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An anthology of writings on high weirdness & secret history? How did I not know of this before?

At the beginning of 1797, John Robison was a man with a solid and long-standing reputation in the British scientific establishment. He had been Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University for over twenty years, an authority on mathematics and optics, and had recently been appointed senior scientific contributor on the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to which he would eventually contribute over a thousand pages of articles. Yet by the end of the year, his professional reputation had been eclipsed by a sensational book that vastly outsold anything he had previously written, and whose shockwaves would continue to reverberate long after his scientific work had been forgotten. Its title was Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, and it launched on the English-speaking public the enduring theory that a vast conspiracy, masterminded by a covert Masonic cell known as the Illuminati, was in the process of subverting all the cherished institutions of the civilised world and co-opting them into instruments of its secret and godless plan: the tyranny of the masses under the invisible control of unknown superiors, and a new era of darkness over all'.

The first edition of Proofs of a Conspiracy sold out within days, and within a year it had been republished many times, not only in Edinburgh but in London, Dublin and New York. Robison had hit a nerve by offering an answer, plausible to many, to the great questions of the day: what had caused the French Revolution, and had there been any plan behind its bloody and tumultuous progress?

Many had located the roots of the revolution in the ideas of Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire, Diderot and D'Alembert, who had exalted reason and progress over authority and tradition; but none of these mostly aristocratic philosophes had advocated a revolution of the masses, and indeed several of them had ended their lives on the guillotine. In the early 1790s, it had been possible to believe that the power-hungry lawyers and journalists of the Jacobin Club had whipped up the Paris mob into their destructive frenzy as a means to their own ends, but by 1794 Danton, Robespierre and the rest of the Jacobin leaders had followed their victims to the guillotine: how could they have been the puppet-masters when they had had their own strings so brutally cut? What Robison was proposing in the densely-argued and meticulously documented pages of Proofs of a Conspiracy was that all these agents of revolution had been pawns in a much bigger game, whose ambitions were only just beginning to make themselves visible.

DarkLore Volume II (Amazon)

It's a beautiful thing to watch people tweet. Especially when you try to figure out what they're tweeting about, how they feel, and where they're tweeting from then put that all on a map and animate the changes over time.

Researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard College recently built a pretty and captivating visualization of U.S. Twitter users' moods, as determined by sentiment analysis. You can watch two days worth of tweeted moods in this video:

Watching the cartogram pulse as it indicates the proportional volume and sentiment of tweets is probably more interesting than the researchers' conclusions about their data: people are happier on weekends than weekdays; West Coast happiness trends are usually about three hours after East Coast happiness trends. Still, it's neat to learn that Thursday evening aka just about the time I'm posting this is the time of the week Twitter users tend to express the most negative sentiment.

Meanwhile, over at Betaworks, they've just posted a visualization of the record-setting sustained volume of tweets from around the world during the World Cup. There's no sentiment analysis here just counting of relevant hashtags but you can see the volume of tweets corresponding with the occurrence of games that people in a country are interested in.

People seem to tweet less about being frustrated than being triumphant; for the championship game, Betaworks noted an immediate lack of traffic in the Netherlands after losing while the attention in Spain persisted through the next morning. Or it could be that disappointed tweeters just left off the proper hashtag formulation when lamenting their team's loss.

These aren't the first Twitter geography-plus-time visualizations videos, of course. Here's one from last year that maps tweets with the words just landed and just arrived in:

Just Landed 36 Hours from blprnt on Vimeo.

Here's another of tweets from people who were pleased about Barack Obama's inauguration. And here's one from the New York Times depicting tweets during the Super Bowl. (Those two aren't embeddable, so you'll have to click through.)

Perhaps the data geeks who made these were too busy thinking about the visuals, but for some reason or another none of them include a soundtrack. So it's up to you to put some trippy music on, chill out, and watch the Twitter visualizations.

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An interesting discussion of the role of "traditional media" in the wikileaks Afghanistan journal

That WikiLeaks went to the press with the Afghanistan war logs shows old-fashioned news organisations still have a role to play

Of all the questions raised by the Afghanistan war logs, perhaps the most intriguing is this: why would an organisation as independent-minded and disdainful of the traditional media as WikiLeaks seek out those very media as partners rather than going it alone?

My necessarily speculative answer is that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who's made a speciality of revealing embarrassing governmental secrets, learned something important earlier this year. That's when he briefly caused a sensation by releasing video of a US Apache helicopter firing on Iraqi civilians, killing (among others) a Reuters photographer and his driver.

The lesson: shocking material and a flair for public relations may be enough to get you noticed. But if it's credibility you want, then old-fashioned news organisations still have something to offer.

WikiLeaks made some 92,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan available to the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel a month ago, giving professional journalists time to sort, vet and craft narratives from jargon-laden field reports compiled by US officials.

The documents add sickening details to the broad outlines of what we already knew: that major elements of Pakistan's intelligence forces are in bed with the Taliban; that chaos and confusion in Afghanistan has led to civilian casualties; and that among the burdens the Afghan people must bear is a corrupt and ineffective government.

The Obama administration has lambasted WikiLeaks for releasing the documents, arguing that the situation has improved since 2009, when the most recent of the official reports were compiled. But no one has questioned the authenticity of the documents themselves, even if the reliability of the information contained therein appears to be of variable quality.

In effect, Assange chose to act as Daniel Ellsberg, the insider who leaked the Pentagon Papers the US government's own secret history of the Vietnam war to the Washington Post and the New York Times. But it was just a few months ago that Assange tried out the role of Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post executive editor who published those papers.

In April, you may recall, WikiLeaks uploaded two versions of the Apache helicopter video. One was an edited, 18-minute version that it titled Collateral Murder, which begins with a quote from George Orwell: "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind." The other, 39 minutes long, was raw footage with no commentary.

The American secretary of defence, Robert Gates, denounced the video as having been taken out of context. No surprise there. But as Raffi Khatchadourian notes in a profile of Assange published in the New Yorker, the media turned Gates's way within days of the release. And in fact, when you watch the video and listen to the Americans on board the helicopter, you can see that the crew members believed, rightly or wrongly, that they were firing on a legitimate target.

Even the comedian Stephen Colbert, in an interview with Assange, dropped his rightwing-blowhard persona momentarily to make a serious point, calling the edited version "emotional manipulation" and telling his guest: "There are armed men in the group. They did find a rocket-propelled grenade among the group. The Reuters photographers who were regrettably killed were not identified as photographers. And you have edited this tape, and you have given it a title called Collateral Murder. That's not leaking. That's a pure editorial."

(An aside for British readers not familiar with Colbert and thus puzzled at my quoting a comedian: it is a sad but undeniable reality that the two most incisive American media critics today may well be Colbert and his fellow fake anchorman Jon Stewart.)

Around the time that the video was released, hubris among the WikiLeakers was thick. In the New Yorker piece, we hear from a friend and supporter of Assange's, a Dutch hacker named Rop Gonggrijp, who smugly says that "we are not the press" and "the source is no longer dependent on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his document".

Yet here we are, several months later, and Assange is acting very much like an old-fashioned source, seeking out journalists even as he uploads the raw source documents to the web.

In the felicitous phrase of New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, WikiLeaks is "a stateless news organisation". But as the New Yorker piece makes clear, Assange and his fellow activists are less interested in news than in making a political impact. And it is an organisation only in the loosest sense of the term. Given those realities, it makes sense for them to work with journalists rather than to posit themselves in opposition to the media.

"WikiLeaks was soaking, drowning in data," Rosen's NYU colleague Clay Shirky tells David Carr of the New York Times. "What they needed was someone who could tell a story. They needed someone who could bring accuracy and political context to what was being revealed."

What I am suggesting is not that old media have triumphed over the new. Rather, I'm simply pointing out that each has its place in the media ecosystem.

WikiLeaks, with its singleminded focus on casting about for whistleblowers and protecting their identity through encryption and secrecy, can obtain material that eludes established news organisations. And professional journalists can vet, make sense of and impart credibility to that material in ways that not all new-media ventures (at least not WikiLeaks) can.

The result is a powerful indictment of the war in Afghanistan and a major challenge to Barack Obama.

Back in character, Colbert asked Assange: "What is the purpose of letting the public know? It's like you're saying it's better to know than not to know. Have you not heard ignorance is bliss?"

It's way too late for that now.

Exhibiting poise, insight and respect, Nigerian President Goodluck Johnson has risen to the top of the list of politicians using social media effectively. Johnson set up a Facebook account a little over a month ago and has posted at least once a day since. However, it is not simply the number of posts that makes his account one to watch for interested politicians and pundits, but rather the content therein he discusses many dimensions of the government's actions and policies, even reversing one of his decisions based on the comments that citizens left on his Facebook page. Read on for an in-depth look at what makes his use of social media such a success.

Johnson's Facebook page was set up on June 28th, and the first message appeared later that day:

Today, in fulfillment of the promise I made at the 26th convocation of the University of Port Harcourt on Saturday, 15 May 2010, I have created a facebook fan page to interact with Nigerians. As I said on that day, there is an unchallengeable power of good in the Nigerian nation and her youth and through this medium I want Nigerians to give me the privilege of relating with them without the trappings of office. GEJ

And he has done just that. Every post to his wall is an invitation for Nigerians to engage with his government, on issues ranging from new government appointments to the environment, inflation to soccer. His posts garner between 1,000 to 3,000 comments a piece huge numbers that indicate that the people of Nigeria are eager to have their voices heard.

Many politicians have a Facebook, Twitter or other social media presence. However, a true measure of success is whether they are truly engaging with their constituents or whether they simply use social media to broadcast a one-way party line type of message. While it is impossible to reply to 3,000 comments per day, Johnson does, in fact, hear what Nigerians are saying on his Facebook page. He replies directly to some commenters, in general to the majority, and even brings some of the comments to government meetings and events. For instance, on July 4th he posted a call for suggestions pertaining to improving the power supply to citizens, and on July 5th he updated his status to read:

Again I spent time reading your comments and yesterday a youth named Toyin Dawodu indicated that he had an idea for a project that could deliver 4,000 MWs of electricity. I believe in the creativity and the spirit of innovation resident in our youth and I want to give Toyin Dawodu a chance to be heard. Toyin, someone from my office will make contact with you regarding your idea. I know I can not attend to every comment or suggestion due to time constraints, but please do know that I read them and they influence my actions. GEJ

Along with singling out certain commenters and engaging with them, Johnson also bring the general sentiment of the Facebook page to bear on political decisions. He recently reversed a ruling to ban the Nigerian football team from international play due to their poor performance at the World Cup, and cited several Facebook comments as key to his decision.

Johnson's Facebook account is not part of a political campaign or a marketing strategy. It is not simply there so that his government can say they understand social media and new technology. He is using Facebook as a tool to engage in a two-way conversation with his citizens, hearing their concerns and raising his own. This increases transparency and accountability, while showing the world that his government is active and concerned about its citizens. Governments around the world could learn a thing or two from Johnson's Facebook page.

It's a little weird to write a story that contains the terms, "Fox News," "videogame" and "sex" yet isn't actually negative. Well, not in the traditional sense, anyway.

Fox News Orlando reports that the University of Central Florida is hard at work developing a videogame geared towards female middle school students intended to teach them skills for handling peer pressure relating to sex. The game places them in social situations and they make choices and score points for demonstrating appropriate responses to offers of sexual activity and innuendo from onscreen avatars.

Now, the ridiculous part. The game uses a full motion-capture suit. They're going to put kids in motion-capture suits and have them act out rejecting male students. I'll grant you, it's a skill that all girls benefit from having, but is the suit really necessary? Not to mention it looks creepy as hell and is costing taxpayers $434,000.

I'm completely in favor of games being used as educational tools but this is just way too much. For that money, you could hire at least ten entry-level teachers and thin out some class sizes in low-income communities which would probably be just as effective in reducing teen pregnancies.

Hit the jump and you can see video of the game in action. If you think the above screen capture is terrifying, you really need to check this out.

UCF developing virtual game about sex, peer pressure [MyFoxOrlando via Boondocks Bootleg]

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

WikiLeaks, the crusading anti-secrecy organization that just published 90,000 pages of secret government documents about the war in Afghanistan, has gotten a lot of attention for its campaign to become the world's repository of whistle-blowing and embargo-busting information, and leader Julian Assange has become the star of the political talk show circuit. But the most interesting thing about WikiLeaks and the release of the secret Afghan documents isn't the details of the U.S. campaign it's what the incident says about the evolution of a truly distributed and dis-aggregated new media ecosystem.

Shadowy sources have been disclosing secret information of all kinds to newspapers and magazines for decades, ever since Watergate made it seem like a public service to do so. But in this case, there was a middleman in the process, and one with a considerable amount of power far more than any other source in a similar situation. WikiLeaks didn't get the documents directly, but was given them by another unnamed source (possibly Bradley Manning, who was the source of an earlier secret video of a U.S. military attack on civilians in Iraq). The site then proceeded to broker a deal with the New York Times, The Guardian and Germany's Der Spiegel, whereby the media outlets could have access to the documents and publish stories based on them simultaneously. Columbia Journalism Review has a detailed step-by-step account of how it happened.

Not everyone thinks WikiLeaks represents a fundamental transformation of journalism in the Internet age, mind you. Doug Saunders, the European bureau chief for the Globe and Mail newspaper, said on Twitter that Wikileaks gave us the War Logs scoop in same way the brown-envelope industry gave us Pentagon Papers or parking garages uncovered Watergate (although he later conceded that WikiLeaks was a useful vehicle). But comparing WikiLeaks and what it was able to accomplish to a source with a brown envelope in a parking garage as Deep Throat was for the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal in the 1970s misses the larger point.

As New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has noted, even after it provided the documents to the media outlets, WikiLeaks still maintained the ultimate control over them including the ability to publish all 90,000 of them at the same time that the stories based on them appeared in the NYT, Guardian and Der Spiegel. This, Rosen says, provided an almost unprecedented check on the traditional media, since any gaps or omissions from their stories would become obvious. Typically, sources cut exclusive deals with a single outlet, and that entity has the final say over what appears but WikiLeaks has altered that traditional balance of power.

You can get a sense of how shaken up this new arrangement has made some traditional journalists, by looking at the response from the NYT reporter who worked with WikiLeaks on the documents, and from NYT editor Bill Keller. The latter defended the newspaper's decision not to link to the full storehouse of WikiLeaks documents, and also said that he felt compelled to pass on to the group the government's displeasure at the publication of U.S. government informants' names and other information, which Keller said he did at the request of the White House. Meanwhile, reporter Eric Schmitt seemed to recoil at the idea that the incident was any kind of partnership between the newspaper of record and the shadowy info-hacker organization:

I've seen Julian Assange in the last couple of days kind of flouncing around talking about this collaboration like the four of us were working all this together but we were not in any kind of partnership or collaboration with him. This was a source relationship. He's making it sound like this was some sort of journalistic enterprise between WikiLeaks, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, and that's not what it was.

Regardless of whether Schmitt or Keller are comfortable with the existence of what Rosen has called the world's first stateless news organization, however, the fact remains that the Internet not only allows an entity such as WikiLeaks to exist, but gives it far more power than any previous non-journalistic organization when it comes to affecting the news cycle. The fact that sources with secret data can now go to an entity that doesn't have to answer to any state or even international authority gives WikiLeaks a leg up on even the New York Times, which has made questionable decisions about significant news stories in the past (such as the lead-up to the war in Iraq, for example) for a variety of reasons. As Steve Myers at the Poynter Institute put it:

In inserting itself between source and publisher, WikiLeaks has shifted power away from the monoliths that once determined what is news and toward the people who, before the Web, would have been stopped in the newspaper lobby before they could see a reporter.

Media writer David Carr of the New York Times called the WikiLeaks case an example of asymmetric journalism, in which the source of information is also a publisher, but also works together with traditional media to make secret data public for society's benefit. C.W. Anderson at the Nieman Journalism Lab called it a classic case study of the new ecosystem of news diffusion:

from new fact-gatherers, to news organizations in a different position in the informational chain, all the way to the Twittersphere in which conversation about the story was occurring in real-time, back to the bloggers, the opinion makers, the partisans, the politicians, and the hacks. This is how news works in 2010.

British journalism professor George Brock calls what happened with WikiLeaks and the two newspapers and magazine a mutualisation of journalism a term that has also been used by The Guardian to describe the newspaper's approach to modern media, which includes an open platform that allows developers to re-use its content, and blog plug-ins that allow bloggers and The Guardian to share content. And WikiLeaks has in mind its own kind of plug-in: an embeddable disclosure and upload form that would allow newspapers to solicit secret documents and then hand them over to WikiLeaks for safe-keeping.

The New York Times and other traditional media entities may not like it, but it isn't just the business model of journalism and the media that is changing; it's the fundamental structure of the industry and how it functions. And they had better get used to it. Yes, WikiLeaks needed the Times and The Guardian and Der Spiegel to draw attention to and filter some of the information deluge it had on its hands, but the balance of power between source and publication has clearly been altered, and journalism will likely never be the same.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req'd): What We Can Learn From the Guardian's Open Platform

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users New Media Days, Menage a Moi and Yan Arief

Here's a case that I'm hoping will turn out to be an epic example of journalistic misunderstanding. Because the alternative is that the International English Language Testing System is a really, really bad way to measure English language proficiency. And that would be a shame, because IELTS, a product of University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations and the British Council, is pretty much the standard English proficiency test outside the U.S.

Commenting on this morning's post "Language tests for immigrants in Canada", IS pointed us to a .pdf of a "sample test" on the web site of The Toronto Star. It includes four questions and I bet you can't get more than half of them right without peeking at the answers. I certainly couldn't. Here's the test, minus the answer key:

Let's try to correct these sentences one at a time. The first one is

1. Tomoko spends an equal amount of money on rent, food, study materials and entertainment.

I thought of several ways to "correct" this sentence, which is ambiguous but false under all available interpretations. One alternative among many would be:

1a. Tomoko spends more money on rent and food than she does on study materials and entertainment.

But according to the answer key, the (only?) right answer is:

1b. Tomoko spends an unequal amount of money on rent, food, study materials and entertainment.

I'm not sure that this is even a grammatical English sentence. I could say "Tomoko spends unequal amounts of money on A, B, C and D", but " spends an unequal amount of money on A, B, C(,) and D" just seems wrong to me, with or without the extra comma. And at best, the "corrected" sentence strikes me as awkward and uninformative.

I got the second sentence right. It simply gives the wrong percentage for "study materials", and so the obvious thing to do is to substitute 25 for 15:

2. Tomoko spends 45 per cent of her money on rent and food, but she only spends 15 25 per cent of her money on study materials.

However, some people might prefer to move only so that it's adjacent to its focus: " but she spends only 25 per cent of her money on study materials". Apparently this would be marked as a wrong answer, even though some prescriptive authorities would mandate the change.

I also got the third sentence right, though it was a near thing:

3. Tomoko spends more less on clothes than she does on study materials.

I was tempted to leave more and invert the order of the categories compared. And again, apparently that would have been wrong though in making that correction, I'd demonstrate that I understand the text and the pie chart, and can compose an English sentence to express my understanding.

4. Tomoko spends as much on rent and food as she does on everything else put together.

I got this one wrong. I decided to add "almost" before "as much". But the right answer, apparently, is to change "as much" to "less". I like my edit better, although it would apparently have been marked wrong.

So my score was 50%. How'd *you* do?

Getting back to the reason that I'm hoping for misleading journalism, it would be nice if the cited answers were simply examples of possible correct answers, rather than the only answers accepted as correct. Then the fact that the Toronto Star presented the answers as shown below would be rather misleading, but the questions and answers could still be part of a plausible evaluation of English proficiency.

I'm hoping that someone who knows how the IELTS is graded maybe even someone who works as an IELTS grader will tell me that I would have scored 100%, not 50%. But I'd need some favorable odds to be willing to bet money on that outcome.

According to Nicholas Keung, "All immigrants face mandatory language test", The Star, 7/20/2010:

Born and raised in New York, Dodi Robbins graduated from Harvard University and has been practising law for 13 years.

Her first language is English. Yet like all other skilled immigrants applying to settle in Canada, the American corporate lawyer must now take a language test to prove her English is good enough to settle here.

I was outraged, insulted and floored, said Robbins, who obtained her law degree at Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School in New York. A mother of two, she has been working in Toronto on a work permit for four years as compliance and regulations counsel for an international financial services company.

I almost fell off the chair. I've been practising law here for years and I have to prove my proficiency in English?

Last month Ottawa made its language proficiency test mandatory for all skilled immigrant applicants, including native English and French speakers. The so-called ministerial instructions stipulate officials are not to process applications without language test results, starting June 26.

There seems to be some substantive controversy over the way the policy was introduced:

Critics say the government is now trying to use the ministerial instructions to circumvent public scrutiny and consultation, ramming through changes without parliamentary oversight.

But Ms. Robbins' case seems to be an odd one to lead with. It's legitimate for her to be annoyed at having to spend a half a day and $285 taking the IELTS. But the article describes her as sweating the outcome:

Robbins says she is juggling her full-time job and two kids to prepare for the IELTS test in August.

Does a native speaker with a college education really need to "prepare for the IELTS test"? If so, it must not be a very well-designed instrument.

I recognize that "language exams" can be (and sometimes are) designed to test something other than language proficiency. When I was a graduate student, we needed to demonstrate proficiency in two languages other than English. In principle, all that was required was the ability to translate a linguistics article, with access to a dictionary. Having achieved roughly that level of competence in German, I planned to take the German exam. Then one of my fellow grad students, a native speaker of German who had an undergraduate degree from a well-regarded institution in Austria, told me that she had failed that exam.

Apparently the gentleman who administered the German exam had a chip on his shoulder about all the grad students who didn't take the courses his department offered. In any event, he apparently set my friend to translate a particularly fiendish passage from von Humboldt, which she found so impenetrable that she occasionally got confused about who did what to whom. Or perhaps she suffered the fate that Mark Twain described in The Awful German Language:

You observe how far that verb is from the reader's base of operations; well, in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state.

Anyhow, I abruptly changed course and arranged to take my German exam in Latin.

And then there's the traditional Japanese method of determining English proficiency, which apparently is a version of the cloze test that in effect requires students to commit large numbers of classic works to memory.

But I find it hard to believe that the IELTS is designed in such a way that a highly educated native speaker really needs to study for it. Can someone who's taken it recently comment?

If I understand the situation correctly, this is roughly the Canadian equivalent of a U.S. H-1B visa, for which a language proficiency exam is not required, rather than the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. Naturalization process, which does have a language proficiency requirement, though a rather minimal one:

During your interview, a USCIS officer will test your ability to read, write, and speak English and your knowledge of civics. You must read one sentence out of three sentences correctly in English, and you must write one sentence out of three sentences correctly in English. Your ability to speak English is determined during your interview on your naturalization application. Finally, you must answer 6 out of 10 civics questions correctly to achieve a passing score.

[Update other stories suggest that Ms. Robbins has had a Canadian work permit for several years, and is now applying for citizenship. But it seems that what she is actually doing is applying for status as a "permanent resident" like having "green card" in the U.S. which may or may not be a step on the way to naturalization. It's not clear to me yet whether similar language tests are required in order to get a work permit.]

[Update #2 Apparently there is no "passing grade" on the test. According to this page,

You must provide proof of language proficiency by taking a language test from an agency designated by CIC. With your test results, you will be able to see exactly how many points you will receive for the language selection factor.

The "points" are part of the system described here:

Also, this is part of the application for admission as a "permanent resident" under the "skilled workers and professionals category", which is not the same as applying for citizenship, but is a bigger deal than getting a limited-term work permit.]

I am going to be a better person at self-promotion because I don't brag enough. Ryan Paugh, who was basically my intern when I met him, and now he's almost my boss and definitely my social-skills mentor, tells me that I am popular because I'm interesting but that I suck at self-promotion. (He uses, as an example, the day I promoted an event on my blog a few hours after it it actually happened.)

I do not tell Ryan to shut up because he has taught me a ton about myself since the day I started working with him. And in fact, he makes me feel qualified to tell you how you can fire up your career by paying close attention to the people with the least work experience.

1. Recognize interns are gatekeepers to the good stuff.

When it was time to promote my second book, I went to Keith Ferrazzi, author of one of my favorite career advice books. I needed a quotation from Keith that said something like, I am The Great Keith Ferazzi and I can tell you for sure that your career will be crap and you will die drowning in the blood of a rabid coyote if you do not buy Penelope Trunk's book.

Just so you don't get confused, I'm going to start calling my first book my first book and my second book my second book. At this point, I have written enough about oral sex and family atrocities that you will not be shocked to hear that first book is really a memoir that my publisher out of the University of Colorado decided was too disturbing to be sold as a memoir, so it was published as a novel.

Anyway, another thing Keith is great at is hiring interns. Keith's intern, and gatekeeper, at the time of the publication of my second book, was Ian Ybarra. Ian said sure, he could come up with a quote. (It did not have animal references, but still, it was a nice endorsement.) Ian could see that I was a book-promotion novice, so he started giving me tips: Trade email lists, give speeches, pitch bloggers. Note: this was five years ago, when no one pitched bloggers.

Wait, please. Do not send me your book because I get too many. I'm sick of getting copies of business books. (Note to all publishers: I am getting really good at self-promotion and my blog is about to really take off, so could you please start sending me books with literary merit? Here's my address: 15010 Oak Grove Lane, Darlington, WI 53030.) (And, a note to people who are going to say aren't I worried that if I publish my address that stalkers will come get me in my sleep. Check me out on Google maps. The farm is so remote that even a stalker would be scared to go there in the dark.) (Finally, a note about using parentheses: Can we talk about style? Can there be more talk about style in blogging? Are links inherently parenthetical? What if each thought in a post is parenthetical, but they all add up to something that is central to our lives? Is that innovative or is it too e e cummings?) It's so difficult to be original.

2. Don't rush on the phone; interns chat about things that really matter.

Then, one day, Ian wrote to me that he was moving with his girlfriend to Beloit. And then to Saudi Arabia. Or something like that. I can't remember where he moved, but he grew up in a really really small town in a state that gets joked about just like Wisconsin. And he told me about how MIT courted him because he had high SAT scores in a weird zip code. When I worry about my kids going to a rural school with no orchestra, I hang my hat on hopes painted with broad brush strokes of the tidbits of Ian's life that I may or may not remember correctly.

The next intern was Ryan Geist. I love him because I met him when he was at a big job at a big firm where I would never have been able to go to when I was his age because I was too busy not doing what the world expected me to do. What I love about Ryan is he gave those expectations a chance, and he was brave enough to say he didn't like them, and he landed on Keith's doorstep.

At the same time Ryan was there, so was Sara Grace. She called to get a quote from me. And I started talking to her about what she does. What her aspirations are. And she started telling me all these ways that Keith repurposes content. I was blown away. He is great at turning everything he writes or says into a post. The thing that really struck me was that he records interviews and has them transcribed in India and then edited into a post. That's a great idea.

3. Let an intern show you your weak spot: you'll love her for it.

That's a great idea because reporters ask interesting questions. And then I end up talking about topics I hadn't thought about talking about before. The reporter uses 10% of what I say and the rest is gone. Poof. I do about five interviews a week, so recording them seemed like a good idea. But I realized that I actually like the process of writing. I don't like the process of reading what I already said. (I wonder, does anyone actually like that process? It seems solipsistic. And shut up to all you people who think everything I do is solipsistic, self-promotion. Here is a list of people who are a thousand times better at self-promotion I am at it and I wish I could be any of them for a day:

Guy Kawasaki

Jason Calcanis

Ramit Sethi

And probably all you people who say that I'm in love with myself and never shut up about myself are also people who rant about me into a recorder and then hit replay so you can listen to yourself rant.)

4. Lay groundwork to get a job from the intern one day. (Ya never know)

So goal number one is to be better at promoting myself.

And goal number two is to be better at using all the content I generate to create more posts. I am also not good at this because once I generate the content, it bores me. I want to move on. So I'm not sure how I will meet this goal either.

But here's a start:

Esquire magazine contacted me this week about how to quit. And I decided it might make a good blog post. I see that it's taken me too many words to get to it. So it's hard to say that it's the real subject of this blog post. But maybe you will like it:

(Don't do an exit interview. If they wanted to hear your ideas about how to make things better, you wouldn't be quitting, would you? So this is really just a way for you to burn bridges and annoy people. Don't fall into the trap. If they insist on an exit interview, say nothing negative. At all.

Send a thank you note. Anyone you worked closely with should get a hand-written thank you note. Bring up specific times when they surprised you with kindness, made your work better, invigorated you with their own contagious brilliance or creativity. And, if you are thinking that you work with people who merely make you want to hit your head on a brick wall, remember this: Intelligent people should can learn from anyone.

Take a vacation. You probably think about work all the time, not because you're a slave but because you like solving problems and learning new things and meeting interesting people. Which is what work really is. This means that the only time you can really take a vacation is in between jobs. So do that. Don't start the new job right away.

Have humility. You are probably not quitting to take a job that sucks, right? So, since you are quitting for a better job, you don't need to shove it in peoples' faces that you are moving up in the world and they are not. The world is not a race to a McMansion, the world is a contest for who can be the most kind hearted and tolerant. That's what makes a good lifeyou'll get kindness in return. So be gracious and grateful.)

Think of quitting as a networking event. These people are no longer your co-workers, they are they network that will help you get the job after the one you just got. And don't forget the entry-level people who look like they couldn't help anyone. The interns will get big jobs one day, and they will remember each person who saw them for who they are and who they could be.

Here in the America, the CIA's drone program targeting extremists in the tribal areas of Pakistan is the subject of heated debate. The CIA calls it a uniquely valuable and precise counterterrorism tool. The Obama administration, which has stepped up the program significantly since taking office, considers it legal under the 2001 congressional Authorization to Use Military Force. The human-rights community, along with many security experts, fear that the program will create more terrorists than it kills due to anger at civilian casualties.

Pakistanis, however, think the drones are sorry; huh? What are you talking about? Did you say clones?

That's according to a new Pew poll on Pakistani attitudes (PDF) that's filled with surprises. Top of the list: Just over one-in-three Pakistanis (35%) have heard about the drone strikes. Apparently, Pakistanis barely know this program even exists. Forty-three percent say they've heard nothing at all about the drones. You can hear the champagne corks popping at Langley.

But it's not exactly time for bottle service. Amongst those Pakistanis who have heard of the drones, opinion skews predictably negative. Ninety-three percent say they're a bad or very bad thing. Ninety percent say they kill too many innocent people. While some researchers claim that if you limit your pool of respondents to the tribal areas, support for the drones actually goes up, 32 percent of overall respondents think they're a necessary measure. (Although perhaps that's a robust total of people saying a foreign government should shoot missiles at their fellow countrymen.) And almost half of Pakistanis believe the fiction that the drone strikes occur without Pakistani government approval.

That's not all the poll found: Pakistanis are freaked out about their economy; highly anti-American; and less concerned about terrorism than they used to be although that latter part might not be such a bad thing.After a $7.5 billion aid package passed Congress last year to bolster Pakistan's civilian government and reeling economy, here's what the U.S. has to show for it: Pakistanis exhibit as much anti-American sentiment as any populace on earth. According to Pew, 59 percent of Pakistanis consider the U.S. an enemy, and only 17 percent consider the U.S. a friend. Pakistanis give the U.S. its lowest ratings among the 22 nations included in the spring 2010 Pew Global Attitudes survey, the poll notes. You have to go to Egypt or Turkey to find similarly negative views of the U.S. in Pew's findings a fact, perhaps, that helps contextualize why the Pakistani intelligence apparatus funds U.S. enemies in Afghanistan, as WikiLeaks reminded us this week. Still, 64 percent say they want better relations with the United States.

Then there's Pakistani attitudes on terrorism, something the poll considers ominous. As Pakistani forces continue to battle extremist groups within the country, nearly all Pakistanis describe terrorism as a very big problem, it warns. However, they have grown markedly less concerned that extremists might take control of the country. Specifically, 69 percent worried in 2009 that the Pakistani Taliban and affiliated groups might rout the government. Now only 51 percent feel that way. Is that necessarily bad?

Haider Mullick, a Pakistani scholar at the U.S. Joint Special Operations University recently returned from a wide-ranging trip surveying Pakistani military development during the army's 18-month campaign against the Tehrek-e-Taliban, or TTP. The effort brought Pakistani troops into tough battles in South Waziristan. In his view, it's natural for Pakistanis to be less concerned about an enemy that they see their army battling, especially considering that last spring, the Taliban were entrenched barely 60 miles from the capitol city of Islamabad.

TTP lost major territory in Swat, Buner, Shangla, Bannu, South Waziristan. That's very signficant, Mullick says. Also, historically speaking, once an insurgent group becomes weak, popular support for reconciliation goes up. And the fight against the insurgents still has popular backing: 49 percent of Pakistanis support it, far more than the 20 percent who oppose it, though 30 percent register mixed feelings.

The Pakistani military effort in the tribal areas is a mixed picture. By January 2010, the United Nations Refugee Agency accommodated 114,000 refugees from the fighting in camps it set up in the Northwest Frontier Province, with nearly a million more living in nearby host communities. The military is apparently holding territory in Swat and South Waziristan, though there's not much of a civilian government presence there. Militants have been making their way to the Punjabi heartland of the country and the military has yet to advance into North Waziristan, the remaining safe havens of al-Qaeda, the TTP and their allies. But the campaign has won persistent accolades from generals David Petraeus and Jim Mattis, who note as did the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. this week that more Pakistani troops have died fighting Taliban than NATO troops have in nine years.

Paradoxically, the military's fight against the Taliban may have impacted Pakistani sentiments toward extremist groups. Fifteen percent of Pakistanis rate the TTP favorably, though, and 18 percent have favorable views of al-Qaeda. Both are higher than last year's 10 and nine percent favorables, respectively. But Pakistani perceptions of both groups are still down from 2008 levels, when a roughly a quarter of Pakistanis expressed approval of al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. And the negative ratings for both groups are high, although the TTP's 65 percent unfavorable rating outstrips the 53 percent antipathy Pakistanis record for al-Qaeda.

Still, no matter how you dissect the poll, what comes through is Pakistani dissatisfaction. President Asif Ali Zardari has an approval rating of 20 percent, more than 40 percent lower than when he took office. The economy has been hit hard by the global downturn, and about half of Pakistanis expect things to get worse, while only 35 percent were pessimists last year. Corruption, economy, energy, inflation trumps the threat from terrorism in many places, says Mullick. See? We're not so different after all.

Credit: U.S. Air Force

See Also:

• WikiLeaks Drops 90000 War Docs; Fingers Pakistan as Insurgent Ally
• Pakistan's Blocking Binge: First Facebook, Now YouTube; Others
• 3 GIs Killed in Pakistan. Now Can We Start Treating This Like a
• Report: U.S. Drone Goes Down Over Pakistan. Again.
• State Department Flies Mercenary Air Force Over Pakistan
• G.I.s Slain in Pakistan: Psyop Sergeant, Two Nation-Builders

In 1850, the HMS Investigator sailed into the Canadian Arctic in search for the fabled Northwest Passage. Captain Robert McClure and his crew, after getting trapped in ice in 1853, abandoned the ship. But a team of archaeologists recently found the ship, which is in remarkably good condition. Canadian parks official Marc-Andre Bernier said:

The ship had not moved too much from where it was abandoned, said Bernier.

The masts and rigging have long been sheared off by ice and weather. But the icy waters of the McClure Strait has preserved the vessel in remarkably good condition.

It's incredible, said Prentice from Mercy Bay. You're actually able to peer down into the water and see not only the outline of the ship but actually the individual timbers.

Link | Image: University of Delaware

Thursday, July 29, 2010

The scientists on the project ranked having low-quality relationships with friends and family as equivalent to frequent substance abuse (that is to say, 15 cigarettes a day or heavy alcohol consumption) but worse for a person's health than not participating in exercise and being obese.

Timothy Smith, project leader from Brigham Young University (BYU), in Utah, claims that "the importance of having a network of friends and good family relationships is comparable to quitting smoking and exceeds many risk factors of mortality such as obesity, physical inactivity."

"In Google we trust." That may very well be the motto of today's young online users, a demographic group often dubbed the "digital natives" due their apparent tech-savvy. Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others.

That may not be true, as it turns out. A new study coming out of Northwestern University, discovered that college students have a decided lack of Web savvy, especially when it comes to search engines and the ability to determine the credibility of search results. Apparently, the students favor search engine rankings above all other factors. The only thing that matters is that something is the top search result, not that it's legit.

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"I Googled It"

During the study, one of the researchers asked a study participant, "What is this website?" The student answered, "Oh, I don't know. The first thing that came up."

That exchange sums up the overall results from this study: many students trusted in rankings above all else. In fact, a quarter of the students, when assign information-seeking tasks, said they chose a website because - and only because - it was the first search result.

Only 10% of the students made mention of the site's author or that author's credentials while completing tasks. However, in reviewing the screen-capture footage of those respondents, the researchers found that even in this supposedly savvy minority, none actually followed through to verify the identification or qualifications of the site's authors.

Google was not the only search engine used in the study, but it was one in which the students put a lot of trust. The students felt emotionally tied to the service in some cases, noting how much they loved it and depended on it. (Those who used Yahoo! said they merely "liked" it.)

Regardless the choice of search engine, though, the first step in information-seeking was always the use of such a service, which was typically referred to as a verb. And yes, in addition to "google it," some even said they would "yahoo it."

Wikipedia Not Trusted as Much

Another interesting finding from the study involved the use of Wikipedia. Perhaps because of teachers' insistence over the years that the user-generated encyclopedia is not a credible source of information, only a third of the students used Wikipedia to search for answers when given particular tasks. This is a drop from earlier studies (like Raine & Tancer, 2007) which showed Wikipedia use at 46% among students.

Other popular trusted sources included SparkNotes (a study guide site), WedMD, Planned Parenthood, CNN, BBC, Microsoft (specifically Encarta and Office-related resources) and those sites with a .gov or .edu extension. Some students even thought that .org domain name meant a site was inherently trustworthy - they weren't aware that the .org extension can be freely registered just like .com and is not for nonprofit use only, as may have originally been intended.

Students Need Media Literacy Education

While the size of the study was only 102 students, the demographics of the group were both ethnically and racially diverse, reaching a representative sample of first-year college students at the University of Chicago.

In summary, the findings showed that students are not always turning to the most relevant clues to determine the credibility of online content, said the researchers Eszter Hargittai, Lindsay Fullerton, Ericka Menchen-Trevino and Kristen Yates Thomas. Further initiatives that help educate people in this domain are needed, they claim.

Image credit in original article: flickr user Paulo Fehlauer

The Telegraph reports that Wan Wuyi, director of China's main domestic news service, has gone missing after a training course at Britain's Oxford University:

He is said to have gone missing after telling colleagues he was suffering a bad back so would have to delay his flight home after finishing the training last month.

Rumours on the Chinese internet suggested Mr Wan may have decided to flee after his reporting landed him on the wrong side of China's leaders. There were also claims he may have been under investigation for corruption. Mr Wan's wife is said to have already emigrated to the UK....

A spokesman for Xinhua refused to confirm or deny whether Mr Wan had defected. He said: "We do not know the situation clearly. You should keep an eye on the news."

But a Chinese official based in Britain rejected suggestions Mr Wan had gone missing. "This is totally wrong. It is a rumour," said Hei Dalong, the Xinhua bureau chief in London. "Mr Wan is at my home. He has been ill for 50 days and the doctors say he is recovering but only slowly. He cannot travel at this time."

Very fishy. Wan would be a pretty major defection if this turns out to be true. Stay tuned.

Hat tip: The Diplomat

Take one look at the newly launched Facebook Questions feature and it's clear that things are about to change dramatically on the world's largest social network. Take a second look and it's also clear that the feature isn't working very well yet - but it will be fixed and is going to be a very big deal.

A few million people have been given access this afternoon to Facebook Questions, a social Question & Answer feature built under the leadership of Blake Ross, co-creator of the Firefox browser years ago and now an employee at Facebook. Questions may come closer than anything else has yet to founder Mark Zuckerberg's vision of Facebook as a connector of people around the world, a force for empathy and world peace. I think it's going to be a very important and enjoyable part of the site.

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It might be tempting to assume that Facebook Questions is going to end up a cesspool of idiocy, harshness and partisan tyranny of the majority. But look at it this way: The most successful social software company in the history of the world hired the creator of the Firefox browser who worked for months to build an effective Q&A service and you think it's going to turn into a YouTube dumb-fest? That's not the outcome I'd bet my money on.

Facebook as Empathy Engine

Why do people listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio? Because they are idiots, right? Wrong, according to Grant Fisher, a grad student at St. Mary's University School of Law in Texas. Fisher offered a lengthy, intelligent, insightful and sympathetic answer to that question on Facebook today and his answer has been voted to the top of the page for that question. Fisher says people listen to Limbaugh because he has decades of experience researching politics, because he articulates to conservatives what (he believes) liberals are thinking and to liberals what (some) some conservatives are thinking and because many people believe he has a good track record of predicting what's going to happen in politics. And because he's entertaining.

That's a good, informative answer and one that has already changed my shallow thinking about Rush Limbaugh fans. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I would pass judgement on a huge group of people so thoughtlessly and callously, but I know I'm not alone. And neither is Fisher alone in offering a high-quality answer to a controversial question on Facebook.

There are going to be some very interesting questions and answers about peace in the Middle East, the Pro Life vs Pro Choice debate, drug policy, race, gender, the environment - you name it.

Because Facebook Questions are open to the whole world and because answers are voted on, we're going to learn a whole lot about other peoples' perspectives. Most of the Facebook newsfeed is filled with Farmville updates, baby pictures and misspelled drunken rambling. That will never bring me closer to the personal thoughts of a woman in Indonesia, a young boy in Egypt or a Candian Mounty who rides through the snow-covered hills on a horse all day, thinking about why on earth people listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio. But the public, voted-on Questions feature will.

Early users of the service are offering long, thoughtful answers. That will change in time, but answers that aren't helpful will not be voted up. Will obnoxious partisan answers be voted to the top in a tyranny of the majority? Even if such an answer were to be at the top, the next one below it would likely be more informative, empathetic and useful. There will be individual Questions that get nothing but terrible answers - but in aggregate, due to the scale of the humanity doing the voting, I think the Questions experience will be on balance strong.

I think we're going to see some really good discussions on Facebook. These conversations aren't going to be like YouTube. They aren't going to be like Wikipedia. They aren't going to be like Yahoo Answers, with millions of questions asked again and again, with no legacy knowledge retained and developed over time. They are going to be like Stack Overflow, and those are some really good conversations.

People will have their hearts and minds changed about controversial matters after using a well-designed social Q&A feature on a sprawling world-wide social network like Facebook. This will be a net win for the human experience. I don't think that's an exaggeration at all.

I think millions of people will end up spending hours browsing through Facebook Questions, learning things. I think it's going to be great. As soon as they fix it and make it work better.

Everyone should know at least one woman who can code her way out of a wet paper bag.

While women developers, computer programmers and hackers of all stripes are by far outnumbered by men in their field, they're hardly nonexistent. They blog, they tweet, and they do fantastic work to keep the Internet afloat. We've chosen to highlight 15 reader-recommended tech women here; if you know of others who should be on our radar specifically women with coding skills please do let us know about them in the comments section.

Some of the women on our list are Internet famous. Some, less so for now at least. Some have worked at big tech companies like Google and Apple and Adobe. Some are startup employees or fly solo. Some are hardcore hackers, some are web design-focused. We've even got a hardware geek on our list.

With a big hat-tip to all our friends on Twitter who recommended these women, here are 15 technically skilled women (in no particular order) to follow.

1. Pamela Fox

Pamela Fox is a graduate from the University of Southern California Computer Science Department, where she earned both her bachelor's and master's degrees with minors in 3D animation and linguistics. She lives in Sydney, Australia and works for Google as a Wave API Developer Advocate.

2. Jeri Ellsworth

This woman is a self-taught computer chip designer and expert electrical and mechanical engineer. She taught herself to program as a kid by reading Commodore 64 manuals. Ellsworth lives in Oregon, works as a consultant, and has a serious penchant for pinball machines, of which she owns 60 or so.

3. Emily Chang

Emily Chang lives in San Francisco and works at Ideacodes, a web dev/design shop she co-founded with husband Max Kiesler. She's a nationally recognized expert in user experience and interaction design. In addition to her Twitter account, we also recommend her personal blog.

4. Hilary Mason

This data-loving lady is a computer science professor with a thing for machine learning. Mason does research at Johnson & Wales University and also works as a scientist for Bit.ly. She occasionally posts code on her personal website.

5. Danese Cooper

Danese Cooper is the Wikimedia Foundation's CTO. She's also a huge open-source advocate; in fact, she's affectionately known as The Open Source Diva in certain circles. She worked for the Peace Corps, on the floor of a stock exchange, and even at a law firm before making the move to tech, where she began at Apple in 1991.

6. Leah Culver

Leah Culver is a software engineer specializing in web apps and Django development. In 2007, she co-founded Pownce, a social networking site, and sold it in late 2008. These days, she's a freelancer in San Francisco, where she cranks out applications and speaks on a number of topics relevant to web devs and designers. Culver is also an open-source advocate; we recommend checking out her blog.

7. Amanda Wixted

Amanda Wixted is a game programmer and an iPhone tech lead at Zynga. In fact, she's the one responsible for FarmVille for iPhone. Before she went to Zynga, she was a lead programmer for Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man for iPhone. And how's this for street cred: Each of the iPhone games Wixted has worked on has been in the Top 10 Free Apps in the App Store.

8. Sarah Allen

Sarah Allen has helped to develop such products as After Effects, Shockwave, Flash video and OpenLaszlo, a development framework for web apps. Formerly an employee at Apple, Adobe and Macromedia (pre-dotcom crash), she now acts as CTO of mobile startup Mightyverse, does some consulting on the side, and reaches out to women in the Ruby on Rails developer community. You can keep up with Allen's goings-on via her blog.

9. Jenn Lukas

Jenn Lukas says she loves three things in life: Coffee, kittens and XHTML. Judging from her website, we'd guess that unicorns are a close fourth. She's done web design projects for such big names as ESPN, Johns Hopkins University, United Healthcare, ABC Sports and Microsoft. Lukas lives in Philadelphia and works at Happy Cog, a web design and UX consultancy.

10. Nicole Sullivan

As a performance engineer and international evangelist for Yahoo, Nicole Sullivan does as much communication and research as she does actual app building. She's an engaging, readable, and regular blogger, and a CSS expert to boot. Sullivan lives in Menlo Park, California.

11. Laura Thomson

Laura Thomson is an Internet engineer, a self-applied job title we don't see thrown around too often. But given her position as a senior software engineer at Mozilla, makers of Firefox, we can't argue with the description. She's a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) advocate, and she wrote the book on PHP and MySQL web development. She's an Australian who lives in Maryland.

12. Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer was one of the first 20 engineers at Google; in fact, she was hired in the same month that Google got its first round of funding. Currently, she's the company's VP of search product and user experience, which means she basically green-lights every product that gets released to the general public, including Gmail, Google Earth, Google Maps and many other apps and features.

13. Sara Chipps

This software developer is one of the minds behind Girl Develop IT, a low-cost program for women who want to learn how to code. Chipps posts regularly on her personal blog, including code samples, and she's particularly skilled in .NET development. She lives in New Jersey and works on contract.

14. Alison Gianotto

Alison Gianotto has been blogging for 15 years, give or take that means she started out before blogging was called blogging. She co-authored a few books on PHP/MySQL, too. Gianotto is currently working in New York City as the director of information architecture at a creative agency.

15. Gina Trapani

Gina Trapani is a programmer, but she's perhaps best-known for founding Lifehacker, a blog that we at Mashable like to read, ourselves. She tapered off her Lifehacker leadership in January 2009 and recently wrote a thorough guide to Google Wave. She's currently developing ThinkTank, a web-based platform for crowdsourcing insights via social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Buzz. Trapani resides in San Diego, California.

BONUS: Women Developer Lists on Twitter

Fifteen geeky, nerdy, technically talented women not enough for you? Check out these Twitter Lists of women developers and engineers:

• Terri Oda's Technical Women
• Anita Borg Institute's Women to Follow
• Grace Hopper Celebration's 2010 Speakers
• Nicole Sullivan's Grrl Geeks
• Jolie O'Dell's Coding With Ovaries
• @DevChix's Dev Chix

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[img credit: johncarney, briansolis, 4nton, adactio, allaboutgeorge]

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Note: The field of data visualization is much broader than most people conceive of it, and exploring this breadth was one of our primary goals in compiling the projects described in "Beautiful Visualization." In the following excerpt, KickMap designer Eddie Jabbour explains the complexity he faced and the trade-offs he made while reinventing one of the most iconic maps in the world.

What follows is Eddie Jabbour's story, as told to Julie Steele:

Maps are one of the most basic data visualizations that we have; we've been making them for millennia. But we still haven't perfected them as a tool for understanding complex systems -- and with 26 lines and 468 stations across five boroughs, the New York City subway system certainly is complex. The KickMap is the result of my quest to design a more effective subway map, and ultimately to encourage increased ridership.

The need for a better tool

I was born in Queens and raised in Brooklyn. The first subway map I saw was my father's, circa 1960. It made a vivid impression on me because it intimidated me. I saw a gray New York with red, green, and black lines running all over it like a grid (see Figure 5-1), and hundreds of station names attached (1). It reminded me of a complex electrical diagram that I couldn't understand; it looked very "adult-serious" and even a little scary. I hoped I'd never have to deal with it.

London calling

In college I majored in design, and I spent half a year studying at the University of London. I was all on my own in a huge city I had never been to before. I quickly learned that the London Underground was the way to get around and that the "Tube map" was the key to understanding it. That map (which of course is the acclaimed Beck map seen in Figure 5-2) was brilliantly friendly: simple, bright, functionally colorful, designed to help users easily understand connections between lines, and physically tiny. Folded, it fit easily into my pocket, to be whipped out at a second's notice for immediate reference (which I did often!).

London was a medieval city, and therefore its street pattern is random. You cross a crooked intersection and the name of the street you're on changes. There's no numbered grid to provide a frame of reference (like in New York), and moving through the city can be a disorienting experience. The genius of the Beck map is that it makes order out of this random complexity, with the River Thames as the only visual (and geographic) point of reference to the aboveground world. And for that reason, the map's layout is iconic: when you think of London, you probably think of that Tube map. But even as a design student, I didn't think much about the form of it at the time -- it was just so simple and easy to use that travel felt effortless.

The combination of that effective little map and my unlimited monthly "Go As You Please" pass allowed me to use the Underground daily to explore London. I went anywhere and everywhere with ease and got the most that I could out of that great city. The Tube map imparted information so quickly and clearly that it became an indispensable tool and an integral part of my experience. It made me feel that London was "mine" after only a couple of weeks of living there. What a fantastic and empowering feeling!

In fact, I formed such a warm attachment to that valuable tool that at the end of my stay, just before I left the city, I went to my local Underground station and got a brand new Tube map, and when I returned home to New York I had it framed.

New York blues

When you come back to your own city after six months away, you look at everything with new eyes. When I got back to New York, I saw our subway map -- really saw it -- for the first time since I was a kid. And I thought, compared to London's, our subway map is poorly designed.

I remember thinking that the New York subway map was the opposite of the Beck map: huge in size, unruly in look, cluttered, and very nonintuitive. I realized that this map was in many ways a barrier to using our great subway system -- the opposite of the Tube map, whose simplicity was a key to understanding and using the Underground.

Even as a designer, however, if I ever thought of creating my own subway map I must have quickly dismissed the idea. This was in the late 1970s, and I'm not a T-square kind of guy. The amount of discipline and mechanical time it would have required for anyone but an experienced draftsman to undertake such an endeavor was unthinkable in that precomputer era.

The map's deficiencies left my mind as I pursued my design career. Like most New Yorkers, I used the subway map rarely and never carried it. This was in part because of its size: it was as large as a foldout road map. If I needed the map's information to get to a new location, I would tear out the relevant six-inch square portion from a free map in the station and throw the rest of it in the trash! I often saw tourists struggling with the physical map and felt bad for them, remembering my great experience as a student in London.

Better tools allow for better tools

Now, fast-forward to one night years later when I was taking an out-of-town client to dinner at a downtown restaurant. As we waited for the train, he confided to me that New York's subway intimidated him. I was surprised: the crime and grime of the 1970s-1990s were virtually gone from the system, and I was proud of our shiny new air-conditioned cars and clean stations. But in our conversation on the way downtown, I realized that his fear lay in not being able to decipher the complexity of the system: all the lines and connections. That's when I realized that the problem for him, too, was the map. My client was very well traveled and urbane; if he found the system intimidating, then there really was something wrong with the communicator of that system -- the map.

At that moment the subway map re-entered my consciousness, and it hasn't left since. It was 2002. I had my own design agency and my own staff, each of us with our own computer loaded with a copy of the greatest and most elegant graphic design tool available. I realized that now, just one person using a graphic design program like Adobe Illustrator had the power to create his own subway map! And I challenged myself to do something about the map.

Size is only one factor

When I decided to try making a new map as a weekend project (ha!), the first thing I considered was the size. Since the New York City subway system has about twice as many stations as London's, I decided to give myself twice as much space as the Tube map takes. (Even doubling the size of the Tube map, the result was about one-fifth the size of the existing New York subway map.)

First, I took a paper version of the official Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) map (a version of which is shown in Figure 5-3), cut it up with scissors, and put it back together in a more efficient way (literally with Scotch tape), just to see the possibilities. I was encouraged as I managed to reduce the area by more then half. Gone were the 56 bus pop-up boxes and other nonsubway information! Then came the laborious task of creating an actual map. I entered all the station names and lines into an Illustrator document, and in two months, voil! I had my very own smaller map! I folded it and easily put it in my wallet, and I carried it around and showed it to all my friends. They liked its size, but of course nobody wanted to actually use it, because it still had many of the major design issues that made the MTA map difficult to use.

It was one thing to reduce the size, but another thing to realize that the way the data was presented was not the best way to present it. So I asked myself: how would I present all this data?

To answer this question, I had to ask a few more:

• What maps came before this map?
• Were there any previous conceptions that were discarded but perhaps still relevant?
• What was it about New York City and its subway that historically made it so difficult to map clearly and efficiently?

Looking back to look forward

I did a research dive, and I started buying old transit maps on eBay. I studied subway maps, New York City street maps, and transit maps from all over the world that I had collected on my travels. I filtered through all the design approaches and eclectically took as much as I could from ideas that had already been implemented (some brilliantly).

Of course, in addition to the map designed by George Salomon that had been my father's subway map, I studied carefully the map designed by Massimo Vignelli (see Figure 5-4), which the MTA used from 1972 until 1979, when it was replaced by the Tauranac-Hertz MTA map (which, 30 years later, still prevails). Vignelli's map appealed to me immediately because, although big, it took obvious inspiration from Beck's Tube map, with its 90- and 45-degree angles, explicit station connections, and the use of color to denote individual lines. There were also some smart aspects of the current MTA map that I wanted to keep, despite finding it on the whole unwieldy because there is so much information crammed onto it. In addition, I borrowed liberally from other past efforts that had been discarded or forgotten.

New York's unique complexity

As I conducted my research, I started to realize that New York City had its own unique set of challenges that made its subway system impossible to accurately and clearly map using just a diagrammatic method, as other cities like London, Paris, and Tokyo had done. It was also clear that a pure topographic mapping approach wouldn't work, either; New York's unique geography and its gridiron street system both have an impact on mapping its subway system.

There are four significant and conflicting aspects of the New York City subway system that make it impossible to successfully map with either a strict diagrammatic or topographic format:

• The narrow geography of the principal thoroughfare, Manhattan Island, which has 17 separate subway lines running up and down Midtown alone in a width of six city blocks.
• The "cut and cover" method used to construct subway tunnels and elevated lines that follow the city's gridiron street patterns. Because New York City's subway generally follows its gridded street routes, there is a strong psychological link between the subway and the aboveground topography that is not found in a medieval city like London.
• The unique system of many of the subway lines running local, then express, then local again along their routes.
• Its formative history, with the current system evolving from three separate and competing subway systems (the IRT, BMT, and IND) that were poorly coordinated to work as a whole system. (The chaotic tangle of these three competing routes, as they meander and fight their way through the dense street plans of lower Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn, and Long Island City, is the most difficult part of the system to map clearly and accurately.)

The KickMap, shown in Figure 5-5, is based on a combination of ideas I selectively borrowed from many earlier maps (some dating back to the 19th century) and my own innovations. I believe that this unique combination makes my map easier to use than most of the preceding efforts. In the following sections, I'll discuss my inspirations and innovations in more detail.

Geography is about relationships

Most of the boroughs -- Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and to some extent, the Bronx -- already have a grid on top of the subway system because of the way the streets were planned. This makes the aboveground geography not only an intuitive starting point, but also an integral part of the user's experience. Knowing your location -- take 42nd Street and 7th Avenue as an example -- places you in the grid, which makes it easy to judge distances and locations. This is why the numerous geographical errors that appear in New York City subway maps (like the Vignelli map infamously placing the 50th Street and Broadway stop west of 8th Avenue instead of east) are so glaring and easy to spot.

One of the issues I have with some previous versions of the New York subway map is that I have a hard time believing that the designers ever actually rode the subway as an integral part of their lives in the city. There's a disconnect between many of the decisions they made and the reality of the subway. As part of my design process, I rode the lines and exited the stations at every major intersection with which I was unfamiliar. There is a strong relationship in New York between the aboveground and the belowground, and since subway riders don't cease to exist when they leave the subway, it's important for the map to express this relationship as clearly as possible. Otherwise, the result is an uncomfortable feeling of disorientation.

Include the essentials

Consider the L line in Brooklyn. As a passenger on the train, you're jostled around as you travel and you don't really notice that the line is curving or turning corners along major streets and intersections. But when you get out at the Graham Avenue station, for instance, it's obvious that Metropolitan Avenue and Bushwick Avenue are two major thoroughfares that intersect each other at a right angle. Why wouldn't that show up on the map? If you didn't know how the streets intersected and you just saw a sign for one or the other as you came out of the subway, it would be very difficult to figure out what was going on.

On the Vignelli map, this portion of the L is depicted as a straight line (see Figure 5-6[a]). The Hertz map (Figure 5-6[c]) shows both Metropolitan and Bushwick Avenues, but the line resembles noth