Information Architecture, User Experience & Other Obsessions
I’ve been pondering lately how complex something can be with only a few facets of adjustment. How very simple choices or factors can render near-infinite sophistication. And then I see this:
Wired News: Humans Aren’t So Complicated
A refined map of the human genome shows that humans have even fewer genes than previously thought — less than 25,000, about the same as a mustard green.
Everybody needs to read this.
NYTimes Magazine article on Bush’s fanaticism
”Just in the past few months,” Bartlett said, ”I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.” Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush’s governance, went on to say: ”This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they’re extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he’s just like them. . . .
And my favorite line…
Faith heals the heart and the spirit, but it doesn’t do much for analytical skills.
If you’ve ever wondered why companies and other organizations and communities end up with their own jargon, take a look here:
See this article at CNN…
Deaf children thrown together in a school in Nicaragua without any type of formal instruction invented their own sign language — a sophisticated system that has evolved and grown, researchers reported on Friday.
I think this throws a lot of light on how powerfully gathered humans can come to shared understandings with some kind of language, even if they have to invent it themselves.
10/10/86
I went back to this recently, to get my head back in the right groove when working out how to model complex relationship structures. It still makes me gasp.
RUDI: Bookshelf: Classics: Christopher Alexander: A city is not a tree part 1
Here’s how it ends:
For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot and must not be a tree. The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. In such a receptacle life will be cut to pieces. If we make cities which are trees, they will cut our life within to pieces.
At Vanguard, we’re trying to figure out the best ways to visually model the incredibly complex webs of relationships between financial institutions, people, and the various ways the money is organized. I wish we could do something along these lines (see below) but I doubt anything like this is mature enough for us to use at this point… Currently all the CRM applications available model this synaptic, organic chaos of connections in a flat hierarchy, like the folding drop-down lists in Windows Explorer (not the file browser in Windows). It’s barely adequate, and possibly even detrimental, because it can trick you into thinking you’re seeing everything important when something essential might be two or three levels down and you might miss it.
Vizster: Visualizing Online Social Networks
Vizster is an interactive visualization tool for online social networks, allowing exploration of the community structure of social networking services such as friendster.com [4], tribe.net [12], and orkut [10]. Such services provide means by which users can publicly articulate their mutual “friendship” in the form of friendship links, forming an undirected graph in which users are the nodes and friendship links are the edges.
Jimmy Carter: ‘The War has Been Unnecessary’
Couric: But turning Iraq into a democracy is a good thing to you?
Carter: I think that’s a very admirable thing, sure. You could list 50 countries in the world that don’t have democracies, and it would be better if they had all democracies. But to attack a country almost unilaterally and waste away the almost universal global support and friendship and alliances that we had after the tragedy of 9/11 is what has been done.
HARPER: “In your experience of the world, how do people change?”
MORMON MOTHER: “Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your body tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled, and torn, It’s up to you to do the stitching.”
HARPER: “And then get up. And walk around.”
MORMON MOTHER: “Just mangled guts pretending.”
HARPER: “That’s how people change.”
(Angels in America: Perestroika, by Tony Kushner.)
CNN.com – Ivan makesÝlandfallÝin U.S. – Sep 16, 2004
After a deadly rampage across the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, one of the fiercest Atlantic storms on record made landfall near the resort town of Gulf Shores, Alabama, at 1:50 a.m. (2:50 a.m. ET) on Thursday.
My mom and stepdad live in Gulf Shores. They’re presumably ok in a shelter 18 miles north of there. Still, cross some fingers?
Yahoo! News – Philly Considers Wireless Internet for All
Wow… maybe I moved here just in time?
Once again I find I’ve been remiss in keeping up with by cyberspace um… presence.
So nearly a year late, I’ve updated my little bio page at IAwiki: AndrewHinton
It’s odd, how bits of us end up all over the web, like flakes of skin or eyelashes. Imagine if every bit of you that you left physically in the world could be googled?
And… on a more personal note (which I almost never have in this blog…just seems too public) a year ago today my marriage broke. Or, at least, it finally snapped. Maybe this is why I’ve been avoiding all the previous residue of my net presence? Too much of a reminder of where I was? It’s not helping, really… it still feels like it happened yesterday.
I’ve been wanting to put up a wiki at my new place of employment, for purposes of tracking projects and sharing information between project teams about what’s being done, learned, archived, etc. But it would take months of discussion and getting approval if I did it the right way. I wonder what would happen if I just snuck one onto my desktop Mac?
Anyway, I ran across this site (many of my colleagues likely know about it already but I’m just recently getting my head back into the larger IA-related sphere) which is basically a blog for a company called SocialText. Here’s an article on wiki’s in corporations.
Socialtext — Enterprise Social Software
Like all great horizontal productivity applications, Wikis and Weblogs are disruptive technologies that emerge in the enterprise from the bottom-up. Louderback goes on to share how similar this is to his experience at Chase during PC adoption, the same could be said for spreadsheets and local area networks.
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BTW I also tweet at @inkblurt.
