Wonders Of A Well-weathered Skeleton

Saturday, August 20, 2011

90 Percent of People Don't Know How to Use CTRL+F

This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page! I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all.

"90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands," Russell said. "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for. At the end I'll say to them, 'Let me show one little trick here,' and very often people will say, 'I can't believe I've been wasting my life!'"

I can't believe people have been wasting their lives like this either! It makes me think that we need a new type of class in schools across the land immediately. Electronic literacy. Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing.

Google itself is trying to teach people a little something with their AGoogleADay.com campaign, but the ability to retrieve information via a search engine is actually much bigger than the search engine itself. We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.

Want It!

Thursday, August 18, 2011

The Sexperience

Welcome to The Sexperience 1000, an interactive journey through the sexual experiences and preferences of one thousand British individuals. What’s the favourite sexual position of iPhone users in the North? Do country music lovers over 55 prefer to do it in
the dark? Explore the 20 questions of our survey and discover what the great British public get up to between the sheets…

The Advantages of Being Colorblind

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Visualizing U.S. Expansion through Post Offices

This visualization shows how formal US territorial control expanded in North America from 1700 to 1900, as seen through changes in the spatial distribution of post offices

Planet of the Apes

Tuesday, August 09, 2011

What we drink when we drink beer

Christmas to July. Not just ME, but these were the bottle caps we saved from the two houses I live in and multiple people drinking beer. About 58% Montana beers.