Arte-non-Vi

Tag: Communication

  • Data – Nothing to see here!

    Ravi Parikh, in his HEAP weblog, offers some advice on “How to Lie with Data Visualization”

    The importance of “data-literacy” and the cautious, if not skeptical mind, cannot be over-stated in a world of 24 x7 news cycles. .

    Parikh offers a number of telling examples of the mis-use or abuse of data visualisation to distort or deliberately add bias to a particular data “narrative”.

    The significance of truncated Y-Axis caught my eye.

    A real-world example whereby the “visual message” distorts that “numerical” or “actual” data message.

    This Fox-Business graphic shows a distorted difference between the variables because the graph Y-Axis does not start at Zero…

    Misleading news
    Beware the Truncated Y-Axis

    Links:

  • The Noun Project

    Worth a close look.

    Links

  • A Christmas Signature

    Add this to the bottom of your corporate emails, go on, no-one will notice! Really!

    Feel free to add to it if I have missed anything.

    =======================================================

    Email claimer: This email and any attachments will not contain any confidential information. It is not legally privileged and/or the subject of copyright because the content will not have any commercial value whatsoever and may have little or no artistic merit. If you are not an intended recipient it does not really matter as the content in the email will probably be vague, mis-directed and I may not have even identified myself in the subject or body of the text. It will no doubt exhibit poor sentence construction and questionable grammar, you may copy, forward, disclose, save or use any part of it as it is likely to have no value to its author. I have no doubt that the physical size of this (dis)claimer will be larger than the size of the average email I send, making it possible to DOUBLE my companies profits and HALVE their IT bandwidth costs simply by either deleting my messages and just sending the email disclaimer or simply not using email. If you have received this email in error [probably], please do not notify the sender as it was probably sent by a virus on my system. Of course, you may also get a “recall email” message from me as well, just to demonstrate that I have no idea that the whole world does not use the same corporate version of my email system. Although this email has been checked for spelling mistakes , we could not afford the ridiculous virus checker software and “IT” won’t let us use Apple Macs. I do not respect your privacy, if I did, I would not have added your email address [both personal and business] to a ridiculously long email address list and then publicise your email, along with the other 279 addresses in my Xmas mail list to everyone else, not taking the time to hide my list in the “bcc” line. I apologise if you have received this email later than expected, it is highly likely that our network has been shutdown again for a security breach and thus the IT department has determined that the best productivity improvement they can make [rather than designing a network for users] is to simply block all access to staff for an indeterminate period of time. I will now attach my ACTUAL signature as a coloured gif image, further adding to the size of this signature and inviting genuine fraud and misuse of my signature by anyone on this list or the thousands of others who will get it because someone else’s virus will forward it on. I will also add an animated company logo and numerous web links, just to ensure I activate your own companies spam-filtering systems, ensuring that at least half of the people I send this to will not receive it. Thank you.

  • Seth’s thinking about quality of communications

    The bandwidth-sync correlation that’s worth thinking about

    Correlation.001
    Check this out. Every once in a while a cool graph pops into my head.

    Here are a dozen or so forms of communication, arranged on two axes.

    On the horizontal, they rank from asynchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are separated in time–like a letter) and synchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are in real time proximity to each other–like a phone call).

    Up and down, I’ve charted the quality of the medium. Quality in terms of density of information exchanged. The 140 characters in Twitter is about as low density as you can get other than a stop light. A movie, on the other hand, is loud and bright and two hours long and there’s audience reaction and it is edited and designed to evoke a response.

    To be clear, then: movies take a long time to make, but they’re high impact. Twitter takes a second to do, but there’s not a lot of info there. One on one coaching is high enough bandwidth that it can change your life and make you cry, in real time, and the Mona Lisa, while less bits per second than a TV show, has enough emotional bandwidth to matter, even if it’s 400 years old.

    So, what can you learn here?

    • There’s a huge correlation between how much interaction there is and how powerful a medium is (at least among successful media). Telephones changed the world because the interaction is so real. As you get more interactive, though, you exchange less dense media. You can’t have a real time conversation online that carries the digital impact of a movie or some other high bandwidth entertainment.

     

    • The bottom left corner is the scrap heap. It’s hard to place a commercial value on this part of the grid and there’s not a lot of commercially interesting work being done here. People just aren’t interested in low bandwidth, non-interactive media. Graffiti, for example, rarely draws a paying crowd.

     

    • The top right of the corner is where huge value and difficult sales lie. Not everyone can pay for the scarce resources needed to deliver an in-person seminar or one on one coaching, but those that need and can afford it, love it.

     

     

    If you had seen this chart three years ago, you obviously would have invented Twitter. Now that you see it today, what will you create?

    – Seth Godin [Seth’s Blog]