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If you hang out in the blog-twitter-sphere you’ve doubtless seen recent mention of brand tags, Noah Brier’s “collective experiment in brand perception”. The site shows you brand logos and asks you to tag them with the first word or phrase that comes to mind. Then it shows you how others tagged those brands. It’s addictive. Here, for example, are the top tags for Jet Blue and United Airlines: Jet Blue: cheap, plane, airline, fly, blue, airplane, tv, cool, fun United Airlines: airlines, airline, airplane, fly, plane, air, old, bankrupt These slices of collective perception are remarkable indicators. Whose perceptions do they indicate, though? Not only, as I guessed, denizens...
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In the domain of Internet software world we take it for granted that standards documents are available for anybody to read. But in other domains that’s not the case, as I was reminded when I landed on this URL, where a copy of EN 303-5 — a European standard that governs “heating boilers for solid fuels, hand and automatically fired, nominal heat output of up to 300 kW” — is offered for Ă‚ÂŁ180. Here’s how I got there. I’ve imported a wood gasification boiler from Europe, and I need to show my city that it’s a listed and rated device. Well it is, but it doesn’t carry ASME and UL certifications, it carries a TUV...
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Government 2.0 was the theme of couple of recent podcasts. On Phil Windley’s Technometria show, Britt Blaser discussed his Independence Year project, which places “the organizing tools of the best political campaigns” into the hands of citizens who want to organize themselves. And on my own show I spoke with W. David Stephenson, a veteran political operative who has recently focused on the same theme. On both of these shows, I harped — too much — on how online tools and services do, and don’t, enable citizens to make sense of, and engage with, the processes of governments. But of course, as Adina Levin helpfully reminds me, it isn’t all, or...
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Consider two analytical reports from CrimeReports.com. San Francisco, last 30 days  Washington DC, last 30 days  A number of oddities leap out, but most of all look at the scale on the X axes. It runs to 30,000 for San Francisco, and only 800 for Washington DC. In absolute terms the numbers of thefts reported are comparable: 732 for Washington, 952 for San Francisco. But some non-reported categories from Washingon skew the comparison wildly. The numbers for Traffic and Proactive Policing, for example, are zero for Washington, but 17264 and 28356 for San Francisco. Now to be sure, CrimeReports offers this...
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Last July the crazy weather prompted me to examine my subjective notion that things were, indeed, going crazy. However, a cursory analysis of NOAA’s historical temperature and precipitation data, available back to 1921 for the Concord, NH station that’s closest to me, didn’t seem to reveal any notable patterns. Well, we’re having another crazy summer, and I took another look at that data. This time around I used Excel to do some deeper massaging, and here’s what I’ve found: Monthly precipitation for Concord NH, 1921 to 2008 (top 15%) rank jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug (1-10) 1 1979 2008 1937 2007...
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Thanks to the expanded coverage at nbcolympics.com, we’re not just seeing more sports, we’re seeing sports differently. The podium training for men’s gymnastics, for example, was a behind-the-scenes view that you’d never see on TV. Now that we’re into the team competitions, another new perspective is emerging — and it’s been a revelation. As we see all the performers, not just the top echelon, I’m struck by the number of blown routines. I’ve felt for years that the sport has been emphasizing extreme difficulty at the expense of form, grace, amplitude, style, and rhythm. Watching the whole competition on high bar has confirmed that. I think you should approach an apparatus with a high degree...
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I’ve always thought that Arthur C. Clarke’s space elevator idea was intriguing, but until recently I never thought much more about it. Then I heard that Microsoft was co-sponsoring, and hosting, the 2008 Space Elevator Conference. This annual event isn’t a science fiction convention. It gathers a diverse group of passionate scientists and engineers who have, in recent years, morphed Clarke’s original vision into something that could cost less, and arrive sooner, than you think. I wound up doing two separate interviews on this topic. On my Perspectives show, I spoke with Ted Semon, a retired software engineer who runs a blog that chronicles the movement to develop this new version of Clarke’s idea.
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Recently I gave a presentation, on a topic that is web-oriented and somewhat technical, to a group that is very much non-technical. I knew slides wouldn’t be an option, because there wouldn’t be a projector in the room. But arguably a slideshow would be the wrong thing anyway. I wanted people to focus on me, and on the message I was delivering, not on a slideshow. So I wound up writing a twelve-page Word document that provided me with speaking notes, and also served as the handout I left behind. For me, it was an odd reversal of my usual procedure, and a bit of a revelation about Word’s ability to wrangle web content into a nicely...
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As a former gymnast, I’ve been quadrennially frustrated by TV coverage of the Olympics. I don’t need the “up close and personal” portraits of a few popular gymnasts. And I don’t need Elfi Schlegel and Tim Daggett to point out some subtle things I already know, or to state the obvious that anyone can see for themselves (”oops, a little hop on the landing”). Most of all, I don’t want to be restricted to the minimal subset of gymnastics performances that was historically all that got televised. I’ve always dreamed of being able to watch raw footage of every performance, and even — why not? — all the warmups. Finally that moment is...
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At the turn of our new century, during the heyday of Napster, the infotech conversation was all about peer-to-peer, or P2P, technology. There were elite gatherings of leading influentials to assess its potential, conferences to bring together ideas and money, new publications to chronicle its development. In September 2000 Dave Winer wrote a touchstone essay called The P in P2P. “It’s not about P2P, specifically, that people should be getting excited,” Dave wrote. “The killer app of P2P is … People!” When Groove 1.0 launched I was asked by a media producer to explain why Groove was an important P2P application. Channeling Dave, I said that Groove was important because it empowered people...
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On this week’s Innovators show I spoke with Lee LeFever who, with his wife Sachi, runs CommonCraft. You’ve probably seen their clever animated videos explaining web topics like RSS and Twitter. If not, check out their most popular one, RSS in Plain English. It’s uncannily effective, and a real inspiration to those of us who’ve struggled to explain this concept to civilians. As I mentioned here, and as we also discuss in the interview, the CommonCraft style shares some DNA with the practice of paper prototyping as described by Bill Buxton in another interview. In Bill Buxton’s case, you abstract away unnecessary detail, and convey action, by sketching and manually animating...
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In my Perspectives series I’ve been exploring some key relationships between Microsoft and external partners: Mercy Corps, NASA, the Library of Congress, the community of scientific and scholarly publishers, and individual scientific researchers including George Hripcsak and Dennis Baldocchi. For this week’s show I spoke with Tony Hey, the VP of the External Research division of Microsoft Research. More than anyone else, he’s responsible for advancing what I’ll call the Jim Gray vision: All science is becoming computational and data-driven; a new breed of scientists requires a new generation of tools and services; Microsoft can and should rise to the challenge. In coming weeks and months...
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To prepare for my interview with Susan Gerhart I tried using text-to-speech software to read menu choices and text selections aloud. As always, I experienced the reaction that Susan, in her latest post, calls synthetic voice shock. For those of us who don’t need to rely on synthetic voices, that reaction isn’t a problem, it’s merely a deterrent to optional use of the technology. For example, though it might be convenient to shift some material from the domain of written text to the domain of audio, the unpleasantness of synthetic voices stops me from doing that. But the real problem, Susan explains today, is that synthetic voice shock deters people who have...
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By an odd coincidence, my interview with Joshua Tauberer, founder and operator of GovTrack, went live just as the bill I’d been tracking using that system made headlines. Had I not been doing some investigation into legislative support for alternative biomass heating systems, I’d never have known that the Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008 — which the President is now expected to sign into law this week, and which is generally known as the bailout for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — is also the bill that may result in tax credits for those of us in New England who’ve been investing in those heating systems. This has been my most comprehensive...
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In yesterday’s essay on my efforts to relate what our New Hampshire senators say about renewable energy to what they do or don’t do about it (and why), I left out a crucial step. It’s a nice illustration of the subtle and powerful data visualization provided by MAPLight.org. I’d found references to a crucial NO vote cast by John Sununu, but was having trouble finding out for which bill, and for which step in its process, that vote was recorded. I thought the bill was H.R.6-110, and I was looking for a NO vote, cast by Sununu just before its Dec 13 passage, where the final tally was 59-40. MAPLight’s use of...
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