1) Listen. She notes that people will think you are smart if you listen — it’s not just the listening, but that what you say afterwards will be more relevant to the person you are talking to because you understand their context.
2) Focus. “Most companies die of indigestion, not starvation…. if you do one thing well, you will have the opportunity to do another.”
3) Make new mistakes.
Nice interview on vator.tv
Can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena? Some folks at Google have been tracking how often people search for flu-related terms and to what extent it relates to CDC data about how many people see their doctor with flu-like symptoms.
They have put together a compelling visualization along with a great article about the process. Here’s an excerpt:
“It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.
“For epidemiologists, this is an exciting development, because early detection of a disease outbreak can reduce the number of people affected. If a new strain of influenza virus emerges under certain conditions, a pandemic could emerge and cause millions of deaths (as happened, for example, in 1918). Our up-to-date influenza estimates may enable public health officials and health professionals to better respond to seasonal epidemics and — though we hope never to find out — pandemics.”
The Google folk, Jeremy Ginsberg, Matthew Mohebbi, Rajan Patel, and Mark Smolinski, and Larry Brilliant have teamed up with Lynnette Brammer from the CDC and have written an article that has been accepted into the scientific journal Nature. Fascinating, yet somehow spooky.
Like many folks in America, I watched the election results stream in through television and Internet sources. The television cnn experience was fabulous in a cheesy, over-the-top kind of way that we’ve come to expect of our tv news. I thought the hourglass display of exit poll survey data was very nice and I wish they had posted it on the web. On the Web, I liked the dailykos interactive map for pure usability (easy to read graph of electoral votes and the ability to zoom into each state to see results per county). However, the visual design of the NYTimes was, as usual, quite lovely: readable with clear navigation (also with the zoom in county results feature).
Each of the sites I looked at was well done. The production values were high and I can imagine what kind of prep went in making these interactive visualizations happen. I was dismayed to see no credits to the individuals who created these pieces. Every photo in the New York Times has a credit, why not the information graphics and interactive charts? If anyone knows the stories behind these, please let me know. I’m very interested in the people who made them and the stories behind the work, whether it be the design process or the data feeds. With any luck, some of these folk are bloggers.
Daily Kos (click for full size images):
clicking on a state would zoom into election results per county:
