• Everybody on TV and in Movies Reads the Same Newspaper – The same prop newspaper is used in most? all? TV and film productions (presumably standardized for rights clearance) (via waxy)

• Subway To Start Tessellating Cheese July 1? [The Consumerist] – Three years after the protests began, it seems Subway has finally listened to its customers and will start tessellating cheese on its sandwiches, according to what appears to be an internal weekly newsletter. As anyone who has gotten a Subway sandwich knows, most Subways layer their isosceles-cut cheese in an overlapping fashion. This means one side of the sandwich gets more cheese than the other and leaves pockets of zero cheese, resulting in a uneven flavor and texture distribution. As the newsletter says, "This will improve the cheese coverage on the sandwiches."
• Reading Lolita On Paper [graphpaper.com] – Throughout the final terrifying third act of the book, Nabokov knew that the reader would be constantly, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, seeking (or deliberately avoiding seeking) a single word, a word whose distinctive typographical form would light up like a flare in the reader’s peripheral vision, paragraphs in advance, impossible to miss. Every time you turn a page, even if you avoid it, your eyes will, in an instant, claw through the one-thousand characters in every new two-page spread to find it, the word, the single characteristic letter. He plays with this visual expectation so thoroughly — torments the reader, in fact — that it’s inconceivable that he wasn’t always thinking about printed words, words on pages being turned in a reader’s hands. Oh, how glad am I that I was unable to find Lolita in any sort of eBook format.
• Kno is a digital textbook that is about to change the way knowledge is transmitted and the way students learn – First we did our homework about the way students do their homework. We studied the way they study. We probed them about the best way to re-imagine the analog studying and reading experience in the digital world. The Kno’s two generous panels open like written material has opened for hundreds of years. The experience is reassuringly book-like. Indeed, because we respect and honor the textbook, content of 99 percent of all textbooks – including the charts and graphs – fit flawlessly. No material spills beyond the screen, so there’s no awkward scrolling or manipulation required. If Kno only transferred existing textbooks into a digital form, we might as well sleep in and skip class. Kno pushes further than that. Our mission is to create a new kind of immersive, fluid, fully-engaging learning experience – made possible because the power of the physical is combined, for the first time, with the potential of the digital. It’s a whole new form factor that feels natural because it is natural.
• Christina York’s sketched notes from UPA2010 – [Her summary of my presentation begins on slide 5] This was the perfect complement to Rachel Hinman’s opening keynote. Steve enthusiastically dives deeper into cultural clues, cues and gaps that impact our work and our own experiences in this world. In this session I sat at the front, which I usually don’t do (I like to observe the entire room). However, I am a fan of Steve’s and was like a groupie in the front row. How embarrassing. But Carol sat next to me, and I felt better about myself. Steve delivered an impassioned talk and engaged an audience that richly represented the cultures present at this conference. The group discussion was as rich as the presentation and I really appreciated that Steve’s focus was to give us something to think about and not try to ground everything in application.
• Complete Beginner’s Guide to Design Research [UX Booth] – Valiant attempt to take a complex volume of expertise and boil it down to some essentials. Not sure what it means to be a "luminary" in this field but certainly the company we're listed with is pretty awesome. Curious to hear what others have to say about this piece.

At UPA2010 in Munich last month, I presented Culture: You’re Soaking In It

Culture is everywhere we look, and (perhaps more importantly) everywhere we don’t look. It informs our work, our purchases, our usage, our expectations, our comfort, and our communications (indeed, if you aren’t familiar with a specific geographic and historical set of experiences, the presumably clever title for this talk will instead be perhaps bland). In this presentation, Steve will explore the ways we can experience, observe, and understand diverse cultures to foster successful collaborations, usable products, and desirable experiences.

Here are the slides and audio:

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Listen to audio:

To download the audio Right-Click and Save As… (Windows) or Ctrl-Click (Mac)

Also see: Rachel Hinman’s wonderful opening keynote Technology as a Cultural Practice

We’re always seeking the best way to tell a particular story. Sometimes, words do the trick. Sometimes, a picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. Often, a bit of both are needed. Tonight, two pieces of data visualization to chew on…

Model of Daydreams: The Cinema in Our Head (from the flickr Great Diagrams in Anthropological Theory pool)

And this lovely meme visualization of the Sandra Bullock/Jesse James split (more like this at Current: A News Project.)

Excess (n.) The state of exceeding what is normal or sufficient.

Not long ago I started collecting images of excessive things. Here are a few that I think are particularly striking.

Terry Bozzio’s drumkit

Carbon fiber dog bowl

Million dollar monophonic speaker

Kitchen island made of Legos

Giant motorcycle

These are all extreme examples, but the line between luxury and excess, between premium and ridiculous can be a thin one, and is ever-shifting.

Artist Chris Jordan conducts a serious exploration of excess and its consequences in his photographic series Running the Numbers and Running the Numbers II.

• Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists [Wired] – The real problem, Greenblatt says, is that business interests have intruded on a culture that was founded on the ideals of openness and creativity. In Greenblatt’s heyday, he and his friends shared code freely, devoting themselves purely to the goal of building better products. “There’s a dynamic now that says, let’s format our Web page so people have to push the button a lot so that they’ll see lots of ads,” Greenblatt says. “Basically, the people who win are those who manage to make things the most inconvenient for you.” [Strongly worded insight about the state of Internet business rings tragically true /SP]
• Organizing Armageddon: What We Learned From the Haiti Earthquake [Wired] – One of the biggest ideas to hit the humanitarian community in the past decade is the notion of surveying the recipients of aid to see what they think. That’s very commercial ­ treating them more like clients than victims…After the Asian tsunami, the Fritz Institute conducted one of the first-ever surveys of aid recipients. Only 60 percent of families surveyed in India and Sri Lanka said they had received timely aid and were treated with dignity in the 60 days after the tidal wave hit. Almost everyone reported getting water within the first couple of days, but just 58 percent of Sri Lankans reported receiving shelter in a timely manner. In general, post-disaster studies tend to measure “throughput indicators” like how much food was distributed, or how much shelter got provided, instead of “output or outcome metrics” like lives saved or suffering alleviated. [A powerful reframe on saving lives, with more cultural shifts clearly needed. /SP]

• Fanboy! The Strange True Story of the Tech World’s Favorite Put-Down [Technologizer] – To understand the origins of “fanboy,” you don’t need to go back to 1919…but you do need to start earlier than 1985. Try 1973–when a handful of copies of a fanzine were distributed at a Chicago comics convention. The zine was credited to two fans who took Marvel Comics, the work of Frank Frazetta, and other matters a wee bit too seriously, Alfred Judson and Bill Beasley.

Much to the delight of shirtsleeves, elbows, and dogs, our office complex is being repainted. Today the crew painted our doorframe. We noticed that they propped our door open with an old brush. They’ve downcycled this brush specifically into a doorstop, using a saw to cut off most of the handle. Check out how well it lines up with the angles of the entryway, as if it was designed just for that purpose!

• The most misused SSN of all time was 078-05-1120 [ssa.gov] – In 1938, wallet manufacturer the E. H. Ferree company in Lockport, NY decided to promote its product by showing how a Social Security card would fit into its wallets. A sample card for display purposes was inserted in each wallet. Vice President Douglas Patterson thought it would be a clever idea to use the actual SSN of his secretary, Hilda Whitcher. The wallet was sold by Woolworth stores and other department stores all over the country. Even though the card was only half the size, printed all in red, and had the word "specimen" written across it, many purchasers adopted the SSN as their own. In 1943, 5,755 people were using Hilda's number. SSA acted to eliminate the problem by voiding the number and publicizing that it was incorrect to use it. (Mrs. Whitcher was given a new number.) However, the number continued to be used for many years. In all, over 40,000 people reported this as their SSN. As late as 1977, 12 people were found to still be using the SSN "issued by Woolworth."

• Buddhist leader tests Asustek e-reader [SF Chronicle] – Venerable Dharma Master Cheng Yen, 73, leads Taiwan's largest charity of 120,000 volunteers and teaches Buddhism on her television show. Add to her resume product tester for Asustek Computer Inc.'s e-book reader. "Because of her patience she can do a better job testing than most," said Jonney Shih, chairman of the Taipei computer-maker and honorary board member of Cheng Yen's Tzu Chi Foundation. "Some ideas were a little bit different from normal usage, but I asked my team to sincerely accept that advice." The charity is testing e-book readers for its Buddhist scriptures and to record donations, said Shih, whose company donated land next to its headquarters for Tzu Chi's Taipei office. Cheng Yen, who gives daily sermons on Tzu Chi's TV station in traditional robes and shaved head, founded the organization in 1966. The reward for Tzu Chi's help will be a final version of the product tailored to the charity's needs in the next 2 months, at least 3 months before the commercial release.