Google Chrome Speed Tests

What a keytar, an electrocuted boat and an Idaho potato have to do with how fast you surf.

For their latest release of Chrome, which purports to be the fastest browser around, the good folks at Google and BBH decided to test just how fast “fast” was. So they pitted Chrome’s 2700 frames per second against the speeds of more familiar things, things people would expect to be fast — a bullet, a potato, sound waves, lighting.

To test that, the team constructed a series of what closely resembles Rube Goldberg machines, each setting off a series of simultaneous reactions triggering both Chrome and the object it’s being benchmarked against. The results — and the effort that went into them — are beyond impressive.

The potato gun test took 51 takes to get the equipment and the rendering working precisely right — 51 new potatoes, reloads and clean graters. There was a moment when the whole team went quiet as the Tesla Coil was removed from the box for the first time; no one was quite sure exactly what we’d bitten off with that one, and — even with ear defenders — the sound of the Coil as it made it’s first 4.2m volt arcs was extraordinary. For a few seconds no one said a word, then we got to work and set up the experiment. ” ~ Ben Malbon, BBH

What makes the effort interesting, beyond the pure stunt value, is that it demonstrates two increasingly important things: In “measuring” something from computer science through physics, mechanical engineering and photography, the effort epitomizes the fertile cross-pollination of displines; it also illustrates the need for creating a new language for the data age and translating these parameters of digital culture into terms more relevant to and thus comprehensible by humans — something we’ve also seen in the flourishing field of data visualization, which translates alienating, incomprehensible algorithms and numbers into visual representations that humanize the information and make it more digestible.

As recent Chrome converts, we can attest to the browser’s speediness and commend the creative team for contextualizing it so brilliantly. But we must point out that when it comes to your web-browsing experience, browser speed is still a negligible factor compared to actual internet speed — and, we’re sorry to say, using Chrome’s speed-potato on Verizon “high speed internet” is like pouring mashed potatoes through a cocktail straw.

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FaceSense: Mind-reading from MIT

70′s-style mind-reading for the digital age, or why we all say one thing and mean another.

We have a longstanding fascination with the human face and the wealth of data that it holds. Now, the Affective Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab (another Brain Pickings darling) has developed FaceSense — a software application that detects head and face gestures in real time, analyzes them and deduces information about the person’s emotional disposition and mental state.

The principle, of course, is nothing new — back in the late 70′s, legendary psychologist Paul Ekman pioneered FACS, the Facial Actions Coding System, which is used to this day by anyone from academic researchers to the CIA to draw information about cognitive-affective states based on the micromuscle contractions of the human face. Though the MIT project doesn’t explicitly disclose it, we bet the data encoding is based, at least to some degree, on FACS.

But what makes FaceSense different and important is that it enables the extraction of such cognitive-affective information from pre-recorded video. And in the midst of all the neuromarketing hype — which is, for the most part, just that: hype — it offers an interesting model for collecting consumer psychology insight remotely, a scalable and useful tool for the age of telecommuting and sentiment analysis. What’s more, it helps bypass the quintessential unreliability of self-report in product testing.

Its applications can, of course, extend far beyond the marketing industry. An accurate disposition detection model for video can be used in anything from analyzing politicians’ televised appearances to testing news anchors for bias. And, judging by the abundance of all things video at CES this year, FaceSense has firmly planted its feet in a rich and ever-expanding space.

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DoGooder: Do Nothing, Change Everything

How to bypass annoyance with slick design and serious dogoodness.

UPDATE: DoGooder is now available for Chrome, the Brain Pickings browser of choice. Perfect combo of performance and purpose.

This week, a new report found that the average American guzzles more than 34 gigabytes of data per day. And anyone who’s ever been online can attest that a hefty portion of this comes from advertising, which, with the exception of the best-curated sites (ahem…), can be anything from a distraction to a nuisance. This has led many to the infamous Adblock Firefox plugin, eliminating ads altogether. But why take your negative experience and turn it neutral, when you can turn it positive?

Enter DoGooder, an ingenious new browser plugin for Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer that turns your ordinary browsing into donations supporting sustainability initiatives and movements — with no cost to you and no change in browser performance.

Here’s how it works: DoGooder hides all the ordinary ads and swaps them out for simple daily green tips, health and wellness ideas, and well-designed messaging for meaningful initiatives from the LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) category. Half of their profits then go to a thoughtfully curated list of charities and nonprofits — which means DoGooder has the potential to generate thousands of dollars a month for good causes.

If you’re a publisher, there’s nothing to fear — DoGooder doesn’t block ads from being served on your site, it just changes the end-user experience, so your CPM earnings remain unaffected. (Think of it as slipping a nice cover over a questionably designed couch.) If your run a charitable or sustainability-related site, you can even drop DoGooder a line and they’ll whitelist you and “exempt” your site from ad-blocking.

This is what a couple of popular sites look like goodified:

In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, you can even keep track of how many ads have been swapped.

And if for some reason you’re particularly enamored with the regular ads on some site, you can always disable DoGooder there simply by right/ctrl-clicking on the site and selecting “Show Original Ads.” The right/ctrl-click is also the way to let DoGood Headquarters know about a good cause they should consider featuring — just select “Suggest a Cause to Support.”

Genius, or what?

Thanks, Andy

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