you require, you can commission one of our photographers to take photographs of any item in our collections. A small fee is charged for this service. You can order prints of our images for personal use or as gifts. A list of our prices is available here. If you wish to order a print contact one of our researchers. All profits from its activities are used to support the work of the Museum."

SARS Art

Xeni Jardin is collecting "SARS-related digital folk art" and sharing it on BoingBoing. Here's the original post and a call for entries. Here's the most recent post to date with links to the first seven entries.

God's Opinion

That beautiful baby is my daughter. We welcomed her into the world and into our family late Monday morning. Mother and baby are both doing fine and her siblings are very excited to have a new sister (I can't help but wonder how long this completely unanticipated level of enthusiasm on their part is going last).

I was already way behind with my postings to TEHI as well as in responding to email. I'm guessing that things are going to stay that way for a while.

A few thoughts on babyhood:

"I don't know why they say 'you have a baby.' The baby has you." (Gallagher)

"Father asked us what was God's noblest work. Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad; babies never are." (Louisa May Alcott)

"A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on." (Carl Sandburg)

Quotes on an anniversary

Today marks the first anniversary of The Eyes Have It. I recently came across three interesting quotes on the web page for a course called "In The Mind's Eye: Information in Visual Form" taught at York University by Walter Whiteley. It seemed appropriate to post them here today as they echo several recurring themes that have emerged in TEHI over the last 12 months.

"The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see. " - John Tukey

"Diagrammatic reasoning is the only really fertile reasoning." - C. S. Peirce (1839 - 1914)

"The soul never thinks without a mental image." - Aristotle


(Sounds like a great course: "Scientists use graphs, diagrams, visual output from experiments and other visual images to image what is going on, organize information, to solve problems, to remember, and to persuade. This course explores the nature of visual information and reasoning, the construction of good representations, and how visual forms may mislead and changing how we 'see' visual representations.")

Guess who took a Flash class this week

This Hiveminds discussion, "why do people hate flash?", is doing good job of outlining both the pro and con arguments surrounding Flash on the web. It also offers several examples of "good" flash and makes it clear that it's very important for designers to control the "gee whiz, look what I can do" impulse.

Robert Lindstrom's Being Visual, which I've already mentioned a couple of times (here and here), provided the main impetus for taking the course.

"As the technology gains a foothold and becomes more commonplace the market grows accustomed to the new technologies and expectations rise. For many companies, the bar has already been raised and rich-media communication is no longer an exception. It's an expectation. "People are becoming savvy enough to know that the capability is there. By not utilizing it you are conspicuous," says Jeff Sprau, Director of Product Sales for the Controls Group of Johnson Controls, Inc. "

Please share, in the comments section of this post, any examples of Flash that you find particularly useful. Especially those that relate to pharma, medicine or biotech.

UPDATE: The "object" and "embed" tags used to insert Flash animations into web pages can't be rendered into valid RSS. Aggregators were showing the graphic attached to this post as a blank, blue box. Fortunately, Flash can also publish to animated .gif files which is what you're looking at now. It appears that the graphic's quality has only degraded slightly but the animation speed has slowed down considerably. Guess I'll have to start messing with the publish settings and repost.

"Prescription Drug Ads Are No Blockbusters"

Recent article in Forbes:

"People are more likely to understand and recall ads for soda, food, lingerie and beer than for prescription drugs."

-- -- --

"Like many doctors, Clifford Dacso, a vice chair at Baylor College of Medicine, worries that direct-to-consumer advertising will cause patients to ask for medicines they don't need. But he also thinks ads could play an important role. 'We have words of art in medicine that are innately deceptive,' Dacso says. If our words can be translated into images that are understandable and it creates a more open market for information, people can make better decisions.'"

[via Corey Nahman]

Imagery From the History of Medicine

Very small but interesting collection with annotations.

"Crisostomo Martinez: "Lamina XVII", engraving, Paris, 1685.

Martinez was both anatomist and artist. He studied anatomy in Valencia but made this and other plates in Paris, a city he unfortunately had to leave in 1690, accused of espionage. This engraving appears twenty years after Newton's discovery of gravity. These remarkable figures with transparent flesh display a life of leasure, playing with a plumb line as well as an apple. Shown here is the upper half of the engraving (the lower half shows samples of loose bones exhibited as in a museum)."

New Tufte Book: The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint

Two words: "buy it". If it's anywhere near as insightful as his other books it should be worth every penny of the seven dollars it costs.

"In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now "slideware" computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?

24 pages, full color, at the printer, please order now, will be shipped by May 12. "

Projector Torture Test: LCD versus DLP

[Today's post is heavy on the hardware and light on pharma/medicine/biotech content.]

I'm guessing that at least some of the people who visit this weblog are just as responsible for projecting presentations as they are for producing the content in them. If you are involved in specifying or obtaining projectors, you might want to check out this ExtremeTech article.

"TI admitted that the results were not statistically representative of a large population of LCD and DLP projectors, but rather limited in nature. Still, the results are eye-popping, even accounting for the limited nature, and TI funding.

After 4000 hours of testing, you can see that the colors shifted enough to warrant a failure in all five LCD units. Even changing the bulbs couldn't improve the color quality; the organic materials in the panels themselves were damaged due to the long exposure to high-intensity light and high heat. The DLPs, on the other hand, remained consistent.'

The first projector to fail only lasted 1368 hours. (BTW, did you know that LCD technology is manufactured using organic material.)

Please note the caveats mentioned in the article: the sample size was very small (N=7) and was in no way representative; the operating conditions these projectors were subjected to really don't reflect the way a vast majority of projectors are used in the real world; oh, and the study was sponsored by the creators of the DLP technology -- Texas Instruments.

Even given these limitations, I still think the results of the study are worth taking into consideration when planning a projector purchase. Especially if budget considerations require that the projector be in service over an extended length of time and that it will be in use for several hours a week.

Roxanne Wolanczyk's Objective Art

"Using computers and biotechnology to graphically represent my identity." Objective art based on data displays and medical imagery.

[via Cup of Chicha]