AT&T recently posted a new app, “AT&T Mark the Spot,” which allows iPhone customers to use GPS to report the location of their dropped calls, poor voice quality, and so on.  (Via CNet News.)

I have to say that I’m on the fence about it.  On one hand, it is an acknowledgment that they need to improve their network, and actually a very clever way of optimizing their efforts.  On the other hand, I really hate systems that push the burden of poor service back onto customers.  I suppose that, as these kinds of efforts go, this is pretty innocuous.  It’s certainly better than selling customers IP-based femtocells, which I believe amounts to charging cellphone customers for the privilege of building out a network that they’re already paying to use.

What’s your opinion?

Maybe I’ve just not been paying attention, but in this age of micro-blogging, I’m surprised that Paul Klee’s 1922 The Twittering Machine hasn’t gotten more play.

Embiggen.

uh, cool.

so can i, like, print it out on something…
like maybe,
a real wall?

I can’t decide if I like either of these…

A beautiful infographic by Bryan Christie Design graces the the IEEE Spectrum special report, Why Mars? Why Now?:

…it was in the stomach of this baby albatross. Photographer Chris Jordan explains:

The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

He and a team of creative folks are documenting what they find in the Midway Atoll and posting their work on a blog. It’s devastating.

Every cub reporter learns that a news story has to answer the five ‘w’s (and one ‘h’): Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How?

Google has answers:

I’m a huge fan of Stamen Design out of San Francisco. One of the things they excel at is data-driven map presentations. And SF Crimespotting (pictured above) is a terrific example thereof!

I do a lot of map-based presentation, and I’ve leaned heavily on their work in the past (particularly their open-source project ModestMaps).

For those of you in the East Bay, you might also check out their original work in this genre, Oakland Crimespotting.

Stay safe!

Heh. Process ID 420. Event: hang.

What’s not to love?

No, really:

Researchers in Japan made this images of the visible light that’s emitted by normal bodies. Scientists speculate that metabolic processes give off miniscule amounts of visible light.