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	<title>B.I.G. Ideas</title>
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	<link>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas</link>
	<description>The weblog at 2MinuteExplainer.com</description>
	<pubDate>Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:04:02 +0000</pubDate>
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		<title>Safari Bookshelf</title>
		<link>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/09/safari-bookshelf/</link>
		<comments>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/09/safari-bookshelf/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:27:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bruce</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Web applications and development]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/?p=21</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In a small company like ours, where everyone wears several hats, The O&#8217;Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf has become an indispensable resource for the person wearing the hat with the propeller.
Safari is a big electronic reference library of information technology related books from O&#8217;Reilly and other technical publishers well-known to IT departments. (O&#8217;Reilly books are the [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Affair of the Century Font Family</title>
		<link>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/09/affair-of-the-century-font-family/</link>
		<comments>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/09/affair-of-the-century-font-family/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Sep 2008 02:07:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bruce</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Typography and layout]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/?p=13</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In selecting typefaces, if you&#8217;re not a professional typographer, a good practice is to stick with one font family (e.g., Univers, Helvetica) throughout a document.
Our company has often used the combination of New Century for body text and Franklin Gothic for headlines. It turns out that, in a way, these fonts also come from the [...]]]></description>
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		<title>The allure of the sidehead</title>
		<link>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/08/the-allure-of-the-sidehead/</link>
		<comments>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/08/the-allure-of-the-sidehead/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:38:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bruce</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Typography and layout]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/?p=22</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[One of our company&#8217;s first projects was to edit and format the strategic plan of a telco spun out of AT&#38;T (the planning group wanted to display forward-thinkingness by using the then-new technology of desktop-publishing). We devised a business-like layout with sideheads (headlines in the left margin), that we&#8217;ve updated from time to time for [...]]]></description>
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		<title>A chart that frames the issue and calls for action</title>
		<link>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/08/a-chart-that-frames-the-issue-and-calls-for-action/</link>
		<comments>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/08/a-chart-that-frames-the-issue-and-calls-for-action/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:50:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bruce</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Information Graphics]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/?p=25</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The final installment of a survey of global warming by Elizabeth Kolbert published in The New Yorker (May 9, 2005), sets forth some ideas for attacking the problem advanced by Princeton engineering professor Robert Socolow, co-director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative. The article features a striking illustration based on a chart Socolow and his colleagues [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Exactly repeatable pictorial statements</title>
		<link>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/08/exactly-repeatable-pictorial-statements/</link>
		<comments>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/08/exactly-repeatable-pictorial-statements/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:47:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bruce</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Information Graphics]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/?p=20</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ We owe more to the printed picture than to the printed word. That, paraphrased, is the thesis of a wonderful book, Prints and Visual Communication, by William M Ivins, Jr., first published in 1953. Ivins was for many years curator of prints at New York&#8217;s Metropolitan Museum of Art. From the title and cover, [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Laying out a formal table</title>
		<link>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/07/laying-out-a-formal-table/</link>
		<comments>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/07/laying-out-a-formal-table/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:06:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bruce</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Information Graphics]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/?p=14</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Information marching across the page by ranks and columns looks more purposeful than when it&#8217;s milling about in paragraphs. But, even with a computer, laying out a table is labor-intensive.
The layout below will provide some useful guidelines. It exemplifies a &#8220;formal&#8221; table of the kind scientists and scholars construct when they have categories-within-categories of data [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Remember the multimedia</title>
		<link>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/07/remember-the-multimedia/</link>
		<comments>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/07/remember-the-multimedia/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:15:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bruce</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Stuff we've learned on projects]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/?p=31</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Being in the multimedia biz, I&#8217;ve often heard (and even cited) bromides like &#8220;we remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see, 50% of what we see and hear.&#8221;  This is totally bogus, according to  this  guy.
The so-called &#8220;Weiss-McGrath retention study&#8221; is referred to [...]]]></description>
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		<title>How to use fewer words</title>
		<link>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/07/how-to-use-fewer-words/</link>
		<comments>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/07/how-to-use-fewer-words/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:59:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bruce</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[re: writing]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/?p=12</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle (1 Corinthians 14:8).
In a 2-Minute Explainer, there&#8217;s time to utter about 250 words. Consequently, the rule from Strunk and White&#8217;s Elements of Style, &#8220;omit needless words&#8221; is frequently invoked here. My favorite prescription for using fewer words is from Samuel [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Perl Template-Toolkit</title>
		<link>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/06/perl-template-toolkit/</link>
		<comments>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/06/perl-template-toolkit/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:18:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bruce</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Web applications and development]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/?p=19</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[We maintain this site with Perl Template Toolkit. Depending on how you want to use it, TTK is either a souped-up templating program or a souped-down content management system. Big, dynamic, content-rich websites using it include the popular IT news site Slashdot and the BBC. 
With templates, you can see the structure of a page, [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Perl Data::Table</title>
		<link>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/06/perl-data-table/</link>
		<comments>http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/2008/06/perl-data-table/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 22 Jun 2008 22:08:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Bruce</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Web applications and development]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.2minuteexplainer.com/BIG_ideas/?p=18</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When you ask a database for information, the result of the query is a table or &#8220;rowset&#8221;. People who are good at database management write queries that slice and dice multiple tables, perform calculations on data, and format it all before it ever gets reported back.
I&#8217;m not one of the people who are good at [...]]]></description>
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