sherman's shared items
The American Medical Association's trade newsletter had an interesting, if troubling story about a recent rise in medical identity theft--and the major health conditions that can arise from having the wrong information in a permanent digital record. While mistaken medical information offers one scary type of error we'll make with data mining, I think the bigger risk is from using proxies for identity--such as Facebook profiles--to make unwarranted and potentially catastrophic conclusions. As the AMA newsletter notes, medical identity theft is the fastest growing category of identity theft in the United States.
Blank cited the slow economy and more people losing insurance as drivers behind increasing medical identity theft. Larry Ponemon, president and founder of the Ponemon Institute, a privacy research center based in Traverse City, Mich., said his research has found nearly half of medical ID thefts are considered "Robin Hood crimes." That means willing or sympathetic "victims" lend their identity to someone else so that person may get needed services… Pam Dixon, founder of the World Privacy Forum, said in a 2006 report that "medical identity theft may also harm its victims by creating false entries in their health records at hospitals, doctors' offices, pharmacies and insurance companies." She said the changes to the records could remain in the files for many years. "Victims of medical identity theft may receive the wrong medical treatment, find their health insurance exhausted, and could become uninsurable for both life and health insurance coverage," Dixon said in the report. One example Dixon cited in her report was a woman who ended up with the wrong blood type in her patient file. As medical records become more transportable through electronic networks, the problem could be exacerbated as mistakes are disseminated and re-disseminated among physicians, hospitals, pharmacies and insurers, Dixon wrote.
In other words, mistaken medical identities are likely going to be a lot more common in the future. And the impacts aren't trivial--having an inaccurate, permanent record can lead to things like death--if you get the wrong blood, say. Put differently, we run the risk of some really catastrophic problems--if we take too many past bits of data for granted. I highlighted this problem a few months ago, when looking at efforts to use Facebook profiles to prosecute fraud. Fraud investigators have recently begun using photos of, say, someone on disability insurance looking happy and active as evidence of fraud--when, of course, it may every well be the first time the person has gotten out of the house in six months and they want to post some pictures to celebrate with friends. This potential for misinterpreting the meaning behind our digital trails is likely to get a lot worse in the next decade--as clever researchers develop increasingly unlikely tools, such as , for teasing out likely elements of our personal lives from data streams. It's the sort of research--analyzing proxies for our identity, such as our personal photos to our social connections--that will yield some of the most unexpected insights to improve health and well-being, as we continue to move into a world where almost everything is digital. What will be key to remember, however, is that while almost everything will be digital, not everything will be. In many instances, what we want to keep private--such as a family history of a debilitating disease--will be a lot harder to find than most things that are far less personal. The broader point, it seems to me, is that we already live in a world where large-scale organizations--such as credit reporting agencies--collect and create representations of our identities behind our backs. Over the next decade, the impact of one of these identities misrepresenting material facts--such as blood type--could literally kill people. It's easy to suggest that we need better tools to control our digital identities and privacy--and of course, we do. But there's a bigger, more difficult challenge here: We're moving toward a world where our identities will be meticulously, almost frighteningly digital. If we're going to thrive in that world, we need to create conditions that make it possible for people to feel comfortable being open and transparent.
I guess this is how a sports fan felt when Joe DiMaggio retired.
Business didn't used to be personal. Now it is.
Computers didn't used to make us smile. Now they do.
We didn't used to care about whether a CEO made one decision or another, or whether or not he was healthy. I do now.
Sure, there was baseball after joltin Joe stopped playing. But it was never quite the same.
Thank you, Steve, for giving us all something to talk about and a way to talk about it with beauty (and fonts). We owe you more than we can say.
Designers use rounded corners so much today that they’re more of an industry standard than a design trend. They’re not only found on software user interfaces, but hardware product designs as well. So what is it about rounded corners that make them so popular? Indeed they look appealing, but there’s more to it than that.
Rounded Corners are Easier to Process
Anyone can appreciate the aesthetic beauty of rounded corners, but not everyone can explain where exactly that beauty comes from. The answer to that is literally in your eye.
Some experts say that rectangles with rounded corners are easier on the eyes than a rectangle with sharp edges because they take less cognitive effort to visually process. The fovea is fastest at processing circles. Processing edges involve more “neuronal image tools” in the brain [1]. Thus, rectangles with rounded corners are easier process because they look closer to a circle than a regular rectangle.
Scientific research done on corners by the Barrow Neurological Institute found that the “perceived salience of a corner varies linearly with the angle of the corner. Sharp angles generated stronger illusory salience than shallow angles” [2]. In other words, the sharper the corner, the brighter it seems. And the brighter a corner appears, the more it’ll affect visual processing.
Which object is easier to look at?
We’re Conditioned for Rounded Corners
Another explanation on why we have an eye for rounded corners is because they’re more organic to how we use everyday objects in the physical world [3]. Rounded corners are everywhere. And as children, we quickly learn that sharp corners hurt and that rounded corners are safer. That’s why when a child plays with a ball, most parents aren’t alarmed. But if a child were to play with a fork, the parents would take the fork away for the fear of the child hurting itself. This provokes what neuroscience calls an “avoidance response” with sharp edges. Thus, we tend to “avoid sharp edges because in nature, they can present a threat” [4].
Which object would you trust with your child?
Rounded Corners Make Information Easier to Process
Rounded corners are more effective for maps and diagrams because they allow our eyes to easily follow lines “as it suits better to the natural movement of the head and eyes respectively” [5]. Sharp corners throw your eyes off the path of the line so you end up experiencing abrupt pauses when the line changes direction. But with rounded corners, the line leads your eyes around each corner to continue along the path smoothly.
Which diagram is easier for your eyes to follow?
Rounded corners also make effective content containers. This is because the rounded corners point inward towards the center of the rectangle. This puts the focus on the contents inside the rectangle. It also makes it easy to see which side belongs to which rectangle when two rectangles are next to each other. Sharp corners point outward putting less focus on the contents inside the rectangle. They also make it hard to tell which of the two sides belong to which rectangle when two rectangles are next to each other. This is because each rectangle side is exactly a straight line. However, the sides of a rounded rectangle are unique because the lines curve towards the rectangle it belongs to.
Conclusion
There are more to rounded corners than meets the eye. Rounded corners are not only easier for our eyes to process, but they also make information easier to process. There’s no doubt that rounded corners are appealing. But these extra reasons make them even more appealing to use. Now when you talk to a client about rounded corners, you’ll have something more to say than it just looks good.
References
[1] Realizations of Rounded Rectangles
[2] Corner salience varies linearly with corner angle during flicker-augmented contrast
[3] Why Do We Love Rounded Corners?
[4] NeuroFocus Study Reveals What Went Wrong With the Gap’s New Brand Logo
[5] FMC Visualization Guidelines
One of the biggest sources of buzz this past week has been Adobe’s announcement of the Edge preview. People have been talking about it a lot but few seem to really grasp some of the ideas or technology behind this.
Today, I’d like to talk to you a little about the Edge preview and why you should be cautiously optimistic at this juncture.
A Little History
Creating content using a standards based approach is hard. This is where Edge comes in.
Flash’s birth and history can make for a very, very confusing read: it’s incredibly loved or hated depending on who you speak to. The undeniable fact is that Flash is one of the main reasons behind the proliferation of video and interactive media on the web. On the flip side, it’s criticized for its closed nature and performance issues.
While the platform itself isn’t going anywhere in the near future, you can’t help but notice that Flash’s hold on the web has been loosening lately.
Chalk it up the rise of HTML5 and an increasing number of developers embracing open standards or a certain fruit flavored company leading a crusade against Flash, the bottomline is that the web has been looking for an open, standards based alternative to Flash for sometime now. One of the big reasons for the arrival and rise in popularity of HTML5 along with libraries like jQuery can be attributed to antagonism and apathy towards the Flash platform.
Creating content with the new technologies though has been far from smooth. This is where Edge comes in.
What is Edge?
Edge is Adobe’s attempt at being relevant in the post-Flash world.
Edge is touted as an animation tool ideal for designers who want to create web content replete with animations but based on the open standards that prop up the web. According to their site:
Adobe Edge is a new web motion and interaction design tool that allows designers to bring animated content to websites, using web standards like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3.
Basically, Edge is your ticket to adding animated content without having to resort to external plugins like Flash or Silverlight.
Do We Really Need Another Tool?
In this case, oh, yes we do!
I certainly feel so. Before you look for your pitchforks, let me explain!
Flash developers have access to very mature and very sophisticated design tools. Want to create a simple animation? A few clicks here, some input there and you’re done! They really do enjoy the use of a complete environment when it comes to authoring their content.
What happens when you want to go the standards based way?
It’s not that easy, I can tell you that much. You have to poke around with code, learn a little JavaScript, get bored, learn to use a library like jQuery, get excited again and then find out that you still have to hand code every single animation.
While it’s ok for us dev types, it’s much more of a chore for the artsy designers. Standards based development really doesn’t have to be hard! I realize that enterprising developers have come up solutions for these but none have appeared from the bigwigs of big content.
Edge seeks to streamline this process by reusing common concepts of media creation such as timelines and stages to make the learning curve more gentler, easier and thus, more accessible.
Initial Impressions
The preview is a svelte 65MB download and installs quite quickly. Getting access to the download requires an Adobe account though. It’s free, sure, but adds an unnecessary step to the process. 1999 called, they want their frivolous signups back.
And oh, if you’re still lost as to where to download your copy, you can get it here.
The Interface
First impressions of the preview are quite positive. It looks clean, composed and uncluttered. If you’ve used GoLive in the past, or even Flash, the interface should look mostly familiar.
The stage or canvas acts as the first DIV and when you add elements to your canvas, they’re added hierarchically with the type of element being displayed on the side.
The timeline pane is one of the key portions of any animation suite and Edge doesn’t disappoint. The entire lower portion of the interface is dominated by the timeline pane.
You can view all the properties of the elements you’ve added so far to the canvas in the timeline. Creating an animation is as simple as adding a keyframe, supplying it with the info for the frame and Edge will fill in the rest — tweening works as expected, excellently.
Functionality of the Current Preview Version
This preview is obviously in alpha mode — the first preview’s main focus is on adding simple shapes and animations. That’s pretty much all there’s present in the interface as well.
Users can add text, images and simple shapes with relative ease — just point, click and drag. You can also customize assorted characteristics of the content including color, skewing, opacity, rotation and much more. Take a quick look at the image below to get an idea of what I’m talking about. If you’ve at all been introduced to animation software in the past, you should feel right at home.
You can also import premade assets, including images, into your current canvas.
Under the Hood
Since this isn’t really a tutorial on how to use Edge, I’m going to skip ahead and download a premade demo which you can get from here.
Let’s take a look at the directory structure of a sample Edge project:
No surprises here. Your animations are now created from your familiar trifecta of web technologies — HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
As opposed to popular opinion, Edge uses a mix of jQuery and CSS3 to animate the contents of its canvas. Yes, you heard that right – jQuery does a lot of the grunt work behind Edge.
Digging into the code with Firebug, you’ll notice that there are a lot of DIV elements being moved around with jQuery. For example, here is the actual code being injected in the example I linked above. Not entirely pretty.
Basically, any animation that CSS3 can do is left to it since all CSS3 effects are hardware accelerated, and thus will perform well. The rest is left for jQuery to handle.
Digging further into the code, you’ll see that all your element, their properties, tweening information and the rest are stored as a JSON file. I’m assuming the engine basically parses this information and constructs the DOM and attaches the handlers.
As a quick experiment, let’s look at what the browser sees:
Uh, oh. There’s literally nothing that makes semantic sense in there. Disable JavaScript and you’re left with a big blob of nothingness. Fans of graceful degradation, get your pitchforks.
Where the Heck is HTML5?
It’s being marketed as a HTML5 tool and well… this is not HTML5 powered. Yet.
I went in expecting to be dazzled by the splendor of canvas or SVG. After a look at the DOM, it’s quite apparent there isn’t even a tiny bit of either in there. Just to make sure, I did a quick search of the JavaScript files searching for the canvas related keyword, getContext . Needless to say, nothing turned up. The biggest blob of HTML5 here is the doctype. Sure, you can import SVG content but you can’t touch the markup so it’s a moo point.
It’s a little puzzling why Edge doesn’t use any of the modern technologies instead. If anything, it’s being marketed as a HTML5 tool and well… this is not HTML5 powered. Disingenuous marketing or signs of features to come? I’m leaning towards the latter whilst really, really hoping the former isn’t true.
Is this Approach the Best Option Moving Forward?
Nope.
From a development perspective, animating DIVs is the equivalent of using tables for layout — it works but at the cost of elegance and semantics. Canvas and SVG are precision engineered to do exactly what Edge does here and make more sense in the long run.
Even if canvas performance is piddling on the current mobile devices, there’s no way for the performance to go but up and it really shouldn’t hamper the adoption of new technology.
While one would ideally like to see cutting edge apps actually make use of similar cutting edge technologies, keep in mind that this is still a preview, an early alpha version.
In the words of one of the engineers behind Edge regarding DIV based animation:
We started with DIVs because we wanted to get something out there quickly that folks could play with. I say we ‘started’ there because Edge will be evolving rapidly — the product is by no means feature complete.
That’s a little encouraging! While I’m disappointed with their initial, see what sticks approach, it’s good to know that this is just how they’re kicking off things, not how they plan to do things ultimately.
Remember, this is Still a Preview
The thoughts above may come off as a little negative but that’s not my intention. I, and the rest of the community, have high hopes for this tool and thus very high expectations.
And Adobe on their part isn’t lazing around. They’re already working on the feedback provided by the community so far and have a road map in place for future versions.
With Adobe embracing open standards and focusing on producing creative tools instead of boxed-in application platforms, I can’t help but feel they’re on the path towards becoming as relevant to the progress of the web as they were in the past during the height of Flash.
Let us know how you feel about the Edge preview in the comments and thank you so much for reading!
By 2012, Morgan Stanley predicts that smartphones shipments will exceed computer shipments. In addition, it’s expected that 25% of all online e-commerce will be executed via a mobile device. It’s already estimated that 30% of corporate email is read on a mobile device. Although social media seems to take the lead of most stories… mobile should be top of mind with every company.
But companies shouldn’t simply be looking at mobile from a marketing standpoint, businesses should also be encouraging their employees to adopt. This infographic from Dell speaks to the efficiencies of mobile from a work and productivity standpoint. As the infographic states:
Is it time to rethink your IT policies and join the mobile worker movement? Companies that can adapt quickly to the new mobile landscape are more likely to thrive and prosper.
Knowledge-based workers are driving business by staying connected. Are your employees connected?
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We don't get to see much of religious design here at Abduzeedo, and maybe that's something we should feature more. There are tons of good religious design out there just waiting to be found, like Jim LePage's.
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Jim emailed us about his work and it happened to be very interesting! As Jim reads the Bible, he designs posters for each book and about individual topics he finds most interesting. Overall, this is indeed a good practice to synthesize a whole book (the Bible or whatever book you might read) through a single piece of design. I wonder if any other designers have done something like these, no matter the religion. We'd love to see it! Remember, good design is universal, and very much welcome here. Of course, for more of Jim LePage's project, called Word, you may visit his portfolio! I hope you enjoy these as much as I did, and I challenge you to make your own designs about stuff you care, books you read, songs you listen, feelings you feel. Cheers! ;)
Genesis
Numbers
Ruth
1 Samuel
2 Chronicles
Nehemiah
Esther
Ecclesiastes
Song of Solomon
Song of Solomon
Ezekiel
Daniel
Joel
Jonah
Matthew
Luke
Crucifixion
Romans
1 Corinthians
1 Thessalonians
About the author
Hello, everyone! I'm Paulo Gabriel, a 26 year old designer from Porto Alegre, Brazil. I have worked as a webdesigner since 2006, but websites and blogs have been a hobby for me since 1999. Here in Abduzeedo, I try to bring only the hot stuff for you... and hope that all of you enjoy my posts! For more cool stuff, you may also follow me on Twitter.
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Can you satisfy the cat? The users?
Describing usability and user-centered design to almost anyone who doesn’t work near the field is difficult. This includes not only the stranger trying to strike up a conversation on the plane, but also the companies powers that be in companies where user-centered designers are employed.
However, in less than 3 minutes, John Boykin, in this wonderful video “Satisfy the Cat, a.k.a. User-Centered Design,” does a great job of explaining just what effective user-centered design is by comparing user-centered design to making cat food. The best part of the video is Poobah, the cat, who illustrates the examples quite well. Even if you don’t care about user-centered design watching the cat react in the video is great. I’d say what my favorite part is, but I don’t want to give anything anyway. I highly recommend taking 3 minutes to watch this informative and amusing video.
This one quote sums up the video and the main point quite well:
In the end, if the cat won’t eat the food, then nothing else matters. Sooner or later the owner is going to have to buy different cat food or loose the cat. The stakes are really that high.
For those who are hearing impaired or want a summary, here are a few key quotes and paraphrases:
- “As a user centered designer I don’t work directly for the people using it [the websites]… I’m in the business of selling cat food. The cats are not my clients. They do not hire me. They do not know I exist. But the cats are the ones I ultimately have to satisfy.”
- The 3 big mistakes a user-centered cat food maker can make:
- Put the owner first. I do need to satisfy the owner too, but need to do more than give the owner what they want with no regard for the cat. The cat will not eat the food, which means the owner will not be satisfied for long. (Near quote, heavy paraphrasing)
- Thinking the cats are like me: I’m not a cat and neither is the owner or the factory, so our needs and agenda come a distant second to the needs and desires of the cat. (Near quote, heavy paraphrasing)
- That the owner or designer can compel the cat to do what we want. Cat’s don’t obey. Only way is to understand cat’s own motivation and play on those. (Near quote, heavy paraphrasing)
Thanks John Boykin for the best 3 minute description of what a user-centered website designer does. Website users are a lot like cats. It is a great analogy.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been half a decade since The Show from Ze Frank graced our tubes with its daily updates. Five years ago to the day, he recorded the greatest three minutes of speech ever committed to video.
In the midst of his challenge to find the ugliest MySpace page ever, he received this comment:
Having an ugly Myspace contest is like having a contest to see who can eat the most cheeseburgers in 24 hours… You’re mocking people who, for the most part, have no taste or artistic training.
Ze’s response is a manifesto to the democratic transformative disruptive power of the web. It is magnificent.
In Myspace, millions of people have opted out of pre-made templates that “work” in exchange for ugly. Ugly when compared to pre-existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.
Regardless of what you might think, the actions you take to make your Myspace page ugly are pretty sophisticated. Over time as consumer-created media engulfs the other kind, it’s possible that completely new norms develop around the notions of talent and artistic ability.
Spot on.
That’s one of the reasons why I dread the inevitable GeoCities-style shutdown of MySpace. Let’s face it, it’s only a matter of time. And when it does get shut down, we will forever lose a treasure trove of self-expression on a scale never seen before in the history of the planet. That’s so much more important than whether it’s ugly or not. As Phil wrote about the ugly and neglected fragments of Geocities:
GeoCities is an awful, ugly, decrepit mess. And this is why it will be sorely missed. It’s not only a fine example of the amateur web vernacular but much of it is an increasingly rare example of a period web vernacular. GeoCities sites show what normal, non-designer, people will create if given the tools available around the turn of the millennium.
Substitute MySpace for GeoCities and you get an idea of the loss we are facing.
Let’s not make the same mistake twice.
Tagged with preservation history culture myspace creativity geocities
What is a public library for?
First, how we got here:
Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own.
This naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come to read books that they didn't have to own. The library as warehouse for books worth sharing.
Only after that did we invent the librarian.
The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.
After Gutenberg, books got a lot cheaper. More individuals built their own collections. At the same time, though, the number of titles exploded, and the demand for libraries did as well. We definitely needed a warehouse to store all this bounty, and more than ever we needed a librarian to help us find what we needed. The library is a house for the librarian.
Industrialists (particularly Andrew Carnegie) funded the modern American library. The idea was that in a pre-electronic media age, the working man needed to be both entertained and slightly educated. Work all day and become a more civilized member of society by reading at night.
And your kids? Your kids need a place with shared encyclopedias and plenty of fun books, hopefully inculcating a lifelong love of reading, because reading makes all of us more thoughtful, better informed and more productive members of a civil society.
Which was all great, until now.
Want to watch a movie? Netflix is a better librarian, with a better library, than any library in the country. The Netflix librarian knows about every movie, knows what you've seen and what you're likely to want to see. If the goal is to connect viewers with movies, Netflix wins.
This goes further than a mere sideline that most librarians resented anyway. Wikipedia and the huge databanks of information have basically eliminated the library as the best resource for anyone doing amateur research (grade school, middle school, even undergrad). Is there any doubt that online resources will get better and cheaper as the years go by? Kids don't shlep to the library to use an out of date encyclopedia to do a report on FDR. You might want them to, but they won't unless coerced.
They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data). They need a library not at all.
When kids go to the mall instead of the library, it's not that the mall won, it's that the library lost.
And then we need to consider the rise of the Kindle. An ebook costs about $1.60 in 1962 dollars. A thousand ebooks can fit on one device, easily. Easy to store, easy to sort, easy to hand to your neighbor. Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.
Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.
Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.
The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books. Just in time for the information economy, the library ought to be the local nerve center for information. (Please don't say I'm anti-book! I think through my actions and career choices, I've demonstrated my pro-book chops. I'm not saying I want paper to go away, I'm merely describing what's inevitably occurring). We all love the vision of the underprivileged kid bootstrapping himself out of poverty with books, but now (most of the time), the insight and leverage is going to come from being fast and smart with online resources, not from hiding in the stacks.
The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.
The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user serviceable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it's fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.
The next library is filled with so many web terminals there's always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don't view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight--it's the entire point.
Wouldn't you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousand things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.
We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.
