diseña libre

¡Soy el diseñador anónimo de la experiencia del usuario! ¡Soy poderoso! ¡DISEÑARÉ!

New Good Sheet - It's the Economy, Stupid

Resurrection Men in the News AGAIN

I'm tellin' ya, this story has legs... and arms... and knee caps... and... I'm just happy to know that my little dark comedy still seems to be relevant.

From the beeb:

Prison for US body part snatchers

Mastromarino described his crimes as "disgusting and embarrassing"

Three men who admitted conspiring to sell on body parts harvested from corpses in the United States have been given at least eight years in prison.

A Philadelphia court jailed Louis and Gerald Garzone, who ran funeral homes in the city, from eight to 20 years.

The scheme's mastermind, Michael Mastromarino, was handed 25 to 58 years - to run concurrently with a similar sentence already received in New York.

The body parts were sold to biomedical firms without the consent of relatives.

They were then used by unsuspecting doctors in medical transplants.

Overall the operation generated $4.6m (£2.3m) for those involved.

Alistair Cooke

The court in Philadelphia - where the Garzone brothers last month pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy, theft and abusing corpses - heard from 40 character witnesses before sentencing.

Many said the accused had made a mistake, and all three defendants apologised in court.

"Words cannot express how sorry I am," Michael Mastromarino said. His crimes were "nothing less than disgusting and embarrassing," he added.

Mastromarino is already serving between 18 and 54 years in jail, a sentence handed down by a court in New York, where he ran the body parts operation.

His company, Biomedical Tissue Services, took body parts from funeral homes in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Among the corpses used was that of veteran BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke, whose bones were sold for $11,000 (£5,400) after he died from cancer in New York in 2004.

In Philadelphia, Mastromarino paid the Garzone brothers - who ran two funeral homes and a crematorium - more than $245,000 for at least 244 bodies between February 2004 and October 2005.

After buying the corpses, Mastromarino would send a "cutting crew", led by former nurse Lee Cruceta, to Philadelphia to dissect the bodies.

The body parts were sold around the country for surgical procedures including knee and hip replacements, as well as dental implants.

The authorities have only been able to identify 49 of the 244 bodies sold by the Garzones, since the process entailed falsifying names, ages and causes of death to disguise the fact that some parts came from bodies too old or diseased to be harvested legally.

You can judge a book by its cover

And I SUCK at it.

How about you?

Keith Loutit's amazing real life in minature...

Amazing videos from Australian photographer Keith Loutit.

I am a Sydney based photographer. These photographs and short films were made in ordinary places, probably not too unlike where you live. Combining a variety of techniques including tilt-shift and time-lapse photography, I aim to present Sydney as the Model City, and help people take a second look at places that are very familiar to them.

Bathtub III from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Advertising 3.0???

???

A friend asked me about where I think advertising is heading.

Here are my far to hastily dashed off thoughts:

I would say that things to talk/think about in terms of future trends in advertising are:

• mobile advertising (right now very similar to the early days of the web... banner ads, etc., but it's going to be HUGE)
• video ads (no one has really figured out how to make money on video... the standard model--pre and post roll--sucks, and there is a lot of experimentation with lower third style ad placement etc., Google is monkeying around with adwords in Video, but the industry is still waiting for the big new idea.
  
• branded entertainment There is a lot of experimentation with advertainment (folding advertising messages in with entertainment--also known as branded entertainment or content) and my gut tells me that that's where some interesting new ideas are going to come from, but nothings hitting big yet.
• enhanced behavioral targeting new ways to behaviorally target web ads (for example, showing more and more detailed ads as a user refines their search for a car) right now behavioral targeting is pretty simplistic--based on keywords, etc.--but if the advertisers can get users to opt in and allow their entire browse history to be used, the targeting can become much more focused.
  
• Google radio & tv ads (ad agencies should be terrified of this...)

So, if web 1.0 was about experimenting with traditional business models (selling products--Amazon) online, and one of the big underlying stories of web 2.0 was the fact that Google basically became an alternative to the traditional ad industry, to me web 3.0 is going to be about several things in terms of advertising:

• Targeting using algorithms--using a user's browse behavior to present the user with the right content in the right context automatically (so ads are going to be valued much higher than they have been because they will be targeted much more precisely. (the old TV/Radio interrupt model will die))
  
• Ads being presented to users across a variety of platforms--computer, TV, radio, mobile, etc.
• The lines between ad and content becoming more and more blurred
• Ads becoming even more interactive (perhaps we'll see more alternative reality games as ads.)
  
• And continued opening up of advertising (TV and Radio) for those who can't afford to advertise under the current model.
  

So what do you guys think? Where do you see trends headed?

Tape Findings

Like Found Magazine for audio. Awesome! In their own words:

Welcome to Tape Findings. This site is an archive of one of a kind cassette tape recordings and other odd sounds that I have discovered throughout my years searching thrift stores and garage sales. I hope you find them as fascinating as I do. Enjoy!

Watching the Feeds

To me, the whole lean back / lean forward description used to describe the difference between the TV vs. computer experience is not so slowly falling apart.

People are watching full length episodes of TV programs (or even movies) on their computers on Hulu, Joost, and ABC.

Current and F'N MTV are constantly blurring the lines between what's sposed ta be consumed on the computer, and what's sposed ta be consumed on the television set.

And, now, on the internets, data feeds are starting to be consumed just like we used to watch the idjit box. (and some of them are pretty idiotic, actually...) You can just sit back, pop-open a beer, and let the rich, data-rich goodness of the internet wash over you. (or do what I do, and scream and yell at the screen, just like I usedta with the telie...)

Election.Twitter.com is my most favorite feed to sit back and scream at:

It's like a giant 90s chatroom filled with constant flaming comments flying back and forth. If you have any faith in our country at all, election.twitter.com will drain it all right out of you.

But then, when you're sick of that, there's always the rainbow vomiting pandas of Flickr. (the background image is from one of my new favorite internet artists/commentators/cartoonists/monologuists/??? (the guy's work defies descriptions I think)


It's the '08 equivalent of watching a fishtank. Sit back, and watch the friendly pandas vomit out the best that Flickr has to offer...

Originally, in the lean back/forward world the sole purpose of computers was to convert data into information... now they are turning it into entertainment. What a wonderful, horrible world we live in.

What are your favorite data feeds to watch?

Things I Covet

Nerdbots!

When to Use Which UX Research Method

Great article from Jakob Nielsen, on when to use which user experience research method:

He breaks the product development cycle into 3 stages:

1. Strategy
2. Optimization
3. Assessment

	Product Development Phase
	Strategize	Optimize	Assess
Goal:	Inspire, explore and choose new directions and opportunities	Inform and optimize designs in order to reduce risk and improve usability	Measure product performance against itself or its competition
Approach:	Qualitative and Quantitative	Mainly Qualitative (formative)	Mainly Quantitative (summative)
Typical methods:	Ethnographic field studies, focus groups, diary studies, surveys, data mining or analytics	Cardsorting, field studies, participatory design, paper prototype and usability studies, desirability studies, customer emails	Usability benchmarking, online assessments, surveys, A/B testing

He breaks down the different research methods on 2 dimensions:

1. Behavioral to Attitudinal (what people do to what they say/think/feel)
2. Qualitative t0 Quantitative (psychological/sociological to mathematical/statistical)

And then talks about where the different methods fall, and when they are most often used.

The Moral Mind

A great Ted Talk from Psychologist Jonathan Haidt about how and why we evolved to be moral.

Very applicable in this election season...

Hack The Debates

Pop-up commentary...
CurrentTV and Twitter are working together to mash up Tweets and the VP debates.

Should be interesting. From Current/Twitter:

Current & Twitter have teamed up for the very first time to integrate real-time Twitter messages (aka "tweets") over major portions of a live television broadcast.

Hack the Debate by adding your Twitter posts to our live broadcast of the 2008 Presidential Debates.

We will broadcast as many of your debate tweets as possible right over the candidates, in real time, on our live broadcast.

But if it's anything like Election.Twitter.com... well, it won't be long before it turns into a MASSIVE NATION WIDE FLAME WAR... who said web 1.0 was dead?

Good Sheets

Good Sheets have been appearing at your local Starbucks.

A fantastic use of infographics to explore the major issues facing us today like fuel, immigration, health care, and global warming.

They do a fantastic job of explaining complex issues. Well worth taking a look at.

GOOD Sheet: Getting Gas

Where does your money go when you pay for a gallon of gas? How much money are oil companies making? What affects the price of gas in the United States? Why do gas prices vary so much from one country to another?

GOOD Sheet: Coming to America

Both presidential candidates have plans to address illegal immigration into the United States. These numbers show how many people are immigrating, where they are coming from, and why coming illegally might seem like an attractive option.

GOOD Sheet: Bill of Health

The prognosis for health care in America isn’t positive. Many people are uninsured and many more lack the level of care they need. Collectively, we cough up trillions to keep citizens well, but our health indicators lag behind other nations that spend far less. Here is a detailed diagnosis of the problem.

GOOD Sheet: CO2 World

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most prevalent greenhouse gas. It is emitted when fossil fuels—such as gasoline, oil, and coal—are burned, and it traps heat in the atmosphere. We produce more CO2 than the environment can process, raising the temperature of the planet. It’s getting hot in here.

An interesting diagram from an article on Usability Post about branding and colors:

The associations they use in this diagram come from an interesting web tool called Cymbolism an interactive survey of color and emotion:

And it's a fun little time waster too...

Beautiful 3D work

From some dude in Russia (I think... sadly I don't read Cyrillic)

This stuff is amazing.