Flashback: Duke Nukem 3D Review

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For reasons too irrelevant to go into here, I ended up on an Amazon page for the 1999 Mac port of Duke Nukem 3D (now only $84.99; nostalgia is costly). And some of the language of the review looked familiar... holy crap, that was me, 15 years ago.

Sure, it's crude. Sure, it could be called sexist, and sure, a good part of it seems designed by socially backward fourteen-year-old boys. Still, once you get past a few distasteful points (such as Duke's steroid-induced buffness), Duke Nukem 3D offers a fast-paced respite from the DOOM-and-gloom tone of most first-person shooters on the market. It's hard to hold a grudge against someone who grumbles, "It's time to kick ass and chew gum, and I'm all out of gum."
Is there a plot? Not really - there's just a premise, and one so thin that it might not even be pitchable to a Hollywood producer. Seems a bunch of aliens have descended on Earth to "steal our chicks," as Duke so delicately puts it. It's up to you, as Duke, to save the day by, basically, shooting everything that moves and a few things that don't.

Anyone familiar with this genre of games will be instantly at home. In between killing aliens, you have to collect security cards (think keys from DOOM), which allow you access to various parts of a level. You finish a level by making it to the Self-Destruct button (how you can win by blowing yourself up is beyond us, but hey, Duke works in mysterious ways). There are some puzzle elements to each level, but none too tough for one who's made it through Marathon.

Speaking of Marathon: inevitably, comparisons will be made. Build, the graphics engine behind Duke Nukem 3D, is still a "2 1/2-D" construct - not truly 3D. However, it does allow more 3D-like effects than the Marathon engine, such as crouching, jumping, ramps, and multistory buildings. There's even a submarine you can board, and a subway car. Also, Duke's world is far more interactive than Marathon's. Phones have dial tones, vases shatter in a cross-fire, windows break, and when you come across a pool table you can roll the balls around.

Still, there are some areas in which the Marathon series retains an edge. Swimming and flying in Duke Nukem 3D is downright boring: You move up or down, and stay in one place without bobbing or sinking. There's also no mystery at all in Duke Nukem 3D. Shoot, watch the gore, run on. The ingenuity of some levels, and some honestly funny parts (besides the alien on the toilet, I mean) do entice you to play on, but there's little to go back to and try to understand. Then again, nobody's selling this game as a replacement for graduate studies. And, make no mistake, Duke is fun.

MacSoft and Lion are to be congratulated for the quality of this port from the PC world. Installation was a breeze, and Mac interface conventions (such as selecting menu items with the mouse, dialog boxes, and menu bars) are all there. But wait - there's more: The Mac version of Duke Nukem 3D offers more value and more features than the PC version did. You get levels that PC users had to purchase separately as the Plutonium Pack, including a great level set in a fast-food joint. Also, "MacDuke" takes advantage of some of the Mac's multimedia features, allowing you to switch screen resolutions on the fly (I know you can already do that, but PC users can't) and record taunts in your own voice for multiplayer games. One tech tip: If you find that the game suffers from occasional momentary freezes, try turning off the Music option - the freezes are most likely caused by the computer accessing the CD-ROM music tracks.

Speaking of multiplayer games: Duke Nukem 3D's Dukematch features are impressive. Not only can you play over a local network, you can play against one to seven enemies over IPX, AppleTalk, or TCP/IP. Head-to-head play over the Internet required only getting a competitor's IP address and typing it in to a dialog box. With a 28.8kbps modem, play was smooth and almost as good as over a local network. Duke Nukem 3D is even cross-platform networkable, so you can go kick some PC user's behind, whether locally, or across the world. One warning: unlike Marathon, Duke Nukem 3D won't send a map to all the players, so if you plan to use a third-party map, you'll have to email it to all your friends (the good news is that Duke map files work on both platforms with no modifications necessary and there are a ton of gamer-made maps available on the Web).

For parents, there's a password-protected "Parental Lock" option (in the Options menu, or course). Once you set this lock, your kids will be protected from some of the more explicit violence and "adult themes" in Duke Nukem 3D. Then they will be free to run around and shoot things to their little hearts' delight.

Speed was excellent (16-28 frames per second on a 800-x-600-pixel resolution) on a Power Mac 7600/120. On a 68040-based Mac, you'll need to reduce screen size and detail, but the game is still playable. Overall, the Mac version of Duke Nukem 3D is an impressive achievement technically, and, though you might feel guilty enjoying it so much, you probably will. - D. D. Turner

Good News: Fast action game with a specific sense of humor. Great weapon variety. Good network play. Excellent port.

Bad News: Possibly offensive sense of humor. Chunky graphics. Must have CD in drive to play.

Rating:3/4

©1999 MacAddict -- From MacAddict -- Subscribe now!

Latest Article on Boxes and Arrows

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Thanks to the great work of Christina Wodtke and Cinnamon Melcher to help me sort out some thoughts that have come up in the last year of trying to talk UX with startups in the SF Bay Area.

This article was conceived to be the first in a series of case studies, in the hope that we could spark lively discussions towards discovering new best practices in the discipline. Please comment on the article and contact Boxes and Arrows if you'd like to write up an experience of your own.

And reviews are in!

"...totally had the ring of truth" – Erika Hall

"Great post" – Eduardo Fernandez

"I am seeing the same patterns" – Hilary Cinis

"That is a great read" – Francis Rowland

"An interesting read" – Jim Housden

"Really interesting" – Entropiixd

"I'm loving this article" – Brent Martin

"A nice post" – Erin Jo Richey

"It is an article that exists" – me

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The Amazons

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One of the seminal (and hey, clean up after yourself!) bands out of the largely wishful Punk Renaissance in San Francisco, The Amazons were fronted by an old friend, mentor manqué, and not-at-all role model before he moved to New York City and got a real job to support his wonderful family while sneaking in lessons from Richard Hell on the side. True story.

From their rare, solo CD copy:

"Careening wildly from the heart of SF's Crocker-Amazon district, The Amazons emerge from a rolling miasma of blood, sweat, and carpet fibers to bring you this throbbing assortment of thrash-and-burn pop goodies. Characterized as a 'beautiful expression of love among men' by late Beat icon Allen Ginsberg, this Kingston Trio of rage augments its Mennonite approach to the idiom with the gusto of a young bull manatee in full rut, blending liberal doses of Joycean imagery, Velvet Underground-tempered angst, and Aolian cadences painstakingly cribbed from the Bulgarian Women's Chorus.

The savory gazpacho bubbling up from these tracks is a concentrated extract of The Amazons themselves. Todd Barker's local musical odyssey began with seminal deconstructivists The Whitefronts; Jason Brownell tempered his chops as a card-carrying member of Milwaukee's pop underground; and Matthew Rothenberg has helmed such genre-bending outfits as The Ho Hos, Three Guys Called Jesus, and Noise 292. But enough commentary: The evidence is now in your hands. Sit back, relax, and let The Amazons apply a vise grip to your aesthetic inseam."

 

The Baffling "Gmail Wiggle" Baffles

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I do not understand the design thinking behind engineering in this action. It doesn't help the user discover that there's more to the "More", while the motion distracts the eye and moves other potential targets. Not to mention that it's inconsistent: sometimes the wiggle happens, sometimes it doesn't, and it's not clear why it should happen when the user hovers over one mailbox and not another. (Clarification: it may be difficult to see in this low-res version, but before the wiggle, the "More" text is partially obscured from below, though still readable, while the wiggle reveals the entire word, but nothing below it.)

Film Festival: "Hollywood to NYC: Drop Dead!"

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HollywoodtoNYC.png

1975 was long before Times Square had a Gap, long before the mayor had to worry about citizens eating themselves to death, long before "broken windows", long before 9/11. It was ages ago, and NYC was a lost cause. I don't know if you're old enough to remember that city and what it was.

New York was facing bankruptcy, crime was rampant, the Federal government was threatening not to supply basic support. President Ford may never have actually said "Drop dead", but Mayor Beame accused Ford of “writing off New York City in one speech”. Everyone could taste the doom in the air, feel under their feet the slick razor blade they were all sliding down, with no end in sight.

And Hollywood loved it.

Remember that Los Angeles and New York long had a special, and not always friendly, relationship. LA's little-sibling 213 area code, after New York's original-flavor 212. The whole Dodgers thing. Woody Allen.

And what's a better cinematic backdrop than a major city fallen?

It was in this context that Hollywood rolled out movie after movie about urban decay, ranging from the "torn from the headlines" pseudo-realism of Serpico, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and Fort Apache, The Bronx, to the daily mythology of what goes on in the dark of The Warriors, to the "logical conclusion" milieu of Escape from New York. There's also an interesting documentary titled "Ford to NYC: Drop Dead" on the rise of punk, disco, and hip-hop, all as a response to the end of the world (or at least the city).

Sure, other cities were also falling apart, from Detroit to New Haven to Chicago (where parts of Streets of Fire) were shot, and Hollywood made generic "urban" horrors, such as C.H.U.D. – but it was always NYC that was the ur-urban, the model of the modern major disaster.

This film festival reviews these major visions of the failure of the real Gotham City, the first metropolis of the USA. I don't know if you kids remember New York City. It used to be great. it used to have no future.

More on "Apple Hates Podcasts"

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As always, I'll preface this by noting the irony that the very term "podcast" arose from Apple products and technology. 

No screenshots for this one, just a frustrating bug report. (Side note: Does anyone know how to report iOS app bugs to Apple?)

Use case: I want to create a playlist of podcasts in iTunes. I pick and choose from various podcasts, and various (not just the most current) episodes. I arrange them in a particular order, like a mix tape, in the iTunes playlist. I select that playlist to sync to the iOS Podcasts app. 

As I've documented in the past, this inevitably results in the iOS Podcasts app showing my playlist either in a random order or a reversed order. Both of which completely defeat the purpose of my (often time-consuming, as iTunes hangs when accessing the Podcasts app) efforts. 

Today, after multiple tries, and deleting the playlist and creating a new one, and syncing only when the Podcasts app was killed on my iPhone, it appeared to be in the order I wanted. Success! Wait, success? 

After playing the top episode in the list, Podcasts queued up not the second episode I'd placed in the playlist, but some random one. When I looked at the Podcast app, all seemed to be in the order I'd wanted; did it just skip?  

Now, here's the weird bug. I tapped on one episode in the Podcasts app playlist screen – and a different one showed up. iTunes had loaded my playlist in reverse order again, but the Podcast app was displaying the apps in my preferred order, which was a lie. 

A friend pointed out on Twitter that Apple has no interest in putting any effort into supporting podcasts, as they're hard to monetize. I can't speak to that directly, but circumstantial evidence keeps piling up. These are such stupid bugs and such difficult to overlook use cases. Come on, Apple. If it's not intentional, this is amateur hour. 

Fewer (and More) than 500 Words

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Thanks so much for reading as I forced out a daily practice of writing exactly 500 words a day for the month of September. I'll be posting less frequently but in more depth from now own, after maybe a few days of recovery. 

If you feel the need to see a bit more (and adapted) writing, please go see my posts on Medium. And (hint, hint), hitting the Recommend button helps immeasurably.

500 Words, Day 28: The End

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Endings are rarely easy.

There's the problem of ending narratives, in the Lost/Seinfeld/Breaking Bad (which I still maintain would be better as a death dream, a la Life on Mars) sense. There's the problem of ending an essay, of making it tie up so perfectly the thread first spun in its opening line. There's the problem of knowing when your work is done, which it never is. There's the problem of ending relationships, whether they end by moving, or a breakup, or death, or just drifting apart.

There's also the problem of stopping. By that I mean: stopping is not the same as ending, but we so often try to pretend it is.

"Suddenly, everyone was run over by a truck."

"Eh, the engineers thought it was a cool feature. Ship it."

"I can't run/pedal/fight any more."

"You stopped calling."

Stopping is a cessation of effort. No more pain, or burden of decision. An end run around the problem of the Hurricane Theory. Stopping (even suicide) is not ending, but the opposite; making an ending requires a great deal of work and the terrible decisions of closing off all other potentials. In that, it shares much with the problem of starting.

Stopping sure is easier. It's definitely why so many people just leave it to others to assume that a lack of contact equals a decision (whether this is in the context of job interviews or dating). It's also easy, in this case, to forget that what you're doing it outsourcing the work to the other person involved, with all the attached ethical implications.

Today is the last day of September, and as such it is the last day of the 500 Words of September challenge. So after posting this I will stop the practice of writing and posting 500-word essays (to categorize them charitably). It doesn't mean it all ended, or wrapped up to any significance, any more than getting a terminal degree did, and it doesn't mean the end of having and expressing opinions. Or the end of trying to bend other peoples' ears about them. I have learned lessons. I've been reminded of old body and brain habits that I'd not have had without participating in this practice.

Will I look forward to waking up tomorrow, knowing I won't have to stress about finding a topic, about making microdecisions around every word chosen (good choices are rarely noticed, while poor ones stand out like Comic Sans), about having to think of extended comma-connected phrases to pad out the day's entry? You bet. It's the relief one feels when dropping a class. Less will be asked of you.

But that's kind of sad. It's the kind of sad when a parent says to a child, "We expected more of you." I'd do anything to not hear that. So I'll keep trying to think about how to end it all well. It's not easy. At all.

And that is the last 500 words.

500 Words, Day 27

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As the 500 Words of September challenge winds down, I thought I'd compile a list of tricks that, over the years, have helped me get thoughts down on paper. Many of these are of a "trick yourself" nature; make of that what you will. Also, please note that I found these to work at different times of my life, under different circumstances, and you are not me, so as always, your mileage may vary.

-- Sit in fresh air. Though the Humanities library at my college boasted probably the best collection of resources for my undergraduate thesis work, it was one of those modern, hermetically sealed buildings with recirculated air that never quite felt fresher than the average sophomore in the carrel next to you. So I hauled approximately 85 pounds of books to a lower level in the Architecture library, found a carrel in the downstairs stacks, and opened the windows. Nobody bothered me, but I could breathe and my head felt clearer.

-- Take naps. This may be great or this may be disastrous; this is perhaps the most personal one. This was also something I found during the undergrad thesis process, though I've used it later in life too, when working on 40-60 page papers. If you've been plugging away at a huge project, and your head starts becoming overwhelmed with eddies of possibilities and options and muddle, try putting your head down. If you practice this enough, you may find that you'll zone out for only a few minutes, but wake with the thing you were stuck on suddenly clear in your head. It's like a reboot for your brain. Make sure to clear away your papers; drool smears ink. (On a large scale, the iOS app Pzizz can help; a grad school classmate introduced it to me and it helped me survive those years.)

-- Walk around. Nilofer Merchant and Susan Orlean can fill you in all about the physiological advantages of pedeconferencing or walking desks, but the easier change is to just take a break every five to 15 minutes, or whenever you hit a knotty problem. You'll be surprised at how many things get solved when you're not focusing on them.

-- Prioritize, and then avoid the top priority ("Benign Neglect"). You know how I got my taxes done? I had a particularly tough piece of writing coming due. Compared to that, my taxes were such a lower cognitive and emotional load. Then I found something I less wanted to face and started writing.

-- Read something by a good but not amazing writer. We all get inspired by good prose, and we all unconsciously emulate the last writer we've read. But reading something that's so good that you can't conceive of how to match it (remember, we rarely, if ever, see the crappy draft versions), you may just throw your hands up and go play Cookie Clicker.

I realize most of this writing advice involves avoiding writing. But you're doing that already.

And that's 500 words.

500 Words, Day 26

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Yesterday I listed some of my own failures of this year, and why I was sharing them: to encourage others to help counter the social-media atmosphere that selects for bragging and pseudo-bragging, which can make your own failures seem rare and shameful, rather than learning experiences. Today I'll talk about some of the specific things the delineated fails taught me about the UX job search process.

1. It's an uncomfortable thing to realize and to say, but the job search process is like dating, in so many sad and awkward ways. (Note: Do NOT share this observation in an actual job interview. It just ramps up the awkward.) Dating sites can run any number of sophisticated algorithms and, as Jaron Lanier points out, we can try to believe them, but as dating comes down to the person and interactions, so is the job search about them wanting or not wanting to hire the person. Of course the person has to meet some minimal requirements in skills and competence, but that's not the closer. Work on being a mensch, and on listening, and on enthusiasm. If you can't be genuine, learn to fake it.

2. This "person, not skills/resume/+3 Intelligence" fact puts all of us into double bind situations. Double binds are horribly distressing scenarios where someone is being given conflicting or contradictory demands: a lover saying "hold me, but don't touch me", or a cat showing both its fuzzy belly and claws. We see little but listings for unicorn designers who have MOMA-level graphic design, a mastery of all UX research methods, and have built our own microkernels from scratch (see github). The same about expressing the willingness to learn. The portfolio and resume are all; they are nothing. There's no way I know to avoid this sword of Damocles, but you can try to ignore it: Have the best work to show, but don't think it speaks for you as a person.

3. So many jobs come from stupid networking. I resisted this for so long because I had this idea (from my years of journalism) that The Work is All, and I still suck at it. The other night I spoke with a twentysomething who has only an internship under her belt, but she's received twice as many job offers in the last six months than I've had interviews. And she told me she never applies to jobs she sees listed online: "I don't have the work to show". Her secret? She goes to conferences and is wicked charming. I don't have tips for how to do this well, and how not to be blatant. I'd love to hear some.

4. If your interviewer starts saying how he or she doesn't like something of yours, don't let the jolt of adrenalin shake you. One interview went pear-shaped because of this. I've since realized that if an interviewer is "disliking", they need to learn critique language from Chuck Jones.

And that's 500 words.

500 Words, Day 25

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A day after Ed at Gin&Tacos wrote about social media disproportionately being a place people brag, by intent or by accident, Katie Lane published "The Positive Power of Negativity", in which she makes the case that people need to talk more often, and publicly, about failure. ("We failed fast and got another $10 million in funding" doesn't count.)

Social media definitely encourages this behavior, or selects for it. People prefer to share happy news, and what doesn't get retweeted or liked gets pushed down; people may even "defriend" or "unfollow" (horrible neologisms of the social age) a negative poster. It's like dating or job interviews, where you can't say anything that's not glowing.

This is, in part, why I almost never go on Facebook. As at least one study has shown, such forced social comparison is likely to produce an envy response (PDF). I don't want that – I want my friends and associates to succeed big and have wonderful lives. So I withdrew.

Therefore, partly as a public service, and perhaps to start a collective trend, here are some big failures of my year so far:

  • 2013 started out a bit rough, with two accelerators, Matter.vc and The Foundry at CITRIS, turning down proposals for building a lab that'd bring together tech-challenged journalists and coders to jumpstart data-driven journalism projects. They asked how it would "scale", meaning spin off revenue generators.
  • Knight Stanford Fellowship: This one was particularly hard. It was the second time I made it to the final interview round, and this time I had what I thought was a particularly viable and apt project for the year of fellowship. (I have ideas why they didn't bite, but that's better discussed privately.)
  • Nieman-Berkman Fellowship: Again, I got great support for my proposed course of study, but no brass ring.
  • Mozilla: I was so psyched. They do great work, they're great people, and work for the public good. And I'd had I relevant experience around mobile internet usage in developing countries during my visiting researcher position at HIIT. There were two Interaction Designer listings that appeared on one day (marketplace, mobile OS) and I applied for both, so I admit I was never quite clear which job the phone screens were for and was too embarrassed to ask (a "Mulva" scenario).
  • OpenIDEO: This was an odd case, as one day an email appeared thanking me for my application. I had to dig in my Sent email folder to realize that I'd filled out an online application six weeks prior. Still, it was nice to let me know; many companies don't do that.
  • Internships: Well, I'm a "real person" now, what with a graduate degree and everything. 

There are others, of course; perhaps as a hangover from my freelance writing days, I try never to pass over any opportunity.

Granted, I've become better at presenting myself, and learned about my professional goals, but still, it's never easy. What have you learned?

And that's 500 words.

 

500 Words, Day 24

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I've had two major careers: writing and UX. I'm constantly amazed at how many important components, processes, and motives of these two disciplines dovetail. Yet I'm also amazed at how one is seen as a solitary pursuit – the writer in his clean well-lighted room or that room of her own – while UX is considered a team sport, with creativity as a byproduct of collaboration only. It's true, but it's not true. At least not the way most people think about it.

(This is not to discount Leah Buley's "UX Team of One" movement; I'm a big fan of her and her presentation. Though I have to admit I've not yet gotten to reading her book; it's focused on UX professionals within a corporate environment, which is not something I've ever done.)

Of course writers now and, well, always have invested in the Romantic notion of the lone writer, wrestling with language and worlds and ideas much, much greater than can be pinned to a page. I went through an MFA program. There, demonstrating how tortured you were was a competitive sport. And ultimately, yes, it's true that it's one person 99% of the time. And it's hard.

So, the process of creative writing. It looks like this:

brookhaven.png

No, wait, that's a bubble chamber at Brookhaven National Laboratory. But it's not far off: generate ideas, get them down, even if they lead to odd places or dead (for now) ends.

But the writing process doesn't end there. Writers also seek critique, share, force unsuspecting strangers into corners to make them listen to the nth revision of their latest pantoum. Joyce had Beckett read his manuscripts; Kafka and Max Brod read their drafts in bars to the laugher of friends. Journalists and most novelists never publish without multiple, painful trips through the editorial process, which often involves killing the phrase or character or flourish you most cherish.

So the more full process of writing looks like:

laseau_funnel.jpg

No, wait, that's Laseau's funnel, which I learned about from Bill Buxton's great book about the UX process, Sketching User Experiences. Laseau's (and Buxton's) point is that there are two forces operating on the design process: "The expanding funnel represents the generation of the possible opportunities... [t]he converging one represents the making of the choices from among these options, and the gradual convergence onto the final design." Buxton adds that this means "we must generate and discard much more than we keep", which, he notes, is Pugh's controlled convergence. So, wait, the design process is generation of ideas and then... editing them down?

That sounds a lot like what writers do. Piles of notebooks with jotted ideas, sketches, obsessive goings over of details, sweeping goals for the final results (after all, what novel isn't perfect in its initial jolt of inspiration?), a heartbreaking revising process based on feedback from experts and readers -- I mean, users.

I will soon offer my own line of black berets for UX practitioners.

And that's 500 words.

500 Words, Day 23

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Recently someone I don't know personally but follow for some reason on Twitter posted something like, "We know better than to work for equity, but we keep falling for it." (Context: she was referring to some form of tech work, not sweat-inducing labor, and "equity" here refers to a possible big payout if a startup gets funded.) I replied that I've never been asked to work for equity, aside from some postings to my graduate department's email list from random MBA students – but I have been asked to work for free. And, in fact, working for free seems to be mandatory in the UX/design world. We have to prove that we are driven enough to build passion projects or contribute to other people's successes (such as Medium), in order to reach a point where a job will be offered to us. Has the UX/design world become a gift economy, or a false gift economy?Qui bono?

A gift economy is a type of social system in which people give each other items of value without any expectation, or contract for, reciprocation. In some societies it can be tied to property rights, or shaming peers, or other reasons. You might be more familiar with charitable donations, blood banks, or copyleft. Or Burning Man. But the idea is that everyone involved buys in, plays by the same rules, and, ideally, needs are met for everyone. Sort of a "what goes around, comes around"

But professionally, some of us seem to be living, to some degree, in an asymmetric gift economy, one where the nature of the gift contains a dram of poison.

Georges Bataille, in his book La Part maudite, wrote about his theory of a "general economy". He felt that gift-giving was not only a constructor of society but also of every possibly form of an economy. This is not as good a thing as it sounds. He noted that gifts as economy, or within an economy, place the dyadic participants in an combative but unequal position, enforcing a Hegelian master-and-slave relationship.

But where Bataille saw the supplicant (a beggar, for example) having to acknowledge his or her subservient position, in the "get a job by doing a job" economy, the poles have reversed and the water of life flows uphill. The givers are supplicants to those who hold some power, and the supplicants outnumber the powerful 20 to one, meaning that giving becomes a competitive sport (unrelated note: please "Recommend" this post on Medium!) while reciprocation is a seller's market. To mix economic metaphors.

And sure: hackathons can be fun, you can make good "contacts" there, you may build skills (that you may or may not use professionally), design challenges can produce items to go into your portfolio... but is this the most efficient way of finding meaningful work, or just another iteration of the Old Boy Network, where it's all about whom you know, and how you know them?

And that's 500 words.

A Data-Driven Journalism Reading List

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This arose from an attempt to augment the readings in the syllabus for the Knight Center online course in data-driven journalism. Some other students helped me with suggestions and revisions. Thanks and follow #datajmooc! 

Data Visualization

Data Journalism

Journalism in General

  • Wheelan, Charles. "Naked Statistics"
  • Goldacre, Ben. "Bad Science"
  • Cohen, Sarah. "Numbers in the Newsroom"
  • Cohm Victor. "News and Numbers" Iowa State University Press, Ames. 1989.
    Huff, Darrell, "How to Lie with Statistics" W. W. Norton & Company, New York. 1954 (renewed 1984)
  • Paulos, John Allen. "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences" Vintage Books, New York. 1990.
  • Paulos, John Allen. "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper" Anchor Books, New York. 1995. (Also, check out the tape from Paulos keynote address at NICAR 2002 in Philadelphia)

Data Visualization Tools

  • Data wrapper:  - http://datawrapper.de/
  • Highcharts: http://www.highcharts.com/demo

Mapping Tools

Finding Data

  • http://www.inside-r.org/howto/finding-data-internet

500 Words, Day 22

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Big data is the gamification of 2013. Companies have to have some big data strategy. As I was writing this, Gartner released a report that 64% of organizations are funding big data projects this year. And it's true that important insights can be derived from large data sets – after all, that's what science does – but the data trend today seems to forget that having data does not mean you have answers.

Jaron Lanier, who should know from big data, writes in his recent book, "Who Owns the Future?":

“We have become used to treating big business data as legitimate, even though it might really only seem so because of its special position in a network.”

He gives as an example the matching algorithms on dating sites. There's no scientific validity to their numbers, yet they are treated as valid due to social engineering: people expect them to be "real". The same goes for recommendation systems of books, of restaurants (and note the recent sting of review mills in Brooklyn). They are given the veneer of truth because they are numbers and the controlling interests (the site, the company) present them as privileged. But this is problematic.

The data may be polluted. The data may be incomplete. The site may only present top listings, reinforcing options that may have been promoted by poor initial data.

What's even more problematic is that none of this matters to many applications of big data as long as something happens. Do you sell more widgets overall? Do you stickify eyeballs to the marketing message?

This creates a false positive of "it works" from an engineering and marketing standpoint. This is engineering- and marketing- driven design, features those roles prioritize because they are implementable and quantitatively testable. Yet they may not serve the user. And they might not answer any real questions.

“It doesn’t matter if the science is right so long as customers will pay for it, and they do.”

Lanier points out that none of the protective processed that science relies upon – peer review, standards, double-blind tests – are in place in the world of big data. Nor does he see any hint of a drive for these because (see above) people are making big bucks the way things are.

There might be a third way, adopted from the young field of data-driven journalism, though this way may be too uncomfortable for businesses to adopt. DDJ practitioners stress that data != information, let alone answers. As you would never go into a human interview without researching your questions, you have to "interview the data", including making an effort to understand any problems users might have in creating the data, or what their unexpressed needs and drives were. Understanding these can save you from  overlooking holes in the data, which leads to bad data and no answers.

If some of this sounds familiar, it's because you've read some UX person harping on user research. Maybe big data could learn something.

And that's 500 words.

500 Words, Day 21

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Christina Wodtke wrote about the astoundingly horrible reaction a woman received when she suggested changes to increase parity of opportunity for those of us who are not white, or not male. Wodtke broke down why even virtual threats of rape and other violence are unacceptable and beyond the limits of "it's just trolling".

Her "you are bigger than me" was both literal and metaphorical: the physical reality that men forget but women can't afford to, and the medium of privilege (to use a term already creaky from overburden) that men forget but women can't afford to. Compounding the issue is that the second acts as a force multiplier on the first. By their sheer composition, men are less likely targets of physical attacks (this is true for me, even though I weigh only 140 pounds), and societies around the world, to one degree or another, treat these as acceptable losses, the cost of doing business, or even a feature for maintaining a dominant cultural construction.

Even in the States, this casual asymmetry is so commonplace. I've often told a female friend, "It's only a few blocks from the subway," not realizing that a few blocks' walk late at night is one thing to me, but entirely another thing to her. Similarly, exposing an email address  or online conversations to anyone may be just an annoyance to me, but a tangible threat to the many women trying to hide from their abusers or stalkers.

Such obliviousness to the privilege of safety by seems a feature of internet and big-data triumphalists, from Google to marketers down to the entrepreneur who makes the big bucks off of people donating free opinions.

As Jaron Lanier demonstrates in his recent book, "Who Owns the Future?", entrenched interests stand only to gain more the more freely given information that can collect and mediate: "Ordinary people 'share', while elite network presences generate unprecedented fortunes."

What Lanier does't say is that this new gold rush creates massive pressure on companies to promote the idea of radical transparency; the more they can convince you to trade email addresses, lunch locations, etc., for nothing, the more they stand to gain in bulk. This in turn creates powerful incentives to make such lack of private identity a structural feature in products and services, with no (or hidden) opt-out options.

The canonical example is Google Buzz. It was on by default for all Gmail users, including a woman whose (formerly, or assumed so) private conversations and identities were exposed to her abusive ex-husband. Loud public reaction drove Google to offer opt-out, then kill Buzz, complete with apology.

To those who live within the privilege of no fear (from debt collectors, from abusers, etc.), transparency is as benign as a late-night walk on the street. But some people have reasons not to share data, such as where they're having dinner, or what they think about inequality. But you, data marketers, are bigger than us.

And that's 500 words.