research

Web designers are all the same. Almost. Sort of.

I came across an excellent graphical representation of a number of web design and development surveys, such as A List Apart Survey. The infographic pulls results of several such surveys into a single long image with graphs and stats. One thing that I was surprised by was how narrow the results profile the average web designer. There’s almost no distribution of value across the any chart – age, gender, ethnicity, geographic location, education, etc. It almost looks like that web designers are a product of the single factory. Have a look and tell me if you don’t agree.

Being surrounded at work by web designers developers for the last few years, I have to say that even though I know a few exceptions to the average, the majority seem to fit the profile just right. I think we could use more variety, but I have no idea on how we could actually get it.

Yaroslavl Roadmap 10-15-20

There were plenty of news recently about Russia in general and its president Dmitry Medvedev in particular taking steps towards building up some technology innovation in the country. Medvedev visited a number of technology companies in the Silicon Valley. And there were a few announcements about some sort of technology center being built in Skolkovo, next to Moscow. Most Russians that I’ve talked to about this are very skeptical (me included).

In fact, I’m not even interested on how this project goes now and who is involved with it. At least, not in Russia. But there are some interesting developments internationally. One example in particular that I want to mention is Yaroslavl Roadmap 10-15-20.

As part of the Skolkovo project, Russian government requested some expert help on figuring out the best approach and course of action. One source of such expert advise came from the New York Academy of Science. In fact, I think they have done some spectacular research and managed to summarize it in a very concise report. They titled it “Yaroslavl Roadmap 10-15-20: 10 Years to Implement, 15 Steps to Take, 20 Pitfalls to Avoid—International Experience and the Path Forward for Russian Innovation Policy” (PDF, 3.7 MB, 128 pages).

In essence, it is a very compact review of how technological innovation was formed and grown in Israel, Finland, Taiwan, India, and USA. It summarizes they key points, successes and failure. It also briefly describes the specifics of each country and how those specifics affected the chosen path. It then describes the key specifics of Russia. Once all that is done, a roadmap is presented, with both generic bullet points and a time table of steps that have to be taken.

And even if my feeling is that this whole work will be completely ignored in Russia, I still think that the report has plenty of interesting information for a lot of other people. If you work in, with, or near technology, you should download the PDF and at least scroll through it. If you ever were interested in Silicon Valley, how it came to be, and if or how it can be created somewhere else, then you should definitely download the report.

I downloaded it a few days ago and barely looked through it, but even that alone gave me plenty to think about. But there is way more than that. It needs careful reading and studying, which I will do the soonest. Brilliant stuff!

On pseudovariety

Kottke has a link to an interesting article, with much more interesting visualization of soft drinks industry. The article discusses pseudovariety. That’s when you think you have a lot of something, when indeed you really don’t. Like with all those soft drinks on the shelves of every supermarket. You think there is a whole lot of them, when in fact most of them are brands of either one of the three major companies.

One other example of pseudovariety that came to my mind was from the field of politics. Think about it. There are usually a number of political parties and presidential candidates at every election. All of them spend hours and millions of dollars to promote themselves, demote their competition, and explain to you how different they are from everything you’ve seen to this day. But in reality, most of them are pretty much the same. You can see it from the way they talk, the way they work, the way they lie, the way they approach difficult problems, and the way they talk about simple things.

It often seems like you have so much to choose from, when in fact, you really don’t.

Ad CTR ratio by browser

Download Squad attempts to analyze a recent report about advertising click-through rate (CTR) ratio based on different browsers. Apparently, more than 40 million impressions were used as the data for this report, and Opera and MSIE users came on top – they click the most ads. Firefox and Chrome users are further down the list, and Safari users are at the bottom.

I think this chart makes a lot of sense. While there are ad-blocking solutions for both Opera and MSIE, neither one of this browsers has a healthy plugin ecosystem. In other words, even if there are ways to filter ads in these browsers, most users don’t know how to do it or simply don’t care enough. Both Firefox and Chrome browsers are blossoming with addons and extensions which filter all ads, known ads, annoying ads, flash ads, ads on specific websites, ads of specific sizes, and so on and so forth. In fact, I don’t know any Firefox or Chrome user who doesn’t have some sort of ad-filtering extension installed.

That leaves us with Safari. Why Safari users are clicking the least ads? I don’t know. I’m thinking that might be a statistical inaccuracy or something along those lines. Or maybe they all are just broke from buying all those Apple products and have no interest in ads no more. Who knows?

Quest for men who haven’t seen porn

Slashdot Science reports:

Scientists at the University of Montreal would love to compare the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular porn watchers. The problem is, they can’t find a man in that age category who has never seen it. “We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography,” said Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse. “We couldn’t find any.”

This is interesting on a number of levels. First of all, it is, of course, hilarious.

Secondly, if seen as a puzzle or quest, I’d say they should look for men like this in places with the lowest rates of Internet connectivity. Internet does not equal porn, but it makes it so much simpler to find and watch it. Pre-Internet porn is harder to distribute, requiring some sort of copying device.

Thirdly, this makes me think back to the argument I had some time ago about who watches the most porn – men or women. While I am not saying that women don’t watch porn, I think men watch incomparably more of it.

Fourthly, this gives me a reason to use both “porn” and “research” tags on the same post.

Fifth, I worry what contextual ad will pop up in Google AdSense.