Quiet Week ASSEMBLEME: It's been a quiet week so far here at Assemble Me and will probably remain so through the holiday weekend. Plenty of things to write about, but I'm just taking it easy this week and playing video games. I'll be back to writing after the holiday. W00t!  ¶ 1:28 PM 1 Comments

  Continuous Population Clock DATA: Next time you need to know how many people there are in the US or the World, right now, check out the Census' PopClock.

Combine this data with the previous post and you'll learn that a gay American is born every 80-160 seconds. How many gay Earthlings are there? Probably somewhere between 318,830,145 and 637,660,291. That means if gay people all decided to form their own country, they'd be the third largest nation in the world, behind India and China, ahead of the US and Indonesia. What a fabulous country that would be!
  ¶ 10:54 AM 1 Comments

  Where My Homos At? INFO VISUALIZATION: This image was published by Seattle's Weekly, The Stranger, but I believe the information comes from a book called "The Gay & Lesbian Atlas" (a book I've been meaning to pick up for a while). This map shows the relative density of gays and lesbians in the US by county; from gayless green to flaming red.



These GIS maps that use zip codes or counties are always a bit misleading for a few reasons. Firstly, not all zip codes are created equal (for example, the White House has it's own zip code with a population of 2). Also, the size of the zip code or county is often inversely related to the population density: denser areas have smaller zip codes and smaller counties. This relationship (greater value = less size) is of course the opposite of what we intuit about information displays. And of course, Western states are much more likely to have large counties (just as they tend to be larger states themselves).

All of these problems distort the image: just look how prominent Nye county in Nevada is -- it's size and color could give the impression that this sparcely populated desert is the center of Gay America (when we all know where that is). But these visualizations are really the best we can do since a proper and arbitrary grid layout would require the latitude and longitude of all respondents who identify as gay (now that would be some awesome gaydar). Still, it's an illuminating bit of information. It gives hints as to why gayless North Dakota is as boring as, well, North Dakota and why the only way The Governator could get elected in gay-as-hell California was by being decidedly pro-gay rights.
  ¶ 10:41 AM 1 Comments

  E.J. Dionne INFO SCIENCE: I heard E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post (and author of "Stand Up Fight Back") on NPR's Weekday yesterday. He had a great comment that I thought I'd pass on:

The plural of anecdote isn't data.

What a great quote.
  ¶ 9:20 AM 1 Comments

  Sony to Send QRIOs Back In Time; Hunt Down Steve Jobs INFO TECHNOLOGY: Peter Rojas at Engadget finally goes all out on formerly-great Sony. Awesome.

SONY WHAT ARE YOU DOING? To us Sony is now officially in bizzaro world, where up is down, left is right and where people might still use Mini-Disc. We hate to say it, but here it is, Sony- we think you had a shot at reclaiming your birthright that Apple yoinked away, the Walkman, any day now we were expected a 100 GB MP3/Ogg player with an amazing sleek design, way less expensive than an iPod, we expected Sony to take the bold step and say “Hey, we’re done with Memory Stick, ATRAC and Mini-Disc for music, here we are now, check out our new device”. But no- Sony is running around updating the Mini-Disc. C’mon Sony, you dumped the CLIE how about killing off Mini-Disc, the world will cheer you on, well maybe not the dozen or so die hard Mini-Disc folks, but if you’re going to market share, there are more people who buy vinyl than Mini-Disc, at least consider a cool record player or something. Maybe Sony plans to send back the QRIOs back in time to hunt down Steve Jobs- Sarah Connor style once the QRIOs get more AI, we really can’t figure it out.

Amen, brother!  ¶ 4:00 PM 0 Comments

  Hudson Yards: Visualizing Urban Development Projects VISUAL COMMUNICATION: Last time I was in New York I wanted to walk the High Line, an old "elevated rail structure on the West Side of Manhattan" that was created in the 1930s and finally abandoned in 1980. Ever since it was abandoned, it's become a sort of unofficial garden / open space that's actually pretty accessible to anyone who wants to visit it. I've always loved old abandoned buildings and structures (who doesn't?) and I especially love those that are a bit arcane even though they're right there in plain sight.



Unfortunately I didn't get to walk the High Line. The fenced-in truck yard where the elevated line comes to ground level had this creepy semi truck driver just hanging out, staring at me as I walked by about a half dozen times. Since he wasn't moving, I decided to save it for a later date. While I was walking around this 'hood though, I couldn't help but notice how under developed it was. Here I was, only a few minutes from Madison Square Garden in the middle of the day, surrounded by a quiet train yard and not a person in sight. Creepy.

Anyway, today I found this great proposal that would develop this area into a beautiful new area of the city. I couldn't help but fall in love with the ideas, in part because the New York City Government has done such a great job communicating their proposals for the area. The website for the Hudson Yards Development is wonderfully put together, with plenty of graphics to give you a real feel for the project. Every city should be so lucky. Ok, suddenly I realllly want to play SimCity.





(High Line photo by J. Sternfeld)
(Hudson Yards story via Gothamist)  ¶ 2:19 PM 0 Comments

  N.E.S.T. INTERFACES: N.E.S.T. (when in doubt, give your project an acroname) is a project that, well, how do I put this? It sends a file around the web (using User Datagram Protocol) and traces how the file slowly becomes corrupted overtime. Kind of cool; kind of forgettable. However, I got a kick out of their interface. Where have I seen this before?


  ¶ 10:47 AM 0 Comments

  "I will let science guide us, not ideology" SCIENCE: John Kerry on the federal government and science policy.

I am proud that today 47 Nobel Laureates have sent an open letter to America in support of my campaign and our cause to invest and lead the world in science. As president, I will listen to the advice of our scientists so I can make the best decisions. Their reports and evaluations will be open so that you can make informed decisions as well. This is your future and I will let science guide us, not ideology.

Second, we need to invest in science and new technologies that may help cure diseases, start great new industries and deepen our understanding of the world in which we live. That’s why I will increase our funding to the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and other important agencies and initiatives that promote crucial research. These advances have the opportunity to do so much good in the world and new technologies like nanotechnology and clean energy have the potential to transform the American economy.

[...]

And finally, we must lift the barriers that stand in the way of stem cell research and push the boundaries of medical exploration so that researchers can find treatments that are there, if only they are allowed to look. And we should do this while providing strict ethical oversight.

Here's the New York Times' report on the speech.  ¶ 11:23 AM 0 Comments

  Flash Attack: In the News & Newsmap INFO VISUALIZATION: In the News is a new project that looks a lot like Newsmap. Basically, it's a flashy way of interacting with some of the meta-data that Google News provides.



In the News gathers its nouns from this little corner of Google News:



and then collects the number of stories related to that noun for any specific day. The color for any specific box shows it's relative frequency compared to the previous day. Good stuff.  ¶ 11:15 AM 0 Comments

  Processing Project: Flight404 INFO VISUALIZATION: Flight404 is an flash-heavy but still cool group of mini-projects created using Processing.



Processing itself is "a programming language and environment built for the electronic arts and visual design communities. It was created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as an electronic sketchbook." Blah blah blah. Basically, it's a cute and simple language that allows anyone to make some pretty kick-ass visualizations. It's a project by Ben Fry (who, as I've said before, I love) and Casey Reas, both of MIT's Media Lab.



The projects on their site are more art then useful, but all the tools are there for applying processing to some interesting data-sets.  ¶ 10:54 AM 0 Comments

  Bush Audio Archive INFO ACCESS: Nothing sounds more painful to me then listening to George Bush on purpose -- I already cringe at the sound of his voice when listening to NPR's Morning Edition. However, this project is pretty cool. The George W Bush Audio Archive is a database of every public speaking event George Bush has given, assembled in a way that allows one to search for any particular phrase just by using your OS's file search function.

The George W Bush Public Domain Audio Archive is a public domain database of the speeches of George W. Bush. Every phrase from each major speech has been made into an individual audio file, where the filename is, in most cases, the exact text content of the sample. This allows you to search the entire database for individual keywords. In the list of links below, "Individual files" links allow you to download a zip file containing the individual phrases. "Linear recording" links are an mp3 of the entire speech, which may be downloaded or streamed. In some cases, either the linear recording or the individual phrases are not available.

The site says the entire database was about ten gigs in wave format. That's a lot of "misstatements" for one man to stand by.
  ¶ 4:15 PM 0 Comments

  Dr. Joseph Janes: The Library Vis-à-Vis Google INFO SCIENCE:It's always nice to see a professor you like in the news. I took Dr. Janes' single-credit Google Class a few quarters back and had a great time. He's a very engaging speaker and the course was a lot of fun. Today he's quoted in a New York Times article: Old Search Engine, the Library, Tries to Fit Into a Google World.

"The nature of discovery is changing," said Joseph Janes, associate professor and chairman of library and information science at the University of Washington. "I think the digital revolution and the use of digital resources in general is really the beginning of a change in the way humanity thinks and presents itself."

[...]

Yet for every archive that has become searchable by commercial Web engines, scores are not accessible. "There's lots of great stuff that isn't available digitally and likely never will be," Dr. Janes said. Most books published before 1995 fit into this category, he said, as do many older magazines, newspapers and journals, as well as historical maps, archives, letters, diaries, older census statistics and genealogical materials.

"We have to figure out how to adapt to a world where people will prefer digital stuff," Dr. Janes said, "yet not forgo the investment in print and analog collections and the work involved in mapping and maintaining those collections."

[...]

Dr. Janes said that, like many others, he occasionally pined for the days spent in musty library stacks, where one could chance upon scholarly gems by browsing the shelves.

"You can think of electronic research as a more impoverished experience," Dr. Janes said. "But in some ways it's a richer one, because you have so much more access to so much more information. The potential is there for this to be a real bonus to humanity, because we can see more and read more and do more with it. But it is going to be very different in lots of ways."

I would hope he's wrong about a lot of older print resources never being made available in digital format. Book scanners, text recognition, and digital storage technologies are all getting cheaper and a lot of older and more arcane materials will come online eventually. There are also projects like Project Gutenberg that seek to bring older texts online the old fashioned way: data entry.

There's good reason to believe this eventually may come about. Just look at music: the greatest music library in the history of humankind is now available online via peer-to-peer services (albeit in violation of old-fashioned copyright law).  ¶ 10:17 AM 0 Comments

  DRM Doomed Part Deux INFO SCIENCE: I Cory Doctorow. Seriously, someone print me up a t-shirt that says that because I want to have this d00ds baby. He posted a wonderful talk he gave at Microsoft's Research Group on June 17, 2004. Please read. God bless him.

DRM systems are broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely,
months. It's not because the people who think them up are stupid.
It's not because the people who break them are smart. It's not
because there's a flaw in the algorithms. At the end of the day,
all DRM systems share a common vulnerability: they provide their
attackers with ciphertext, the cipher and the key. At this point,
the secret isn't a secret anymore.

I have no idea who took that photo, but I found it here.
(Via - duh - BoingBoing)  ¶ 3:17 PM 0 Comments

  Geocoding INFO VISUALIZATION: If I had a nickel every time I needed to know the Longitude and Latitude of an address, I wouldn't have any nickels. Still, Geocoder.us is awesome... If only I could find a reason to need it.

Geocoding is the process of estimating a latitude and longitude for a given location. Geocoder.us is a public service providing free geocoding of addresses and intersections in the United States. The geocoding service relies on Geo::Coder::US, a Perl module available for download from the CPAN.

(Via Eyebeam reBlog)  ¶ 2:56 PM 0 Comments

  Why Sony Failed INTERFACES: Brighthand has a great article, "Why Sony's PDAs Failed in the U.S., but Not in Japan." It's a great read about why you need to keep your gadgets' physical and software interfaces simple and intuitive. Well, duh, Sony. Also not news: Sony's designers simply don't understand the American consumer.

Sony failed with Clies in the U.S. because its devices had numerous small software controls with cryptic icons, buried settings with vast numbers of mystifying variables to set up things like Wi-Fi, and unnecessarily complicated looking screens. Apparently for the Japanese consumer, a complicated-looking Applications screen suggests that the device is cool and powerful. In America, the same screen is seen as too complicated and confusing, and if it requires a manual to figure it out, it's going back to the store.

Japanese people like overly complicated interfaces and enjoy reading manuals? Say it aint so! This goes against my thoughts about technology and interfaces so much I'm tempted not to believe it.  ¶ 2:46 PM 0 Comments

  CEO Confidence, Nearly Worthless INFO VISUALIZATION: Slate has a great piece poking fun at the idea that CEO Confidence (as measured by The Chief Executive Group) is any better at predicting the future state of the economy than any other index. In fact, they find that you're better off following the Dow Jones, since CEO's tend to be a bit behind the curve.



Here's a great quote from the article, written by Daniel Gross:

CEOs don't seem to have a better handle on the economy's prospects than the average mutual fund investor. CEOs seem to be slow on the uptake. According to the CEO Confidence Watch, in the third quarter of 2003, when the economy was cooking at an 8.2 percent annual clip, only about 10 percent of CEOs described business conditions as "good." Today, with the economy growing at half that pace and with interest rates on the rise, some 44.6 percent do.

View the report (PDF Alert).  ¶ 4:30 PM 0 Comments

  Explore New York Architecture INFO VISUALIZATION: Two new tools for those interested in New York real estate and/or architecture.



First off, there's VIVA (Visual Index to the Virtual Archive), based on New York's Skyscraper Museum's collection. VIVA is a cool "visually-based interface that uses a 3-D computer model of Manhattan as a click-on map, allowing Web visitors to view the city, present and past, and to access the Museum's collections through an on-line, searchable database."

Sound too good to be true? Well, it is. The problem with VIVA is that the interface isn't intuitive and can take a bit of getting used to. Secondly, the photos you actually manage to find are about the size of postage stamp on up-to-date monitors. Also, VIVA is a work in progress; when I last got it to work, the only neighborhood you can actually explore is Lower Manhattan. Lastly, VIVA sometimes just doesn't work. It will seemingly just load forever. All of these qualms aside, it's a great and interesting project that I hope will continue to move forward.



Also, the New York Times added a cool feature to their Real Estate Section that allows you to explore data from the five boroughs and beyond (read: Jersey). It's a well done visualization, even if it's a bit depressing with housing prices through the roof and all.
  ¶ 4:10 PM 0 Comments

  Chip Kidd Interview VISUAL COMMUNICATION: Graphic designer Chip Kidd has done a ton of highly recognizable book covers, including David Sedaris' new book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.



The Onion's A.V. Club has a great interview with this cool guy. Here are my two favorite quotes from the article.

One of the things I learned while majoring in graphic design in college, that I've always taken very much to heart... The teacher one day drew an apple on the blackboard, and then wrote the word "apple" underneath it. He pointed to the whole thing and he said, "You should never do this." He covered up the picture and said, "You either just have the word," then covered up the word and said, "or you just have the picture. But don't do both." It's insulting to the reader, or the viewer, or whoever. I think that's true.

[...]

I don't avoid repeating myself. I rip myself off all the time. But you also have to try and constantly rethink the form. It's very important. Or everything will just get stale.

  ¶ 3:32 PM 0 Comments

  iRaq Posters VISUAL COMMUNICATION: Theunofficialappleweblog shows some new iPod-like "iRaq" posters that are showing up around New York City. You have to appreciate how powerful they are.

  ¶ 1:35 PM 0 Comments

  The Two Things INFO THEORY:The Story of Two Things story according to Glen Whitman:

A few years ago, I was chatting with a stranger in a bar. When I told him I was an economist, he said, “Ah. So… what are the Two Things about economics?”

“Huh?” I cleverly replied.

“You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay, here are the Two Things about economics. One: Incentives matter. Two: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Ever since that evening, I’ve been playing the Two Things game. Whenever I meet someone who belongs to a different profession (i.e., a profession I haven’t played this game with), or who knows something about a subject I'm unfamiliar with, I pose the Two Things question. I also posed the Two Things question on my blog, where it elicited many responses in the comments section and on other blogs. This page is a collection of responses to the "Two Things" question, collected from various pages on the web, with credit given when possible.

The two things about data visualization and interfaces? I'd say:
1) Simplify, but empower the user simultaneously.
2) Treat the user's computer screen like a new acquaintance's home. Act respectful; don't take over the place.

  ¶ 10:52 AM 0 Comments

  The State of Wireless London INFO VISUALIZATION:Julian Priest has an interesting piece up about, well, "The State of Wireless London."



Shown here is a visualization of shown nodes for commercial wifi services in Greater London, however the piece talks about home and office wireless access points also. In a fairly crude manner, he estimates the total number of WAPs inside the M25 highway circling London to be about 20,000:

Total Distance flown 348.4 km
Total nodes seen 1525
Radius of view ~0.5 km
Flight height ~0.4 km
Ground area covered ~0.3 km -2
Total area covered ~98 km -2
Node density ~15.5 nkm -2
Estimate of nodes within the M25 ~19451

  ¶ 3:34 PM 0 Comments

  iBooks Everywhere INFO TECHNOLOGY: I was studying well into the night yesterday at the Bauhaus Cafe. While trying my best to concentrate on data structures I couldn't help but notice that 4 out of 5 of the laptops in my general vicinity were iBooks. The fifth notebook was a Sony (the same model I used to have before it died and I stripped it for parts and subsequently swore off buying anything Sony ever again). I was also listening to my iPod of course; it was virtually a commercial for Apple.

So I see iBooks everywhere I go, but Apple is less then 5% of the market share. What gives? Who knows for sure, but my hope is that Apple is gaining some ground amongst the young and the tech savvy - an influential group. Perhaps as more of this core group migrates to Mac (or like myself, expands to all three major OSes) more of the people that rely on these folks for tech support (hi mom) will make the crossover too.

On a related note, Caffeinated and Unstrug is a great resource for finding Free WiFi in Seattle. The list is getting quite long!   ¶ 9:40 AM 0 Comments

  Bonnie Nardi on Blogging INFO THEORY: I just received an email about an upcoming talk by Bonnie Nardi. I wasn't familiar with her previously, but a quick look at her webpage piqued my interest.

I am an anthropologist specializing in the study of technology. My theoretical orientation is activity theory, a philosophical framework developed by the Russian psychologists Vygotsky, Luria, Leontiev, and their students. My interests are user interface design, collaborative work, computer-mediated communication, e-democracy, and theoretical approaches to technology design and evaluation.

Here are the details on the lecture:

6/11/2004 Lecture: Bonnie Nardi (School of Information & Computer Science, University of California, Irvine), "Blogging for the Rest of Us"

Location: 12:30 pm, Communications 321

Digital Media Working Group Lecture Series

Nardi will discuss why people blog, why she believes blogging is like having a private radio station, and how democracy will be impacted by blogs and related Internet tools. The research was conducted in two milieux: blogging in and around Stanford University, and Burlington, Vermont where one of her students studied the use of blogs and other Internet tools in the Howard Dean campaign. For more information, call 206-543-3920.

  ¶ 12:34 PM 0 Comments

  Prefuse INFO VISUALIZATION:I won't be posting too much for the next few days as I have some big deadlines coming up on some projects.

However, I do want to take a second to give props to the programmers of Prefuse.



This great Java package has some awesome tools for data visualization. I’m going to be using this package to display a large dataset for a personal project, and I was fascinated how easy it is to use. You certainly don't have to be a prolific Java programmer to dig in and do some cool things. I only wish there was more documentation!  ¶ 10:39 AM 0 Comments

  SETI @ Home INFO VISUALIZATION:This summer I'll have some extra time on my hands, so I'm going to try and do a bi-weekly project where I create or recreate an information visualization or interface.

Today I recreated the Seti@Home interface. Why SETI@Home has been around for so long and been so popular, yet changed so little? I don't know, but if someone asked me to redesign the Seti@Home GUI -- and no one has -- I might create something like this:


(click for actual size version)

For reference, here's the current version:

(click for actual size version)

As you can see, I would leave the basic layout intact; it works so no reason to mess with it. However, the pitch black background would be the first to go. I don't know about you, but when I look at the real Seti@Home interface, the first thing I notice is that giant, ugly, light-blue "grid." So that was the second thing to go. Last but not least, I cleaned up the interface to make it more pleasing to look at and also easier to explore. If only they supported skins.


  ¶ 3:52 PM 0 Comments

  My iPod, My Love INFO TECHNOLOGY:If you have an iPod and a Windows box, you need the iPod Agent.



It is perfect for getting your iPod to perform a number of PDA-type functions, plus additional functions Apple made a little bit harder then easy to appease the RIAA. The best thing is the RSS reader though. I use these feeds to pull entire sections of the New York Times onto my iPod for those boring times spent on mass transit. I feel sorry for the suckers that still try to read a paper on a crowded city bus. Now if only I could get The Stranger on rss.

Don't forget to check out iPodSoft's other handy programs too. (I think I'd like them more if they changed their name to iSoftPod.)  ¶ 3:44 PM 0 Comments

  Is Customization a Design Copout? INTERFACES: I was thinking about customization in lecture yesterday.

First let me say that I am usually a big fan being able to customize my operating system and application interfaces to suit my tastes. I usually know the way I like things and I get pissed if I can't change it accordingly.

But then I thought about iTunes. I've never had to customize the GUI. I've never wanted to. All I had to do was tweak a few tiny things like turning off the iTunes music store tab. But all in all, even if I could tweak the interface, I wouldn't. It's really that good.

On the other hand, there is Windows. The too Blue XP scheme, the magically disappearing menu items (why simplify menus when you can just temporarily mask complexity?!?), Rover the retriever, Clippy the crap head... If I couldn't remove these things I might just kill someone.

This left me asking: do I really want to customize software? Or do I just want to customize software that hasn't been well designed in the first place? I really don't know the answer, but I'm guessing that most people really don't want to customize their interfaces beyond setting the desktop image and incorporating their favorite colors. Instead, they just want it done right, out of the box.

iTunes does it right. Media Player, for a touch of contrast, should be customizable to the point of complete recreation.
  ¶ 3:21 PM 0 Comments

  DRM Doomed INFO THEORY: The Register has an interesting interview with Jim Griffin, the former director of Geffen's technology group.

The Register: You're so certain that DRM will not succeed, but the temptations for the industry are so great - one-time party CDs - that surely it's too tempting for them not to try?

Jim Griffin: Theoretically what you're saying makes some seductive logic. But it's obvious that not only should it not happen, it's not going to happen.

The flow of information once digitized, this anarchy of art and knowledge and creativity, can't be controlled. We've designed our societies around the anarchy. For example, we've been emphatic about the notion that we can't control speech. We may send out the secret police and have all manner of efforts of control; but basically we don't believe in it.

So we're left with two paths here. Will we try and end the anarchy of art, or will we try and monetize it? Art and knowledge and creativity are fascinating to us because they make our lives better when they're not controlled. And we've monetized it successfully throughout history.

My favorite quote from the interview:

We have to start with the a priori notion that we must democratize access to art and knowledge. That's a baseline notion of a civilized society. We have libraries that will get you any movie, and any song, and any book; and price or money should not stop you hearing those songs. Museums go even further, with the idea that great art should be able to travel, to come to you, and feel free.

The RIAA vs. civilized society. What a fascinating way of framing the 'piracy' debate!  ¶ 9:23 AM 0 Comments

  Newsflash: Sony: Sucks, Out of US PDA Market INFO TECHNOLOGY: Lots of news in the last two days about Sony leaving the PDA market. Could it be because their handhelds suck? Probably. I remeber back when Sony was the cream of the crop; back before they decided that complicated was the rough equivalent of good and their business of selling American Poptrash was more important then kick-ass electronics.

Anyway, Sony bashing aside. This is good news. I'm still waiting for Apple (they're the new Sony, didjahear?) to come out with a PDA. Actually, no I'm not, because my iPod mini does most the things I would want a PDA to do anyway.

Related Stories:
Gizmodo
New York Times  ¶ 4:02 PM 0 Comments

  Modeling Porous Material INFO VISUALIZATION: I don't know enough about biology to say what this model does exactly, but I found this visualization of a busy neuron to be very interesting.



Here is some info from the NSF:

The model is a new approach to look at percolation—the flow of a liquid or small particle through a porous material. In the simulation, materials pass through fields of complex, three-dimensional shapes, a scenario that is closer to real-world environments than existing two-dimensional models and models incorporating simpler shapes.
[...]
In addition to biological applications, the simulation will help researchers develop new materials by revealing better ways to craft porous substances. By understanding the properties of these types of materials, researchers can enhance conductivity in batteries, flow paths in filters and numerous other percolation mechanisms.

  ¶ 10:40 AM 0 Comments