Only slightly bent

The next completed book on the subject of visual presentations on my to-read list was The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam. The subject is quite accurate; this is a book that tells you how to use visual aids to solve problems and does a pretty good job at it, too.

The book starts by quite appropriately debunking some of the myths that keep people from drawing; i.e. the familiar “But I can’t draw” and “I’m not a visual person” excuses. After those possible initial in-your-head restrictions, it’s off to work creating pictures. The book, as far as books come, is a very hands-on book, encouraging you to draw (by hand! not with a computer) the numerous examples.

Beyond the introductory chapter, the book is divided into three parts; Discovering Ideas, Developing Ideas and Selling Ideas. Along the way, several frameworks are developed to help categorize and remember what kind of visualizations are out there, what are the questions they need to answer and so forth. One of the most useful ones is the SQVID which helps decide whether a picture should be simple or elaborate (S), qualitative or quantitative (Q), explaining vision or execution (V), focus on individuals or comparisons (I) and whether it depicts change (D for delta) or as-is/status quo. SQVID combined with a list of different kind of visualizations provided, one can easily choose the most appropriate type of picture for most situations.

I found the Back of the Napkin to be a highly interesting and useful read. The frameworks it offered will most certainly come in handy in the future. One of the most interesting insights was at the end of the book; it is often forgotten was that a picture does not need to be so simple as to not require any explanation:

This brings us to the last problem in this book, namely, Is a problem-solving picture “bad” if it requires an explanation? After all, doesn’t the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” tell us that good pictures always stand on their own?
 
The answer is no. All good pictures do not need to be self-explanatory, but they do need to be explainable. It’s a rare problem-solving picture of any sort that can carry a clear message, convey powerful meaning, and inspire deep thoughts without at least a caption. [..] the point isn’t to replace all the words; the point is to use a picture to replace those words that are more effectively conveyed, understood, and remembered visually.

All in all, highly recommended for most problem solvers. Btw, the book also has a website at http://www.thebackofthenapkin.com/ along with some convenient downloadable “cheat sheets” for the presented frameworks.

When one gathers the main media consumption patterns of people and sums up the figures, you end up with an interesting dilemma. For example, Finns:

• Watch an average of 3 hours 13 minutes of television daily [article]
• Listen to the radio an average of 3 hours 15 minutes daily. [article]
• Spend an average of 1.5+hrs on the Internet daily, though this varies a lot depending on which study you believe.
• Read the printed media about 2hrs per day.

That’s about 10 hours. Add 7hrs a day for sleep, 8hrs a day for work and 1hr for commuting and there’s no time for anything else but work, sleep and media consumption – and not even time for all of that. So it’s clear that exclusive media consumption – i.e. a situation where you for example only listen to the radio and do nothing else – must be somewhat of a rare thing. Do you actually ever only listen to the radio? Or even primarily listen to the radio?

This may not sound all too interesting. But consider this: the value of the channel to its main financiers – currently advertisers in almost all instances – is partly in how much you focus and pay attention to the channel. If you don’t pay attention to the channel, you’re likely not to pay that much attention to the ads either. And this is where it gets interesting because the two channels that are most conducive to exclusive or primary media consumption are mobiles and the Internet.

While I have no studies to quote about this, all it takes is some commonsense thinking: the TV is often used as a generic background noise generator in many families, with no real attention paid to it. The same goes for the radio during your commute. But whenever you use your mobile device, already the physical limitations of the device dictate that it must usually command your primary attention. And the same goes for the Internet – it usually entails reading and it’s difficult to primarily concentrate on anything but the reading.

There is a reason why Google makes so much money and why Blyk seems to be thriving.

It’s also why you should not underestimate the power of mobiles in the long run. At the moment, most of the money might be in voice calls and relatively stupid content like ringtones, but give it 10 years and you’ll hardly recognize the landscape.

Elsewhere, this ties in with Tomi Ahonen’s long-proclaimed thesis that mobile is the 7th mass media, with this exclusivity-argument perhaps being an additional point for the claim.

Among industry experts, it has long been known that so-called “always-on” mobile Internet applications present a huge and currently largely unsolved problem for battery life longevity. There various technical and non-technical reasons for this that I will not get into here. The point is that among normal users, it hasn’t so far created any outrage – not because it’s not a problem but primarily because people do not use always-on Internet services in significant numbers yet. But as that may change, it’s good to see what you can expect when you do start using them. (as always-on, I mean applications that require TCP/IP connectivity to outside the mobile operator’s network at all times)

Let’s take one mainstream application as an example. Widsets, despite the braindead name, is a semi-popular application that is basically, simplifying somewhat, a glorified RSS reader with some scripting support. It’s a convenient application in the sense that you can have news etc update on the background and it works on lots of devices.

But what does it do to your battery? Should one care? Let’s take another Nokia application, Nokia Energy Profiler, and find out.

To cut a long story short and go straight for the bottom line, take a look at this graph. It depicts the estimated battery lifetime when the phone is idle (i.e. on normal standby mode) and when there is a WidSets application running on the background with just five widgets.

Would you start using an application that cuts your standby time by 80%? It means going from a phone that could barely handle a day’s activity to one that requires recharging before lunch.

It should be emphasized that this isn’t a Widsets-specific problem nor is it a Nokia-specific problem; similar figures can be seen for most if not all always-on mobile Internet applications on all devices.

Interestingly enough, there are many things developers, operators and handset vendors alike could do to alleviate the situation. But nobody is because nobody’s complaining. If mobile Internet services take off like many predict – and many more hope – we just might get enough people to complain about it.

A couple of years ago I completed the mind-bogglingly boring task of scanning my old negatives and slides. Not only did I end up with hundreds of gigabytes of photos, I also inherited a royal mess – from myself, of all people. While a lot of work remains to be done in organizing the photos and adding keywords, here are a few shots from the archives along with a short note. These can also compensate for the shamefully few photographs I’ve taken over the past couple of months.

First up, Sunset at Waikiki Beach, Honolulu in 1991. Makes me wish it was summer

Then some fire from 1990. I have witnessed both a small plane crash and a forest fire out of control, but for the life of it, I cannot remember which incident this was. What I do know is that it wasn’t controlled burning. What I don’t know is what the hell I was doing so close to it

Noora, my St. Bernard from the early 1990’s. She sure was one cute dog. And big. And she produced a lot of drool during summers..

Two symbols of American culture; a gas station and McDonald’s, appropriately taken at a highway rest area where an awesome sunset caught us by surprise.

A plane taking off from our then-hometown, Boston, Logan Airport in 2000. I miss Boston, it’s one of the greatest cities ever.

Looking back on these and other photos, lots of memories spring up. What I find perhaps most amazing is how did time go by so fast that I have actual solid memories from over 20 years ago? I thought it was just yesterday that I was 20 myself, what the.. Good thing, though, that most of the memories are positive. Otherwise I’d be really upset

Even though the global downturn might not have even gotten started for real, I’m already sick of the media fanning the flames of a recession, depression or prolonged stagnation. Surprisingly, even generally respected papers are joining the ranks of sub-standard headlining and stories to go with them. The media coverage of the downturn has many really annoying features, but let’s take just one in this post:

Misleading headlines (or worse) are one thing that really tick me off. A typical misleading headline, this one from Kauppalehti, reads “Yhdysvaltojen talous supistui viime vuoden loka-joulukuussa 6,2 prosenttia.” (translation: “US economy shrank by 6.2% during october-december quarter”). Reading that, one would expect that the economy shrank by, well, 6,2% during that period, when in fact it did not. Whenever headlines like this are present, almost invariably the percentages therein refer to annualized figures, which are an entirely different thing from quarterly figures.

Another typical headline is offered by The Australian, hollering “Economy grinds to a halt”. If one would view things objectively, the headline should mean that economic activity stopped altogether which it, of course, has not done. That dramatic headline in fact stemmed from a 0.5% reduction in Australian GDP in 4Q08. That’s like saying that a car traveling at 205km/h “stops suddenly” when in fact it decelerates very very slightly and continues traveling at a speed of 203.975 km/h. “Grinding to a halt”? Hardly.

What most annoys me is that it’s quite natural for an economy mostly based on finite resources to eventually stop growing. For some curious reason almost nobody in the media, governments or businesses seems to understand this.