Enough already

Can we software folks take an oath that we're not going to build radiation treatment systems that fry patients?

2008

The Gamma Knife

2000

incidents at the National Cancer Institute in Panama

1980s

the infamous Therac-25.

Kids nowadays, and data viz

There's much handwringing about the demise of reading and writing. Clive Thompson has a different take:

Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment... Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos -- assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

Changing subjects completely, here's some great data visualizations (I think you can see Tufte's influence):

Have you ever rushed to the airport only to find that your flight was delayed or canceled? In the most recent Data Expo at the annual Joint Statistical Meetings, data heads explored 120 million departures and arrivals in the United States, with the goal of finding "important features" such as:

• When is the best time of day/day of week/time of year to fly to minimise delays?
• Do older planes suffer more delays?
• How does the number of people flying between different locations change over time?
• How well does weather predict plane delays?

More data visualization: although this is over a month old, Umair Haque at the Harvard Business Review shows data about US healthcare.

There's a yawning gap between left and right in America today: the healthcare debate has grown so convoluted that both sides are talking past each other. Why? I think much has to do with the fact that one side is talking apples, and the other side is talking oranges. The right is focused on benefits foregone, while the left is focused on costs incurred.

A more productive debate must compare the two, to look at returns. So I thought I'd spend an hour or so trying to come up with a number that might help focus a more productive debate about authentic value: a measure of just how effective the American healthcare system is.

Vernier jets

Wow, something I actually know about the space shuttle. Discovery's vernier jets failed, so they have to use the primary reaction control system (RCS) jets to move around while on orbit. The bigger RCS jets are at 90 degrees to each other (i.e., directly in line with yaw, pitch, roll axes), and the vernier jets much less powerful, so aren't as jerky for maneuvering. From Spaceflight Now:

The shuttle's forward reaction control system, or RCS, includes 14 primary engines and two vernier jets. Two aft RCS pods feature 12 primary thrusters and two verniers each. The primary engines generate 870 pounds of thrust while the verniers produce just 24 pounds of push.

The software we were analyzing was the DAP jet-select and deadbanding (more than you ever wanted to know here). We spent a lot of time with this "Phase-plane" diagram.

Changing subjects, a Wyland painting was stolen from a Waikiki store on Lewers Street. Which is more surprising: that it was snatched from a gallery during business hours, or that there's a Wyland painting worth $700k? :) Anyway, support your local tiki.

Arnold say furlough

The Mount Wilson observatory that Hubble famously used survived the recent wildfire. Interesting pictures at Wired.

Lots of people on furlough. I was thinking it would be good to augment these days of the week shirts with an eighth saying FURLOUGH. You can support some local state employees by visiting their Cafepress store. I recommend the coffee mug.

If things get bad you, might want to read Getting Even, about workplace justice. Or take a trip to Reno. Or rent a timeshare week from me at Jensen Beach and snorkel during low tide at nearby Bathtub Reef.

In techie news, the author of Showstopper wrote a Technology review article about whether it's wise for Google to develop an operating system. The "Good enough" revolution (reminds me of James Bach's "satisficing" idea), and the "new literacy" are also discussed.

Both Spectrum and Wired have articles about the Beatles and RockBand, but I recommend the Spectrum article for getting into what was required to make it work, and for you old timers, a nice column by Bob Lucky, a profile of the Stanford prof who came up with the iPhone ocarina app, and bad news for you face-recognition folks..

Finally, tomorrow Wired is paying a guy to fly in Jetblue every day for a month, and write about it. Hmm.

You mean the Sun doesn't go around the earth?

A Nature Conservancy blogger says that scientists are to blame for an anti-science country (the part about writing passively is amusing):

Between 2002 and 2007, nearly 32,000 Ph.D.s in science were awarded in the United States. These not so-young Ph.D.s (median age for receiving a Ph.D. is 33) are trained to become like their mentors — college professors, even though at best only one in 10 will actually land a tenure-track job. And that was before the recession. These scientists are deft at statistics and experimental design, and have been schooled in writing passively, without adjectives or storyline or anything that could capture the interest of anyone other than the 17 other specialists working on the same research topic.

He even talks about C.P. Snow at the end, who's famous lecture is 50 years old. Snow was the topic of one of my first posts.

Finally, during jury duty in April and May I spent a lot of time looking at the Security Bank building out the window. They look like great lofts, but pricey.

More UCM woes

An article from Inside Higher Ed is about the newest UC campus at Merced. Putting on my three-time UC alum hat, it should have been in or near Fresno. Clearly it's not a matter of being in the valley or close to a CSU (UCD and Sac State seem to be doing OK). I remember the UC president at the time being tired of hearing from Fresno-area alumns about picking the wrong site :)

Physician envy?

Steve's thoughts about software development as a stochastic art (you should read it) got me thinking again about how software developers look to the medical field for inspiration, or at least metaphor, or analogy?) But the question that has nagged me for a couple of decades is why we would want to model ourselves after an industry in which all the users die and is running us out of money :)

Some random thoughts about health care and software development:

• Back in 1992, Tom McCabe and Charles Butler suggested that cyclomatic complexity and essential cyclomatic measures could be used like blood pressure measurements to determine the health of code. A high cyclomatic complexity can be treated by restructuring the code (abstraction, essentially), but a high essential complexity is more difficult to address since it means that the essence of the code's structure can't be reduced beyond this point. There's a scanned PDF version here, but you'll have to scroll about 60% down, and look for "A clinical approach to reverse and reengineering" (IEEE Software, January 1992).
  
  
• Over thirty years ago chapter three of Fred Books' The Mythical Man-Month describes the surgical team (aka Chief Programmer Team) organization for software development. Amazingly, this is yet another idea that originally came from Harlan Mills, a great thinker who most developers never heard of (chief programmer teams, cleanroom software engineering, structured programming, ...)
  
  After reading Brooks back in the day, I first started thinking about the big "individual differences" in programing performance and how to leverage that (McConnell has a nice discussion).
  
  
• Although I think he gets a little "out there" at times, in Jim McCarthy's Dynamics of Software Development is suggestion that we "Be more like the doctors". I can't find my copy right now, but a good quote is here:

  For now, we really need to learn to be like doctors. They are able to say, quite comfortably and confidently and with conviction, "These things are never certain." Doctors seldom if ever state with certainty what the outcome of any procedure might be. Yet software managers, operating in a far less disciplined and less data-driven environment... blithely promise features, dates, and outcomes not especially susceptible to prediction.

  Interestingly, the uncertainty that McCarthy cites is a motivation of the evidence based medicine (and evidence based software engineering) movements.
  
  You can watch a really old video of McCarthy giving his famous "23 Rules of Thumb" here. You can tell it's an old video since they talk about consultation fees being $100/hour:)
  
  
• Anecdotally, when expert systems burst on the software stage, the software was better at diagnosing rare diseases than human physicians were. I'll have to try to find some citations. But is there something in that we can transfer to software development? As I remember, Feigenbaum's systems being pretty good, but Lenat's CYC not being so good at diagnosis (concluding that Lenat's rusted-pocked car had chicken pox :) Britannica has an intriguing summary of Feigenbaum's work:

  Experience with DENDRAL informed the creation of Feigenbaum’s next expert system, MYCIN, which assisted physicians in diagnosing blood infections. MYCIN’s great accomplishment lay in demonstrating that often the key is not reasoning but knowing. That is, knowing what symptoms correspond to each disease is generally more important than understanding disease etiology. At a basic level, MYCIN also demonstrated that the means of navigating the reasoning tree and the contents of the different branches can be treated separately.

  
  
• Finally, one of my favorite examples of a disconnect between software developers and physicians is here: "Building an Information System for Collaborative Researchers: A Case Study from the Brain-tumor Research Domain". A lot of stuff to think about, unfortunately I can't find a free copy to link to. But if you have access to Science Direct or the ACM Digital Library you can read it.
  

Bottom line -- for anyone working in requirements, the paper above is probably the most important thing in this post. The other big ideas to think about are putting software development (and medicine) on a firm evidence-based foundation.

Mother knows best?

Mother Earth News is still published. Or should that be Mother Earth News is still published? Yes, and "fascinating" as ever, for example readers report their most amusing superglue accidents, and an interview with radical farmer Joel Salatin. Here's an excerpt from "Everything he wants to do is illegal" about vegetarians:

This philosophical and nutritional foray into a supposed brave new world is really a duplicitous experiment into the anti-indigenous. This is why we enjoy having our patrons come out and see the animals slaughtered. Actually, the 7- to 12-year old children have no problem slitting throats while their parents cower inside their Prius listening to “All Things Considered.” Who is really facing life here? The chickens don’t talk or sign petitions. We honor them in life, which is the only way we earn the right to ask them to feed us — like the mutual respect that occurs between the cape buffalo and the lion. To these people, I don’t argue. This is a religion and I pretty much leave it alone.

What?? Sounds like Ted Nugent with a dose of anthropomorphism :) Anyway, at least there doesn't seem to be as many weird personal ads in Mother Earth Newslike there were in the 1970s. Shudder.

More interesting, because of the state budget and work furloughs, I'm reading Getting even: The truth about workplace revenge and how to stop it. It's not about workplace violence and "going postal", but about little things that people do for the sake of "workplace justice". Here's a little bit from the introduction:

... managers already spend an inordinate amount of time trying to sort out conflict. One study showed that middle managers spend an average of 25 percent of their time on this effort, while the numbers were even higher for first-line supervisors. The same study found that CEOs spend 26 percent of their time dealing with conflict... we argue that the motivation for revenge is primarily rooted in the sense of injustice. Further, revenge should be seen as actions intended to restore a sense of justice.

Bob Sutton liked the book.

40 year anniversary

Since the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing is coming up, here's a few things:

• The Kennedy presidential library has a real-time replay of the mission. All the audio, plus things you can click on.
• Walter Cronkite didn't quite make it to the 40th anniversary, but his reaction was pretty memorable at the time.
• Three new books to check out: The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Spacesuits by Amanda Young, a spacesuit curator. Lots of good pictures. Speaking of pictures, Apollo through the eyes of the astronauts combines images, text by the astronauts, and a forward by Lucy and Stephen Hawking. Andrew Chaikin (I previously talked about him) returns with Voices from the moon: Apollo astronauts describe their lunar experiences.

Finally, I finally finished Dragonfly: NASA and the crisis aboard Mir. It is a 500 page book that I read a few pages at a time, like I did with Digital Apollo. The book discusses scary events, like a fire onboard the Mir space station, a collision with a Progress cargo ship, a decompression, leaking cooling systems and an airlock door held in place with C-clamps. That was on the Russian Mir, and the NASA astronaut selection and training side of things was just about as scary. It's amazing no one died. ISS still uses Progress cargo ships - and sometimes amateur astronomers gets pictures of ISS and Progress from their home telescopes.

Bonus: an amusing Q&A with "the third one", a grumpy/lucky Michael Collins.