Here’s something really interesting: Mike Volpe’s word clouds allow you to get a visual sense of the content of President Bush and President Obama’s inaugural speeches. Seen side-by-side, you get a feel for how they are similar — and different. (The size of the words is determined by the number of times it was used; larger words were used more frequently.)

I’m not going to share my personal interpretations, or my reactions to the most recent inaugural address. But I confess to being fascinated by the ideas it triggered, and these clouds add another thoughtful aspect to that contemplation.

[from A Marketing Blog and other stuff]

Driving in urban parts of Israel is more difficult than in Los Angeles, in part because there is less rigid a distinction between roadway and sidewalk.

Having lanes that suddenly swoosh off in unexpected directions (while your direction becomes a “public transport only” lane) turns the whole thing into a kind of living labyrinth. The internal control tower dialogue goes something like this:

“So, if I want to get to Keren HaYesod, I can start out of Geula, cut through Davidka Square and swoosh around Agrippas. Just remember not to come out down Hillel, or there’s no right turn onto Keren HaYesod and I’ll have to go clear down to the Old City before I can start to come around again; I’ve got to sneak behind the Great Synagogue first. That’ll be fine. As long as I’m going to the bank on the right side of the street, not the dentist on the far side. For that, I’d need to begin my approach by coming through Rehavia.”

If you drive a taxi, of course, just go down Jaffa Road and turn right on King George V, which turns into Keren HaYesod. That would be too easy for the taxi drivers, though, so the municipality has thoughtfully dug up most of Jaffa Road for the past two years, just to even the score.

[picture from the Elms in the Yard blog]

Dear Fifth Graders:

How do you do! I am the little book that you have made. I have many little stories. They are very interesting. I hope you will enjoy them. They may not be exactly like the works of the great authors, but they are your thoughts and word pictures and I am sure you will love them. Take good care of me and I will bring you many happy hours.

School No. 2

February 18, 1931

[From the wonderful single-topic site, Book of Short Stories.]

Part I

I’m from Los Angeles. In L.A., we say “You are what you drive.” Sad, but true.

In a sprawling city with inadequate public transportation and a high average income, people go everywhere in their cars.

When I was a child, the car was a vehicle. My grandparents had cars (one per family, not one per grandparent) with bench seats front and rear. I climbed in and sat between Grandma and Grandpa, and we talked while we drove. If it got hot, there were these neat triangular vent windows that popped open in back, and roll-down windows that took about five minutes to roll back up (and an equal amount of time to recover from). Maps went in the glove compartment. Eating and drinking in the car were not conceivable.

When I was a teenager, the car had evolved to become a second home. My parents’ cars (one per parent) each had air conditioning, radio with five station memory buttons, power windows, console storage and a cupholder. The map was a fat Thomas Guide stuffed in the seat pocket behind the front passenger seat. That was new, too: the front passengers each had their own adjustable bucket seat (slide forward/backward and recline). We didn’t talk as much together in the car; we listened together to the radio. Usually the driver chose the station, so it was either news radio (both parents), sports, pop psychology, country music, golden oldies (dad), or classical music (mom).

By the time I finished school, the car had become an extension of self, part of a person’s identity. When you got your first drivers’ license, you started thinking about getting your own car. When my dad handed down his (totally cool) car to me, the first thing I did was earn the money to install a cassette player. I didn’t talk to anybody (car phones were so new that I only knew three people who had them, all in their forties), except sometimes my little brother, when I took him to school. When my first children were born, we drove and sang along to tapes and CDs.

Today, car interior design has gone farther than ever in cocooning the individual rather than the group: DVD players front and back, separate headphone jacks, individual climate control (front and back; driver and passenger). Second- and third-row captain’s seats. Cup holders in every door, seatback, and floor panel. iPod and mobile phone jacks. Memory storage of your seat’s height, location, and degree of lumbar support.

“You are what you drive.”

Step back for a moment, and you’ll see that these design trends paint a larger cultural picture. The car has moved from a shared space (bench seats, no entertainment, little customization) to a highly personal space that is unlikely to be shared. When it is shared (for example, in a family mini-van), every effort is made to create as much private space as possible (individual seats, individual climate control, individual cupholders, individual entertainment and entertainment controls).

It’s a very different attitude about the car and how you spend time in it.

To me, it’s speaks of a very Western interpretation of mobility: Freedom, Entertainment, Movement, Privacy, Independence. Mobility = Individuality.

Part II

This attitude and the design ethic it inspired isn’t limited to cars. It has been the driving force (sorry) in mobile phone design for years.

Listen to the usability experts up until about a year ago. Everything was about how “personal” the mobile phone is. Studies showing that a high percentage of people don’t feel comfortable sharing their phone, or letting someone even use their phone briefly. The personal messages, notes, contacts, call history, browser history, photos.

Even more, there’s a sort of personal identification and relationship with the phone itself. Going further, your mobile phone number is more meaningful that your social security number — it’s one of your names. Your mobile number represents you, unlike a landline number which represents a location, and doesn’t follow you around.

I have a book here on mobile phones in Japanese life called Personal, Portable, Pedestrian. That pretty much sums up what UI thinkers saw as being important to users.

It’s all true, but there’s a big problem with all this: it’s all based on “Western” cultures. Cultures in which individuality, freedom and personal space are high on the list of life’s priorities.

Paul Adams (User Experience Researcher, Google) at the MEX conference pointed out in his presentation that if you look at countries like India and China, there are people everywhere.

Americans look at these teeming masses and say, “chaos”. But it’s not chaotic to non-Western eyes. What we perceive as “chaos” may be perceived locally as “shared space”. Paul gave the example of Southwest Airlines’ seating system, which for years was a “first come-first served” arrangement, proven to be faster than assigned seating. For Americans, this was perceived as chaotic. We prefer assigned seats because we place so high a value on our unique, personal, private space. It defines us. (Southwest has since changed over to a numbered boarding order — with it’s own adorable website to explain it. Which already tells you something.)

But that isn’t necessarily true of people in other countries, other cultures. What is valuable to one person may be undesirable to another.

Even in our “own” Western culture, feelings about personal space are changing. Definitions of privacy (personal secrets that you share with 800 blog readers…), of space (virtual, real, contained within a particular device or account) are changing.

Spaces that were once shared (eg., living room, public bus) are now personal (iPod as a “sphere of isolation”, killing time with mobile broadband). Spaces that were once personal (eg., Walkman music player, internet browser) are now shared (sharing headphones, Zune WiFi, Facebook Wall, IM, location based services).

Part III

I just got a Nokia 1208 as a gift; an upgrade to my Kosher Phone account. (We’ll talk about kosher phones another time. Suffice it to say for now that a kosher phone is a phone with no data capabilities.)

If you’re reading this blog, a dual-band Series 30 phone [bet you thought S30 was extinct in the wild] probably isn’t on your mobile tech wish list. It’s three main selling points are:

* Get instant access to phone features [one programmable softkey]
* Add a little color to your life [lo-res color display and exchangeable color faceplates]
* Monitor and manage your costs [calling card tracking and call timers]

Notable features on the 1208 are an integrated LED flashlight on top (where some phones have the power button or IR window), speakerphone, support for multiple user contact lists, pre-loaded polyphonic ringtones, dust-resistant keypad, durable materials construction with non-slip backing, and a very long battery life (7 hours talk time / 15 days standby).

You may have noticed that the feature set doesn’t exactly match your checklist of phone features. That’s because the 1208 was designed for… well… less-developed countries. Despite the fact that its being sold everywhere (which is pretty interesting), priorities in the design were cost reduction, durability (many users, dusty climates) and sharability (if you can only afford to have one phone per household — or even per neighborhood — then making sharing easier becomes very important).

Which is exactly why the 1208 was on my Wish List; it’s a great example of the new attention being paid to read people, real cultures, real usage needs in the design of products and services. It has taken a long time to recognize that overall, we have enough feature. It’s about delivering them in a meaningful way, and hearing what people truly need.

It’s also about respecting other people enough to accept their own mobile identity definitions and priorities (family, community, participation, responsibility, communication), without trying to impose our “better” systems on them. In doing so, we honor others, while creating new design and product possibilities that benefit everyone.

Some people are in a race to “keep up with the Joneses”. Some people are in a race to “keep down with the Cohens“. As for hats…

[today’s offering from xkcd]

The victimised Muslim woman is the lens through which Islam and Muslim society are seen. In medieval times she was cast as an intimidating powerful queen or termagant (like Bramimonde in the Chanson de Roland, or Belacane in Parzival) reflecting an intimidating powerful Muslim civilisation. And when the power balance began to shift in Europe’s favour in the 17th and 18th centuries, she was made to mirror her society’s fallen fortunes. She turned into a harem slave, leading little more than a dumb animal existence, subjugated, inert, abject, powerless, and invisible. She is the quintessential embodiment of a despotic, deformed, and backward Islam. [from Damsels in Distress?,  Soumaya Ghannoushi]

A fascinating assertion. I won’t comment on the overall theme of the blog posting; the issue is complex. Worth reading, though. It will make you think.

From the comments (which are well-worth reading, too): 

There are other aspects to this complex, too. Thus there’s the tendency for societies to use female symbolic figures to represent themselves (Athena, Britannia, Lady Liberty etc). There’s the sentimentalisation embodied in the phrase “motherhood and apple pie”. Among many other things. Religions, of all varieties, being concerned with the regulation of social groups, are particularly interested in women, because of womens’ status as social vectors.

So if a society is reacting against “the west”, that reaction will inevitably take the form of suppressing the freedoms of women, for the simple reason that those freedoms have become associated with westernisation. And this reaction will be justified in religious terms. But equally, western and other interests seeking moral justification for intervention will highlight the situation of women.

…and this…

This argument is OK as far as it goes but may I add a couple of points:
1) Human rights can and do exist outside of an imperialist narrative. In the European context they arose in the struggle against ruling elites that were also involved in colonialism. Hence they are better framed in an anti-imperialist narrative.
2) My first point would of course preclude blowing the **** out of someone in order to liberate them, but not of being concerned with their state of being, or of engaging with them to improve their situation. (R.A.W.A. springs to mind). Your point about ‘the oppressed Muslim woman’ being an imperialist construction, is quite possibly true. However, if you then conceive of a Muslim world that is self-contained and separate from the ‘West’, (or wherever), you are reproducing the same fallacy; namely that Muslim human beings have an essential difference that requires special treatment. […]

…and also this…

What would you say to people like me who abhor Islams treatment of women yet opposed the Iraq war? I’m sorry but tarring everyone who recognises that Islam oppresses women as some kind of racist imperialist is simply false. I’m not impressed at all with the OP, she seems to be trying to brush the abuses of women under Islam under the carpet by pointing out how western governments exploit this abuse as propoganda for their imperialist wars. […]

It was with a pleasant start that I received my change, including a shiny new 2 shekel coin (my first). Sized between a 1 NIS and a 5 NIS coin, its value is about 50 cents, which is a very practical amount. Since I came to Israel, the 5 and 10 NIS bills have been phased out to be replaced by coins; also gone is the 1 agora coin (worth about 0.25 U.S. cents), with the 5 agora coin (1.25 U.S. cents) scheduled for obselescence next year.

I do foresee that this new coin will take some adjusting  to both mentally (to quickly identify the coin my wallet) and practically (not to make payment mistakes). Actually, considering the question, I think that this 2 NIS coin is going to be a problem for a while. The 1 and 5 NIS coins are so far apart in size that I never would confuse them, despite their sharing a color. But this nice new 2 NIS coin is too close to both of those, and will require a lot more attention to identify. The Bank of Israel claims that the size was a deliberate decision, meant to convey the coins value between 1 and 5 NIS. Oh, well. Remember the Susan B. Anthony dollar? It was always getting confused with a quarter… and died a silent death. I haven’t seen too many Sacagawea coins around, either.

*There’s a word I don’t have much opportunity to use, so please excuse the indulgence.

Imagine my Americanized surprise to find this page in my daughter’s school book:

The bird is in the birdhouse. The cat is in the garbage. The cow is in the shed. The fish is in the water.

Doubletake.

The cat is in the garbage?

Indeed, in most parts of Israel cats are not pets, they are rodent control and garbage scavengers. They are considered almost like rats (and as infectious).

Even when we think we know what we’re all talking about (cats), sometimes we don’t know at all.