David Lidsky's Blog, page 4677

Infographic: Every Country's #1 at Something

A stunning look at the inner workings of every region in the world.

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David McCandless's new infographic is a masterpiece that lays out each country's individual claim to a #1 rank.

These range from commodities to demographics to ecology to crime--and obviously, most of these things you'd never want to be known for being the "best" in:

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But collectively, it gives you a pretty phenomenal snapshot of the workings in myriad economies, countries, continents, and regions. For example, Africa in...

Infographic of the Day: Everything We Know About the BP Spill. Seriously, Everything

An encyclopedic infographic, laying out the disaster and its effects so far.

We've been bringing you infogaphics on the BP spill, and they've told the story in bits and pieces. This crazy thing is another matter entirely. According to the designer Carol Zuber-Mallison at ZM Graphics, it was created in a frantic, four-day span and grew as the news kept rolling in.

And as you can see, any single section tells a massive portion of the story. And by my count, there's almost 20 separate sets...

Jennifer Magnolfi of Herman Miller on Innovating in the Workspace

She has lived, learned and worked all over the world, leading her to a career as a pioneer of Programmable Environments at global office space and furniture design pillar, Herman Miller. Here's how she has honed her skills and passion for shaping the modern work environment.

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*In Partnership with

 

About Herman Miller: The way we work is changing dramatically as the world grows more connected, so naturally, the work environment must change to promote new ways of doing business...

French Design Master: "I'm a Kind of E.T."

Matali Crasset talks to FastCompany.com about her development as a designer, and how growing up on a farm keeps her ideas fresh.

Crasset with a lamp she designed of whisk wires

Matali Crasset is, undoubtedly, one of the quirkiest product designers working today. It's often hard to digest some of her quirkiest creations--which include a coat rack that transforms into a bed, goofy and futuristic interiors, and a "domestic UFO." In her native France, she's something of a national treasure.

On...

Body Fluid-Powered Fuel Cell Could Turn Pacemaker Patients into Steve Austin

Fuel cell technology is hyped as a possible future power system for electric vehicles, but it's actually got a plethora of uses: The latest, and perhaps greatest, is a glucose cell for medical devices that could get its "fuel" from your body.

The innovation is coming from France's Joseph Fourier University, where they've been experimenting with the complex physics and chemistry needed to create a miniature glucose-powered electricity generating device. The goal was to make the device...

Switch: Shrink the Change With One-Minute Praisings

What do you dread at work? Maybe it's filling out expense reports. Making a cold call to a new lead. Giving a performance review to your employee Chester, who's prone to tearing up at the first hint of negative feedback. Whatever it is, you avoid it. You procrastinate. You check Google News, you check your fantasy football stats. You check Google News again.

There's a way out, though. Let me show you how it works in the context of housecleaning, which is something that I absolutely dread...

Meet the New MOCA Logo, Same as the Old MOCA Logo

Museums are great at keeping musty artifacts around, but L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art actually brought a dead icon back to life on Tuesday. Fresh off of the announcement of actor/director/artist Dennis Hopper's show and the appointment of Jeffrey Deitch as curator, the museum has decided to dig up a 30-year-old logo, designed by Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar, who designed identities for NBC, Mobil, PBS, and National Geographic. (So fresh is the decision that the museum's Web site

In the Future, We Will All Be Replaced by Telepresence Robots

Ever wish you could attend a meeting without getting out of bed or chat with participants at a conference 2,000 miles away? You could always videochat, sure, but that just doesn't add the extra weight of having a physical presence. Enter the telepresence robot. Google cofounder Sergey Brin made use of a Texai Skype-connected telepresence bot at an X Prize fundraiser this past weekend, shuffling around to talk to participants as if he was actually there.

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The Texai

NASA's Madcap Sci-Fi Plan Could Get an Android Moonwalking Within 3 Years

NASA's moonshot program is in tatters, and the shuttle's due to fly for the last time soon ... but it doesn't mean there's no exciting space news. For example: Did you know NASA could send an android to the moon inside just three years?

This crazy scheme even has a funky, mysterious title to go with its radical science and engineering: Project M. It's not funded at Agency level yet, let alone at the governmental level (from where dedicated funding would have to come) but it seems to be a...

Android's Apple-Smashing a U.S. Phenomenon

Lies, damned lies and statistics: You can play games with numbers, and recently the game has been to show Android phones are beating the iPhone in the U.S. Now new data proves that in the rest of the world, Google's still chasing Apple.

The new figures come from Gartner as part of a bigger survey of global mobile phone use patterns. This has two headline figures that are news all by themselves: Globally the entire mobile market grew by 17% in the first quarter of 2010, a strong indicator that...