Thinkcorps

• smithmag.net relaunched. very tired, but folks seem to like it. rides gonna get faster from here on out. #

Two of my current interests include homes design and green trends. So, when I see this Treehugger story, “Home Design Trends: Smaller, Closer, More Urban“, I click. Turns out, it’s based on a WaPo article on a published summary of an AIA survey of member architects. I love Treehugger, but regurgitations of excerpts of summaries just doesn’t do anyone any good.

First off, there’s no raw data to be had anywhere here, just abstraction on top of abstraction. So, I don’t really see how anyone (even the AIA, who sponsored the survey) can expect to draw any real conclusions. You should always expect surveys to be biased and try to get behind the numbers and compare your conclusions to the survey-makers’.

I love dataviz, but numbers are easily skewed and fudged, and people with no statistical background are churning out Excel charts like there’s no tomorrow. And yet, we buy into it every day. Someone makes a pretty chart and we’re all like, “Wow, that’s awesome!” All down the media chain, it’s assumed that someone else has done the homework.

Well, today I’m calling bullshit! It happens again and again, and no one calls anyone on it. So, no offense to any of the parties involved, but I’ve got a ask a few questions:

(images copied from the AIA summary article)

1. What’s with the weird data format? Percent reporting sector “improving” minus percent reporting “weakening”? What does that even mean? I’d guess it’s an easy way to exaggerate the numbers. Example: 100 people, 50 answer improving and 25 answer weakening, (25 answer something else we’ll never know). So, is the answer 50% minus 25% = 25% positive. Or 33% positive as (50%-25%)/(50%+25% total respondents)? I guess we’ll never know.
   
2. Given that this is Q3 data only,  I have to take this as “housing market is awful; people are spending what money they have on remodeling vs. buying.” No exactly earth-shattering news.
   
3. 
   As far as this expressing an interest in “new urbanism,” well, maybe. Mixed-use projects are not built by architects for families. They’re built for developers. And in almost any market, building in a denser (read: urban) environment and adding retail reduces risk in your investment. It’s not a trend because of ideals, it’s a trend because the current market  bears it out. I don’t see how this says anything about people not wanting to commute.
   
4. When I go through the list of “neighborhood features,” it has me wondering where these trends are coming from. Someone had to tell the architects they wanted these things, right? And we know it wasn’t families. Here’s a few of my personal guesses (no guarantees implied).
   
   • Does “traditional neighborhood design” = Adapting to lowest-common denominator buyers in the market to eliminate developer risk?
   • Does “dedicated open space” = Conforming to city ordinances?
   • Does higher-density development = Maximize our return on investment?
   • What’s “access to commercial”? (See previous guess)
   • Does “affordable housing” at 0% = Times are tough, screw the working class?
5. 
   I’m also very confused about the home style trends. Is new urbanism all about bringing the suburbs back into the city? Because that’s what this survey seems to say. Architects are seeing demand for features that echo the suburban single-family home. And how do you reconcile the trend of “single-story homes”? I mean, is there anything less urban, less green than that?
   

So, at the end of it all, AIA, WaPo and Treehugger have some new content, while I have far more questions than answers as well as having wasted an hour on this post.

Tags: aia, housingtrends, surveys, statistics, dataviz

I’m going to take a stab at this Yahoo/Adobe announcement, since Yahoo didn’t apparently take the time to think this through. According to the Paidcontent article, which quotes WSJ and AP sources, publishers can now include contextual ads in their PDFs. Here’s why this is dumb:

1. Selling ads isn’t hard if you’re doing it right. If your product is good, and your sales people are competent, you can make money. If it becomes hard, then perhaps the deals are too small, in which case, the prospect of splitting revenues with Adobe and Yahoo isn’t going to be any help.
2. Laying ads out on the page isn’t hard, thanks to a recent revolution in desktop publishing (Oy! Heard of InDesign, Quark Xpress??). They sometimes look better than auto-generated text ads, too.
3. Assuming #1and 2 are difficult, then you’re going to have to make up the difference in volume, which means you’d better go learn HTML fast, since PDFs aren’t going to get you the audience you need (It’s pretty incontrovertible that your Web audience is going to be larger than that reading PDFs).
4. Finally, somehow Yahoo and Adobe are going to have to convince advertisers that having their ads disappear when the PDF is printed out is a good idea. I mean, isn’t emulating the print ad/edit relationship the whole point of PDF advertising?
   

Yahoo and Adobe need to sit down and think about how they can actually make publishers “new” money, not just insert themselves into an already functional business process. They may make it “easier” for some publishers, but it’s extremely doubtful that this program will deliver solid ROI for any of the parties involved. I don’t think the math is works out on this one.

Tags: yahoo, pdf, ads, adobe

• Bubbletime: Pepperidge Farm creates site that does nothing, calls it "Social Networking". NYTimes = hooked fish. http://tinyurl.com/34jbq6 #

Every once in a while, I get an idea. I’d been walking past Powell’s technical bookstore and they had a rack full of these punch-out wood puzzle kits that made different things: heavy machinery, navy ships, etc. I figured I could do something cool with them, being that they’re basically 3D puzzle kits.

I only had to fabricate two pieces (from puzzle pieces I wasn’t going to use), so it’s pretty much all snap-together. The two pieces formed the top and bottom of the cage surrounding the light bulb.

Unlike most other projects I’ve done, this one was mostly about staring at the pieces and thinking about how they could fit together. I actually let it sit, hanging above my workspace for about a week, coming back to it every day for a few minutes. Eventually, I stumbled upon a set of combinations that I liked, at which point I took a bunch of pictures for reference, then glued it together for stability.

I put up a few more pictures on Flickr.

• I can use my Fred Meyer giftcards to buy other companies’ giftcards. Law of unintended consequences = my xmas shopping done in record time #

• can’t wait for hulu/zucker to receive ass in hat. nbc’s been rocking on itunes shiny dime. and now their hubris = bubble time #


• Signal is pretty nice iPhone remote for iTunes/AirTunes. http://www.alloysoft.com/ #