What ‘The Office’ Gets Wrong About the Office
I start a new job next week and so I’ve been working on documenting all of my old tasks and projects in preparation for the transition. As I was going through old e-mails, I came across the introductory note my manager sent out to the department on my first day back in June …
Thick as a [LEGO] Brick
A few weeks ago, Samuel Arbesman wrote an article in Wired touching on the mathematical properties inherent in LEGO structures. In it, he discussed the results of a 10-year old study of natural and human-made networks that described how the number of distinct components in a network increased with the overall size of …
Favre-a-Palooza
Now that we can safely say that Brett Favre has retired (notwithstanding rumors to the contrary), I thought it was time to pull out some data on the indecisive quarterback’s career touchdown passes. Stats on passes say a lot about the relationship between a quarterback and his receivers so I wanted …
Unemployment vs. Underemployment
The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the results of two major surveys on the first Friday of every month (the Current Employment Statistics or CES and the Current Population Statistics or CPS). Although the amount of information in these two surveys is quite extensive, the general public is probably familiar with only …
Six Degrees of Joy Division
My local record store used to have this great poster on the back wall that explained how several dozen British indie bands from the 80s were all linked together through their various group members. The title of the poster was something like “Why All These Bands Sound the Same” and it was clearly a tongue-and-cheek …
Time-Distance Diagrams
After I was in a car accident a few years ago, I contacted the city Traffic Control Engineer to see if I could get a copy of the signal timing sequence for the intersection of the street where the accident occurred. The information they provided allowed me to construct a …
Fighting Insidious Business Jargon with Design
One of the biggest barriers to introducing new concepts to people is that they often have old, preconceived notions about those concepts that are just close enough to the truth to cause confusion. For example, my company recently started a sales program that establishes performance incentives by “vertical” — one of those vague business …