Paper Documents Are A Pain

INFO SCIENCE: BoingBoing has taken note of a research project of my department at the UW. It's called Keeping Found Things Found and is all about human information behavior. Here's what BoingBoing had to say:

A new study from the University of Washington's Information School provides more proof that search rules:

More than half of survey participants admitted losing track of a paper document at least once a week -- more than twice the number of people who reported losing electronic information.



The result? While more than 60 percent reported being satisfied with their ability to handle computerized records such as e-mails, electronic documents and Web bookmarks, only 31 percent were satisfied with their ability to organize their papers.

The survey is part of an interesting project called Keeping Found Things Found, an effort to develop innovative ways to manage information stored digitally and on dead trees. Link

I feel like I should say "go dawgs!" or something here.

Get Your International News

DATA:

Google News just got a bit handier. They recently added (or perhaps I just recently noticed) a little drop-down box near Top Stories that allows you to quickly jump to Google News' international sites.







I used to jump between international versions of Google News because I'm always wondering what other countries think of this crazy country I live in. (I don't know why, sounds a little sadomasochistic now that I say it.) Now it's a bit easier.



Next I'd like them to develop some really good translation tools and allow me to read news from all over the globe in English. So get on it Google! :-)

Subway Map Special Edition

VISUAL COMMUNICATION: On the heals of my earlier post about real subway maps comes a special (wink wink) subway map for RNC delegates.







This is cool, but for some reason I doubt many delegates are using the subway.



Looking at this gets me excited for the Second Avenue Subway (T), which will hopefully begin construction by the end of this year.

Ted's Handy FireFox Plugins

INTERNET: I've been using Ted Mielczarek's FlashBlock program for some time and highly recommend it for getting rid of unsightly flash ads. Checking his Mozilla page today I found a few other gems that are also useful.

* Nuke Anything: This plug-in ads an option to your right-click menu to get rid of anything on a rendered webpage. You can select big chunks of text, images, tables, whatever, select 'remove,' and it's gone in a fraction of a second. To get everything back to normal just hit refresh.



* Plain Text Links: This little badboy lets you treat a url without an A tag as a hyperlink. Very hand when reading message boards and the like.

Where my peeps at?

INFO VISUALIZATION: LandScan has one of the best population density maps I've seen.







It sure is easy to forget just how many Asians there are in the world. But what's up with Argentina? This map makes it look more barren then the Sahara Desert.



If you're interested, they also talk about their methods on the site:

In order to assess population density, the LandScan dataset is based on the ambient population of an area over a 24 hour period, meaning that a single population number is predicted for each grid cell irrespective of variants in the population due to time of day. In order to accomplish this task, the LandScan model takes the best available census data for each country or region and apportions that data into the grid cells based on "probability coefficients" (ORNL August 2002). These coefficients are developed based on a set of input variables, including roads, slope, land cover, and nighttime lights, among others.

Poverty in America

INFO VISUALIZATION: You've probably heard that poverty in America is on the rise, as has been widely reported in the last few days. But if you want a bit more depth, check out the actual report over at the Census Bureau. The data is clear, the visualizations are crisp and the report is very user friendly overall.







I thought this graph was particularly interesting. They say Americans vote their wallets. I've never completely bought that argument, but if you do, look at the poverty level between '89 and '93 and again from '01 to present. Pretty similar eh? Where's Ross Perot when you need him?

Leave My Context Menu Alone!

INFO VISUALIZATION: Someone needs to make an extension for FireFox that ignores JavaScript that breaks the right-click menu (a.k.a. the context menu). Come now people, this doesn't keep anyone from saving images from your website. (As John Ashcroft might say, people still have P2P, or permission to pilfer.)



Just today I was checking out Santiago Calatrava's images of the Athens Olympic Stadium and the new WTC Transit Center when I ran into this annoying little piece of code.

document.oncontextmenu=new Function("return false")

What a complete bummer it is to see this clumsy little technique spread from crappy Geocities "art" sites to architechture firms and giants like Amazon.



UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who wrote in. I was using an older version of FireFox that didn't have the extra context menu protection, but I downloaded the new version and it works great! W00t!

Subway Map Fun

INFO VISUALIZATION: Stories about a redesigned New York subway map have been floating around (notably Gothamist and Jason's Notes).







I actually like both for different reasons. The redesign (left) sacrifices having a consistent scale for the benefit of showing clearer curves as well as showing the multiple lines sharing a single tunnel. If I had to choose one for my own use, I would choose the redesign simply because it mimics my own conceptual understanding (model) of the trains.



Of course, you can take abstraction way too far with maps. Just check out the subway map from 1972:







But, that's just my opinion. Check out the current official subway map, a few small pictures of this redesign, a redesign by Michael Calcagno, or Dynamap (which is very cool but only includes Lower Manhattan).



My personal favorite? A redeisgn by Joseph Brennan. His map includes NJ connections (like Path) as well as other light rail connections around the city (like the JFK Airtrain) and really gives you a good understanding of the entire region.

"Latte Liberals -- Activist Judges -- Partial Birth Abortions"

COMMUNICATION: Here's a great read (via Boingboing) that talks about how liberals and progressives are failing to use language to properly frame the current political debate.

Why do conservatives like to use the phrase "liberal elite" as an epithet?



Linguistics professor George Lakoff: Conservatives have branded liberals, and the liberals let them get away with it: the "liberal elite," the "latte liberals," the "limousine liberals." The funny thing is that conservatives are the elite. The whole idea of conservative doctrine is that some people are better than others, that some people deserve more. To conservatives, if you're poor it's because you deserve it, you're not disciplined enough to get ahead. Conservative doctrine requires that there be an elite: the people who thrive in the free market have more money, and they should. Progressives say, "No, that's not fair. Maybe some should have more money, but no one should live in poverty. Everybody who works deserves to have a reasonable standard of living for their work." These are ideas that are progressive or liberal ideas, and progressives aren't getting them out there enough.



What progressives are promoting is not elite at all. Progressives ought to be talking about the conservative elite. They shouldn't be complaining about "tax cuts for the rich," they should be complaining about "tax cuts for the conservative elite," because that's who's getting them.

Personal Photo Collection

ASSEMBLEME: I finally went through my photos folder and put up an album of some of my favorite pics.