Viz tool–from cells to strata

A fascinating visualization tool created by a researcher at the Scripps Research Institute gives an intuitive breakdown of the relative sizes of the internal structures of a cell. This animated graphical tool can morph the complex cellular structure into a highly simplified geometric version enabling direct comparison of the various organelle volumes. Check out the superb video on the above link to see a demonstration.

The analog to this tool in terms of textual analytics might might categorize the primary topical themes of a given book or chapter, organize them sequentially into color-encoded geographic regions, thus enabling the side-by-side comparison of multiple books (or perhaps the chronological progression within a single corpus or sub-corpus.)

Windows 8 tablet

Just read the unfortunately named gizmodo post “Designing Windows 8 or: How to Redesign a Religion”. Giz interviewed Sam Moreau, the Director of User Experience for Windows, Windows Live and Internet Explorer – the guy who has spent the last 5 years re-imagining Windows from the ground up with Windows 8. A fascinating read. I can certainly imagine CodeX living on that machine!
One of the things that really struck me from the article was the way they are re-thinking Search. (I’ve slightly modified the quotes below to condense a couple different statements into one, and to apply the discussion for this blog):

So any apps that have registered for the Search contract,—basically you build an app, then you say, "I'm gonna use this API, which means I'm doing the Search contract," Then they get to show up in this list whenever app A has a Search moment….

So as long as CodeX is designed with this API in mind, we can play along with all the other big boys. Here’s a good example (once again, edited slightly):

Imagine I had typed "crown." The results for hangover are very different in Internet Explorer on Bing versus Netflix. Let's say I've got a bunch of apps: Netflix, Hulu, Wikipedia, CodeX:Serendipitus, whatever. Each time I click one of those they get to render what they have, their best foot forward for "crown." And it may be very different things. Google gives you this homogenized version of the internet for a query. Apps, in this one box that drives the query across all the other apps, lets each app give you the best version of what they can do for "crown." Maybe you can get WebMD to describe dental procedures.