From the Many Eyes: Obama Inauguration Speech Word Tree.

Can we do collaborative data viz? Yes, we can!

(Sorry, joke had to be made).

In Perform or Else, Jon McKenzie uncovers an uncanny relationship between cultural, organizational, and technological performance. His conclusion–that performance will be to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries what discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth–is an exhilarating realization of how culture, business, and science have become hyperlinked through globalization.

I never seem to get around to doing the review of the history of performance in design and as a design method.

Then the stupidity of the situation hit me – it’s not like there were going to be fewer couples (whether straight or same-sex) with different last names in the coming years. And typing up those envelopes was just as likely to create typos. Why not just redesign the database and the entry forms so that we could avoid any chance of insulting wealthy donors who should never receive incorrectly addressed letters?

It took a week.

Apparently, that’s not how it works in Maryland.

From the Washington Monthly

Under the administration of then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), Maryland law enforcement infiltrated law-abiding protest groups and labeled 53 Americans, who had done nothing wrong, as “terrorists” in a state database shared with federal authorities. (It turns out, their law enforcement database didn’t have categories for anti-war activists. Police created “terrorism” categories to make filing easier. How reassuring.)

Every now and again, I’m reminded of the continuing importance of studying how classification systems are made – with Bowker and Star’s Sorting Things Out the essential guide:

What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include “fainted in a bath,” “frighted,” and “itch”); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification–the scaffolding of information infrastructures.

In the case of my undergrad art museum, the problem easily solved by changing the default settings for address labels. I understand that changing categorization options for a massive government database is harder. I do. But it’s the sheer malignant sloppiness that gets me about the Maryland case.

Either the troopers didn’t believe that there would be no consequences for labelling members of an anti-war group “terrorists,” or – what’s worse – they didn’t think there was a difference. There was no way the database problems could be corrected, because the information infrastructure of the War on Terror both promoted and was created by those types of classification decisions.

Home Is So Sad, Philip Larkin

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped in the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft.

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

Depressing, no? It’s typical Larkin: beautifully written, confrontational, elliptic. It’s the antithesis of holiday cheer.

Anyway, to honor the 23rd anniversary of Larkin’s death, I’m offering something that would probably make Larkin’s stomach turn: a good recipe for latkes! It’s well known that it’s hard to hate life when your stomach is full of fried potatoes.

I like to think that Larkin would actually have enjoyed eating the potato pancakes, but enjoyed them even more as the excuse to write a poem about the familial disillusionment and sordid despair that lies behind the homely smells of salt, oil, and onions. What follows, then, are Larkin Latkes. Delicious, but a little complicated.

My grandmother’s were better, but these turned out pretty well. The trick is to parboil the grated potatoes – which cuts out the raw taste and keeps them from turning brown in air – then squeeze out all the excess water before frying so that the grated potatoes get super crispy super fast.

Ingredients

• 1 large potato (1/4 lb?) per person
• 1 large egg per 1lb potatoes (I used about 10lbs for a big day-long party)
• 1 medium onion per 1lb potatoes
• 1 tbsp minced garlic per 1 lb potatoes
• 1 large carrot per 2 lbs potatoes
• 1 cup or so of flour or matzoh meal (optional, but helps the latkes stick together)
• salt
• canola oil (some people recommend olive oil, but I think it gets too smoky at the high heats you need to cook the latkes)
• sour cream and apple sauce for dipping
• brown paper grocery bags

Directions

1. Peel potatoes and carrots. Put the peeled potatoes in a bowl of cold water.
2. Put a large kettle of water to simmer, then start grating the potatoes into another bowl of cold water. Now you have two bowls of cold water, one with whole potatoes and one with grated.
3. In batches, move the grated potatoes into the simmering water and parboil for about 3 – 5 minutes. Dump the boiled potatoes into a colander and run some more cold water over them. Let one batch drain while you deal with the next batch. I got through about 10 lbs an hour or so with my handy electric grater.
4. Grate the onions and the carrots.
5. If you have a ginormous bowl, now is the time to mix the potatoes and onions and carrots all together. If you have no more ginormous bowls, just keep all the ingredients in separate bowls and mix them up into separate batches as you start frying.
6. I tend to make latkes in 2 lb batches. Get a biggish bowl and put about 2 lbs of the potatoes in, about half as much onions, one-fourth as much carrots, and two or so tablespoons of the garlic. Add about 1/4 cup flour. Sprinkle generously with about 1 tsp salt. Add 2 eggs and mix all together.
7. Now get your oil going. Take a large frying pan and fill to about 1/4” with oil. Put it on medium-ish heat until the oil is steaming.
8. Now take about a cup of the latke mix on a spoon and roughly shape it into a little circular cake. Place the cake of latke in the oil. It should be sizzling vigorously. Flatten the latke cake a bit with your spoon. Watch it sizzle. Eat a little bit of chopped liver on a cracker to tide yourself over.
9. When the bottom of the latke looks browned, gently turn over the latke. I find that this works best as a two handed job with two spoons.
10. Since the potatoes are already basically cooked, all you’re trying to do is make sure they’re crispy and brown. When you think you’re done, move the browned latke onto a cookie sheet covered with brown paper bags to drain some of the oil. Then serve with sour cream and/or apple sauce.

Combines elements of Molly Katzen’s latke recipe, Epicurious, and the Kindler, Gentler latkes. Thanks to Josh K. for fry help, and the addition of the garlic and carrots.

Wednesday December 3, 2008 from 6:00pm – 7:30pm

Berkeley Center for New Media Commons
340 Moffitt Library, next to the Free Speech Movement Cafe
Berkeley, California 94720

People knit scarves, build furniture, sew clothing, and solder radios together in their homes and garages. Diverse groups of people–girls and boys, grandparents and college students–lovingly engage in these hands-on low-tech hobbies. In contrast, companies produce high-tech things by high-tech processes, using teams of people and sophisticated machinery to build devices like cell phones, computers, pharmaceutical drugs, and cars. But this clear division between high-tech and low-tech is beginning to blur. A host of new tools is making many of the resources previously available only to companies accessible to individuals, empowering people to design, engineer, and build devices that integrate high and low technology.

This talk will discuss this “new craft”, envisioning a future in which individuals integrate traditional craft, engineering, and web-honed communication skills to build and share information about “high-low tech” devices like temperature sensing scarves, algorithmically generated furniture, and radically customized cell phones. The presentation will discuss burgeoning high-low tech communities, focusing on ways that professional designers and engineers can support and encourage this new creative movement. It will present examples of high-low tech artifacts–including embroidered circuits and paper computers–and examples of tools that empower others to construct high-low tech devices–including the LilyPad Arduino, a construction kit that enables novices to build fabric-based wearable computers.