I arrived in Moscow on Monday to do some consulting for the coming months. Two months to be precise, unless there is an extension of the contract.

I’m sitting now in the huge space of Crowne Plaza lobby, a facility with an interesting history – or so I was told – but I cannot find it written anywhere (i.e. not on wikipedia). Colleague told me the complex was built in the 70s and became a rare enclave of capitalism within soviet Moscow, where people in western clothes could be seen, prostitutes abound etc. (full fledged capitalist environment in any case).

What else. The weather is shitty and I can hardly mobilize myself to do any work on Ogito side.

There seems to be a new element which came to light after I was last here, as an effect of the crisis.

People I work with, and they would be typical new middle class representatives, talk about feeling insecure in the country, anxiety can clearly be felt, to the point that makes them worry about state of things in Russia.

In the time of prosperity any troubling signs were filtered out before they could reach their consciousness. Things like political killings or corruption were known to exist, but not something successful specialists aiming for new cars and apartments would worry about.

Plus they bought into nationalistic theme, where every unpleasant fact was dismissed as exaggeration driven by hostile external propaganda.

Not anymore. Moscow streets were always a curiosity, where luxurious cars of the elite are mixing seamlessly with working class in ancient Russian ladas. Now, low income workers start to display open hostility towards suits passing by on the street.

Police would be expected to separate the extreme layers of the society, but unfortunately anyone in the uniform is considered rather a potential threat than protection. Men in uniforms look to benefit from their status for extortion and not serve anyone.

Prosperity is over for now and status quo where everyone is paid into submission through oil money may become unsustainable. Things may get ugly then.

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Agnieszka Pomaska, 29, will become a new member of the Polish parliament. She barely missed being elected in Gdansk last time, now she will take place of a new EU representative.

She is a hell of a sportswoman, studied politology and apparently did a good job in Gdansk’s government (can’t tell since I’m not from Gdansk).

With liberal party getting 45% of votes in the middle of the recession, Polish politics doesn’t leave a lot to complain about, but surely it wouldn’t hurt to have more young politicians.

Even better if they understood new technologies and helped the country compete – topics like user-friendly copyright law and support for high-tech startups could use some spokesmen.

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Some impressive map overlays (phone calls data during Obama inauguration):

http://senseable.mit.edu/obama/index.html

I find visualizing data to be such a cool topic – which can easily be seen from the number of posts related to statistics on Ogito blog, like this one.

But there is often a gap between aesthetics and usefulness of advanced visuals.

To be useful we typically require easy access to lots of context, to be able to draw any conclusions from the data, for example:

• ability to drill down – investigate what contributes to the variable value
• ability to compare variable level through time
• ability to compare variable level in case of different objects (e.g. competitors, regions, etc.)

(Ogito statistics for cities — registration required to see the charts — use simple Google Charts and tables with links to underlying sets of objects, and this is already enough to get the basic understanding outlined above)

Sometimes complex visualizations add difficulty to perform these basic operations rather than reduce it.

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It used to be like this: kids were first to learn new technologies, and then explained them to their less savvy parents.

In my family it was always the case, with stuff like VCR and computers.

I was always curious if that situation will remain with my generation, or if perhaps we are different – world is so much about learning something new all the time, that we simply cannot afford to fall back on getting used to new things quickly.

I got my first feeling that I was behind a kid (10 years old daughter of a friend) a couple of days ago, when we were skyping and she used XD emoticon (written form), and I didn’t know what she meant.

First sparrow?

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