moebius recursive

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.

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

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

If you can abide the annoying gratuitous flash interface, there is some interesting stuff you can get a glimpse of on the web site for the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit that recently wrapped up at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

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creativity, ideas, moma

Or so the famously non-oil and electricity consuming Amish in Ohio are discovering.

It is also notable that they are reluctant to pass the increased costs onto their customers.

“I feel embarrassed to raise prices,” he said.

Bread at his market just went up 25 cents a loaf.

But the price of flour - based on increasingly expensive wheat and raised, harvested and milled by gas-guzzling machines - has nearly doubled.

“I can’t justify raising it more than a quarter,” Miller said. “We’ll just have to get by.”

Getting by goes hand-in-hand with the legendary self-sufficiency of the Amish.

You’re doing a great job, Georgie.

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amish, inflation, oil, economy

Rising transportation costs are making a significant dent into the advantages that low cost suppliers once enjoyed:

Tom Friedman wrote “The World is Flat”, suggesting that globalization had leveled the playing field between industrial and emerging countries. Jeff Rubin of CIBC World Markets suggests that this is perhaps changing because of the cost of fuel.

The cost of shipping a 40 foot container from Shanghai to the east coast of North America has gone from $3,000 in 2000 to $8,000 because of the cost of fuel, and for many products, the Asian cost advantage has virtually disappeared.

Maybe the end result of this will be foreign companies opening up plants in the US (much as the Japanese have done with auto manufacture) to largely escape the sea-based shipping costs altogether.

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flatearth, ideas, oil

Someone wearing a scarf of middle eastern origin is support for terrorism? Someone had better tell the Israelis, US and other troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What next? People who wear hoodies are supporting the unabomber? People who don’t wear lapel pins are unpatriotic? Oh, wait, this isn’t the first time this has been made into a (non)issue.

Until this country can get back to reasoned discourse there is going to be trouble. Turn off Fox News and shout radio and get your news from a number of outlets. And think about it. And decide for yourself.

If the people of the US can be distracted by shrill hysterics about clothing items how will we ever focus on what is important?

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crap, news, propaganda

I am getting dizzy from constantly rolling my eyes at pundits who keep trying to spin high gas prices as a good thing. Well, good thing if you are raking in record profits as an oil company — not so much for everyone else not profiting from it.

For a different perspective on high gas, look at it through the lens of the US health care system. Has the high cost of health care in this country caused people to become more healthy to avoid having to pay for health care? No. It has just produced a widening gap of those who can afford care and those who can’t.

The same is true for the recently bandied about factoid pointing to reduced miles driven since gas shot up. Great, seems like a positive thing, but it is probably comparable to the number of pills dispensed or office visits in the health care scenario. People aren’t going to the doctor less because they are healthier, it’s because they can’t afford to. Just as people aren’t driving less because they are suddenly eco-friendly, it’s because they can’t afford to drive. In either case, the economy ultimately suffers.

Then there is the rosy predictions about it forcing alternative fuels and/or electric cars. Right. I am old enough to have heard similar empty claims back in the 1970’s. ‘If oil ever reaches $50 a barrel, we’re gonna…’ liquefy coal, boost solar, improve battery technology, etc, etc, etc. Apparently a few efficient electric car was created, tested and proven, then collected an destroyed en masse in the desert. Yep, that’s how serious we are about this problem. I can only imagine the efficiencies that we would have gained by actively tweaking that technology over the last decade or so.

Next myth is that this high gas prices will spur the development of mass transit. Uh-huh. In Cincinnati, they would rather spend hundreds of millions of dollars building sport stadiums for losing teams than spend a dime on improving public transportation. I was floored when money was actually approved to put in the beginnings of a street car system, though with all the squabbling going on over that I have my doubts that it will be much more successful than Cincinnati’s subway system. And don’t get me started on how we could be spending the trillions of dollars not on a failed war to grab foreign oil resources, but on funding infrastructure development in the US.

Come on folks; wake up to the fact that when Bush was installed in office gas was selling at a quarter of the price it is right now. Cheney claimed that all of the USA’s woes were due to not having an ‘effective energy policy’. Apparently, the solution to that was to have closed door (illegal) sessions with the oil companies to drive the price at the pump as high as it will go. And while we are at it, lets do nothing to stop the dollar from going into a free fall; after all big oil and global corporations benefit from a weak dollar while the citizenry gets screwed. Let’s maintain ridiculously lax CAFE standards for autos, especially SUVs. Let’s provide no tax incentives to people to by hybrids or to use available public transportation. Lets encourage people to buy McMansions that they can’t afford further and further away from where they work.

Let’s recover money from the war profiteering that has been going on for the last eight years and channel it into improving public transportation and funding research for alternative fuels, etc. There is still time to return this country to a representative form of government where those being represented are the people and not select business interests.

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ideas, politics, rants, suckage

It feels like the tech industry is still trying to work out what the optimal mobile user experience should be. And it also feels like we have been down this road before. Like when we went from a comfortable desktop (client server) design/development paradigm to a browser-based one it took a while to figure out that they weren’t the same and how to exploit the differences.

Think about it. At the time of the browser shift the desktop development mentality was around using Visual Basic and a huge palette of visual components (most of which were just fluffy eye candy). So the first impulse of the industry was to try to replicate that (admittedly hideous) component heavy user experience/development model inside of the relatively austere HTML model. This gave birth to the loathsome Java Applet and the even more vile ActiveX control. The industry had completely missed the boat by treating the browser as a heavy desktop application delivery mechanism rather than exploiting the lightweight, largely device independent model that HTTP/HTML provided.

It took about ten years time before HTML/CSS/Javascript and related standards support in browsers made it possible to have truly rich interactions within the browser without having to assume a pretty heavyweight underlying infrastructure for most in the industry. It is worth noting that both Microsoft (.net) and Adobe (AIR) continue to flog this decade-old failed development/delivery model. Any technology that assumes that there is several gigabytes of code on the (lightweight) client is not a proper technology for developing browser-based applications (nor mobile ones for that matter).

Now it feels like we are in the same place with mobile development and user experience — far too many people look at mobile devices as if they are just a desktop browser/computer with a smaller monitor attached to it. But for the mobile experience to be successful, applications need to be designed to address the constrains that are on most mobile devices not try to force them to be mini-desktops. This includes not forcing mobile users to endure your useless Flash-only sites, popups, gratuitous CSS layers, plugins, requiring too much typing and browser specific markup.

To some extent, Apple is leading the way with changing ideas about mobile development with the iPhone SDK (and all of its constraints and limitations). The difficultly with this is that what Apple defines is okay for Apple, not necessarily for the rest of the mobile industry. This can lead to something else we have seen in the past — a ghettoization of the mobile experience between sites ‘optimized for iPhone’ (eg IE) and what everyone else gets.

I am no expert, but it feels like we have the basis for a successful, flexible implementation on mobile devices in the guise of XHTML/CSS/Javascript. Flash and other desktop legacy apps just won’t cut it. Combine that with microformats to facilitate data sharing (and potentially reduce keying) and ‘designed for mobile’ interfaces and we have a fighting chance.

Note: I subsequently found this posting on The Web Beyond The Desktop that does and excellent job of both reinforcing and expanding some of the points that I was making.

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adobe, browser, design, development, flash, innovation, iphone, javascript, microformats, mobile, technology, ubiquitousdata, webdev

The source of the title of this posting comes from a document that I was reviewing recently. The author was going on and on with buzzword-laden run-on sentences in which he proudly proclaimed how he had revolutionized development at a company through the application of ‘agile mythodology’. I laughed out loud and decided that typo was a keeper because it expresses some of my feelings about and experiences with agile.

Don’t get me wrong, I have seen agile work very, very well when it is used to structure the execution of the development phase and/or when agile design and modeling approaches are well understood and applied. Where agile absolutely falls apart is when it is twisted into the ‘I don’t have to design or document anything — I just make it up as I go along’ approach that many proponents advocate. Agile delivery is not a substitute for proper design and documentation. This is the mythology part: that you can create quality software by fiat. It is easy to pick out the agile mythologists; listen for their disdain for ‘architecture’ and ‘documentation’ and ’standards’ while all the while no producing any acceptable code.

I recall being asked to do an architectural review of an ‘agile’ project. When I asked for the standard project documentation I got the asinine response: ‘The code is the most accurate documentation for the system’. Really. So show me in the code what the security requirements are and how they were approved by corporate security or where the scope and objectives are (and on and on). I wasn’t about to accept the ‘trust me I coded what the customer wanted; oh and by the way, you have no way of verifying that’ BS.

Agile-boy eventually came back with a link to a wiki (cus’ wikis’ is agile-cool) that had a handful of paragraphs on it and some links to a few UML diagrams (several of which had nothing to do with the project at hand — but I wasn’t supposed to be smart enough to figure that out). Needless to say the project was shaping up to be a disaster and was saved only when a proper design and more ‘traditional’ development approaches were hastily put into place.

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agile, architecture, development, dubious, ideas, , mythodologysoftware

Interesting paper on In-Car GPS Navigation: Engagement with and Disengagement from the Environment.

In a way it confirms what I have already suspected, that GPS serves as yet another distraction for the driver (along with mobile phones, etc) from doing the one thing that is most important at the time: paying attention to traffic and driving.

One of the findings is that people under the influence of GPS no longer pay attention to landmarks as a way of orienting themselves and finding locations. Nope, just blindly listen and follow whatever the GPS tells you. Cases of people getting horribly lost doing this are all over the internet. Reminds me of an experiment that was done back in the 80s that showed that people would rely on the results of a calculator that was programed to give the wrong answer even when they knew it was wrong because, well, of course the ‘machine’ knew better!

And I hope you have never had the unsettling experience of riding with someone who spends more time looking at the GPS screen than out the windshield. It is almost like they think the GPS is some video game in which they are driving a car rather than actually driving the car in the real world.

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cognition, gps, ideas

I have about half a dozen news sites of which I consume the RSS/Atom feeds. Most all of them suck. Hard. The chief point of suckage is the amount of duplicates that they present in a given refresh. Typically, the duplicates are just that — redundant; as they don’t reflect any update to the underlying posting. In some cases you get the same posting with slightly different titles.

Perhaps one the most egregious I have encountered is the feed from the Cincinnati Enquirer’s site. In a given one hour refresh, it is not uncommon to see the same article 4-5 times, sometimes with slightly different titles, sometimes with a summary, sometimes with just the title (annoying in general). All of them point at the exact same article — so why all of the duplication? Judging from the horrid layout and extreme usability issues of the site in general, I would say that the answer is general incompetence of the people running the site.

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ideas, news, reading, rss

Britannica blog’s posting on The Problem of Data Storage points to how complicated archiving and retrieving things in the digital age has become. Before it was enough to preserve tablets or paper — now this is greatly complicated by the various digital formats that house our data and how the formats themselves are subject to disuse (in many cases making the enclosed data unavailable as well). PDF is a glimmer of hope; we shall see how it holds up to the test of time.

As anyone who has tried to migrate data from an ancient floppy can tell you, retrieving that information, though only 25 years old, is no easy task. (The floppy disk itself is a nearly extinct medium, for that matter.) The mere difficulty of retrieving old data provides the rationale for Adobe’s now-standard PDF (portable document format), documents that can be read and printed across any operating system. What is more, Adobe developers maintain, “ten years from now, and into the future, users will still be able to view the file exactly as it was created”—meaning that fonts, layout, and illustrations are locked into the document and cannot easily be changed, unlike documents created with standard word processing software. (For more, see Adobe’s white paper “PDF as a Standard for Archiving.”)

On a larger scale this reminds me of the excellent book The Clock Of The Long Now by Steward Brand, that covers designing (and documenting) a clock that works on a massive scale and is intended to run for thousands of years.

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archiving, britannica, history, ideas, storage, longnow

With a growing number of apps on Mac OS X being delivered with Growl notifications, I find myself wishing that the default behavior of growl was not just display only, but something more actionable. That is, I want something like a configurable Growl client that could ’subscribe’ to certain Growl notifications (Growl Actions?) and then take action based on them. This would make all of the apps that participate in the scheme much more flexible and powerful using a common mechanism (growl).

For example, if you use Twitter or Jaiku and that client could subscribe to a Growl notification that a batch update to your files in Aperture had just completed and send you a corresponding Twit. Another app might then perform some file housekeeping action based on the same notification having been sent (so one GrowlAction, multiple ’subscribers’ take action on it. Some of this could probably be done with Applescript, but using Growl feels like a more open and extensible solution (and keeps it open to our Linux brethren). Heck, this could even lead to Growl-based mashups on your desktop (and beyond).

In conjunction with this concept of Growl Actions, I thought it would be handy to have an app/widget that I call a Growl-er (think flower). This is a circular visual widget that would compactly display received growls; hover over a ‘petal’ and it would extend out and show more detail about the growl received. When a Growler becomes too cluttered it could ’sprout’ another circle to populate.

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apple, ideas, mac, software, growl

As sort of companion piece to the previous Facts Are Not Enough there is this article from the Guardian that talks about how some widely held beliefs really have no basis in fact. I am sure you will recognize some of this wisdom from your own lives; here are some of the ones I have heard countless times:

Everyone must drink at least eight glasses of water a day (water is in food and other beverages)

We only use 10% of our brains (science still hasn’t discovered the ‘un-utilized’ 90%)

Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight (makes reading difficult, but not damaging)

Shaving causes hair to grow back faster and coarser (I’ve heard this mostly from women)

Eating turkey makes you especially drowsy (but Swiss cheese has more Tryptophan in it)

The article doesn’t cover one of my personal favorites, the all-too-frequently repeated and quite-well-documented-as-false claim that ‘Al Gore invented the Internet‘. Whenever I hear some repeat this, it just flips the bozo bit for them in my mind. Anyone who would parrot a lie that big is just a sad individual lacking in critical cognitive skills.

All of this goes to show that if you just blatantly make up ‘facts’ and repeat them enough, people will believe them (and repeat them).

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ideas, news, facts, science

Both of the things that I am about to suggest have been around for a while, but I think the combination of them is very compelling. First off, if you haven’t already, read A Long Way Gone. Then watch the movie Blood Diamond (if you have already seen the movie, read the book).

While the story of the ‘boy soldier’ is just a subplot in the movie, the book does an incredible job of providing first hand insight into what it was like to exist in that mode. The movie really brings to life all of the things you read about in the book and provides more insight into that subplot in the movie.

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boysoldier, conflictdiamonds , book, dvd, history

There is a lot of good advice in this posting by Marc Andreessen about hiring the best people you’ve ever worked with. I am glad that he is quick to debunk one of my favorites: the companies that use logic puzzles and academic degrees as interview tools:

Specifically, I am unaware of any actual data that shows a correlation between raw intelligence, as measured by any of the standard metrics (educational achievement, intelligence tests, or skill at solving logic puzzles) and company success.

…

For example, a classic Microsoft interview question was: “Why is a manhole cover round?”

The right answer, of course, is, “Who cares? Are we in the manhole business?”

(Followed by twisting in your chair to look all around, getting up, and leaving.)

In fact, I have blogged previously about how smug intelligent people frequently get it tragically wrong in a business environment.

I have been in several frustrating conversations with clueless hiring managers trying to convince them to hire very talented, driven and focused individuals who didn’t happen to have a specific technology buzzword on their resume. Hire motivated people and they can learn a technology; in fact, they will be eager to learn something new (it’s a warning flag if they don’t). Hire smug know-it-alls, and they have no motivation to learn anything (they know it all already) and tend to drag down those around them with their prima-dona attitudes.

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interviewing, hiring, techjobs, ideas

I am not an economist or a CIO, but I called this one 5 years ago. It seemed pretty obvious that wage inflation (even then) would quickly make India less of a bargain. At that point your choice is to find ‘the next cheap place to develop’ or pull your operations back to the US. This is exactly the sort of thing that happened with Ireland before India was all the rage.

The other lesson that people have learned in outsourcing to India is that while the upfront cost appears attractive, the fact that you are going to have 5x or 10x the amount of re-work means the overall cost is much higher that doing the work in house. So that enticing $30 a hour work done offshore (versus $100 onshore) becomes more like $150 to $300 once you factor in the extra cycles to fix all of the low quality code you receive and the delays to your project by having work done 12 time zones away.

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india, outsourcing, ideas

Google’s Erik Schmidt has recently made some comments that have recently gotten a load of tongues wagging, but really is anyone surprised?

I have often thought that development within Google has been aimed precisely at gathering as much info about individuals as possible. I would imagine that the evolution was something like this:

Hey, we have all of these people that we are showing advertisements to, wouldn’t it be cool if we could individually identify them. Setting a cookie won’t work, because that can turn off cookies or use different systems. Let’s get them to login by requiring a login to enable certain parts of search. Check. Now we can associate everything that they search for with an identity.

Let’s not stop there, because we really want to know more private/confidential information that they have. That Writely thing looks pretty interesting, let’s buy that and Google brand it along with a spreadsheet. Now we can scan, parse and mine their resumes, budgets and whatever other highly personal stuff they are willing (or stupid enough) to put in our online offerings.

As so it goes with the youtube and feedburner acquisitions (what do they like to watch?, what feeds do they read). It would not surprise me if at some point in the future that they acquire Joost to get even more targeted information on viewing habits as well as another easy avenue for advertising.

It sort of reminds me of the short essay Brian Eno wrote in A Year With Swollen Appendixes that was a sort of futuristic look at the lengths that advertisers would go to try to personalize their message. The tactics used, included customizing radio broadcasts, news reports and even people to try to entice a buy or garner attention for a message.

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google, data, privacy, advertising

The Guardian has an interesting followup on the whole ‘mobile phones are killing all the bees’ meme. Basically, the researcher from the original report claims ‘we never said any of that’. The first clue should have been that the research was not done on cellphones and towers but cordless phones used in the home where there is (or should be) a decidedly smaller bee population than in the wild.

Shocked. Shocked I am that the press would sensationalize something to make a profit.

Technorati Tags:
press, suckage, bees, cellphones