joshuarrrr

I guarantee it’s a human typographic error, where the superscript was lost when converting the text from the print layout.

(Source: I used to work at the magazine and am painfully aware of previous such mistakes.)

One of the authors here- we have another graphic coming about Queensland Health. The craziest part was when IBM estimated it at $6 million.

What's worse is that they didn't try to even hold those requirements on paper.

Hi, I'm one of the authors of the piece. As my co-author would say, the industry is fueled by failed projects. But because outright failure is common, huge overruns can be seen as a success when they actually manage to deliver anything of use.

A Spectrum editor here- yes, we know the layout is far from ideal, especially on large monitors (I'm painfully aware-my primary monitor is a 30-inch cinema display). We just had a meeting about page templates for infographics last week, so hopefully it will me much better in a couple months.

Presumably you could also use lossy compression across users, especially for the boring parts. I imagine that, within the confines of my bowl, my milk and cheerios look pretty similar to yours. Do the actual differences matter, as a record of some particular breakfast experience? I suppose only if they float into some surprising configuration.

The IEEE's datacenter in New Jersey has been without power for days and eventually ran out of generator fuel. There were some intermittent DNS issues after Spectrum moved to backup servers in Arizona. I've been told they're resolved now.

That's right-it will be fully implemented in an upcoming redesign, but we've already shifted our production and design process to a non-paginated model. Usually when our articles were posted on Slashdot, Reddit, or here, readers used the single-page URL anyway. So the number of pageviews past page two was almost negligible.

Agree completely with font size and column-width critiques, both of which are addressed in an upcoming redesign. And, for that matter, I've always had issue with Slate's UX and design choices.

>The fact is that editors simply don't believe there is special expertise here.

I agree that UX and design are often neglected when traditional publishers work in digital mediums. But I find it odd that you can appreciate the experience that leads to good UX and design but not the editorial and reporting experience that leads to good copy.

>there are copycats that don't do the testing, don't optimize for their niche of readers, and are probably losing both money and readers because of it.

I think this is much more common than sophisticated A/B testing.

At our publication, we were able to make the business case that the added pageviews from pagination didn't make much of an impact on the bottom-line. Because we generally run out of premium ad inventory each month anyway, most of the extra impressions were just for extremely low-revenue, Google-served remnant ads. Again, some publications thrive on volume, but it's a tough way to make money as CTR on Google ads is very low.

>If it didn't improve their revenues, they wouldn't be doing it.

The publishing industry has not always been about maximizing profits. The weird hybrid of advertising and reader-supported has created a different mentality in the business. There are plenty of things that publishers still do- like supporting foreign correspondents- that are driven more by the editorial side of than the business side.