You are currently browsing Andrew Willard's articles.
They’re still “seeking”:
- an oceanographer
- a chemist
- a marine engineer
- and at least one expert on the problem
(yeah, might need at least one of each of these…)
but a group of Dutch architects and engineers has started up a research project to explore the idea of creating a sustainable island nation out of the trash floating in the Pacific. The project has been heralded “Recycled Island,” and the goal is a livable and scalable habitation the size of Hawaii’s big island.
The early mock-ups bring Venice, Dubai, and science fiction to mind, but the project is still very much in the early R&D stages and far from a reality. People love Dutch design for architecture and urban planning, not to mention their credibility in environmental solutions, so despite the distance from the potential island, this idea has sparked in the Netherlands. And why not beckon the world’s greatest minds through online publishing and networking? The project has been spreading across magazine websites, blogs, and press releases this week (I saw it here), and the group networks through Facebook to various other sustainable design groups.
Some virtual ships, machines, and robots and things building Recycled Island in Waterworld, er, the Pacific
We’ve laid off the “Infographic of the Day” posts for awhile, as so many other blogs feature similar content. This one demanded attention though. The information itself is important and interesting, but I found the interactive functions of this home energy use tool to be so well-designed that I couldn’t pass up the chance to pass it along. This infographic works in three dimensions: question asked (there are 4 options); appliances selected and their individual data; and the running total usage at the bottom. If only there was a way for the user to indicate when they own multiples of these products…
Click through and around to assess your home’s energy usage:
A little Friday afternoon ribbing – graph-er to photographer. Click through for a closer look and the sourcing path.
I’ve recently come across several organizations and websites that aggregate and track facts. The Long Now is a foundation that claims as its goal the fostering of long-term thinking (blog), and companies like Ambient Devices offer cool consumer electronic products that are designed to “datacast,” constantly streaming real-time facts that by their nature are always changing, like the weather, the stock market, oil prices, traffic congestion, etc. (They go well beyond kitchen-window digital thermometers, the “Orb” on the right is one of their products.)
But Samuel Arbesman, a research fellow at the Harvard Medical School and associated with the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, started a fascinating website and blog earlier this year that focus on “mesofacts,” facts that change slowly over time, but which are challenging to track. I’ve been checking the blog periodically to see the various charts and subjects they post.
“These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.” – Excerpt from Boston.com article by Arbesman
I’ve always felt a little challenged by retention of facts. So much of my personal approach to learning has been focused on comprehension and understanding, and pattern recognition, that the details sometimes seem to go, pardon the cliches, “in one ear and out the other,” or are “stuffed into the back of my mind somewhere.” I can’t remember jokes to save a party, and I’m not even as good at music trivia as my friends expect me to be. I studied International Relations in undergrad, but learned about the UN of the 90s, and the political climate of the post-Cold War world; it’s been challenging keeping up with foreign affairs and the state of international communications over the past ten years.
You don’t have to be a trivia buff, a librarian, or a passionate scholar to appreciate tracking of mesofacts of some kind. We all have our interests and challenges in keeping up with the evolution of knowledge on those topics. Your focus may be more academic, historic, entertainment, or even outright silly, but do remember to keep thinking and push yourself to keep up!
Note: We’re always seeking comments for our blog posts, but few people actually submit them! Feel free to tell us about your fact-watching, and especially your sources for keeping up-to-date, in the thread below!
Photographer and mathematician Nikki Graziano overlays graphs and their corresponding equations over full color nature photography. This set of engaging compositions reminds us of the elegance and “art” of math, and its essential function as a descriptor of natural phenomena. Click through the image below (and keep clicking) to check out the full “Found Functions” set.
By Nikki Graziano
Taking a long break from the office can really change your perspective on your workplace. I generally just ignore the three foot high stack of old double-printed paper (data tables, spreadsheets, proposal drafts, etc.) sitting under my desk, but it certainly got my attention this morning. I need to block off some time this month to clean up shop – to shred and recycle this stack – but it’s a daunting task. Maybe I should get one of these:
When we write market research screeners, to ensure research respondents or participants are qualified for our studies, we sometimes craft questions that include misleading “red herring” answer options. The idea is to include some answer options in the set that do not relate to the research topic. We then randomize the presentation of the answer options for each respondent so that it is harder to pick an answer just to continue on towards a participation incentive. This obscures the topic of the research, helping to ensure respondents/participants are truly qualified.
For example, we may pose a question similar to the following for a textile category survey:
For which of the following purchases are you the primary or secondary decision maker in your household? Please select all that apply.
- Clothing (continue)
- Automobiles (red herring)
- Groceries (red herring)
- Toilet tissue (red herring)
- Fast food (red herring)
- Laundry supplies (red herring)
- Over-the-counter medicines (red herring)
- Home textiles (continue)
But where does this expression come from?
For a long time, it was thought that the metaphor had something to do with either fox hunting tradition, food preservation on overseas trips, horse training, and/or prison breakouts. In 2008, the Oxford English Dictionary clarified the etymology of this expression, as explained in this totally mental article in World Wide Words by Michael Quinion. I recommend clicking through and reading the full article when you have a few minutes and need a weird break in your day, but here’s an excerpt (and a quick answer):
“OED now trace the figurative sense to the radical journalist William Cobbett, whose Weekly Political Register thundered in the years 1803-35 against the English political system he denigrated as the Old Corruption.
He wrote a story, presumably fictional, in the issue of 14 February 1807 about how as a boy he had used a red herring as a decoy to deflect hounds chasing after a hare. He used the story as a metaphor to decry the press, which had allowed itself to be misled by false information about a supposed defeat of Napoleon; this caused them to take their attention off important domestic matters: “It was a mere transitory effect of the political red-herring; for, on the Saturday, the scent became as cold as a stone.”
This story…was enough to get the figurative sense of red herring into the minds of his readers, unfortunately also with the false idea that it came from some real practice of huntsmen.”
Okay, now you know!
