Victor Riley

Forget 9/11

2011-09-17T22:20:00.000-07:00

The tenth anniversary of 9/11 was last weekend, and it was full of exhortations to remember the event, as if merely remembering it were a patriotic act. Apparently, taking care of the first responders and volunteers who cleaned up afterward isn't so patriotic, as demonstrated by the ongoing refusal to pay for those victims' cancers, just in case one of those illnesses wasn't actually caused by the event and taxpayers get saddled with someone's medical expenses unjustly.

To illustrate our reverence for the event, if not for the victims, pieces of the World Trade Center are being shipped to build memorials around the country just so we never forget. Which makes me wonder - why is it so important to remember it? If you were a terrorist, what would be more rewarding than to have your victims build monuments to remember your deeds? Wouldn't a more effective, and probably healthy, response be to take care of the victims who still live, remember those who died, and forget the rest?

New YouTube Channel for my Music

2011-06-05T12:57:00.000-07:00

nosuchartist

401Kasino

2011-05-30T11:51:00.000-07:00

When I started putting money into a 401K plan, the conventional formula assumed that a conservative investment mix would deliver about 8% per year.

Ha!

This was back when real estate values were expected to never retreat, the stock market was presumed an almost sure bet, and bonds were suggested as a kind of seasoning to the recipe, basically a head-nod to the faint possibility of risk, a demonstration of being a responsible investor rather than a speculator pinning one's star to the flighty fancies of the stock market.

According to US News, the average 401K account balance is now back to about where it was in 2007, before the latest financial unpleasantness. That's about $70,000, up about $20 K from the low in 2008. Of course, only a few people had the foresight to bet against the housing bubble and subprime mortgage gold rush. The breadth and depth of the bailouts required to keep the world's economy afloat are pretty strong evidence that most investors failed to see the end coming.

Efficient market theories assume that the price of an asset always reflects the perfect balance of valuations by informed investors acting out of rational self interest. Market behaviorists have recently shown that most investors don't qualify as perfectly rational or informed, and this is certainly even more true among the amateurs who make up the bulk of 401K owners. Since most actively managed funds fail to beat the market, even the experts get it wrong more often than right.

Recently, Steve Levitt and Thomas Miles at the University of Chicago demonstrated that poker is a game of skill rather than strictly one of chance. They showed that high performing poker players continue to perform well from year to year, while mutual fund managers' successes and failures are random.

It's ironic that online poker is outlawed in the US because it's considered to be gambling, while investments in mutual funds are a mandatory part of retirement planning.

Irony

2011-02-06T15:35:00.000-08:00

Sarah Palin, speaking at a celebration of Ronald Reagan at the Reagan Ranch Center, proclaimed that the US was on the "road to ruin" because of mounting debt. Being the astute student of history that Sarah is, I'm sure she was fully aware of the irony.

Persecution Complex

2011-01-27T20:45:00.001-08:00

"I want my life back." - BP CEO Tony Hale, complaining about the inconvenient effects of the Deepwater Horizon accident, which killed eleven people, on his own life.

"...journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible." - Sarah Palin, confusing criticism of right wing confrontational rhetoric with persecution of her personally.

"...I’m getting bludgeoned from one end to the other." - Don Schmierer, one of the American evangelicals who visited Uganda in 2009 to urge passage of legislation condemning homosexuality there, complaining that he had received over 600 messages of "hate" mail related to his visit. His complaint was voiced in reaction to the beating death of David Kato, one of the leading gay rights activists in Uganda.

Industrial Policy, Again

2011-01-25T20:58:00.001-08:00

In the official Republican response to tonight's State of the Union address, Representative Paul Ryan stated, "Depending on bureaucracy to foster innovation, competitiveness, and wise consumer choices has never worked – and it won't work now."

Actually, the microprocessor and the internet are two technologies that developed specifically because of government sponsorship. In the early 1960s, the US military bought large numbers of nascent microprocessors at prices designed to stimulate further development of the technology, in effect creating an artificial market to prop up the technology until it got a foothold in the broader commercial market. Without that assistance, the US wouldn't have become the center of microprocessor manufacturing that we became: no Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Apple... and the personal computer revolution would have come later and, probably, somewhere else. The PC revolution created countless jobs and became a new infrastructure-level productivity enhancer that increased US competitiveness and, I think, pulled us out of the early '80s recession.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is famously responsible for the development of the internet in the 1970s, which blossomed 20 years later and created another infrastructure-level increase in productivity and competitiveness. Again, I think that technology pulled us out of the recession in the early 1990s.

Today, there's no similar technology emerging from the labs, ready to conquer the world and make us all more productive, create millions of new jobs, etc. If Ronald Reagan hadn't pulled the plug on government-sponsored technology programs, particularly in environmental technologies, we might have such a new technology ready to create jobs and maintain our competitiveness. Lacking such a technology, we're left to compete with few advantages in a world full of lower cost producers, some of whom also have more natural resources. Republican demonizing of industrial policy has basically disarmed us economically.

Missing the Points

2011-01-17T19:57:00.001-08:00

The current national dialog about and coverage of the recent shootings in Tucson has left out some points that I think are important. In no particular order:

1. The controversy over gun control ignores the fact that when guns are readily available, they're readily available to mentally ill people too. A short list of victims besides those in Tucson includes Ronald Reagan and Jim Brady, John Lennon, students at Virginia Tech and Columbine, and Darrell Abbott, one of the best and most underrated (in my view) electric guitar players in the world.

2. Many are expressing hope that the shootings in Tucson will wake people up to the destructive, hyperbolic rhetoric that poisons our political process. But we had a far worse incident, the terrorist attack against the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, that killed 168 people and was directly precipitated by right wing rhetoric about "jack booted government thugs" from J. Gordon Liddy and other talk radio hosts. If that didn't do it, this won't either, particularly since the connection between rhetoric and action is far more tenuous in Tucson than it was in the Oklahoma City incident. Then, as now, those same right wing commentators are slinking away from the scene of the crime with their hands open saying, "It wasn't me." But in the case of Tucson, that's probably accurate, and soon we'll be back to business as usual, if we're not already.

3. Articles and commentary about the Tucson shootings and the toxic, hyperbolic rhetoric in our political discussion usually claim that such rhetoric comes from both sides, that the left is as guilty of inciting violence as the right is. Why doesn't anyone challenge this bromide? Throughout the Clinton and Obama administrations, right wing commentators have made claims of tyranny, socialism, and even murder (completely ignoring that both administrations were moderate by almost any objective measure). These commentators included the religious, political, and thought leaders of the Republican party: Gingrich, Limbaugh, Beck, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Sarah Palin. When did any of the Democratic equivalents of these people ever say anything equivalent about a Republican politician? When did Nancy Pelosi call Bush a Fascist and compare him to Hitler? When did Harry Reid ever mention "second amendment remedies" in reference to a political opponent? When did Jon Stewart, Arianna Huffington, or Bill Maher ever urge violent revolution against the Republican administration? And when did a Democratic member of Congress ever call the President a liar during a State of the Union address? The false equivalence of rhetoric between the left and right shouldn't go unchallenged.

4. Speaking of the right wing vendetta against Obama and the lies that Fox News and others like it continue to manufacture, why doesn't anyone remind all these so-called Christians that one of the Ten Commandments prohibits bearing false witness against your neighbor? Is it because all these so-called Christians don't actually, um, know what the Ten Commandments actually are?

5. In all the controversy over Sarah Palin's use of the phrase "blood libel" in reference to criticism of her own level of rhetoric and her use of gun sights to target swing districts, no one seemed to notice that she recast legitimate criticism of rhetoric that incites violence against liberals as itself a kind of hate speech against conservatives. How can THAT go unchallenged?

6. Speaking of Palin, her video response to that criticism continued the conservative tradition of casting themselves as victims. In fact, several conservative commentators have claimed that they, in fact, were the true victims of this event, because people are starting to (albeit timidly) criticize them. Hasn't anyone noticed a pattern here? Christians are continually persecuted in this country (even though they're by far the majority, every US president has been a practicing Christian, and they control the political agendas at every level of government). Furthermore, the anti-abortion crusade is the equivalent of the equal rights movement, and the taxes that pay for our roads and public services are tyrannical impositions of an oppressive government. How much longer can the dominant US political movement of modern times continue to claim the advantages of oppression and persecution?

What's Wrong With America....

2010-09-22T20:54:00.001-07:00

...is that the people who are obsessed with the news should listen to some music, and the people who just listen to music should pay some attention to the news.

Christians Behaving Badly

2010-07-21T20:14:00.000-07:00

I'm usually not very interested in celebrity news, but Mel Gibson's recent rantings made me wonder about something. Let me illustrate:

- My wife had her rental car damaged in a parking lot in Minnesota by the wife of a professor of religious studies at a Lutheran college there. When the car rental company demanded compensation for the damage from my wife, she referred them to the woman who caused it. She and her husband initially denied they were responsible, then avoided phone calls from both the company and from my wife until my wife finally threatened them with legal action.

- A former neighbor sold a house on our street with a septic system that was on the verge of failing. The symptoms were clear but the former neighbor failed to disclose the problem, leaving the new owners with an unexpected $20,000 bill. The former neighbors claim to be devout Christians.

- Need I mention Catholic priests?

You would think that people who publicly proclaim their faith would feel some responsibility to live up to the values of that faith, but in some cases it seems the opposite is true. Why is that? Do some Christians feel that, because they're essentially good and moral people, anything unethical they do is OK because they're still good people underneath? Or does the weekly trek to church relieve them of their sins so they can pile more on during the week? Does bad behavior in the secular world not count for much in the spiritual world?

Some right wing Christians, including my mom, seem to think that all morality stems from religion, so atheists can't be trusted because they lack a moral foundation. Like many things, I think this notion is supported more by faith than by evidence.

Dear Facebook:

2010-07-15T21:26:00.000-07:00

I recently got an email from a Facebook member who I must know from somewhere, with a bunch of recommendations from you of other people I might know. I was curious about how you knew so many people I've encountered in my life, particularly since there wasn't much in common between them: some personal and some business, some here and some from my previous home... I wondered how you knew. IP addresses? Mining public data bases?

So I did a quick Google search and found several hundred posts on numerous forums from Facebook members who were wondering the same thing: how do you know? How do you dredge up someone that a person met in a bar ten years ago and offer them as a friend recommendation? Or an ex-husband, or a stalker? How do you offer a forty year old guy as a potential friend for a sixteen year old girl?

But here's the thing, Facebook: I'm not on you. I'm not a Facebook member, and I have no interest in becoming one. So while your own members find this, let's generously call it "prescience", somewhat creepy, getting a bunch of eerily accurate recommendations from you without having first opted in to your social network asylum is almost scary.

Based on my quick search, I suspect that what you're doing is suckering new members into uploading their address books so you can mine them for new customers. So let's say that Jay and Nancy both have my email address. As some point, then, I get an invitation email from you suggesting Jay and Nancy as potential friends. It may not matter to you that Jay is a psychotic sociopath who claims to be "electrosensitive", rants about radiation from cell phone towers, and has my email address because I once attended a community meeting about cell coverage. Or that Nancy is a consulting client who likes to keep her professional and personal relationships as separate as possible, and co-mingling them may put my professional relationship with her at risk. As far as you're concerned, if someone has my email address, that person is likely to be a potential friend.

Facebook, this is one of those cases where you can have too much of a good thing. When your marketing efforts start reaching past the fruitful fields of friendship into the murky swamp of indeterminate and potentially damaging connections, it suggests that your business model has run out of steam, that growth is at an end, that your valuation has probably passed its peak. Probably should have gone public a couple of years ago.

Sincerely yours,

You-know-who

How Ronald Reagan Killed America

2010-07-04T14:39:00.001-07:00

The June 14/20 issue of Bloomberg Business Week has a summary of why several prominent economists and analysts who have been bearish through the past few decades (in some cases) are still bearish now. At the end is one exception: James Grant, publisher of "Grant's Interest Rate Observer". The article states: "'We observed this in the recessions of 1991 and 2001, which were meek and mild, and so were the corresponding recoveries.' The deep recession of the early 1980s, on the other hand, led to a spectacular recovery. Based on that, Grant believes the rebound from this recession will be job-rich and strong, a position he has stuck to for nine months now."

My intent here is not to pick on Grant, but rather to use this as an opportunity to point out that a lot of economic analysis seems to want to treat the economy like the weather: a complex system that is hard to predict, but that does exhibit historical patterns because it's self directed. This may be true of weather, which has relatively few inputs. But economies are not self-contained forces of nature, but rather complex systems that are tightly coupled to many influences: demographics, technology, politics, and so forth.

So let's take the "spectacular recovery" that followed the recession of the early 1980s. Many people would like to credit Ronald Reagan with that recovery. The analysis quoted above would like to treat it evidence that the deeper the recession, the stronger the rebound. But what else happened in the mid-1980s?

One thing that happened was the personal computer revolution, which kicked off a wave of infrastructure-level capital investment and yielded tremendous operating benefits in almost every industry that continue today. Surely that had something to do with this recovery? And perhaps the subsequent emergence of the internet, another infrastructure-level transition that required, again, tremendous investment as everyone from corporations to grandmothers built web sites, had something to do with the recovery in the 1990s?

I don't think it's merely coincidence that these massive technology advances and infrastructure-level transitions happened at about the same time these recoveries did. So I have to ask, what infrastructure-level technology is on the cusp of maturity today that will lead to a wave of investment and operating benefits over the next ten years?

Frankly, I can't think of one. And without one, I don't think we're going to see a recovery like we did in the 1980s and 1990s.

Where should we be looking for such an opportunity? Well, the government cultivated the nascent semiconductor industry in the 1960s that led to the computing revolution of the 1980s and beyond. The government cultivated the internet in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and we started reaping the benefits twenty years later. So to find the maturing technology that will pull us out of the current recession, we should look to the 1980s.

One class of technologies that would fit the bill and was just getting off the ground at that time was renewable energy. At least, it was until Reagan killed government investment in renewable energy programs. Renewable energy is, like computing and the internet, and the national highway system, electrification, water, communications, and railroads before, an infrastructure-level technology that would require massive current investment and reap massive future rewards. Had Reagan not halted government investment in such technologies, we would probably now be on the verge of transitioning from fossil fuels to wind and solar. We might be burning our garbage for energy rather than burying it in landfills. We might not be intimately entangled in the Mideast and a target of terrorism. We might not have a uncontrollable oil well dumping untold amounts of crude into the Gulf of Mexico.

Instead, all of these are happening, and we have no long term strategy for solving these problems. For the foreseeable future, we'll be dependent on a finite and dwindling resource that pollutes our air and water, and that's largely controlled by entities who may not have our best interests at heart. As the world's biggest consumer of oil, we have the most to lose when it gets expensive and rare.

But perhaps more important than all of this is that, without another maturing infrastructure-level technology waiting in the wings to fuel the next wave of economic growth, we may not have a next wave for a long, long time. Without such a wave, there's nothing to stimulate growth except more borrowing. Without such a wave, there's no mechanism for organic job growth. And the one person most responsible for putting us in this position is Ronald Reagan. I predict that in thirty years or so, it will be widely recognized that he was the one who killed America.

Comments Off

2010-07-04T14:39:00.000-07:00

Turning comments off - too much comment spam.

Microsoft, innovation, and Competitiveness

2010-05-24T21:06:00.000-07:00

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are famous for not letting members of their families use Apple products. Since taking over the reigns at Microsoft, Ballmer's stance seems to be that guts and determination will beat innovation, even though he claims the mantel of innovation every chance he gets. In the press, Apple is held up as the paragon of innovation, and Microsoft is tagged as the follower who's always a step or two behind. This has certainly been true in operating systems, where Vista and now Windows 7 have basically been clones of the concurrent version of OS X.

The thing is, Microsoft had a nice, fast, light, and highly functional smartphone OS, Windows CE, ten years ago. Third party developers could write applications for that platform and sell them in something like an app store (like Handango). And Bill Gates has been stating for almost that same amount of time that tablet PCs would be the future of computing. Despite its reputation for innovation, Apple is merely refining product categories that Microsoft has been developing for years.

Despite the advantages of an eight year market lead (at the time of iPhone 1.0), a huge installed base, and a clear and accurate vision of the future, Microsoft failed to capitalize, and is now an also-ran in mobile devices (see here and here). Microsoft could have, and should have, owned this space. Why didn't they?

Despite Ballmer's public displays of determination and competitiveness, the bottom line is that Microsoft failed to compete. After winning the browser war with Netscape, they stopped advancing IE until Firefox matured into a viable threat. After developing the smartphone market, they sat on that platform while Apple and Google developed more modern mobile OSs. Perhaps Microsoft's problem is that they declared victory in a competition that never really ends. And perhaps the lesson from that, one that Apple certainly embodies, is that you never sit on a lead.

Might Makes Right

2010-04-24T16:21:00.000-07:00

Living in a mostly rural area, we frequently see (and sometimes hear) nature at work, as larger and stronger wildlife (eagles, hawks, coyotes) prey on the smaller and weaker. Thank God that civilization has enabled us to substitute the force of ideas for the force of, well, force.

Or has it?

The New York Times recently ran a piece ("Jon Stewart's Punching Bag, Fox News") describing how the Daily Show is fact checking Fox News and calling them out for hypocrisy, inciting violence, and other offenses. The Times piece was a cautious treatment of the subject, recognizing that Fox doesn't always get its facts straight but not acknowledging the deliberate distortion, misrepresentation, and manipulation of their audience that characterize their programming.

This brought to mind the hand-wringing that went on after Scott Brown won the Senate seat in Massachusetts that had been held by Teddy Kennedy. Drama aside, the general conclusion was that the Democrats were toast because they no longer had a filibuster-proof majority - they had been reduced to merely holding the White House and large majorities in both houses of Congress. Hence, they would be completely ineffective going forward.

The consternation (or glee, depending on which side you're on) was due to a simultaneous high degree of faith in the solidity of Republicans and their willingness to do whatever they had to to advance their agenda (or at least hold back the Democrats) and a complete lack of faith in the Democrats' ability to stand up to the Republicans. Apparently, 41 well organized Republicans outnumber 59 poorly organized Democrats.

Or is it really their relative levels of organization that matters?

Back to the Times article. I wondered why the Times wouldn't go the extra step of pointing out how emphatically correct Jon Stewart is in his criticisms of Fox News. I wondered why congressional Democrats are accurately perceived as being so cautious. And why the Obama administration has been equally cautious in reversing Bush administration policies, abolishing Don't Ask Don't Tell, and aggressively pursuing a progressive agenda.

I suspect that I know the answer. Republicans have guns.

Seriously, when did a liberal every blow up a Federal building? When did a liberal kill a doctor out of a sense of moral and religious self-righteousness? When Bush was in office and trying to take the county back to the Dark Ages, did liberals go off into the woods, form militias, and threaten armed rebellion? Did liberals ever tell a Republican president that he was lying during a State of the Union address? Have liberals ever showed up to rallies for a Republican president carrying guns? And have liberals ever incited violence against elected officials for passing legislation they disagreed with?

People often call Democrats "pussies" for not standing up to Republican bullies. I'd prefer to characterize them as civilized. While liberals try to advance their causes within the frameworks of law, Republicans are resorting to force and the threat of it. And in inciting this behavior, Fox News is the chief obstacle to civilized, law-abiding debate in this country. In this sense, they violate everything that America supposedly stands for.

So why is it that a Comedy Central comedian hosting a fake news show is the only public figure in the country to take them on?

Ironies Abound

2010-03-27T21:16:00.000-07:00

I have a new theory about why the Republicans have been so successful over the past ten years - or more. Consider the recent health reform legislation: the very people who will most benefit from it (lower income working people) are the ones who most vociferously opposed it. A recent New York Times article profiled Tea Party activists and found that many had joined the movement after losing their jobs. And that many were living on government subsidies - the very ones that they protest against so adamantly. Perhaps the most revealing part of the article, though, was its account of why some of the members joined - that it gave them a sense of belonging, of purpose, and recognition that they didn't get anywhere else.

I think the Republican party has been doing this for a long time, now. Its focus on churches and Christian "values" is really an appeal to that segment of the population who belong to churches because they need the community and direction that those churches provide (see Matt Taibi's description of an evangelical community in his book The Great Derangement). Perhaps the conservative movement is really composed, largely, of people who need the direction, purpose, and sense of belonging that membership in an evangelical congregation or the Tea Party provides. The reward structures offered by those communities outweigh facts, apparently, and make it possible for people to demonstrate, and vote, against their own economic interests. Apparently without thinking about it much.

This suggests that the essential problem with liberals is that they're too, well, satisfied with their lives - they don't need that kind of external support and reward structure, so there's no liberal equivalent of the evangelical church network or Tea Party movement. And the problem with the Democratic party is that it hasn't leveraged similar reward structures, so it has nothing to offer that segment of the population who are searching for meaning from those kinds of structures. Apparently, there are enough Americans who need that kind of support to make Fox News, the Tea Party, and the right wing overall successful. Perhaps the number of Americans who fall into that camp is a measure of our overall well-being as a country.

In addition to the obvious irony that these people are trying to prevent the very progress that will provide them more economic security, the final irony is that all these people, searching for community, do so in the name of individual rights and liberties. Their message is libertarian but their behavior is collective. It's difficult to imagine a political movement that could possibly be more intellectually inconsistent.

A Few Thoughts After the Death of a Pet

2010-02-22T21:10:00.000-08:00

Our beloved dog died last November. We had about a week with him after the initial diagnosis, during which time he took Prednisone and perked up to the point where he had a few moments of near-normalcy during his last days. We were grateful for the time we had to tell him how much we loved him and mentally say goodbye to him many times before doing it for real. Afterward, I wondered about a few things. It's taken me a while to put them down here.

One of the things we struggled with afterward was what to say about it. It didn't seem right to say that he "died", because he didn't, really - he was euthanized. It was an active process rather than a passive one, done on our terms rather than on nature's. The closest I could come to something that reflected how I felt about it was, "We had to say goodbye to our dog." Because the alternatives just didn't seem to fit.

One alternative was, "We put our dog down." This struck me as too harsh for the kind of relationship we had with him. We made him stay "down" when we punished him; making him stay down was an act of dominance. But euthanizing him had nothing to do with punishing him and nothing to do with dominance. Instead, giving him a relatively painless, dignified death, with minimal anxiety and before uncontrollable pain set in, was specifically an act of respect. This made me wonder if you would talk about "putting your dog down" if you respected him or her, and whether I was strange to respect our dog. I was certainly proud of the fact that he, a Welsh Corgi with short, stubby legs, could leave the ground, twist in the air, and catch a Frisbee in flight. That, while many Corgis become overweight, he was mostly muscle, stayed within his ideal weight most of his life, and played recklessly into his twelfth year. That he was so patient with us and so gentle with others, and so undemanding. And that he connected so well, making direct eye contact in a way that seems rare in dogs.

Another was, "We had to put him to sleep." More respectful of the dog, maybe, but less respectful of the event. This was not an event to minimize, and this phrasing seemed to do just that. Our dog couldn't avoid what happened to him - why should our language attempt to do so?

I'm not sure I ever found the right words, but that might have been appropriate, because there was little that was, ultimately, right about losing him. He, our relationship with him, and the process of losing him were too complex for a simple description to do justice to, and in the end I stopped trying. But that was okay, because most people had been through a similar event, and most understood even without the right words.

Which brings me to the next thought, that how people reacted to the event or to the news became, for me, almost a test of character. I found myself being disappointed by people who I thought were closer or better friends when they failed to express the right amount of sorrow, and being surprised by the comfort and support that came from unexpected sources, people who hadn't been that close lately for one reason or another. When I've been in that situation, hearing of bad news and being in a position to react, I've often failed to speak or reach out, believing that nothing I could say could adequately respect the situation, that an inadequate attempt would be worse than no attempt at all, and that silence was more respectful than platitudes. Now I know I was wrong, and I hope I'll handle those kinds of situations better in the future. Sincerity and sensitivity matter more than eloquence.

My final thought comes from sitting in the vet's office during that final week, knowing that it wasn't his last day yet, but that that day was pretty close. A neighbor, an evangelical Christian, happened to be there with his dog, and he asked what we were in for. We gave him the story, and he blithely assured us that he'd put down four dogs in his time and we'd be fine. On a personal level, his general affect and mode of operation is friendly, loud, relentlessly upbeat, and more broadcast than receive, so I don't blame him for his relative insensitivity. What I do blame him for, though, is the notion that we can give our pets a painless, dignified death, with minimal anxiety and on our terms rather than waiting for the biological crisis of natural death, but we can't do the same for ourselves or for the human members of our families.

If Late Night Talk Shows Were Desserts

2010-01-18T19:39:00.000-08:00

Show	Dessert	Why
The Daily Show	Tiramisu	Complex, stimulating, ultimately satisfying
The Colbert Report	Chocolate Mousse	Simple, smooth, deceptively rich
Letterman	Plum pudding	Mostly conventional, but with a hint of danger when soaked in brandy and lit on fire
Conan O'Brien	Licorice ice cream	Intriguing, different, out of the mainstream, not sure if good or not
Leno	Lime Jello with whipped cream	Almost offensively inoffensive

Web 3.0

2009-12-24T17:12:00.001-08:00

No one reads this blog (or at least very few do), so it shouldn't be too presumptuous of me to call Web 3.0.

Web 2.0, of course, famously called by Tim O'Reilly, was about social networking and user-generated content, which turned the one-way, static pull of web pages into a two-way dialog. It snuck up on us, just as Web 3.0 has done.

Web 3.0, in my view, is about emergent functionality. Where Web 1.0 and 2.0 were still about dedicated web clients, Web 3.0 is about web-aware applications and the way web functionality changes when lots of portable devices and new types of sensors become clients.

Let's take the iPhone as an example. Google Maps is a traditional web application, but adding location services makes it possible to show you where you are on that map. Connect location awareness to data bases of restaurants, subway stops, and all the other location-related information you might ever need, and you get emergent search functionality that produces relevant local results.

That's a simple one. Let's take some more subtle ones.

Continuing with Google Maps, a recently added feature uses velocity information provided by Google Maps users who have location services enabled on their phones to show traffic status. When enough data are available from a given location, the map shows how quickly traffic is moving, even in those locations where traditional fixed sensors and cameras are not available.

The Urban Spoon app for the iPhone lets users take photographs of restaurant menus and upload them to the Urban Spoon site. The application then makes those menus available to users of the app.

Google Goggles lets users search on objects that they take photographs of with their mobile devices.

Amazon's Kindle application lets users download and read books on their mobile devices. Reading locations are uploaded back to the server so they can be synchronized across all a users' various devices. That is, when I stop reading a book on my iPhone and start reading the same book on my iPod or my Kindle, I pick up where I left off on the iPhone.

Augmented Reality is the recently-coined term for overlaying location-specific information on a camera view. The application uses location information from GPS, direction information from the compass, and visual information from the camera to overlay labels onto the camera scene showing items of interest.

Google Voice lets a person associate a single phone number to all of that person's phones and manage all phone-related information in one place.

The iPhone itself is a fully capable web client, not needing the support or intervention of a computer to download content, update functionality, etc. Need an inclinometer, or a sound pressure level meter? Download the app you need from Apple's app store directly on the device. Want to listen to a radio station that's across the country? Download the app you need, right on the device. This makes the device capable of becoming almost any information tool that you might need, because it's connected to a service that can instantly provide an almost limitless range of functionality. The same can be said of Amazon's Kindle, or its Kindle app - since you can order and download books directly from and to the device, the entire Kindle library is practically in your pocket.

Web 3.0 moves beyond traditional web clients (browsers running on personal computers) to incorporate any application for which web-awareness can provide emergent functionality. As the number and sophistication of portable devices and their associated sensing capabilities grow, I expect that we'll all be using dedicated, web-aware applications more and general purpose browsers less. Also, the range of emergent functionality that's possible in this world is only now being explored. To me, this is the next big wave of web development, and that's why it merits being called Web 3.0.

Morning-After in America

2009-11-05T17:47:00.000-08:00

Although we just had an off-year election here, that's not what I'm referring to. Instead, I've been thinking about the recently revived interest in renewable energy, motivated by last year's high energy prices. While interest has fallen lately along with prices, due to reduced economic activity, there are plenty of reasons to continue pursuing these technologies, including the relationship between energy and national security, climate change, and flattening production.

Ronald Reagan famously declared that it was "morning in America" when he took office. I think he was right, in a way. He was really the morning-after pill that wiped away the renewable energy technologies that were gestating after the 1970s' energy crises. I wonder how much better off we'd be today had those efforts continued uninterrupted.

Fox News Viewers: Foot-Soldiers for Elite Special Interests

2009-09-10T11:15:00.001-07:00

Fox News and right-wing talk radio position themselves as populists, championing the causes of their viewers, who are conservative, patriotic, and often middle- to low-income. They appeal to the conservative values of their audience, then get that audience to champion causes that primarily benefit wealthy people and special interests. Yet, if you suggested to a Fox News viewer that they were foot-soldiers for special interests and wealthy elite, they would never believe you.

Here's why they are, though. Consider the tax revolt "tea parties" last April, organized, led, then gleefully reported as a spontaneous "grass roots" effort by Fox News. Many of these protests took place in states with positive balances of payments (they receive more funding from the federal government, from the tax revenues of the country at large, than they contribute in tax payments). Should taxes be restrained or cut as the protesters wished, they themselves would likely have borne the brunt of reduced services, subsidies, roads, and other federal benefits. The primary beneficiaries of their efforts would have been the wealthy, who are the primary target of planned tax increases.

Now consider health care. Many people in Fox News's demographic have tenuous health insurance, and I suspect that many others have none at all. They would be the primary beneficiaries of real health reform. Yet wealthy Fox News and talk radio hosts have incited them to disrupt town hall meetings intended to advance the process of reform. They have taken on the mission of defeating reform as if it were a threat to democracy and the American way of life, when in fact it's primarily a threat to insurance companies, doctors, and others who may benefit disproportionately from the current payment structures. In other words, these protesters are working for powerful special interests, and against their own personal interests.

Thomas Frank dives deep into this topic in his book, What's the Matter with Kansas, which I admit that I haven't read. So this isn't an original idea. I do wonder, though, if the specific manipulative relationship that Fox News and Rush Limbaugh have with their audience, inciting them to work against their own interests, has been sufficiently explored. And I wonder what it would take to get these people to understand how thoroughly they're being played by people they trust.

Blurred Boundaries

2009-09-08T10:48:00.000-07:00

According to ABC News Australia, two girls, 10 and 12 years old, got lost in a storm drain and were rescued after they updated their status on their Facebook page instead of using their cell phone to simply call for help. The story quotes Glenn Benham of the Metropolitan Fire Service in Adelaide as saying, "If they were able to access Facebook from their mobile phones, they could have called 000, so the point being they could have called us directly and we could have got there quicker than relying on someone being online and replying to them and eventually having to call us via 000 anyway."

I think there's an interesting point to be made here about interaction design and the mental models of naive users. Consider times when you may have helped a naive user with their computer, and found that they didn't understand such basics as the distinction between the operating system and applications, and between applications and what they do. Email is email, internet is internet. You click on the envelope icon for email and you click on the big blue "e" for internet. More advanced users (whose friends or family have installed Firefox on their machines) may talk about starting Google (since that's the default Firefox home page). Talking to them about their email application or internet client is hopeless because they don't understand the concept. This may have made it difficult to communicate the concepts required to resolve whatever problem they were having.

The point for design is that designers are always the world's leading expert in their product, and they often assume that their users will share their mental models. So their interaction and interface designs often presume some basic understanding of an underlying framework: client/server architecture, application-specific preferences, the need for application updates, file formats, even the basic notion of files and operating system services, all of these may be presumed by the designer and escape the user. The consequence is products that are almost unusable by naive users. Typically, such users will learn a very limited path through the interaction logic to perform a very specific task, and become confused if they deviate from that path.

Two trends are conspiring to make this problem worse in the future, as demonstrated by the two girls lost in the storm drain. Technology is becoming more broadly used by less expert users, and the functional boundaries between applications are becoming more blurred as more and more of them add social networking features. It used to be that calling 911 (or 000 in Australia) was the way you called for help and email was how you kept up with friends. Now, whether you're lost in a storm drain or want to see what your friend is doing, you can call them, email them, Twitter it, update your Facebook page, IM it, blog it, ....

The more functional overlap there is between applications, the more likely it is that naive users will learn, and stick with, one preferred way of accomplishing a task, however inappropriate that may be for the situation at hand. I'm not suggesting that designers should limit application functionality to prevent over-burdening users with choices, but rather that they simply recognize that naive users often don't recognize the basic framework and context of systems and applications that designers take for granted.

Iranian Democracy

2009-06-15T20:20:00.000-07:00

So those terrible Iranian Muslims that we don't want to have anything to do with are taking to the streets to protest a stolen election and demand democratic justice. In contrast to us Americans, who sat on our hands after the Supreme Court gave the Presidency to George W. Bush in 2000.... I wonder if those terrible Iranian Muslims might have something to teach us patriotic Americans about Democracy.

On Balance

2009-04-18T20:55:00.000-07:00

Wednesday was tax day in the US, and Fox News took full advantage of the opportunity to stir up the masses with a series of "tea parties" across the country. Conservatives gathered to protest high taxes and government spending.

To which I say, "Amen".

You have to admire the generous, selfless spirit of the protesters. They undoubtedly realize that the red states, the ones in which conservative republicans are prevalent, are net recipients of tax money, while the democratic blue states are net contributors. Recognizing the unfairness of this arrangement, these protesters are willing to sacrifice the benefits of their positive balance of payments. As a resident of a blue state with a negative balance of payments, I welcome their endorsement of reducing tax revenues to their own states. I'm sure that's what they have in mind, aren't you?

Self Reference

2008-12-31T10:42:00.001-08:00

I recently read an article in Fortune ("GM and Me", December 8, 2008) describing the gradual decline of GM. While reading it, I thought of Microsoft, and of the US as a whole. Why?

One of the themes of the article is how insular and self-referential the culture at GM is. They seem to hold themselves to their own standards rather than measuring themselves against competitors. Having captured so much of the market for so long, they apparently continued playing to that market. Meanwhile, over the years, the market gradually shifted out from under them, and they failed to either lead it (as Toyota has done) or follow it. The consequence of this has been a gradual decline over several decades. Perhaps the most telling part of the article: "Ask Rick Wagoner why GM isn't more like Toyota, and he'll tell you, 'We're playing our own game - taking advantage of our own unique heritage and strengths.' Turns out GM should have forgotten that and become more like Toyota. Toyota's market cap is now $103.6 billion; GM's is $1.8 billion."

So why did I think of Microsoft, which is still minting money on the strengths of Windows and Office? Perhaps it's because I heard a podcast (Windows Weekly) several months ago in which Paul Thurrott, a Windows expert, was asked by Microsoft PR how he liked Windows Mobile 6, which had just been released, and they were surprised when Thurrott asked them if they had even seen an iPhone, which is lightyears ahead of WM6 in just about every way. Perhaps it's because of the insistence, from Steve Ballmer on down, that Microsoft executives' kids shouldn't be allowed to have iPods. Both of these behaviors suggest the same kind of self referential, insular culture that caused GM to stall out.

Microsoft these days is a strange combination of competitiveness without inspiration, inward-looking but imitative. When Vista was released, the list of features apparently copied from OS X was striking. Apple releases the iPod, and Microsoft releases the Zune. Google has Google maps, and Microsoft has their own satellite mapping site. Google has Google Earth, and Microsoft has Virtual Earth. Adobe has Flash and AIR, and Microsoft follows with Silverlight. Even Microsoft's development environment, Visual Studio, has its roots in Apple's Hypercard and Interface Builder tools. Now, Ray Ozzie wants to lead Microsoft into the world of cloud computing and online apps, but Google and Adobe are already there. And Microsoft is trying to follow Google into the world of ad-supported search.

I think that Microsoft is at that point where GM was around 1980. At that point, GM employed about 853,000 people and dominated the largest automotive market in the world. Today, Microsoft claims about 90% of the world's desktop operating systems and provides software to most major businesses. But where GM's market moved to higher quality, more efficient Japanese cars, Microsoft's market is moving to Linux, Apple, and web apps. As GM struggled to design cars that people wanted to buy, Microsoft is struggling to gain traction online. Despite claiming to lead and innovate, GM continued to fall farther and farther behind, continually shifting strategies in the process. Same with Microsoft.

The lesson here, I think, is that the biggest mistake any organization can make is to start believing it's the best. That belief establishes the foundation for using oneself as one's own standard, which in turn leads to insularity and self-reference. At that point, you listen more to yourself than to your customers and competitors.

If I were running Microsoft, the first thing I'd do is let anyone buy and use an iPhone, iPods, Macs, Linux, Google, anything, to make sure that everyone understands the competitive environment that the company is operating in. Their customers understand that world - why shouldn't Microsoft? The next thing I'd do is ask whether the world really needs Microsoft to keep providing late, less compelling counterparts to every new big product, and whether continuing to follow the market leaders is a recipe for long term success. Finally, I'd ask the bright, creative, and entrepreneurial people in the organization to ask themselves where Microsoft could be leading instead of following, and how it can leverage the advantages it has in business platforms, Exchange, .NET, and so forth, to do something that no one else is doing yet.

I've left out one part of this story. Another thing I thought of while reading about GM is the US itself. Like me, many of you (Americans, at least) have probably been told countless times that we're the "greatest nation in the world". Americans have believed that for a long time, and the pitfalls of self-reference apply there as well. Like GM, we've become inward looking, unaware of the advantages that other nations may have. As a consequence, we're losing ground in life expectancy, education, quality of life, and productivity. I guess the old saying is true: as GM goes, so goes the country.

A Few Minutes of Calm

2008-12-28T11:51:00.000-08:00

I have started a video blog at A Few Minutes of Calm. I've been writing music since I was a kid, and I've always been interested in the combination of music, visuals, writing, movement, and so forth. The videos are all of local scenery here in Point Roberts, Washington, which is a small piece of the US attached to the bottom of British Columbia, south of Vancouver. All scenes are taken with a still camera on a tripod, and all music is original. The intent is to capture a moment in time and a sense of place, in such a way that someone can check in any time they need a few minutes of calm, a break from a stressful day, or some time to relax or reflect. I hope you enjoy it.

Financial Innovation

2008-12-07T14:31:00.000-08:00

In a recent Business Week article ("Get Credit Flowing, Heal Housing", November 17), the CEO of Ernst & Young is quoted as saying, "It would be a mistake to regulate so strongly as to stifle innovation." It's easy to reflexively agree with this statement if you don't think about it too much. But let's think about it for a minute.

Recent financial innovations have included junk bonds, derivatives, no-doc loans, interest-only loans, mortgage-backed securities, and credit default swaps. Recent prominent financial innovators have included Michael Milken, Enron, and Long Term Capital Management. Financial innovation seems dedicated to finding new ways to privatize profits and socialize losses, and innovations spread and generate profits until they cause a crisis, require a government bailout, and become regulated. Perhaps the field of Finance is mature enough now that innovation is more likely to cause harm than good.

Villains

2008-11-02T12:00:00.000-08:00

This election has been characterized by much villainizing of the other side. People on both sides are genuinely scared of what will happen to the country if the other side wins. As a liberal, I think this has been encouraged more on the right than on the left, and I think this has been true since Reagan started villifying liberals. Since then, the right has framed liberal values and gay rights, in particular, as moral issues, and demonized people on the left for supporting those values.

I wonder how much of this is facilitated by our predilection to view stories in terms of good guys and bad guys, protagonists and antagonists, good and evil. As kids, we heard or read about evil witches, evil stepmothers, and so forth. As adults, our books, movies, and TV shows are filled with conflicts between good and evil, between heroes and villains. Villains are motivated by inexplicable evil tendencies, or by greed, fanaticism, and other traits that make them easy to hate. How much does this framework bias us toward seeing the world in the same way? And how much of our recent history has been shaped by an overly simplistic worldview, encouraged by this perspective?

Buried Ledes

2008-10-17T21:53:00.000-07:00

The following excerpts are from the New York Times:

From October 17:

"The United States Supreme Court on Friday overturned a lower court’s order requiring state officials in Ohio to supply information that would have made it easier to challenge prospective voters. The decision was a setback for Ohio Republicans, who had sued to force the Ohio secretary of state, a Democrat, to provide information about database mismatches to county officials.... A 2002 federal law, the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, requires states to check voter registration applications against government databases like those for driver’s license records. Names that do not match are flagged. Ohio Republicans sought to require Ms. Brunner to provide information about mismatches to local officials. Those officials could use information to require voters to cast provisional ballots rather than regular ones. They could also allow partisan poll workers to challenge people on the lists."

From October 15:

"Republicans have been angered by reports of voter-registration fraud linked to groups allied with Democrats, like Acorn, a community organizing group with ties to Mr. Obama. This month, the Ohio Republican Party filed a motion seeking to force Ms. Brunner, a Democrat, to hand over the list of all registration applications that had been flagged when checked using the state or federal databases. In court papers, Republicans said they wanted the names to file challenges.... Social Security data indicate that Ohio election officials found more than 200,000 names that did not match this year; state election officials say their analysis of the data indicates that most of these are individual voters, not duplicate registrations. But Ms. Brunner said that problems with the databases could very well be why the names did not match."

From October 16:

"When Mr. McCain invoked Mr. Wurzelbacher in Wednesday’s debate — some version of 'Joe the Plumber' was mentioned two dozen times during the 90 minutes — as a way to criticize Mr. Obama’s tax plan and wealth-sharing argument, Mr. Wurzelbacher suddenly found camera crews outside his home, Katie Couric on the phone, and himself in the full glare of the media spotlight.... Mr. Wurzelbacher is registered to vote in Lucas County (Ohio) under the name Samuel Joseph Worzelbacher. 'We have his named spelled W-O, instead of W-U,' Linda Howe, executive director of the Lucas County Board of Elections, said in a telephone interview. 'Handwriting is sometimes hard to read. He has never corrected it in his registration card.' The records, she said, showed he voted Republican in the March primary."

"I Didn't Do It My Way"

2008-10-10T08:34:00.000-07:00

Prior to this election, John McCain enjoyed a well-earned reputation for honesty, integrity, and bipartisanship. I wonder, if he loses this election, if he'll look back on it and regret that he compromised those values so much and took the low road. And I wonder if he might be doing better in the polls if he had stayed true to his own values. Perhaps Americans have realized that "straight talk" has become more a branding exercise than a reality.

Abandon Ship

2008-10-06T12:34:00.000-07:00

Items that have been abandoned recently:

- Decades of conservative free market ideology, to the overriding requirement to save the economy from effects of that same ideology

- The Bush administration, in Sarah Palin's readiness to point out its failings

- Trickle-down economics: how many Americans would currently support tax cuts for the rich?

- Neoconservatism: remember that?

Opportunity Knocks!

2008-09-22T18:44:00.000-07:00

Hmmm... maybe now would be a good time to revive the idea of privatizing Social Security. Don't you think so?

Uncommon Sense

2008-09-15T19:42:00.001-07:00

My last post elicited several comments, most in person, from some liberals and a conservative, all defending common sense. The funny thing is, each of them had a different definition of what common sense was....

Three Virtues That Lead to Bad Decisions

2008-09-07T12:10:00.000-07:00

The recent Republican convention has caused me to think about how some of the values held up by the nominees and delegates can lead to poor decisions when used to drive policy. Three personal attributes that we Americans hold up as virtues can be particularly damaging:

Loyalty

Loyalty is necessary in a military context but can be counterproductive in a civilian one. Why? Because loyalty only comes into play when someone is obligated to do something that they fundamentally disagree with. After all, if one agrees with a course of action, there's no need for loyalty. Loyalty is used to keep members of a team marching in the same direction whether they agree with that direction or not.

This may be entirely appropriate and constructive when loyalty is earned rather than demanded. But when loyalty is demanded because it hasn't been earned, there's no rational reason that loyal behavior will lead to a good outcome. Rationally, someone with less knowledge should defer to someone with more. When someone with more knowledge defers to someone with less, because loyalty is demanded, the outcome can be catastrophic. One need look no further than Colin Powell's presentation to the UN for a clear demonstration of how unmerited loyalty can upend the proper relationship between someone who is informed and competent and someone who is not.

This is one of the basic dynamics that have led to the most prominent failures of the Bush administration: loyalty was the most important attribute to Bush, and it was demanded rather than earned. It was more important than competence, as demonstrated by the response to Hurricane Katrina and the inept handling of the Iraq war and reconstruction. It also prevented thoughtful deliberation and honest, informed feedback at those times when it was most needed; dissenting voices were absent, so decision-makers never benefited from hearing all sides of an argument.

This came to mind when reading about how Sarah Palin, as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, fired her Chief of Police because she felt she didn't have his unreserved loyalty. Staffing an administration with people who are unquestionably loyal to you is a sure prescription for group-think, for suppressing the kind of feedback and honest disagreement that would lead to better, more informed decisions.

Toughness

One of the attributes that certainly appealed to Americans about Bush, and now about McCain and Palin, is toughness. All of them pride themselves on the strength to make tough decisions. By definition, a decision is only tough when it's unpopular. And, in some cases, it may be unpopular because it's wrong.

In these cases, one's self image as tough can make it hard, or impossible, to change one's mind when presented with new evidence. Toughness, inflexibility, and stubbornness are basically synonymous. Again, one need look no further than the Iraq war to see the results of decision making distorted by toughness. The fact that McCain and Palin share this trait may make them vulnerable to the same kind of inflexibility.

Common Sense

One of the delegates at the recent convention cited Palin's "small town values" as a reason to support her, and when asked what those values were, cited "common sense" as a prominent one. Americans love common sense. I think they believe that someone who operates on common sense is trustworthy.

There are several problems with common sense. An obvious problem is that it's a substitute for education. Nature abhors a vacuum, and common sense fills in where education is absent.

A second problem with common sense is that it's reductionist. It often relies on a few, basic principles, sometimes derived from religious belief or moral values, that fail to recognize the underlying tradeoffs and complexities that exist in the real world.

A third problem is that it's based on one's personal experience with the world, and thus is limited by the limits of that experience. It was once common sense, for example, that the sun revolved around the earth. We now know better, and the fact that the earth revolves around the sun is conventional knowledge. But evolution is currently running into the same resistance that the Ptolemaic universe once did, and probably for the same reasons. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have convincingly demonstrated the limits of human judgment, and the distortions of that judgment can be seen in the vast number of suboptimal decisions made in policy and economics, among others.

Again, one need look no farther than the Iraq war to see this in play. Common sense, to an American at least, would hold that one need only introduce democracy to a region and good things will happen. Bush's foray into Iraq failed to recognize the essential complexities of one of the most complicated parts of the world, and we will be paying the price for that for a long time.

Americans seem fundamentally suspicious of education, perhaps because they feel it will displace their highly valued common sense. They recognize that someone with more education than they have may be unpredictable to them, and thus untrustworthy. I think we can see this sentiment in the vilification of "elites" in the current campaign. But if anything, Americans should be suspicious of common sense, because it is as fundamentally incapable of grappling with the complexities of the world as our eyes are of watching atoms spin.

Trust

I don't include trust as a distorting virtue, but I do think that trustworthiness underlies all of the virtues that are. If someone is loyal, tough (therefore consistent), and uses common sense, they're more intrinsically trustworthy than someone who uses their superior education and mind. I wonder if our preference for trustworthiness over competence will, in the end, be the factor that holds us back in the world, as other nations embrace the opportunities that come with knowledge and better education.

Moral Authorities

2008-09-04T19:41:00.000-07:00

How can President Bush chastise Russia for invading Georgia, after he himself so recently invaded a sovereign nation?

And how can he chastise other countries for human rights shortcomings, after his administration has engaged in torture, extraordinary rendition, and warrantless wiretapping?

How can politicians and pundits like Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Rush Limbaugh espouse family values after multiple marriages and, often, affairs?

How can Bill Bennett write a book called The Book of Virtues while gambling away several hundred thousand dollars?

And how can Sarah Palin press abstinence programs on the country despite the very visible evidence in her own family that they don't work?

The problem here is that our moral authorities have no moral authority.

Hypocrisy part 2

2008-09-02T20:21:00.000-07:00

One of the things the federal census tracks is the balance of payments to the states. In general, the states that tend to vote democratic also tend to be net payers into federal coffers, while states that tend to vote republican tend to be net beneficiaries of federal payments. Ironic, no? Money being transferred from the states that most support federal programs to the states that advocate for small government? According to the most recent census figures, Alaska ranks seventh in the country in terms of how much money they receive from the federal government vs. how much they pay. (Virginia and Maryland are the top two because of the large numbers of federal employees, and federal paychecks, in those states.) So my question is, how can a state whose populace seems to pride itself on its independence and favors small government be so dependent on federal largess?

Buried Lede

2008-09-01T21:28:00.000-07:00

From Peter Baker's New York Times Magazine feature article "The Final Days", on the last act of the Bush presidency, from page 4:

"'They’re friendly,' said Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican and McCain ally who has watched the two men up close. 'They don’t hang out together. I don’t think John’s ever been to Camp David. I think it’s respectful. President Bush respects Senator McCain, and I think Senator McCain respects the office of the presidency.'"

Hypocrisy

2008-09-01T21:11:00.000-07:00

How come no one has pointed out that, of all the recent political sex scandals, the Democratic ones have involved consenting, heterosexual adults (Bill Clinton, Elliot Spitzer) while the Republican ones have involved homosexuality (Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, Jeff Gannon, Mark Foley...), soliciting minors (Mark Foley again), and teen pregnancy? How come no one has pointed out that families and areas with strong "family values" (read sexually repressive) have higher rates of teen pregnancy? Why isn't anyone drawing contrasts between Amy Carter and Chelsea Clinton, on one hand, and the Bush twins and Sarah Palin's seventeen year old daughter on the other? And why isn't anyone on the right questioning whether their focus on abstinence, faith, and marriage might be having exactly the opposite effect than the one they intend?

Supporters will say that Governor Palin's family should be off limits from the spotlight of politics. That would be fine, except that social conservatives are the ones who put the family in that spotlight in the first place. If they didn't want to impose their family-related values on the rest of us, I'd agree that private matters should be off limits. But they put that particular ball in play by supporting a sexually repressive social agenda, and they should be held responsible for the results when their own families fail to meet their own tests.

The Right Wing Lifestyle

2008-08-02T23:11:00.000-07:00

Right wingers have frequently been vilified for their illogical views and hypocritical behavior. I must admit that I’ve been among those who have condemned such people, because I assumed that their views, and their unceasing attempts to impose those views on others, were a matter of choice and free will. However, I have become increasingly convinced that being right wing is not a choice, but instead is a natural, intrinsic product of who these people are. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if, someday, scientists demonstrate that the brains of right wing people are significantly different from those of you and me.

What brought me to this conclusion was the realization that no rational person would ever deliberately choose the right wing lifestyle and all the problems that come with it. Who, for example, would ever deliberately choose to believe that lowering taxes would increase federal revenues, or that you could reduce the murder rate by having more guns around? Who would deliberately overlook the fundamental inconsistency of advocating for religious freedom while simultaneously trying to deny gay people the right to marry? Who would deliberately believe that Creationism is a science while evolution is “just a theory”? Who would plausibly believe that teenagers can be abstinent? Who would deliberately believe that the sick and the poor should be denied health care? And who would deliberately believe that global climate change is purely a natural phenomenon despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

It’s hard to reconcile the obvious logical flaws of right wing thinking with the notion that anyone would choose to engage in it. Yet almost a third of Americans apparently do. And what a struggle they face in the pursuit of their lifestyle: trying in vain to defend the policies of the current administration, actually believing what they see on Fox News…. Even the Bible is against them, warning against the perils of right wing tendencies. Don’t believe me? Look it up – it’s near the section that condemns abortion and supports the right to bear arms.

If being right wing is a product of nature rather than nurture or choice, then we can no longer condemn the right wing lifestyle in good conscience. After all, we know better than to condemn people for things they have no control over. Here, again, is a difference, as right wing people do exactly this when they engage in racism, condemn gay people, or fixate on Barack Obama’s middle name. Forgive them – they can’t control their racist, homophobic, anti-Islamic tendencies. Instead, the next time a friend makes a snarky comment about a right winger, just smile to yourself, secure in the knowledge that they aren’t that way by choice. They just turned out that way.

Oil Men

2008-07-05T22:15:00.000-07:00

With oil approaching $150 a barrel, gas in the US around $4.50 a gallon, and oil companies reporting the largest profits in corporate history, I wonder if this is our reward for having a pair of oil men appointed to the White House. And why does no one remember Dick Cheney's energy task force, whose members he has never divulged to the public? I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but I have to wonder if this was planned all along.... Nah, forget that. Given this administration's inability to plan and execute effectively, they couldn't possibly have pulled off something like this....

The "Us" Generation

2008-07-05T16:41:00.000-07:00

Remember the "me" generation? The self-indulgent tail of the Baby Boom generation? Then came "generation x", then "generation y" (for lack of a more imaginative label)....

Much has been made of the social nature of today's young generation. With younger kids on MySpace, older ones on Facebook, constant sharing of pictures, text messaging, videos, and so forth, this generation is assembling a shared experience like no other before it. This has its downsides, of course; parents and business-minded adults fret that the "kids today" are leaving a trail of cyberdroppings that will follow them into job interviews, lead to stalking and identity theft, and compromise their privacy in ways they can't imagine or appreciate until they're older.

I wonder if this is necessarily a bad thing. Today's adults, like all the ones who have come before, hide their shortcomings and hope that their friends, neighbors, and associates will believe them to be stronger, more principled, and more sensible than they probably really are. The line between public information and private places personal habits and preferences that may be controversial or unsavory well behind the privacy line.

Today's generation may not have the luxury, or perhaps the burden, of keeping all that personal stuff off limits, when so much of it is on YouTube, Juicy Campus, and their own social network profiles. Rather than leading to embarrassment, though, I wonder if this might instead promote a wider understanding of what it means to be human, with all its flaws and frailties. Perhaps the "us" generation will, in the end, be more tolerant of personal differences and less burdened by conformity.

And, what happens when the "us" generation meets "Big Brother"? What happens when the continuing proliferation of data mining, background checks, surveillance, and other tactics of a generation that hordes its own privacy yet seeks compromising information about others meets the openness of a new, more social generation? Perhaps the personal information that Big Brother covets like gold will be recognized by a new generation as nothing but fools gold.

"Hello Kitty's" Blog Post

2008-05-21T20:32:00.000-07:00

New post found on Hello Kitty's blog:

"

Computer Illiteracy

2008-04-30T18:41:00.000-07:00

It seems to me that computer literacy is becoming almost as important as the usual kind of literacy. We've seen cases recently where the lack of computer literacy has led to unjust court outcomes (like that of a teacher who was convicted of exposing her class to pornography when a virus- and spyware-ridden Windows 98 computer in the classroom encountered a Javascript "porn storm" and kept opening a new window for every window she closed....) and, obviously, bad public policy.

An example of the latter can be found in a recent Business Week cover story ("E-spionage: A Business Week Investigation", April 21) in which the magazine tries to describe the origins and effects of targeted malware emails to government agencies and contractors. Along the way, they apparently confuse a domain name registrar with an ISP, and describe "corrupted" Microsoft Office documents that somehow, apparently magically, install malware on the recipient's machine. How do they do this? Malicious macros? Buffer overflows? Are they really .exe files masquerading as .doc files? It would be useful to know. There are ways of recognizing these various kinds of attacks that the magazine apparently doesn't know about.

The best part of the article, though, was a description about how a staffer to Missouri Republican Senator "Kit" Bond recommended that the Senator see Die Hard 4 as background on cyber-terrorism. Bond is quoted as saying that "Hollywood... doesn't exaggerate as much as people might think." If our elected representatives are taking technology lessons from Hollywood, no wonder they think the Internet is a bunch of "tubes". Perhaps that also explains why they think they can successfully wiretap terrorists when any halfway computer-literate user can easily evade monitoring using simple, readily available tools, thus guaranteeing that the only "terrorists" these laws will trap will be the hapless, harmless wannabees.

Implicit Messages: Law and Order

2008-04-25T19:22:00.000-07:00

Last night marked the end of Jesse L. Martin's long run as Detective Ed Green on Law and Order. Green left a hero thanks to the heroic efforts of the writers, who contorted the plot sufficiently to cast him as a villain before turning him back into a hero by the end. They did this by exploiting the heroic efforts of Green's partner, who wouldn't stop believing in him and continued pursuing leads long after the case seemed to be wrapped up, and members of the DA's office, who wouldn't stop believing in him and discredited their own witness, among other things, to find the truth. The explicit message of this was that Green really was the upstanding, heroic guy we've always believed him to be. A secondary explicit message was probably one of of how your friends will come through for you if you really are an upstanding guy.

But I wonder about the implicit messages. Did the producers mean to imply that your best chance to have justice, if you're improperly accused of a crime, is to have powerful friends in the police department and the DA's office looking out for you? And what does this mean on the day after the program aired, when a judge in Queens acquitted three detectives in the shooting of Sean Bell?

Straight Talk

2008-04-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

John McCain has distinguished himself by taking stands that seem to be principled, sometimes because they are counter to those of the administration and the rest of his party. Hence, the "straight talk express". With most Americans now against the war in Iraq, his continued strong support for the war seems to be another example of a principled, unpopular stance.

But could it, instead, be due solely to a basic point of confusion?

McCain has several times recently raised the specter of Iran support for "Al Qaeda in Iraq". Does he not know that Al Qaeda is Sunni and Iran is Shi'ite? He also raises the specter of "Al Qaeda in Iraq" gaining control of Iraq. Does he not understand that the Shi'ites have the upper hand in the Iraqi civil war? If not, is it possible that his entire support for the war is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about the differences between these two Islamic sects?

Buried Lede

2008-04-20T09:28:00.000-07:00

From Business Week, April 7, 2008, "China's Factory Blues", by Dexter Roberts (pp. 78 - 82):

"'Unlike in the last 20 years, when China exported deflation, from now on, China will export inflation,' says Peter Lau, CEO of Hong Kong retailer Giordano International, which has extensive operations in China. (p. 82).

The article describes how Chinese producers have hit the cost floor: the rising yuan, cancellation of preferential policies for exporters, and increased labor and environmental regulations are raising the cost of production in China. This is probably a good policy for China because it squeezes out the lowest cost producers who pay the lowest wages and contribute disproportionately to pollution. However, it's potentially bad new for us because low cost imports have kept inflation in check even as the economy expands. Now, with the economy contracting, the closing of this inflationary safety valve means that the Fed has less flexibility to stimulate the economy. Until now, the Fed has thrown considerable weight behind economic stimulus policies with a rapid series of large rate cuts. Now, that approach is much more likely to cause inflation.

Buried Lede

2008-04-20T09:15:00.000-07:00

From Fortune, March 17, 2008, "The Man Who Must Keep Goldman Growing", by Bethany McLean (pp. 131 - 140):

"Goldman spotted the problem early because it is fanatical about pricing its holdings at their current market value - even at times forcing traders to sell part of a position to establish a price." (pg. 140)

Goldman Sachs was the only one of the major independent investment banking firms to make money from the subprime meltdown. The other banks have posted billions of dollars in losses because their subprime holdings have lost so much value. No one knows how much, because the banks can't sell them, so banks like Citi keep taking writedowns, hoping to find the true value of their assets at some point. The exception, apparently, was Goldman, apparently because they sold small amounts of assets periodically, even as they were rising in value, in order to determine what their real market values were. This allowed them to detect falling confidence in the assets before the other banks did.

In the best of all possible worlds...

2008-04-18T11:07:00.000-07:00

In the best of all possible worlds, this is the answer that Barack Obama gave to the question in Wednesday's debate about his refusal to wear a flag pin:

"One of the problems we have in America right now is that too many people confuse symbols with the principles that those symbols stand for. We claim that terrorists 'hate us for our freedoms', yet we're willing to give up those very freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism. This administration has suspended Habeas Corpus, circumvented legal protections against spying on Americans, violated Constitutional mandates for due process and against cruel and unusual punishment, kept vital information from the American people about Iraq and the war on terror, and carried out other policies that fly in the face of the Constitution and our deepest values as Americans. Yet, they wave the flag and claim to be patriots. Let me tell you something: wearing the flag does not make you a patriot, particularly when you fight against free speech, due process, and the very liberties that it stands for. And not wearing the flag doesn't mean you're not patriotic, particularly when you are fighting for those values. When we go to war, we are not fighting for the flag; we're fighting for what it stands for. We're not fighting for the flag, we're fighting for the people who it represents. And when we confuse the symbol for the principle, we risk giving up the very thing that gives the flag its value."

Complexity

2008-04-15T21:26:00.000-07:00

Law professor Michael Greenberger recently appeared on Fresh Air to explain the subprime meltdown and the overall state of the economy. He said that, while the US economy used to be based on investments in tangible assets and enterprises, it is now largely based on financial instruments that are essentially bets on the directions that the tangible assets and enterprises will move in value. He called it a "shadow economy" because a large percentage of its overall value is based on these instruments - derivatives, monetized baskets of assets such as loan portfolios, etc. In other words, much of our economic activity is based on what the tangible assets represent rather than on the assets themselves. I'd call it a second-order economy, perhaps.

It seems to me that this movement away from tangible asset to intangible derivative of the asset owes much of its existence to the Black-Scholes option pricing model and its relatives. This model made pricing an option apparently as reliable as pricing the underlying asset. It inspired so much faith that whole financial industries were built on its foundations. Perhaps the early collapse of Long Term Capital Management, which required the last large Wall Street bailout prior to Bear Stearns, should have been a warning that option pricing wasn't as reliable as it appeared to be.

Nonetheless, heedless of the LTCM fiasco, derivatives became the basis for huge investments in, among other things, baskets of mortgages. Because banks were able to sell their loans to aggregators that collected thousands of loans into securities that they could slice into derivatives and resell, the banks that originated the loans had no further incentive to ensure that the loans would actually be repaid, and every incentive to make and sell as many loans as possible. Consequently, no one knows how many of these loans will actually be repaid.

So here's the problem. Because no one knows how many of these loans will actually be repaid, no one knows what the true values of the derivatives are. When Citi Group or Merrill Lynch or Bear Stearns take writedowns at the end of a quarter, they don't know if those writedowns will be sufficient to cover the actual losses or not. No one knows - without knowing the actual risk underlying the instrument, there's no principled way to value it.

Here's where LTCM comes in. The mathematical models that generate derivative prices are so complex that humans can't understand them - hence, Long Term Capital Management encounters a scenario that they didn't anticipate and their house of cards crumbles around them. The underpinnings of the derivative market suddenly look shaky today, and the economy collapses around the vacuum created by a relatively small number of unpaid mortgages.

All of this makes me wonder - if the economy is built on financial instruments that no one actually understands, how reliable can it be? If software and operating systems are so complex that no one can actually understand how they work, is that why Windows and some applications are so unreliable? Is that why my old Windows Mobile phone kept having problems? Are we condemned to a world where our basic tools are so complex that, in the end, we can't trust them?

A Technology Tipping Point

2008-02-09T14:23:00.000-08:00

Let's think about technology, for a few minutes, in terms of supply and demand. Not in the economic sense, though. In the sense that demand represents what users want from technology and supply is what technology can provide. Until now, we've clearly been in a state where supply hasn't quite met demand. Now, we may be at the point where the two are balanced, and supply is about to overtake demand. What happens then?

I used to have a Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer. It used FM synthesis to produce a wide range of sounds, based on the combinations of six sine wave generators. The sound you got depended on how you configured the generators to either sound independently or modulate each other, and what output levels, frequencies, amplitude envelopes, and other attributes you assigned to each generator. The number of possible combinations made a tremendous range of sounds possible, but the synthesizer had several obvious limitations: a relatively small keyboard (not full piano range), an inability to produce the very complex waveforms of natural instruments, and no onboard effects. It also used 12-bit signal processing, so it couldn't produce sounds at full fidelity. Although it was a wonderful instrument, and its limitations inspired a lot of edge-pushing exploration, it was easy to imagine what a better instrument might be like. In other words, there was still more demand than supply.

The synthesizer I have today is capable of full fidelity output, has a full weighted keyboard, contains a massive library of both sampled natural instruments and synthetic ones, and has an onboard sequencer, mixer, and effects. If the sound you want isn't in the built-in library, it also has sampling capabilities so you can add your own. You can dissect a sound to its essential waveforms and edit them to your heart's content, making it possible to both tweak existing sounds and come up with entirely new ones. It's so capable that it's hard for me to see, from a musical perspective, how it could be improved on. In this case, supply is exceeding demand, because I haven't come close to any of its limits, and I probably never will.

So what happens? In my case, there's no compelling reason to explore the limits of the machine any more, so my music has become more focused on the composition than on the sounds. And I think that this may become a common reaction as supply surpasses demand.

Consider movie special effects, for example. Over the past thirty years or so, special effects have played a prominent role in driving movie development and audience interest. People would flock to movies with awe-inspiring special effects and stunts. Now, however, we're reaching the point where an average audience can't distinguish between effect and reality, and effects that used to inspire awe are now routine. Again, supply is starting to exceed demand. Is it possible that, when special effects are no longer special, movies will have to re-focus on compelling stories and characters?

I think this is a universal phenomenon. Digital cameras are reaching the resolution of film. Web access is becoming ubiquitous. Video games and TV are reaching naturalistic fidelity. Social networking and wireless technologies are dissolving the separation of geographic distance. So, again, what happens next?

First, I think we'll see more and more evidence that people don't know how to make the most effective use of the technology supply. The TV coverage of last week's Super Tuesday primaries provided at least two wonderful examples: CNN's Anderson Cooper holding a platter with a mark that allowed the network to super-impose a standing pie chart that moved with the platter, and Fox News showing a collection of bar graphs that stood on a rotating platter like salt shakers on a lazy Susan. In both cases, the technology was clearly an unnecessary distraction; not only did it add nothing of value, it actually made it harder to interpret the information that was supposedly being presented. I'm sure it made Edward Tufte's head spin.

More seriously, I wonder if we may see a slow-down in the technology market within the next five years or so. I've written before about feature saturation - what incentive do people have to buy new products when they don't use all the features of the ones they already own? We may be at that point, with technology supply exceeding demand, where new product improvements aren't compelling enough to drive sales any more.

This is less true, though, of wireless technology. I think that's the one place where the limitations of today's technology are still so visible, and where improvements are still so easy to imagine and their benefits so apparent, that demand still exceeds supply. I think this is intensified by the growing awareness of technology and its benefits in the general population - with more users becoming more interested in technology in general, demand for improvements in wireless devices will continue to increase rapidly, so it may be many years before supply catches up to demand.

There are two other places where opportunities for improvements still exist: reliability and usability. Again, I've written about usability as a market discriminator before, and the iPhone is clearly demonstrating that theme. The less obvious one, though, is reliability. As technology becomes more complex, its potential failure modes become more numerous and more obscure. Couple that with the security vulnerabilities of networked devices, and the potential for technology to become more of a hindrance than a help is clear. Perhaps this suggests a maturity path for technology: features, then usability, then reliability. With the exception of wireless technologies, I think we're almost through the features stage and partway through the usability phase for most technologies. Someday, I hope that everything I might buy will be both usable and reliable. At that point, supply will truly meet demand.

Shooting Yourself in the Foot in the Middle of a Class War

2008-02-03T17:13:00.000-08:00

I've decided to broaden the content of my blog to include thoughts in areas beyond human factors and user centered design. Politics, for example. Actually, you could make a case that politics are very closely related to the user experience of living in, and interfacing with, society at large.

I've noticed that most of the people I know who work in this area tend to be either liberal or moderate, and I wonder if it's because at the very heart of human factors is the recognition that people, in all their varieties, need to be accommodated by systems. It seems to me that liberalism and human factors both put people first, to borrow a phrase, the former in terms of societal priorities and the latter in terms of systems and product design.

So here's a first contribution to this area: an assertion that the subprime mortgage mess was based on a large bet that the upper classes put on the financial health of the lower and middle classes. And that the bet was essentially illogical because of all that's been done to weaken those latter classes over the past decade or so.

Here's a short list of ways the lower and middle classes have suffered in that time:

falling real wages
less access to health insurance
bankruptcy "reform"
welfare reform
outsourcing
the growing wealth gap
rising education costs
fewer social services
the Iraq war, whose direct participants are disproportionately from these classes.

In all of these cases, the benefits of these changes have gone to the wealthy, but the lower and middle classes have bought into them. Why? I suggest that it's because the notion of trickle-down economics is basically designed to convince the lower classes that they have a stake in the health of the upper classes. The better off the latter are, the better off the former will be because of trickle-down effects.

So the lower and middle classes believe they have a stake in the health of the upper classes. What does this have to do with the subprime mortgage mess? Because, after reaping the benefits of a weakening lower- and middle-class, the upper classes placed a huge, unsecured bet that all the people in those classes could pay off any mortgage they signed up for, and bought billions of dollars' worth of securities derived from these mortgages. In essence, they placed a big bet on the health of those classes after doing whatever they could, in the preceding years, to weaken them.

I suspect that people in the financial industries won't recognize this tacit investment. I suspect that many of the conservatives in those classes will continue to advocate policies that continue to weaken the lower and middle classes. Ironically, though, this would further erode the value of their own investments in those classes.

If they did recognize this tacit investment, I think it would be a good thing. Just as, I believe, trickle-down economics has given the lower and middle classes an illusory stake in the health of the upper classes, mortgage-derived securities give the upper classes a real stake in the health of the lower and middle classes. I would love to see them recognize this stake, and start taking an interest in the real health of those classes. Perhaps then we would start to see better schools, better social safety nets, and other mechanisms that would benefit the lower and middle classes directly. Because they would also indirectly benefit the upper classes by protecting their investments.

User Fiendly

2007-10-17T17:19:00.001-07:00

No, that title is not a typo. If you didn't think it was, look again. If you noticed, you may not be surprised that my topic is voice response systems.

I can always tell when my wife is negotiating a company's telephone system's speech recognition menus by the note of restrained frustration in her voice. I thought of this when I answered a call from Verizon Wireless wanting to survey me about their own voice response system for customer service. The first question was, "Did you use the voice response system, or did you choose to use the telephone keypad?" When I said, "Telephone keypad," that was all they wanted to know.

For at least several decades now, clueless executives have somehow been under the impression that speech recognition is the magic bullet that will make all technology approachable and user friendly. Nothing could be further from the truth. Remember when the same magical qualities were attributed to GUI's? A thousand graphical interfaces ensued that were just as hard to use as DOS or UNIX.

The key point that I think these people miss is that it's not the form of the interaction (text, graphical, key presses, voice), but rather what you do with it. The intuitive nature of the graphical interface derives from the use of appropriate metaphors; the graphics simply enable a broader range of possible metaphors than is allowed by a command line interface. Similarly, speech recognition does not itself make a system easier to use - it can actually make it much harder to use. What matters is what you do with it.

On this point, a fully functional and reliable natural language system would be ideal. Lacking that, a constrained, limited vocabulary is second best, but still probably slower and therefore less desirable than simple key presses. An open-ended, pseudo-natural language interface that sometimes works and sometimes fails in unpredictable ways, doesn't react appropriately to expressions of frustration, and gets in the way instead of greasing the skids is the worst possible solution. Yet that's the one we have now. So why, exactly, do companies think this is easier than pressing keys?

Blame the User

2007-09-23T20:37:00.000-07:00

“Oh, come on,” Richard said quietly to himself.

“Sorry?” Bill, or Bob, or whatever lifted his head from behind Richard’s monitor.

“Sorry, not you,” Richard said. “It’s this stupid magazine. Everyone’s blaming the financial industry for the subprime mess, but what about the home buyers? Why doesn’t anyone make them take responsibility for signing up for loans they couldn’t repay?”

“Good point, sir.” Bob or Bill put his head back down and tapped some more keys.

“How much longer, anyway?” said Richard.

“It’ll be another hour or so. Um, did you change any of the settings on your anti-spyware utility?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe. It was running real slow so I changed a bunch of settings in various places until it sped up. Why?”

Bill or Bob sighed. “Well, you’ve got a major spyware infestation, including several stealth keyloggers installed by Trojans. They’ve probably captured all your passwords and account settings. Do you access the company trading accounts from this machine?”

“Sure, I have to. So, what do you have to do?”

“Well, sir, you should probably make sure there haven’t been any unauthorized transactions from your account. In the short term, I can get you up and running but I’ll have to reformat your drive and reinstall Windows. You’ll lose all your files, but your computer will be up again. I may be able to restore your files from backup but I’ll have to make sure they’re clean.”

“OK. Whatever.” Richard went back to his reading while his computer made the Windows shutdown and startup noises several times in a row. Finally, he folded the magazine and hurled it across the room, neatly hitting the rim of his wastebasket and knocking it over. “Damn. You’d think people would know better than to sign false income statements. I just don’t get it.”

He pondered for a few more minutes. Then, “If people aren’t going to be responsible, how do you keep it from happening again?”

Bob or Bill looked up and hesitated for a moment. “Well, sir, if it were up to me, I wouldn’t let anyone use a computer unless they knew what they were doing.”

Feature Creep

2007-09-15T21:31:00.000-07:00

I've often heard users and designers bemoan "feature creep" and express the wish that manufacturers would limit the number of features supported by their products in order to make them more simple to use. While I sympathize with the goal, I don't think that avoiding feature creep is necessarily the solution.

Consider the iPod. A recent issue of MIT's Technology Review magazine (May 2007) focused on design, and frequently held up the iPod as a design ideal. Don Norman, speaking of Apple in general, stated, "The hardest part of design, especially consumer electronics, is keeping features out." Mark Rolston, senior vice president of creative at Frog Design, said, "The most fundamental thing about Apple that's interesting to me is that they're just as smart about what they don't do. Great products can be made more beautiful by omitting things."

So, back to the iPod. It originally began life as a music player. Along the way, it added a calendar, contacts, notes, alarm clocks, world clocks, stopwatch, audiobooks, picture viewer, video, podcasts, and games, and it can be used as an external hard drive, even a bootable one for an OS X machine. The iPod Touch adds internet surfing, a You Tube viewer, online access to the iTunes music store, and the ability to buy whatever song you're currently hearing at Starbuck's.

Hmmm... Isn't this the very definition of feature creep?

And yet, the iPod remains beloved, an icon of good design. And very deservedly so.

Because what makes the iPod easy to use is not feature restraint, but rather the fact that all of its many features work the same way. The user need only learn one general rule about how the interface works and can apply that rule to pretty much every function.

So perhaps the trick isn't in avoiding feature creep, but rather in avoiding "rule creep".

Six Sigma, Innovation, and Usability

2007-06-03T11:54:00.000-07:00

This week's (June 11, 2007) Business Week cover story is about how Six Sigma "almost smothered" 3M's culture of innovation. The gist of the story is that 3M's attempt to use Six Sigma in every corner of its operations, including R&D, caused innovation to become more incremental, more safe, and more saddled with administrative overhead. Consequently, higher risk programs weren't pursued and 3M has slipped markedly in measures of innovation, such as the proportion of revenues coming from recently developed products.

Having been through a Six Sigma transformation at a large organization, I have a few thoughts on this.

First, it seems to me that user experience is one of the most important and least appreciated aspects of quality. As a proponent of applying more structured methods to user requirements and usability assessment, I think that formal user requirements methods and structured usability testing fit right in with the spirit of Six Sigma and other quality programs. If Six Sigma, for example, causes an organization to move from focus groups to more effective human performance-based measures of usability, I'm all for it. I hope that anyone advocating for Six Sigma within an organization will recognize that user experience and usability are key aspects of quality and deserve the rigor and emphasis traditionally paid to engineering and manufacturing.

Second, I think that everyone should learn something about statistics. I think that some understanding of probability and statistics is actually necessary in order to not only work effectively, but also to make informed decisions in most aspects of life, including voting. When an organization adopts Six Sigma and makes everyone learn the basics of statistical analysis, everyone benefits, including society at large.

However, no program dedicated to process improvement should itself become a process impediment, and the indiscriminant application of Six Sigma to all parts of an organization has a lot of potential to do just that. It's well understood that many of the most profitable break-through products come from serendipitous discoveries enabled by exploratory research that may not be undertaken in a risk-averse, highly controlled environment. This is what the Business Week article focuses on.

To me, the benefits and drawbacks of Six Sigma all stem from the same source: the fact that Six Sigma tries to substitute objectivity for subjectivity and data for intuition wherever possible. I think this is both useful and appropriate in some applications, such as administration, logistics, and manufacturing, but not so much in R&D. Research and design, particularly the exploratory types that lead to breakthrough products, depend to a large extent on subjectivity and intuition and are easily stifled by processes that seek to drive them out.

Furthermore, even where it's useful and appropriate, Six Sigma can still fall down because it's very susceptible to garbage-in/garbage-out. In Design for Six Sigma, for example, people often have to enter ratings of competitive position and other market environment factors into an analysis process, and these form the basis for subsequent decisions. Many of these factors can't be directly quantified or measured and must necessarily be subjectively estimated. Lengthy analysis processes can often include chains of subjective judgments, and small errors in early steps can compound into much larger errors at the end. It very easy, in Six Sigma, to end up with a product that looks like fact or data but is actually largely fiction, because of the use of formal methods to force subjective products into an apparently objective framework.

The bottom line, I think, is that Six Sigma and other quality programs can be very useful and productive if used within their valid limits, but can be highly counterproductive otherwise.

PowerPoint Power Tip # 1

2007-04-04T13:24:00.000-07:00

Need to delete or change an object that's being covered by another object that you don't want to move or delete? Click and drag over both objects to select them both, then hold the Shift key while you click on the objects. This should de-select the object in front, since that's the one that will intercept the click. Now you should have only the object behind selected; you can now delete it, move it using the arrow keys, or whatever else you want to do with it.

The Right Answer

2007-03-13T19:33:00.000-07:00

One of our friends here recently sent out a flyer on behalf of the local historical society asking people to submit their stories of how they learned about Point Roberts and how they got here. The flyer also asked people to donate $10 to the society. Unfortunately, the wording of the flyer made it appear that people had to donate in order to submit their stories, and the wording of the request for stories was so open-ended that some of the responses were unusable.

A university student was wrestling with the design of an experiment. She knew the general topic to be investigated and had a general approach in mind, but couldn't arrive at the specific approach or the steps that needed to be taken.

A group of engineers at a company I worked with were trying to design an input device for a workstation. They were trying out several options and having a hard time deciding which one was the best.

These situations all have one thing in common: inadequately defined requirements. I think this is one of the most common mistakes made by designers of every type, and I think it stems partly from a tendency to think one already knows all the requirements, or that the requirements are obvious and don't need to be spelled out. But my friend at the historical society might have had a better response if he had first spelled out what the desired product was (a specific type of story and a willingness, separate from the story, to make a donation), the student would have had an easier time designing the experiment if she had articulated the experimental question to be resolved, and the team of engineers would have been better able to decide which design was best if they had specified some criteria first.

You may think this goes without saying, but I can't count the number of meetings I've been in that have gone either nowhere or in circles until someone said, "What are the requirements?" Perhaps it's one of those lessons that are so basic that we need to be reminded of them continually, because we take them for granted otherwise. And, as illustrated by these three situations, I think this lesson goes beyond product or interface design to life in general. After all, how do you know what the right answer is if you haven't defined the requirements?

New Term...

2007-03-01T16:03:00.000-08:00

...for a poorly designed interface: "untuitive".

The Features/Usability Bind

2007-02-24T12:45:00.000-08:00

One of the implications of Moore's Law, which states that processing power doubles about every eighteen months, is that in about eighteen months you'll be able to buy products that are twice as complicated as the ones you can buy today. This seems inevitable in a commoditized electronic products marketplace, in which manufacturers seem only able to compete based on the number of features they can fit into a product.

The twin trends of technology products are smaller form factors are more features. This leads to what I call the "features/usability bind", in which smaller devices with smaller physical UIs have to access larger numbers of functions. Inevitably, this ends up requiring that input devices (even simple pushbuttons) have to become multi-function; even if the interface remains relatively simple, the underlying functional logic becomes more complex. Furthermore, unless the problem is addressed at the level of the functional logic, complexity will continue to grow with proportionally with features. Perhaps this is why so many electronic products are returned as defective because people can't figure out how to use them.

Engineers have often stated that they expect technological progress to hit a brick wall when the laws of physics catch up with Moore's Law and no more transistors can be crammed onto a chip. I think the real brick wall of technology isn't the number of transistors that can fit on a chip, but rather the number of rules that will fit in a user's head. After all, the user has to learn and remember all the rules that govern how the product works; if these rules aren't intuitive, they must be learned by rote, or the user will simply decide that the feature isn't worth the effort.

I think that there are three basic classes of usability problems associated with electronic products today: modes, convoluted functional logic, and hidden functions. Let me briefly describe each, as I see them.

The technical definition of "modes" from a UI perspective is when the same user action produces different results when the control or system is in different states. A mode error led to the crash of an Airbus A320 in Strasbourg, France, when the pilot, attempting to dial a 3.3 degree flight path angle into the autopilot, instead selected the vertical speed mode, causing the value to actually be 3300 feet per minute. Mode errors in consumer electronics products don't usually have such dramatic consequences, but they can be annoying. One that I typically encounter is when I try to change the channel on my satellite TV receiver but instead cause the TV to revert to "tuner" mode because the remote was in TV mode, and the TV thought I was trying to change its internal tuner channel. A lot of people have come up after presentations to tell me that they've tossed the universal remote control and gone back to the five separate ones because they were tired of making similar errors all the time.

Convoluted functional logic is when accessing a function requires following a complex or hard-to-recall series of steps. For example, storing a phone number in a speed dial location of a phone that I have requires you to press PROG to put the phone into "program" mode, then press the speed dial button where you want to store the number, then dial the number on the keypad, then press another speed dial button labeled MEMORY which, when the phone is in program mode, stores the number you just typed into the memory location you selected at the start of the sequence. Then, you press PROG to take the phone out of "program" mode and put it back into "phone" mode. (This example has the added benefit of again demonstrating a problem with modes.) Another example would be that, on a minidisc recorder I used to own, you had to press and hold the RECORD button and simultaneously press the VOLUME button in order to select manual record level. Have you ever had trouble figuring out how to turn off the alarms on a hotel clock radio? Convoluted logic was probably the culprit.

Hidden functions are typically press-and-hold functions that aren't revealed anywhere in the interface. A friend of mine had to leave a car wash once because he couldn't get the antenna down; when he pressed the radio POWER button, the system would alternate between radio and CD player. It turned out that he had to press and hold the button for a second or so in order to actually turn the power off.

I'll bet that most of the problems people have using products are due to one of these three classes of problems, and not to poor design of the interface itself. One of the ironies is that modes, for example, are often intended to simplify product use by collecting similar functions into the larger umbrella of a mode. But then the user has to learn about the modes, and they themselves become a source of complexity. This is why mode errors have been implicated in several aircraft accidents and at least one cruise ship accident in recent years.

Ultimately, these three classes of problems represent rules that the user must learn and remember. I think we're already at a point where people don't use all the features of products they already own, so trying to sell them new products based on additional features may soon become a losing proposition.

In my view, the best way out of the features/usability bind is to decouple the conceptual complexity of the product from the functional complexity, so the user doesn't have to learn new rules in order to use new features. Note that this is not an interface-level problem. If the functional logic is hard to use, the best interface in the world won't make the product easy to use. One strategy is to apply appropriate metaphors at the level of the product's logic, rather than just the interface. We're used to thinking about metaphors in terms of what icons represent, how radio buttons and check boxes work, and so forth. But the principles of metaphors can be carried to the level of the logic and, ideally, applied across the entire range of product functions. In other words, make the product work like the user thinks, so the user doesn't have to learn how the product works.

The desktop metaphor of the Mac and Windows interfaces is a good example of this, because it re-defines the underlying functions of the operating system into a conceptual world that the user already knows. And it offers a way out of the functions/usability bind. After all, Windows is substantially easier to use than DOS was, but it's infinitely more functionally complex.

PowerPoint Prototyping: an Introduction

2007-02-23T12:40:00.000-08:00

I've had several occasions recently to develop quick prototypes of new display designs, and some small, focused usability evaluations of design options in cases where analysis wasn't able to resolve all of the outstanding questions or issues. I've found PowerPoint to be ideal for this, for several reasons:

- Its familiar graphics front end make developing the prototype graphics quick and easy. Although PowerPoint doesn't have as much graphic power as, say, Photoshop, the Format Autoshape dialog (right click on an object) provides more than enough control to create graphics that are precise enough for interface prototyping.

- Its hyperlink features make it possible to build what are essentially "screen shots", or slides of what the interface would look like in each possible state, and simulate navigating between them when the user selects the available options on each slide. The hyperlink features (accessed by the Action Settings dialog) include both mouse click events (go to the link when you click on the object) and mouse over events (go to the link when you simply move the cursor over the object). This makes it possible to simulate such things as highlighting individual options in drop-down menus when you move the cursor through the menu.

- Its Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) back end makes it possible to build in much more complex behaviors than would be supported just through hyperlinks. For example, a VBA subroutine triggered by an object can cause another object to change in some way. I'll show an example of this below.

- Furthermore, VBA can be used to record user actions and send them to Excel. In this way, a prototype can be turned into a desktop usability test, with user selections, what slide they were looking at, relevant prototype status variables, and time tags all captured automatically in Excel for easy analysis. This makes it possible to quickly develop a prototype that can be used to automatically capture user performance data such as how much time it took a user to make a decision or complete a task, and what errors or choices they made along the way.

- Because most people in business already have PowerPoint and Excel, designers and researchers can develop prototypes, usability tests, and experiments with tools they already own instead of having to buy special-purpose products. Furthermore, in some cases, the files for a study can be sent to the user/subject and run remotely on their own machines. This makes running a small study much more convenient than it otherwise might be.

Depending on the complexity of the interface being prototyped, the actual prototype can be developed in anything from a day to a couple of weeks, and an entire usability study can be accomplished in a few days or weeks. To illustrate this, I've built a small prototype of a clothes dryer control panel. You can download it from here. After downloading the file, open it and enable macros. Select slideshow mode, and select a cycle. You can select a new cycle at any time, and adjust the dryness level and overall cycle time. You can also select START and watch as the panel goes through an abbreviated dry cycle. When the cycle is done, or at any other time, select PAUSE/CANCEL to return to the starting condition. For reference, this prototype took me about a day to build.

Here's how the demo works: the controls and displays that do not change behaviors from slide to slide are all built on the master slide so they're always available. The time window contains a variable that is set by the cycle buttons and adjusted by the time adjustment buttons and the dryness level selection. By implementing these controls and displays on the master slide, the settings are stable from slide to slide. The cycle buttons themselves are implemented in the various slides to make it easy to change the embedded LED in each button with a new cycle selection. Although this could have been done in code, this was one case where simply drawing the graphic changes was easier than writing the code, and it's a nice illustration of how PowerPoint gives you several ways of doing something.

What's the point of all this? My major point is that you may already own all the tools you need to create truly rapid UI prototypes that can also serve as platforms for usability tests with objective human performance data. And you don't need to be a VBA expert to get started. You can look at the code in this prototype by returning to the regular view (exit the slide show) and selecting TOOLS, MACROS, VISUAL BASIC EDITOR. The VBA help files (select HELP and help contents, and navigate to PowerPoint Visual Basic reference) contain all the explanations and code examples you may ever need to build your own prototypes.

Displays vs. Controls

2007-02-22T18:56:00.000-08:00

Situation awareness has been a significant focus area for human factors over the last twenty years or so. I suspect that much of the emphasis on SA can be traced to Earl Wiener's finding, in the early studies of flight deck automation, that one of the most common questions in the flight deck was "what's it doing now?" The importance of SA has since been reinforced by the apparent causes of accidents in some automated aircraft. For example, the first three of the A320 accidents that occurred shortly after its introduction involved very experienced flight crews losing track of basic, fundamental aspects of the flight: airspeed, altitude, vertical speed, energy, etc. I think it's unlikely that an experienced pilot would ever lose track of any of these parameters in an older, non-automated aircraft, so SA certainly seems to be the important issue when it comes to managing highly automated, safety-critical systems.

But is it really the most important issue? Is "what's it doing now" really the most important question?

What causes a human error-related accident in the first place? Is the root cause a failure to notice what the system is doing? Or is it instead an input error that causes the system to enter an undesired, unexpected state? If it weren't for the initial error, would it be so important to notice what the system is doing?

I'd like to suggest that the question, "How do I get it to do what I want it to do?" is actually more important than the question, "What's it doing now?" After all, the failure to accurately communicate intent to the system is what causes the undesired state in the first place. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; in this case, getting the system to do what you want it to do is prevention, and figuring out what it's doing is the hoped-for cure. Ultimately, I think that SA to detect the error is less important than preventing the error in the first place.

Unfortunately, I think that we, as a community of designers, engineers, human factors people, etc. have put a disproportionate amount of emphasis on SA at the expense of helping the user avoid input errors in the first place. For many people, human factors is synonymous with "displays", and controls are taken for granted. Perhaps that's why a modern airplane has big, beautiful, high bandwidth displays with which to communicate to the pilot, and the pilot has knobs, buttons, and a relatively primitive keyboard with which to communicate to the airplane.

I once counted up the number of papers presented at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society annual meeting that dealt with displays and compared them with the number that dealt with controls. The display-related papers outnumbered the controls-related papers by about five to one. I then did the same exercise for the International Symposium on Aviation Psychology; there, there were 159 papers related to displays and 6 related to controls.

I suspect that the same thing may be true in product design. Designers seem to pay a lot of attention to the formatting and appearance of displays, but assume that the user will learn whatever control logic is provided. Hence, we're stuck with alarm clocks whose alarms we can't figure out how to shut off, car radios we can't figure out how to program, etc. And if you think of it, I'll bet that when people have difficulty figuring out how to use a product, it's probably because they're hung up on how to get it to do what they want it to do, rather than trying to figure out what the product is actually doing.

There's one other reason that I think input logic is more important than SA: since people often see what they expect to see, what they thought they did affects what they think the system will do. When pilots select the wrong flight control mode, they may miss all the visual indications that the mode is wrong because they "know" what they told the airplane to do, and they interpret what they see in light of that expectation. Again, the input error is the root cause and SA, at its best, can only catch the original error, but the error and its departure from the user's expectations hampers subsequent SA.

In the interests of preventing such errors in the first place, I'd like to suggest that we start placing more emphasis on controls and input logic, instead of devoting so much attention to SA. We need to make functional logic more intuitive, less complex, and less error-prone. We need to start applying all the cognitive science we've been doing for the past thirty years to control use. Again, an ounce of prevention....

New Human Factors Blog

2007-02-21T16:42:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my human factors and user-centered design blog. I am a human factors consultant with 25 years of experience in human factors research and design, and I want to use this blog to share thoughts, lessons learned, tools, and best practices with anyone grappling with usability questions and challenges. Some of the topics I intend to cover include the following:

- Many product designers and researchers are looking for convenient, easy-to-use, flexible, and inexpensive rapid prototyping tools. If you have Microsoft Office, you already have the basic tools you need to set up your own portable prototyping environment and usability lab. Did you know that PowerPoint can serve as a very capable rapid prototyping platform, and that with a little Visual Basic for Applications code, you can capture user selections along with time tags and send them to Excel for automated recording of user performance data? I'll describe how to do this in a series of posts.

- I believe that most usability problems associated with electronic products are not due to poor user interface designs, but rather to poor functional logic. In other words, the problem is not typically how the product looks and feels, but rather how it works underneath the interface. If the functional logic is hard to learn and remember, the best UI in the world isn't going to make the product easy to use. I'll discuss some of the usability issues related to functional logic and how to address them.

- The design is only as good as the requirements, and the requirements are only as good as the analysis. I'll present a number of analysis methodologies I've developed and found useful on various projects. Furthermore, the requirements themselves may have an optimal structure in a human-centered process. Using a hierarchy of mission requirements, operational requirements, functional requirements, information requirements, and display/control requirements, along with the appropriate analysis methods for each stage, can help resolve many, if not most, design problems and issues before the design itself is even begun.

- Usability practitioners often debate the merits of expert design reviews vs. formal usability testing, and there's been some research on which is better, or at least more appropriate, for different problems and stages of design. There's a third option: design analysis tools. These can range from checklist-like forms to computer-based tools that apply heuristic reasoning to diagnose interface design problems that may lead to specific kinds of error. This is particularly useful because errors are often hard to produce and observe in the lab. Structured usability analysis tools are a particular interest of mine, and I intend to devote a lot of attention to them.

If any of these topics is of particular interest to you, please let me know and I'll delve into it/them first. I always welcome comments and questions. You can post comments here, or email me at vic@uird.com. If you'd like to learn more about me and our services, please visit my (very simple) web site at www.uird.com.

Thanks for reading -

Vic Riley