I read a great interview this morning by Guy Kawasaki with Matthew E. May, the author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing, and found this particular snippet particularly interesting:

 I spent some time with the late traffic designer Hans Monderman and the UK urban designer Ben Hamilton-Baillie. Together they have designed and redesigned high traffic intersections in the Netherlands and UK to be nearly devoid of traffic controls. I’m talking intersections with over 20,000 vehicles, pedestrians, and bikes daily.

 

Flow and safety have doubled because they create “shared space” with no right of way. You have no choice but to be cautious and alert—and use your noggin. Ben says this: “Research shows that over 70 percent of traffic signs are ignored by motorists. What’s wrong with how we engineer things is that most of what we accept as the proper order of things is based on assumptions, not observations. If we observed first, designed second, we wouldn’t need most of the things we build.” But it is not quite as simple as the trite cliché “look before you leap.”

I thought this to be an excellent observation from an obviously excellent designer.  ”Just becasuse you can, doesn’t mean you should.”  The first comparison I can think of is the difference between navigating my Blackberry — whose time is numbered — and Apples elegant iPhone.  My Blackberry is full of menus and sub-menus and options and settings…and it’s really just a pain in the ass.  

Why not find the simplicity on the other side of complexity?  Make it simple, engaging, elegant.   It’s about playing chess, not checkers…think about what your customer needs, don’t just act on what you want.

We’ve known about a business earnings gender gap between men and women for some time now, but it seems that we may have miss-identified the true underlying cause of it’s existence.  

According to an article in the New York Times, Professors from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Harvard studied business graduates’ careers between 1990 and 2006 and found that women generally worked much less after taking maternity leave and resulted in a noticeable wage disparity.  

I’m not going to assume there are not businesses out there imposing a glass ceiling on female business professionals, but this clear shows that we cannot rely solely on the same historic arguments from years gone by.

Just when you thought that you’d become the foremost expert on the latest and greatest Swine Flu pandemic news, you flip on your TV, turn on your radio, log onto Twitter or Facebook — yes there really is no escape.  There they are, the nameless faces riding trains and buses with blue and green colored surgical masks, when did another SARS outbreak occur?  It really is all quite dramatic, but how close to a true pandemic are we really?

I was listening to a piece this evening on the local NPR radion station 89.3 KPCC here in Los Angeles that featured artist Laura Milkins.   Earlier this year she had moved to Mexico city to explore Insurgentes, the longest avenue in the world, and gather stories from local residents.

From the picture that the media has painted you would think that the streets would be deserted or its people wearing full bio-hazard suits — but this is far from what I heard.  Laura explained that life is actually quite normal in Mexico City, life goes on as it always has and probably always will.  While people are certainly quite aware of the situation surounding them they also seem more intent on focusing on life and the fact that utimatly it is more rewarding to live that life than to huddle in fear from something that may or may not be the next great pandemic.

Let’s put a true pandemic event into perspective.  The great influenza epidemic of the early 20th century was so severe that the average life span in the US was depressed by 10 full years.

We’re all going to have to wait and see if I’m once again spouting nonsense and just plain missing that point, but do remember, I live in L.A.  As I write this one-quarter of the national antiviral stockpile being delivered to California — direct to the front lines.  For now, I’m going to wait it out.   Luckily, I’m a progammer and I don’t see the light of day often — who says the life of a nerd isn’t healthy?

I just watched a great speech by Mike Rowe of the Discovery Channels Dirty Jobs television series.  This man’s man may tackle nasty jobs and questionable situations but I see a serious future for him, if not in politics, then as an ambassador in some capacity.  The stage just calls his name.

I read the excellent article in the latest edition of Wired magazine (the actual dead-tree version), but you can find it on the interweb here: Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion.

This was a wonderful article that touches on the fact that magic works because our brains contain “blind spots’ that keep us from seeing what’s really going on in front of us.  Check out the excellent article Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience and coauthored by Teller, Stephen Macknik, and Susana Martinez-Conde, researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix.

This article aside, I find it utterly refreshing to observe the way that Penn and Teller bring a new angle to something so old.  I love it when someone comes up with a new angle, a new twist, something that no one else in the magic community is doing..they provide us answers.  Answers to how illusionists for centuries have be tricking the mind into seeing the impossible.

The Penn and Teller experience feels like that great website that finally takes a great service that was once only available through a paid subscription and sets it loose upon the world…for free.  You know someone had to do it.

But you know the best part about all this, the part that I like the most?  It doesn’t matter!  Not to me, and certainly not my brain.  Because even though I know what’s happening behind the scenes, I still can’t believe what I’m seeing.

Even when we know we’re going to be tricked, we still can’t see it.

It’s interesting that I might start off this blog with such an interesting event as the one that traspired at Amazon.com this past weekend.  For those of you that might not have heard of this event or just are not sure what happened–here is the quick low-down.

Sometime this past weekend online shopping giant Amazon.com managed to remove an enormous number of books relating to lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered (LGBT) themes from their normal rankings within the site.  This, ‘un-ranking’  within the system caused these titles to effectively fall off the face of the earth and stir-up a hornets nest of controversy as to the reason that this group of topics suddenly disappeared overnight.  It turns out that a mistake was made in Amazon’s categorization system that flipped these titles to be flagged as adult in nature.

Whoops!  I’m sure this isn’t the first time something like this has happened, but it’s one of the first to feel the full power of the twitter hash tag.  The hash tag #amazonfail quickly spread through twitter, and while on it’s own this is nothing new, this hash tag spread more than news…it spread lies.  It turns out that this massive tweet effort was spreading the word that Amazon.com was bigoted toward the gay movement and even helped spawned efforts to boycott the online retailer.

While this is supposed to be about social impact, what about Amazon’s response?  To date, I have still not hear an PR release or statements make admitting anything other than the fact that mistakes were made that they have been corrected.  No appologizes, no sympathy, and certainly no admission of guilt.  I really have to question the way that Amazon has handled this whole situation.  In this day and age swift and cincere action is required by every company due to the instant knowlege sharing capabilities of Twitter and Facebook–and this goes double for online businesses.  If you want to see a truly forward thinking company handle their mistakes, look no farther than Netflix who early last year suffered through delivery problems to 2.8 million of it’s own subscribers.  What did Netflix do:

“We apologize, and we’ll be automatically issuing credits to all of you whose shipments have been delayed. Our goal is to ship DVDs as soon as possible and to provide a personalized e-mail update to you if your DVD shipment was delayed.”

Quick and decisive action was taken to ensure that their customer base was secure in the fact that Netflix had their best interests in mind.

Well, now it’s late and I’m just tired but this is nothing new and I think we all knew that at some point Twitter was going to help spread something that did more harm than good, but maybe this is the wake-up call.  That bit of information that makes up all stop and consider, “what am I really forwarding on to my followers”.