Tasty Tweets makes smoothies based on trending fruits
Jun 01, 2012 12:29 am • Permalink During a one-week visualization course at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, Kat Zorina, Ruben van der Vleuten, and Kostantinos Frantzis put together a working prototype that makes smoothies based on mentions of fruit on Twitter.
Using the Twitter API, it collects tweets containing mentions of specific fruits such as blueberry, pineapple, apple and carrot and creates a smoothie that represents the blend. The smoothie is created based on the same proportions of fruits collected from the tweets. Because twitter trends change quickly, each smoothie has a unique palette of flavors.
Next steps: a blender that provides variable consistency like chunky versus completely blended, a scoop of sherbet, and free energy boost. Oh, the possibilities.
[via @golan]
Reverse engineering targeted emails from 2012 Campaign
May 31, 2012 08:34 am • Permalink After noticing the Obama campaign was sending variations of an email to voters, ProPublica identified six distinct types with certain demographics and showed the differences. It was called the Message Machine. Now ProPublica is taking it a step further, hoping to dissect every email from all 2012 campaigns.
Today, we are relaunching the Message Machine, and expanding it from handling just one mailing to handling every email from all of the campaigns in the 2012 election. It will seek a broad understanding in real time of the new and sophisticated ways modern campaigns are targeting voters.
It's a big puzzle, and to solve it, we need a big sample of political emails, and an understanding of who received them. That's where you come in.
If you get campaign emails on any subject — donation, get-out-the-vote, volunteering, events, etc. — just forward them to emails@messagemachine.propublica.org using your email program's standard forwarding feature. Nothing fancier than that needed.
Way cool. Although I bet there will be a lot of noise, especially from the smaller, less data-savvy campaigns.
Typewriter installation remembers killed journalists
May 31, 2012 06:53 am • Permalink 
Julian Koschwitz uses a typewriter linked to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists to generate stories about those who have fallen doing their jobs.
The typewriter installation On Journalism #2 Typewriter writes generatively constructed stories about all journalist who have been killed worldwide between 1992 and today based on the existing data of their lives as well as their published work. The individual stories are connected through common fields of coverage, places, professions and many other aspects. Besides the text the typewriter creates also images e.g. flags which are heavier distorted the more journalists got killed in that particular country.
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