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If you design web sites, write reports, or do presentations, you should probably take a look at the work of Edward Tufte. One of his best-known essays tells how your typical PowerPoint presentation can obscure information more than it helps illustrate. So what do you do if you have a ton of numerical data and just two and a half minutes to present it? Well, if it's data about the pron industry on the Internet, you could do something like this: (Might be NSFW) [youtube]QOFTQpNhsWE[/youtube] Thanks to TechCrunch for digging up the video. The video might seem like just a punchline, but seriously, this is the perfect way to present this data and I think it could be translated to other subjects as well. Obviously it would take a bit of creativity, I don't mean to say that your quarterly sales data should be sharpied across your significant other's backside. A simple example: if I had data about food, I might capture my audience's attention with pie charts made out of, well, actual pie. Tufte is not really a fan of pie charts, and I admit this example is more about capturing attention than effectively conveying complex data. Can you think of any novel, but amazingly appropriate, ways to present facts and figures? And in case you need the executive summary (read: no data) of the above presentation, here it is: [youtube]QtiGd58J0bY[/youtube]

So, as you may or may not know, here at unsought we are really kind of environerds, some more than others. Either way, while stumbling on the internet I came across a page about an environmentally friendly roller coaster. Needless to say, my love for the environment, for the zany, for all things Japanese and for roller coasters overtook me and I read the entire article. Since it was in Japanese, the English translation is a little lacking but you get the general idea if you go to read the site. If not, you can just read my interpretation of it, and I will even put up some of the pictures of this "green amusement ride". Not to dissuade you from ever wanting to actually ride this roller coaster, the general gist of the article is "fear". To be honest, they use the word "fear" 18 times in the article. Though they felt the fear, they do recommend the ride after all is said and done. Basically the premise of this roller coaster is that you are pedaling instead of having it run off of gasoline or electricity. As you may or may not know, it takes a tremendous amount of energy to power a single roller coaster all day, thus wearing down our natural resources worse than leaving all the lights on in the house as your mother often yelled at you for doing. So, here you are doing the environment a favor, and you are doing a favor for your health as well. Think of it as killing two birds with one stone, but don't actually kill any birds, thank you. I realize that that may seem like a lot of work and not really worth it when you want to ride an amusement ride, but how cool is this? I mean, look at those seat belts. Those are not going to hold you in if you were to fall out. I am serious. The thrills are a mile a minute, or at least as fast as you and your partner can pedal. And the roller coaster even has a little basket, just like that bike your cousin handed you down when you were a kid, the one with the basket and bell and the little tassels on the handlebars. As the Japanese would say, it's very nastukashi or sentimental. This ride is apparently located in a Japanese amusement park on the island of Seto, but I am not sure of the name. From what I can gather, though, it might called Eagle Feather Mountain Highland. The coaster is much more of a monorail type than an actual roller coaster but the fear comes from the possibilities of falling out of the car to your death; some of the turns on the course are more than forty feet from the ground. The actual enviro-coaster is the one with the arrows pointing to it, there is another energy powered roller coaster in this park as well. Look how high up some of the track is from the ground. I can see how these people feared for their lives, but that's part of the thrill of riding a roller coaster. The Japanese writing on the picture says chiyupikosataa, the second part of that if you sound it out is coaster. From what I gathered from the site, the mascot of this amusement park is a mouse called Chiyupi, so this probably a coaster named after it. I don't really think this will catch on with American audiences, but I know that if I go back to Japan, hopefully in October, that I will make it a point to try and find this park just to ride this ride. If I do, I will definitely write another article on this coaster with a first hand account of if it was really worth all the effort and fear. Until then, please enjoy the fantastic amusements that are located in your general vicinity.

A lot of really crazy ideas were floated as the next big thing during the dot-com bubble. USB-powered olfactory devices, buying 50-pound bags of dogfood online, and even Internet currency backed by Whoopie Goldberg instead of the Fed all got a lot of press and a lot of money before disappearing. You might remember a lot of excitement around the idea of Internet radio back then too. It seemed for a while that everyone and their brother was setting up RealServer on a spare Pentium II or signing up with Live 365 to broadcast the definitive European house techno mixes or every bootleg Phish MP3 they could collect to the masses. Streaming was dodgy, but possible, over dial-up speeds and it worked so well over high-speed lines that universities and offices ended up blocking ports. But Internet radio has largely faded away. Was it a bad idea all along, like the CueCat? Nope. Was it killed by ever-expanding iPod storage? Probably not. Rather, Internet radio's popularity and vitality were drained by a poorly-legislated artificial monopoly and compulsory licenses. This all has to do with how music is licensed. In the wild-west days of the Internet, anyone could broadcast anything and it was up to musicians and copyright holders to go after broadcasters. Since broadcasters included anyone with some spare time and virtually no one was making any money, this resulted in a huge, messy, innovative, fascinating jumble of Internet radio stations, much like the fascinating jumble of Web pages we know and love. Clearly, though, musicians had a valid argument about not getting paid for their work. At first, the RIAA pursued the same tactic used against Napster and other P2P systems - refuse to negotiate at all and sue into oblivion. Lawsuits, or the threat of lawsuits, shuttered services like NetRadio. Finally in 2002 relief came in the form of uniform royalty rates set by the U.S. Copyright Office. Unfortunately the rate, 7/100th of a cent per song per listener, was much too high for all but the largest Internet broadcasters to pay. And the fee was retroactive to 1998, meaning big checks were due when the policy went in place. To put that fee into perspective, let's say you have a station that averages 10 listeners at any time. You play songs that average 3 minutes each, and were broadcasting from 1998 through 2002. That's 700,800 songs, and really 7,008,000 listener-songs, which means suddenly you owed almost $5000. Small change for Yahoo, perhaps, but good luck making $5000 in advertising revenue with an audience of 10 listeners. So by 2002 we've done a great harm to a once promising medium. It isn't dead yet, since some big players can afford the fees or subsidize their broadcasting with other revenue. Not quite dead, but not lively or interesting - let's say five years of a persistent vegetative state. Now The U.S. Copyright Office is pulling the feeding tube. It has granted the RIAA the exclusive right to administer a compulsory license over all music through it's collection agency, SoundExchange. This means two things will change- first, the fees are going to go up, way up. Second, even if you don't play any music owned by RIAA member record companies, you still might have to pay them. This doesn't necessarily benefit the copyright holders. SoundExchange doesn't have to seek out and pay the 13-year-old kid who created some random MP3 on his mom's iMac. Also, forcing broadcasters out of business will result in less fees being payed. Pretty much every blog on the Web thinks this is an ill-conceived plan. Listen, I've watched a fair amount of Star Trek in my day and when Wil Wheaton tells you something won't work, you better listen. In addition to stunting an entire medium, this whole system is obviously unfair. Internet radio will pay much, much more than terrestrial radio. The regular radio stations pay license fees based on a structure that was calculated based on their revenues. Those royalties probably totaled less than $500 million last year, but by the time the online fees hit their cap Internet radio will pay a projected $2.3 billion for fewer listeners. What can you do? Not much, but the founder of Pandora has asked people to sign a petition. The "Internet Radio Equality Act," introduced by Congressmen Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and Don Manzullo (R-Ill.), would reverse the decision so writing your Congressmen might help a little. But in large part the damage is already done. Imagine if the Web had been subject to similar legislation. Back in the 1990s copyright holders like Disney and Fox were aghast that anyone could put up a site with a GIF of Bart Simpson or Mickey Mouse. Do you think the billions of dollars of value and commerce generated by the Web would have happened if every single jpeg, whether or not it was someone else's IP, required payment of .07 cents per pageload?

A few months ago I was looking at blood sugar meters and cholesterol testers for family members.  I have had my blood tested for various things throughout my life and I've seen the standard drugstore-issue glucose monitors in action, so I had a very basic idea of what I was looking for.  But I wasn't exactly an expert, so I went online. Now one of the benefits of living in the Internet age is that if you need to learn about any technological device, from MP3 players to video cards to application servers, you can quickly and easily find out all about it online.  Making a major purchase?  Some skillful Googling will lead you to novice-level tutorials, product comparisons, recommendations from normal users, and jargon-laden details from experts. Unless you want to buy a glucose meter.  I found virtually nothing except for short blurbs on retailers' sites.  I even had a hard time finding product info from manufacturers! The worst thing is, I was wasting my time.  Even if there had been a ton of info out there, comparisons, anecdotes, reviews, etc., it would have been no use.  Because as far as I can tell, all blood glucose monitors are complicated, confusing devices that are difficult to use.  Diabetics are supposed to test their blood every day, but the testers are temperamental, require expensive consumables, and can fail without always alerting you to the error. You have to line up drops of liquid on a tiny little target.  Make sure you cover the whole target, or the results will be off.  Make sure you don't go outside the target, or you'll screw up everything.  Oh, maybe you need to recalibrate.  Did you check how old the strips are? I was really, really surprised about this.  Actually, it was a mix of surprise and anger - why should anyone have to put up with such frustration for something that is so important? Why would a confusing interface make me so angry?  I couldn't really put my finger on it (bad pun) until now.  I just read an article at Techcrunch, "Apple iPod vs. the Insulin Pump."  Apparently a blog that covers Diabetes that has posted an open letter to Steve Jobs of Apple:

We are, of course, deeply grateful to the medical device industry for keeping us alive.  Where would we be without them?  But while they’re still struggling with shrinking complex technologies down to a scale where we can attach them, hard-wired, to our bodies, design kinda becomes an afterthought.

This is where the world needs your help, Steve.

This is precisely what is needed.  Now, it doesn't have to be Steve Jobs or even Jonathan Ive, the guys who designed the iPod.  Any designer with some insight and a proven track record of making usable devices could probably improve these medical devices immeasurably.  Millions of people's lives could be made easier if someone married modern medical technology with user-centered design. So add me to the list of people asking the questions in this letter, Steve (few people realize that Steve Jobs reads Unsought Input daily and hangs on our every word).

Wind turbines are cool. The might not be able to replace all the coal power plants in the world, but they're a great example of how old concepts and new technology can be put together like peanut butter and jelly to become a delicious source of power. They're also a great example of the sort of positive environmentalism that sees efficiency and economic growth as two sides of the same coin. I would go so far as to say that most of the various groups opposing wind farms around the country are really lame. But what if I wanted to join in on the blade-spinning fun, instead of just blathering on and on about it on the Internet? There's a cool-looking rooftop vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT) from a company called Mag-Wind that looked really promising when I first saw it late last year. It's compact, doesn't require a tall mast, and it's designed specifically for roofs. Unfortunately, it might not be on the up-and-up. Paul Gipe at Wind-Works.org ran some numbers and he doesn't think the power output they are claiming is possible. There's also some talk of a fake Mag-Wind dealer (not actually authorized by the company) taking a whole bunch of people's money in North Dakota. More interesting discussion can be found at Treehugger. This is unfortunate because I had dreamed up a plan to put one of these guys on top of my roof any then buy a plug-in hybrid like the Chevy Volt. Charging a battery at night is already cheaper than buying gas according to Prius conversions. I'm just the kind of geek who goes out and spends money on sort of thing. Now it is possible that the calculations are off, because no one seems to have been able to make any independent measurements yet. Maybe the assumptions are wrong - for example, when they say 1100 kWh/month in a 13 mph average wind, maybe they are talking about the wind measured in a clear area away from buildings, like you see on the weather report. Because of the "roof effect" the wind actually hitting the turbine would be more than 13 mph. Also, this isn't a completely fictional company, their representatives and distributors have contacted bloggers and other writers here and there. So I guess I'll hold out a little hope and keep an eye out for something to materialize from these guys. In the mean time, anyone have a recommendation for a roof-mounted wind turbine that definitely exists? Maybe the WindCube (man that is cheesy-sounding bad name)? Oh, and here's some footage of various wind turbines in action in Taiwan. Not too exciting, but it shows that some people have working VAWTs up and running. [youtube]n0_lmtfwUYg[/youtube]