Courage

This guy is my new idol for standing up against the US Border Patrol's unconstitutional checkpoint 40 miles from the US-Mexico border:



Via Cato@Liberty.

Wilkinsonian Insight

David Brooks (of The New York Times) wrote an op-ed proclaiming that individualism is dead because humans are naturally social creatures. Will Wilkinson smashes that non-sequitur with one sentence:

Individualism is indeed unnatural — much like other noted mockeries of the natural order, such as equality under the law, vaccination, and the wheel.

He actually wrote many more sentences, all of which destroy David Brooks' ridiculous proposition.

Yikes!

Guess what movie this poster is for:


Why, it's the mad-capped zany Weekend at Bernie's, of course! Apparently Poland likes its movie posters a bit more dramatic.

Via The Agitator.

Cursive Typing

This is the future of text input:



Just like cursive handwriting allows a person to write words without picking up the pen, this technology from Swype allows you to type words on a touchscreen without picking up your finger. I think I would prefer this greatly over T9 (the predict-what-you're-going-to type technology used in texting).

Via 37 Signals.

Foodzie: Like Etsy for Food

Foodzie is a new website that allows people from all over the world to buy food directly from small boutique producers. As 37 signals says, it's "like Etsy for food." Hopefully the site will be a huge success...this is a great way for small businesses to compete on equal footing with big corporations.

Image of "Enrobed Candied Lemon" from here.

User-Reported Usability Testing

A while ago I heard about UserTesting.com, and then this post in Usability News alerted me to the presence of Userfocus. Both companies offer unmoderated, "crowdsourced" usability testing in which users spend a bit of time with a website and then offer their opinions. Whereas UserTesting.com seems a bit more structured--users are screened ahead of time and paid for answering pre-defined questions, Userfocus seems more open-ended and open to more users. In other words, UserTesting.com delivers more feedback but also a lot of noise, while UserTesting.com will yield less but more useful feedback.

Users are notoriously-bad at self-evaluation, so my first reaction to these services is that they probably are a good first pass but do not substitute for more traditional, moderated usability testing. In some respects, these services seem more like crowdsourced heuristic evaluations, which typically involve "experts" in user interface design rating an interface against a standard set of metrics. Of course, UserTesting.com also provides recordings of each user's screen actions and the "think-out-loud" things that users say, which is a useful check on the self-reported findings.

In any case, these services seem to be filling an important niche of providing cheap and fast usability testing. While not perfect, this may be the only usability testing that many startups and small businesses can afford, and certainly some usability testing is better than no usability testing.

Image from here.

I wonder how well these work...

The picture above is from this post by Jan Chipchase. I wonder how effective those little blue things are at protecting against door dings...it looks like the blue things have to be on the door of the would-be denter, as opposed to the dentee. So what's the incentive for the reckless door openers of the world (those most likely to dent other cars) to put on these blue things? Maybe it's part of the ground rules for parking in a given lot?

I got my picture taken with Rachel Maddow!

After going to the Daily Show in St. Paul last Thursday, I noticed MSNBC's Rachel Maddow in Rice Park. She was nice enough to let me take a picture with her. Obviously I don't agree with Ms. Maddow on everything (although I'm sure we agree on a lot), but I really respect how she argues/debates. She's one of my favorite political pundits. So it was neat to get my picture taken with her.

Wilkinsonian Insight

Will Wilkinson:

Indeed, it makes a lot more emotional sense for me to feel led by by a woman like that than by some hotshot Air Force pilot. When a guy with a buzzcut says “jump,” I say “screw you.” When a woman like Sarah Palin says “jump,” I am inclined to deferentially inquire into the requirements of this jump.

I have to say that I agree...maybe it's a midwestern thing?

Just Attach the Funding to the Student

There is a big protest going on in Chicago that first involved hundreds of Chicago Public School students peacefully gathering on the campus of a very nice suburban public school and is now going to involve students sitting in the lobbies of big corporations in downtown Chicago. The goal of the protest is to even out the discrepancy in per-pupil funding in Illinois:

At issue is how much money schools spend per student. In a funding system largely fueled by local property taxes, New Trier Township spent nearly $17,000 per student in 2005-06 and Sunset Ridge spent about $16,000, while Chicago Public Schools spent an estimated $10,400 per student.

The leaders of the protest seem to want to change the system so that all schools in the state get the same amount of per-pupil funding. This would be better than the current system, but imagine all the bureaucracy needed to work this out.

A much simpler, more elegant solution is to just attach the funding to the student and let the student and their parents decide where to go to school. This is how they do it in Sweden.