Typically, we see medal counts ranking countries by raw medal numbers. Something like this, where the total score is derived by having the Gold worth 3, Silver worth 2, and Bronze worth 1. (This isn’t a complete count — I got sick of cleaning tabular data.)

	Country	Gold	Silver	Bronze	"Total"
1	United States	20	17	12	106
2	China	20	13	10	96
3	Russia	7	13	14	61
4	Germany	10	9	11	59
5	Australia	11	7	11	58
6	Japan	12	5	5	51
7	France	6	8	7	41
8	Korea	5	10	5	40
9	Italy	6	6	6	36
9	Great Britain	5	7	7	36
11	Netherlands	3	6	7	28
12	Ukraine	6	2	5	27
13	Romania	5	0	2	17
13	Belarus	2	3	5	17
15	Greece	3	1	3	14
16	Hungary	2	3	1	13
16	Poland	2	2	3	13
18	Slovakia	2	2	1	11
18	Spain	0	5	1	11
20	Turkey	3	0	1	10
21	Cuba	0	2	5	9
22	Georgia	2	1	0	8
22	Thailand	2	0	2	8
24	Indonesia	1	1	2	7
24	South Africa	1	1	2	7
24	Bulgaria	1	0	4	7
24	Denmark	1	0	4	7
24	Austria	0	3	1	7
24	DPR Korea	0	3	1	7
30	Zimbabwe	1	1	1	6
30	Croatia	0	2	2	6
30	Czech Republic	0	2	2	6
33	Ethiopia	1	1	0	5
33	Belgium	1	0	2	5
33	Canada	0	2	1	5
36	Chile	1	0	1	4
36	Sweden	1	0	1	4
36	Switzerland	1	0	1	4
39	New Zealand	1	0	0	3
39	Norway	1	0	0	3
39	United Arab Emirates	1	0	0	3

But, this approach doesn’t take into account what I consider an obvious advantage of the leading countries — population size. Of course the United States has a lot of medals — it has a lot of people from which to draw a select group of athletes. If you factor a country’s population size into their total, you get a very different ranking. “Score” is the “Total” divided by the population, multiplied by 10,000,000 (to get a nice, readable number).

	Country	Gold	Silver	Bronze	"Total"	Population	Score
1	Australia	11	7	11	58	19,731,984	29.39
2	Slovakia	2	2	1	11	5,430,033	20.26
3	Netherlands	3	6	7	28	16,150,511	17.34
4	Belarus	2	3	5	17	10,322,151	16.47
5	Georgia	2	1	0	8	4,934,413	16.21
6	Croatia	0	2	2	6	4,422,248	13.57
7	Greece	3	1	3	14	10,665,989	13.13
8	Denmark	1	0	4	7	5,384,384	13.00
9	Hungary	2	3	1	13	10,045,407	12.94
10	U Arab Emirates	1	0	0	3	2,484,818	12.07
11	Bulgaria	1	0	4	7	7,537,929	9.29
12	Austria	0	3	1	7	8,188,207	8.55
13	Korea	5	10	5	40	48,289,037	8.28
14	Cuba	0	2	5	9	11,263,429	7.99
15	Romania	5	0	2	17	22,271,839	7.63
16	New Zealand	1	0	0	3	3,951,307	7.59
17	Germany	10	9	11	59	82,398,326	7.16
18	France	6	8	7	41	60,180,529	6.81
19	Norway	1	0	0	3	4,546,123	6.60
20	Italy	6	6	6	36	57,998,353	6.21
21	Great Britain	5	7	7	36	60,094,648	5.99
22	Czech Republic	0	2	2	6	10,249,216	5.85
23	Ukraine	6	2	5	27	48,055,439	5.62
24	Switzerland	1	0	1	4	7,318,638	5.47
25	Belgium	1	0	2	5	10,289,088	4.86
26	Zimbabwe	1	1	1	6	12,576,742	4.77
27	Sweden	1	0	1	4	8,878,085	4.51
28	Russia	7	13	14	61	144,526,278	4.22
29	Japan	12	5	5	51	127,214,499	4.01
30	United States	20	17	12	106	290,342,554	3.65
31	Poland	2	2	3	13	38,622,660	3.37
32	DPR Korea	0	3	1	7	22,466,481	3.12
33	Spain	0	5	1	11	40,217,413	2.74
34	Chile	1	0	1	4	15,665,216	2.55
35	South Africa	1	1	2	7	42,768,678	1.64
36	Canada	0	2	1	5	32,207,113	1.55
37	Turkey	3	0	1	10	68,109,469	1.47
38	Thailand	2	0	2	8	64,265,276	1.24
39	Ethiopia	1	1	0	5	66,557,553	0.75
40	China	20	13	10	96	1,286,975,468	0.75
41	Indonesia	1	1	2	7	234,893,453	0.30

Congratulations, Australia, Slovakia, and the Netherlands, for being the leading countries (so far)!

When in D.C., I always make an attempt to visit the National Building Museum. I got the chance to do so today (wrapping up our workshop here), and the NBM has done it again with their fantastic Liquid Stone exhibit, all about concrete, its history, its engineering, contemporary uses, and where its headed.

When I was in Europe, I found myself swept up in Euro 2004 fever. I found it odd that a sport I never before followed took so much of my attention. When I saw reviews of Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explain the World, I got a copy of it from my local library.

I just finished it, and, well, If soccer does explain the world, Franklin doesn’t explain that to us. Really, it’s just an excuse for Mr. Foer to travel all over the world, and where he has brought back stories of soccer in various places. There’s actually a lot of good material in there — he finds some interesting stories, and tells them well. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of FC Barcelona (aka Barca) — the truly populist nature of the team reminded me of the Green Bay Packers. (I tend to think that only cities should own teams, not individuals.)

Anyway, a good book, but not really an exploration of “globalization.”

A little bit o’ company promotion here.

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Use the coupon code SEARCHDEAL to get 15% off your whole order, as long as the search report is in it.

To get a taste, read Jeff’s latest essay, 8 Quick Ways To Fix Your Search Engine.

In today’s Chronicle, an article on Humboldt Fog cheese begins with this passage:

Few American artisan cheeses created in recent years have penetrated the national market like Humboldt Fog. Whether because of its striking appearance or superior flavor, consumers have embraced this unusual goat cheese with ash in the middle.
In supermarkets that make no pretense of offering a quality cheese selection, there’s Humboldt Fog. On the menus of small-town restaurants aiming for a little sophistication, there’s Humboldt Fog. Cheesemaker Mary Keehn says she felt she had really arrived when an acquaintance told her about seeing the cheese in Europe.

The secret to Humboldt Fog’s above-average success is not that secret: it’s marketing, pure and simple. Doubtless, there are countless cheeses on the market that offer a similarly superior flavor, quite possibly for less money.

But Humboldt Fog has the gimmick: a layer of ash through the middle and ash in the rind. Now, ash isn’t enough — there are other ash cheeses. So thus, the name, “Humboldt Fog,” which evokes the mysterious romance of California’s northern coast. So the name provides the hook, the necessary fillip that takes this cheese from being one of many tasty artisan cheeses (that all tend to blur together to any but the most ardent connoisseur) to one that stands out.

It’s classic branding really.

I bring it up because I find, at least in the user experience community, an unfortunate baby-with-the-bathwater mentality when it comes to marketing… Because so much marketing *is* bad, and so many marketers *are* clueless, there’s a tendency to dismiss marketing altogether. But Humboldt Fog points out the brilliance of good marketing, the elevation of a truly quality product to a distinct, must-have item.

[This is a draft (and an early one at that) of an essay I’m working on for the Adaptive Path site. Wanted to get some thoughts out there while still raw.]

At the DIS2004 Conference, I attended a panel on how innovation seems to be on the wane, with the potential culprit being user-centered design methods that stress safety over risk, surety over adventure, meeting existing customer expectations instead of exceeding them.

This argument struck me as a red herring. In my experience, the problem is not with design or design processes. In fact, design practitioners have figured out a lot about what works, and what doesn’t. For those in the design field, design is easy – developing solutions to problems is a pretty straightforward endeavor. The problem isn’t with design or designers – it’s with organizations whose fundamental structures prevent the good ideas from getting out.

A panelist harkened back to a more golden era of design, a mid-20th-century period where massive organizations took design risks, where GM would develop visions of a Futurama, where IBM worked with The Eames’ and Paul Rand. The thing is, these companies could do so because they were extremely centralized, and the wishes of those at the top became the marching orders of all beneath. Design-minded CEOs could make such innovation happen.

In the 70s, 80s, and 90s, corporations fundamentally changed. They became extremely siloed. Product teams were no longer collaborative individuals, but a stovepiped set of departments whose efforts were stitched together by a product manager. And each of those departments has their own metrics of success, their own P&L statements — in other words, their own asses to cover. product managers are rewarded for on-time and under-budget delivery; marketing with exceeding sales goals; engineering with minimizing defects and other marks of “quality”. Nowhere does design and innovation factor in.

As the products became more complex, the lack of cohesion became more apparent – it’s common for an electronic consumer product to have the hardware engineering performed by one group, the onboard software made by another group, the manufacturing somewhere else, the marketing yet elsewhere, all leading to incoherent messes that blink “12:00.”

This departmental mess has been witnessed in the field of web design, in research conducted by User Interface Engineering, where they found that the only correlation they could make between the size of an organization’s UCD/usability practice was mildly inverse to the usability of the site – companies that seemed to invest more in usability actually had marginally worse products.

A big reason for this oxymoron is that the more that’s invested in UCD, the more likely it is to become a separate group or department. With it’s own measure of success (minimize user interface defects) that are not aligned with those of the other departments. And this group tends to get relegated to the role of “interface cops,” folks who must review everything before it goes out, and thus serve as a bottleneck in development processes, a point of pain to route around.

The panel I attended was called “Beyond Human-Centered Design”, suggesting that maybe we need to explore other design approaches to achieve innovation. Currently innovation doesn’t happen because every department in product development has competing metrics for success, and any of them can veto a product decision if it doesn’t satisfy their limited world view. I would argue that the imperative is to move Toward Human-Centered Organizations, where companies are structured to support good, usable, innovative design, where metrics are aligned across organizations to achieve a common goal.

What we’ve seen is that the best work, the best products, are created by small, multidisciplinary teams. Where there is no such thing as departmental hand-offs and review. Instead, you’ve got marketers, designers, engineers, user advocates working closely together on a single project. Where success is measured for the group as a whole, so that everyone is striving for the same goal.

Hey all… I’m now using Feedburner to process my RSS Feed, and I’m using the del.icio.us splicer to post what I’ve bookmarked. So if you want the full peterme experience, point your aggregators here.

Among my more popular posts is Way more about paths at UC Berkeley than you’d ever want to read. It got some recent traction, and in the comments were a couple of interesting items I wanted to call to people’s attention.

Phil gives us a fab photo of paths in front of the Hotel Moskva.

Robin Sloan and a colleague published “On the Beaten Path,” which attempts to find the applied math in such wanderings.

I just attended the Design for Hackability panel here at DIS2004. Hacking, in this context, tended to mean appropriating existing technologies for purposes other than intended. Anything from modifying Barbie Dolls to grabbing audio and text feeds to manipulate objects to jumpstarting social interaction between strangers.

It was one of those talks where meme overload causes a bit of cerebral paralysis. Some notes I jotted down…

– There’s a prevailing notion that “hacking” is a meme on the rise. More things are being hacked. Hacking is getting easier to do. The first suggestion as to way the increase dealt with the lowering of barriers to entry — hacking is easier, because, thanks to the Web, you can get instructions for hacking more readily. Also, some of the tools of this kind of hacking — RSS feeds, audio streams, plug-ins, etc — are more readily available.

However, I think a more important aspect to the rise of hacking is as a response to what is feeling like an increasingly monolithic culture. This was touched on briefly, but I think more crucial. I think our larger political and consumer systems have left a lot of people feeling disempowered and without identity– and hacking is a way to regain control, to personalize, to make Things Your Own.

– One thing that suggested this rise of hackability was an increase in presence in pop culture. The magazine Readymade was a case in point — it’s filled with do-it-yourself projects for augmenting and configuring your life. And I wondered the degree to which Readymade is like Wallpaper or Seventeen — it’s more aspirational than actually practiced. People crave the DIY life, don’t have the time for it, but can read about at and feel involved.

– And then I thought of Alton Brown, and his requirement of every tool in his kitchen to be a “multitasker”. Alton has done a lot to hack kitchen tools (and non-kitchen tools) for the purpose of cooking. This was a tangential thought. Though the success of Good Eats speaks to the popularity of this approach.

– I started wondering if it’s valuable to distinguish between hacking products and hacking media. Jonah Brucker-Cohenand Lalya Gaye strike me as product hackers. Dan Hill, through his work with BBC Radio online, addressed more media hacking — blogs, BBC radio feeds, etc. Similarly, Elizabeth discussed the Billboard Liberation Front.

Though, as I’m typing these notes, I’m seeing the distinctions between the two blur. Things like Steam are products for hacking media. But, I guess, for me, I see hacking media as far more accessible than hacking products.

– Hackability Happens. This was a theme, though not necessarily stated explicitly. Designers need to recognize that people will modify their products to adapt to their personal needs, contexts. Period.

– However, currently, hackability is kind of a privilege. You need to have the savvy and the time to hack. And while the barriers are dropping, they are still significant. I fear that, in this strive for hackability, we’ll create a new set of haves and havenots… I mean, we see this already. People who can hack have a distinct advantage over those who can’t. This relates a bit to my post on Shit Is Too Hard To Use. I’ve been watching people attempt to use products that require a significant level of technical savvy. And people are feeling overwhelmed by these technical requirements.

– So, for me, what I realized would come out of this notion of “design for hackability” is a pattern language for hackability. Given that users will configure their products, and, if I want to be a responsible designer, I want to support and enable such configuration, what are ways and approaches I can take to accommodate hackability. What are the qualities of hackable systems?

I don’t quite know what the title to this post means, but it came into my head when reading this column on a recent essay citing the 100 most influential papers in physics. It points out that for all the glamour that cosmology, quantum mechanics, black holes, and the like have been getting, what physicists are actually *doing*, and what they’re actually *reading* is more prosaic.