Regular readers of this blog (both of you) know that I’ve devoted a few posts to public awareness campaigns, particularly related to accident prevention. You can imagine my delight then at coming across The Book of Accidents, Designed for Young Children, an indispensable guide from 1831. A sample warning:

Little children who can just reach to the top of a table, often endeavor to drink from the spout of a tea-pot; and in consequence scold their mouths and throats, and die miserable deaths in a few hours.

And in a later passage that could serve equally well as a warning against run-on sentences:

The little girl was playing about at the head of the stairs, and though frequently cautioned by her mother of the danger and carelessness of so doing, yet she heedlessly neglected the charge, and the consequence was, that one of her feet slipped off the first step, and down she came headlong, crying and bawling in the most dreadful manner, and alarming all the inmates of the house.

I wonder if this inspired Gorey’s Gashleycrumb Tinies.

(Via MeFi.)

This morning, as I was drinking coffee brewed in my beloved Chemex, I saw that Boing Boing had linked to this wonderful article in Gourmet Magazine about the odd inventor who developed the iconic coffeemaker, Peter Schlumboum. A little Googling turned up some interesting contemporaneous articles about Schlumbohm, including a piece in Time Magazine from 1946, and another from Life Magazine in 1949. A very brief Talk of the Town entry from a 1954 New Yorker refers to the Chemobile, Schlumboum’s attempt at car design. (Also, an eBay search led me to this semi awful plastic Chemex warming element from the ’60s or ’70s, which I have to confess, I bought. I suspect Schlumboum had nothing to do with this design.) The Chemex itself sits in the MOMA permanent collection, along with his water kettle and the “Filterfan,” an alleged air filtration system.

Whatever one thinks of Dr. Schumbohm, the Chemex makes a damn good pot of coffee (although the secret may lie in its above average quality paper filters more than its beaker-like shape. And they’re still available.

Dear Jeff,

I meant to write when the Kindle first came out, but you know how these things go. I understand you’re a pretty busy person yourself.

Anyway, for reasons I can’t quite discern, the Kindle’s news coverage has picked up a lot in the last couple of weeks, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to pass on the thoughts that I kept to myself a few months ago.

First off: congratulations. I’m sure you suffered your share of skepticism when pitching Kindle initially, and its success has proved those skeptics wrong. You can hardly keep them in stock, and really, I can’t claim to find that surprising. The device moves ebooks forward several steps, and while I still like settling down with a traditional paper book, I can’t help but feel compelled by what the Kindle has to offer.

And yet, I haven’t ponied up the dough. Amazon didn’t reach its dominance in the market by ignoring customers, so I’m sure you and your team have sat around the table many nights wondering, why? Why hasn’t Jason bought a Kindle yet? Surely, only shyness has kept you from calling to ask, so I’ll save you the effort, and tell you now.

Many people have risen to declare the Kindle the iPod of ebooks. But it isn’t, Jeff. It could be. But it isn’t.

The beauty of the iPod is that while Apple’s DRM may be proprietary, its essential file formats, MP3 and AAC are not. Anyone wishing to produce content for the iPod that takes advantage of its features may do so.

Sadly, you can’t say the same thing about the Kindle. Sure, it supports various other file formats, but its optimal format, the .AZW, remains proprietary. And the Kindle doesn’t support the closest thing we have to a universal format for electronic documents, Adobe’s PDF standard, a published and open standard.

I know what you’re thinking: “Who cares? If people want to read The DaVinci Code, he can buy the AZW from us.” And apart from the fact that I would probably slice open my veins before spending my time reading The DaVinci Code, you may be right. But the truth is, even if I wanted to read The DaVinci Code, I can’t, because I don’t have time.

I know you follow my activities closely Jeff, but perhaps you forget that in addition to everything else I have going on, I’m a par-time graduate student. Every semester, I read somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 pages of journal articles, mostly downloaded from the web, mostly in PDF form. And I mostly print them out, because frankly, although it pains me to do so, having paper copies makes it easy for me to carry them around and read them in my spare time, most of which occurs on the train or the X9 bus.

Now, if I could load these PDFs onto the Kindle, that could hold some advantages. But I also know that it would hold some disadvantages as I tried to navigate different numbers of columns and differing layouts.

If only some standard existed for reproducing journal articles for an ebook reader. If only all the major aggregators and independents had some open, published standard that gave them an incentive to add a new format to their downloading options. A standard like .AZW, for example, if it were open and published.

And just think… textbook publishers constantly look for ways to continue charging outrageous sums without having to bear the expense of actually printing books. If only they had such a standard, like an open and published version of the .AZW. (Of course, it would also help Amazon further dominate over college bookstores, but I’m sure you know that.)

But so far, Amazon’s approach seems to turn away what must be one of its largest potential markets: higher ed. Indeed, if .AZW really became a standard for textbooks and journal archives, many colleges and universities might even make the Kindle a required purchase for incoming classes. But even without that incentive, I know many a student who would happily pay a few hundred dollars to make their backs a little less sore, their printing bills a little less high, and their rate of tree destruction a little bit lower.

So, there you have it, Jeff. That’s why, for all its appeal, the Kindle currently sits towards the bottom of my tech wishlist. For me, and many other people who still depend on published materials, the Kindle represents one more thing to carry, rather than a way to carry less.

You’re a sharp guy, Jeff. I’m sure you can figure out a good way to solve this problem. Let me know, okay?

Best,

Jason

With Sunday coming up tomorrow, I realize that nearly a week has passed since this terriffic article by Alex Kotlowitz about Gary Slutkin and CeaseFire Chicago (based at UIC’s School of Public Health) appeared in the New York Times Magazine. A nice write up of important work.

I think I covered logos pretty thoroughly a few months ago, but really, who could resist passing this on?

Math and I have never been fast friends. Oh, sure, I can do the basics, and even statistics and I have reached a sort of detente. But in school, math was always the subject I dreaded. I could get excited about almost any other subject, but math always seemed so soulless.

A few weeks ago, I downloaded a great essay by a guy named Paul Lockhart about what’s wrong with math education in this country, and I finally got around to reading it yesterday. All I can say is I wish this guy had taught math where I went to school. In the problems he identifies, I see the very things that put math and me on the outs so long ago. I wish I could remember where I saw the link originally, but after a Google search, I did find the essay itself (PDF). Worth a read for math lovers, math haters, and the math indifferent equally.

In other math news, Scientific American reports that those stupid word problems really were as stupid as we thought.

I had intended to post about The Rather Difficult Font Game, but my brother beat me to it. However, he was somehow able to resist writing about a font game he and I used to play, an omission I’m happy to remedy. One of us would sing or hum the theme to a TV show, and the other would have to name the font used in the opening credits. (I know, I know… pretty sad, really. And not that good a game since we didn’t watch that much TV, and there are only so many times you can come back to Mary Tyler Moore, The Prisoner, and Baretta; or Peignot, Albertus, and a custom version of Stencil respectively.)

I scored only 29/34, which I find somewhat humiliating, particularly in light of my brother’s 30/34 showing.

A couple years ago, I linked to a terrific instructional film from the 1920s concerning how to use the newfangled direct dial telephone. Well apparently some serious hands on learning was required for those using the new device professionally. (Via.)

First we had the Flu Wiki; now we have… Flu Flickr! (Via BoingBoing.)

Just a quick post to note three new public-health related blogs to the blogroll:

Angry Toxicologist, for those of you who always felt you could get interested in toxicology if only it had more of an attitude.

The Pump Handle, which focuses mostly but not exclusively on environmenal and occupational issues

Secret Ingredients, by the excellent Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Andrew Schneider, covering public health and worker safety.

Enjoy!

One of my new year’s resolutions was to blog more often this year. Obviously, I’ve fallen down on that one a bit. But for those of you who continue upholding new year’s resolutions to eat better, make no mistake: salad will hurt you.

(I say this as someone who’s pro-salad, although I tend to prefer my vegetables cooked.)

Read the complete Post.

Somehow I tore myself away from Super Tuesday results long enough to watch this weird bicycle safety film from 1963. Between the monkey masks, the mass casualties, and the “plot,” this is almost as horrifying as those Canadian shock ads I wrote about a couple months ago (albeit in an entirely different way). (Via Boing Boing.)

(I have no idea whether or not the setup may have been inspired by the same year publication of the original Planet of the Apes novel.)

I’m pretty sure I’ve pontificated here before about the slightly surprising emergence of typography awareness in popular culture. Adding to this meme this month is a terrific Atlantic Monthly article by Virginia Postrel, which sadly, they only make available to subscribers. On the upside, they do feature two web-only extras though, an interview with Gary Hustwit, director of Helvetica; and a video with type designer Michael Bierut.

Update: Yesterday, just days after this post, the Atlantic dropped their subscriber model and made all its content free to all visitors, so you can now access the full article. Were they motivated by the thoughts of thousands of J-Blawg readers clicking through to their site? I’m sure they were. (And they were hoodwinked.)

This is not the announcement alluded to in the post below (that will come in a few weeks), but I’m happy to report that I’m also blogging at the newly retooled PublicHealthGames.com, a new resource sponsored by CADE. (Full disclosure part 1: CADE (and by extension the School of Public Health at UIC) is my employer. Full disclosure part 2: This blog is my own, and in no way reflects the opinions of my employer, even though I may mention them from time to time. Just thought I should say…)

While there were many reasons I didn’t post for a few weeks, I’d be lying if I didn’t confess another reason for my procrastination: every time I tried to write about this NY Times OpEd by Atul Gawande, covered so well in this Effect Measure post, I felt as though my head might explode. So instead of trying to write about it here, and working myself into another frenzy, I just leave you the links to read on your own. Breathtaking. (Maybe we DO need Squid Soap for doctors, now that we’ve been shown how wrong our other approach has been.)

Speaking of the holidays, I am now (thanks to Virginia) a proud owner of a HomeHero fire extinguisher, surely the snazziest fire extinguisher ever designed. Apparently, everyone but me has been talking about this product for months, but despite articles about it appearing in several magazines I read, I seemed to have totally missed it. So it was a funny coincidence that just a few days after receiving this thoughtful gift, I ran across this excellent piece about HomeHero in Rob Walker’s Consumed column.

Walker examines one of HomeHero’s more interesting claims, namely that its good looks will encourage owners to keep the extinguisher out where it can be seen and admired and — by extension — be closer at hand when needed in an emergency.  As Walked concedes, it’s hard to say whether or not this claim holds up. But it’s still an interesting idea that injecting good (or, at least, attractive) design into health and safety tools might enhance their effectiveness.

Ugh… another multi-week blogging desert. Why? Well, the holidays for one, general busy-ness for another, not to mention… well, I’ll save that announcement for another day. But let’s just say the busy-ness will continue for a little while yet. In the meantime though, I’m going to try and get back to a slightly more normal posting schedule.

Speaking of that old Web 2.0 and Public Health talk, one of the main points I tried to get across was that public health has to redefine “outreach” to engage communities as they extend into online spaces or form anew in online spaces. Via Effect Measure, I give you Exhibit A:

And public health authorities need to come to grips with the potential impact YouTube, Facebook and the whole Internet-based social-networking phenomenon could have on policies like universal vaccinations, suggested the authors, researchers from the University of Toronto and York University.

Senior author Dr. Kumanan Wilson said he calls the approach “anti-vaccination 2.0″ - a play on the term Web 2.0.

“This is their new strategy for communicating,” said Wilson, an internal medicine specialist and a public health policy researcher.

“These people believe their viewpoint is not being aired in public. They believe that they are being shut out of the discourse and they want to get their viewpoint out. And this is their way of creating commercials for their viewpoints.

“And they’re putting a lot of effort into it. And other people … just from the view counts and the ratings, are coming on and wanting to find out more about these viewpoints. Their videos are being viewed and rated highly.”

…

Wilson acknowledged that in the past some vaccine advocates didn’t like to address the claims of opponents, assuming any discussion of what was seen as views from the fringe was counterproductive. But the Web 2.0 universe requires a new strategy, he suggested.

“In the past that could work, but it’s not going to work anymore. You could ignore it and not discuss it and perhaps it would eventually peter out. But now there are ways for people with these viewpoints to communicate with each other,” he said.

“These sites are now providing people with a mechanism by which they can bypass the conventional filters and get their messages out. It can be dangerous. The Internet is valueless in that respect.”

Talk about missing the forest for the trees. Memo to Dr. Wilson: These sites can provide public health with a mechanism by which we can bypass the conventional filters and get our messages out. It can be a great opportunity. The Internet is valuable in that respect.

When I was working on my Web 2.0 and Public Health training session, I posted a link to Teaching the Machine, an excellent overview of Web 2.0 by anthropologist Michael Wesch. I was thrilled to come across one of his newer videos a couple days ago, which should be required viewing for anyone teaching in higher ed (or high school, for that matter:

(Via PeterMe.)