Too right

When it’s this easy to ping Yahoo or Google services to get the weather, every yahoo puts up a site. Today’s example of a one page wonder tells it like it is:

the weather for Inkom, Id

Note the small comment—Where’s a Tauntaun when you need one? Probably right behind you, mate. Not the greatest design (although a nice, high end, Swiss grid dealie with helvetica would be amusing; you know, for the contrast between ‘wang icicles’ and classiness), but at least it’s honest.

Sometimes I’m embarrassed to be a GIS professional

mostly because of garbage like this:

Ugh. (via)

I guess it’s not totally their fault; ESRI certainly has a lot to answer for in the whole design process. But still, who in their right mind thinks the ‘ribbon’ is a good bit of UI design? Or that it is an appropriate solution on every web mapping site? No one. Between this and the magical, just transparent enough so that you can’t read the legend floaty box deal on web 2.0 maps, it’s just embarrassing. And what the hell is up with those tabs? Oy.

 

A little IE6 smackdown

and another site to add to our list of one page wonders. This time around it’s Is IE6 Older Than Your Grandpa?

Ain't he a cutie?

Sadly, no highly entertaining wackaloonery in the source, but you can’t have everything. Could also use a little tweaking on the layout (unless, of course, the designer is making a statement about the horrors of IE6 dev and the disaster that is CSS compliance, in which case, good on you).

 

Employee failure

For some reason, today I was reminded of a chemical spill at my high school and how it served as a pretty good metaphor for my current situation. A container of a corrosive liquid was improperly sealed and stored on a wooden shelf. No one paid any attention to it, but the gunk on the container was slowly eroded the shelf. Until one day, the shelf broke, leading to a rather nasty spill. Broken containers, more broken shelves, potentially unpleasant chemical reactions—it was a really toxic situation (haha). The students got sent home; guys in hazmat suits got sent into the chem lab closet. No one was injured, but that was just luck. All because of one mistake, the badly sealed container, and a series of missteps by those responsible for the storage of the chemicals.

So how does this relate to the office? Consider this—you have a guy on a team who doesn’t complete his tasks, misrepresents his progress on those tasks, berates other members of the team members publicly and complains, mostly baseless, about other members of the team to their supervisor without any repercussions (to himself, certainly plenty for the team). The supervisor takes our toxic guy’s word at face value, for both his efforts and his attempts to improve his position at his teammates’ expense, even after members of the team have approached the supervisor repeatedly to discuss the situation. Here we have our toxic container, let’s just call him Guy, and the well-meaning but inept storage manager, our team supervisor. Toxic ick is leaking all over the shelf (our project) and no one pays attention.

Until one day, the shelf breaks. All of the damage Guy has done has left the project in ruins and team morale nonexistent. But, because most members of the team are also involved with other projects, the collapse of the one project has led to damage to other projects (the shelves below the original break). Here’s the problem, though, there’s no hazmat team to come save you. If the supervisor doesn’t recognize the damage and doesn’t take any steps to refocus the team and get the project back on track, odds are, the project will fail. I suppose that’s a lot to ask; if the supervisor was that clueless in the first place, there’s really not much chance that they’ll understand how to pick up the pieces. Toxic guy’s effects will continue to damage other projects. The pieces aren’t going to pick themselves up, rebuild the shelf, and generally tidy up.

I don’t have any solutions. The shelf broke months ago and no one has even really noticed how broken everything is. Clearly, it’s better to nip it in the bud. Ignoring the concerns of the majority of the team hurts morale; ignoring the repeated delays hurts the project; telling the other team members that that’s just how Guy is is just infuriating. I don’t know how you can have any trust in the supervisor after that. It’s not like there’s a switch for the next project to all of the sudden trust the supervisor again. Simply ignoring the problem will not make it go away.

Daylight savings. Thpbbpt.

In all of the calculations that they put into deciding when daylight savings should be and how much awesome money we’ll save on energy, etc, did it not once occur to anyone that maybe ensuring that we now leave work (assuming 9-5 hours) in the dark is utterly depressing? And depressing in a way that, hooray, it’s light when I leave for work just doesn’t compensate for. It wouldn’t surprise me if we spend all of our energy savings (and that is actually an uncertain premise) on things to combat the ick.

The green broken record

The mid-sized college town where I currently reside prides itself on being a healthy, decent place to raise your kids. Decent schools, safe neighborhoods, lots of volunteerism, good old-fashioned American values. So in the spirit of civic responsibility and making the community an even better place, the university and the mayor’s office put on a couple of sustainability conferences this year. All well and good—we got to hear a bit from local officials or experts about what’s being done or what might be done to create a sustainable community, have a cookie or two (while I am not a grad student, the free cookie bribe still has a wickedly strong pull), and then meet in smaller groups to discuss possible action items. These groups were divided into higher education, business and community as a way to focus the brainstorming.

I attended the community session both times. At the first conference, quite a large number of community activists attended and the session got a little heated in the traditional diehard greenie vs. evil business owner way. The second time around, we seemed to have lost the unaffiliated community activist crowd (i.e. most attendees worked for a green business, a local or state enviro agency, a local-ish university, etc, but not the guy trying to organize folks in his neighborhood to protect green space or what have you). So the session did not involve any heated arguments and instead devolved into a different, but still traditional, let’s brainstorm about eco-friendly things we could do to make the place better. Like educate people about recycling, water and energy conservation, walkable communities, etc. The only vaguely original idea I heard was using woody biomass to supply all of the energy needs of the university (good luck with that, really).

And that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? We’re still having the same conversations; we’re still talking about the same solutions; we’re still holding on to this idea that we just need to educate people more and the problems will magically go away. Let’s take recycling, since that was one of the main themes at the session. The action item that a lot of people agreed on was that we needed more education programs to get homeowners and businesses to recycle more. Because it was a lack of awareness that’s the problem.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had recycling education in some way or another for twenty-something years. So at this point a lot of those kids who have heard about recycling and how important and easy it is for years are parents and employees. Their kids are getting the same education about recycling. And yet, the common complaint is that the neighbors aren’t recycling, just look at all of that cardboard and plastic stacked up on the curb. And these same people, educated about recycling, aren’t recycling at the office either. So, yes, absolutely, what we should do is try educating people more because we just haven’t told them enough about recycling to get the response we want.

This is when I brought up some of the things people have tried with nudges, that concept of tweaking something in the environment to get people to make the preferred choice. I was thinking about my power bill rather than recycling and comparing the experiences here with those I had in Arizona. My Arizona bill included a chart showing my usage over the last year; my current bill just acknowledges the amount I paid the previous month. So here, unless I go back to previous bills, I can’t really tell if I’m doing better or worse this month or compare this month to last year. There’s no feedback, positive or negative. (There’s a power or water company out there that experimented with adding emoticons to the bills to encourage conservation—a smiley if you conserved power or water and a frown if you hadn’t. That little addition was enough to get people to start changing their habits. And I can’t come up with the link right now, sorry.) I have the education; I know that I should conserve power, but I don’t have any easy way to see the results. Given that my life is relatively straightforward, i.e. no spouse or kids to worry about, and yet I still don’t feel like I have the time to spend tracking down previous usage totals for comparison, how do we expect people with lives to do it?

We know the answer—they’re not. And so we’ve missed an opportunity to push them towards the outcome we want. Obviously, recycling is a little trickier. It would require, probably, instituting a pay as you throw billing method and curbside pickup (seriously, if I have to pay to recycle and there are easily four different recycling pickup companies, that is kind of a lot of trouble to go through; no wonder adoption rates are low). We have to start giving people easier ways to incorporate eco-friendly actions into their daily lives. And feedback to give that little extra something to motivate them to do it.

But the session ended; my groupmates looked at me like I was nuts when I brought up nudges; and everyone went home feeling pretty good about themselves for doing something good. Status quo, really.

Update: New York Times article about zero waste waste management. Although I hesitate to call required composting and recycling and a national park’s switch to bioplastics a nudge to get people to recycle. They haven’t really made a choice to do those things.

Watersheds are everywhere

Everybody is talking about the Pacific garbage patch these days, following the return of at least one trip out to study it. Which is good because the garbage patch is a troubling thing. But this video just tweaked me a bit (view it here at Treehugger). At one point, a very earnest woman says that the landfill is in the watershed! OMG, not in a watershed! And that right there is the problem. Lady, everything is in a watershed. Every landfill, every house, every coal plant, every car. And almost every watershed is part of a larger system that eventually reaches the ocean (the Great Basin is closed, but not so many people live there so for this discussion we’ll just ignore them). So of course the landfill is in a watershed. And that means that what goes to the landfill has the potential to reach our waterways and the ocean.

That statement just had this kind of NIMBY-ish feel to it. Sort of like “The landfill is in a watershed. Watersheds are these special things. I must not be in a watershed.” You put fertilizer on your lawn—it’s in the watershed. Your neighbor sprays his fruit orchard—it’s in the watershed. That doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is funneled straight into the ocean. Stuff gets in the fish, in the plants and in the soil. So get a grip and remember, everything is in a watershed.

Watersheds in Massachusetts

ModelBuilder fun

Quick tip – when ModelBuilder (ESRI ArcGIS) starts pulling the whole invalid input/input tables don’t match rigamarole, it doesn’t seem to help to just  run the validator or restart ArcMap. At least for my last model marathon, it actually wouldn’t run until the computer was rebooted. And now, no problems. Just another bit of wacky weirdness for ArcGIS.

Hmm.

I moved a few years ago from a large metro area to a medium-ish metro area. My commute dropped from 25-45 minutes each way to just over 5 minutes. Hooray for me, I’m saving the world! Well, at least some carbon. And even though it’s cut down on the driving and the gas bills, it’s come with a bit of a downside. I used to resolve a lot of design and coding issues driving and now I’m home and focusing on other things before the brain can wrap around the day’s fun. I haven’t found anything else to replace that nice chunk of time.

Alternatives for inspiration while driving:

• shoveling snow (unfortunately cannot be relied on, even in winter)
• raking (again, pretty seasonal)
• showers (a traditional standby)

There must be other minimally distracting tasks that leave enough room for problem-solving out there. I definitely don’t want to shovel more snow than I have to.

Real-time twitter trends map

Trendsmap

A new web app that displays the trending topics by location in near real-time. When you select one of the tags, the Introduction box displays a little sparkline for the region and the world as well as recent tweets with the topic. It’s pretty basic—all of the map tools are related to zooming. My main issue is with the info box on the right. That thing doesn’t move (although it does resize if the rending topic doesn’t have much to it) and it obscures part of the map. Why not just make it a column in its own right and not interfere with the map?

Anyway, it gives you an idea of the inanity of twitter without having to actually go to twitter, so there’s that.