Timoni West is a web designer in San Francisco.
This is her blog.

Thanks to digital technology, designers can squeeze so many functions into such tiny containers that there is more computing power in a basic cellphone…than at NASA’s headquarters when it began in 1958. That is why the appearance of most digital products bears no relation to what they do.

Take the iPod Shuffle. How could you be expected to guess what that tiny metal box does by looking at it? There are no clues to suggest that it might play music. Like most other digital devices, the Shuffle is (literally) an inscrutable box of tricks. Apple’s designers conceived the latest model as a subtle joke on the demise of “form follows …” It is so small, half the size of its predecessor, that they could make it in the same shape as one of those pins that clip on to clothing. This means the Shuffle’s form does reflect one of its functions, albeit the very minor one of attaching itself to a jacket, but gives no hint as to its more important role of storing and playing hundreds of songs.

The Q Score is a way to measure the familiarity and appeal of a brand, company, celebrity, cartoon character or television show. The higher the Q Score, the more well-known and well thought of the item or person being scored is. The Q Score is primarily used by the marketing, advertising and public relations industries.

Sometimes the term Q score is used in popular discussions of a person or product’s overall fame, popularity, or likeability. Other popular synonyms include Q rating, Q factor, or simply Q.

The Q Score was developed in 1963 by Marketing Evaluations, Inc., a United States company based in Manhasset, New York. To calculate someone or something’s Q Score, Marketing Evaluations surveys a panel of US consumer households about their awareness and opinion of that person or thing. The Q Score is influenced by both people’s familiarity with the subject and their favorability toward it. Q Scores are calculated for the population as a whole as well as for demographic groups such as age, sex, income or education level.

Marketing Evaluations claims that the Q Score is more valuable to marketers than other popularity measurements such as the Nielsen Ratings because Q Scores indicate not only how many people are aware of or watch a product, but how those people feel about the product. A well-liked television show, for example, may be worth more as a commercial venue to an advertiser than a higher-rated show that people don’t like as much.

Still, such blunders are rare, and Ms. Jolie’s Q score, a measurement of a star’s likability, has continued to increase. Around the time she won her Oscar, 13 percent of people surveyed viewed her positively, according to Marketing Evaluations Inc. The average rating for female stars is 18 percent.

Last year, a team of researchers at Harvard made headlines with an experiment testing unconscious bias at hospitals. Doctors were shown the picture of a 50-year-old man — sometimes black, sometimes white — and asked how they would treat him if he arrived at the emergency room with chest pains indicating a possible heart attack. Then the doctors took a computer test intended to reveal unconscious racial bias.

The doctors who scored higher on the bias test were less likely than the other doctors to give clot-busting drugs to the black patients, according to the researchers, who suggested addressing the problem by encouraging doctors to test themselves for unconscious bias. The results were hailed by other psychologists as some of the strongest evidence that unconscious bias leads to harmful discrimination.

Kenny Rogers, a data security specialist, moved into Mountain House last year, buying a foreclosed property on Prosperity Street for $380,000. But the decline in values has been so fierce that he too is underwater. He has cut his DVD buying from 50 a month to perhaps one, and is waiting until the Christmas sales to buy a high-definition television. He does not indulge much anymore in his hobbies of scuba diving and flying. “Best to wait for a better price, or do without,” Mr. Rogers, 52, said.

The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, “I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that’s green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—-ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.

We’d note in particular that Mr. Obama ran as a tax-cutter for “95% of workers,” promising tax rates “less than they were under Ronald Reagan.” This is only one of the ways that the skillful candidate was able to disguise the details of what was the most left-of-center Democratic agenda since the early 1970s. The exit polls showed that among the 70% of voters who believe their taxes will go up under Mr. Obama, 55% voted for Mr. McCain. Democrats raise taxes in a recession at their peril.