moebius recursive

As the internet has become more and more mainstream, I often wondered if there my be some sort of impact to the way that people absorb data. Apparently, there are some that are of the opinion that the internet is having a pronounced impact on reading habits. The reaction to this is a ‘slow reading’ movement.

So are we getting stupider? Is that what this is about? Sort of. According to The Shallows, a new book by technology sage Nicholas Carr, our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information. Round-the-clock news feeds leave us hyperlinking from one article to the next – without necessarily engaging fully with any of the content; our reading is frequently interrupted by the ping of the latest email; and we are now absorbing short bursts of words on Twitter and Facebook more regularly than longer texts.

Which all means that although, because of the internet, we have become very good at collecting a wide range of factual tidbits, we are also gradually forgetting how to sit back, contemplate, and relate all these facts to each other. And so, as Carr writes, “we’re losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we’re in perpetual locomotion”.

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cognition, culture, ideas, internet, reading

ideas

I was listening to a report on the radio the other morning about how postal rates in the US are going to increase and how this was going to cause issues for some people. I had to laugh. To me it seemed that if they did it right, they could solve two problems at once.

The obvious solution to me was to eliminate the ridiculously cheap ‘bulk rate’ (aka corporate welfare) that businesses have enjoyed and abused for years. Bring this to parity with the ‘first class’ postage rate that the private citizens that fund the postal service have to pay. The net effect of this should be two fold: 1) less junk mail being sent out 2) less junk mail being thrown away. Those who wish to continue to send me 4 catalogs a month from which I have never ordered a single thing may continue to do so — only now paying their fair share.

And while we are at it, require all those tax-dodging corporations who have incorporated offshore to pay international rates for all of their domestic mailings. After all, for tax purposes they are a ‘foreign’ company, they should be for postal purposes as well.

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dubious, humor, ideas

ideas

Several years ago I committed to myself to try to trust my intuition more and (perhaps with a bit of bias) I would say that commitment has served me well. This essay from The Guardian explores the topic a bit more.

Albert Camus said that the body is as good a judge as the mind. We know what he means. When we meet someone for the first time the whole of us responds to that person. Later the mind may reflect on the encounter and think that they were likeable, or not, but that first meeting will be an important element in whether we want to follow up the relationship or not. Yet, though there is a great truth in what Camus said, I believe that in the end the mind must be the final judge. The body, with its instinctual response, can orientate the mind in a particular direction or nudge it in another one if it feels it is going wrong, but in the end the mind must decide, using rational criteria.

The same point can be made in relation to what is called conscience. Some people think of conscience as an inner voice making them feel guilty, or telling them what to do. But conscience, as Thomas Aquinas said, is the mind making moral judgements. It is a matter of the mind, not any inner voice. In short it is the considered judgment we make when we weigh up all the pros and cons in the light of our values and overall perspective on life. This is not to say that guilty feelings, or intuitions are unimportant. They are. Sometimes they can stop the mind going down a wrong track altogether. When we make a rational decision it is very good to take into account the totality of what we are feeling. But in the end we must try to think as rationally as possible.

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cognition, ideas, intuition

ideas

So maybe the recent crazy for anti-bacterial everything is not necessarily a good thing? From Science Daily:

Exposure to specific bacteria in the environment, already believed to have antidepressant qualities, could increase learning behavior, according to research presented at the 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego.

What next, the discovery of midichlorians and their impact?

Also previously Cut Down On Infections By Cutting Down On Antibiotics

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ideas, nature, science

ideas, misc

Question is whether this just seems awkward because it is a new way of doing things or whether it is truly a bad thing. In any case, the iPad certainly takes it’s knocks in this discussion:

In a recent column for Interactions (reference 2) Norman pointed out that the rush to develop gestural interfaces – “natural” they are sometimes called – well-tested and understood standards of interaction design were being overthrown, ignored, and violated. Yes, new technologies require new methods, but the refusal to follow well-tested, well-established principles leads to usability disaster.

Recently, Raluca Budui and Hoa Loranger from the Nielsen Norman group performed usability tests on Apple’s iPad (reference 1), reaching much the same conclusion. The new applications for gestural control in smart cellphones (notably the iPhone and the Android) and the coming arrival of larger screen devices built upon gestural operating systems (starting with Apple’s iPad) promise even more opportunities for well-intended developers to screw things up. Nielsen put it this way: “The first crop of iPad apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not. It’s the same with iPad apps: anything you can show and touch can be a UI on this device. There are no standards and no expectations.”

Why are we having trouble? Several reasons:

· The lack of established guidelines for gestural control

· The misguided insistence by companies (e.g., Apple and Google) to ignore established conventions and establish ill-conceived new ones.

· The developer community’s apparent ignorance of the long history and many findings of HCI research which results in their feeling of empowerment to unleash untested and unproven creative efforts upon the unwitting public.

After cataloging some of the issues with gestural interfaces in a bit more detail, the article attempts to conclude on a positive note on the ‘promise’ of GI. It comes off a bit mixed (if not mildly scolding):

The new devices are also fun to use: gestures add a welcome feeling of activity to the otherwise joyless ones of pointing and clicking.

But the lack of consistency, inability to discover operations, coupled with the ease of accidentally triggering actions from which there is no recovery threatens the viability of these systems.

We urgently need to return to our basics, developing usability guidelines for these systems that are based upon solid principles of interaction design, not on the whims of the company human interface guidelines and arbitrary ideas of developers.

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accessibility, apple, design, gadgets, interfaces, ipad, usability

ideas

I had to pass along this absolutely brilliant posting that should shine a bright light exposing the hypocrisy and idiocy of the (Fox sponsored) tea tantrum ‘movement’.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

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ideas, politics, teatantrum

ideas

In discussing location-based sites like foursquare, britekite and the like I coined the term ‘incentivores’ — people who live to chase after virtual incentives (badges, titles) by participating in social web sites. I suppose this could just as easily apply to coupon chasers and the like.

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ideas, socialsoftware, webtools

ideas

In Norway, they have founds that by cutting down on antibiotics, they can reduce serious infections and even deaths by infections. Counterintuitive, but effective:

Aker University Hospital is a dingy place to heal. The floors are streaked and scratched. A light layer of dust coats the blood pressure monitors. A faint stench of urine and bleach wafts from a pile of soiled bedsheets dropped in a corner.
Look closer, however, at a microscopic level, and this place is pristine. There is no sign of a dangerous and contagious staph infection that killed tens of thousands of patients in the most sophisticated hospitals of Europe, North America and Asia last year, soaring virtually unchecked.
The reason: Norwegians stopped taking so many drugs.
Twenty-five years ago, Norwegians were also losing their lives to this bacteria. But Norway’s public health system fought back with an aggressive program that made it the most infection-free country in the world. A key part of that program was cutting back severely on the use of antibiotics.

This is, of course, not to say that antibiotics themselves are evil. It does, however, point to using anything in moderation and with a clear assessment of the consequences of over use.

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ideas, medicine

ideas

Today is the 7th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Bet you won’t hear the Tea Tantrum people raving about how many trillions and trillions of dollars have been spent there. Well, at least in Iraq and Afghanistan they have free, universal health care paid for by US tax payer dollars. The irony is, there it is called ‘Democracy’ here the right condemns it as ‘Socialism’ (without understanding what either of those words mean).

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dubious, politics

ideas, politics

A fantastic TED presentation by Jamie Oliver discussing the effects of poor diet/food choices on children in most of the western world. His solution: teach every child about food. Some enlightening facts and figures about the issues as well as an overall engaging discussion.

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food, ideas, ted

ideas

Interesting thoughts from Brian Eno on the impact art and culture diversity and availability is having on society. I share his hope that this will translate into advances in politics and other attitudes as well.

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

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art, culture, ideas

ideas

Apparently, in their haste to produce an even more controversial followup to the first book, the authors of Freakonomics get the facts colossally wrong (from the New Yorker):

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modeling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is a climatologist who, like Levitt, teaches at the University of Chicago. In a particularly scathing critique, he composed an open letter to Levitt, which he posted on the blog RealClimate.

“The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them,” he observes. “The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking.” Pierrehumbert carefully dissects one of the arguments that Levitt and Dubner seem to subscribe to—that solar cells, because they are dark, actually contribute to global warming—and shows it to be fallacious. “Really simple arithmetic, which you could not be bothered to do, would have been enough to tell you,” he writes, that this claim “is complete and utter nonsense.”

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books, dubious, ideas

ideas

I thought this was an interesting clip showing a smartphone UI ‘concept’ that “Puts the ‘Friend’ in User-Friendly“.

Though the implementation has a slightly too childish feel to appeal to many potential users, it does expose the current crop of Apple, Palm, Nokia and Android UIs as catering to the look-and-feel of glossy futuristic, nay sci-fi-esque gadgets. And while that’s resulted in some sleek technology, it may be missing out on the softer, more human side of human-gadget interactions, rather than “putting people first…”

Food for thought, but I think it also needs to be balanced with the lessons learned from the VRML/Virtual World interfaces that cropped up in the 90s: Cute to look at, frustrating to use and ultimately limited in what can be expressed in a purely visual interface metaphor.

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ideas, innovation, mobile, nokia, ui, usability

ideas

After listening to the rapacious credit card industry whine and cry and hew over the prospect of some regulation that will reel them back from their semi-usarous ways, I was struck by a thought. One so obvious that I don’t know why there is no media discussion of it.

During the artificial price spike in gas last Spring and Summer, pundits were going on about how ‘high gas prices are a good thing’ because they change consumer behavior. By the same logic, why aren’t high credit card interest rates a good thing, because they should prevent consumers from over spending? If credit card companies what to react to regulation buy jacking up rates and fees, so be it. There will always be one or two who won’t and that is were consumers will take their business.

Of course, credit card companies have already proven that they don’t operate on a rational basis anyway. Personal example: I had a credit card with CapitalOne for over 20 years, used it regularly, paid it off every month with great consistency. My reward for that was that they first changed my fixed rate to a variable rate (effectively doubling it), then doubled it again while simultaneously shortening the payment period to 15 days. All of these changes were though no actions of my own. When I called a CapitalOne rep to ask why the changes were made the response was ‘I am sure it was done for a good reason’. When I pressed the matter, her supervisor basically said ‘if you disagree with the changes you can always stop using your card — would you like me to cancel it now for you?’ Thank you for your years of patronage, shall I poke your other eye out, now?

To answer my own question, the reason why high credit card rates won’t have the same effect is because the impact is deferred. The purchase is made and the balance goes up on next month’s bill, with very little friction. However, at the pump, it is very real as you watch the numbers click by for you $100 fuel up — do that twice a week and it really drives it home.

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dubious, ideas, oil

ideas

I wanted to riff a bit on a theme that a collegue of mine touched on earlier in the year regarding the relative importance that some people place on ultimately arbitrary dates. Why do people put so much emphasis on making resolutions at the start of a new year? or a new month for that matter? Is it simply the need for a ‘clean’ boundary to demarcate things?

The interesting thing is, people seem to find these significant dates all over the place. Recently, there was a modicum of apocryphal hysteria in the tech community because the representation of time in computers was going to be 1234567890 last week. And, to add surety to that, that same day was Friday the 13th, that assuredly unlucky day for all. *GASP*. Yet, somehow, the date passed without incident (as far as I am aware).

What of other dates that are supposed to have such significance? As was previously pointed out, even the concept of ‘what day it is’ is a bit of a made up construct depending upon which calendar system you happen to choose (Gregorian, Julian, Islamic, Hebrew, or Chinese, etc).

What of these ‘special’ dates themselves? It appears that over the years they have just multiplied (seemingly at the whim of the greeting card industry). We now how Teacher’s Day, Grandparent’s Day, Student’s Day, Administrative Assistant’s Day, Valentines Day, Earth Day, Groundhog Day, Arbor Day and the list goes on and on. In many cases these ‘holidays’ are celebrated on different days in different countries; in some cases they aren’t celebrated at all. My point is, why can’t you be nice to these people on every day? Why is a ‘special’ day needed to take action? Is something that happened (or didn’t) on Earth Day, really more special than if it happened (or didn’t) on any other day?

I fear that such relative value placed on arbitrary days can be the source of resentment and disappointment for some. For sure, some dates, such as anniversaries should be noted and commemorated accordingly (birthday and wedding celebrations and more solemn remembrances of those no longer with us). These are tied to actual events on actual days and (if one chooses) have actual significance. No need to wait for the first of the month to celebrate or for the next greeting card holiday.

I recently rediscovered these quotes; both of which relate back to this whole theme:

“I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false
estimates that they have made of the value of things.”
— Benjamin Franklin

and

“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.”
– Oscar Wilde

I guess this is my long, rattling way to say “make the best of every day, express your gratitude and recognize, that, after all, good or bad, it is just another day”.

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holidays, ideas, time

ideas

The Register rather mercilessly skewers Malcolm Gladwell in a recent posting. I’ll grant them that some of his grand proclamations turn out to be a bit hollow (discussed previously) but is that enough to conclude that he has nothing to say?

I recently purchased Gladwell’s new book Outliers. Hopefully I’ll have time to read it and draw my own conclusions as most of the comments in the Register’s posting refer to statements he has made in public presentations/discussions.

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books, dubious, ideas, outliers, science

ideas

Auto makers: instead of going, hat in hand (fresh from your private jet) to the government and asking tax payers for a bailout, why not go to your biggest benefactor: the oil companies? You have tacitly been in their service for the last thirty years if not more, cranking out bigger and less fuel efficient cars that serve to line their pockets with more and more cash.

Why does a minivan need to have an engine in it that is bigger than what was in a ‘muscle car’ back in the 60s? Do you really need a 2.5 ton pickup truck to drive down to the wings place and pick up a case of beer on the way home? ‘No’ to both.

So there you go: ChrysForGM can consolidate and be the demand side for the oil companies who will continue to pay them for their wasteful services. After all, the oil companies are flush with cash and government is still giving them corporate welfare checks. Please don’t let it be American taxpayers. Again.

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dubious, humor, ideas

ideas

From Counterintuitive physics may help everyone drive home quicker

If you’re trying to drive to a destination as quickly as possible, you might think that knowing the traffic conditions would help you choose the quickest route for yourself. Traffic reports and new GPS technologies that provide traffic data are based on this assumption – but scientists have found that knowing this information may do more harm than good.

A recent study has investigated just how much time is lost due to individuals opting for strategies that maximize their own personal utility rather than the social optimum, which often aren’t the same. Physicists Hyejin Youn and Hawoong Jeong from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, Korea, and computer scientist Michael Gastner from the Santa Fe Institute and the University of New Mexico in the US, call this lost time “the price of anarchy” (POA) that society must pay for the lack of individual coordination.

This would appear to be another demonstration that acting for a greater good rather than for individual gain actually benefits the individual as well. Check out Robert Axelrod’s excellent book The Evolution of Cooperation for more on this topic.

ideas

Another study shows that people come up with more creative solutions to problems by using simple paper and pencil than they do by using a computer. Fundamentally, the difference seems to be between a constrained environment (the computer) and an unconstrained one (pencil and paper).

This mirrors my own experience in computer programming and other areas. When I first started programming over twenty years ago, I felt I came up with a much better solution by sketching out the overall flow of the app and the different sub-routines and modules on paper first. Now it seems the first instinct of most developers is to reach for google and copy and paste some code rather than think through the problem themselves and come up with an approach.

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cognition, creativity, ideas, technology

ideas

Keep this in mind when you hear the often repeated falsehood that the reason why the price at the pump is soaring is because of increased demand from China and India. Maybe a factor, but perhaps we should address the fact that the state of California uses more gasoline and diesel than China. That’s right, California has ~2.8% of China’s population but manages to consume more that an entire country of 1.3 billion.

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badideas, energy, ideas, propaganda

ideas