in a survey of 1,506 people last year by Nationwide Mutual Insurance, 81 percent of cellphone owners acknowledged that they talk on phones while driving, and 98 percent considered themselves safe drivers. But 45 percent said they had been hit or nearly hit by a driver talking on a phone.
That’s the Lake Wobegon effect, the tendency for overestimate their capabilities in relation to others.
Charlie Brooker on a television advert by the British National Party, England’s (very small) right-wing political party:
Extremist material of any kind always looks gaudy and cheap, like a bad pizza menu. Not because they can’t afford decent computers – these days you can knock up a professional CD cover on a pay-as-you-go mobile – but because anyone who’s good at graphic design is likely to be a thoughtful, inquisitive sort by nature. And thoughtful, inquisitive sorts tend to think fascism is a bit shit, to be honest. If the BNP really were the greatest British party, they’d have the greatest British designer working for them – Jonathan Ive, perhaps, the man who designed the iPod. But they don’t. They’ve got someone who tries to stab your eyes out with primary colours.
Congressman Mike Honda, D-San Jose, writing about opening government databases:
Instead of databases becoming available as a result of Freedom Of Information Act requests, government officials should be required to justify why any public data should not be freely available to the taxpayers who paid for its creation.
Wow, what an exciting time to be in North America.
In the prologue to The Science of Fear, by Daniel Gardner (published as ‘Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear’ in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada), which I have just started reading, as he talks about the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States:
I have just launched Plebis.net. It’s a wall on the Internet you can write on, for all to see.
You can write anything you want. There’s no censor and nothing is recorded, so feel free to scream shout and wail. Tell the world how you feel. Get it off your chest. Go on, it’s good for you. Head over to Plebis.net, and say something!
As you probably know, the U.S.A. is electing itself a new president. The process is that each of the two parties elects their candidate, then they compete against each other. The four remaining Republicans vying for their parties nomination recently participated in a debate here in California. Here is the transcript of the Republican debate of January 30th 2008. It’s mostly standard political fare, until you get to the topic of immigration. Then, well, see for yourself:
Do you remember how we were all going to die of Ebola, then S.A.R.S., and more recently Avian flu ?
Have you got the memo that the job creation program at airports is because Terrorism is such a big threat to your life ? In England at the moment you are, according to the media, at great threat from drug dealing teenagers, and anyone younger than you in general.
And yet, here you are, reading safely. So instead of tolerating idiots pretending to be journalists, I went looking for what we should really be wary of – what really does kill people.
Last weekend I attended BarCampLondon2. Bar Camp is an unconference, where a group of like minded people get together, everyone presents a topic / session, and we all hang out and discuss things. On the morning of the first day you write your topic on a card and stick it on a board where times and rooms are layed outin a grid.
The most interesting sessions for me were the following:
From the 9th to the 15th May 2004, I went on the Fundamental Bushcraft course with the Ray Mears School of Bushcraft, in the Kent countryside. Here’s what happened:
Most journalists, I assume, aspire to delivering the truth on what is really going on to the reading public. They want to write serious, factual, possibly investigative, often opinionated, pieces. Only a small percentage of journalists, a small percentage of the time, get to do this. The rest, the vast majority, end up in the entertainment business, and live in denial.
They cannot simply fill their media with invention and humour in order to entertain; they must allow the paying public to believe they are consuming serious, factual journalism. It is this complicity of denial between journalist and consumer that has filled our media with celebrity lives and gruesome stories. The journalist is reporting facts and the consumer is entertained by the voyeurism and horror. They will not admit to being entertained lest they be thought deranged or perverse. And the cycle continues, burrowing ever deeper in search of the salacious and disturbing to fill yet more serious, factual media.
A very interesting article about Amazon censoring a negative review. I have had exactly the same experience. I left a negative but, I thought, well written review which explained why I didn’t enjoy the book. Amazon never posted it. When I wrote to them they claimed it was pulled because I revealed too much about the book (I didn’t).
All this to say don’t buy a book based on it’s reviews on Amazon – they may only represent one side of the story.
This is a write-up of my notes from Tom Coates’ presentation at the Future Of Web Apps (futureofwebapps) conference, held in London on Wednesday 8th February.
We are moving from web pages connected by links to data connected by APIs.
The Web 2.0 design aesthetic can be summed up as: Rounded corners and gradient fills.
The future according to Tom: A web of data sources, services for exploring and manipulating data, and ways that users can connect them together.
Mash-up: A network effect of services. Web as a platform. Hybridization of web services together makes both of them better.
APIs drive people to your site, allow people to enhance your site. You don’t have to do all the work yourself. People might start charging for the user of their APIs.
“What can I build that will make the whole web better ?” The Aggregate Web. It’s all about data – owning, exploring, manipulating.
Build for normal users (the HTML interface), for developers (the API), and for machines (XML, predictable and consistent URLs and structure)
Start designing with data, not pages. Navigable, re-usable, explorable data.
Identify core objects that people will refer to. For the BBC, that’s programs, films, events, people. Then make each core object addressable by URL.
Good URLs: permanent, readable, and have a 1 to 1 correlation with concepts. Use directories to represent hierarchy. Predictable, guessable, hackable. Reflect structure of data. Only 1 URL for a piece of data. For example the BBC needs to have one and only one URL for a single program. That way all entries on the web will connect to that one URL, and will be connected themselves.
Correlate with external identifier schemes (such as ISBN)in your URLs, or coin a standard if there isn’t one. If 100 people are blogging about a film, they need to be connected somehow – if they all link to the same BBC or IMDB page, they will be connected.
Build list views and batch manipulation interfaces. Types of page:
Destination page (the entry of a film). Make XML versions of these.
List page (search results, lots of films). Make RSS versions of these.
Manipulation page (comment on a film). If needed, use AJAX / Flash here.
Make sure your AJAX / Flash doesn’t break your URLs. Keep it in the page. Only manipulate the concept of that page.
Open questions invite the other person to express their thinking freely rather than allowing a “yes” or “no” response. Open questions usually begin with Who, Why, When, Where or How.
For example:
“How much petrol do you use per week ?”
“Where do you normally get your petrol from ?”
Closed questions can be answered with a yes or no. They tend to close a conversation down. However, they can be useful for checking facts, clarifying a point, or deliberately finishing a conversation. They can also control the length and form of the reply and allow a “yes” or “no” or brief response. They can be useful on the streets, especially as an opening line.
Multiple Questions combine many questions together, making it unclear which question to respond to. People can become confused. Less is more !
For example:
“Have you seen, heard or know about Greenpeace ?”
“Do you think Esso is bad, or just like the others, or what ?”
Leading Questions reflect an assumption, or give an obvious direction to the reply, indicating the desired response. Leading questions hint at what you want the answer to be. They don’t allow a person freedom of expression, or require them to really engage or think. They should usually be avoided and certainly abandonded if they are met with any resistance.
For example:
“You like peace don’t you ?”
“It’s the only way, isn’t it ?”
Hypothetical Questions can be good for opening up options and helping people to explore possibilities. However answers bear little relation to what would actually hapen.
For example:
“If I could prove to you that Esso have absolutely no commitment to the environment, would we get your support ?”
Probing Questions are good for following up information already received but can lead to a lengthy conversation which should be avoided!
For example:
This section presents a system for getting things done. It is inspired by Getting Things Done by David Allen – a valuable book which I recommend.
This system takes the e-mails in your In-box, the ideas and reminders in your head, on scraps of paper, in your notebook, your PDA, wherever, and organizes them so that none of them get lots, and the important ones get acted upon.
Gather everything together
Make or buy an in-tray. Then gather those unpaid bills, scraps of paper, books, printouts, TO-DO lists, jot down the ideas from your head, and pile it all in the in-tray. Next do the same for your electronic data, using your e-mail In-box. Most likely there will already be quite a few e-mails in there. E-mail yourself with anything else you need recorded and processed.
Make two special folders in you mail client – one called @action and one @waiting. Make or buy two similar trays for the real world. Buy a sectioned / expanding file. If you haven’t already got a diary, get one.
Process
Once you have everything gathered take e-mails or pieces of paper one by one and run through this diagram:
Everything starts at stuff and ends up in one of the circles.
Calendar should be only actions with a hard date / time (meetings, appointments, birthdays). Things that you would like to get done on a particular day go into Actions.
If needed, Actions can be split by location: Calls, At Computer, Errands, At Office, At Home, Read / Review.
Look at the Calendar daily, first thing. Then look at the Actions list.
Do a Weekly Review of everything – this is whatever needs doing to keep the system up to date – get the ideas in the world onto paper. In a business context, Friday early afternoon is good for this.
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