NYU CUSP Meetup

Went to a cool informative meetup at NYU's Center For Urban Science And Progress (CUSP) where Mike Flowers did a Q&A about the NYC government data field. Flowers has a very interesting and diverse background which, importantly, includes a lot of hands-on getting things done (and by "things" I do not meet writing academic papers like I mostly do). Currently he is CUSP’s first Urban Science Fellow, although I am not sure exactly what that means. (Perhaps it's, "person who can teach smart things but doesn't have a PhD since he's a practitioner.")

One of his comments that I found very accurate and liked very much was his focus on what the data means -- that is, the numbers do not speak for themselves, you have to know what they actually represent. You go out into the field with the people that generate those numbers and have a hands-on understanding of them. What are they quantifying? What do the measures mean? How are they measured?

One great quote, which I will paraphrase since I don't have it exactly, was that, in order to understand NYC data, you have to have an understanding of the history of the city.

Flowers is a person who understands how to understand data! History! Awesome.

An Obvious Realization

So, Habermas' concept of the public sphere -- that is, people who aren't in the government talk about government stuff and the ideas can be judged on merit -- I had been thinking recently about how Facebook apparently started out as a way to meet... ok let's be honest, stalk... women, and turned into a massive social advertising platform ("platform", I know, I know). Google too started as one thing (search for users) and became a massive social advertising platform (search on users). Just like I used to read about with television (at least the advertising supported model we rely on here in the US), you are the product, not the shows, those are just there to get you to watch so they can advertise at you, that is, sell you to advertisers. And that's what happened to the public sphere, it became corrupted by advertising. How's your belly fat, by the way? Did you know that moms in (your town) discovered one shocking secret that doctors don't want you to know? Or wait maybe the president changed laws in (your town) and you can get car insurance for $5. Lies, all lies. Not all advertising is terrible, but too much is.

Test Your Surveys

If you don't actually test your surveys, you roll out something for a major US telecommunications carrier that doesn't pick up the right value and then prints blanks and is clearly wrong, like this:

An Interesting Sentence

An interesting sentence, unlike one I've ever seen (well that I recall), from the New Yorker where the copy editors are intense:

He liked to roar, though also: he liked quiet.

I would probably have written "He liked to roar, though he also like quiet." but the colon puts a really hard stop in there. From The New Yorker, May 12, 2014, p. 72, by Jill Lepore.

I had more on this post but I had copy and pasted it and it got a bit messed up, then it was deleted accidentally. The New Yorker is very pedantic and precise about grammar is the point here.

Excel and Date Formats

I hereby hate the people who programmed Excel and how it deals with date formats.

This error warning makes absolutely no sense. Sure, there are a ton of date formats. But the source file, which I made myself, is just a CSV file. The destination file is a brand new empty Excel file. Four years? You are kidding me. Approximately? What? This is not acceptable.

Edit: Aha! So this is what is going on. Not at all acceptable, since it means that Excel is interpreting the text as dates when I just want it to passively see everything as text. Microsoft has made Excel overdo it here, and it is not helping.

Ubisoft Toronto Visit

Lucky enough to be a part of CHI's game group (see also CHI Play) and headed along to Ubisoft's Toronto offices and their User Research Lab!

Yup. Ok we missed the "FT" part but hey.

Testing Station: Xbox One, PS4, PC under the table.

Testing stations.

Testing room with one-way mirror!

Through the looking glass.

You can see me in the mirror there.

This room is made to feel like a living room.

Serious!

A headcrab from Half-Life!

The Psychology of Seating

I'm sure research has been done in this area, but I never see it reflected in conference seating layouts... probably because there is "easy" and there is "this is what best practice and research articles show."

Indeed, Google Scholar has articles on seating, but most I see in a cursory glance are about children and education, but anyways.

As you can see in the following photo from CHI 2014 in Toronto (just ended this week!), there are people who haven't gone to a seat, yet there are seats open. Why? Well that seems mostly obvious (spatial norms, seats too small, no outside aisles are just a few possibilities). But what bothered me is, given that we know a thing or two about this kind of seating and human behavior, why can't we do better?