From an email I sent to a friend describing my birthday break in New York City: First went to the David Smith show at the Guggenheim.The lower circle floors: early work of biomorphic vaguely surrealistic tabletop pieces (the NYRB reviewer of the DS show favorably described them as "European," and having something to do with Giaocometti, a non-obvious point). They were generally small and fussy, although the Hirshhorn DS chicken was included, a favorite of mine, which I'd photographed at the Hirshhorn a few years ago. And then a wonderful series of tall thin eloquent pieces called "Forgings," which I'd never seen face-to-face before. Some excellent ideas there: abstract in shape and profile, but with the naturalism of a hand-worked surface. There were also 3 or 4 Cubis, but they sat dead indoors against the studiously uniform warm white walls and florescent lighting; they belong outside as David Smith once powerfully wrote about stainless steel in the sun. The Voltri pieces were as wonderful as ever. DS's work is amazing but after all these years (I first saw his work at the 1969 Guggenheim show and also visited the leftovers at this studio near Lake George after his death), perhaps I've seen it all. So the current brilliant list: Smith's Cubis, Serra's Torqued Ellipses at Dia Beacon and Te Tuhirangi Contour (seen only in photographs) in New Zealand, and Judd's artillery sheds at Marfa, Texas. The Guggenheim is a fine museum for showing sculptures (at least those under 10 feet tall); and it is wonderfully different, like the Barnes, from any other museum. Right now my favorite U.S. museums are the Nasher (Dallas), Guggenheim, Barnes, and Dia Beacon. Have not been to Kimbell yet. Then to the Whitney Biennial. Oh no, or something like that: closed on Tuesdays! The Whitney Biennial catalog, which I bought at the unclosed-on-Tuesdays Whitney bookstore, was filled with unpleasant, self-conscious work--often based on falsely ominous and falsely knowing photographs. I agree with some of the political stances, but anger is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of good art, and some of this artistic passion tends towards political naivete and therapeutic pouting. The anti-war posters, the several hundred posted outdoors at the Whitney, were pretty good; about one-third veered toward earnest commercial art posters, not art. Personal conclusion from catalog only: nothing much to learn, for my no doubt narrow interests, from the last 2 years of contemporary artwork at the Whitney. Am going the Art Fair in Basel this June so I'll have another look at contemporary work. Then onwards to MOMA. Oh no, CLOSED ON TUESDAYS! Pre-trip, I confirmed that the Guggenheim was open Tuesdays but didn't check the Whitney and MOMA. OK, back uptown to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met is always interesting. The pre 200BCE and the indeed the pre 2000BCE art is wonderful: abstract but with style, and unstereotyped at least my modern eyes, fresh, different. Then to the classical Greeks and Romans: beautiful, striking, glowing, but centered on an idealized representational (nonabstract) human bodies. On to the Renaissance: looked fussy and heroically show-off (elaborate hairdos cut with tortuous detail into marble) after the abstactions of early Greek and Roman, Assyrian, Egyptian. Then on to many fresh beautiful largely abstract pieces from Africa and the Far East. Saddest image: museum map of one of the "cradles of civilization," Mesopotamia, now in today's darkness. All sorts of fine abstract gestural shapes (again, to my eyes) in Chinese calligraphy; other Chinese work too stylized. Favorite works at the Met: small cylindrical stone seals (Sumerian, 3000BCE?), with good text-image integration, similar to the magnificent Assyrian royalty reliefs with writing all over the image in the bottom third. I followed my usual strategy of going to galleries at the Met that were largely unpopulated by visitors, in order to see quietly and without interruption. I learned that you can take photographs at the Met, as long as no flash. So next time to New York, I'm going to stay in a nearby hotel for 3 days and photograph abstract ideas at the Met like crazy. All told, thankful about Tuesday closings elsewhere. Lunch at Tang Pavilion (home of one of my rare celebrity sightings in New York, Jasper Johns, a while back), then dinner at Shun Lee (about 8 years ago saw Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall there, who ate with forks not chopsticks, waiter showed us the AMEX slip for "Michael Jagger"). Tang Pavilion better, Shun Lee steamed "Chilean Sea Bass" (aka "Patagonian Tooth Fish") had stayed in the aquarium a bit too long, but Shun Lee's mapo dofu proved an excellent birthday treat.

An intriguing use of Google Earth here.

Link via Robot Wisdom, which is also interesting, visual, and unusual.

Work-arounds and hacks for voice mail menu systems:

http://www.gethuman.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/business/yourmoney/26mgmt.html

Graphics Press has now published Virginia Tufte's new book, Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. A description of the book, some sample pages, and ordering information are posted here.

Virginia Tufte is distinguished emerita professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Graphics Press was created in 1982 in order to publish only my books, but we've made an exception for my mother. Her daily behind-the-scenes reviews of this board have contributed enormously to quality and flow of our threads here.

Say that someone wanted to publish about tens of thousands of copies of some photographs (about 10 by 16 inches, near A3 size) that are nearly as good as 6-color Epson ink-jet digital prints. Can an expert help this person?

I'm having problems with standard 4-color printing of the beautiful Epson inkjet prints of my sculptures for Beautiful Evidence and am looking expert high-end advice on alternative methods, color correction, and so on. Our Epson prints are beautiful, the 4-color proofs we've seen are not. What to do?

My Designer Prescription for Medicare's Ills
By Leslie Smolan
Sunday, January 22, 2006; B02

When I read the headlines last week about seniors lost in the maze of the new Medicare prescription drug plan, I didn't just see them as further evidence that the confusionridden, fraud-laden, money-squandering Medicare system is headed for disaster. The news also bolstered my conviction that most of Medicare's failings can be tied to a single "disease": disastrously poor information design. Designing information is a large part of what I do for living. Designers like me try to simplify complex information for a time-starved, information-hungry society, whether that means helping you sort through the investment options in your 401(k) plan or figuring out how to make the most of your visit to the Louvre (regardless of what language you speak or your familiarity with a complicated piece of 16th-century architecture).

Despite all my experience, I recently fared no better than the average Medicare patient when it came to understanding a system that seems almost deliberately obscure. Last year, my elderly father became chronically ill, and I was forced to navigate Medicare's labyrinths to manage his care. Every step of the way in my long and frustrating dealings with the system, from finding a nursing home to tracking down my father's medical records to reconciling the endless stream of bills, I found that the information I needed was either unavailable, unedited or unintelligible. Clearly, our healthcare system is sick, and unless we focus on curing it before the first baby boomers become eligible for Medicare in 2011, it is likely to be so overwhelmed that it will either cease to provide any reasonable standard of care - - or cease to exist. What follows is my modest proposal for saving Medicare. As is the case with any ailing patient, the cure depends on making the right diagnosis.

Diagnosis: Information Discontinuity

Symptoms: My father's predicament began with a bad fall that resulted in a cerebral hemorrhage. As he was air-lifted to the hospital, my mother, overwhelmed by the swiftness of events, had to immediately produce a health directive, living will, power of attorney, Medicare number, secondary health insurance policy and prescription drug card. These separate documents all come in different formats and are produced and distributed at different times. Even if you have them all, finding the latest version of each can be a challenge. Imagine if you had to provide bank balance, credit history, utility bill and birth certificate every time you made a credit card purchase. The wasteful, labor-intensive process of repeatedly generating and collating the same information became a recurring theme throughout the year ahead.

As my father was moved from hospital to nursing home and back to the hospital again, I was shocked to discover that basic information about his condition and treatment did not always make the journey with him. Every healthcare provider in the Medicare system maintains separate records; there is no universal data bank that they all can access. This absence of continuity in the flow of information often resulted in an absence of continuity in care, as when my father's recurring urinary tract infection was misdiagnosed . . . as a stroke!

In addition, Medicare, the insurance companies and the doctors all have different computer programs, making cross-referencing bills and payments nearly impossible. The secondary insurance company pays its portion once Medicare has paid. Despite Medicare's approval, we began to get "scare letters" from the secondary insurer saying they would deny claims unless they got certain information. It turns out that the insurance company's computer system accommodates fewer characters per line than Medicare's, so half the information dropped off when Medicare passed on the claim.

Treatment: From the moment someone enters the Medicare system, all information abut his illnesses and treatment should be entered in a confidential, centralized database to which the patient himself (or a designated representative) grants access. Any number of entities could be in charge of the database, from the government itself to an independent third-party provider. With a central database, the necessary information will always be at hand when the patient, doctor or even a pharmacist needs it. When you consider how easy it is for anyone to obtain your detailed credit report, it's clear that the technology exists to remedy this information-sharing crisis (and also, sadly, that our priorities are out of whack).

Diagnosis: Information Overdose

Symptoms: We began to get pounds of paper from Medicare, pounds more from the secondary insurance company, not to mention individual bills from cardiologists, anesthesiologists, oncologists, radiologists, psychologists, urologists, helicopter and ambulance services and hospitals. They contained page after page of doctors' exams and procedures: electrocardiograms, echo exams, Doppler echo exams, Doppler color flow add-ons - - and on and on. A quick scan of the individual costs was frightening: $980, $692, $575, $331, $133, $468, $107, $214, $107, $214 . . . and 37 more similar charges, all on the first statement!

Payment can often take 60 to 90 days. Then Medicare passes the bill on to the secondary insurer, which adds another 30 days at the very least. After months of waiting for your portion of the bill, you often end up with a balance so small that it hardly seems worth the effort to bill it. An additional problem arises because many senior citizens, often not in the best of health, and sometimes suffering from short-term memory loss, are inclined to pay the initial bill - - including fees that Medicare and the insurance company are responsible for - - rather than worry about being delinquent. As a result, many are overpaying, ashamed to let a bill sit "unpaid" for 90 days.

Treatment: Here again, the solution is already a part of our daily lives. Take a look at your year-end American Express statement. Using chronology, categorization and clear presentation, you can see your spending "history" at a glance. A comparable system of itemization for Medicare would save patients and doctors countless hours of work.

Diagnosis: Information Dysfunction

Symptoms: After my father had been in the hospital for 30 days, the social worker assigned to his case informed us that his stay had "expired" and that he needed to be discharged to a "sub-acute" facility (that's Medicare-ese for nursing home) the very next day. To help us find one, she provided us with a barely legible photocopy that offered nothing more than the names of facilities and their addresses. So I went to Medicare.gov, where the primary information available was a list of violations for each facility. In the absence of usable information, I resorted to old-fashioned personal networking to determine where my father would go next.

Treatment: One of the reasons the available information about Medicare services, procedures and billing is so daunting is that there is almost no effort to regulate the amount of information provided, deliver it in an easily understood format and communicate it in plain English. A fundamental principle of information design is to give the user the ability to make comparisons. This requires that the information be relevant, straightforward and easily verified. Beyond this, whenever possible, customization should be built into the program, allowing users to sort data based on their individual needs. Today's sophisticated Web sites show how far we've come in this regard. Take Amazon.com, where not only can you read consumer reviews of products you are interested in, but the site actually greets you by name and suggests books you might like. Both on and offline, the systems for providing relevant, contextualized information exist. Two great printbased examples are the daily stock market tables and the nutrition labels for packaged goods developed by the Food and Drug Administration. The latter is a universal format for information that was developed to allow people to compare content and make choices based on their individual needs. The fact that the FDA labeling system has been adopted as an international standard is a testament to its success as information design.

Good information design is clear thinking made visible. Applied to the Medicare system, it would make administration and oversight by Medicare professionals easier, allow for easier retrieval of patient records to ensure continuity of care, and simplify billing processes to facilitate prompt, accurate payment for services.

The question is: Who should lead the charge? It's entirely possible that private industry will take up the cause and do an end run around the government, as FedEx has done with the U.S. Postal Service. Many corporations and entrepreneurs have already identified Medicare as a profitable area to explore. But I believe the government itself is best-suited to handle this crisis - - not just because Medicare is one of the few remaining government programs we count on to support us, but because the government actually has a decent track record with information design. In addition to the FDA nutrition label, there is a healthcare program administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs, which switched recently to an electronic records system and has since reaped the benefits in terms of improved care and a 50 percent reduction in costs per patient.

My father has finally returned home after more than a year in rehabilitation facilities, and the bills are finally beginning to trail off. But my experience with the Medicare system has shaken me so greatly that I am determined to speak out about its problems, and potential solutions to them, whenever and wherever I can. Ultimately, if we are unwilling to embrace some kind of universal health coverage, then an overhaul of Medicare's information design is essential. We have the tools to transform Medicare into an efficient, workable and humane program. The government simply needs to channel all of the time, effort and money it is currently expending on finding ways to cut benefits, and invest them instead in meaningful reform. Author's e-mail: Leslie@carbonesmolan.com

Leslie Smolan is head of the Carbone Smolan Agency in New York. She and her information designers have helped to demystify mutual funds for Putnam Investments, develop the year-end statements for American Express cardholders and orchestrate the movement of visitors through the Louvre.

From The New York Times, February 12, 2006, article by Randall Stross on amazon: "Something in Amazon's secretive investor relations office has wafted through the air into its customer service department. The company has long provided a toll-free number for customers who want to speak with a human representative to solve a problem. Yet it does not mention the number on any help page on its site. If this guess-our-phone-number game is intended to curtail calls and to keep associated costs low, it seems unlikely to thwart anyone. A search for "Amazon 800 number" takes Google's servers an eighth of a second to produce 3.3 million results. ****************************************************************************************** Putting exact phrase quotation marks into this search yields a grand total of 760 results for the phrase, a number which differs from 3.3 million. But the whole idea in the last paragraph is wrong, since the number of results has little to do with thwarting a search; for in this case there is no practical difference in ease of finding the amazon 800 number between hundreds and billions of pages returned. No doubt everyone here knows that searching AMAZON 800 NUMBER produces all those pages containing the words AMAZON and 800 and NUMBER. Searching "AMAZON 800 NUMBER" returns all those pages that contain the exact phrase AMAZON 800 NUMBER. I once was talking to web designer A who said that he was more famous than some other web designer B. Designer A claimed some vast number of results in Google, far more than the wretched B. The number seemed large, so I asked A if he put quote marks around his name when ego-surfing. "No, that makes B higher than me." I almost blurted out something about designer arithmetic, but instead bit my tongue. What is the biggest possible difference in results for words in quotes and not in quotes? Here's a guess. The exact phrase "the and" yields 0 documents. Without quotes, the phrase yields 8,200,000,000. This will hold at least until Google spiders this thread.

A good set of images of Dan Flavin's beautiful and different art here. Even more than most sculpture, photographs fail to capture the amazing visual experience of these light works. The best permanent collection in the United States is in Marfa, Texas.

Probably the most difficult challenge for a writer is a blank page, and for a sculptor an empty space. Way too many options. In starting a work, I have always found it helpful to begin work with a small visual element such as an unprepossessing diagram, or, for a sculpture, a couple of pieces of bent metal. The theory soon emerges, a theory probably already implicitly lurking in the practical choice of the beginning element itself. I have no interest in premature grand theories, which tendentiously limit the scope of inquiry. That initial element contains an enormous number of built-in decisions that limit the scope of the intellectual or visual problem at hand, thankfully preventing the paralysis that results from the overwhelming unlimited scope of decision contained in a blank page or empty space. The initial element provides a leverage point for expression. Also that starting element helps to find a problem that one can actually make progress on; there are no rewards, rightly so, for choosing an important problem but one on which no intellectual progress can be made. (This is the point of Peter Medawar's insightful essay on "The Art of the Soluble". Or part of the point of Steve Jobs' remark that "real artists ship".) I remember these particular instances: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information began with a long letter (back when I was a political economist) to the editor of a political science journal critiquing a complexly silly statistical graphic in the journal, a letter that I had no particular reason to write other than to start talking about statistical graphics and their credibility. And Visual Explanations began with a little diagram of a glass of water in a book on magic. Both were clear and decisive moments in starting something new. Two conclusions: (1) to be enormously thoughtful about the choice of the initial element and look at many possibilities before deciding which initial element and (2) to recognize the power of the initial element in solving or limiting certain issues and thus make the work manageable. One of the most important qualities of good thinking is a deep sense of the relevant, the wise specification of the relevant domain. The starting element should not be found by the accident of what comes across one's desk. It is should be found by active extensive search, by experiencing a vast number of possible starting elements. These comments merely describe my work strategies and are not meant as recommendations for others (although sometimes I have made these points to graduate students pursuing their dissertations). Your mileage may differ. It turns out that behavioral economists have already described the importance of limiting the domain of decision. Here's an account by Jacob Weisberg, applied to the new prescription drug program.

A 2006-2013 chronicle of design, publishing, and consequences of my Beautiful Evidence. [2006] I have completed Beautiful Evidence, except for the index and a few loose ends. We are currently proofing some difficult images on press, negotiating with printers, planning the order for paper and binding, and working through other production issues. Probably the major threats to breaking the schedule will be in color-correcting images and in importing some paper used in one section of the book. I'm enormously grateful to all those who commented on drafts of 3 chapters of BE posted on this board over the years. The invisible college of Kindly Contributors suggested new examples, pointed out my mistakes, and caused me to rethink and rewrite parts of the posted material. It is not always easy to write parts of book in public; I am delighted with the results of our mutual experiment. Thank you very much everyone!