Progress or Merely the Illusion of Such

Are we realizing any real gains, or merely running in place?

As of 2010, we have much better internet infrastructure, but the World Wide Web has become so bloated with extraneous information and poor design that it chews it all up. ReadWriteWeb offers an insightful article  on the matter of technological innovation. The mysterious "Guest Writer" describes, in quantitative terms, citing multiple data sources, that a faster internet speed hasn't translated into any real gains for end-users, particularly in page load times.

Why not? Because of the vast preponderance of excessive CRUD that is loaded on web pages: links placed as much for SEO (search engine optimization) as elucidation, videos, related stories from the past, possibly related stories in the future, content-based advertising that is oddly prescient and so forth.

ReadWriteWeb uses the Official White House website in 1996 versus the current White House site as an example. Screen shots are included, and as always, make the point most eloquently.

Please be aware, this is no thinly veiled (nor blatantly obvious) partisan commentary. The trend is not associated with political party, nor with any Presidential Administration.

"We have the ability to deliver more content in the same amount of time as 1996, but we're doing it very inefficiently. End users haven't experienced any true acceleration in [page] load times".

For more, see the full story via ReadWriteWeb: It's Not About the Network Anymore.

Sheering Time Approaches: Let's Go Hyper-local Arizona

It's that time of year again. Navajo sheep herders will be coming down from the hills north of The Valley of the Sun, no doubt psychologically well-prepared for all the sordid news of the city:

• A broken dam due to burst bladders at Tempe Town Lake,
• The $1,000,000 price on the head of Maricopa County's Sheriff Joe by volatile Mexican drug lords, and 
• The ever popular AZ Senate Bill 1070 a.k.a. Arizona Immigration Reform.

To commemorate sheep-shearing season, I'm presenting an extravaganza of gentle sheep-y imagery, from a variety of sources. Well, I admit, from two sources: Zazzle merchants, and Amazon.com. The images are so nice, I thought you might enjoy looking at them too.

I need to find a better illustration source than advertisements, at some point. Until such time should arrive, well, if you'd be so kind and not breathe a word of this.

Stick Figure Sheep and Stickers

Consider this a follow-up to my earlier post about floatingsheep.

I love the floating sheep project

Fun with Correlations and Obesity

Cartographer-geographer-demographer Matthew Zook PhD explores correlations (at the U.S. state level) between the number of internet references to beer, Christianity and obesity and much more, all neatly pulled together in the floatingsheep Working Papers Collection. 

He recently posted a follow-up on the obesity theme, running the same data for correlation between "obesity" and "feminist" and other meaning-laden words.

via floatingsheep.org

Although I realize that correlation does not imply causation, I always enjoy this kind of thing. Have a look at the full article, More Fun with Correlations.  

While you're there, peruse the sweetly sheepy Floating Sheep Manifesto. "What would a floating sheep map be about?"  Neo-geography?  The geography of user-generated online content?  Yes, something like that.

Why FloatingSheep?

The answer is part of a not-so-long, windy path. Footnote 4 of the Manifesto leads to this explanation page, with various rationales. My favorite is the most sheepish:

We have noticed that the standard Google Map placemarks look a bit like floating sheep (albeit red ones without heads, legs, tails or much in the way of fleece) hovering over the countryside. We simply are extending this observation to its natural conclusion. 

They really do love sheep as much as I do!

I shouldn't reproduce such a long excerpt, but the URL persistence isn't one of the Internet's strengths, I have found. Via IronSheep 2012: The New York City Sheep Evacuation Map:

When we heard there would be extra points for including sheep in our maps, we knew we had to do it. But how? Where were the sheep in our data? After spending far too much time brainstorming possibilities for a map of the whole US, we decide to focus on New York City because there were so many more datasets available.

In our Exploratory Data Analysis phase we searched the Flickr and Twitter data looking for mentions of "sheep". We didn't find any interesting patterns in the data, other than clusters of points around the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, and Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. We knew that somewhere between these two locations we would find our inspiration.

Thinking about Sheep Meadow in Central Park, we recalled a story in the news recently about legislators from Alaska and Wyoming proposed reintroducing wolves into Central Park. Since wolves are the natural enemy of sheep, perhaps our fluffy, hooved friends (if there actually are any in Sheep Meadow) would need to be relocated if this were to happen. Perhaps Sheepshead Bay could be their new home?

We were also incredibly tempted (who wouldn't be?) by some of the more peculiar datasets available, namely the zombies and alien sightings. We posited, for some reason, these three groups are all threats to our precious sheep. Thus, we had our assignment: determine the best route to evacuate sheep from Sheep Meadow to Sheepshead Bay, avoiding any concentrations of aliens and zombies.

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"This is an essay about maps. But it is not just about maps." https://t.co/4jhN9sTCqY pic.twitter.com/XYxvO8iigt

— Floatingsheep.org (@floating_sheep) March 1, 2016