Change Blindness Plus (YouTube via Schneier)

The Schneier On Security blog points today to an interesting video (embedded below) that demonstrates and discusses the phenomena of Change Blindness:



There are several good videos and resources on this effect and you can find them all here.

The Biggest News Stories Of The Year Are Not What You Think (GOOD via Neatorama)

If you are a regular reader of this blog...well, thank you!

More importantly, though, you are probably better informed about what is going on in the world than the average Joe or Jane.

While this is a good thing, it is not a universal good. It probably also creates a cognitive blind spot as well. What do I mean? Well, most people think that other people think the same way they do. This applies particularly to what is "important".

For example, I remember coming back to the US after having worked the Balkans issue for a number of years and being totally taken aback by the lack of news on the situation there. It was the most important thing in my life and I did not understand why it was not important to people in the US as well.

To put things into perspective, then, (and, note, I did not say proper perspective...) comes the "Biggest Stories Of The Year" infographic from the online magazine, GOOD (via Neatorama). The screenshot below just gives you a taste of the level of detail embedded in this image (you can either click on the image or go to the site to see the chart in all its full, glorious interactivity-ness).



The data for this chart comes from US media exclusively but it includes a wide variety of sources (Fox News and MSNBC, The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, Limbaugh's radio show, Beck, O'Reilly, Hannity and Olbermann's TV shows, etc.).

Check out the relative importance placed on various stories. It is no surprise that the Economic Crisis and Health Care received a lion's share of the time but look at how they dominated print and the air waves. Eyeballing it, I would say that those two topics alone accounted for 40% of the stories. Worth it? Maybe...

Some of the comparisons are even more revealing. Iraq got 3-4 times less coverage than the death of Michael Jackson, Russia got about as much coverage as the White House Party Crashers and Tiger Wood's Adultery was about as important as the Mexican Drug War in the eyes of the press.

This is not, in my mind, the result of some vast international conspiracy of either the left or the right. It represents, I think, what Americans wanted. These media outlets are supported by advertising and advertising is supported by eyeballs and ears. If people aren't reading, watching or listening then these outlets can't survive.

It is, then, a reasonably accurate reflection of what Americans were interested in and, arguably, what they cared about in 2009.

Something worth thinking about in the new year...

24: The Christmas Special (YouTube)

MethHunter: Find, Fix And Incarcerate! (DagirCo)

Want to cut your town's meth problem in half next year? You can. Really.

The guys over at Dagirco have finally done it! MethHunter is on the streets and check out these early stats: One of our small, local police departments is using it and they have had over a dozen busts and over a half dozen convictions in the last six months. The best part? The program has cut the time it takes to conduct an investigation in half!

One of local TV stations (WICU) recently did a five part special series on meth in NW Pennsylvania in general and on the MethHunter in particular. The video below is only one part of the five part series. The other four parts can be accessed at the end of this video:



I am particularly proud to say I know the team at DagirCo that put this piece of software together. Most of them, including Mark Blair, the CEO, are Mercyhurst grads and I have had the great good fortune to have many of them in class over the years.

Beyond this, though, I am particularly impressed with the way they tackled the problem. They have essentially created an expert system that looks at pill shopping patterns and "thinks" about them the same way a meth expert might think about them. It automates, as Mark puts it in one of the videos, the "80% of the tedious, time-consuming" work of analyzing purchase records. It even examines the shopping patterns for evidence of denial and deception on the part of the pill shoppers!

It is easy for you to imagine this all getting very technical and difficult to interpret. That is where this program really shines. The DagirCo team has worked particularly hard to make the program user friendly for small town and rural police forces. Their thinking was that large cities often have dedicated meth experts but that small and rural police forces may not have the resources for such a position. This meant that the program had to produce something that was understandable and actionable by a police officer who had received no special training.

It turns out that the straightforward, cop-friendly way the program generates output benefits both small and large police forces. It gives the smaller police force a capability where it had none before and it saves the experts in the larger forces time that can be better spent looking at aspects of the meth problem that the software cannot address.

The DagirCo team is also particulaly proud of the "engine" they developed to drive the MethHunter. They think it can be used in a broad range of applications. Currently, they are thinking about how it might be applied to other problem drugs and even other crimes in general (they are working on an anti-graffitti version right now). Mark, a former marine, also believes a modified version of this software could be useful in analyzing insurgent attack patterns in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Surreal Saturday: The Pong Prom (Vimeo)

From the interestingly titled Department of Covert Athletics...

Pong Prom from Ed Keeble on Vimeo.