Our Core77 article Shopping for Innovation: What you need to know before hiring a design firm is finally up - and nicely blogged by Bruce Nussbaum at BusinessWeek.com (among others).

Full story
Mr. Incredible and Elmo said they were taken into custody at gunpoint and driven in handcuffs by police car to the front of the Kodak Theatre. There they claim they were paraded on the Hollywood Walk of Fame before shocked tourists and other boulevard impersonators.
“We were leaving to get something to eat. We had our heads off and were walking about a block away to our car when they pulled up,” said Barry Stockton, 42, who was dressed as Mr. Incredible, wearing a red superhero costume topped with a huge, cartoonish head.
Donn Harper, 45, said he complied, tossing his bug-eyed, furry red Elmo costume head to the ground. “They jumped out of their car with guns drawn. With all of the crime in Los Angeles they pick on us?”
Stockton, of Ontario (San Bernardino County), and Harper, of Los Angeles, were charged with misdemeanor aggressive begging along with the “Scream” character, Bill Stevens, 54, of Hollywood. Police said the three were among those who had been warned that authorities were preparing to respond to growing complaints from boulevard visitors and merchants about the Tinseltown impersonators.
Some tourists have contended that they were harassed for failing to pay the costumed characters for posing for photos with them in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and the nearby Kodak Theatre. Some merchants have grumbled that the impersonators were scaring customers with menacing costumes, fake weapons and props such as phony snakes.
Los Angeles Police Officer Michael Shea said the impersonators — who make their own costumes or buy what they say are licensed suits on eBay — were summoned to a meeting last month at the Hollywood and Highland shopping center and warned that enforcement of solicitation and harassment laws was coming. Sixty-eight of them, many in costume, showed up.
Shea said Mr. Incredible and Elmo were brought back to the boulevard so others could see they had been busted. “Make no mistake about it — I wanted the characters to know what we’re doing,”

Technorati: hollywood, tinseltown, begging, characters, posing, arrest, busted, elmo

One of my favorite things to track down, foodwise, on a return trip to Canada, are milk drinks that are flavored like chocolate bars. They are amazing; they capture the exact taste of a specific chocolate bar in a completely different form factor. From a solid to a liquid, with the same mix of tastes. Last trip we tried the Rolo version.

It was as incredible as every other one I’ve tried. It tasted like a Rolo, but it was a liquid. I can’t stop repeating the superlatives and proclaiming the sensorial wonder of it all, sorry.

So it was cool to see that here in the US we’ve got a similar product available now.

Milky Way and Three Musketeers. We bought both but have only tried the Milky Way. It’s good, but not stunning. It has the flavor components of Milky Way, but they don’t replicate the bar experience.

I am hopeful to see this category of product here in the US, though. Maybe we’ll get more of ‘em, especially if they can figure out how to get it right.

Technorati: chocolate+bar, milky+way, milk, beverage, candy, chocolate, rolo, grocery, food, canada

The Sneeze fantasizes, only to be sadly disappointed, about the scope of the new Mega M&Ms.

Technorati: size, candy, m&m, mega, promise, supersize, disappointment

Last month we stayed in Calgary for a few days to attend the Calgary International Film Festival. We stayed at the 5, a newly remodeled hotel that used to be the Hawthorn. Most info about hotels in downtown Calgary referenced the Hawthorn, and we found the website through a redirect. The website seemed pretty nice.

Kinda cool design, palette, nifty logo. Seemed like they were doing the JetBlue/IKEA thing of taking a commodity and adding design and more thoughtfulness to the overall experience, and finding a way to charge less for it. There were photos of the rooms (not currently available on the updated website), descriptions of all the amenities (free WiFi, breakfast), and the price was good. We decided to stay there.

When we booked our shuttle from the Calgary airport, the woman behind the counter growled in an intense Scottish brogue “Yeah, that used to the Hawthorn, and before that the Prince Rupert. I was finally getting used to calling it the Hawthorn and they changed the name. What a stupid name!”

The shuttle drops us off around the corner from the front door (which is not exactly door-to-door service that we paid for, but that’s a complaint for elsewhere). It doesn’t look like it’s the Five.

It looks like the Hawthorn.

The front door, at least, is a little more clear what hotel we’re at.

Unless you happen to look up. Serious naming/branding confusion!

A few days later I find a card in the lobby. The card has the new brand scheme and reads, in part “Over the coming months, Hawthorn Hotel & Suites will transform into 5 Calgary Downtown Suites.” Okay, so this is an ongoing project. But the entire experience is confusing; it doesn’t suggest transition, it is just a mishmash of radically different brands. This card was sorta hidden; one had to be poking around to stumble across it. It’s the only place they acknowledge the transition; the rest of the time the hotel presents all this as if it’s normal. But really, it was just odd.

The room number says we’re at the Hawthorn.

But the apples say we’re at the five. Apples? They took the trouble to order brand stickers for apples, but they couldn’t change the door numbers? I was really surprised.

Finally, I was a total sucker for the website branding, like I said, expecting JetBlue. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was like when we’d visit a distant great aunt in an apartment building in Winnipeg in the 70s. It was seriously dated, and not well-kept.

The kitchen featured a stove from the Mesozoic era.

And really cheesy cupboards.

An access panel in the bathroom was old, dirty, and loose.

Not to mention this disgusting vent in the bathroom.

The living room was typical of the “suite” - outdated, poorly maintained. I think we found some remnants of painter’s tape from whatever remodeling they had done. Who knows how long it had been there.

Anyway, it worked out fine (although their free breakfast was disgusting and they never had enough staff or food to handle the traffic flow even on a weekday), but I was struck by how different the hotel experience was from what the branding had led me to believe - or what I had let myself believe based on that.

From Travel Agent Central

Air Canada will no longer offer customers free pillows. Instead, for a $2 charge, the carrier will offer customers a so-called ‘comfort zone’ kit that includes an inflatable plastic pillow and polyester blanket, according to media sources in Canada. Apparently, the kit is a pouch with pillow case, blanket and an instruction card on blowing up the pouch into a pillow.

I can’t help thinking of a prescient series of parody radio ads from the 70s somewhere in Southern Ontario (Hamilton? Toronto?) for Air Harold, where everything, including seatbelts, were extra.

This is such a messed up industry.

Technorati: air+travel, airlines, air+canada, pillow, blanket, freebies, economy, service

Grant McCracken offers up a provocative post entitled Brand theatre and the experiential brand, with some rules to create effective storytelling experiences

1. First, discover [and] obey the local culture. Use its favorite media.
2. Second, proceed as if less is more. Engage their detective work.
3. Third, invite completion. In this case, invite them to tell more stories.
4. Fourth, keep a small footprint (fewer reps better than more).
5. Fifth, practice brand murmur (aka brand diffidence). Don’t go crashing in there.
6. Sixth, engage theatrical resources. In a world saturated with mediated communications, there’s nothing quite like the real thing.) (Besides, we’re Elizabethans, too).

Technorati: story, stories, storytelling, grant mccracken, marketing, brand, experiences

Simon Roberts shuts down Ideas Bazaar, his small UK user research consultancy. He’s off to a job with Intel, no doubt to do amazing things. Interesting to read the above-linked entry (for me, at least) because it describes life in a situation not unlike my own, a very small consulting business. Lots of detail in the long post, including lessons learned (headlines only here):

• That a good accountant is great asset.
  
• Working with other small business usually works really well.
  
• That in this type of business you have to give some stuff away.
  
• That there is a lots of totally crap market, strategic, creative or whatever sort of research out there and loads of companies seem content to put up with it.
  
• That you don�t have to have to have a anthropology degree (or even a social science background) to be an �ethnographer� or even an ‘anthropologist’ anymore.
  
• That you can say �no� to companies that you don�t want to work with if you don�t like what they stand for or what they do.
  
• That these sort of businesses don�t scale very easily
  
• That if you run a blog you should be more outspoken, more often and put more �editorial� or opinion on it.

Technorati: user+research, anthropology, consulting, ethnography, simon+roberts, ideas+bazaar

The latest search engine queries that led people to this blog.

The Simpsons MArge
‘digital camera history’ sasson
scott young obit
all this chittah chattah
Akido Yada
button typed toilet theory
Cupid Costumes
simpsons marge
grapples fruit
blogspot iit lingo
Origins Plantidote reviews Dr. Weil
art gallerys ronnie wood
jay leno
ml stern
simpsons marge
spammer scott hirsch

Technorati: search+engine, query, searching, blogging, index

This ad from Sonos features Mieko Kusano, director of product management, and Wai-Loong Lim, of Y Studios, their designer. Certainly, as we understand design as a differentiator, it gets talked about in corporate marketing, but the appearance of the actual designer is often limited to someone like Jerry Hirschberg in a Nissan ad. Here we’ve got the consultant with their own brand being interviewed about the product and about design. This is a designer who’s demonstrated value to his clients and who is appreciated for it! (Disclosure: Wai is a former colleague)

Technorati: wai+loong+lim, y+studios, sonos, design, advertising, differentiation

WSJ.com has a story [via Techdirt] about all the different services where people can exchange or “flip” their products, in essence you buy something and then resell it, so you’re only owning it for a short time for a small cost. This it the Netflix model (packaged differently). I guess that’s the gold standard now, Netflix-for-X.

But one model they mention is eBay - where the exchange is between individuals, rather than a controlled top-down facilitated exchange via a Netflix. As Dirk pointed out in email, there’s a too-much-stuff semi-conservation thing at root here as well, we can’t deal with any more stuff. That led me to consider a few other services that are out there as part of the “access-not-ownership” trend.

Freecycle is a grassroots organization that sets up local email groups (I run the Coastside group where I live) for people to get rid of stuff they’d otherwise throw out by offering it free (and only free) to somebody nearby. We got rid of an old shed yesterday - someone came and disassembled it and hauled it away. For free. I got service for free; they got a shed for free.

BookCrossing is all about sharing free books.

I think these peer-to-peer models for exchange of extra stuff (whether free, or commercial, like eBay) are equally valid and hold great potential. Instead of trying to be the next Netflix, maybe more companies should try to be the next Napster?!

Technorati: acess, ownership, rental, model, consumerism, freecycle

Wonderfully passionate blog entry about making that all-important connection with another person in a user-research setting. This would be great fodder for the workshop I’m leading at EPIC next month.

Last week, after a long long time I had a chance to conduct user interviews again. I loved any minute of it. There is nothing more rewarding (for me) than spending two hours with people I never met before (and probably I will never meet again) trying to understand the world from their point of view.

In those two hours and from the first few seconds, my attention is totally focused on the other person. I observe how they enter the room, how they look at me, and how they shake my hand; I need to understand anything I can about their personality, their level of comfort, and their communication style to be able to be in synch with them. The entire session is a dance, where I ask and listen, probe and observe, with the only purpose of gaining insight in somebody else perceptions, thoughts, and expectations. It’s always a fascinating journey.

….

But I believe that the magic of understanding another person is not just a technical issue. It requires to suspend for a moment our ego-centered way to interpret the world and open up to a different interpretation. In a way, it’s about love.

…

There is something wonderful in experiencing somebody else’s world. You understanding expands, you suddenly see something you could not see before. And there is no going back.

Kraft Food Ingredients has designed Pan Drippings Flavors, a “new line of home-style flavorings that embodies the aromatic, mouthwatering flavor of meat pan drippings.”

Technorati: drippings, flavors, pan+drippings, kraft, food+technology, gross

There are some amazingly arcane companies out there, like Sethness Caramel Color

In 1880, a 25 year old self-educated immigrant named Charles O. Sethness started a flavor and syrup business in Chicago, Illinois. And from this humble beginning grew the world’s largest and most respected manufacturer of caramel color.

Technorati: sethness, food, caramel, color, ingredient, manufacturer, company

[via Pasta and Vinegar]. Technology is clearly the mother of invention here. What else can we customize? How’s about mouthgards!

Would you buy face goo from this man? Dr. Weil for Origins is a new line of skin care products.

This proactive approach addresses you as a whole person - inside and out and introduces three provocative new products. Each propriety formula features some of the most effective natural substances Dr. Weil has found to address skin problems.

The line includes Plantidote Mega-Mushroom Face Serum, Plantidote Mega-Mushroom Supplement, and Nite-trition Restful Sleep Supplement.

But this is not stricly for profit, no!

Dr. Andrew Weil donates all his after-tax profits from the sale of Dr. Andrew Weil for Origins� products to the Weil Foundation, an organization dedicated to sustaining the vision of integrative medicine.

Of course, Origins will keeping their booty. The Weil Foundation sounds cool, but I guess I’m cynical about what that all really means. And please forgive the overal cynicism of this story; we want companies to do good work, but sometimes it seems too much, too silly, too unbelievable. For me, this is one of those times.

Technorati: dr.+weil, andrew+weil, dr.+andrew+weil, origins, skin+care, weil+foundation, mega-mushroom

Bitchy review of Rosie in Fiddler

Here are instructions for transforming yourself into a Jewish matriarch in provincial Russia in 1905, inspired by Rosie O’Donnell’s performance in “Fiddler on the Roof” at the Minskoff Theater. Feel free to try this at home.

1. Plant yourself on the floor as if you were an oak.
2. Puff out your chest.
3. Place the palm of your left hand on the back of your left hip.

And, voil�!, you have instant Golde, the wife of Tevye, the philosopher-milkman in the musical adaptation of Sholom Aleichem’s stories of shtetl life in the twilight of imperial Russia. Just strike that commanding maternal pose and all other essential elements of character will soon arrive naturally. It might help if you prayed a little, too.

That would seem to be Ms. O’Donnell’s approach to a role previously played by Randy Graff and Andrea Martin in David Leveaux’s elegant but empty revival of this much-loved show by Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick. Alas, a pose and a prayer prove to be not quite enough to allow Ms. O’Donnell - the comedian, television personality, theatrical producer, sometime actress and confessional blogger - to make us believe that she is someone other than who she so famously is.

Her accent trots the globe, through countries real and imagined. It is variously Irish, Yiddish, Long Island-ish and, for big dramatic moments, crisp and round in the style of introduction-to-theater students. Her relationship with the notes and keys of a song is similarly fluid.

In the scene where Tevye (Harvey Fierstein) frightens his wife by describing an ominous dream, Ms. O’Donnell puts her hands to her pinchable cheeks and emanates a series of high-pitched o’s, bringing to mind a distressed dolphin. Whether center stage or on the sidelines, she can be relied upon to react with italicized gestures and facial expressions to what everyone else is saying.

Ms. O’Donnell, who has previously appeared on Broadway as a tough teenager in “Grease” and the Cat in the Hat in “Seussical,” executes all this with a cheerful confidence that is unfortunately not infectious. A stalwart promoter of Broadway when she was a television talk show host, Ms. O’Donnell does seem to be enjoying herself.

But as is usual with her stage performances, she suggests a jill-of-all-trades who thought she might as well try her hand at acting, too. The overall impression brings to mind what might happen if the lead in a high school production fell ill and the director turned to the most popular and reliable girl in the senior class (who is already the captain of the field hockey team, the debating society and the pep club) to fill in.

Technorati: theater, theatre, rosie, rosie+o’donnell, fiddler, fiddler+on+the+roof, review, bitchy, critic, criticism

I hadn’t seen anything like this before, known as a dual-flush toilet. Nice interface; the oval flush button is divided in two; one button is twice the size of the other. You choose which flushing button to press based on what you’ve just done. Visually there’s a number one and a number two button. They could have had some awkward fun with color-coding, I suppose. If it’s yellow…etc.

Note: other pics from our trip to Banff are here

This post-Spurlock ad intrigued me. A sick amount of food/calories/fat, but suggested as an occasional indulgence, with a pointer to their other products for regular consumption (everyday? Yikes). Giving permission to indulge, and somehow if you don’t eat this gross beef explosion daily, then it’s okay to eat their other burgers daily? And toss in an macho appeal (as if finishing this burger is some kind of impossible accomplishment) and you’ve got a timely story that takes on the obesity/SuperSizeMe meme and deftly turns it around.

Do a Classic Triple from Wendy’s: We don’t recommend you eat this all the time, unless you’re an offensive lineman or a Kodiak bear. For everyday use, try the Classic Single or Double. But since you probably won’t climb Everest, it’s nice to tell your friends you’ve had the Triple. It’s prepared fresh, the way a hamburger should be. Do a Wendy’s Classic Triple and do what tastes right.

I blogged previously about trouble commenting on BusinessWeek blogs. Turns out that my ISP (which is SBC) has been blacklisted for some nefarious activity. Trying to submit a comment redirects me to a horrible page

DSBL: Listing Data
If you’re not sure why you were referred to this webpage, please read this page first.

Status

IP: 68.127.18.86
State: Listed
Listed in unconfirmed (unconfirmed.dsbl.org): yes
Listed in singlehop (list.dsbl.org): yes
Listed in multihop (multihop.dsbl.org): no
Record last changed: 2004/Oct/29 05:03:49 UTC
Reverse DNS identifies server as: adsl-68-127-18-86.dsl.pltn13.pacbell.net

History

2004/Oct/29 05:03:27 UTC Listed in Unconfirmed (view message)
2004/Oct/29 05:03:27 UTC Listed in Singlehop (view message)
2005/Oct/11 15:05:52 UTC Removal Confirmation Sent EMail address: postmaster@pacbell.net
Requestor IP: 68.127.18.86
Message Report:
207.115.57.16 accepted message.
Remote host said: 250 2.0.0 j9BF4f7

and of course, it’s up to someone at the ridiculous monolith at SBC to fix this. Yeah, like that’ll happen.

I guess I won’t be joining in on the BusinessWeek blog dialog anytime soon!

Technorati: businessweek, business week, business week online, blog, comment, dsbl, blackhole, spam, sbc, pacbell,

Toilet seat cover dispenser, ” A Steve Portigal-inspired photo of a washroom novelty found at O’Hare in Chicago” uploaded by atomiq.

Wow! Someone was inspired by me! Funny, cuz I’ve seen this thing many times in O’Hare but never thought to photograph it as an artifact of our time and culture.

Last night’s BayCHI event was a good experience. A panel of champions of user research (Director, Manager, Lead, etc.) at key Silicon Valley companies (Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Intuit, and eBay) attracted a large and energetic crowd. The pre-meeting dinner was extremely well-attended. It felt like the discipline is having a good moment in the zeitgeist.

Each panelist gave a 10-minute summary of what’s going on at their firm. What types of methods they are using, how they are feeding design, strategy. How they might interface with market research and other areas of the business. Where they have been, historically, and what may have changed in how they are embraced (or not).

Rashmi Sinha moderated, and only spent a bit of time asking her own followup questions after the panelists finished; and then it was basically an hour (?) of audience questions. Although I stood up and asked a question, I would rather have had more questions from her and less from the audience (that’s my bias, I guess, as someone who’s played that role in the past); the audience questions are not usually about creating conversation, and the moderator is obviously in a role to do that. By the time we finished with questions people were asking about how to recruit participants for studies; a tactical question that had no place in this meeting, if we were there to discuss the practice and how it integrates into corporate America, then let’s not deal with newbie process questions. I’m not minimizing the importance of that question to the person who asked it, but it wasn’t on topic and kinda brought things down for me.

People mumbled afterwards about wanting to see some conflict between the panelists, who represented competitive firms (but maybe didn’t see themselves individually as competitors) and who sometimes expressed different points of view on how to use the tools of user research (it’s hard for me to be specific from memory, but there were several examples from Google about how user research wasn’t always necessary, but they were ridiculous examples, as in, “should we have told people not to build a search interface until they had done years of research” as the strawman questions, when I don’t think anyone was advocating years of research, more so the opposite). It wasn’t in panelists charge to debate what they heard from the others; they were there to tell their own story and they all did that very well.

Perhaps the comments about conflict are proxies for my desire for more conversation; something that (as user reseachers know) takes good questions, and frankly, audience members just aren’t going to ask good questions. This sounds terribly snobby and let me clarify - there are questions that are informational (what type of deliverables do you use? how do you recruit) and there are questions that provoke conversation and interaction.

There’s another panel phenemonen at work here - “question drift” - whoever answers the question first is the most on target; as other answers come from the panelists, we end up hearing about an entirely different question, and we’ve lost the thread. I don’t have a solution to this. Sometimes the drift is interesting, but often it’s just a bit frustrating.

So it was hard to take much specific away from the evening - there was a lot of info; a lot of bits of perspective and insight and jargon thrown out quickly, with something new on the heels, so I felt like it was an immersion more than an education.

But here’s what I took away:
- this is a mature field; you can see the newer practices (Google) presented as adolescent next to their more wizened counterparts
- I’ve lived as a consultant for a very long time; there’s a whole set of challenges and benefits that these corporate folks have that are almost alien to me - I felt very aware of how I can deal with some of their situations so much more easily, and how there’s so much more formalized and permanent processes being created that I’m not at all engaged with - it’s just tradeoffs and contrast, one isn’t better than the other, we need to be in-house and out-of-house both
- it’s not clear to me how research is different from design (and I don’t mean Research and Design) - this was my question and I don’t know that I got an answer except a fallback to corporate structures (and one person pointed out that designers and researchers have very different skill sets, but that wasn’t my question - if this is collaborative work, can’t teams of people with complementary skills deliver ONE thing - “design” - rather than breaking it down so much) and formalized processes
- this is a bit of a hot topic among software/tech/design types right now
- MORE I REMEMBERED: Christian Rohrer from eBay defined success criteria for user research as impact (which I really liked), and he defined impact as
1. credibility
2. consumability
3. relevance

Technorati: baychi, user+research, silicon+valley, design, software, tech, technology

Months ago I blogged about being solicited to review some plastic food packaging product for this blog, and indeed never received the product. My blog entry about not receiving the product produced inquiries from the PR firm. The followed up with the “client” who was going to send me the product. Then weeks later, I still hadn’t received the product, and the PR person promised to pick some up at the store and send them to me directly.

I never received anything.

Yesterday I received an email from another person at the PR firm asking me if I’d be interested in sampling and reviewing the next product they are launching.

I passed. The whole thing was silly and ironic and curious, but it runs the risk of becoming annoying, so it’s clearly time to step away. I don’t have free crap, I have a correspondence relationship and a blog topic. No thanks.

Technorati: PR, Hefty, pactiv, fulfillment

User Research Strategies: What Works, What Does Not Work is tonight’s BayCHI discussion panel, featuring Sheryl Ehrlich, Adobe; Christian Rohrer, eBay; Klaus Kaasgard, Yahoo!; Kaaren Hanson, Intuit; and Maria Stone, Google.

Interesting to read all the bios and see they all have Ph.D.s.

I’ll be in Palo Alto tonight for the discussion (and I think I’ll be at the dinner ahead of time as well).

Technorati: parc, baychi, user+research, panel, PhD

Blogger Help has a sidebar entitled “Ask Support”

Can’t find what you’re looking for in Blogger Help?

First check Blogger Status and our known issues page, then write Blogger Support and we’ll see what we can do.

Of course, when one tries to write Blogger Support, ie, submit a report of something not working properly, there are really two choices:
* Ask for help or instructions
* Submit a feature request or suggestion

Telling them that something is not working is not an option. They don’t seem to want to know about problems. That’s one way to keep the bug list down, just keep the users at bay!

Thanks, Google!

Technorati: bugs, support, bloger, google, error, customer+service, ignore

I’m trying to comment on a couple of blog entries on BusinessWeek online. Hitting “post” just times out. So I searched the site for a means to contact them. First I found the Masthead for the online edition. But nothing there. Turns out I want “customer service” (even though I’m not a customer, I’m a user, yes?).

BusinessWeek Online: Customer Service says

Thank you for taking the time to contact us. Please provide as much information as possible to help us resolve the problem. We will respond if you include a valid BusinessWeek user name and email address below.
Name
Email Address
Address
Address 2
City
State/Province
Zip/Postal Code
Country

Of course, I have no idea what a BusinessWeek user name is. Nor do I see a place to enter that information! I put in my name and email and describe the problem. Nope. I need to provide an address. A City. A state or province, and a zip or postal code. To submit a problem report with their website. What?

Okay, I give them 1 nowhere st. Nowheresville, etc. etc. And submit it.

And it reloads the exact same page, with the fields still populated with what I typed.

There’s no acknowledgement that they’ve received my feedback, nor any indication that I need to do something else to get the info to them. I have no idea what has happened. Have they now received several copies of the same bug report (including the one I tried in IE in case this was a Firefox problem?) or have they received none?

Meanwhile, I have two composed but not-accepted blog comments.

Obviously something is broken, but how much is broken and how much is bad design? I expected better!

Technorati: design, interface, UI, user, experience, BusinessWeek, BusinessWeek+Online, Business+Week, technical+problem, bug

According to a study of national personalities

which found that this time-honoured perception of our oh-so-unique Canadian psyche — and other cultures’ stereotypes of themselves — are in fact just so much hooey.

‘These stereotypes are as Canadians see themselves and Americans as they see themselves,’ said Robert McCrae of the U.S. National Institute on Aging, a principal investigator of the study on national personalities around the world.

‘Canadians think they’re extremely agreeable; the Americans think they’re very disagreeable,’ he said. ‘Canadians believe that they’re very calm and not irritable, very even-tempered, whereas Americans think they’re more anxious and hostile.

‘The fact is Canadians and Americans have almost identical average personality traits.’

In a measure of five main areas of personality, covering a total of 30 traits, Canadians and their U.S. cousins fell roughly in the middle. Not only that, but they weren’t all that different from other cultures around the globe, researchers found.

The study, published in the latest issue of Science, collected data through personality questionnaires given to thousands of people living in 49 countries.

Technorati: canada, america, us, USA,