ryan.freebern.org

I like to think of Burlington, VT as “the biggest little town in the Northeast,” not because we’re especially populous (the metropolitan area has just over 200,000 people; compare that to Boston’s 4.4 million, or Providence’s 1.6 million), but because the community here is so unique and varied. Thanks to the near ubiquitous availability of high-speed internet, we’re also a well-informed and well-connected community, and our IT sector is thriving. Because of this, when it comes to local politics, I’ve had an easier time here than anywhere else I’ve lived learning about and discussing the issues and the candidates.

While Burlington’s traditional print media outlets (the daily Burlington Free Press and the alternative weekly Seven Days) are strong and well-written, there are also good online sources of news and information. A huge number of people subscribe to their neighborhood’s Front Porch Forum and voice their opinions through that venue, for instance, and our city government does a fairly good job making information available. There’s local politics weblogs: BurlingtonPol.com, the Vermont Daily Briefing, and She’s Right to name a few. And we have CCTV, our local government-access television channel that also streams live on the web during big events.

It’s no surprise to me that the combination of a strong IT sector and easy access to lots of quality information and debate leads to a vibrant and involved community. This was demonstrated well yesterday on Vermont Town Meeting Day 2009, the day when towns across Vermont hold their town meetings and elections. Last weekend, Bradley Holt of Found Line put together a website to aggregate social media feeds related to this annual Vermont political process. tmdvt.net pulled in content from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Del.icio.us, and weblogs via Technorati, collecting loads of real-time news and thoughts in one central location. Word of the site spread quickly, and the local news sources joined in, both contributing to the feeds and pulling them onto their own Town Meeting Day news pages.

But beyond the “official” news sources, local community members also took part, tagging their tweets and photos and blog posts appropriately so that they’d show up, and it was their contributions that really made the project take off. By harnessing and encouraging the enthusiasm of the people of Burlington and the rest of Vermont, tmdvt.net instantly became the go-to site for live election coverage. To describe this effect, I’d like to coin the term townsourcing: a localized form of the popular social-web concept of crowdsourcing. I look forward to seeing how it can and will be used more and more to encourage participation in local politics, media, and culture.

Thanks, Bradley, for putting together such a neat experiment, and thanks also to everyone who took part. May next year’s tmdvt be even better!

With two local teams (I’m from New York and now live in New England) on their way to Superbowl XLII in Arizona, football has been on my mind more than usual lately. I’m generally not an avid football fan, but I’ve taken more of an interest this year as the juggernaut Patriots have surged their way past record after record, so I’ve spent a significant number of hours in the past few months watching the televised broadcasts of the games. While the game itself is enjoyable, there’s always one thing that bugs me: the informational on-screen graphics that the various networks use to display the current game state all seem to be missing something.

Score isn’t everything

When I look at the TV and a game’s on, there are a handful of key data points I want to gather as quickly as possible so that I’m up to speed with the game and can pay more attention to the action than to the numbers. That’s the supposed purpose of the infographics: to provide a quick snapshot that I can instantly parse into a game state, to mentally construct a symbolic understanding of the game so far, which I will then use to fully understand the meaning of the teams’ current actions in the larger context of the entire game. These are the data points that I believe any football fan needs to build an accurate mental snapshot:

• Quarter: how far along is the game?
• Time left: are we nearing a break?
• Score: who’s winning, and by how wide a margin?
• Possession: which team has the ball?
• Down and Yardage: is the offense running out of chances to make progress?
• Ball position: how close is the offense to scoring?

Additionally, the graphic needs to be designed to take the following accessibility factors into consideration:

• Obtrusiveness: is there a good balance between readability and screen coverage?
• Contrast: is the graphic readable by viewers with poor vision?

How they do it

The three major networks that broadcast NFL games—Fox, CBS, and NBC—each have their own style of infographic, although Fox and NBC use a similar design, and while theirs are better than CBS’s, they’re still not great. Here’s why.

CBS

CBS chose to go with a shape-shifting graphic that hovers in the upper corner of the screen. Its default layout shows the Quarter, the Time left, the Scores of the two teams (using abbreviated team locations), and Possession is indicated by a tiny yellow dot. Occasionally, a black bar appears at the bottom of the graphic that shows the Down and Yardage, but this information comes and goes seemingly at whim. At other times, a yellow “Flag” indicator appears at the bottom, and sometimes other information about drive length, possession time, individual player statistics and such appear at the bottom or at the end of the “arm” of the graphic. Ball position is never shown. Occasionally, the information-rich arm disappears, leaving only the “NFL CBS” logo. Woe to the viewer who tunes in when that’s the only thing displayed on-screen!

The CBS graphic is somewhat Obtrusive, since it hovers in the corner of the screen, set well away from the edges, obscuring a portion of the camera’s view of the field. However, it does have good Contrast: the text is all white on black or black on white.

One nice subtle touch is that the arm switches direction to indicate the direction of the current offensive drive; unfortunately, doing this requires the graphic to swap from the top left to the top right of the screen, an inconsistency that I think is harmful; consistency is key.

NBC

NBC’s graphic lies Unobtrusively along the bottom edge of the screen. It reads naturally left-to-right in a single line, and you can immediately figure out the Score and the Quarter and Time Left. The section containing the Down and Yardage, however, is dynamic. Sometimes it shows nothing, sometimes the Down and Yardage, sometimes a yellow “Flag”. Nowhere is Possession indicated, which strikes me as a major oversight. The text has good Contrast, however, and the inclusion of the team logos is a nice addition.

Fox

Fox takes a similar approach to NBC, only their graphic stays almost at the top of the screen, and is narrower than NBC’s, making it very Unobtrusive. Contrast is decent, although the small fonts hurt readability. Scores, Quarter, and Time left are all constantly displayed and easy to find, but once again, the Down and Yardage displayed here is in a section of the graphic that is constantly in flux. The rightmost third of the graphic (showing “Playoffs - Divisional”) is unchanging, and could be put to better use providing more contextual information, such as the Ball position. Possession is indicated with a bold, high-Contrast outline, making it easy to tell which team has the ball.

How it should be done

The (fictional, of course) Yin Yang Network takes a similar approach to that of NBC and Fox, but enhances it by adding all the necessary information that the others leave out. On the left, we have the Scores, including team logos and team location abbreviations. Possession is indicated by a colorful highlight around one team (and on the bar above it), and Ball position is listed next to the team currently in possession. In the center is the necessary network logo. On the right is the Down & Yardage, beneath which can appear a conditional “Flag” marker (but never anything else). To the right of that can occasionally appear the play clock, when it is close to running out. And finally, on the far right, we have the Quarter and Time Left, fulfilling all our informational needs.

And as for accessibility, the graphic is thin, partially translucent, and sits at the very top of the screen, making it as Unobtrusive as possible. The fonts are big, bold, and Contrast well with the background, making them easily readable by even viewers with poor vision or colorblindness.

While I have no illusions about any network adopting my design, I figured it was a good exercise to compare what’s being done and see how it could be improved. What do you think? Is my design better or worse than the others? Have I missed any considerations? What would you have done differently?

Recently I was thinking about the whole copyright/software patents/DRM/DMCA kerfuffle, and it struck me that it’s a very interesting story with a lot of neat characters, and it would make a great documentary along the lines of “This Film is Not Yet Rated”. I discussed it with friends, all of whom agreed that it could make a great film. There could be interviews with Jon Johansen (of DeCSS fame), Bruce Schneier, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Steve Jobs, Page and Brin, maybe even an anonymous informant from within the RIAA or MPAA.

Today, I watched a video of Cory Doctorow giving a talk about these topics (his favorites) at Google. You can watch on YouTube if you’re interested. It’s an hour long including the Q&A session at the end, but Doctorow is a compelling speaker and it’s a great talk if you care about information freedom and the future of technology. The reason I bring it up, though, is that thirty minutes into his talk (at 30:45, actually), he offhandedly mentions that he’s “doing some consulting on a movie” that Kirby Dick, the creator of “This Film is Not Yet Rated,” is doing.

So I think that, given Doctorow’s involvement, maybe Dick is actually in the process of making that copyright/software patents/DRM documentary that I dreamed up. You heard it here first!

I have come up with a neologism.

trengedy, n.

What occurs when the mainstream media seizes on a particular type of tragedy that’s not actually very common, seeks out every instance of it, and reports on them all, making people think it’s much more common than it really is.

Example: “The rash of reports in Summer 2001 about shark attacks was a particularly heinous trengedy.”

Googling this term gives one hit, which appears to be a typo on a foreign language blog. Hence I think I can safely claim I’ve invented it. Now, go forth and use it! Maybe this can be my eventual claim to fame.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who doesn’t care about the Oscars this year. In 2006, according to this page, there were 354 movies released. I saw 9 of them in theatres: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, X-Men: The Last Stand, Casino Royale, Borat, V for Vendetta, The Illusionist, A Prairie Home Companion, Marie Antoinette, and The Notorious Bettie Page. Of those, I didn’t enjoy Borat, I was unimpressed by Marie Antoinette, and I thought The Illusionist, Dead Man’s Chest, and The Last Stand didn’t live up to what they could have been. The two movies from that list I really loved — Prairie Home Companion and V for Vendetta — didn’t get any Oscar nominations. So, meh.

I don’t have a lot of movie-watching time, but I do like to keep on top of the stuff considered really great. Which movie released in 2006 that I haven’t seen do you think is really worth seeing?

Boing Boing: Big theater chains refuse to show Soderbergh’s “Bubble”

Soderbergh is taking a novel approach to distributing this movie, one that I’ve thought of in the past: he’s releasing it in theatres, on pay-per-view television, and on DVD all on the same day. His rationale is that movies are already hitting the internet the same day they hit theatres, so why not give people other options than illegally downloading it?

The movie theatres, understandably, are upset. They say giving people these options will decrease their profits. This is potentially true, and I’m curious to see how it goes.

However, occasionally I’ll see a movie in a theatre, and love it so much that I’d be willing to buy the DVD immediately, if it were available. If the movie theatres simply set up a DVD stand in their lobby where you could purchase the DVD of a movie you just saw, at a lower price than in a DVD store, by presenting your ticket stub, I bet lots of moviegoers would take advantage of it.

In any case, bravo to Soderbergh for attempting to tackle the movie-downloading problem through unconventional means. Instead of engaging in pointless lawsuits that have been proven to discourage nobody, this approach is productive and thoughtful, and could help to update the film industry’s business model to compete in today’s high-bandwidth world.

Edit: Mark Cuban, who owns Landmark Theaters (which is the only chain actually showing “Bubble”), agrees with me, but is a much more eloquent guy, so go read his post.

Browncoats Rise Again. The fund-raising drive to revive Joss Whedon’s Firefly. (Warning: loud Flash movie.)

A group of Firefly fans is trying to raise enough money to produce 24 new episodes of Firefly. That’s $24 million, they estimate. While I’d love to see this happen, I somehow just can’t see that kind of money being raised. But if you really love the series, go donate! At the very worst, all the cash donated will end up going to a charity of Joss Whedon’s choosing.

When she gets too burned out on studying, Sarah’s been playing the game “Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life” on our GameCube since I bought it for her for Christmas. It’s a lot like both Animal Crossing and The Sims in that you’re controlling a character in all aspects of his life, as he attempts to run his farm, make friends, engage in romance, and more.

Meanwhile, I’m attempting to learn basic Italian for our upcoming trip. I’ve been using the short lessons at LearnItalianPod.com as well as at the BBC website, and I’ve got a book out of the library to help me.

While watching Sarah play for a few minutes the other day, it struck me that combining these two activities could quite possibly be the best way to learn a new language. When I start learning a language, I find it pretty easy to learn the rules of grammar: how to construct sentences, in what order to place words, how to manipulate endings to form plurals, etc. What I have trouble with is learning enough vocabulary that I would feel comfortable, or at least not totally lost, in all the various situations I might find myself.

Harvest Moon takes your character and has him engage in a large number of common real-life activities: cooking, shopping, ordering food, looking for people, exchanging small-talk, sleeping, cleaning up, and so on. What if, instead of all English, it began the game by replacing a few common words with words in another language. Instead of “bring your milk to this cooler,” it could tell you to bring your latte to the cooler. Instead of picking a flower, you’d pick a fiore. Instead of your cow being hungry, it could be affamata. Slowly, as the game progressed, more and more common terms could be replaced with their foreign equivalents. At some point, new characters could appear who only spoke in Italian, and you’d have to figure out what they’re saying in order to interact. Eventually, all the text in the game could be in Italian, and if the change was gradual enough, over the course, of many dozens of hours of play, the player might not even miss a beat.

This would, I think, work better than other methods, because 1) people love playing videogames, and will gladly do them for hours, even if they don’t necessarily understand all the words, 2) part of playing games is solving puzzles, so players’ brains would just interpret the foreign language as another type of puzzle, and 3) all the words used would be shown in a familiar sort of context, with visual cues to aid in understanding.

Videogames appeal to young and old alike, so this could potentially be a great learning tool for anyone. Kids are naturally more adept at learning languages, too, so it would work even better for them. And the marketing opportunities are tremendous: sell it to videogamers as a game, or to parents or educators as a learning tool.

I use AudioScrobbler, a service provided by Last.fm that keeps track of what songs I listen to when. Even though I know anyone can observe my listening habits and judge me based on that, I don’t let it affect what I listen to. As you can see on my profile page, along with such inarguably fantastic music as Thievery Corporation, Zero 7, and The Ditty Bops, I’ve also got some remarkably cheesy artists like Neil Diamond and Mannheim Steamroller.

If you use AudioScrobbler, do you try and show off your good musical tastes and hide your poor ones? Or do you choose to not care, like me, and just listen to whatever strikes your fancy?

Apparently Verizon is selling a phone for kids called “Migo.” Maybe they didn’t know that this term is already in use, and refers to something that kids would probably want to avoid:

Mi-Go, the Fungi from Yuggoth

“They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be…. As it was, nearly all the rumours had several points in common; averring that the creatures were a sort of huge, light-red crab with many pairs of legs and with two great bat-like wings in the middle of their back. They sometimes walked on all their legs, and sometimes on the hindmost pair only, using the others to convey large objects of indeterminate nature. On one occasion they were spied in considerable numbers, a detachment of them wading along a shallow woodland watercourse three abreast in evidently disciplined formation. Once a specimen was seen flying—launching itself from the top of a bald, lonely hill at night and vanishing in the sky after its great flapping wings had been silhouetted an instant against the full moon.” (“The Whisperer in Darkness”) (From A Lovecratian Bestiary)

Seeing the Peanuts television special “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” on TV was something I looked forward to every Halloween when I was a kid. It was on TV tonight, and is still amusing, and now nostalgic as well.

A year ago, the excellent online speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons published a short story that fans of the Peanuts special will appreciate. I’m linking to it now because even if you’ve read it before, it’s still wonderful: The Great Old Pumpkin, by John Aegard. Happy Halloween, and enjoy.

Strange Horizons, which is entirely volunteer-run despite paying its contributors well and being considered a professional fiction market, is conducting a fundraising drive. They hoped to raise $3000 this month, but their meter only shows about $600 so far. If you enjoy the story, and want to help keep a great zine in business, please donate a few bucks. I just did.

When Sarah and I bought tickets to see Tori Amos at the end of August, we were especially exicted because, at that time, Imogen Heap was going to be the opening act. Imogen used to be half of the duo Frou Frou, whose excellent album Details is well worth picking up if you like, say, Zero 7, Thievery Corporation, or The Postal Service. Her new single, “Hide and Seek,” was recently featured in the season finale of season 2 of Fox’s hit prime-time soap “The O.C.”, and has since been consistently high on both the U.S. and U.K. iTunes charts. Her new album, “Speak For Yourself”, was just released in the U.K.

However, I recently got notice that Imogen will no longer be opening for Tori. The reason? Well, in Immi’s own words:

Ok…you know that Tori tour…well…erm…it’s not happening. I’m really sorry for anyone who’s already bought tickets in the hope of catching me play. Some of you know I STILL haven’t signed a licensing deal for the states yet (my goodness these things take time!) and it’s now only 3 weeks until it would have kicked off. Also due to the exchange rate it’s almost twice as expensive for a US label to fly me out as ususal and at the start of the album US campaign that is a lot of money gone…

Despite her obvious commercial appeal and amazing success on iTunes, Imogen can’t find a U.S. label to even distribute her new CD, much less pay for a tour. Any U.S. label not leaping at the chance to get this wonderful, talented artist on board is a complete moron. The sales to fans of “The O.C.” alone will be huge. Imogen Heap is an artist to watch, and I’m deeply disappointed that I won’t get to see her perform live.