The US Census Bureau needs a lesson in database normalization
I pulled a slightly rain-warped 2010 US Census Bureau form from my mailbox last night when I got home from the airport. I've been looking forward to filling it out, since our government has put so much time and effort into raising awareness this time around. A Twitter account! And a Super Bowl spot, no less!
A form that only comes around once every ten years, one that has just a short list of questions per person, is a form that has probably gotten a lot of attention thrown at it by usability pros, accessibility experts, ethnographers, linguists, lawyers and so on. Safe to assume that someone didn't bang this thing out at the eleventh hour.And for the most part, it was really good. I was suprised they ask for phone number (in case they need to call to clarify an answer, apparently). Well, I was pretty hesitant to enter mine, so I looked for some kind of privacy policy. It wasn't on the form itself, but there was a separate insert that dealt solely with data confidentiality. One side was basic and clear, the other was in-depth and detailed. I liked 'em both. Really nice job. Feeling better, I gave up the digits.But then I got to the section about age. And my inner data modeler shed one single, lonely tear.They ask respondents to enter their age in years. Then they ask for date of birth.
All I see are buttons now, buttons everywhere
After listening to The History of Buttons, I can't stop myself from seeing buttons everywhere I look. It's like when I read Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud for the first time, and started seeing faces in everything (the electrical outlet example, for those who've read it). It's not just the usual suspects like elevator buttons, but more broadly any tactile interaction point. The horizontal bar on an exit door is a button. A fire alarm is a button, one that telegraphs to its potential users that it means business. Enclosed in lexan, bright red, not a button to be taken lightly. I wonder how many buttons one encounters in a day? Both physical and digital. Which buttons have the highest interaction rate? Door: high, fire alarm: very very low (ideally zero!). I'd love to see that data. If only I could hook up Google Analytics to physical objects. Hmmmmm, I guess I could, really. Possible hardware/ software project is forming in my brain at this very moment. Which buttons are almost subconcious (mouse click, faucet, car door) and which require our focus (dialing the access code to a conference call, Mullen's bizarro microwaves, "Place Order")? So yeah, I cant stop seeing buttons. And now you'll see them too. You're welcome. It's kinda like having that awful "if you like piña coladas" song stuck in your head. Shit. Yep, it's stuck. Damn.24-bit PNG alpha channels and position:fixed only exist to allow this moment to happen...
http://www.fucking-windows.com/
You're welcome.
My intention wasn't to start longassinfographics.org, but this is another good one about gaming
If you don't know much about the video gaming landscape, and let's face it, you just don't, this nicely-presented and super-long infographic (I know, I know... "Again?!") will ensmarten your brainhole. Not much beyond the basics, but considering your last video game experience was a rousing game of Q*Bert at the Paladin Arcade on the Lynnway in 1983, you need to walk before you can rocket jump. That's a joke. That you don't get.
You may not be familar with what each console is known for, so here's a one sentence review of each, because I'm nice:
- Microsoft Xbox 360: The clear leader in online multplayer gaming and entertainment, Xbox Live is the best thing Microsoft has ever made.
- Sony Playstation 3: A Blu-ray player wrapped in a console, playing catch-up to the 360 with online features, but some amazing PS3-exclusive games.
- Nintendo Wii: Changed the face of casual gaming via motion control, but tons of awful games, few standouts, and very limited online features. But this is the one console you do understand, which is its undeniable strength. And I still hold it against you that you beat me at Wii Bowling. I play big boy games, goddamit!!
So anyway, the long-ass infographic. Please take note of the scale (65% of households, 18 hours per week) and demographic diversity (32 avg. age, 40% female).
Basically, while these people are playing games, you're watching World's Blankiest Blanks, so I wouldn't go getting too judgemental there, chief.
Found here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/video-games-by-the-numbers
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I <3 My Swedish Hero!
A moving tribute to one of Sweden's all-time great heroes.
http://en.tackfilm.se/?id=1264644222008RA20
"Swedish Hero" kinda sounds like a meatball sub made with Swedish meatballs. I wonder if that would be any good? Are you listening IKEA?!?! … No? They're not? Fine. Well you are. And I know you think it's a good idea. Thank you for that.
Did you watch it yet? I don't want to ruin it.
Okay, so the thing I like most about this execution is that they absolutely nailed the integration of the user-submitted photo. Instead of taking the straightforward route and placing the photo on a static billboard, it's mapped to surfaces that are in constant motion relative to the camera. They also did an outstanding job lighting the image, as well as manipulating it. The Warhol and wallet photo shots were particularly nice. And it never looks janky at all. Well done, Swedes of DraftFCB! You make good internets!
But get a load of why the site actually exists…
WARNING! EDUMACATIONAL CONTENT AHEAD!
From here. Emphasis is mine.
The TV Licence finances public service radio and television broadcasting in Sweden. The TV Licence is required to be paid by law, and Radiotjänst is entrusted by the Swedish Riksdag with the task of collecting licence fees nationwide and verifying payment of them.
Everyone who owns, rents or borrows a television receiver has to pay for a TV Licence. It doesn't matter which channels you watch, the mere fact that you have a TV receiver makes you liable to pay for a licence. The TV Licence is not included in the fee charged for cable or satellite TV. The TV Licence finances the public service TV and radio channels of Sveriges Television, Sveriges Radio and Sveriges Utbildningsradio (educational broadcasting). As of January 1, 2009, the TV Licence costs 2 076 kronor per year, or 173 kronor per month.
According to the Googles—and you do use Google as a calculator and currency converter right? "2,076/12 kronor in USD"—that's $23 USA America Dollars and some change per month just to own a TV. Not watch it. Own it. If you bought a $1,000 LCD today and kept it for four years, you'd pay more to these Radiotjänst dudes than you did to Best Buy.
Seems a little… excessive. But hey they seem happy over there. With their Volvos and their aforementioned meatballs and their bork bork bork.
Soundproof booths in bars so dudes can lie to girls about where they are. Is there a home version?
And yes, ladies, I know you want to lie to guys about where you are, too. You naughty fillies, you.
The Data Decade will be measured in petabytes, so you should get to know one
Let's pretend that in 1990 you were cool enough to own what I consider one of the most aesthetically pleasing computers of all time*: the Mac IIci. The price for owning such a buttery rig was—you might want to sit down for this—$8,800. For that princely sum you got a then-gargantuan 40 megabyte hard drive. And you were stoked. Fast forward twenty years… my laptop has over 12,000x the storage capacity. My phone has 800x.
Hard drive capacity has been growing at an insane pace over the past few decades. You can go to Newegg right now and buy a 2 terabyte drive for less than $200. That's just crazy.
But how exactly do we contextualize why that's crazy? What is a terabyte anyway? Well, its 1,024 gigglebytes, but that's not much of an answer. We need a real-world demonstration of what a terabyte is.
Or maybe we need something bigger. Even the mighty terabyte ain't gonna cut it in the coming Data Decade. Each of us is generating massive amounts of data on a daily basis. HD video, 20+ megapickle photos, lossless audio, documents on your computer, documents in the cloud, Facebook photos, tweets, Tripit itineraries, e-commerce transactions, their related credit card data, the resulting Mint data, blog posts in Google's search index, along with ad serving cookies, analytics data, and log file entries to go along with all of it.
Just an absolute metric shitload of shit. And it all lives on hard drives just like the one in your computer.
I wonder how many physical drives you or I have personal data on? And I don't mean in your own computers. I mean on Amazon, Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, American Express, Jet Blue, Bank of America, the IRS. It has to be somewhere in the tens of thousands. It has to. How big are our "data footprints"? Including all the redundant data scattered across storage clouds and RAID arrays? Who knows.
Clearly, humanity (well, the connected portion thereof) has an insatiable appetite for laying down 1's and 0's on magnetic platters. And we're only getting hungrier. Just as a megabyte is now seen as a quaint measure, and a gigabyte is no big deal, soon a terabyte will lose its mystique, if it hasn't already.
And that baton is being passed to the petabyte. Until recently, "petabyte" was just the answer to the trivia question "what comes after a terabyte"? It's amazing that the petabyte, which is 1,024 terabytes or about a million gigglebytes, is now an appropriate unit of measure for things we can relate to fairly easily.
Which is where the following long-ass image comes in. Created by the folks at Mozy, which is an online backup company, it puts some much needed context around what these units of measure actually represent. Have a look, they did a great job with it.
The best part of all of this is that someday I'll look back and laugh at myself for thinking a petabyte was a big deal. By then, everything will be exabytes, zettabytes and yottabytes. Okay, I admit, I had to look the last two up, but I knew exabyte. Also: "yottabyte". What a silly name. "That's a whole yotta bytes"! Whoa, that might be my best storage joke since gigglebytes and megapickles. Man, I can't wait to use that one. Hurry up future!
Oh, and just to close the loop, 1 petabyte would hold the contents of about 27 million Mac IIci's. Silicon Valley to Tokyo, laid side by side.
* Yes, I think about shit like this. My all-time favorite is the Next Cube. C'mon... it's magnesium. The Paul Rand logo doesn't hurt either.
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iPhone controlled video-streaming quad-copter drone... A-BUH?!?!!?!!?
I need this now. Where do I send my blank check?
Holy shit it uses a downward-facing camera to hover using the image to stabilize its position.
And there's an API for it.
DO. WANT.
Quick, somebody warn Louis Gossett Jr.*, ESPN 3D is on the loose!
Welcome to 2010, folks. True, we still don't have flying cars, but the future just crept a little closer. ESPN announced at CES that they'll be launching ESPN 3D this summer. They plan on broadcasting 85+ events in all their tri-dimensional glory, including the World Cup of 0-0 Draws Followed by Penalty Kicks and Summer X.
Yes, you'll need a new TV. Most of the big name manufacturers are announcing 3D-ready sets at CES as we speak. Save those pennies.
You'll also need some sweet lookin' glasses. And these aren't the blue-and-red cardboard jobbers from back in the day. The new 3D systems use "active" glasses that house an LCD shutter in each lens. The TV alternates displaying the left eye and right eye versions of the video, and the glasses alternately black out the opposing eye in perfect sync.
TV ==> right eye image ==> left lens shutter closed ==> right eye sees image
TV ==> left eye image ==> right eye shutter closed ==> left eye sees image
This happens like 120 times a second or so; you won't notice a thing. The end result is that your right eye sees only what was shot with the right lens of the 3D camera rig (pictured above), and the left eye only sees what was shot on the left. That's called binocular vision, and it's how our eyeballs percieve depth.
Okay, so now we're on the hook for a new TV plus maybe four pairs of hideous ~$150 glasses (plus batteries, they're active, remember). Hey, no one ever said magic was cheap.
With all the 3D movies being released in theaters, the demand for a home 3D experience won't lag far behind. Sports programming is an obvious choice to lead the charge, just as it did for HDTV. How many of us can't fathom watching sports in anything but HD? Fast forward a few years and replace that "H" with "3". Feature films, CG animation, video games and—one might speculate—"adult programming" could all benefit from breaking into the third dimension, some more disturbingly than others. Computing interfaces could benefit as well. Combined with some motion-tracking cameras (a la Minority Report, or more realistically, Project Natal), an engineer could examine a part he's developing in the palm of his hand.
Tons of possibilities here, for sure. And where there are promising real-world applications of a technology, advertising lurks not far behind.
* That's a Jaws 3D reference, if you didn't pick up on it. If you did, congrats, you're awesome!
Leave it to CP+B to make the agency world's biggest project ticker
Never ones to think small, the folks at Crispin Porter + Bogusky have built themselves a project status tracker that takes up an entire wall. And it's a big friggin' wall.
This is a perfect example of something that any agency could do, but CP+B actually does. Do I wish we had done this at my shop? Yes, and we could have. We have the underlying system in place, it would just be a custom view of that data, a projector and a wall. But did we do it? No, we didn't. They did.
So why is that? I think it's two things.
The first stems from agency culture. From everything I've read, heard or been told, this is a group of people who take craftsmanship very seriously. Of course they have "big ideas" (whatever the hell that means at this point), but the act of creating artifacts that people actually interact with appears to be highly valued there. And if they value their output, they certainly must value the process that fosters the creation of that output. And because of that, they gave 400 square feet of space in their carefully considered working environment (which, incidentally, they call The Factory) to a gargantuan project ticker.
Oh, and the agency's love-him-or-hate-him creative mastermind blogged about it. He blogged about their process tools.
The other contributing factor is opportunity. This ticker didn't spring forth from nothingness. It had a team. Granted, the project went on hold for nine months (while the team was on paying work, one would assume), but they got it done. I doubt they were given the luxury of 20% time, but they probably had some time carved out of their week, and chipped away at it after hours, too. Nevertheless, the opportunity was there, and they made the most of it.
Looking at CP+B's work is an obvious source of inspiration for attemping to recreate their success, but it's stuff like this that makes me realize that we'd be wise to look beyond their ideas and really examine their approach.
About
I'm Christian Madden. I make internets at an advertising agency in Boston. You can find me at www.christianmadden.com
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