Noise Between Stations

January 2005

  • There’s a juicy internationalization problem

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    1 min read

    Hindus in Europe want to take back the swastika because to them it’s a symbol of luck and peace which the Nazis stole. Meanwhile the European Parliment is considering banning the symbol throughout Europe after Prince Harry of Great Britain wore a mock Nazi uniforn to a costume party.

  • IA Leadership Seminar

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    1 min read

    The early registration deadline for the Information Architecture Institute’s Leadership Seminar is January 28th. If you sign up now you’ll get a significant discount for this star-studded event, 1 ½ days including: “Managing Up: The Business Strategy of Information Architecture” – Christina Wodtke and Scott Hirsch “The Enterprise IA Roadmap” – Louis Rosenfeld ”Homeland Security…

  • Disruption in home audio

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    3 min read

    If you’d like to see the process of a disruptive technology take hold before the disruption, look at the home audio industry. In the past year or two home audio has taken some interesting turns. Before you basically had two configurations: simpler, inexpensive all-in-one systems or more flexible and expensive separates. Cambridge Soundworks, then Tivoli,…

  • Why does free tagging seem so familiar?

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    2 min read

    Tim Bray on Technorati Tags: “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about metadata and have written on the subject; the most important conclusion was: There is no cheap metadata. I haven’t seen anything to make me change my mind. …I think that it would be nice if a huge number of web pages converged…

  • The Paradox of Choice

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    3 min read

    I meant to make a note of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice a while ago, and was reminded of it as it’s now in paperback. The New Yorker review is, as usual, the best introduction to the topic. Excerpts: As Herbert Simon, the 1978 Nobel laureate in economics, observed, any firm that tried to…

  • Navigate by fabric pattern

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    1 min read

    It’s little experiments like this that reassure me there’s still fun to be had on the commercial web.

  • Flickr tag: cardreader

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    1 min read

    NYC Subway metrocard slots Mike Lee sparked my interest in observing how many different ways designers tell us to insert a card into a machine. It’s interesting 1) because there are so many different ways, and 2) because many are confusing in that fascinating why-did-they-do-it-that-way? way. If you’d like to contribute, just add the tag…

  • Falseonomies

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    1 min read

    The Clay Shirky spin on the ethnoclassification discussion is amusing. How such a large percentage of the community manages to discuss a classification technique without explicitly illustrating how it aids in retrieval misses the whole point of classification. But I’ve already covered that ground, so let’s move along to the more interesting, subtle developments. At…

  • The new global currency?

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    1 min read

    The Economist says, tongue-in-cheek: …the dollar has been dethroned even sooner than we expected. It has been superseded not by the euro, nor by the yen or yuan, but by another increasingly popular global currency: frequent-flyer miles. Turns out there’s about $14 trillion in frequent flier miles in circulation.

  • Malcolm Gladwell blinks

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    1 min read

    Malcolm Gladwell I just saw Malcolm Gladwell do a book tour talk. With “The Tipping Point” and now “Blink” it’s clear he’s a student of change. In his new book he looks at the ability of the adaptive unconscious to make good decisions because it’s been trained through experience. The implications for practice and iteration…

  • We are all in this together

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    1 min read

    Just returned from San Francisco where one of the best things I saw was a billboard of Mark Mumford’s WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.

  • NYC Lectures, Jan 2005

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    1 min read

    Malcolm Gladwell talks about his new book, Blink, at Barnes and Noble Union Square at 7pm on January 13th. Free. Jared Diamond lectures on his new book at the 92nd St Y, 7:30pm on Jan 16. $25. The editors and writers of a new magazine called Plenty discuss the mag’s view on the intersection of…

  • The Daimler-Chrysler merger at work

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    1 min read

    James Cobb of the New York Times generates the latest praise for the Chrysler 300 and adds, It also melds Stuttgart engineering with Detroit style, providing a rebuttal to those who were skeptical – we know who we are – of Daimler’s takeover of Chrysler. Beneath its audacious design, the 300 is packed with well-engineered…