Omega Point

Blogathon 2009: Infographics Part 2: The New York Times gets it right

While I found the CBC’s efforts lack­ing, the New York Times uses “inter­ac­tive fea­tures” very effectively.

For instance, this info­graphic from last year uses area and two states to visu­al­ize the loss of over $88 bil­lion in value dur­ing the col­lapse of the US bank­ing sys­tem. It’s very effec­tive, con­veys the mas­sive drop in value well, and frankly, it works bet­ter with an ani­mated tran­si­tion than a sta­tic image would have.

This is an impor­tant point: just because you can make some­thing “inter­ac­tive”, it doesn’t mean you’re not bet­ter off with a nice, standards-compliant JPEG. (Hey, how’s it going, Cana­dian Press?)

On the other hand, there really isn’t a bet­ter way to rep­re­sent the data avail­able than how the NY Times has here. Colour me impressed.

Blogathon 2009: Infographics, Part 1: Why the CBC sucks

Okay, this is some­thing that has bugged me for a while. Peo­ple who say “inter­ac­tive” when they mean “hard to use” and “Flash scroll­bars”.

While oth­er­wise a com­pe­tent, irri­tat­ingly under­funded news orga­ni­za­tion, the CBC sucks at info­graph­ics. Most of their “inter­ac­tive fea­tures” are just text that requires a lot of click­ing and scrolling to read. That’s not “inter­ac­tive”, guys. That’s “bro­ken”. (In fair­ness, a lot of these come from the Cana­dian Press, which pre­sum­ably also sup­plies these hor­ri­ble clicky things to the two other^[1] Cana­dian news organizations.)

But I digress. A tad.

Yeah, that’s a shame.

This graph of the depress­ing fail­ure that is North­ern Tele­com is pretty good because it ties news and events to stock price over time. There’s still ridicu­lous amounts of click­ing on tiny lit­tle dots though. Mouseover, anyone?

(In fair­ness, there are at least forward/back buttons.)

I find it really bizarre that the two most effec­tive “inter­ac­tive” fea­tures on CBC’s web­site are both incred­i­bly mor­bid: a “where did peo­ple find feet washed up on beaches?” map, and a map of gang hits in Metro Van­cou­ver. (Wow, that map cer­tainly makes the Down­town East Side look quiet. “DTES: Too poor for gang-bangers.”)

Both of these, pre­dictably, use Google Maps, and colour-code the dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of event at that loca­tion. (“Rac­coon paw hoax” or “stab­bing”, for exam­ple.) This con­veys a decent amount of infor­ma­tion with­out hav­ing to select the icon to view addi­tional details. How­ever, you still do have to click the thing to find out any­thing more.

I will say, though, that the effec­tive­ness of both of these hor­ri­ble death maps could be improved by tak­ing time and date into account: per­son­ally, I want to see how long ago those peo­ple down the street got mur­dered in their attic. I mean, really, now. (I remem­ber see­ing a Google Maps mashup that did this, with a slider at the bot­tom. Can any­one help me out with a URL?)

The New York Times, on the other hand, takes online info­graph­ics to a whole new level, rival­ing the qual­ity of their print fea­tures. I’ll explain more about this in 30 minutes.

[1] Yes, seri­ously. (Stu­pid Con­rad Black. Stu­pid CRTC.)

Mobile data rates: Canada’s national shame

With the US release of the iPhone per­me­at­ing even Cana­dian news, I’m find­ing that my cur­rent smart­phone solu­tion just isn’t as desir­able as that which I can­not buy. These days, I’m more than happy with my Treo 650, despite Pal­mOS show­ing its age. I expect a Linux-based Treo will fol­low the recent Palm Foleo by the end of the year. How­ever, I don’t actu­ally even use the data side of my smartphone.

That’s right, I have a smart­phone with no web access at all. Why? Well, the 650’s wifi capa­bil­i­ties kind of suck, but it’s usable. How­ever, if I want to use EDGE, I don’t have a lot of options.

Canada has three national mobile phone com­pa­nies: Bell and Telus, which are both CDMA, and Rogers, which uses GSM. (It’s actu­ally four national com­pa­nies, if you include Fido, which is now owned by Rogers, and which uses the Rogers net­work, but has sep­a­rate brand­ing and billing plans, includ­ing things like per-second billing.)

Despite hav­ing an oth­er­wise highly devel­oped telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work, there is a flaw: Canada’s cel­lu­lar com­pa­nies are goug­ing us on data fees. Observe. Sadly, at one point, Fido had a $20/month unlim­ited EDGE plan, as well as a $30/month unlim­ited incoming/outgoing calls plan. Need­less to say, after their acqui­si­tion by Rogers, both of these were qui­etly canceled.

So right now, my want-to-buy device seems to be the Nokia N800 tablet. It’s a tiny 800x480, WiFi/Bluetooth web brows­ing, media-playing, handwriting-recognizing, 8GB-extensible Linux device. There’s no phone, but then again, I already have a phone.

So, who wants to buy me one?

Singing in the shower

For a long time, I was embar­rassed about the way my voice sounds. It’s still one of the things I have the most trou­ble with since the great “Hey, let’s grow 8 inches taller than every­one else in our class!” deba­cle of my teenage years.

It’s taken me a long time, but I’m finally feel­ing more com­fort­able with my body. I actu­ally own (and occa­sion­ally wear!) heels now. Take that, feet!

Now I’m start­ing to warm up to my voice as well. When I think about it, one of the biggest cat­a­lysts hap­pened sev­eral months ago. I ran­domly met a group of women vis­it­ing Van­cou­ver from Seat­tle — two cou­ples a decade or so older than me. We struck up a con­ver­sa­tion and, one of them men­tioned –with­out any fish­ing on my part– that she thought I had had a great voice. The other three chimed in, agree­ing that my voice was “hot” and did I sing? Oh, but I should! I’d sound great. One of them com­pared it to “Shane, you know, from the L Word?” This was met with agree­ment and much nodding.

What!? These are not sen­ti­ments I’ve often heard. Were they mess­ing with me? No, that didn’t seem likely, given the spon­tane­ity and appar­ent sin­cer­ity of their words. Sure, per­haps their com­par­i­son to Kather­ine Moen­nig as Shane was a bit of a stretch, but then again, I’ve always known that I was being just a tad inse­cure and self-deprecating by describ­ing my voice as sound­ing like Cap­tain Janeway as por­trayed by Bea Arthur.

Days later, after I’d given their words some thought, I real­ized that even if their opin­ion isn’t one that’s broadly agreed-upon, that’s not impor­tant. What is impor­tant is the source of the sen­ti­ment: a group of seem­ingly suc­cess­ful, socially-inclined gay women. Sure, in gen­eral terms, it’s nice being told you have an attrac­tive qual­ity, but I know that I’ve always been far more recep­tive to com­pli­ments from the cute girl hand­ing me my cof­fee than from some ran­dom dude as I step around him on the street.

So maybe it doesn’t mat­ter if every­one thinks my voice is hot, so long as it’s pos­si­ble that some­one does. We all seek val­i­da­tion from oth­ers, despite mostly real­iz­ing that it’s not par­tic­u­larly healthy and that we should feel good about our­selves with­out need­ing some­one else’s approval. Still, free com­pli­ments feel good, par­tic­u­larly when they come from some­one unex­pected. The fact that it came from sev­eral some­ones — sev­eral les­bian some­ones — made it all the more sat­is­fy­ing to hear.

So where does this new­found sense of not-total-loathing leave me now? I came away from the North­ern Voice 2007 con­fer­ence with an inter­est in video blog­ging. I’m beta test­ing Sec­ond Life’s upcom­ing voice chat sys­tem, and as I write this, I real­ize that I can’t remem­ber the last time I felt anx­i­ety about using the phone. Wow. Maybe just singing along to Dar and Ani isn’t such a far-fetched idea after all.

Some­times, pos­i­tive change hap­pens with­out us even being fully aware of it. I’d like to keep that up.

(Cross­posted from a com­ment on ChangeEverything.ca)

Emotional cues in virtual spaces

While fre­quently used to great effect in prose, text is a noto­ri­ously poor medium for con­vey­ing the emo­tional meta­data humans rely on for face-to-face con­ver­sa­tion. How do we know exactly how to inter­pret some­one else’s words, stripped of their emo­tional con­text? What was intended as a sim­ple request for infor­ma­tion may be taken by one reader as a joke, while another may see it as a per­sonal attack.

The sys­tem used by many mod­ern inter­net users was pro­posed in the early 1980s by Scott Fahlman, a com­puter sci­en­tist with Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­sity. He sug­gested that users employ a short series of char­ac­ters, evok­ing the iconic smi­ley face, to demon­strate that their words were to be taken lightheartedly: :-)

While at the time, the pro­posal was viewed by many as some­what tongue-in-cheek, the smi­ley quickly caught on, and is as rec­og­niz­able as the let­ters “www” today, demon­strat­ing its effec­tive­ness in clar­i­fy­ing human-to-human inter­ac­tion in text-based com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In the decades since, inter­net users have extended the orig­i­nal sys­tem by adopt­ing many other emoti­cons, con­vey­ing dis­plea­sure, sad­ness, dis­gust, exhaus­tion, and many oth­ers, insert­ing much-needed emo­tional con­text to their chat and email conversations.

Just as vir­tual envi­ron­ments like Sec­ond Life are fre­quently described as updated MUDs or cha­t­rooms, user inter­ac­tions within them can be sim­i­larly enhanced by the use of body lan­guage and ges­tures based on that of real-world humans. Con­sider the image of an avatar fac­ing another and smil­ing, look­ing away dis­in­ter­est­edly, or stand­ing with arms crossed; each con­veys a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent mes­sage even when asso­ci­ated with the same text.

But what about cases in which we see avatars’ body lan­guage injected into our com­mu­ni­ca­tions with­out our explicit per­mis­sion? There have been count­less posts to the Sec­ond Life forums by newer users, angry and hurt by the dis­dain­ful, supe­rior man­ner of an estab­lished res­i­dent, and how they were delib­er­ately ignored.

These new users describe an inci­dent that usu­ally fol­lows a set pat­tern. They approached a Lin­den employee or an older res­i­dent, usu­ally a fairly high-profile con­tent cre­ator, and greeted them. The estab­lished res­i­dent turned to face them, looked down their nose, and turned back to what they were doing. In actual fact, this is a client-side avatar animation–when chat is “heard” on the client, avatars appear to turn their heads to face it with­out any input from the user con­trol­ling that avatar.

From the per­spec­tive of the Lin­den or long­time res­i­dent, they are unlikely to have even known any­one approached them, as they were busy doing some­thing else: pro­gram­ming, brows­ing the web, or work­ing on tex­tures, leav­ing behind a pup­pet with its strings cut.

This is an exam­ple of a “sub­con­scious” mes­sage injected to the com­mu­ni­ca­tions chan­nel. While no infor­ma­tion has delib­er­ately been con­veyed, to a human observer, a clear mes­sage has been sent. The body lan­guage of the avatar has effec­tively spo­ken for its user. Yet, to the recip­i­ent of this mes­sage, the avatar is the human. From their per­spec­tive, they’ve just been snubbed by some stand­off­ish per­son who clearly can’t be both­ered to even give them the time of day.

Next: Delib­er­ate sub­con­scious fil­ters and their implications.