In some fields, contests drive research and the entire field forward. Those contests are prestigious, and people list the fact that they won the contest in their CVs. In InfoVis, the contest is trying to appeal to researchers, but is getting little attention. What should the role of the contest be? And how can we make it more interesting?

The EagerEyes Labs' mission is to provide tools to gain insight into relevant data to everybody. As part of that, the plan has always been to release the source code. The first piece of code is now published, and more is coming.

How do bats fly? What are the aerodynamic conditions around their wings? And how do you visualize all that? I did a short interview with David Laidlaw (PDF), who has collaborated with physicists, biologists, fluid mechanics experts, and others, to create a poster that won last year's NSF Visualization Challenge. The interview was done for American Scientist's Sightings column, which I have been invited to write.

I'm not generally a big YouTube fan. Sure, I've watched all the funny cat movies and seen people dump Mentos into bottles of Diet Coke. But little else has made me go there in some months. This has changed, though, with a new feature of the website: The YouTube Screen Room. Twice a month, four independent short films are added to the site, and the quality is amazing.

This website just got a facelift and a few new features. I transitioned it to Drupal 6, and in the process redid the theme from scratch. While the changes are not huge, it does look a bit more modern. There are also a few new features to facilitate commenting and discussion.

My colleague Celine Latulipe has made a nice website about her Dance.Draw project. In what she calls Exquisite Interaction, three dancers wield inertial mice and thus control shapes in a projection behind them. The result is interesting and beautiful.

I am looking for a designer to help me work on the icon for a program I am developing. The program is written for the iPhone and will be announced here once the iPhone AppStore is up (presumably at the end of June). Without going into details, let me tell you that it will be visualization-related, and that it will tie in with this website. If you feel that you could help, please contact me by the end of the week the latest (there is a first deadline next Monday).