Communicating with Interactive Articles.
In this work, for the the first time, we connect the dots between interactive articles such as those featured in this journal and publications like The New York Times and the techniques, theories, and empirical evaluations put forth by academic researchers across the fields of education, human-computer interaction, information visualization, and digital journalism. We show how digital designers are operationalizing these ideas to create interactive articles that help boost learning and engagement for their readers compared to static alternatives.
Innovation is only a small piece of what happens with technology. This preoccupation with novelty is unfortunate because it fails to account for technologies in widespread use, and it obscures how many of the things around us are quite old.
Is Bitcoin Really Untethered?
This paper investigates whether Tether, a digital currency pegged to the U.S. dollar, influenced Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices during the 2017 boom. Using algorithms to analyze blockchain data, we find that purchases with Tether are timed following market downturns and result in sizable increases in Bitcoin prices. The flow is attributable to one entity, clusters below round prices, induces asymmetric autocorrelations in Bitcoin, and suggests insufficient Tether reserves before month‐ends. Rather than demand from cash investors, these patterns are most consistent with the supply‐based hypothesis of unbacked digital money inflating cryptocurrency prices.
The American Abyss.
Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions.
Pijul is a free and open source (GPL2) distributed version control system. Its distinctive feature is to be based on a sound theory of patches, which makes it easy to learn and use, and really distributed.
Relevant: nest.pijul.com.
Not for the font of heart.
GlyphCollector is a desktop application for typeface revival projects both as a production and research tool.
…but who is Lena?
Ditherpunk — “The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering.”
I always loved the visual aesthetic of dithering but never knew how it’s done. So I did some research. This article may contain traces of nostalgia and none of Lena.
Relevant: The game ”Return of the Obra Dinn” and a forum post of its creator explaining his approach to the dithering process.
General Guide For Exploring Large Open Source Codebases.
Yes!
We are a community of designers and developers pushing more open design processes and improving the user experience and interface design of open source software.
In fact, there’s a style of programming, well known in Lisp and Smalltalk circles, in which you define a toplevel function with calls to other functions that don’t yet exist, and then define those functions as you go in the resulting breakloops. It’s a fast way to implement a procedure when you already know how it should work.