Job: Product ManagerAnswer: This is one of those questions Google asks just to see if the applicant can explain the key challenge to solving the problem.

Reader Matt Beuchamp came up with a dandy answer, writing:

I figure a standard school bus is about 8ft wide by 6ft high by 20 feet long – this is just a guess based on the thousands of hours I have been trapped behind school buses while traffic in all directions is stopped.

That means 960 cubic feet and since there are 1728 cubic inches in a cubit foot, that means about 1.6 million cubic inches.

I calculate the volume of a golf ball to be about 2.5 cubic inches (4/3 * pi * .85) as .85 inches is the radius of a golf ball.

Divide that 2.5 cubic inches into 1.6 million and you come up with 660,000 golf balls. However, since there are seats and crap in there taking up space and also since the spherical shape of a golf ball means there will be considerable empty space between them when stacked, I’ll round down to 500,000 golf balls.

Which sounds ludicrous. I would have spitballed no more than 100k. But I stand by my math.

… and 14 others from
http://www.businessinsider.com/answers-to-15-google-interview-questions-that-will-make-you-feel-stupid-2009-11#how-many-golf-balls-can-fit-in-a-school-bus-1

http://tapuniversity.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/null-hypothesis/

Years ago, one of the criticisms lobbed at the Mac platform was that when it comes to software, there just isn’t much out there.

Any Mac user will know that that stopped being true a long time ago, but in the last five or six years especially, the Mac as a platform has undergone a sort of software renaissance. Not only are the big mainstream programs available for the Mac (with the exception of games, where Windows still consistently rules the roost), but independent software developers have put out some of the most spectacular software available for any platform — much of it only available for the Mac.

I’m always trying to juggle lots of different projects and looking for the best ways to make my time and my work as efficient as possible, so I love productivity applications. I don’t quite have a GTD obsession, but I’m close.

For the Mac addicts and newcomers alike, I’ve compiled twenty of my favorite Mac productivity applications. This list is by no-means exhaustive, so chime in with your favorites in the comments!

Task Management

One of the most common types of productivity applications is the task manager. This is an app that can do anything from storing notes, integrating your calendar and to-do lists and popping up reminders and linking information. For many users seeking productivity bliss, the task management app is their productivity hub. The Mac has some great options, but here are 3 of the strongest (verified against an informal poll of my Twitter followers):

Things ($49.95) — Cultured Code’s Things was easily the top choice on my Twitter followers’ lists of “best Mac productivity app.” Not only is the interface gorgeous (it won a 2009 Apple Design Award), the app is both simple and powerful.

Not only can you manage all your tasks on the desktop, the fantastic Things iPhone app is a great way to keep track of your tasks while on the go, as well as a fantastic portable task manager and to-do list.

The Hit List () ($49.95) — After Things, The Hit List won my impromptu Twitter poll. Like things, The Hit List is elegant, but powerful. If you participated in MacHeist this year, you got a copy of The Hit List, and as a task-manager, this is one of my favorites. It syncs with iCal, makes it easy to add lists and tasks, as well as attaching and organizing notes onto certain items, and it has an interface that is uncluttered and easy to use.

The Hit List doesn’t have an iPhone app, though one is in the works.

OmniFocus ($79.95) — OmniFocus has been around for a long time, so of the three applications, it’s probably the most feature-rich. As a result, it also has the biggest learning curve — but if you are a strict GTD-devotee, it might just be the app for you. You can assign tasks via e-mail and OmniFocus will watch your inbox and automatically add tasks you send yourself to your OmniFocus inbox.

OmniFocus syncs with iCal and also has a great iPhone application for syncing, creating and managing tasks on the go.

All three of these apps offer a free-trial period, so play around with them and then choose what works best for your workflow.

Information Organizers

Shawn Blanc calls these kinds of applications “anything buckets” and I have to agree. Although you can use information organizers as task managers, they really excel at collecting and collating lots of different types of information for different projects.

So, you can have a way to store all the files associated with a project, all the pictures and the contact information of your co-workers, all in a way that is taggable and searchable.

Bento ($49) — Bento is from the FileMaker, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple, Inc., so the interface and features of Bento naturally match and work with those of native Mac applications. Bento describes itself as a personal database program, and that’s true.

You can attach e-mail content directly to a Bento box, just by dragging and dropping, it automatically syncs and can integrate with your iCal and CalDAV calendars. You can also use it with Excel spreadsheets to view and search items and terms more easily. What’s more, there’s an excellent Bento iPhone app that works both independently and in conjunction with the original application.

Yojimbo ($39) — Yojimbo 2.0 was recently released and the application has gained some new features, but it remains pretty much the same tried and true information organizer. Drag information into Yojimbo and tag it — it’s searchable in Spotlight, you can find it in Yojimbo, and if you want to take the information or files out of Yojimbo, you just drag it out.

Calendars and Address Books

Although Google integration for calendars and address book entries is built-into Mac OS X Leopard and improved with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, managing your calendars and address books across systems (or keeping them updated both in Google () and on your Mac) can still be a challenge. For instance, when you sync Google calendars with your Mac, many times they are only read-only, and you only have the option to sync five calendars at a time — a real bummer if you have lots and lots of calendars. Additionally, the systems don’t always work together as well as they should.

Fortunately, there are a couple of great Mac apps that do the trick.

BusyCal ($40) — The successor in many ways to the fantastic BusySync, BusyCal is like iCal on steroids (BusyMac calls it “iCal Pro”). BusyCal lets you share your iCal calendars across a LAN (great for business users) and also lets you sync with Google Calendar (including the ability to edit Google Calendar events), without Google/Apple’s 5 calendar limitation and with the ability to sync with more than one device. If you just use OS X and you want to sync a calendar with both your iPhone and say a BlackBerry or another phone, you can’t — BusyCal lets you do this sort of syncing.

You also get the option to add weather reports, notes, graphics and other media into your iCal view. Very, very nice.

Spanning Sync ($25 one-year subscription, $65 to buy) — Spanning Sync does much of what BusySync does, but with the addition of Google Address book syncing too. OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard can be set to sync with your Google Address book, but as a former BlackBerry user, I quickly found the problem with this: if you are using another mobile phone (or want to sync multiple Google accounts), the whole thing breaks.

Spanning Sync also works really well with Google Apps and makes sharing with multiple Google Apps users a breeze. If you want an easy way to do over-the-air syncing with your mobile phone, iPhone and other computers, Spanning Sync is something you should definitely check out.

Twitter/Chat/IM

Many of us spend much of our day communicating with colleagues over Twitter, IM or in apps like Campfire: here are some of my favorite productivity apps for communication.

Tweetdeck () (Free) — Even if Adobe Air () does have its pitfalls for Mac users (high memory usage, high crash-rate for apps), Tweetdeck is one of the most powerful Twitter apps for the power Twitter () user. Granted, for some people, Twitter is actually a productivity killer, but if you rely on keeping up with social media news and trends for your job, Twitter is essential, and Tweetdeck is definitely powerful.

Twitterrific () (Free, $14.95 ad-free) — One of the very first Twitter clients, Twitterrific’s icon is still often associated with Twitter itself. Twitterrific is available in a free ad-supported version or in an ad-free version for $14.95. Although the feature set is a bit sparse in comparison to some of the newer apps, this is still one of the sexiest OS X apps and it is a great option for users who want to keep up, but don’t want to have their lives overtaken with Twitter.

Tweetie () (Free, $19.95 ad-free) — The iPhone () app was so popular, Atebits was bombarded with requests to make a Mac Twitter client. The result: Tweetie for Mac is one of the best Twitter apps for the user who wants something that doesn’t overtake their screen, but still provides options like search, multiple account support and the ability to follow/unfollow in app.

Propane ($20) — 37Signals’ Campfire is a great way for groups to communicate. Think of it as an always-on chatroom, with the ability to share files, search through transcripts, create sub-rooms and directly address users. It’s fantastic, and like all 37Signals apps, designed to run in the browser.

However, if you are a heavy Campfire user, you know that sometimes the browser option isn’t always best. You’re forced to dedicate a certain size of a window to Campfire, you have to always have a browser window open (which can be bad when installing apps that insist all browsers be closed — I’m looking at you Adobe!), plus if your browser crashes, your Campfire session goes with it and you have to re-login.

For any Mac user who uses Campfire on a daily basis, I highly recommend Propane. More than just a single-site browser, it’s a well designed app that makes searching, adding in files, viewing files and using Campfire a joy. You can set your Growl settings for certain alerts or extended alerts, you can drag and drop images or videos directly from Safari () into Propane and adding other files is just as easy.

Text Tools

Text-expansion was built into Mac OS X Snow Leopard but at a very low level. Full fledged-text expansion applications make it much easier to type more in less time. Don’t believe me? Read David Pogue’s text-expansion workflow to see a totally hardcore implementation.

TextExpander ($29) — TextExpander is one of the big names in the text-expansion space, and for good reason — it’s scriptable, adaptable and compact. Many of the features in TextExpander are also available in the other programs, but one standout is built-in scripts for bit.ly and digg short urls. Just copy a link, type in “/bitly” and voila, the shortened version of the URL in your clipboard is inserted. This is great when working with Twitter applications.

The recently launched TextExpander Touch brings your expansions to your iPhone or iPod touch.

Typinator ($29) — Typinator is very similar to TextExpander and is also scriptable to attach certain commands to certain programs. You can also add snippet-libraries for CSS, HTML and auto-correct rules for even more productivity.

TypeIt4Me ($27) — TypeIt4Me has been around since 1989 (!) and even has an iPhone app. It has lots of great-looking features and a long legacy. Of the three, TypeIt4Me is the only one that can use Mac OS X’s () built-in auto-correct (though the other two have auto-correct snippet libraries).

Working With the Web

These are some of my favorite productivity apps when working with the web.

Evernote () (Free, Premium $5 month/$45 a year) — Because it is cross-platform in nature and available on a slew of mobile devices, Evernote is a very popular service. You can store photos, notes, bookmarks, sketches, video files, voice notes, pretty much anything you want, and then pull those notes up from the web, or an app on your Mac or PC or on your phone.

LittleSnapper () ($35) — Admittedly, this app is more for people who take tons and tons of screenshots or need to grab images from elements of a web page. Because I take so many screenshots or web shots a week, LittleSnapper is a lifesaver to me. It’s basically like iPhoto for your screen snaps, so you can collect and tag shots from your desktop or from the web, crop them, and add annotations in the app, and then export them out to be used on the web, or upload them to Realmac’s Ember service.

What I love about LittleSnapper is that I can select specific DOM elements from a webpage. This is great when you just want to get a certain snippet of the page. It’s also great because you can open your snaps directly in Photoshop or whatever image editor you use, for additional refinements.

The Ember service is great for users who like to share their collections or images all over the web.

1Password () ($39.95) — One of the first applications I install on any new Mac (or after any fresh install) is 1Password. Quite simply, my life is better because of this app. It stores all your passwords across web browsers, makes it easy to create tough, secure passwords and then you can just login by selecting “fill with 1Password” from the context menu of your favorite web browser.

My passwords used to always be the same, which is dumb — 1Password makes it easy to not only create new passwords that are secure, but to keep them in a secure database for the times I inevitably forget what they are. 1Password is about to launch its PasswordAnywhere feature so you can access your passwords securely from across the web, no matter what type of computer you are using.

1Password can also store you software licenses, which is a nice touch.

Application Launchers

So you have Finder, you have the OS X Dock, but what if you want to quickly launch a certain app with just a few key commands? What if you want to automatically search Google with just the flick of a wrist? For that, you need an application launcher.

Quicksilver (Free) — Quicksilver is an app that is near and dear to many Mac productivity geeks’ hearts. Unfortunately, the app is also more or less abandonware (yes, yes, it’s open source now, but so little has been done to keep it updated, or more importantly to keep the add-ons that made it so great updated, that it’s basically dead). Still, for users on Tiger (or Leopard without many needs for add-ons, Snow Leopard support is iffy at best), this is the app for you. The array of plugins developed for Quicksilver over the years is one of the reasons so many users still cite this as one of their top productivity apps.

The developer of Quicksilver is now working on the Google Quick Search Box for Google, so maybe we’ll see a return of sorts in the future.

LaunchBar ($35) — Until then, Leopard and Snow Leopard users with the need for a good Quicksilver-like utility need to take a look at LaunchBar. With LaunchBar 5 (still in beta, but nearing release), the app has become everything Quicksilver was, and more. Easy application launching, a built-in clipboard history, the ability to perform calculations from the Quicksilver bar, the ability to search google, open web pages and more — all from your keyboard.

Carpal tunnel be damned, LaunchBar is awesome!

Miscellaneous

Here are a couple of tools to round-out your productivity toolkit.

Dropbox () (Basic 2GB account Free, 50GB account, $10 a month, 100GB account $20 a month) — Dropbox is one of those deceptively simple concepts that just gets better the more you use it. You sign up for a free 2GB storage account that you can access across machines and with other users. What makes Dropbox so brilliant — and better than other disk-storage services — is that it is integrated perfectly with the OS X Finder. You can easily add a file or folder to your Dropbox account and make changes to your Dropbox files locally and watch as they instantly update online.

One of my favorite uses for Dropbox is with my encrypted 1Password keychain. This way, I can share my 1Password files with my Mac mini in the living room and on my MacBook in my office, without having to manually sync anything. The file is in a shared dropbox between those two computers so changes on one automatically update on the other.

Xmarks () (Free) — Formerly known as Foxmarks, Xmarks is a wonderful way to keep your browser bookmarks in sync and updated across both browsers and computers. A plugin is available for Firefox () and Internet Explorer (), and a special preference pane is available for Safari.

What I like about Xmarks is that I can assign different browser profiles and usage profiles. So if I have some bookmarks I only want to sync with Firefox, I can do that — if I want some bookmarks only to sync on work-related machines, I can do that. It’s a brilliant way to keep your bookmarks managed.

Freedom (Free) — Sometimes the Internet is more of a distraction than it is a productivity aid. For those times, the best solution is just to unplug. Freedom will turn off your Mac’s networking card for up to 8 hours, so you can get what you need to get done done, without the distraction of Facebook (), Twitter and the latest viral videos.

Obviously, as a web writer, this doesn’t really work for me during the work week, but it’s great for when I’m on a deadline — like trying to finish an article of 20+ Mac productivity tools!

from http://mashable.com/2009/09/19/mac-productivity-apps/

- Seth

Todd provides 5 reasons why data visualization isn’t more prevalent:

1. People don’t know what data visualization is.
2. Bad visualization has skewed perception of what data visualization is and what it can be used for.
3. People can’t interpret charts or new data representations.
4. Visualization is difficult to create, but easy to copy.
5. People won’t pay for visualization.

While all the reasons do have some truth, there are a couple things worth adding.

People Do Know What Data Visualization Is

People have some kind of idea of what data is and know that you can get information out of it somehow. Maybe it’s with a graph or it could be with something more elaborate, but most people will get it. They know what data visualization is. They just don’t know what it’s called. In other words, they know. They just don’t know they know.

People Will Pay (A Lot) for Visualization

With all the data out there and the constantly increasing volumes of it, more people want to understand without having to learn formal statistical methods. How can they understand it? Visualization of course. The growing number of examples I’ve covered here on FlowingData show that there is a growing demand. After all, a lot of stuff I’ve covered here was commissioned.

Not Too Worried

Anyways, even though not everyone knows about data visualization (yet), I’m not too worried about it. There’s just too much data for people not to care… or am I wasting my time? No. If they don’t care, we’ll show them why they should.

Like what you see? Subscribe to the FlowingData RSS feed to stay updated on what’s new in data visualization.

One data theme. Three original prints. Your walls will thank you.

Inspired by the tangram puzzles from when we were kids, this design paints a fascinating portrait of what goes into learning in America.
from: http://flowingprints.com/

Education: Enrollment and Dropouts

from http://personas.media.mit.edu

designed with www.wordle.net

latest + greatest

Our research on the perception of time-series visualizations received an ACM CHI 2009 Best Paper Award.

Our work on social data analysis was featured in the January 2009 issue of Communications of the ACM.

I recently presented A Brief History of Data Visualization at the Stanford HCI seminar. A video is on the internets, as is an earlier talk on interactive visualization.

O’Reilly’s Beautiful Data contains 39 vignettes of data in action, including our work on social analysis of census data. Proceeds go to the Sunlight Foundation and Creative Commons.

selected projects

Interactive Visualization Toolkits

Over 100,000 downloads!

Software: protovis, flare, prefuse
Papers: InfoVis’09, InfoVis’06, CHI’05
Video: DivX AVI (30M), WMV (33M)

Collaborative Visualization

Social data analysis using interactive visualizations on the web.

Papers: CHI’07, VAST’07, CHI’06
Video: Flash (20M)

Multi-Scale Banking to 45°

Perceptual optimization of the aspect
ratios of data graphics.

Papers: InfoVis’06

Animation in Data Graphics

Using animation to improve perception
of transitions in data graphics.

Papers: InfoVis’07
Video: Quicktime (18M)

Vizster: Visualizing Social Networks

Visual exploration of networks such as Friendster, Facebook, and MySpace.

Papers: InfoVis’05, HICSS’06
Video: Numb3rs (CBS TV), WMV

from http://hci.stanford.edu/jheer/

from http://cs.jhu.edu/~razvanm/fs-expedition/tux3.html#popular-50