Josef.platil

User Experience House Design Between 1945 and 1966 Arts and Architecture magazine commissioned a series of case study houses which have become icons of modernism. Since I’m both an architect and a web product designer, I thought it would be fun to design a building the way that web applications are. Use Case Study House is a pun on the Case Study program and a reference to use case design which is fundamentally different from the way buildings are planned. Web Design vs Building & Product Design Web design has come along way in the last few years, since the rise of User Experience (UX) specialists, who are closer to architects in what they do than traditional web designers were. That is not to say that some web designers weren’t good UX people, it’s just that the perception of the role of web designer meant that they were marginalized into...

This comic needs more damn robots.

I wonder what society’s threshold is, on average, for willingness to pick up change off the street?

YOUTH unemployment is blighting a whole generation of youngsters. The International Labour Organisation estimates there are 75m 15-to-24-year-olds looking for work across the globe. But this figure excludes a large number of youngsters who do not participate in the labour market at all. Among the 34 members of the OECD, a club of rich nations, it is estimated there are 26m youths not in education, employment or training (so-called NEETs). Similarly, across the developing countries, the World Bank estimates that there are 262m such youths. All told, there are perhaps as many as 290m 15-to-24-year-olds not participating in the labour market— almost a quarter of the world’s youth, and a group almost as large as the population of America. More young people are idle than ever before. Why?

Some of these youths choose not to work. About a quarter of the 290m are south Asian women who do not work for cultural reasons. And under-24s who are working are disproportionately engaged in informal or temporary employment. In the rich world, it is estimated that a third of under-24s are on temporary contracts; in developing countries a fifth are unpaid labourers or work in the informal sector. That is better than not working at all, but is hardly cause for celebration. In total, nearly half of the world’s young are contributing to the labour market less effectively than they could be.

This is not simply the result of the financial crisis, though that is part of the explanation, having affected young people in the rich world particularly badly. Youth unemployment has increased by 30% across the OECD, and in Spain it has doubled to 20% as proportion of the youth population. In the developing world, meanwhile, a second contributory factor is that many countries with fast-growing populations also have inefficient labour markets. Almost half the world’s young people live in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa, the regions with the highest shares of youngsters out of work or working informally. (It is no coincidence that South Africa has some of the strictest rules on hiring and firing and one of the worst youth-unemployment problems in sub-Saharan Africa.) A third factor is the growing mismatch between the skills that youngsters have and the vacancies that employers want to fill. Germany, which has a relatively low level of youth unemployment, places a lot of emphasis on high-quality vocational courses, apprenticeships and links with industry. But it is an exception.

The effects of youth unemployment can persist for years. Those who begin their careers without work are more likely to have lower wages and suffer joblessness again later in life. The economic loss can be substantial, too, and not just in the form of higher welfare payments. Part of these losses may be due to missing out on training and experience accumulation that typically occurs with young workers. But younger workers typically change jobs at much higher rates than their older counterparts, and these job switches are responsible for most of a worker's wage growth early in a career. Workers forced into bad matches or no matches end up on a productivity trajectory well below what they might otherwise have expected. One estimate suggests that the total economic loss from youth unemployment was equivalent to 1.2% of GDP in Europe in 2011. Realising this problem, governments are trying to address the mismatch between skills and jobs: apprenticeships in Britain have increased in recent years, for example. There is evidence too that companies are investing more in the young and revamping their training programmes. New technology is providing educational opportunities to people who might otherwise remain outside the job market. There is some cause for hope, then. But the scale of the problem is daunting.

LATE last month Amanda Filipacchi, an American writer, discovered that the editors of Wikipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopaedia, were re-categorising female American authors from "American Novelists" to to "American Women Novelists". No corresponding "American Men Novelists" subject area existed at that time. The process seemingly happened sub rosa, through the actions of several editors. After she published an article in the New York Times pointing this out, Ms Filipacchi found that her own Wikipedia entry was edited numerous times for spurious and sometimes vindictive reasons. "Wikipedia is created and edited by its users," she observed. But when it comes to recategorising novelists, or vetting changes to individual pages, who actually makes the decisions?

Wikipedia advertises itself as a bias-free encyclopaedia which allows any internet denizen to contribute well-sourced facts or modify existing entries. In reality, however, the site has only about 35,000 English-language and 70,000 total active editors (as every contributor is known). With few exceptions, any visitor may edit the text of an entry so long as he follows the formatting, style and editorial form. Changes typically appear immediately, but modifications or entire entries may be rejected by other editors. That in turn may lead to consensus-driven votes and lengthy discussions. A common point of contention is whether a topic or person doesn't meet Wikipedia's detailed test for "notability". Editors who register an account, and who contribute regularly and in a manner that conforms to the nature of Wikipedia, gain implicit authority. Some editors become "administrators"—about 1,400 are at the moment—able to freeze or delete entries. Administrators have a big technical stick to ensure that when "edit wars" erupt or inappropriate changes are continuously applied, they can prod or truncheon users. Users may be banned or put under strictures, while administrators themselves can have their actions overridden by any of the 41 demiurges known as "stewards", a 12-member Olympian arbitration counsel, or the site's founder and chief deity, Jimmy Wales.

Given that no one is precisely in charge of anything, who has responsibility for the accuracy or intent of any given change, such as the shift of female novelists to a sub-category? The site tracks all changes to an obsessive degree, and also maintains for each page a "talk" section in which changes are discussed ad nauseam. In another article, Ms Filipacchi documented the seven editors who relocated women authors using the record of changes for both categories' entries. In the modifications to her entry and the "talk" section, one can see the disputes and annotation of modifications to her biography. Ultimately, then, Wikipedia's ostensible fairness relies on vigilance, and editors can mark articles and be notified if any change occurs. But a million unnoticed changes can take place without any authority or agreement other than the will of the editor to make the change.

As a result of Ms Filipacchi's exposure of the category issue, a debate is now raging which an administrator will at some point bring to a conclusion. It might seem that Wikipedia's problem is that it has too many editors and is too fluid. But the opposite may in fact be the case: the site is stiffening with age. A recent academic study found that the rate of rejection of changes jumped from 6% in 2006 to 25% to 2010 for new editors who had received kudos from other users. Meanwhile, active editors for the English-language version dropped from 50,000 to 35,000 during that period and has stayed roughly steady since. This may simply be an indication of Wikipedia's maturity. But the more complete Wikipedia becomes on historical, scientific, and other settled factual matters, the fewer people there will be keeping an eye out for odd decisions or inappropriate edits to articles read by hundreds of millions of people. Who will watch the Wikipedians?

• What else should The Economist explain? Send us your suggestions.