this is totally gonna work…

This is all I walked out of the local Apple Store with today. No unnecessary bag. No receipt I have to dispose of securely. Just the product I wanted and a friendly little “Thank you” sticker. If all stores were like this, I might actually like to shop.

The local Apple Store also switched over to a cool new portable POS system where just about any sales associate can swipe your credit-card and allow you to make the purchase there. They must have been paying attention to customer complaints because before the remodel, the lines to the cash register were absolute heinous.

This was fantastic. I walked in, a sales associated asked what I was looking for. I told her and she immediately directed me to the available products. I picked one and she took to me another guy who had one of these little POS thingies. I gave him my card, he asked if I wanted my receipt e-mailed to me and I was out the door in less than two minutes. In the time it took my wife to pick out a wedding present I walked a block to the Apple Store, completed this transaction and made it back to where she was before she was ready to go. Fantastic.

This past week has seen Washington State abuzz with the excitement over Saturday’s Caucuses. For the Democrats especially, this is an exciting time since the two candidates are running neck and neck and in the Evergreen State the Caucus is for all the marbles. So Saturday we headed over the local church for our precinct Caucus which was an absolute madhouse. There was a record turnout for the Caucuses and my personal experience certainly validated that.

Our particular location covered six precincts. I wish I had taken a snapshot of the precinct signup–it was utter chaos. I have no idea if there were any Fire Marshalls in the crowd, but they wouldn’t have been happy with what they saw. However, I did manage to get a snapshot of our precinct’s meeting:

This picture doesn’t really do justice to the size of the crowd. Our precinct had over sixty people register (though not all of them stayed for the meeting). This was my first Caucus and it was certainly an interesting and eye-opening experience. It was completely disorganized–our precinct head wasn’t there so we had to elect one. What we lacked in direction was made up for in earnest desire to pick the best candidate for the Democrats.

Like most of Washington State Democrats, our precinct was overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. That’s not to say that it was a room full of Hilary-haters. Indeed many Obama supporters voiced their pledge to support Clinton if she wins the nomination. However two themes emerged as people pled the case of Obama.

The first was that the sense of change that Senator Obama would bring to the nation is one that is desperately needed. The second is that having Senator Clinton in the Whitehouse would lead to four years of fractious fighting with the Republicans which would prevent the nation from addressing the stack of dire issues we face.

After we voted a couple of times, the final tally was held. We then split into the two camps. The Clinton camp needed to select one delegate to send to the city caucus and the Obama camp needed four delegates. At this point my wife and daughter left because Audrey, bless her heart, hung in like a trooper but was starting to fade. A Tootsie-pop can only take a kid so far. I stuck around for what I thought would be a lengthy delegate-selection process but what, in fact, only took about ninety seconds to decide. We selected four delegates and four backups in record time which sort of made up for the previous hour’s worth of bumbling.

We’ll see how the race turns out as this primary/caucus season unfolds, but it was certainly exciting to participate in the process and feel like it mattered.

Personal

On Super Tuesday, I forwent attending the usual Seattle Ruby Brigade meeting and stayed at home glued to the radio and TV keeping up on the primary and caucus results across the nation. I love the Public Radio/TV talking heads, but I was really lacking the overall picture. So I warmed up the Internet tubes and started searching for some helpful at-a-glance snapshot of the state of Super Tuesday.

Here then, is an amateur’s critique of the various infographics I tripped across. What I was looking for was something that would tell me:

• Margin of victory for each candidate
• Percentage of precincts reporting
• The number of delegates available
• The number of delegates each candidate won
• Clear indication of races that have finished, and those that have not.
• I want as much information as I can get in a small space
• I don’t want to navigate through data

The New York Times

So let’s start with New York Times. This tabular graphic came from the New York Times front page:

This one came the closest to the goals I was looking for. The Times doesn’t waste any space on images of either the candidates or the states themselves (something a lot of other graphics couldn’t avoid). I get just about everything I’m looking for on my list, except for the delegates.

From the front page, I followed the “Full Coverage” link to this pictorial table which shows the breakdown by state. The conversion of images to black and white for candidates that have dropped out is a nice visual touch. I don’t mind this too much because the table would still be quite readable without them. This table is essentially the same information as the previous one, except that it shows all of the states and has the additional bonus of indicating states whose primaries haven’t happened yet.

And then, of course, we have the ubiquitous geographic map. This view was predominant one across most of these sites. Many sites touted these things as “interactive” which amazes me that it could be considered a possible selling point. I’ll take “informative” over “interactive” any day of the week thank you.

The Washington Post

This little tidbit was at the bottom of each party’s news column on the Washington Post Politics page. I’m not so hot on the geographic map, but the fact that it was placed at the bottom of a text column instead dominating the page (as many of the maps do) earns this a few points.

Next, we turn to the Post’s “Super Map”, which is a glut of hyperactive mouse-oriented popups. It looks promising, but the popup comments came up too easily and weren’t easily dismissed. While this map gives us some notion of the delegates each state has, I can’t tell which candidate got what portion of delegates. Also states that have declared winners don’t show any margin of victory details. This map takes up the entire screen and doesn’t really earn the space it takes up.

At the bottom of the map was a little trend-line chart for the Democrats. Care to guess when Edwards dropped out of the race?

National Public Radio

This is the table from the front page of National Public Radio’s page. This table gives me most of the things I’m looking for with no space wasted on unnecessary graphics. While we get delegate information, the lack of percentages is unfortunate. This is the only tabular display I found that ordered the per-state results in the chronological order in which the polls will close.

This table was a nice compact little sidebar on NPR’s Super Tuesday coverage page. This is probably the best delegate information I found out of any of the sites surveyed here.

CNN

I have to come clean and admit that I simply can’t stand CNN. It’s always on and has so little useful content. The election coverage I’ve seen to-date has some of the glitziest, lowest-density graphics in their live broadcasts of any I’ve seen. The touch displays are merely a cover up for the fact that the content is empty and newscasters cannot improv. However, I have to give CNN credit with this tabular display. Not fantastic, but at least no wasted space on graphics.

However, this table falls short on a number of counts. The biggest problem is the need to paginate through results. Requiring mouse-overs to get popups on a map is one thing, but clicking through a list of data to find what you’re looking for is simply inexcusable. This is a particularly obnoxious example of failing to making the data dense enough.

From the “Full Coverage” link:

I find the stylized map insulting. The northern border of the United States is not a flat. The state borders don’t line up neatly in rows. Not only does this map have the same faults of the others (low data density, too much interaction required), it’s also simply wrong.

USA Today

The USA Today made it’s name in glitzy, over-wrought graphics and typing the URL in the browser bar I fully expected some useless 3D pie-charts and other such non-sense. I was pleasantly surprised to find this box on the front page:

This is a surprisingly informative view. The densely-packed links dispense with state navigation via map. I don’t mind navigation here so much because I can quickly get to any state. I don’t have paginate through results and I don’t have to float over states whose shapes I can’t remember to find them. Instead, clicking on a well-known state abbreviation link in the navigation bar gives you a nice detailed breakdown:

The inclusion of the advertisement in the outlined space of the first graphic works to draw your attention, but is really a turn-off. It’s only because I was giving each site one click that I continued navigating through the site. Normally, I would have left the site for that reason. To be fair, I understand the these sites have to support themselves with advertising. But putting an ad in the middle of a graphic depicting who we pick as our president in one of the most critical times of our history really cheapens the subject being covered.

MSNBC

Sigh…

By now you’ve probably figured out that I think the inclusion of visual geographic information is superfluous. The state images take a third of each state’s space for information. Other than the letter and color, which indicate the candidate and party, this space doesn’t help me. I can tell that the box is about California because it is titled “California” at the top. The inclusion of state images seems like a weak attempt to “spice up” the presentation of the data.

This graphic gives us the usual percentages, including the percentage of precincts reporting, and the total delegates which is helpful. However, since each state apportions delegates differently, we can’t really tell how important a margin of victory is in a particular state. I can’t really harp on MSNBC for this, nobody included that level of detail in the graphic summaries.

Information Design

I’m a big podcast fan. There aren’t many I listen to, but the few I enjoy accompany me and my dog on a near-daily basis. One of my favorites is Geoffrey Grossenbach’s excellent Ruby On Rails Podcast. In particular the last two episodes, about women in computing, really got me thinking about education and technology. If you haven’t had a chance to check them out, they are worth listening to.

RailsConf 2007 had the best female turnout that I’ve observed by far of any conference I’ve attended—and sadly, it was still too little. I’m not talking about having gender diversity for the sake of diversity, but that the field of software is truly missing out on a lot of talented women who have been turned away for one reason or another. Why is this happening?

I believe that it’s a combination of education and culture that has made it this way. The curriculum that has formed around computers in schools is frankly appalling. By the time students leave high school very few have had the stomach to persevere through restricted access to machines, social stigma and bad teaching (no, learning MS Word does not count as computer education).

Culturally, computing reveres the lonely genius who springs some great idea on us. Social interaction through and with computers has always been awkward and fringey, despite the success of things like IM, Twitter or MySpace. Within the so-called “geek-culture”, independence is prized over group interaction. Frankly I think this turns a lot of girls off. The cultural fabric of computing has become so rooted in shielded individuals that it simply doesn’t occur to many girls that getting involved with computing is something they might enjoy. I hold out hope that various agile methods will be adopted more widely with their emphasis on collaboration.

So what can we do? I may get hate-posts for this but I’m not sure there is much we can do for the current high-school aged female population and beyond. Each person (male and female) has acclimated to gender norms in our culture and has enough experience that changing many attitudes would be difficult. I think we have to improve the curriculum, access and social attitudes at a much younger age.

We are obligated to remove the cult of priesthood, masculinity and mystery from computing and put these wonderful tools in front of kids as soon as we can. So here’s my proposal: since the field of computing is so male-dominated right now, fathers who work with computers owe it to their daughters to make extra-sure that they get exposed to computers. This means when you’re working at home on some deathly-important thing and your little girl wants to type on the keyboard you stop what you’re doing and let her type in a word-processor or text editor. This means that you let them play around with and click on things without telling them what to do. This means you don’t scare them out of interacting with it. This means when they ask questions you try to answer them the best way you can.

My four-year-old daughter likes to “type some letters” and “play the drums that I like” on my MacBook. This translates to saying and typing letters into TextMate and playing drums via the keyboard in GarageBand. I never say no. I always haul her up in my lap, close whatever else I’m doing and let her play, explore and ask questions. Yes, this once resulted in crashing the window manager on my Linux box, but that was okay. Just the simple tactile experience of touching the machine is important.

Do I hope she follows in dad’s footsteps? Not necessarily. I only hope that she’s as fortunate as I am to have discovered what I like to do and can make a career out of it. What I certainly don’t want is to have this avenue closed off to her as was the common experience of my wife and most of my female friends. It’s going to take some time and effort to get girls engaged. We (computer nerds) desperately need them if we’re to continue to innovate, learn and grow.