It's The Monitor, Stupid

Slate has a great piece that argues that the best computer upgrade you could treat yourself to would not be a new CPU with a faster processor, but a giant monitor. They're just getting cheaper (a decent big screen should run you less than $3,000, and you could get the dreamy setup pictured above here for $6,000), and (at least for now) super-fast processors won't do much more for anyone but serious gamers when compared with the perfectly sensible previous generation. As someone whose productivity, or at least sanity, has been doubled through a dual-monitor setup, I'd have to agree - and a giant screen would be even better.

Anyway, I don't have anything intelligent to add, just wanted to suggest the article for a good, quick read.

The Confusing Diagram on FIJI Water Bottles: Or, Why Good Designers Are Worth Their Weight In Gold

Numerous bloggers (most recently, the folks at Boing Boing) have noted the irony of FIJI Water's graphic describing the source of their artesian aquifer water, which sits contentedly below a layer of "Impermeable Rock" while rain pours down generously from the Fijian sky.

Basically, the geologic graphic this company created to promote their product is confusing because it employs a confusingly "cyclical" design trope common to water-cycle diagrams to show something that is not cyclical at all. To make matters worse, they throw a bit of misinformation into the mix.

The Idaho Department of Environmental Water Quality describes several types of aquifers, the most basic being:

• Confined—An aquifer overlain by one or more layers of impermeable rock or soil that restrict water to within the aquifer. The water is confined under pressure. Drilling a well into a confined aquifer releases that pressure and causes the water to rise in the well. These wells are sometimes called artesian wells.

• Unconfined—An aquifer that is not overlain by a layer of impermeable rock or soil. Water in a well will naturally stay at the level of the water table. As water is removed from the well, the water table at that place is lowered, causing the surrounding ground water to flow toward the well.

Fiji and other volcanic islands are literally built on igneous rock formed by volcanic activity over millenia. Igneous rock types like basalt have very small mineral grains and are thus deigned "impermeable" (although the term means "barely" rather than "absolutely not" permeable), and are formed by lava cooling at the earth's surface; others, like granite, have larger pores and are formed by lava flows which cool much more slowly underground. Fractures in the layers, as well as the "long tail" of lava flows (the way it spreads out thinly at the beginning and end of the flow) increase the permeability of such rock layers in some cases. There is some more good information on all of this stuff here and, if you have way too much time on your hands, information about Fiji's geology here.

Here is a University of Georgia graphic showing confined and unconfined aquifers:


A confined aquifer, which technically is "locked out" of the water table by impermeable rock, does not have a recharge zone and thus does store a theoretically limited supply of water. This confinement can be caused by an impermeable layer of rock being laid down on top of an existing aquifer or part of the water table, dividing it from any porous area. Keep in mind that an aquifer itself is not usually an open space filled with water, but a highly permeable layer like gravel, silt, etc. that is saturated with water, and this starts to look a little more plausible.

But there are serious problems with FIJI's campaign. As their own website declares:

By definition, artesian water comes from a source deep within the earth, protected by layers of clay and rock. There is no opening, not even a porthole to the surface. As a result, the water never comes into contact with the air, protecting it from environmental pollutants and other contamination.

Whoops! In fact, an artesian aquifer may be confined, or unconfined, as the above UGa graphic makes clear. Many others seem to get this wrong too. (Wikipedia exhibits a problem only Wikipedia can boast of, that of contradicting itself - a nice graphic clearly shows an unconfined artesian aquifer, but the first line of the entry that links to it defines artesian aquifers as confined.) To cite one of many definitive counterexamples, the U.S. Geologic Survey describes an artesian aquifer in New Mexico thusly:

Recharge to the artesian aquifer of the Roswell Basin occurs over a broad region east of the Sacramento Mountains known as the Pecos Slope where geologic units containing the artesian aquifer are exposed at land surface. Discharge from the artesian aquifer into sinkholes supports critical habitat for endangered species at the Bitter Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.

Of course, Wikipedia's entry can be corrected in about five minutes. (Got five minutes?) But when will FIJI fix their water bottle labels? And does FIJI's error mean that they don't know what an artesian aquifer is, or that theirs may not be confined?

But the biggest source of confusion over FIJI's graphic is that they show rain falling on the area and the aquifer underneath it. This immediately suggests, as it should, that the water is recharging the aquifer. It is possible that their diagram is intended to show that the water was introduced to the area at an early stage, followed by the introduction of a lava flow that turned into a layer of igneous rock. If so, there is something truly medieval about the way this graphic collapses real time into a single image without any reference to time's passage. It is more likely that they included the rain to show how it does not penetrate into the aquifer, but it seems more likely that it deserves all of the scorn it is receiving. It is a very confusing graphic.

So, long story short, such things do exist, even if FIJI doesn't explain them very well.

A few design changes could have improved the situation. The folks at FIJI could have:

• Included a graphic showing how the impermeable layer is laid down;
• included a magnified view showing how difficult it is for water molecules to navigate their way through the mineral grains of an "impermeable" rock; or, most importantly,
  
• added an unconfined aquifer above the impermeable layer (the most common real scenario anyway) to show where the rain actually goes, and to highlight the distinction between a confined source and an unconfined one.

Imagining Terrorism: TSA "Precognition" and Computer Recognition of Emotions

Boing Boing published an item on the Empathic Painting Project a while back and I've been thinking off and on about it ever since, without incident. It reminded me a bit of Komar and Melamid's Most Wanted Paintings project, except without the irony, certainly more of a science experiment than a concerted effort at artistic expression.

The technique might be more interesting in installation art than painting, which would give viewer emotions a dramatic influence over a space through their real or expressed mood. One great technological advance would be for a computer to interpret the collective mood of a group of people in the space, or to scan a variety of faces and interpret that information in some other way. This would provide real and socially useful information and making manipulation of the machine much more difficult - and, if achieved, much more interesting!

Of course, ideas like this are a creative inversion of the real work going on in this technology, a serious project which has plenty of 1984-style ramifications as well as the potential to save lives. (How often the two go hand in hand.) The New York Times published an article in late August about the U.S. Transportation Safety Administration's "behavior detection officers," an expanded cadre of officials who assess the facial expressions of would-be passengers in search of terrorist intent. Apparently, according to the graphic above, you must be happy, confused, or bored out of your mind in order to not look like a terrorist.

The Times takes the comforting tone of playing up the scientific nature of such screenings, but TSA officials admit that their techniques are not perfect. Put at its most ironic, their facial recognition techniquees are most limited by the fact that they "catch" a variety of emotions - fear, anger, frustration, stoicism - that are quite common among people going through post-9/11 security checkpoints!

I suspect that science will soon catch up with art, and human "behavior detection" screens will begin to look very... 20th century.

The Golden Age Of Embedded Comic Book Advertising

Think embedded advertising was invented by Hollywood or network television? Check out these great single-page comic-book "adventuretisements" from the early days of color comics. (Of course, the practice goes back much further than that! Radio, medicine shows... modern advertising can seem a lot less shocking when you remember its roots.)

See! Sam Spade save himself by using Wildroot Cream-Oil Hair Tonic!

Watch! Little Jim stare down a gorilla thanks to the gun he earned by selling White Cloverine Brand Salve!

"Nightmare Before Christmas" To Get 3D Release

It's Christmas in October this year: Disney has plans to release the seminal Nightmare Before Christmas in a 3D version in time for the holiday season. Drawn!'s Johnny comments that "for an animated movie that’s nearly 15 years old, Nightmare really has legs — especially in this age of CGI-or-Bust." I couldn't agree more.

What's strange is that Burton has had so little success squeezing more value out of his techniques and animation team - I recently tried to watch Corpse Bride and gave up halfway through. For all its bustling energy, the film is absolutely lifeless. Nightmare, in contrast, featured a cultural mash-up - Christmas meets Halloween - that had so much to offer Burton that he just couldn't miss.

If you happen to have a pair of 3D glasses handy, dig them out and take a look at the generous collection of 3D stills animator Joel Fletcher has posted to his own website.

Mark Jenkins' Multimedia Graffiti Art: The Politics of Absurdity

I've seen some of Mark Jenkins' "Embedded" street series (see one of my favorite figures below) but have only now learned from his website how much more his work encompasses. The balance of political messages and absurdism is pitch-perfect for illicit public art - it confronts through engaging viewers' curiosity and imagination, and ultimately has opportunities to get people thinking where many graffiti messages only generate a combative response.

Toddler TV: "Interaction," and What Television Is Really Good For

The New York Times reported yesterday on a study at Vanderbilt University that found that toddlers are far more responsive to television programming that feels "live" than to the type of faux interactions pioneered by the Children's Television Workshop in the 1960s, which remain one of the key methods of children's television today.

The Times reports:

The test hinged on a hiding game. First the 2-year-olds watched the video — either the tape or the live version. The screen showed a person hiding a stuffed animal, Piglet, in a nearby room, often under a table or behind a couch. When the video ended, the children were asked to retrieve Piglet. Those who saw the recorded video had some trouble. They found him only 35 percent of the time. Children in the other group succeeded about 69 percent of the time, a rate similar to face-to-face interaction.

Does this mean that TV programs that simulate interaction are doing nothing for kids? Not necessarily, the researchers say. A few of the children in the recorded video group were especially responsive to the games and pauses, and they were the few children in that group who retrieved the toy.

“We found that if children gave evidence of treating the video as a social partner,” Dr. Troseth said, “they will use the information.”

A 35% success rate would be damning praise in the classroom. But the article goes on to minimize the findings:

Their article referred specifically to “Blue’s Clues,” saying the show appeared to be “on the right track” — a point that, not surprisingly, thrilled creators of the program. Alice Wilder, the show’s director of research, said each script was tested in live settings with children to make sure that the show’s hosts — a young man named Steve in the early seasons and the current one, Joe — appear to be having realistic, child-centered conversations with viewers.

To me, it sounds like we haven't come as far as we'd like to think. Maybe it's because we haven't yet figured out what educational TV is really good for.

"Interactive" children's television was pioneered by the Children's Television Workshop in their design of Sesame Street. The CTW offered a breath of fresh air in the genre because they actually did research to test and improve their programming because their explicit goal was to improve literacy and help kids learn, whereas others were concerned primarily with entertainment and saw learning as a natural process that would follow without much forethought. There is still a huge gray area of unknowns in this genre, which critics on both sides use their imaginations to fill. But what we do know about child-television "interaction" we owe largely to Sesame Street. From the Encyclopedia of Educational Technology:

Critics in the 1960s predicted Sesame Street was doomed to fail because television was not an interactive enough media to facilitate learning. CTW researchers proved them wrong with what is now known as "The James Earl Jones Effect" (Lesser, 1974).

Producers filmed a segment in which stage and screen actor James Earl Jones recited the alphabet. Mr. Jones stared intensely at the camera. Moments later, the letter A appeared above his head. In his compelling voice, he then spoke the name of the letter. This sequence of events repeated throughout his one and a half minute recitation, maintaining wait times before the letter appeared on screen and before the letter's name was spoken.

When researchers showed this segment to children over time, they noted the following: During the initial viewing, children joined Mr. Jones in naming the letters. During subsequent viewings, the children anticipated Mr. Jones' spoken words and named the letter as soon as it appeared on screen. Finally, children were able to name the letter before it even appeared on screen. Clearly, children were interacting and learning!

It seems that if we will ever make progress and produce more effective television programming for very young children, it will need to examine several factors:

1. The role of single versus repeat viewings. My own daughter interacts intensively with our television, but not on the few occasions when we allow her to watch shows on PBS - her deep engagement, at the age of two, comes with heavy repetition that fosters a combination of emotions which encourages her to speak, act, and respond. This suggests that there might be different strategies for materials marketed as videos (Baby Einstein, etc.) than for serial programming on television. Broadcast children's shows will need to find ways to bridge that gap if they are to compete with intensively-watched videos for young children's attention.
2. Applying learning models to interactive strategies. The silence in my daughter's television-watching is most deafening when she is asked a direct question by a character in a television show and fails to respond, then is praised as though she had answered. Who thought this was a good idea, and how can anyone be surprised to learn that toddlers can tell the difference between this and actual interaction? I think this particular strategy will be looked upon by future generations as evidence of just how naive our view of toddlers has been. There are better ways for a TV show to interact with a child than to ask a question and assume that it is answered correctly, and most of these ways come down to looking at the issue of interactivity more broadly. A show's ability to inspire movement, laughter, spontaneous action, and creative play among viewers can go far beyond the direct "problem-solving" of shows like "Blue's Clues" and engage children on multiple levels. Just as we no longer expect direct, lecture-based instruction to be the most effective teaching method, we should not expect a simple question-and-answer format in TV programming to be the best way to teach children.
3. Evaluate what is to be learned. Surely, there is no harm in exposing a child of any age or maturity level to any learning content or strategy, if their attention can be maintained. But I am operating under the assumption that limiting our child's television-watching to a minimum is a good thing, because the things it replaces - direct interaction with a parent, as well as time to explore the world in an open-ended fashion - are generally more instructive and more rewarding than television. So I want the time my child does spend watching TV to be as beneficial to her as possible. To me this means that the content of learning should be aimed at her most intense concerns and interests at any age, or at least to those that can be met through a visual, televised performance. Among other things, this means that a good television show will help her do some or all of the following things:

• Allow her to explore places that are unfamiliar to her, but which she can connect with personal experiences. (Agriculture can be connected with the foods she eats, for example, and demonstrations of how certain real-world tasks are performed can be play-acted later.)
• Allow her to play games. (Blue's Clues meets this standard.)
  
• Invite her to explore movement and other forms of basic self-expression.
• Model language concepts that she can immediately apply to the world around her.
• Allow her to observe other children without interacting with them. That's right, without interacting. Interaction is proof of engagement with the world, but sometimes the cycles are not completed within the confines of a television show. We expect older students to be capable of "studying" a topic - reading, thinking, observing - and I think that young children's need for the same is minimized by shows like Sesame Street, which is scripted and edited in a way that stamps out opportunities for the consolidation of memory and for quiet observation.

It's only as I look back on this list that it becomes clear that only one of these things involve problem-solving, and only two of them involves what these researchers are not only calling "interaction," but are using as a litmus test for the effectiveness of a television show aimed at two-year-olds.

Does this mean that problem-solving is not important to my toddler's development? My daughter solves problems every day, and my involvement in this process may be instructive, but it is always child-led. She finds problems that she finds it meaningful to solve, and we help her find solutions, encouraging as much problem-solving in her as she is capable of. Even with forty years of R&D in kids' television programming, no one has come up with a televised strategy that can compete with that.

1960s Stock Letterheads

More great advertising art from the collection of Dan Goodsell. Below are some of my favorites; there are many more in his post.

Art Crimes

The wonderful graffiti hub Art Crimes has added links to my two posts on "Visualizing Dissent" (Graffiti As Art | Art As Graffiti) to the site's excellent Articles section. Susan Farrell's tireless work on this site has made it the best resource for writing about graffiti on the web, not to mention a great source for photographs of recent graffiti writing. I'm honored to have my voice added to the discussion there. Thanks, Art Crimes!

All This, And Cool Too: Party-Crashing at the Gates of YouTube

Something about Cai Guo-Qiang's sculpture for his "Head On" exhibition currently installed at the Dutch Guggenheim reminded me of Ars Technica's recent reporting on YouTube. A striking photograph from the Telegraph's Images of the Week (reproduced here for easy access) shows Guo-Quaing's sculptural installation of a wolf pack racing in a river of fur and teeth through the air and towards a gallery wall, into which the pack leaders have already unceremoniously collided.

Ars Technica's Nate Anderson wrote:

There comes a moment in the life of every sitcom where a desperately uncool father tries to act hip around his children's friends. The results, disastrous as they always are, should have given the UK government pause as it contemplated its own attempt at hipness—putting some videos on YouTube.

Anderson was actually writing about two incidents he considered categorically uncool: The British government's use of YouTube as a cheap public relations tool (since pulled down due to copyright issues) and a defense industry whistleblower's attempt to draw attention to security and safety issues in a Lockheed-Martin project refurbishing ships for the Coast Guard. (This, too, has apparently been removed; a search for "Michael De Kort" turns up nothing.) I'd hate to insinuate that the door-panel-mounted LCD screens in the Think In Pictures limo show anything but OKGo treadmill-based music videos or that government PR films about "sharing the leadership challenge" meet my crew's exacting pre-funk standards. But what's profoundly uncool is watching a technology website completely misread the power of a new technology because it has momentarily donned sunglasses so dark it can't see the blindingly obvious.

YouTube is not just a cultural phenomenon. It is also, believe it or not, a website that hosts free streaming video. Some of these videos are indeed very cool, and most of them, cool or not, speak directly to very young people with lots of time on their hands who are very easily bored. Meanwhile, many more people who are no longer freshmen in college skim the surface, looking for the occasional work-break fodder. At this point, it's safe to say (and Anderson says it loud and clear) that none of us are seeking out statements from the British government or defense-industry whistleblowers.

But why not?

Google ranks websites based on inbound links. Are websites that serve a niche audience or that hone an amateur's skills mocked for joining the Internet because the majority of Internet users spend most of their time on top-ranked websites? Of course not. Then why assume that anything posted on YouTube is put up with the goal of garnering massive numbers of views? Should we really ask people like Michael De Kort or British government officials to stay away from a video streaming site which offers free uploads and video hosting, blog integration, and video sharing tools because their content doesn't match the site's current target audience - teenagers looking for the next viral hit or just a way to spend half an hour that they can laugh with their friends about later? De Kort's video was viewed more than 8,000 times in three days. Top-ranking videos tend to hit a couple hundred thousand views before fading out. But what if no one's counting?

I have posted two unerringly uncool videos to YouTube, examples of middle-school educational PowerPoint animations. It never once crossed my mind that I would be "mocked" for posting them. Here's why: I assumed the only people who ever saw them would be watching them on my blog. (How many searches for "educational technology" and "nuclear fission" do you think YouTube sees in a day?) I was making pragmatic use of an web-based application that met my immediate and personal needs.

How many people use sites like YouTube in this way? I'm sure Nate Anderson has no earthly idea. In the cases of the British government organization looking for some free PR or De Kort's revelations about Coast Guard insecurity, YouTube's primary audiences were not pandered to; they were ignored, a point Anderson completely misses in his article. The Washington Post put the blog to shame, going so far as to interview people for their story and coming up with a great source at YouTube competitor who has no problem cutting through Anderson's knot of audiences and the technological tools that enable them:

"This is an excellent example of the democratization of the media, where everyone has access to the printing press of the 21st century," said Dina Kaplan, co-founder of Blip.tv, a site that hosts grass-roots television programming.

Kaplan, like others, was hard-pressed to think of another video like De Kort's. "We have some people that come to mind that like to complain about government conspiracies," she said. "But in terms of something truly substantive and credible, nothing springs to mind."

The real story for tech readers, Ars, is not how "embarrasing" it is to post serious videos for post-teenage audiences on a site like YouTube. It's a story about how easily technology blogs can get caught up in a web-app's hype and lose sight of what the future holds.