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Once again, in the absence of a functioning Delicious to WordPress feed, a number of articles we’ve found interesting over the last month:
- More on irrationality and decison-making: thoughts on Daniel ‘s Khaneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow
- Wired’s recommendations for must-read books for geeks
- On structuring lengthy written works. A presentation for a science writer’s workshop, but implications that can translate to other writing
- The Myth of the Average Consumer – another example pertaining to the arts, but with emerging insights that can be applied elsewhere
- The history, or backstory, of Dropbox
- Insensitivity to Internet banner advertising
- Understanding lone consumers
- Avent argues that restricted access has raised housing prices artificially on both the east and west coast of the United States, reducing urban populations and restricting access to labor markets. He argues that this in turn has artificially depressed growth in the United States by keeping workers from their most productive opportunities. The conversation closes with a discussion of possible policy changes that might make cities more accessible to development and growth.
- Chatter about Siri
- Is your mind playing tricks on you?
- A sociological content analysis of advertising catalogues with the eye-tracking method
- Overconfidence and Negative Feedback
- The psychology of advertising – ads with facts versus ads aiming at emotional response
- The impact of new media on customer relationships
As Marty mentioned in a previous post, the new Delicious design is a little wonky, and no longer pumps content to our blog and Twitter account. So here’s a roundup of articles I’ve stumbled across over the past month that you may find interesting:
- Two sides of an argument/book review about the value of unpaid internships in the modern workforce
- Compelling infographics on voice recognition applications, inspired by the launch of the iPhone 4S
- Scott Adams (Dilbert) on creativity, and the stifling thereof
- A press release for an academic article on learning while sleeping
- We’ve posted several entries about publishers moving content online, but here are some folks who are moving in the opposite direction
- On confidence
- The End of the Future
- “Creative Class” around the globe
- There is no evidence supporting auditory and visual learning…(some psychologists say…)
- The back story on Lorem Ipsum
- Tumblr on the up and up
The U.S. Census Bureau Center for Economic Studies has long supported (for the past ~5 years) an online system for pulling area-based employment and residence data using a visual map-based selection tool called OnTheMap. This software is fairly intuitive and fun to use, but can also be quite useful in exploring a specific market or region to understand where workers live and work, and how that has changed over time.
OnTheMap is useful for more than work location, however. It’s a multi-layered mapping tool, with companion data on demographics, earnings, industry characteristics. We’ve also used it to identify exact metropolitan statistical areas and radius ranges, to find transportation routes, greenspace, and tribal and military lands, and to simply better understand a physical marketplace.
For years, organizations like the Census Bureau relied heavily on point-in-time estimates, tables of statistics and physical and static maps for data exploration like this. As new systems come online, are developed further, and improved over successive versions, our ability to access information from our desktops is not only facilitated but empowered.
Infomous is a dynamic and intuitive navigation solution – perhaps soon to pop up on websites you visit. Web developers for content-rich sites have integrated word cloud and tablet-style flip navigation over the past few years, but this is a solution that seems to combine aspects of both: reference triggers and dynamic script. The tool is currently available in preview/beta version through a relationship with the provider, but will roll out later this year, ready for embed. More info at Infomous – they have a demo up for world news, a version for sports news, entertainment news, science news. It’s easy to explore and find links to try.
Jeff Ely, economics professor at Northwestern University and contributor to the Cheap Talk blog, recently wrote a great article about titles, or names. His examples focus on bank names, and how they engender trust, and the names of legal documents, which could perhaps be simply skimmed to get a sense of utility or relevance. But the article is an interesting reminder and idea spark, for researchers and marketers.
There are varying degrees of scope and sophistication in our wildly different projects and initiatives. Our work is passed to our clients, to internal teams, to executive management, to various partners and outside parties. The names of studies, reports, presentations, tools used in the process, task force teams, strategic plans, products in development, etc. do matter.
Names should be clear and communicative – presenting the topic but also the considering the audience. Names should not be overly technical or detailed. Names should be intuitive, parsimonious, and should be readable (and intelligible) “out loud.” But names should also hold up over time, regardless of how related issues change or evolve. Future researchers should be able to refer back to your work, referencing a name that still communicates something to them. It’s somewhat a lofty challenge, if you think about the implication of the choice of title. The goal is to strike a balance between communication and brevity – if the name simply “fits” in these terms, it will likely carry and communicate as desire.
There is an interesting round-up and comment discussion published at The Big Picture about models that visualize a hierarchy of intelligence. The images below also link through to their sources and related discussions.
The paradigm has traditionally been 1) Data 2) Information 3) Knowledge and 4) Wisdom. As data sources amass, and become more widely accessible through digital interconnectivity, does the model hold up? Are the definitions of each of these “levels” evolving? To visualize this model for various applications, what story should we try to tell? Do the stories below seem relevant (the story of how organization increases, or the story of how data is produced, consumed, then personalized)? Does the model only serve as an explanatory framework, or can it be applied to strategies for learning; for communications? It’s interesting to think about these questions, and to consider the evolution of this model, and various visual approaches to its application, over time.
