The Virtual Library of Olfaction is an extensive bibliography of scientific articles and books that has been compiled by our scientific advisors and organized by category. A handy glossary of olfaction is also included for your reference.

Field Papers allows you to print a multipage paper atlas of anywhere in the world and take it outside, offline, into the field. You can scribble on it, add features, or make notes about the area, all without a GPS or complicated GIS software.

This template is meant to get you from thinking about publishing a piece of text you have to actually publishing it on Kindle Direct Publishing.

Whatever the insinuation, one thing is certainly clear, “design by committee” is never meant as a compliment. Too bad for us designers, since the majority of the work we do is initiated, executed, resolved and troubleshot through collaboration with our clients, who, as a single individual or a group of vested folks make up committees.

Realistically, they are the group of people you work with, to varying degrees of involvement, from the start of a project until the end. Whether they are note-takers, brand managers, vice presidents or CEOs, they are the people that you talk to and e-mail with, they are the ones that brief you on the project and sit through the presentations of your work, they are responsible for informing your process and ensuring that the work is beneficial to their organization… they are the ones you celebrate with once the project is completed. They are real and they make or break your days, weeks, months and years. And this is why using “designed by committee” as an insult or an explanation for poor work, even if meant as a joke, is detrimental to our profession, and perhaps an underlying thread of why graphic designers are less prone to be taken seriously — if we don’t respect the decisions made by those we work with, why would anyone want to respect ours?

We are forgetting that design is not about us, but about them.

Unless we want to add Narcissism to our service offerings, we need to realize that committees shape, for better or for worse, the work we do.

Acclimating yourself to warmer weather is much better, and better for you, than running the A/C all the time.

The Codex Foundation exists to preserve and promote the hand-made book as a work of art in the broadest possible context and to bring to public recognition the artists, the craftsmanship, and the rich history of the civilization of the book.

We meet the places we wind up loving much the way we meet the people we fall for: on purpose and accidentally; at precisely the right moment and exactly the wrong time; in the highest of spirits and the lowest of moods.

The structure of our brain, from the details of our dendrites to the density of our hippocampus, is incredibly influenced by our surroundings. Put a primate under stressful conditions, and its brain begins to starve. It stops creating new cells. The cells it already has retreat inwards. The mind is disfigured.

The social implications of this research are staggering. If boring environments, stressful noises, and the primate’s particular slot in the dominance hierarchy all shape the architecture of the brain—and Gould’s team has shown that they do—then the playing field isn’t level.

Scientific facts are meaningful precisely because they are ephemeral, because a new observation, a more honest observation, can always alter them.

Nottebohm, in a series of beautiful studies on birds, had showed that neurogenesis was essential to birdsong.

On a cellular level, the scars of stress can literally be healed by learning new things.

This site is centered around the function of adult neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, including discussion of scientific research papers, methods and protocols, and other trends or observations about the field. However, since we cannot truly understand the function of adult hippocampal neurogenesis without also studying behavior, plasticity, development etc., I will invariably comment on findings outside of the adult neurogenesis literature that are interesting or relevant.

Encouragement is like an apple; praise is like candy.

[Praise] can only be given after success. Encouragement is so potent that it can be given after failure.

Praise is general and high-energy. Encouragement is low-key.

By the way, “thank you” is a powerful form of encouragement.

A static Photoshop mock isn’t cool. You know what is cool? A living mock.

Knuth was obsessed with making The Art of Computer Programming perfect in every way right down to the print and type.

I wouldn’t have wanted to write The Art of Computer Programming if it was going to look ugly.

My books are better thought about than read.

Two not-quite-friends meet again after a couple of years. Neither of them is like, transformed. In fact, they’re both doing basically the same thing they were doing before. But neither is the same, either. Both have made progress, each in their own way—progress, sure and steady.

The book documents the development of the relatively young field of graphic design history from 1983 to today, underscoring the aesthetic, theoretical, political and social tensions that have underpinned it from the beginning.

Barry and Katigbak plan to keep printing one poster at a time and teaching other employees how to do it. For a perfectionist like Barry, relinquishing control isn’t easy. “All I can do is explain,” he says, “and then sit back and watch

[Twitter] has never made its users’ private information  public when it has introduced new features. Unlike Facebook, Twitter has not endlessly changed its privacy policy. Users of the site trust Twitter more.

In this age of changing habits, if print is the stairs and screens the elevator, then what could the escalator be?

There's talk nowadays
in publishing circles about a new device for books, called a
ReadMan. Like a Walkman only you carry it in your hands like
this.... Has a very nice little graphics screen, theoretically,
a high-definition thing, very legible.... And you play your
books on it.

If you’re not having to do research to solve problems, then your problems aren’t challenging enough.

Is the vagueness of the font’s intention a kind of silent bad advice? Is this an amateur comedian’s darkest and most successful joke?

It’s a different category of thing that can exist only on the newly extended continuum that digital durability makes possible.

Le Prix Fernand Baudin, le Prix des plus beaux livres à Bruxelles et en Wallonie, est une initiative de plusieurs graphistes-enseignants, agissant dans le milieu du livre. Pour sa première édition bruxelloise en 2008, il a été soutenu par Bruxelles Invest & Export. En 2009, grâce au soutien de Wallonie-Bruxelles International (WBI) et de l'Agence Wallonne à l'Exportation et aux Investissements étrangers (AWEX), le prix s’étend à la Wallonie pour ses éditions suivantes.

Blended learning describes a process or practice; hybrid pedagogy is a methodological approach that helps define a series of varied processes and practices. (Blended learning is tactical, whereas hybrid pedagogy is strategic.) When people talk about “blended learning,” they are usually referring to the place where learning happens, a combination of the classroom and online. The word “hybrid” has deeper resonances, suggesting not just that the place of learning is changed but that a hybrid pedagogy fundamentally rethinks our conception of place.

Pegasus Global Holdings, LLC, a private international technology development firm, is creating CITE to be the largest scale testing and evaluation center in the world.

CITE will represent a 20th century American city with a population of approximately 35,000 people and be built on roughly 15 square acres. CITE’s test city will be unpopulated. This unique feature will allow for a true laboratory without the complication and safety issues associated with residents.

CITE will be a catalyst for the acceleration of research into applied, market-ready products by providing “end to end” testing and evaluation of emerging technologies and innovations from the world’s public laboratories, universities and the private sector.

These innovations, if brought forward to the point of manufacturing, are essential for the United States to regain manufacturing superiority and to train and put a highly experienced and well educated workforce back to work – while at the same time helping to change the environment for the better through commercialization of advanced innovations in energy, transportation, infrastructure, healthcare and the environment.

And maybe I live in the future more than many, but I realized that sort of not having a future was inhumane in that part of what meant to be human was to have a future, was to look forward, was to in some ways be future oriented and live in the future a little bit. I think that is part of what being human means because when I didn’t have a future I felt my humanity shrinking.

I started my career writing about travel, but very early on I had an opportunity to participate in an online world and I began to write about that as a foreign country. That’s where I got involved in the future by actually experiencing it online.

Led by Dr Anne Galloway, the Design Culture Lab supports collaborative and multidisciplinary research into the material, visual and discursive aspects of technology.

Using Douglas Harper’s online dictionary of etymology, I paired up words from various passages I found online with entries in the dictionary. For each word, I pulled out the first listed language of origin and then re-constructed the text with some additional HTML infrastructure. The HTML would allow me to associate each word (or word fragment) with a color, title, and hyperlink to a definition.

First we must acknowledge that all writers make terrible things. Embarrassing, half finished ideas bloated with lies, clichés and abhorrent misuse of all the languages in the world.

But perhaps, after years of jealousy, regret and unrequited love, we’ll find that the rewards of writing are not so much products of strain as they are gifts of patience.

And so it is with design. We have reached our own “ahistorical moment”—a post-postmodern free-for-all in which almost anything goes. History has become disassociated from content and context, and has been rendered a vast library of potential memes available for appropriation and reuse without prejudice. As designers, we have lost our sense of the larger story and our passion to engage with it through our work.

What we need is a Venn diagram.

Portal is a nerd fantasy. You’ve got this gun and when you blast a wall with it, you literally rip spacetime wide open with an entry portal. Blast another wall and there’s the other half of your portal.

How. Cool.

That’s the beginning of the cool and the simplest part of the game. As you progress through the increasingly complex puzzles, Portal does something even cooler. It teaches you the game, it teaches you how to improvise solutions to the puzzles, and it eventually makes you a master of the Portal gun and its associated physics — without a single page of documentation. You learn about the Portal universe intimately, but you don’t notice the learning because you’re too busy playing.

The mystery of the player not having a clue what the hell is going on is the initial incentive to learn.

Success is not measured with points, timers, or headcrabs. Success is measured by the satisfaction you receive when you use the mechanics you’ve incrementally learned to solve the puzzle and exit the chamber in a not-dead state.

When people talk of gift economies, often they talk about them as a replacement for the market economy. But gift economies and market economies have operated side-by-side for much of history.

The real story is that their founders thought of the gift first, and the means of supporting it second.

Thinking about ants and their networks of communication and gift, I can't help but think of the internet. In 2005, Paul Rademacher reverse-engineered the JavaScript code for Google Maps, wrote a program to scrape Craigslist apartment listings, and overlaid the Craigslist listings on Google Maps. It was the first web mashup.

It's hard now to appreciate how clever that was at the time. Today, most web services offer free APIs, and it's common for people to use multiple APIs to build something more intelligent than any of the individual services. APIs serve as a mechanism for communication and gift.

We publish vivid and provocative essays from leading practitioners in technology and the arts, exploring the relationship between humans and technology. All material is released under a Creative Commons NonCommercial-Attribution-ShareAlike license. Food for thought!

On a small scale, the effects of software are benign. But at large companies with hundreds of millions of users, something so apparently small as the choice of what should be a default setting will have an immediate impact on the daily behavior patterns of a large percentage of the planet.

The historic video magazine Radical Software was started by Beryl Korot, Phyllis Gershuny, and Ira Schneider and first appeared in Spring of 1970, soon after low-cost portable video equipment became available to artists and other potential videomakers. Though scholarly works on video art history often refer to Radical Software, there are few places where scholars can review its contents. Individual copies are rare, and few complete collections exist. This Web site makes it freely available and searchable on the Internet.

The right question evokes its own context.

Between Page and Screen, a ground-breaking collaboration between poet and book artist Amaranth Borsuk and programmer Brad Bouse, is truly a first: a book that only can be read when simultaneously using a codex book and a computer’s webcam. When placed in front of a webcam, the black shapes printed on the pages, sans words, trigger animated text on the screen, revealing a correspondence between characters P and S.

The work of Raw Color reflects a sophisticated treatment of material and colour by mixing the fields of graphic design and photography. This is embodied through research and experiments, building their visual language. Daniera ter Haar & Christoph Brach work on self initiated and commissioned projects in their Eindhoven based studio.

She wrote on both sides of the paper, rather neatly but with only a few lines to a page (almost never more than eight), centering some lines and indenting others like poetry; running-on still others like prose.

She wrote first drafts full of marginalia: personal comments, grocery lists, addresses of people she intended to contact, notes to Toklas, and so forth. She disposed of most of these first drafts after writing second drafts, again in pencil, in children’s cahiers.

Like father, like daughter: For how many generations, I sometimes wonder, has this internal clock been keeping my relatives awake—and why?

Staying up at night is, among other things, an act of communitarianism; an act of love.

I believe I was supposed to outgrow that habit. Instead, I grew into it. Left to my own devices, I write best from ten at night to 4 a.m.

Those who have shared my bed—when I am in it to share it, anyway—have observed my nighttime habits with reactions varying from indulgence to incredulity.

It starts, as I said, around 10 p.m., when something ticks over in my mind, as if someone had walked into a shuttered cabin and flipped all the switches in the fuse box to “on.”

My normal indiscipline, the ADHD-ish inability to keep my head inside my work, finally drops away. For the next few hours, I write steadily, cleanly. If my body is producing a drug during that time, it is a natural methylphenidate—a dose of pure focus, side-effect-free and sweet.

If I put my work away and go to bed, I will fall asleep almost instantly, and can be up and functional again at nine. If, instead, I cross the 3:30 a.m. threshold, I will write all night.

The sun will fill my bedroom, and I will close my laptop and cover my eyes, and sleep maybe two hours, from six to eight or eight to ten—I have lost, alas, my childhood ability to sleep till noon—or sometimes not sleep at all. Either way, I will be awake the rest of the day, and utterly destroyed.

It’s hell on your social life, bad for your body, contraindicated by every piece of emotional and physical health advice you’ll ever see.

I love the quiet and the solitude; love, especially, nighttime’s strange combination of adventure and calm.

Running, you may have noticed, is a terrestrial activity, pretty much one hundred percent about gravity. And yet, when I run at night—or walk at night, or write at night, or do almost anything at night—I sometimes seem to slip its bounds. In darkness I am freer, less weighted down, my perspective wholly altered: a kind of noctonaut.

Among species, we humans are to time what Polish villagers have long been to place: unhappy subjects of multiple competing regimes.

What you cannot do—contrary to popular opinion—is change your clock through sheer force of will.

Work-wise, I function best from around 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., a characteristic I share with roughly one percent of the population.

One researcher he cites found that nursing-home residents sleep poorly in part because they’re exposed to almost no natural light. Similarly, the average chronotype of people in cities is later than that of rural dwellers—and the larger the city, the later it gets.

Perhaps the most explicit shift away from sun time came around the turn of the twentieth century with the gradual adoption of global time zones. Before then, all time was local, typically dictated by a church or town-hall clock. That system kept social time and sun time aligned—the clock read noon when the sun reached its zenith—but it became inconvenient in a nationalizing and then globalizing world. Time zones, by contrast, are convenient but contrived.

In mammals, the clock is located near the base of the brain, in a group of nerve cells known as the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN. The SCN consists of only about 20,000 of the brain’s estimated 100 billion neurons; you could fit the entire thing on the tip of the second hand of an analog watch. Yet without it, you are profoundly screwed. If you replace the SCN of one hamster with that of another, the original hamster will begin sleeping, eating, and attending its manic hamster spin class on the schedule previously maintained by the other one. If you remove the SCN, the hamster’s behavior will lose all regularity. Similarly, people with brain lesions in the SCN region cannot maintain consistent sleep-wake patterns.

“The myth of Peter Saville is based mainly on those album covers for Factory, but that work was done in a weird autonomous zone.”

But if Saville is acknowledged for his modern appropriations and uncanny ability to read the culture, he also has the reputation of being a notoriously lousy businessman who works to his own schedule.

“Saville’s story can be read as a refusal of commercial success,” [Emily] King says. “The moments he has come closest to being able to carve up his talent for considerable profit are when he has behaved at his very worst -- the nocturnal schedule, the procrastination, the anxieties about the quality of his work.”

''Peter is this extraordinary combination of supreme solipsistic self-confidence and acute insecurity, and that's what powers his work.”

By the early 1990s Factory was in financial crisis as was Saville’s business and he accepted the offer of a partnership at the Pentagram design group. Unhappy there, disillusioned with design and the frenzied overload of early 1990s visual culture, Saville filled his work with with images of exhaustion and depletion. He drew inspiration from artists like Barbara Kruger and Richard Prince, but borrowed images from stock photography libraries instead of fine art catalogues. His work reflected the uncertainty of global recession and echoed the mood of Yamamoto, who was equally disillusioned with fashion.

Devised in 2009, AND is a platform exploring print on demand technologies to publish conceptually driven artists' books. Photocopied or glossy printed, we define print on demand as a method, a tool to directly and immediately interact and communicate an idea to an audience. Due to short print runs (starting from one copy), low productions costs and almost no storage costs, we can develop and sustain an adventurous, inquiring, creative practice without having to compromise and conform the conventions of a mass market.

I don’t think that I would have been able to write a single word had it not been for music as a force in my life.

People—both men and women—who find themselves at a satisfactory level in life usually have a mentor to help them rise to that place.

I read until I realized I was causing damage to my eyes. It was a kind of runaway lust.

Fuego is one way to cope with the waning gatekeeper function of editors, Benton explains, describing a world in which “the power to publish is no longer limited to people who have a broadcast tower or who buy ink by the barrel. While some may not like the cacophony of voices that can sometimes produce, I think it’s inarguable that this has enabled some very smart people to produce some very good work that they wouldn’t have been able to do in a pre-Internet world.”

This whole incident is definitely about journalism, storytelling, labour practices, and fact-checking.  But it’s also about how belief, trust, and doubt intersect to make us make things true for ourselves.  On the internet there are countless sources, genres, stories, traditions, networks, and appeals to authority.  The case of Mike Daisey, Apple, and This American Life isn’t about the internet per se; but it does serve as an examplar for thinking about contemporary truth-making.

In Parallax Scroll I have attempted to invert this process, that is, to translate a story into a physical environment. Using the vocabulary of comics (images, hand-drawn words and frames) as pictorial elements, I have created an immersive world, one that is dense, seamless and devoid of traditional narrative structure. There is no beginning, ending or causal connection, simply a self-contained, continuous flow of information. Within this world, I invite the viewer to become lost in the piece, navigating their way, making their own connections and constructing their own meanings.

After reading the Mother Jones piece, I deleted the Path app. Each user’s relationship with a new social product hangs by a thread of social connections and trust. I was on the fence about Path — only two of my actual friends use it — and when I have a choice, I’d rather not trust carelessly sexist people (or the companies that hire them) with my data, attention, or time.

The derailing attacks and defensive tweets are typed by fingers belonging to actual humans in front of keyboards.

We’ve all said dumb, offensive shit. This is what friends are for: they help you be a better, kinder human.

One day in the air of the Prim Prim studio appeared a question – is it possible to describe the taste of the font?