A jury in Austin, Texas, has awarded Richard Garriott $28 million in damages in his suit against his former company, NCsoft. Congratulations to Mr. Garriott and his attorneys at Fish & Richardson. Barnes & Roberts provided graphics and helped present the case in Judge Sparks’s courtroom in Austin.

Here is a piece by author Jonah Lehrer talking about how machines that seem less like machines and more like beings endears them to us.

These mistaken perceptions of agency can dramatically change our response to the machine. When we see the device as having a few human attributes, we start treating it like a human, and not like a tool. So here’s my advice for designers of mediocre gadgets: Give them voices. Give us an excuse to endow them with agency. Because once we see them as humanesque, and not just as another thing, we’re more likely to develop a fondness for their failings.

This is reminiscent of Jason’s argument in his ASTC article last year, where he suggests looking for ways to anthropomorphize in our presentations so that jurors will be drawn into what are sometimes very cold technical presentations. Which is not to say that we need an animated paperclip, or a talking grasshopper, to guide the jury through claim 15 of the patent. However, when appropriate, adding a subtle touch of humanness to our presentation can connect with the audience in a way that a simple diagram may not.

Errol Morris has the first part of an article up on the New York Times Opinionator page discussing “unknown unknowns,” beginning with the story of a bank robber who was too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber.

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight.  What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise.  The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest.  There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money.  Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving.  “But I wore the juice,” he said.  Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

More than just a hapless criminal story, Cornell professor David Dunning saw this as a tale of the limits of human intelligence and imagination, and began studying what became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, how our incompetence masks our ability to see our incompetence.

At the beginning of trial, the jury is full of known unknowns. Educating them about the law and our case is our first task. But what about the unknown unknowns, the backgrounds and preconceived ideas the jurors bring that will color the way they hear our arguments and reach their verdict? What about our own assumptions and ignorance?

(Via The Awl.)

Over on the Atlantic website, James Fallows points to a good use of Google Earth to help visualize the surface area of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Using this utility, you can map the spill onto any city to see how far reaching it is (The utility requires the Google Earth plugin). Here is the spill mapped to Dallas:

Fallows notes “the surprising power that different visual renderings of reality can have, in changing our ability to understand, or at least begin to envision, what is going on around us.”

Used properly, Google Earth can be an effective tool in litigation graphics— not only for capturing still images, but also for live presentations during trials. The ability to pan, tilt, rotate and zoom Google’s satellite maps makes presentations lively and engaging. In the right situation, Google Earth can go beyond what a traditional, static map might offer.

Alex Lundry delivers a crash course on familiar topics in information graphics, using Congressman John Boehner’s cluttered Healthcare Reform Chart as a jumping off point (language briefly NSFW):

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Change blindness is the failure to notice changes to the scene (or image) you are viewing.

From Kelly:

This is an interesting phenomenon and worth keeping in mind as it relates to demonstratives. It tells me that the presenter possibly needs to verbally point out the changes that occur when presenting a sequence of demonstratives that have the same base image (or at least point out that there is going to be a change from one slide to the other so that the audience looks for it).

It’s kinda like the gorilla experiment…

The clip is from the BBC documentary series “Brain Story“. Some other clips and episodes are available for online viewing, though it appears the entire series has not yet been released.

(via Boing Boing)

A study published this summer (PDF) asserts that using animations in PowerPoint to control the rate of information on a slide may actually reduce comprehension by the audience.

Even though the use of custom animation allows the introduction of new information incrementally the technique can adversely impact student learning experience when factual information is conveyed in the presentation.  Subjects shown the static slides had better recall of graphics and text on the slides due to prolonged exposure to the information. The incremental introduction of concepts in dynamic slides was designed to prevent student exhaustion caused by visually presenting all concepts at once.  However, the dynamic slides lead to excessive processing demands and limited exposure time.

To use the example of a slide with five bullet points: if you added the bullet points incrementally, the last bullet point, which could very likely be the most important point or even a conclusion to the slide, would be available to the audience only a fraction of the amount of time that the first bullet point is available. Seeing the last bullet point only briefly could reduce the audience’s ability to retain that information.

However, the study in question took place in a classroom, where a presentation has a much different function than in a courtroom. Also, the data for the study were gathered using a nine question quiz administered after the viewing of the PowerPoint, so although the scores of those who viewed the animated presentation were approximately 10 points lower than those who viewed the static presentation, that is really only a difference between answering seven questions right and eight questions right. The actual presentation used does not seem to be available, and so we can’t assess whether there are any other issues that might contribute to the discrepancy in scores.

Still, I think it is important to note that simply adding information a piece at a time may not help a jury get more from your presentation than if you just put up the information all at once. There are other methods for focusing a jury’s attention without withholding information, but even more important than that is having a clear message that is communicated as simply as possible, avoiding clutter and unnecessary distractions.

Congratulations to Cummins-Allison Corp, and their attorneys from Winston Strawn, Nixon Peabody and The Heartfield Law Firm, for their successful infringement suit against Shinwoo Information & Telecommunications Co. and Amro-Asian Trade. US Patents 6,459, 806; 5,966,456; 6,381,354; and 5,909,503 were found valid and infringed in Judge Ron Clark’s Court in Beaumont, TX. The jury awarded Cummins-Allison $12 Million in damages. Barnes & Roberts provided graphics and presentation support in the war room and courtroom.

Attributing Human Voice, Behavior and Motivation to Inanimate Constructs

Both scientific and legal training stress the importance of avoiding anthropomorphism. We are taught to study and apply the laws of science and society based on facts and logic; to remove our own personal bias from observation and communication. However, that very science, through the study of linguistics, for example, teaches us that human beings think, speak and experience the world through the lens of our own, rather personal, sense of anthropomorphism. In other words, people experience the world through human hands, human eyes and human ears all coupled to a human brain filled with human emotions. We are hard-wired to apply human emotion and reason to all we see and hear.

When it comes to trial presentation, patent lawyers (many with technical training prior to their entry into the law) and technical experts are at a distinct disadvantage. They live by the cold, harsh light of the scientific method, eschewing anthropomorphism in their work. There is nothing inherently wrong with the scientific method. However, to point out the obvious, jurors in technical cases are not typically scientists or technologists. Indeed, any scientifically trained juror is likely to be excluded based on that very training.

Now that we are faced with a jury of non-scientists and the difficult task of teaching technical subject matter to them, we must switch off the cold light of science, light a warm fire and settle in to tell a story.

Read the full article at WWW.ASTCWEB.ORG