Posts Tagged scienceUI
The Trouble with Scientific Figures
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Visual Design on September 30th, 2011
A beautiful figure can get you a cover on a top journal. Some institutions, like the University of Illinois, have special scientific visualization departments to help their faculty get published.
I’ve been reading issues of the prestigious journal, Science, lately, which I always approach in the same way. First of all, I flip through the first third or so of the pages impatiently. This is the part of the publication that contains the essays, letters, commentary, political events, news, and short science pieces on things of interest to normal humans- like sex, or how to win an argument, or cool robots, or oil spills, or funny monkey behavior. In short, this is the material which I’m capable of understanding.
Instead, I go straight to the “Research Articles” section, which contains pieces with titles such as “How the CCA-Adding Enzyme Selects Adenine over Cytosine at Position 76 of tRNA.” My brain starts to whirl. This is one of the main articles in Science, man. Impact Factor something like 32. Muy Importante. Read the rest of this entry »
The User Experience of Organic Chemistry – Part 2: NMR Spectroscopy
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on March 7th, 2011
Go out and grab a coffee when the NMR guy is refilling the liquid helium, unless you are willing to risk quick freezing of body parts or catching shrapnel from a surprise tank explosion. (image source: Dephologisticated)
Most of an organic chemist’s physical work appears to the naked eye as an interchangeable set of clear liquids and white powders (that is to say, if they are lucky enough in the lab not to produce brown sludge.) This is because atoms, even entire molecules, are too small to be seen through the lens of a microscope, so chemists must deduce their shape and structure indirectly. This is achieved with a variety of instrumentation and analytical techniques, most of which output data in the raw form of spectra, wavy lines that with a little experience can be used to paint a high-resolution image of the unseen. Because atoms and molecules, even gigantic ones such as a protein or enzyme, are smaller than a wavelength of light, they appear under even the most powerful electron microscopes as a nothing more than a fuzzy blob. Because it’s not part of our human perception, interpreting spectral data is a difficult challenge that chemists face every day starting when they are undergraduates. Operating the obscure equipment, and the hardware and software interfaces that this entails, is its own sort of challenge.
There are several types of spectroscopy, which is a broad concept that describes any kind of radiation of energy as it passes through a given material. Mass spectroscopy or Infrared spectroscopy is widely used in organic chemistry, but is mostly good for identifying mixtures. For instance, a winemaker might use one of these techniques to understand levels of eugenol in their chardonnay and therefore determine how long to toast their French oak barrels (eugenol is a compound from oak which gives the clove-like aroma and flavor to wine). Ultimately the Mass and IR techniques are too low in resolution to do what most organic chemists really need to do, which is to confirm if the thing you think you made in the lab is what it is supposed to be. Step in, NMR. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, the work horse tool of the organic chemist, and therefore the only one I’ll get into much detail with here. It is said that if the NMR machine is shut down for some reason, then the organic chemist goes home for the day. (So in my world I guess that makes it a bit like a Starbucks.)
The User Experience of Organic Chemistry – Part 1: A Chemical Language
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on September 23rd, 2010
Who do you think you are, God? ChemDraw is smart enough to warn a user (with a red outline) when something is chemically impossible.
Chemistry is one of the great non-verbal disciplines. In so many ways it reminds me of music. Atoms are too small to see, even with a microscope, so chemists must measure the invisible as spectra and then visualize the data as waveforms – just like audio engineers do with sound in applications like ProTools. To express themselves, chemists draw things in complex symbolic notation – just like a composer draws sheet music. Chemical structure drawings not only represent a molecule’s make-up, but also it’s spatial arrangement, information about it’s chemical properties, and it’s potential intermolecule interactions. From their first days as students, chemists quickly learn to think in two-dimensional planes of geometric shapes such as hexagons and dashed lines, and rarely need to reach for the English words to describe the same concepts (cyclohexane rings and partial bonds, in case you were wondering). By the time one is working as a professional in the field, the visual vernacular is not even questioned. The complex notations are scrawled (by hand) in lab books and on fume hoods, then ultimately plugged into a computer in order to utilize specialized search engines, lab-book software, PowerPoint presentations to colleagues, and to illustrate scientific articles. It is a natural, living language, bending itself over time as new abbreviations and rival ways of doing things are constantly introduced.
The User Experience of F1 Telemetry
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on August 30th, 2010
Despite the glowing brakes, you can't tell much about an F1 car's performance by just looking at it.
Formula One fans know that competing at auto racing’s highest level is as much an act of technological bravado as it is one of sport, and F1 teams are undoubtedly the sporting world’s must gluttonous consumers of information and statistics. Telemetry refers to the automatic measurement and transmission of data by wire, radio, or other means from a remote source – in this case, an F1 racing car moving at speeds up to 250mph. Massive amounts of data are involved. For example, 150,000 measurements are made by the Williams F1 BMW FW26’s on-board computer from almost 200 separate sensors on the car during a typical test run. All of this is shipped back to the pit lanes via live radio transmission or downloaded from the car’s on-board computer, and is then sent to engineers back home in the UK control room in Woking on dedicated pipes of fiber optics. (There is a good reason F1 teams seek out sponsorships from telecoms companies such as Vodaphone.) During actual races, around 25 key functions are actively monitored, with about 1MB of data per second sent back from the car. Some stats won’t surprise you since you can monitor them on your own vehicle’s dashboard, such as engine revs, water and oil temperatures, ground speed and fuel. However, you are unlikely to have a team of analysts scrutinizing the exact moment of your gear changes, your tire temperature, or your braking efforts. What do the interfaces look like that these engineers are using?
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