The main objective of posters, as with other communications media, is to influence attitudes, to sell a product or service, or to change behavior patterns. Public health posters are clearly in the third category, their purpose being to alter the consciousness of the public to bring about an improvement in health practices.

See, for example, Arabian Nights: "Night was beautiful, the sky was starry, and Sheherazade took out a condom."

Related posts from the past:

American Social Hygiene Posters, ca. 1910-1970

Public Health Posters at the National Library of Medicine

And these:
American Propaganda Posters from World War II (now here)

AIDS Posters - UCLA Digital Library

Not all career changes involve huge debts, but they are no less of a challenge (*) to those undertaking them.

Robert Lang kept folding while earning a master’s in electrical engineering at Stanford and a Ph.D. in applied physics at Caltech. As he worked on his dissertation —— "Semiconductor Lasers: New Geometries and Spectral Properties" —— he designed an origami hermit crab, a mouse in a mousetrap, an ant, a skunk, and more than fifty other pieces. They were dense and crisp and precise but also full of character: his mouse conveys something fundamentally mouse-ish, his ant has an essential ant-ness. His insects were especially beautiful. While in Germany for postdoctoral work, he and Diane were taken with Black Forest cuckoo clocks; the carved casings, pinecone-shaped weights, pendulums, and pop-out birds wouldn’t seem to be a natural for origami, but Lang thought otherwise. He started a job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, in 1988, shortly after he had finished folding a life-sized cuckoo clock. It had taken him three months to design, and six hours to fold, and it made Lang a sensation in the origami world.

See also this slide show:

Here Orlean talks about Lang and the wonders of computer-aided origami.

You can download his TreeMaker software and fold your own.

(*) So how do you achieve success?

Why a physicist dropped everything for paper folding | The New Yorker

I've asked him to improve information sharing within the intelligence community and with officials at all levels of our government, so everyone responsible for the security of our communities has the intelligence they need to do their jobs. I've asked him to ensure that our intelligence agency focus on bringing in more Americans with language skills and cultural awareness necessary to meet the threats of this new century. I've asked him to restore agility and excellence to our acquisition community, and ensure that our nation invest in the right intelligence technologies. I've asked him to ensure that America has the dynamic intelligence collection and high-quality analysis that we need to protect our country and to win this war against these extremists and radicals.

President Bush Attends Swearing-In of Mike McConnell as Director of National Intelligence

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a low cost and potentially covert method of remotely retrieving stored information. Broad recent growth of RFID applications, especially in the retail sector, has raised several specific privacy and data protection concerns derived from the potential that RFID offers for surreptitious monitoring and the linking of personal and obscure or private information into large databases. The result of these concerns has been an active policy debate, with legislative proposals at the U.S. state and federal levels, as well as in Europe. The author first constructs a qualitative framework for analyzing these policies, which provides a description of the key stakeholders in the debate and the issues concerning each. He then develops a simple economic model showing that all the assessed policies involve substantial tradeoffs in firms’ and individual behaviors and that a true understanding of uncertainties such as market structure and individual preferences about privacy is critical in assessing the impact of any policy.

RFID in the Retail Sector: A Methodology for Analysis of Policy Proposals and Their Implications for Privacy, Economic Efficiency and Security

iConcertCal is a free iTunes plug-in that monitors your music library and generates a personalized calendar of upcoming concerts in your city. It is available for both Windows and Mac OS X and supports worldwide searches.

iConcertCal

This paper describes mechanisms for asynchronous collaboration in the context of information visualization, recasting visualizations as not just analytic tools, but social spaces. We contribute the design and implementation of sense.us, a web site supporting asynchronous collaboration across a variety of visualization types. The site supports view sharing, discussion, graphical annotation, and social navigation and includes novel interaction elements. We report the results of user studies of the system, observing emergent patterns of social data analysis, including cycles of observation and hypothesis, and the complementary roles of social navigation and data-driven exploration.

Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization

Johnna Cottam was showing a group of her girlfriends how to do a move called the Fireman.

... a pink “Got Pole?” tank top ...

... poles — spring-loaded and adjustable from 8 to 10 feet — for sale ...

The removable nature of our product offers the flexibility of only having it in place when you want to use it.

... Every so often, she wiped the accumulated hand lotion from the pole with Windex.

Pole dancing! It's not just for children any more.

Pole Dancing Parties Catch On in Book Club Country

Need to link to a New York Times article from your weblog? Enter your link here, and we'll give you the weblog-safe link.

What does "weblog-safe" mean?

If you look at the URLs of each of the stories, you'll see that there's information encoded after the question mark. Here's an example. The special coding tells the Times's server that the link is coming from a weblog, and now and in the future, this link will work without a fee to access the archive.

There's also a bookmarklet, but I can't include the link here (directly). The source code (in Python) is available. Basically they're just doing a database lookup.

With this, perhaps MemeStreams could normalize NYT URLs as they are blogged, so that the click-throughs continue to work later on. Alternately, they could be used on click-through, in conjunction with the redirect function.

For example: if you visit this page from 2005, entitled "A Film Offers Buckets of Blood in Three Designer Colors", you're hoping to see a review of Sin City. If you click through, you hit the walled garden and are served only the abstract. If you pass it through the link generator, you get a link that takes you through to the full text, complete with images.

New York Times Link Generator

The Department of Homeland Security is paying Rutgers $3 million to oversee development of computing methods that could monitor suspicious social networks and opinions found in news stories, Web blogs and other Web information to identify indicators of potential terrorist activity.

The software and algorithms could rapidly detect social networks among groups by identifying who is talking to whom on public blogs and message boards, researchers said. Computers could ideally pick out entities trying to conceal themselves under different aliases.

Researcher Nick Belkin is one of the PIs; check out his presentation on the "Prospects for information 'selection'" for the Unified Cryptologic Architecture Office.

Also: GSA on SIS:

The Unified Cryptologic Architecture Office (UCAO) is developing a secure information sharing architecture, called HatWizard, to support intelligence information dissemination within the cryptologic community.

Also: Trust Architecture for Future Intelligence Processing, alternately titled "A Trust Framework for the DoD Network-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) Environment".

Government research to track online networking

pick any artist, we'll build you a custom playlist featuring music by your artist and related artists. you can also click on one of the playlists featured below.

the mix tape evolved. you pick the songs. put your playlist on your blog with our player widget, it's the soundtrack for your life and anyone can tune in.

our community members are building new playlists everyday. the best way to discover new music is to have it recommended by a friend.

finetune