brownorama’s bookmarks, posted 2005-04-27
This image does not scare me nearly as much as it should:
Source: Homeland Security White Paper, published recently by Association for Public-Safety Communications Officials.
The visualization is trying to show that incidents requiring additional responding agencies need better interoperability. Interoperability is the ability of radio communications systems to work together, such that users from different agencies can communicate with each other. Lack of interoperability was one of the issues that came out of the 9/11 Commission Report — the firefighters at the World Trade Center could not talk to the police officers. There are several reasons why our public safety and security personnel do not have interoperable radio communications systems: poor equipment, lack of governance, scarce spectrum, among others.
Although the government and private sectors are finally doing something about allocating spectrum for use by public safety and homeland security personnel, it has been a long time coming — more than 10 years. As a designer, I can’t help but feel like the calls to action — while earnest and lucid — were not spelled out as clearly as they could have been. Advocacy groups for public safety did not produce a “Napoleon’s March” — a rich visualization of the issue with a simple and powerful message.
In this graphic, for some reason, the author plotted the frequency of occurence against the number of agencies responding: two variables that don’t have anything to do with each other. Additionally, neither of these variables specifically speaks to the need for freeing spectrum for use in public safety. While I do not (yet) have an alternative, the graphic should account for:
- Not just the number of participating agencies, but the number of lines of communication. With two agencies, there is only one line of communication. Adding another agency to the mix triples the lines of communication! Adding yet another doubles the lines of communication again!
- The severity of the incident, as a measure of the number of potential fatalities, the long term impact to infrastructure, and the financial cost. This variable is probably not independent of (1) because the scale of the incident would probably increase its jusidiction or at the very least create jurisdictional confusion, causing increased participation.
- A direct measurement of the lack of interoperability. For example, the time to respond. In other words, when agencies can not communicate with each other, it takes longer to respond to individual issues within an incident. Not being a public safety person, I have no idea if this is a relevant metric, but the graphic needs something like it to be convincing. It needs to tie the lack of interoperability with the context of the incident to agencies’ ability to respond to it.
- Ideally, actual incidents. The graphic should show incidents where interoperability was and was not available and the impact on agencies’ response. The impact of “Napoleon’s March” is its depiction of actual events, so that the next general who thinks he can march an army into Russia in the dead of winter will think twice about it.
Of course, the key problem here is lack of data. Although bits and pieces exist, it would take time to research and compile. Who has the patience for that sort of thing?
Additionally, the original graphic never intended to be a representation of data. Instead, it depicted connected concepts, as demonstrated by the seemingly hastily added incident names (”Industrial HazMat”, “Airplane Crash”). Though infinitely more powerful when built with actual numbers, it may be possible to create a visualization that shows the relevance of these concepts without hard data.
I’m going to be puzzling through this for a while: how do you show the importance of radio interoperability with a graphic? Relevant datapoints include the number of agencies involved, the severity of the incident, and the effect of interoperable radio communications. Am I missing anything?
How would you tell this story?
brownorama’s bookmarks, posted 2005-04-26
- Why Can’t We Talk? — National Task Force on Interoperability (pdf)
- Homeland Security White Paper - APCO Intl (PDF)
- WFDT - Chapter 4 - Lakoff
- Federal Functional Requirements for Commercial Wireless Services (PDF)
- gaoreport1.pdf (application/pdf Object)
- NASTD - Technology Professionals Serving State Government - Publications
For some reason, she’s stayed with me for eight years. Today, Sarah and I celebrate our octo-versary. Del McCoury says it best:
My love will not change
My love will not change
It just rolls like a river
To the sea of your name
My love will not change
My love will not change
It’s as steady as the rhythm
Of the pouring rainMy love will not change
My love will not change
Might as well try holdin’
Back a fast freight train
My love will not change
My love will not change
Baby, ask me tomorrow
And I’ll tell you the same
Happy anniversay, sweetheart!
brownorama’s bookmarks, posted 2005-04-25
I finished Dan Pink’s Whole New Mind this morning on the train. Great stuff. I highly recommend it with only a couple small reservations. A full review is forthcoming.
Have you seen ads like this one?
Are you seriously asking me if I’ve evolved?
I saw them all over New York this past weekend. Microsoft insists that Office has evolved and wonders if their users have. The ads are being lauded as clever, and the associated web site is also described as “hilarious”:
The site features a receptionist wearing a dinosaur head and a map leading to different rooms with information about Office functions–not features but functions. Good approach, because the focus is on what people can do with the product. By the way, there are people in each room, all dressed in dinosaur heads. And they all have problems to solve or successes with using Office. Hilarious.
It’s just this sort of thinking that makes me want to buy a Mac. People work the way they work — it’s not antiquated, obsolete, or extinct. Software must accommodate the foibles of human behavior and account for the unpredictable nature of collaboration, innovation, and — frankly — deadlines. That Microsoft believes its software is superior to their customers is indication that people did not play an important role in the design of the product.
I know Microsoft is better than this. I know they invest substantially in user research. Why portray users as long dead, stupid lizards? A better message would have been: You have evolved. Don’t use extinct software. Office evolves as work evolves.
The end of analog TV - PRACTICAL FUTURIST - MSNBC.com
This account of the digital transition is somewhat slanted toward the broadcasters’ perspective. (The author is a columnist for MSNBC, so that’s no surprise.) He leaves several of the equations dangling — the broadcasters aren’t just interested in serving the public, they’re concerned about advertising revenue; auctioning off that spectrum would more than subsidize digital converter boxes for low-income families; dragging our heals will leave America technologically in the dust and stifle innovation.
If you’re not a television-watcher, stop reading now. In this post, I apply some amateur cognitive linguistics to primetime. Why wouldn’t I? TV and philosophy represent a substantial portion of my spare time.
And if you think Buffy the Vampire Slayer is nothing more than Dawson’s Creek* with vampires, then do us both a favor and move on to your next RSS feed. There’s nothing for you here and you’ll just think less of me.
Say what you will about Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BTVS), but it was no doubt revolutionary television. Both comedy and drama, both horror and teen soap, both parable and satire, BTVS broke “genre stereotypes”. On the surface, it was action-packed and touching, but it also had subtext, a metaphor for growing up.
Buffy faced real demons that embodied her psychological demons. So, when an unpopular girl in school felt like no one really saw her, she really disappeared and began terrorizing Sunnydale High. When, as a teenager, you feel like you can’t be heard, Buffy faced demons who caused a mute epidemic in her town. To get her voice back, she had to find the strength within herself. You get the idea.
On Monday night, Sarah and I caught up on DVR and watched the new medical drama Grey’s Anatomy. It was the third or fourth episode we had seen. It follows a handful of young interns at a Seattle hospital as they struggle with the trials and tribulations of 48-hour workshifts and uncooperative patients.
On my way to work Tuesday morning, I was thinking about the show and thought:
Grey’s Anatomy is the Buffy of medical dramas
Like Buffy, Grey’s Anatomy uses a larger-than-life situation — medical internship — as a backdrop for learning about life. The main character, Meredith Grey, is also dealing with romantic issues and family issues. The patients and colleagues she interacts with parallel the events of her life. Sunday night’s episode, entitled “No Man’s Land,” deals with intimacy on several levels: the intimacy between Meredith and her new roommates, between Meredith and her Alzheimer’s mother, between Meredith and her patients.
In the claim “Grey’s Anatomy is the Buffy of medical dramas,” Buffy acts as a beacon, pointing the way in the sea of medical dramas, toward Grey’s. Grey’s anatomy is in the same category as ER and House and Chicago Hope and General Hospital and China Beach and Doogie Houser, MD and Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman and St Elsewhere. But all these examples are connected to the prototype differently. Distinguishing Grey’s from these others requires stepping out of the genre, and looking to another show that distinguished itself from its peers.
The blend happening here is between two genres — between two graded categories of television shows. But only certain elements are being mapped. There are substantial differences between Grey’s and Buffy, which become effectively ignored in the blend. Buffy takes place in a fantasy world and she has superhuman powers. The main characters in Grey’s are in their 20s, while for the first several seasons of Buffy most of the main characters were teenagers. Buffy had a support network of friends that sometimes challenged her. Meredith has competitive colleagues who are sometimes friends.
There are also similarities in the shows that are not relevant to the blend, as I conceived it: Both Buffy and Meredith have older mentors, have difficult relationships with their mothers, and find themselves involved in complicated romances — Meredith with her boss and Buffy with a vampire (it’s a long story).
How do these ideas get excluded from the blend? I’m not sure they do. You might say that these other similarities serve only to amplify or reinforce the blend. At the same time, these elements do not distinguish Grey’s from other shows in the genre. Many medical dramas deal with mentor relationships, complicated romances, and the impact of work on family life. What put Buffy and Grey’s in the same class is that both use the main character’s profession as a metaphoric system for illuminating the character’s person.
For the sake of relevance, this makes me wonder about how we use genres in other blends, especially with the emergence of new digital genres:
- Salon is the New Yorker of online magazines.
- RSS feeds are the clipping services of cyberspace.
- IMDB is the Daily Variety of movie sites.
Genre theory, as reported by Leen Breure in Development of the Genre Concept, accounts for evolution — the emergence of new genres. The theory acknowledges that new genres, until they have established a stable role in the culture, “mimic” existing genres. Mimicry perhaps helps the transition, an intermediate stage in the evolution to give people a means for understanding through conceptual blending.
Either way, you should really be watching Grey’s Anatomy.
* Admittedly, I hated Dawson’s Creek with a passion.
How do I get to be a language designer for video games?
The New York Times > Arts > Do You Speak Tho Fan? It’s All the Rage in Jade Empire
If one set of fictional characters had given him his ear, he was eager to answer BioWare’s call to give others their voice. He set about asking Mr. Bishop’s team questions. He wanted to know the speakers’ physiology. If they had no teeth, they wouldn’t be able to make a “t” or “th” sound. They had teeth.
