The Eyes Have It

Robert Linstrom, author of Being Visual and fellow member of the ICIA’s Presentations Council, recently wrote a comprehensive wrap up of PowerPoint Live for the InfoComm website.

PowerPoint® transmogrifies! explores many of the issues crucial to communications professionals in today’s working environment and reviews the technology exhibited at the show that’s extending PowerPoint into realms no one would have even considered plausible a few years ago. I think it’s been fairly obvious that Microsoft has been attempting to position PowerPoint as a Flash analog with a somewhat less daunting learning curve and a much broader user base. The tools and technologies seen at PowerPoint Live seem to confirm the viability of this trend.

“Mother Nature is not the only one capable of madcap experiments with new life forms. The progression of Microsoft® PowerPoint® from a lowly, black-and-white-only electronic presentation tool to a ubiquitous, media-rich facilitator of tens of millions of presentations per day is one of the strangest tales in the history of computer software. From annual meetings of FORTUNE 500® companies to digital scrapbooks of the family vacation, PowerPoint® has shown itself to be surprisingly adaptive. … The morphing of PowerPoint into an enhanced media-communications platform could be called the dominant theme at this year’s PowerPoint Live conference, though such a claim did not appear in the conference literature. Nearly 200 users and 20 vendors gathered Oct. 10-14 in San Diego to share tips, tricks and strategies. Overall, the effect was that of a fan club meeting genetically blended with a professional development conference. The attendees were a mix of serious PowerPoint groupies and communications gurus — roughly equivalent to the Star Trek fans who attend conferences in full Klingon regalia — and avid newbies, who aspire to be masters of the Master Slide.”

I also would like to recommend Rob’s most recent project: Being Spherical. It’s one of those books that can really change the way you look at everything.

Article in the NIH Record.

“Creating art with older “teammates” made first-year medical students more sensitive to older people, according to results of the Vital Visionaries (VV) collaboration, a pilot program developed by the National Institute on Aging in conjunction with Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) in Baltimore. … Launched in March 2004 as a pilot project, the VV program paired 15 first-year medical students from Johns Hopkins with 15 older people from the Baltimore area. The two-person teams met and learned from older visionary artists, took a contour drawing class and worked on various art projects at AVAM in conjunction with its year-long exhibition, ‘Golden Blessings of Old Age/Out of the Mouths of Babes.’”

The AVAM is a fantastic institution with a sky-high inspiration quotient. I strongly recommend that you visit the next time you get to Baltimore.

Kidney stone photographs from the Louis C. Herring & Co. Kidney Stone Analysis Laboratory (”We Leave No Stone Unturned”). Painfully and surprisingly beautiful. There’s also poetry in their reports and analyses as well as in they way they describe the initial visual inspection of the stones:

“The true nidus is invisible because it is the first crystal or aggregate of crystals precipitated from solution and deposited at what eventually becomes the stone site. An “apparent nidus” is either a region from which crystalline forms radiate or the geometric center surrounded by concentric laminations.”

[via lonita’s links log]

“The preference for Coke versus Pepsi is not only a matter for the tongue to decide, Samuel McClure and his colleagues have found. Brain scans of people tasting the soft drinks reveal that knowing which drink they’re tasting affects their preference and activates memory-related brain regions that recall cultural influences. Thus, say the researchers, they have shown neurologically how a culturally based brand image influences a behavioral choice. These choices are affected by perception, wrote the researchers, because ‘there are visual images and marketing messages that have insinuated themselves into the nervous systems of humans that consume the drinks.’ Even though scientists have long believed that such cultural messages affect taste perception, there had been no direct neural probes to test the effect, wrote the researchers. Findings about the effects of such cultural information on the brain have important medical implications, they wrote.”

Full news release on EurekAlert.

[via boingboing]

“Virtopsy® was born from the desire to implement new techniques in radiology for the benefit of forensic science.”

From the Popular Science article “Why Give a Dead Man a Body Scan?“:

“It’s a criticism supported by the cacophony of the courtroom, where prosecutors and defense lawyers often present dueling pathologists, each reinterpreting autopsy reports to favor one side or the other. Complicating a jury’s difficulty in following such arguments are the typically gore-drenched autopsy photos that prompt many to turn away in horror. “We [in Switzerland] are not so used to shows like CSI,” Thali points out. “It can be a real problem.” In the future that Thali envisions, any pathologist taking the witness stand can bloodlessly redissect the victim in full view of the jury by calling forth the original data stored on the discs. “Graphic, yes. Gory, no,” he says.”

“Illustrations were essential in spreading new scientific and medical ideas and it was often the case that new developments in the sciences were accompanied by corresponding developments in illustrative techniques. These techniques are the subject of Seeing Is Believing, which complements an exhibition of the same name on view from October 23, 1999-February 19, 2000 at The New York Public Library’s Humanities and Social Sciences Library.“

Beauty rendered from deformity.

“Because I am an artist and tend to think in visual terms, I needed to be able to picture what my scoliotic spine looked like. As I began to learn about anatomy, I realized that the imagery was quite visually compelling, and could be interesting on many levels, from the literal to the metaphorical. I decided to undertake “an artistic inquiry into scoliosis.” I would use my artist’s duality: living through the experience and at the same time observing it and turning it into art. Scoliosis is a flawed model of the beautifully designed human musculoskeletal system, but I wanted to portray it as having its own more complex beauty, one that viewed deformity as differentness, and differentness as individuality.”

50 of these multi-layered paintings based on medical images of the artist’s own skeleton are currently being exhibited at the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

Okay, enough tweaking and fooling around. There will be a new post on TEHI by this weekend. In the meantime, as you will have noticed if you actually visited the site and aren’t reading this via RSS feed, I’ve added a random quote function to the top of the page. I plan on keeping the quotes used here pretty well focused on scientific visualization. Please feel free to share any quotes that you think would be a good fit. I would also appreciate it if you could let me know of any other features that you would like to see added to TEHI.

Well, TEHI is now in it’s new digs and I’m busy unpacking boxes and moving stuff around. Please feel free to drop me a comment if there’s something not working right or a there’s a feature you would like added. I’m planning on getting back to regular posting by the end of the week.