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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.
Beautiful series of infographics by Peter Orntoft about how the Danish people feel about a number of pressing social issues. Though shortfalls of time, budget, and creativity force us to revert to PowerPoint Smart Art, it’s inspiring to see work that challenges what an infographic can be.
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.
Okay, this one’s a little obtuse… 
Check the article too, whew!
Wired: World’s Most Precise Clocks Could Reveal Universe is Hologram
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!
It may not look like much at first, but click through to play and learn with this great interactive infographic from the Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah. From Coffee Bean to Carbon Atom.
Any one who has read Freakonomics will be familiar with this story: A University of Chicago grad student does some research in the projects and ends up with a bunch of data about the finances of crack dealers. As it turns out, that was only the tip of the iceberg.
In Gang Leader for a Day, that grad student, Sudhir Ventakesh, tells the whole story. It all begins as a little quantitative survey conducted for one of his faculty advisors. It becomes a sprawling ethnography that takes place over the course of five years, against the wishes of his mentors and his own best judgment. Along the way, Sudhir sees the world inside the roughest projects in Chicago unfold before him in all its complexity. We meet a gang leader who deals crack and serves as a sort of social glue for the community. We meet a community leader who does what she can to help her fellow residents, all while taking kickbacks to better her own circumstances. We meet the police, charged with patrolling the projects, who never show up when called.
Ultimately, it’s a great piece of research, and a story well told.
