The Adnostic

The Zen Master can tell that I am starting to get very excited about SXSW, because I have officially gone into Hyper Organized Social Mode. These are the symptoms that I have displayed so far:

1) I have taken the liberty making sure that every SXSW Interactive event is properly tagged and grouped on Upcoming.org

2) I noticed that there was an uneven dispersion of events on certain days, so I went on the SXSW Evening Events page and transcribed every missing event onto Upcoming.org

3) I am now have either a watching or attending status on every SXSWi event. Even the one possibly sponsored by a pornographic media service (btw, not going).

4) I created a map of Downtown Austin with the location of every bar hosting a SXSWi event.

5) I signed up for Twitter so that I know where all the cool kids are at all times.

6) I entered the entire party schedule into my cell phone.

Some people turn into a blubbering mess when they're excited about something, I turn into a geeky Martha Stewart crossed with a Tasmanian Devil. That's how I roll.

Part 1, Part 2

Presentations (creating and evaluating)
1) Figure out their story (understand)
2) Assess credibility (bias, competence)
3) Write down domain statement
-- What is this relevant to?
-- What leverage does it give?
4) Stop abbreviating the truth

Use PowerPoint only as a projection software

Use Word to write presentations
- What the problem is
- Why it is important
- What is the solution

No executive grunts (abbreviated/incomplete sentences)
- People can read faster than you can talk

Creating Presentations
1) Work on the content
2) Practice, practice, practice
3) Show up early
4) Problem, relevance, solution (200 words)
5) Never apologize
6) Avoid using first person singular or plural (no opinions)
7) Know your content and respect your audience, be reasonably frank
8) Humor. Make sure jokes are relevant and on point
9) Finish early

Part 1

Analytical Design Principles
- Turning fundamental cognitive tasks into design principles and practices to assist thinking about the information
1) Compare data, show comparisons
2) Show mechanism, causality, dynamics
-- Casual thinking is unnecessary
3) Show more than one or two variables
4) Completely integrate words, numbers, and graphics (it's cell data)
-- Tell the entire story with the graphic
-- No bureaucracy of information
-- Design should explain content
5) Document everything and tell people about it
-- Establish credibility
6) Design is an agency to content
-- Serious presentations stand or fall depending on the quality of the content (relevance, integrity)
-- Boring numbers -> get better numbers, do NOT over-design
7) Try to show information as long as possible adjacent in space
-- Not stacked in time (flip, flip, flip)
-- No such thing as too much information for the human eye
-- Start with the hardware and what the user sees and then think about software.
-- Begin with content.
-- "Visible certainty liberates us from wordy arguments." ~ Galileo

8) Use small multiples
-- A small canvas on which to paint the information
-- A steady field to show content variation
-- Mastery of detail generates credibility
9) Take graphics and tables as seriously as we take our words on the universal grid
-- Put everything in context
-- Detail brings context, not clutter
-- To clarify, add detail. It shows relation.

The single biggest threat to learning the truth from a presentation is "cherry picking" data.

Lumpy graphics are better than spiky graphics
- You can see patterns in the data better

I went to a one-day seminar on graphical data presentation with Edward Tufte in Downtown LA on January 31st. People who were not there may consider them nonsense, but these are my notes:

Gather information in whatever form it takes to explain something.
- Multiple levels of information
- Segregation by discipline
- Ref: Beautiful Evidence, pg. 79 SARS Diagram
-- Data points = nouns
-- Connecting lines = verbs, differentiated/annotated to define relationship

Efficiency = elimination of unnecessary data, no "chart junk," more room for content (Beautiful Evidence, pg. 79)

Provide reasons to believe through design, establish credibility
- Peer review, credible publication, detail, source
- Constant caveat - Accept until better evidence is presented, or alternative explanation.
-- We want an open mind, but not an empty head.

Visual Explanation, pg. 90 Genealogy of Pop/Rock Music
- Intriguing texture of content
- Evoke a content response
- "But where is Emmy Lou Harris?"
- High resolution display = interactive
- The viewer explores on their own
- The design is simple; the content is rich and complex
- Clutter is not an attribute of information; it is a result of bad design (failure)

Visual Explanation, pg. 120 Quote from Salmon Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories
- Sustained visual metaphor in words
- Evidence does not care if it is in words or pictures

Envisioning Information, pg. 56, 57 Hospital Bill
- Annotation provides additional evidence
- Link words to a particular place
- Small but effective contrasts (grayed out lines)

All Purpose Consult
- Find good examples and copy them
- Talent imitates, genius steals
- Excellent conventional (widely used) examples
-- Performance data -> market, weather, or sports sections of newspaper
- Giving lots of data points creates greater interest
- Organize data/reporting style
-- Look to NYTimes or WSJ, in the appropriate section, for examples of reporting materials

Multimedia
- Multi Variant Problem (3+ variables) - high dimensional
- Information resolution, rate of information transfer
- Euclid's Geometry
- Legends take away from graphs
- Build a model

Another meme, another excuse for random personal content on my site, and another chance for navel gazing. This one came through Erika and seemed like a heck of a lot of fun and just about as accurate as getting your tarot cards read by a storefront psychic or a web site.

Here are the rules - Put your iPod, iTunes, or music player of preference on shuffle and interpret how the songs that play answer the following questions:

How does the world see you?
The Jessica Numbers by The New Pornographers. "This thing is your mission, lone wish and condition." Maybe the world sees me as someone driven and focused. Definitely career wise, possibly even in my personal life as well. Goals are set. Accomplishment is inevitable.

Will I have a happy life?
How It Ends by Devotchka. Oh boy. This is such a sad and beautiful song of survival and hope. "And in your soul, they poked a million holes, but you never let them show. Come on its time to go." Life is hard, that is no secret. You get knocked down and you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and persevere. It's how I've lived my entire life so far and just because I have found some personal and professional success doesn't mean that will change. "You already know how this will end."

I have always liked this quote from Lauren Bacall (my namesake), "I am not a survivor. Anyone can just survive. I prevailed."

What do my friends think of me?
What You Live By by Harvey Danger. "Lay me down in the bed that I made, starved for sleep by the shrill serenade, singing over and over: You die by what you live by." Wow, this is getting depressing. I suppose this means that my friends see me as self-possessed and accountable for my own actions. Something not everyone seems to practice for themselves.

Do people secretly lust after me?
Where Do We Go? by The Kings of Nuthin'. This doesn't sound like that much of a secret. This is a song about a guy who's life sucks and wishes he could get back together with his ex. I have a pretty good idea who that could be. Let him lust.

How can I make myself happy?
Nosy Neighbors by The Ditty Bops. This is all about the sins of being a nosy neighbor, not just by listening to conversations through thin walls, but also by going through other people trash and discarded letters. Um. I don't really do this. Ever. I rarely even read the tabloids. Okay, I guess I'll keep being happy by just continuing to mind my own business. I can do that.

What should I do with my life?
Down Is The New Up by Radio Head. This one is confusing. "Nothing is going to happen without a warning, down is the new up. What is up, buttercup? Down is the new up." I'm going to interpret this as saying that I'm on the right track with tracking social and business trends. This is the new that. That is the new this.

Either that, or I should prepare myself for another career shake-up. (Please, no.)

Will I ever have children?
Gone Daddy Gone by Gnarles Barkley. This could go either way. Maybe I'll have a child and loose it or let it go into adulthood, or by the time I get around to wanting a child the chance will have passed me by. "The love is gone away."

What is some good advice for me?
Aluminum Can by The Ditty Bops. "You are just a semblance of before, following the dust and calling it more, these are the seeds that beseech the leaves for cover, hiking canyons where people have fallen, these are the places where some learn to fly." I guess this is trying to say that there is nothing so radical that I can do with my life that hasn't been done before. If I decide to move to another country, that isn't so bizarre, almost an entire generation of my family did the same thing.

How will I be remembered?
Bye Bye Love by The Ditty Bops. Who knew that The Ditty Bops would be so important to my future? I suppose this means that I will be remembered as someone who lost love, gained love, and ended up the better for it. That's pretty simple and ordinary.

What do I think my current theme song is?
Time Is Gone by The Bellrays. "I don't know why I feel nowhere. Time is gone." I guess a lot of the time I feel like time is running out for me to accomplish my goals. I see a lot of other people my age who are further along in their careers and better off financially and I feel like I need to catch up. I feel like I'm late and time is running out to make my move.

What does everyone else think my current theme song is?
Ultraviolet (Light My Way) by U2. I'm a fairly decisive person and a lot of people look to me to organize events and make all the choices, and I don't really mind. I'm good at it, but I sometimes wonder how I started to shoulder the weight. It feels pretty natural. "You burry your treasure where it can't be found." I hide myself from people a lot. I'm pretty shy and tend to not extend myself around people I don't know or don't feel safe around. I'm not sure if this is best and I'm trying to be warmer towards people who irritate me, but it’s hard.

What song will play at my funeral?
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas by Coldplay. Okay, this is odd, but it makes sense. I'll be gone, but I'll be wishing everyone the best in my absence. "From now on our troubles will be out of sight."

What types of men do I like?
Fidelity by Regina Spektor. "I never loved nobody fully, always one foot on the ground, and by protecting myself truly, I got lost in the sound." I suppose this is in reference to all the horribly inappropriate men that came before the Zen Master. As long as a part of me always knew that they didn't really deserve me to begin with, then they could never really hurt me. ZM changed all that by being the wonderful man that he is. I don't know how my pattern changed, but when it happened I was taken aback by how right and natural it felt.

What is my day going to be like?
Who Cares by Gnarles Barkley. Well, I'm writing this at 8:30pm and my day as almost over. So really, who cares what my day is going to be like at this point?

Tag! Who's next?
Dave - because I figure that one day persistence will pay off.
Ms. Jen - because she has a great music collection.
CPJ - to get him back for tagging me last time.
Mike - it's a good way to get him into the SXSW mindset.
Sandra - I'll bet she's got some great music too.

Remember the Yuppie? Remember how Michael J. Fox made us laugh at his uptight Type-A character, Alex P. Keaton? The ego. The one-upsmanship. The conformity. The hyperactive drive for materialistic wealth. Lest we forget American Psycho, with a lot of same qualities taken to much darker and bizarre extremes. Is that a titanium business card I see?

Remember your classmates in the 80's with dreams of becoming stockbrokers, doctors, or lawyers? They had no ambition of changing the world or making a difference. They just wanted the German sports car that came with the hefty paycheck. They were the perfect products of insatiable affluence.

Of course you remember. Just like you remember hot pink legwarmers and Flock of Seagulls hair, all of which died out with the decade that spawned them only to be resurected for the sake of nostalgia. Right? Maybe not.

From Details Magazine:

Of course, that term, yuppie, has fallen so out of favor that we’re not even supposed to use it anymore. We’re expected to come up with a neologism—a clever 21st-century inversion of the word. But we’re not going to do that, because we don’t need to: The yuppie of 1986 and the yuppie of 2006 are so similar as to be indistinguishable. A used copy of The Yuppie Handbook recently fell into my hands. The book was published in 1984 as a jokey piece of social anthropology, and it made a slew of observations about this new American species. The yuppie’s bizarre lifestyle preferences were intended to elicit populist guffaws. Here are some of the things, according to The Yuppie Handbook, that the budding yupster could not live without: gourmet coffee, a Burberry trench coat, expensive running shoes, a Cuisinart, a renovated kitchen with a double sink, smoked mozzarella from Dean & DeLuca, a housekeeper, a mortgage, a Coach bag, a Gucci briefcase, and a Rolex. Oh, har har har, that crazy yup!

The yuppie could be found working off stress with a shiatsu massage and a facial, learning as much as possible about fine wine, traveling around the world on vacation, exercising at a fancy health club, listening to Bessie Smith and Bob Marley and the Police on a tiny device attached to headphones, drinking bottled spring water, freshening up in a five-star-hotel-quality bathroom, typing away at a computer while sitting in an ergonomic chair, racking up gobs of debt on his credit card, and—the clincher—eating tuna sashimi for lunch! The mere mention of tuna sashimi for lunch was apparently seen as the height of hilarity back in 1984. “A yuppie most nearly approaches sainthood,” the book noted, “when he or she is able to accomplish more things in a single day than is humanly possible.” (This was long before BlackBerries.)

Okay, maybe I don't do all of those things, but I would say that almost everyone I know is guilty of at least one of these things. We have essentially become our own worst nightmares in a hipster package.

“When people were denouncing yuppies, they had considerably lower incomes than yuppies, so the things yuppies spent their money on seemed frivolous and unnecessary from their vantage point,” says Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank, author of Luxury Fever. “What most people fail to anticipate is that your sense of what you need and want is very elastic. When your income rises, your consumption standard gradually adapts.”

We may have hated them then, but we can practically identify with them now, with two exceptions - we are far more self aware and globally conscious. It is no longer fashionable to simply consume for the sake of it. We don't just shop at Ralph's Fresh Fare, we spend the extra money and buy our groceries at Whole Foods because the meat is humanely raised without hormones and the produce is (mostly) organic. To show off one's wealth with a Porsche or a finely tailored suit for daily life is gauche. Instead we fill our closets with limited edition sweatshop free t-shirts and designer jeans. Its like a secret code for those with the appropriate level of affluence. If you can recognize it, then you must be in the club. The Yuppie Club.

Am I ashamed of being a Yuppie Club member? A little. But I also know that this level of affluence can do a lot of good. I can give to charity. I can buy better designed, more sustainable, and less disposable products. I can be a yuppie with a heart.

[via PSFK]

It's time for another LikeMind Coffee Morning!

Bring your appetite, your caffeine addiction, and your stimulating conversation to the Susina Bakery on Friday, February 16th at 8am.

Susina Bakery
7122 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036

LikeMind.US

Upcoming.org

We have much to discuss.....