Tag Archives: ACS Nanotation

Visualizing innovation and the ACS’s second nanotube contest

Leave a reply

I’ve found more material on visualizing data, this time the data is about innovation. An article by Cliff Kuang in Fast Company comments on the WAINOVA (World Alliance for Innovation) and its interactive atlas of innovation. From the article,

Bestario, a Spanish infographics firm, designs Web sites that attempt to find new relationships in a teeming mass of data. Sometimes, the results are interesting, as examples, if nothing else, of data porn; other times, it’s merely confounding. Its new project is a great deal easier to explain: The Wainova World Atlas of Innovation attempts to map the world’s major science and business incubators, as well as the professional associations linking them.

Kuang goes on to point out some of the difficulties associated with visualizing data when you get beyond using bar graphs and pie charts. The atlas can be found here on the WAINOVA site. If you’re interested in looking at more data visualization projects, you can check out the infosthetics site mentioned in Kuang’s article.

Rob Annan at the Don’t leave Canada behind blog has picked up on an article in the Financial Post which, based on an American Express survey, states that Canadian business is being very innovative despite the economic downturn. You can read Annan’s comments and get a link to the Financial Post article here. As for my take on it all, I concede that it takes nerve to keep investing in your business when everything is so uncertain but I agree with Annan (if I may take the liberty of rephrasing his comment slightly) there’s no real innovation in the examples  given in the Financial Post article.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) has announced its second nano video contest. From the announcement on Azonano,

In our last video contest “What is Nano?”, you showed us that nano is a way of making things smaller, lighter and more efficient, making it possible to build better machines, solar cells, materials and radios. But another question remains: how exactly is “nano” going to impact both us and the world? We want you to think big about nano and show us how nano will address the challenges we face today.

The contest is being run by ACS Nanotation NanoTube. There’s a cash prize of $500USD and submissions must be made between July 6, 2009 and August 9, 2009.  (Sorry, I kept forgetting to put this up.) You must be a registered user to make a submission but registration is free here. The Nano Song (complete with puppets!) that was making the rounds a few months ago was a video submission for the first contest.

Elsevier has announced a new project, the Article of the Future. The beta site is here. From the announcement on Nanowerk News,

Elsevier, a leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announces the ‘Article of the Future’ project, an ongoing collaboration with the scientific community to redefine how a scientific article is presented online. The project takes full advantage of online capabilities, allowing readers individualized entry points and routes through content, while exploiting the latest advances in visualization techniques.

Yes, it’s back to visualization and, eventually, multimodal discourse analysis and one of the big questions (for me) how is all this visualizing of data going to affect our knowledge? More tomorrow.

Fish camouflage, Australian webinar for nano business, medical nanobots in your bloodstream and Simon Fraser U has nano news

Leave a reply

First off, the American Chemical Society (ACS) has declared ‘The Nano Song‘ a winner (in the People’s Choice and Critic’s Choice categories)  in their ACS Nanotation web community video contest ‘What is Nano?’.  If you haven’t seen the video yet, you can go here (scroll down).

Researchers at Sandia Labs are working to develop materials that change colour in the same that some fish can. Here’s how it works with the fish (from Nanowerk News here):

Certain fish species blend with their environment by changing color like chameleons. Their tiny motor proteins carry skin pigment crystals in their “tails” as they walk with their “feet” along the microtubule skeletons of cells to rearrange the animal’s color display.

The fish change colour as the environment around them changes. The researchers led by George Bachand are trying to enable synthetic or hybrid materials to do the same thing. Applications could be for military and/or fashion.

If you’re interested in the business end of nano, then there’s a webinar courtesy of the Australian Office of Nanotechnology coming up on April 29, 2009. NanoVentures Australia CEO, Peter Binks, will be talking about nanotechnology’s impact on global markets and industries. For more info. about the event, check here and to sign up for the event, go here.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University (US) are honing in on a way to get hordes of microrobots (or nanobots) that have been introduced into the bloodstream to flock or swarm together so they can repair organs or deliver drugs to a specific target. I gather the problem has been  getting the machines to work together and the proposed solution is to use UV light. More details here.

Finally, some latebreaking news from Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada). The university’s nano research facility, 4D Labs, has won funding (roughly $884, 000) from the federal government’s Western Economic Diversification agency to build a maskwritiing facility.  More about this tomorrow.