Komanoff’s spreadsheet, which he has posted online, calculates how new fees and changes to existing tolls affect traffic at different times of day. It calculates which costs are borne by city dwellers and which by suburbanites. It calculates how long it takes passengers to dig for change and board buses. And it allows any user to adjust dozens of different variables—from taxi surcharges to truck tolls—and measure their impact. The result is a kind of statistical SimCity, an opportunity to play God (or at least Robert Moses) and devise the perfect traffic policy.Felix Salmon, The Man Who Could Unsnarl Manhattan Traffic from Wired Magazine
Showing only Notes & Links tagged data
Contact Me
hello@caseyagollan.com
@caseyg on Twitter
The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures « OkTrends
I agree with Robin Sloan that the OkCupid data blog is awesome:
What I love is that any single one of the findings they present would have made a totally fine post. Totally link-worthy. But it just keeps going… and going… and going. Like they couldn’t stop themselves.
There’s actually a really deep humanity to this post, and to the OkCupid blog in general. It would be easy to talk about this stuff in a really crass, cynical way. But instead, the blog overflows with charity and nerdy enthusiasm—for all of us and all the weird things we do.
As Matt from Signal vs. Noise has pointed out, Tynt is the name of a copy-and-paste tracking web service that many of us have been using whether we like it or not. I, personally, like it!
If you’ve copy and pasted, or even just selected text or images from The New Yorker, SFGate, or TMZ (among a growing number of sites) you’re being tracked by Tynt. The easily installable code tallies the most selected text and images across your site to show which exact content your audience is “engaging” with, definitely an interesting metric.
Also, at the end of your paste is inserted the text: “Read more:” with a link back to the article. I’ve encountered this a few times, not knowing what exactly it was but it’s actually useful. If you don’t want the link back you can just delete the trailing text, however, the link directs specifically to the point in the article you selected and highlights it, giving whoever clicks through a strong point of reference.
There are so many ways that messing with ubiquitous interactions like copy-and-paste can backfire, but this is pretty successful in my opinion. However, I would definitely advocate for adding the “Read More:” link to be an opt-in, or at least opt-out rather than default setting. The tracking portion (which is what’s most interesting to me anyway) is simply the right of the website publisher.
Of course, the conspiracy theorists are already claiming to be “[selecting text] more often on this site just to push some noise into their profile.”
There’s a swank new apartment tower going up, and the developers pay a writer to compose a book of short stories about it. (It would be great arbitrage: a fortune in writer-terms is a pittance in developer-terms.) When you move in, there’s a crisp, limited-edition copy of that book waiting on your polished-concrete kitchen counter. The action is all set in and around the building: characters move in and out of spaces you recognize. They walk down your street, shop at your grocery store. They have the same view out their window that you do!
Why do I like this? Well, one of the things writers need desperately, I think—especially writers of short fiction—is new venues, new contexts.
What if every product shipped with a story?
It’s fanciful, but I think it connects to the idea of a data shadow—the idea that every physical object has tons of metadata attached to it, cascading away from it—and expands it. That “metadata” can be more than, like, a stream of usage information. It can be narrative; it can, in fact, be fanciful. Call it a story shadow.
Robin Sloan Story shadows (and a quick Friday read) on Snarkmarket
Some choice excerpts from a great post on Snarkmarket.
Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.Apophenia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
GOOD Magazine has started a Flickr set with all their major infographics, and they will update it as more are published. Nice! These are some of the best and occasionally most-overdesigned-but-gorgeous out there.
Scott Stevenson on designer Doug Bowman leaving Google’s data driven design environment:
The one indisputable advantage humans have over data is imagination. I realize this is often overplayed and sounds like hyperbole. But I mean it literally. The ability to step outside of what you’ve seen and consider how something that doesn’t exist yet may yet exist is at the center of everything we do. Imagination is what allows us to consider if we should try to gather a different kind of data.
Read the full post at Theocacao: Measuring the Design Process
