Bird watchers (a.k.a.-birders) make more identifications through bird songs than visual observations. Recognizing birds by song is a critical skill for any birder. There are more than a few sets of records and tapes of bird songs available that can be used to learn them. There is a book, of interest to birders, and denizens of this site, that shows bird songs in notation. It is A Guide to Bird Songs, by Aretas A. Saunders, Doubleday and Company, Inc, 1951. The notation shows five qualities of a bird's song: time, pitch, volume, quality, and phonetics. At the top of the diagram is an indication of quality: clear, loud whistle, or harsh rattle, or the like. Below is the notation of the song in lines that are continuous or broken, of longer or shorter length, rising or falling, thicker or thinner, to indicate the line of the song and the duration of each note and the song as a whole. To the left is an indication of the musical pitch of the most prominent note or the mid point of the song. At the bottom is a phonetic transcription of the song, which, when combined with the information above, gives an indication of what the bird is saying in song. Saunders gives us a visual representation of the songs of 201 eastern U.S. birds in this fashion. As an example of the visual representation of sound, it is quite a masterpiece. As with any notation of sound, it takes a bit of practice with known sounds to learn how to interpret the notation in this book. The book is out of print, but can be obtained through interlibrary loan.

I attended (and thoroughly enjoyed) your course in San Francisco a few weeks ago. You talked about color choice for computer displays, and recommend reducing glare by picking a black background, as this is less stressful to look at for long periods. You showed a web site or two with this kind of color scheme.

I can't help noticing that your own web site does not follow this approach. Not that I dislike the color theme you selected for the site -- a similar background color to the cover and paper used in the books, red highlights and link color for separation, and a decent sized serif font (Times Roman or equivalent) for easy reading. I just don't know much about color selection and wondered why you made your choice vs. a dark or black background.

Mathew

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Do you have any commentaries on the impact of the Unified Modeling Language?. Do you believe that software is best represented visually? Do you think that we can expect software quality to increase and development time to decrease as the UML usage increases?. Do yo have any opinions on the graphic constructs used in the UML? Do you see anything major missing?.

In my own personal experiences trying to educate others on software modeling techniques I have found that most programmers initially embrace modeling as an initial analysis of design effort, but once the have any code in place (either manually generated or engineered from the models) they never look back at the models.

Is it that the models' expressiveness is not adecuate for what programmers want to express?. I would love to hear your opinions.

Sincerely,
Brian

I'm developing a training module for epidemiologists on questionnaire design. I'm looking for information on how to develop questionnaires for activities in the four fundamental functions of epidemiology: surveillance, disease investigation, analytic studies, and program evaluation. Thanks

The Escaping Flatland sculpture, currently on exhibit in Los Angeles, seems to have similarities to the outdoor sculpture of David Smith (1906 - 1965, artcyclopedia and the Smithsonian)

Specifically, with regard to the 1961 - 1965 body of work (28 pieces) created from square and rectangular hollow blocks ("cubi") of stainless steel by David Smith. The artist intended the shapes and materials to contrast and interact with outdoor landscape.

Was David Smith's work an inspiration for "Escaping Flatland" or is this just a happy coincidence.

Smiles... Theresa-Marie

--
Theresa-Marie Rhyne
Multimedia/Visualization Specialist
Learning Technology Services
NC State University
Campus Box 7113
Venture III, Suite 267
Centennial Campus
900 Main Campus Drive
Raleigh, North Carolina 27695
Phone: 919-513-4623
Fax: 919-513-4237
Email: tmrhyne@ncsu.edu

At NCSU's Engineering Online offices:
Wednesday morning

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I am reading the "Envisioning Information" (eighth printing). On the right side of page 84, there is a illustration of the "Pythagorean" theorem from the classical Chinese book "Chou Pei Suan Ching". The small center square in the induction equation looks more like a rectangle to me. Is this a mistake in the re-drawing or a visual effect? (I attempted to measure with a ruler, it seems the vertical is shorter than the horizontal, but not sure)

I am more curious what contributes to such a visual impression if it is indeed a true square

Thanks.

-Xiaoying Lin

Hello,

I don't know much about the stock market, but I like this site's innovative way of compressing the hard-to-read stock page of the morning paper into a simple snapshot. It also has a seasonal colour scheme...

http://activequote.fidelity.com/rtrnews/market_map.phtml

I would be interested if others know of other good visualizations on the internet.

Cheers,

Matt

[link updated February 2005]

Please elaborate on the differences between your analytical information presentation principles and the human factors design approach. I thought the latter was to present information in a way that was within the human capabilities to perceive and process. If true, wouldn't that design imperative completment the content drives and cognative needs which you stress underlie your univeral principles. But I understood you to say your approach and human factors' were opposites in an answer at UCLA. Thank you.

What prompted people to display and compose maps from the "above" perspective? Although "common-sensical" to us now, at the beginning of cartography (some 5,000 years ago on clay tablets?) the "from the sky" perspective seems to be a somewhat unique notion. I'm not proposing a "chariots of the sky" (visits in ancient times by extra-terrestrials) theory but rather the thought that it was a revolutionary and radical departure from a ground view.

Any thoughts or ideas?