ARTS & FARCES internet

ESRD

How much is a transplanted kidney worth after a botched transplant that kills the organ? According to Jessica Fargen writing for the Boston Herald, it’s US$1.25 million. That’s the settlement agreed to by Mike and Mary Findley and the Tufts Medical Center (formerly New England Medical Center). Mike Findley, a 54 year-old building inspector from New Hampshire, received the kidney transplant in 2003. His lawyers argued that because of “understaffing, rookie doctors-in-training, and chain-of-command breakdowns” the live-donor organ from Findley’s brother failed a week after the transplant. Shortly after the transplant procedure, Findley’s urine output dropped drastically and the medical professionals failed to properly respond. A renal ultrasound wasn’t ordered until another doctor’s assessment the next morning. Findley received a second, cadaver-organ, transplant at the hospital which failed after several years.

Tina Hesman Saey, writing for Science News, reports on a study published in the 6 August 2010 issue of Cell Stem Cell finding that a protein that helps the body protect itself from cancer also prevents regeneration in mammals. Researchers discovered that by blocking the protein, ARF and Rb, mature muscle cells from mice were able to proliferate.

Internet

Paul Graham, in a really smart essay, asks “What happened to Yahoo,” and finds the answer: Yahoo wasn’t a hacker company as a result of having too much easy money and ambivalence about being a technology company.

Jess Bachman has published another information graphic, this time about how internet web search became a US$20 billion business in less than 20 years. It’s hard to remember the internet before web search, but it did exist. There are some pretty big gaping holes here—Open Text, Magellan, and the original Excite to name just three—but’s it’s well done nonetheless. If I had any, my early money would have been on Excite. Excite’s model was to give away a pretty good search engine for individual websites and have them phone home instead of crawling everything it could find.

The HTML5/CSS3 boilerplates are starting to appear. Monkey Do’s HTML5 Reset is available in two versions: stripped-down for building up and kitchen sink for scaling back. Paul Irish and Divya Manian have released HTML5 Boilerplate. Neither of these are desperately needed frameworks; just nice jumping off points.

Technology

I’ve been worried ever since Oracle bought Sun in April 2009. Not because of Sun per se, but because Sun has previously purchased MySQL the year before. Along with that Sun purchase came Java, and it looks like that might be what Oracle was really after. Or at least it’s become convenient. Oracle has filed a patent and copyright infringement lawsuit against Google for using Java in its Android mobile device operating system. Both the media release and complaint (.pdf; 66KB) are suspiciously lacking detail.

User experience

Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox is about blogs—corporate blogs to be precise, but the points are applicable to individual and small organization blogs as well. Summaries of articles are more likely to draw in users than full articles. Nielsen’s eye tracking studies indicated that sites with a single article on the front page lose users who scan the article and don’t look any further. “... summaries are usually superior to full articles because they let you expose users to a broad selection of topics,” writes Nielsen. He goes on to offer an exception: If your readers are so fully engaged with you that they visit your blog daily, full articles may be a better alternative.

Richard Ingram has constructed an information graphic that’s very useful for user experience people trying to tell managers and clients what content strategy is and why it’s so very important. Ingram blows up the familiar honeycomb cells for each user experience practitioner and deliverable and recombines three broad approaches to content strategy—technical, editorial, and web strategy and planning—in a honeycomb venn diagram that shows where the sweet spot of the three approaches lies.

UX Myths takes down the magical number seven, plus or minus two with a wealth of resources. I admit holding on to this one in the face of all evidence to the contrary including that provided by one of my heroes, Edward Tufte and George Miller himself. The reason? My admittedly dated academic upbringing in human factors (among other things) that tells me I want my website users to form a mental map of the navigation structure.