Glass cockpits, social interfaces

The October 2007 issue of Computer has a good two page article about software and modern avionics. This is one of the few places where you will find definitions for such things as "full-authority" digital engine control. Here's a quote:

GE aircraft engines can downlink operational data during flight to GE's Remote Monitoring Center near Cincinnati, Ohio. The center can analyze the data in real time, thereby enabling the scheduling of essential maintenance if necessary while an aircraft is still in flight.

The article is available to everyone without subscription. Thank you John Knight.

If that interests you, I suggest looking at Lala and Harper's paper " Architectural principles for safety-critical real-time applications". Since that paper was written in the mid-1990s, the Boeing 777 avionics were being developed:

The Boeing 777 flight control computer ... takes design diversity well beyond what has ever been tried in pratice or even in a research laboratory. The initial concept rested on three quad redundant computers with each of the quads implemented in dissimilar hardware and programmed in dissimilar software ... The software design diversity has since been simplified to use only Ada, although three different compilers are still under consideration to generate code for the three types of microprocessors ... The hardware design has also been simplified to a 3 by 3 matrix of 9 processors.

Changing the subject, I like reading Joel on Software, but cringe when Joel goes too far. The almost-always-interesting Michael Feldstein takes Joel to task about social interfaces. It's from a couple of years ago, but still interesting.

Joel may be off about social interfaces, but he has an interesting recent post about a disturbing bug in Excel.

Harvard Business Review cartoons

Many of the cartoons from the Harvard Business Review are online free (most the articles are pay-to-read). The October issue has a cartoon that cubicle dwellers understand. I haven't figured out how to go directly to arbitrary HBR monthly comics, but here is the link to October's, and you can see more by using the Browse Issue function on the right, pick the month you want, and then click Cartoons.

Besides the cube cartoon, farther down the page is a good one for anyone going to too many meetings.

Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations

This is a good time in the semester to review students' options for common tasks like word processing, spreadsheeting, and presenting.

Microsoft is encouraging students to "steal" Office for $59.95. Frugal users of the free demo versions may be able to get through the semester before reaching the 25 use limit:

Eligible students may have free access to Microsoft® Office Ultimate 2007 Trial for a limited amount of time. Each trial provides (1) 25 application launches (each launch of an individual Office Ultimate application is counted as one launch) before the software goes into reduced functionality mode (at which time your software behaves similarly to a viewer, you cannot save modifications to documents or create any new documents, and additional functionality might be reduced)...

A free alternative is Google Docs, and with a recently added presentation tool, you have the triumvirate of word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations anywhere you are online and have a web browser. If you aren't doing anything too fancy, you should be able to load your Microsoft Office files into Google Docs. It's also easy to share all of the above with other users. And, it's free.

Another free alternative (if you are comfortable with installing open source software) is OpenOffice. A plus for OpenOffice is it's multiplatform.

More open source software: for Macs, for Windows.

Sakai usability, short low fidelity training videos

Michael Feldstein has hope that Sakai's user experience is getting the attention it needs so much of:

Sakai has had some fairly serious usability problems since its inception. The development community has been aware of these problems for some time; however, the efforts toward improving the situation have been sporadic and fragile to date. Today, I’m happy to point to some tangible signs that this is changing, and that we have a good chance of seeing some real improvement starting with the next release.

(For all you HCI students out there, they even do UX walkthroughs).

Speaking of users, the Common Craft Show is a nice example of short online training videos that remind me of the interface development technique of paper prototyping. You should watch this one about social networking and del.icio.us. Note that they provide captioned versions, and a transcript. (I show a bit of Jakob Nielsen's video about paper prototyping to my HCI class, it's amusing).

Two bonus things:

1. The author of Debunking the myths of innovation is interviewed on the UIE site. Here's a couple of sentences:

   I think it's pretty rare that "the best" idea among experts in any field becomes the dominant, mass popular leader. HTML is not the "best" programming language. Certainly few computer scientists believe Microsoft Windows is the best operating system, and very few doctors believe Airborne is the best cold remedy.



2. The New York Times has given up its online paid service Times Select. Now your T-Fried is free, but you will see ads :)
   

Two things I learned today

Since you learn something new every day, and I learned two things today, I am going to take tomorrow off.

First, I learned about this interesting cross-platform, web-based drawing tool called gliffy (you can see a demo video).

The second thing I learned about are funkenrings. Penn Gillette suggested it to mythbuster Adam as an inexpensive way to add sparkle to the practical jokes on the electricians and sound people. Funkenrings are discussed about 34 minutes and 50 seconds into this interview of Adam on Penn's defunct radio show.

Tickets are on sale for the Mythbusters' Fresno State visit on 12 February 2008. If you are really into this, you can see Penn, Adam, Jamie, and Kari on YouTube.

I'm kidding about taking tomorrow off :)

Classic books and new citations

Over a year ago I posted about the effort to put classic computer science books into the ACM Digital Library. Now you can peruse the ACM Classic book series, including the Macintosh human interface guidelines, Essays in computer science, The elements of programming style, Cryptography and data security (I knew it well in UCSB days), Papert's Mindstorms, The multics system, and others. If you are a Fresno State person you can access the classics here, and if you aren't, you can go here.

The ACM also semi-quietly announced that online publication is primary, with hardcopy "simply a secondary distribution mechanism unbundled from the official publication in the DL" [Digital Library]. You can read the short article here or if you are a Fresno State person, here. The new style bibliographic entry looks like

Demaine, E. D., Iacono, J., and Langerman, S. 2007. Retroactive data structures. ACM Trans. Algor. 3, 2, Article 13 (May 2007), 20 pages. DOI = 10.1145/1240233.1240236.

Note the DOI.

Avionics, datelines, and shopping carts

The Risks Digest (volume 24, issue 58) described the F-22 Raptor software glitching at the international date line when the planes were going from Hawaii to Okinawa. Pretty interesting (and there is a footnote about the apocryphal F-16 that flipped crossing the equator). Someone who worked on the F-22 system responded to the reports.

Another short, interesting article is in the September 2007 IEEE Computer. "Online experiments: Lessons learned" is about testing prototype interfaces and systems. Here's two paragraphs:

Experimenters often ignore secondary metrics that impact the user experience such as JavaScript errors, customer-service calls, and Web-page loading time. Experiments at Amazon.com showed that every 100-ms increase in the page load time decreased sales by 1 percent, while similar work at Google revealed that a 500-ms increase in the search-results display time reduced revenue by 20 percent.

You can read it here (or if you want to see the official citation, it's here).

Speaking of JavaScript, Jim Horning noticed his typing deteriorating, so went to a doctor for neurological testing. The diagnosis was IE 7. See his message and follow-up. All you really need is a mid-1980s Mac anyway.

Outposts, process, and brains

Microsoft is opening a software development outpost in Honolulu. I didn't know they had such things, but the article says there are also groups in Reno and Fargo.

Something else that caught my eye recently was a three paragraph column in the September Harvard Business Review about process improvement. The webpage might say something like "subscribe to read the rest of the article" but you've already read it on the preview page, it really is only three paragraphs long :)

And I'm not sure why, but I was reminded again of Oliver Sacks (you'll remember that I mentioned him back in April). His The man who mistook his wife for a hat is one of the influential books on my academic career (and in 2006 was named number 18 on Discover magazine's top 25 science books of all time). The book, and access to colleagues and interesting data at the UCSF Fresno Medical Education Program inspired a short presentation that we never got to follow-up. Anyway, Sacks was recently appointed an "artist" at Columbia University, so he can do what he wants :)

Sacks isn't a great speaker, but he seems a lot better than when I saw him at Caltech. He gave a interesting, about 25 minute long, keynote at an MIT conference about disabilities and technology. You can click on the button to go straight to the keynote (but why is MIT using Real video format?) -- and John Hockenberry is pretty good too (he talks about how typewriters were initially hyped as a way for the blind to write).

The New Yorker also has audio of an interview where Sacks talks about music and the mind -- it's amusing.

One other crazy thing: When in Tuscon as one of ACM's judges for the 1996 International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) I drove out to Biosphere 2 to peek in the windows (and buy a refrigerator magnet memento). Biospshere 2 was sold this summer to housing developers, although the University of Arizona says they will continue research in the big greenhouse.

Chess, trailers, and grapes

The latest Technology Review has an column by cognitive scientist/philosopher Daniel Dennett about the tenth anniversary of Kasparov losing a match to Deep Blue (free registration is required). I happened to be at the ACM conference the year before where Kasparov lost a game to Deep Blue, but won the prize money. I remember his chess-equivalent-of-a-rock-star entrance (and entourage) at the awards banquet to receive his $400,000 winner's check :)

Also in Tech Review is a profile of a controversial researcher who believes resveratrol is a key to long life, so keep eating those grapes (or drinking red wine). Here's a quote from the article:

Sinclair's basic claim is simple, if seemingly improb­able: he has found an elixir of youth. In his Australian drawl, the 38-year-old Harvard University professor of pathology explains how he discovered that resveratrol, a chemical found in red wine, extends life span in mice by up to 24 percent and in other animals, including flies and worms, by as much as 59 percent. Sinclair hopes that resveratrol will bump up the life span of people, too. "The system at work in the mice and other organisms is evolutionarily very old, so I suspect that what works in mice will work in humans," he says.

Some NASA news: Dawn sent me this link about how the Apollo 12 quarantine trailer ended up on a fish farm in Alabama.

Finally, in local news: The first meeting of the Central Valley Cafe Scientifiqué is in October about sea otters. And, the securities and exchange commission (SEC) charged a local company with an illegal stock scheme involving about $1.5 million. If you lost money, you might remember some of the players from IQ Biometrix days.

Corn, spy planes, tunnels, and vanity

Some miscellaneous stuff: An article about "The Ethanol Scam" from Rolling Stone magazine.

An ABC News reporter gets a ride in U2 spy plane.

Shocking tales of the underground (tunnels on university campuses) and more about university tunnels and even more about Caltech's and Columbia's tunnels.

Finally, I was surprised to see how many times I came up in a search of NASA documents.

Security

Back in April I wrote about ONE QUART ZIP TOP BAGS. Airport security is in the news again:

• A new TSA directive as of yesterday about what kinds of electronics needs to be removed from your carry-on luggage for scanning (in addition to laptops computers).
  
• A summary of a Q&A with security expert Bruce Schneier at DefCon. An excerpt:
  

  
  The first thing he talked about was the need for ID to fly on US airlines, or lack thereof... Bruce says you simply need to go to the airline and say that you don't have an ID. You will be issued a boarding pass with "No ID" on it... So, the whole no fly list thing just went out the door. If you are an evildoer, just buy a ticket under someone else's name, go up and say you lost your ID, and go on through. Security theater at it's finest. Luckily, this only inconveniences you if you are honest.
  

  
  
• Schneier does his own Q&A with the head of the TSA.

asps

Steve's gopher snake picture (click on "Mill Creek is completely dry") reminded me of these two rattlesnakes on the Sierra Foothill Conservancy property. It's a busy place: you can read about a three-way bobcat fight, or rowdy hummingbirds. Here's a quote:

As you may suspect by observing the behavior of males around a feeder, they are so busy threatening their rivals that they may lose as much as 20% of their body weight during the mating season.

Yikes

Here's something that would start you thinking about how long you can tread water: losing an engine over two hours out from HNL on an ETOPS flight.

Cell phones, free talks by McKusick

Since the topics aren't related, this should be two postings. First, cell phone spying and criming have been in the news lately:

• From IEEE Spectrum, details of how "extremely smart hackers" tapped the Prime Minister of Greece's cell phone. Wired has an article about how CIA agents were tracked through Italian cell phone networks.
  
• Second, two free talks by Marshall Kirk McKusick of UNIX fame, both sponsored by UC Berkeley extension, but actually located in San Francisco: "A narrative history of BSD" (the "Greatest Piece of Software Ever") on 26 September, and "Bulding an Running an Open Source Community" on 3 October, both from 5:30-7:30pm.
  

Bonus: Checkers has been solved computationally, but not in the way you might think by evaluating a game tree the way many of us were taught.

Lives (First and Second) and interfaces

Here are some links to interesting stuff that's popped up recently:

Second Life

One favorable article and two that are more skeptical: Technology Review has a very interesting article about combing aspects of Second Life with Google Earth in the article "Second Earth" (you might need to register free). On the other hand, Time magazine lists Second Life on its Five Worst Websites list here. Finally, the Los Angeles Times discusses how retailers might be bailing out.

Interfaces and design

You really need to watch this five minute video of Jeff Han discussing multitouch interfaces and their implications for collaboration. Also Bruce Sterling discusses design in this video and talks about how a typical public telephone is designed "like a cactus" versus how Google would design a public telephone.

Finally, here is a bonus link from Technology Review. Is Artificial Intelligence dead or just misguided?

Over 20,000 computer terminals!

Deep in the Alcatel-Lucent website are some videos of famous Bell Labs employees. Here's a two minute video about the UNIX operating system -- see what fashonable geeks were wearing in 1969. Hear Ken Thomson talk about making computing simple, and Dennis Ritchie about fellowship and "communal computing". Far out.

Politically incorrect

I want to see the Egyptian pyramids and Luxor, so I recognized the name of Zahi Hawass (the guy you see on television talking about antiquities) as I flipped through the July Conde Nast Traveler. But I was surprised at some of the statements he made in this interview, such as

A group of tourists who can afford to pay only a thousand dollars apiece for a trip are useless. Let them stay in their own country!

Yikes.

Traceability

Anyone who's taken a software engineering class from me, undergrad or grad, knows I like traceability:

Requirements traceability... provides critical support for software engineers as they develop and maintain software systems. Traceability helps determine that researchers have refined requirements into lower-level design components, built them into the executable system, and tested them effectively. It further helps analysts understand the implications of a proposed change and ensures that no extraneous code exists...

Furthermore, organizations building safety-critical systems are often legally required to demonstrate that all parts of the code trace back to valid requirements. Laws such as the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 require organizations to implement change-management processes with explicit traceability coverage for any parts of a software product that potentially impact the balance sheet.

The above is from a paper in the June 2007 IEEE Computer magazine, "Best practices for automated traceability" by authors from DePaul University, Siemens Corporate Research, and iRise. The paper gets heavily into probability after the first couple of pages, so I wouldn't make undergrads read it, but skimming the paper gives an idea of what folks are doing to find and maintain those threads of traceability I'm so fond of.

Here are the links:

• directly to article in the IEEE online library (unless you have a subscription, you'll only get the abstract and reference information)
  
• a direct link to the article for Fresno State students, staff, and faculty.
  
• a direct link to the June 2007 issue for University of Hawaii students, staff, and faculty (you'll have to scroll down to the article).
  

Veggie oil tales

We've previously talked about cars powered by vegetable oil and how some states are going after tax revenue.

North Carolina is the most recent one I've heard about:

Teixeira's story began near Lowe's Motor Speedway on May 14. As recreational vehicles streamed in for race week, revenue investigators were checking fuel tanks of diesel RVs for illegal fuel.

The investigators spotted Teixeira's passing bumper sticker: "Powered by 100% vegetable oil."

"It was like some twist of fate that put me there," he said. "It was like I was asking for them to stop me."

And now for something completely different

Yesterday evening having pizza and fruit at the farm of some nearby friends we got to talking about organic, almost-organic, and traditional tree fruit farming.

I remembered that back in the day when we had an apple orchard I read something in California Farmer magazine about someone drinking a glass of malathion. This was during the medfly scare.

Well last night David knew the guy's name (B.T. Collins) but we thought it was during the Reagan governorship. Actually Collins (a republican Viet Nam double amputee) was appointed by Jerry Brown as his chief of staff. Sounds like a very interesting guy. Time magazine describes the malathion incident:

Brown's fears notwithstanding, state officials said it was safer to spray from the air than the ground. Reason: the Malathion is mixed with molasses, sugar and yeast and falls in coffee-graint-size droplets that cannot be easily inhaled. B.T. Collins, 40, director of the California Conservation Corps, gave the most dramatic demonstration of its safety: he drank a glassful of Malathion diluted with water to the concentration used in the spray.

On findagrave.com an entry quotes some of his personal "rules":

You stand up for your people. You dig your own foxhole. Don't tell your best friend who to marry. Never argue with a cop. Always send handwritten thank you notes.

Reminds me of David Hackworth, author of the very interesting About Face, not to be confused with Alan Cooper's user interface book of the same name :)

Stu Card and Don Norman

The Franklin Institute posted two brief, layman-level videos of recent HCI award winners.

Stuart Card

from Xerox PARC for human-computer interface achievements

Donald Norman for user-centered design.

both videos are easy to understand and interesting, and short. The Franklin Institute has been around for a while, and describes the awards as:

For 182 years, The Franklin Institute has honored the greatest men and women of science, engineering, and technology. The Franklin Institute Awards are among the oldest and most prestigious comprehensive science awards in the world.

You can also listen to an audio podcast about human-computer interaction, and about how the committee chose Stu Card for the award. They even talk about Fitts Law!

Computer people and their tiny airplanes

I've previously posted about Jef Raskin's take on why planes fly: here and here. Simson Garfinkel blogs about meeting Raskin and marveling at his radio controlled gliders. Raskin died in early 2005, but Garfinkel finally built and flew a glider: "After five years, I make good on my promise to Jef Raskin". You can see a video of Raskin's workshop with lots of airplanes, and two secret doors :)

The inspirational story of an 'overnight' success

The May-June 2007 issue of ACM's interactions has a two page article about how Harmonix's Guitar Hero took off after Best Buy put the game on kiosks. If you are a Fresno State person you can access the article here, and if you are a University of Hawaii person you can access interactions and then go to the issue.

But more interesting than the interactions piece is this take at GameSpot News: scroll down about one screen to "Alex Rigopulos: Whose dream is it, anyway?". There is also a link to really lousy audio. A slightly better article is here.

My nemesis

A significant portion of my late spring is weed whacking star thistle, one of the nastiest weeds around. The Nature Conservancy does the same thing, but on a much larger scale, using a helicopter (no, not upside down as a weed whacker). There's a good article in the latest Nature Conservancy magazine (which lots of pictures) -- here's a quote:

Standing on the east rim of the canyon, the river thousands of feet below, you can see a lot of that ground, and it’s all at risk, particularly from a weed called yellow star thistle.

“It’s nasty stuff,” Talsma says. “It’s just a crying shame.”

... The plant first came to North America from Mediterranean countries in tainted loads of clover seed or alfalfa shipped to California in the Gold Rush days. From there, it has marched steadily east. It bears a pretty yellow flower, but that’s the only nice thing to say about it.

Here's even more pictures, courtesy of UCB.

Jumpseats, Cars, Beaches

I've been reading the blog of a NWA 757 pilot. Recently he was in the jumpset of a Hawaiian Airlines 717 from Honolulu to Hilo, and soared on the north shore. Interesting pictures in both, but it sounds like he prefers his 757:

After all, if I miscalculate a bit, I have those magnificent, high compression, high bypass, twin rotor, axial flow, turbofan, Pratt & Whitney R-2040's, producing more than 80,000 pounds of thrust to bail me out. In thrust we trust, let's fire this baby up!

Changing the subject, the annual report of water quality of California beaches is available. Because of low rainfall this year there wasn't as much contamination from run off, but I did find this paragraph:

In a recent study on enteric viruses at Imperial Beach and the Tijuana River mouth, researchers reported a number of hepatitis A virus strains. Because untreated human fecal waste from Tijuana sewage outfalls is a major pollution source to coastal waters near the US/Mexican border, human fecal bacterial densities (E. coli and
Enterocci) during wet weather exceeded state water quality standards in 86% (12 of 14) of the samples in the study. Exceptionally high concentrations of these human fecal indicator bacteria were significantly correlated with high concentrations of hepatitis A virus and enterovirus. Three strains of poliovirus were also detected

Polio? yuck.

Changing the subject again, an interesting paper in the Proceedings of the IEEE volume 95 issue 2 (2007) about the software running in modern cars. The article is fairly understandable and not too technical. Here's the citation:

Engineering Automotive Software. Manfred Broy; Ingolf H. Kruger; Alexander Pretschner; Christian Salzmann. Page(s): 356-373 vol 95 issue 2 (2007). Digital Object Identifier (DOI) 10.1109/JPROC.2006.888386

If you are a Fresno State person, you can click on http://dx.doi.org.hmlproxy.lib.csufresno.edu/ and paste in the article's DOI (10.1109/JPROC.2006.888386).

Enhanced color vision

Speaking of HCI, another topic in my class is enhanced color vision. I first read about this in Glenn Zorpette's article "Looking for madam tetrachromat" (you can read a plain text version or see the article in the Red Herring archives if you log in). The idea is that there are women with extra photo receptors.

This has also been a good Damn Interesting story (with some nice illustrations).

I was reminded of this again because the May/June 2007 Technology Review had a short review of a recently published Science article describing genetically engineered mice with an extra photoreceptor. Eventually you'll be able to see the blurb in the Tech Review "From the Labs" archive, but until then you can read the abstract of the Science article.

Actually, I fooled around with different URLs and I think you can see the May/June 2007 issue of Tech Review before it is officially released. You might want to check out the Objects of Desire photoessay, in addition to the enhanced mice.

Time: Subjective and Objective

One of my favorite things to have HCI students read is Tog's short description of an experiment showing the difference between objective and subjective time. (Tog also talks about the manipulation of time in the classic "Principles, Techniques, and Ethics of Stage Magic and Their Application to Human Interface Design" in which he talks about the mirrors-by-the-elevators anecdote (also repeated by Ackoff & Rovin in "The Ups and Downs of Elevators" section of Beating the system: Using creativity to outsmart bureaucracies and also appearing as a Joel on Software topic)).

Anyway, The whole point of this post is that Tog recently posted an update including a funny example of airlines that "get it" and "don't" when it comes to objective and subjective time. You can skip all that stuff above and read this :)

Santa Barbara whales

A gray whale was swimming around by the wharf in downtown Santa Barbara (still alive, but maybe suffering from the “Unusual Mortality Event" that's killing marine mammals.

A nutty student tried to steal teeth from a recently washed-up sperm whale and was arrested.

P.S. about Einstein

I saw part of the X Files movie today but I'd forgotten that some was filmed at the Athenaeum also. But I can't remember which part. I also remembered that I saw some filming of a movie about Richard Feynman on the Caltech campus. Matthew Broderick played Feynman. Didn't see Matt on campus though. Or Feynman :) Although Jim Kiper and I attended a talk that Oliver Sacks gave in Cal Tech's crazy looking auditorium.

My Einstein inadequacy

On CSPAN's BookTV this weekend I saw a brief talk by the author of a new book on Einstein. This reminded me of back in my JPL days I got to stay in Einstein's apartment at the CalTech Athenaeum. There was a Joshua Reynolds painting over the fireplace, and the patio overlooking the campus was great (you can see pictures of both here). That night I felt pretty dumb and had trouble falling asleep.

But, it could be that was because it was also the night of the explosion and crash of TWA 800. I sat on Einstein's couch (OK, I think it wasn't the original :) and fiddled with the rabbit ears on the ancient TV (also non-Einstein) to watch news coverage of the accident.

I always thought it was funny that while I was semi-regularly staying at the Athenaeum there were only rabbit-ear TVs, and no air conditioning, which made some summer Pasadena nights pretty unbearable (one night at 2am it was 92 degrees F in the room). I think both of those have been remedied (and a guest elevator installed).

The Athenaeum is known for it's food (I mostly ate downstairs in the Ratheskeller pool hall), and there is even a reference to Einstein in this foodie review.

BTW, I also stayed in the Millikan Suite, but wasn't as intimidated since I don't think he actually lived there :)

One more bit of trivia: the dining room scene of Beverly Hills Cop was filmed at the Athenaeum:

"If you saw Beverly Hills Cop, you've seen the Athenaeum," says Arden Albee, a retired professor of geology and planetary science who is chairman of the club's house committee. The banquet room was used in a food-fight scene in the 1984 movie, which starred Eddie Murphy. The club's porch was used more recently in The Wedding Planner, starring Jennifer Lopez, and features real weddings as well.

The quote is from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education available only to subscribers, or to anyone who Googles athenaeum albee and clicks "cached" :)

One more bit of trivia: during one of my JPL summers I stayed in Dr. Albee's guest house in the backyard. I think they pretty much forgot that I was staying there since they seemed surprised when I would come up to the main house to pay the rent :)

Not exactly UFOs, but strange flying things

Sporty's Pilot Shop has the weirdest stuff sometimes. Like a cannula that you attach to your headphones with double-stick tape. I never thought of jamming tubes in my nostrils and then taping them to an ear.

Another thing is an ordinary looking ice chest, with a hole cut in the lid and a fan attached. The idea is you fill the chest with ice and water, and run the fan to cool your cockpit. Seems like something that I would have done in 1976 driving an un-airconditioned car to the midwest.

But, really, for weird, this is right up there. Could be useful in this summer though :)

disposable or reusable revisited

Back in October I posted something about how many times you'd need to reuse a ceramic (or glass) mug to use less energy per use than drinking from a disposable cup.

There was something today on digg about the topic. Since digg can be annoying, here is the link to the cited report. This is probably where the "you'd need to use a ceramic mug a thousand times to break even" comes from -- according to professor Martin Hocking's calculations, the ceramic-foam "break even" point is 1006. A quote:

The results are extremely sensitive to the amount of energy the dishwasher requires for cleaning each cup. Hocking's choice for the dishwasher, requiring 0.18 MJ/cup-wash, is barely less than the manufacturing energy of the foam cup, 0.19 MJ/cup. If Hocking had chosen even a slightly less energy-efficient dishwasher as his standard, then the reusable cups would never have broken even with the foam cup.

The lesson of this life-cycle energy analysis is that the choice between reusable and disposable cups doesn't matter much in its overall environmental impact. One should use one's best judgement.

Bonus tidbit: earlier in the week I was in a meeting where someone who knows a lot about local health statistics opined that contrary to popular local belief, the number of emergency room visits for "asthma" don't peak during "bad air" (high ozone) days. The visits peak during high allergy days :)

Duh.

Here is a page of statistics that looks ... misleading. For example, the central valley has a higher percentage of kids with asthma. OK, how much higher. The rate for the valley is 11%, the bay area 10%, the state (9%), and LA (8%). Three percent difference? Is that statistically significant? Could there be something else going on here, like, oh, family income? Access to health care? Living where there is a ton of pollen in the air? :)

Also, when you look at "all ages" and see that Fresno County is 13%, yet Kern, Tulare, and San Joaquin counties (two out of three with at least as bad air quality :) are 9%, well that makes you wonder about the data :)

I've always thought it interesting that living around cockroaches is bad for asthma.

Back to ages 0-17. As above, the central valley rate is 11%. Assignment: What's the national average for ages 0-17?

How about this (emphasis added):

In 2003, most U.S. children under 18 years of age had excellent or very good health (83%). However, 10% of children had no health insurance coverage, and 5% of children had no usual place of health care. Thirteen percent of children had ever been diagnosed with asthma. An estimated 8% of children 3-17 years of age had a learning disability, and an estimated 6% of children had ADHD.

Isn't data interesting :)

More Malc

A few more Malcolm Gladwell videos:

• Malcolm on spaghetti sauce (you'll have to scroll down to find him). Pretty amusing.
  
• Malc's agent hosts two videos on their web site, one about Blink and the other a talk given at Lucent Technologies. This is very similar to the talk he gave at the BbWorld conference.
  

Bonus update: The New Yorker Festival video from last year was moved. This is the talk about using neural networks to predict hit movies. You can watch it
here.

Things higher-ed related

A few things related to universitying:

• "Research points the finger at PowerPoint". Some of the research is summarized as:
  

  
  They [the researchers] have also challenged popular teaching methods, suggesting that teachers should focus more on giving students the answers, instead of asking them to solve problems on their own.
  

  
  Other parts of the research sounds a little like Tufte and other things I've previously mentioned about presentations. Professor Sweller is quoted:
  

  It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.

  
  Bonus link: a comparison of Gates' and Jobs' presentation styles. You might also want to click here and scroll down to the video by Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice.
  
  
• Two posts from the Tomorrow's Professor mailing list: "Teaching Naked: Why Removing Technology from Your Classroom Will Improve Student Learning" and how not to be a bore.
  
  
• The infamous U.S. News rankings got the top ten electrical engineering schools wrong. Whoops. "Another Rankings Fiasco at ‘U.S. News’".
  

Cleaning a whale from the inside

Revisiting my whale theme of a few months ago, this seems like a miserable job: vacuuming and dusting a 100 year old whale that is suspended from the ceiling :)

Here's a bonus link. The editors of the kooky/quirky muckraking website CounterPunch published their list of the top 100 non-fiction books originally written in English. I was reading another top 100 list and followed a link to that one. The thing that caught my eye was that Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire was the first one on the list (because it's alphabetical by author :) That reminded me that the first Edward Abbey story that I remember reading is "In defense of the redneck" in Abbey's Road. Anyway, I didn't think Edward Abbey would appear on a top 100 list. Other ones I noted were the Sunset Western Garden Book (it's been published since the mid-1950s?) and Norman Maclean's A river runs through it, both classics :)

Quay Valley Ranch

Last week I was in a meeting that reminded me how good it is to throw ideas around on a college campus. The meeting was about Quay Hays' proposal for a new sustainable community west of here. Quay Hays says:

We are planning Quay Valley Ranch so that its residents will never have to pay a power bill

(the quote is from an article about the project from a business point of view).

I didn't realize until I saw him that I knew the main presenter for the meeting: the father of "systems thinking", Russ Ackoff. I think I might have read one of his books back when I was in junior high (I'm not kidding).

He had some great stories. You can get a flavor of the the meeting by looking at the Ackoff Center blog.

Also presenting at the meeting was Vince Barabba who has a real passion about this project.

Two recent newspaper articles

The Fresno Bee reprinted an AP story about one of my recent topics -- "jerks":

Passion is an overrated virtue in organizational life, and indifference is an underrated virtue

Yesterday the paper ran a story about geocaching. A "dutiful state employee" is quoted about his alter-ego:

I don't smoke and I don't drink, but they do call me The Obsessed One

Beverage recommendations

Steve talks about getting (or not) coffee at Starbucks. Two things: first, the out-of-coffee Starbucks barista obviously hasn't read the story in Steve McGuire's Debugging the development process about coffee-making and software process (if you are an Amazon customer with enough standing you can do the "search inside" and read the two pages -- 25 and 26 -- about coffee and process). Second, I recommend going to the World Handcrafts (aka Ten Thousand Villages) store in Reedley for a package of "Reanimator" fair trade, shade grown, organic coffee (a related article is in the Pasadena Weekly :).

My other beverage recommendation is "pulque fino" (at the bottom of the "mead" page) from Full Circle Brewing on F street in Fresno.

That is all.

People still use film?

I try to treat my time with airport security as an opportunity for serendipitous amusement: sometimes lip balm is needs to go into your ONE QUART ZIP TOP BAG, and sometimes not. Sometimes a tube of antibiotic ointment need to go into the ONE QUART ZIP TOP BAG, sometimes not (one TSA agent loudly told me that Neosporin specifically did not have to be bagged, so she took it out of my ONE QUART ZIP TOP BAG and threw it in the gray plastic bin with my shoes, after everything had gone through X-ray, hmm). Sometimes the agent will say "hey you missed one" after spotting a small tube of something or other in my bag. Cowering like a bad puppy I await my humiliation. But they just wave me through. But then one time post-X-ray an agent, made an example of me, held up my clear zip top bag over her head and loudly says "THIS IS NOT A ONE QUART ZIP TOP BAG!", but it is clear, has a zip top, and was given to me by LAX so that I could "zip through security". "WELL I DON'T KNOW WHAT LAX IS DOING GIVING PEOPLE NONSTANDARD BAGS". Whatever :)

And then there is the shoe carnival.

All this doesn't bother me much, but then I haven't lost a bunch of money like the producers of Lost did when their film was X-rayed.

The state film office said it has worked with TSA and United Airlines to put a new process in place that will prevent future accidents.

"The issue has been addressed, and they have procedures in place to make sure it doesn't happen again," said Dawson, the state film commissioner.

You can read more about it here.

And that Neosporin stuff? It is specifically mentioned on the TSA website, and has to go in the ONE QUART ZIP TOP BAG. Vindicated again!

P.S. The Jetsons-looking restaurant in the middle of LAX is closed since a panel fell off the building. The cool observation area just above the restaurant has been closed for years. That was a great place to watch planes.

The revenuers are coming

This week I was talking about my next car being powered by vegetable-oil. Steve M blogged about our friend Steve F and Ken and driving cross country on fry oil. You can see their photo travelogue, and you can listen to a short mid-trip audio interview.

But in Illinois at least, the revenuers have gotten wind (whiff?) of fry oil. Hmm.

Hey! Watch out for that fomite over there!

Many television news stories (particularly during rating sweeps time) take a UV light into hotel rooms to elicit the ewwwwww-yuck response.

But this article in the March 2007 Conde Nast Traveler is really disgusting. I've heard of people taking extra ziptop plastic bags in their luggage so they can bag the TV remote control, and after reading the article that sounds like a good idea :) There's already a commercial version available.

People mock me for using hand sanitizer! Not anymore! I am vindicated! (Just make sure your hand sanitizer has a high enough percentage of alcohol to be effective)

:)

Getting better and better at not caring

As a follow-up to my previous post, this almost-five-minute video of Bob Sutton is pretty interesting. To pique your interest, he talks about littering, both literally and within organizations, and about constructive uses of indifference.

Another update: this week's free Designing Interactions chapter (and videos) is about multisensory and multimedia human-computer interaction.

The ethical mind (and bonus link)

This conversation with Howard Gardner in the March 2007 Harvard Business Review is sort of the other side of the coin of my previous post. A quote:

... there is no substitute for detailed, textured, confidential oral recommendations from individuals who know the candidates well and will be honest. I don’t particularly trust written letters or the results of psychological tests. A single interview is not much help, either. A colleague of mine says “It takes ten lunches,” and I think there is truth in that.

I might also ask a young person about mentors. Our studies found that, across the board, many young professionals lack deep mentoring from individuals in authoritative positions. This was in contrast to veteran professionals, who spoke about important mentors and role models. So I might ask, “Who influenced you in cultivating a particular moral climate, and why?” The influence of antimentors—potential role models who had been unkind to their employees or who had shown behavior that others would not want to emulate—and a lack of mentors is something that we underestimated in our studies. Negative role models may be more powerful than is usually acknowledged.

You might remember Howard Gardner from the mid 1980's days of cognitive science.

Changing subjects, here is your bonus link of the day: Jakob Nielsen's list of the computer skills kids should be learning in school, and why. He says:

Understanding usability heuristics like "recognition vs. recall" or "consistency" will be as important to the educated person as having dissected a frog.

As someone who didn't want to dissect a frog in high school, I feel vindicated! :)

The Giant Orb from Niihau

An article from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune was reprinted in today's Fresno Bee, and it reminded me of finding a fishing float (about a foot in diameter, plastic, not glass) on the beach on Niihau. Long story which I might post sometime so that I never feel the urge to tell it again, but the reason I call it an orb is that I checked it as baggage, and it was "sort of lost", and when it arrived at the Fresno airport the next morning I got a voicemail saying that my "orb was available to be picked up at the American Airlines counter."

Here's the article: "The sand, the sun, the sea, the squalor:
The Great Eastern Garbage Patch, twice the size of Texas, spreads litter to far shores".

It definitely gets you thinking about trash in general, and besides, when was the last time you read an article that used the word "gyre"? And when was the last time you read a blog posting using both "gyre" and "orb"?

More trouble than they're worth

Judging from all the references I'm seeing to Bob Sutton's new book The no *ssh*le rule (I've edited some of the vowels), I'm late to this party. So far I've seen it mentioned in the March Fast Company, in CIO Insight (from back in 2004), and in Guy Kawasaki's blog.

I can't find a web copy of the original column in the February 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review (which I am embarrassed to say I thumb through occasionally).

Some of the comments to Guy's posting are funny, like this one, and this one.

I got Sutton's book yesterday -- it's short and easy to read.

Speaking of books, the new one by Bill Moggridge is Designing Interactions, and it is incredible -- almost a coffee table book. It's not very expensive, but if you don't want to spend the money you can download one chapter a week free from the website. It's really great that all the videos of interviews are on the website (although in smaller format than the book-accompanying DVD). I highly recommend that you watch the video of Bill Verplank.

Computer Science bachelor's and graduate degrees

The January 2007 Computing Research News has a lists of the most prolific producers of bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees. Guess who is #1? Here's a hint.

See how many of the "top" colleges you recognize.

The article says you can go to the NSF site and create your own queries. I tried to replicate the author's table and got this. Sometimes it is sorted by decreasing value, sometimes alphabetically by name of college. I'm not sure why.

Anyway, the top California bachelor's producer is UC Irvine (#10) and the most prolific CSU is San Jose State (#27). Cal State Ebay (nee Hayward) is #19 for master's degrees, and UC Santa Barbara is #23 for CSci doctoral production, whoo hoo!

Don't care about CSci degrees? You can do whatever query you want at http://webcaspar.nsf.gov

Now that you are fascinated with landing an airplane

I liked this site, and its description of a Cat IIIC landing:

Pray that your electronics and autopilot are reliable.

You can go on the pilot's trip around Florida and his eight ILS approaches. Kissimmee to Melbourne: not to be missed! (I'm kidding)

I think you can fly his route if you have Microsoft Flight Simulator.

What are they thinking up front?

This is the best, most detailed, and easy to read description of commercial pilots being diverted from their original destination and doing a Cat III landing at BWI.

I think they were doing a Cat IIIB landing (50 foot decision height). A Cat IIIC landing can be done in zero visibility.

If you are planning on doing a Cat III landing at LAX you should probably look at this diagram, or practice first at FAT.

Spaf on security

Here's streaming audio and video of Spaf being interviewed about "US Computer Insecurity". This is a nice layman's level discussion.

I was going to try to joke about how the next interview in the series is about "Redefining Masculinity" and how much more interesting it would be if the producers had mixed up the guests for the two weeks, but I refrain.

In the spirit of my recent postings about HICSS, here's some trivia: I first met spaf at HICSS-22 in 1989. As I recall, someone in his posse was collecting our unused drink tickets. Allegedly.

Disclaimer: I wouldn't have written the two previous paragraphs if I didn't know about spaf's tolerance of bad attempts at humor. Judging from his recent post to Web-Heads about a man and a dead horse, I think he's still warped :)

HICSS slides

Hal Abelson's slides (promised in a previous post) from his distinguished lecture are posted, along with other HICSS-40 highlights.

Sittin' on a plane

I'm glad I wasn't on this plane from FAT-DFW, or the infamous SFO-DFW flight that was also diverted to Austin for hours and hours.

Using Information: New Technologies, Ways & Means: How to Have a Great HICSS Experience

A few more notes from HICSS:

• I went to a session about development of secure software. There were statements about how it's not feasible to formally specify and verify something as complicated as an operating system. Hmm. Well, in before 1980 aspects of UCLA secure Unix was formally specified and verified. In fact, work on "multilevel secure operating systems" is one of the most developed example of formal V&V of real, complicated (and really complicated) systems. And, work on multilevel secure operating systems paid for a lot of my UCSB education :)
  
  In any case, this is all related to the infamous Orange Book.
  
• Yesterday's plenary by Hal Abelson was good. It was essentially a pitch for Creative Commons, and how the knowledge-creation community should shun commercial publishers and some professional associations such as the American Chemical Society :) I will post a link to his slides when they are posted.
  
• I'm currently in a session about automated testing. Also here is my former UCSB professor, and father of design-by-contract, and Eiffel, Bertrand Meyer. It was nice to say hello.
  

One thing I like about HICSS (my first one was 21 years ago!) is if you make good selections about what to attend you'll hear some great ideas. Looking through the program I see the following software engineering names in addition to Bertand: Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, Barry Boehm (HICSS distinguished lecturer two years ago), John Carroll, et al.

Jonathan Grudin has a blog about HICSS and Using Information: New Technologies, Ways & Means: How to Have a Great HICSS Experience

Do you aspire to be a Scrum Master?

Steve's post about stand-up meetings (see the three questions at the end of his post) reminded me about the HICSS session I am attending today on agile development techniques, Scrum and XP in particular.

Some very interesting comments made by the speakers such as

• in one industrial case study presented about the use of pair programming, very few defects were found by the "navigator" of the pair.
  
• you can use rock-paper-scissors at the beginning of each day to determine who starts driving and who starts navigating.
  
• a Scrum case study (about 1000 KLOC) showed "linear or better" productivity increases by adding people. Note this is opposite to Brooks' "adding people to a later project makes it later". The general claim by the speaker was that by going to Scrum you can double productivity, in contrast to outsourcing which he claimed gives a 20 percent productivity increase.
  

Other impressions: There's actually been quite a bit of research done on pair programming, from a software development productivity point of view and from a cognitive approach. The industry people seem to be reinventing the wheel on some of these basic things. Not surprising since it feels good to reinvent a good idea like the wheel :)

Seriously though, I recommend that software engineers flip through Barry Boehm's slides from his ICSE 2006 keynote slides (ICSE is the big practitioner-academic yearly conference). He notes (on slide 7) that we are losing our history:

Median ICSE 2005 paper has no reference before 1984-85
77% have no references before 1980

In any case, everyone should look at his figure on slide 9.

A Goshen College - University of Hawaii connection

The chancellor of the Manoa UH campus got her undergrad degree at Goshen College. She was in a one-hour live chat today hosted by the Honolulu Advertiser, and I was able to get in a question about how attending a Mennonite liberal arts college influences her approach to UH. Her answer is toward the end. Most people were asking about boring things like parking and dorm space :)

Here's more Goshen College trivia. Henry D. Weaver, professor emeritus of Chemistry, former provost, and former interim president, was hired by the University of California system to direct the study abroad programs for the system. He was able to do this from an office at UC Santa Barbara, which is where I met him.

What does this have to do with today's chat? The connection is in her answer to my question.

Bonus points: As you might suspect, Henry is an amateur radio operator (W9BHX). The radio world was recently rocked by what FCC action? Hint: /-. ---/-- --- .-. ./-.-. --- -.. . / You can figure that out by looking here (left is . and right is -), and you might want to ponder why the letters ETIAN are near the root (top) of the tree.

Further hint: It's the same reason that simple substitution ciphers are so easy to crack.

Here is the answer.

One less thing to worry about: getting squished in a library

From today's LA Times article about libraries:

But not everyone likes such automation. Michael Gorman, the soon-to-retire dean of library services at Cal State Fresno, said his campus steered away from it in a library expansion under construction.

Fresno's project instead will include more compact shelving, the kind that usually lacks aisles until someone pushes a button to open up one. Such movable shelves may seem odd at first to some, but "it's really very easy once you get used to it. It doesn't kill people," said Gorman, past president of the American Library Assn.

Here's a link to a news release about a recent gift for the new library.

Copyright? Copyright? What's that?

You can watch 101 "classic" holiday videos -- Rudolf, Charlie Brown, The Office season two Christmas episode -- here.

A Trader Joe's, a hookah bar, a PF Chang's, Dave & Busters

Yeah, that's what Merced needs to keep those students happy. Sheesh :)

Who needs those diversions when you can watch a debate about "Creativity: The Mind, Machines, and Mathematics" between David Gelernter and Ray Kurzweil, courtesy of MIT.

A aircraft-like black box for your car?

I am really tempted to get a CarChip and log the data about use of my car. I'm surprised that the system is under $200 and plugs in to the standard diagnostic port on post-1996 cars.

Another one of Simson's Technology Review columns got me thinking about it. He installed a CarChip on his wife's car, and also points out that a lot of cars already record data, but drivers are not aware of it:

For example, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, about 64 percent of the model 2005 cars sold in the United States were equipped with event data recorders (EDRs). Similar to the so-called black boxes in airplanes, these systems continuously monitor a variety of statistics and preserve their most recent readings if the vehicle crashes. According to the NHTSA, EDRs typically record "pre-crash vehicle dynamics and system status" (such as the car's speed), "driver inputs" (the position of the steering wheel and throttle and whether the brake is engaged), the "vehicle crash signature" (the car's change in velocity during a crash), and "restraint usage/deployment status" (how quickly the air bags were released). Consumers typically don't get access to this information. Its purpose, instead, is to help industry and the government make cars and roads safer. Increasingly, it is being used in the courtroom as well.

Finally, I am too lazy to make this a separate blog post: More UC Merced news -- trouble filling the dorms.

From a strange comic blog

The word "pwned" is showing up everywhere, even in geeky comics.

The same artist does an amusing comic about a famous mathematician/computer scientist.

Cable cars

Speaking of traffic, the local news had a story about cable cars being the most dangerous public transportation in SF:

High Accident Rate On S.F. Cable Cars
The I-Team has uncovered some surprising data on the safety of public transportation that might make you think twice before getting on a cable car.
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=i_team&id=4805051

Mental gridlock

Steve's recent post about no-rules traffic reminded me of interesting, and sometimes surprising, ideas about traffic.

For example, near Steve's house is a wide two lane street that is a dangerous for pedestrians to cross because traffic is moving fast (for a residential area) and the road is so wide that pedestrians spend a long time crossing. It is a road in need of traffic calming. One technique is to reduce the radius of sidewalk curves at intersections (reducing road width -> pedestrians are in the roadway less time).

It is a little counter intuitive, but congested narrow residential streets might be safer for pedestrians. I seem to remember a few years ago a consultant recommended to the City of Reedley not to indulge the instinct to install stop signs willy-nilly, and making wide residential road. Unfortunately, Reedley is now The Land of Many Stop Signs.

Another interesting thing is that the modern traffic roundabouts are more efficient and safer than intersections controlled by stop signs or signals.

There's also provocative data about urban vs. rural traffic fatalities. Somewhere (Tufte?) I saw a map of the US showing by county the traffic fatality rate. That map is essentially the mirror image of a map showing population density by county. I can't find the map on the Web, but the "Partners for Rural Traffic Safety" say

More than half of fatal crashes occur in rural areas: 59 percent of total traffic fatalities for all vehicles and 64 percent for passenger vehicles.

The fatality rate in rural areas is TWICE that of urban areas: 2.6 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled versus 1.1 in urban areas.

Restraint use in rural fatal crashes is LOWER than in urban crashes: 36 percent versus 48 percent.

Finally, the "safer to drive or fly?" question pops up in the Risk Digest:

As for the cliche that the drive to the airport is riskier than
the flight, the researchers concluded that average drivers with
the age distribution of airline passengers are less likely to be
killed on a 50-mile, one-way trip to the airport than on the flight.

Speaking of flying, a new record was set today for amount of time before I get panhandled in San Francisco. This record is likely not to be broken since as I was getting out of the airport-hotel van, I was asked for money immediately.

One more thing, according to the June 2005 Harper's Index:

Portion of the world's motor vehicles that are in China: 1/17

Portion of the world's annual traffic fatalities that are: 1/5

Updates

Here's a few updates on previous postings:

• Back in February 2006 I mentioned the probability of dying in various ways. There is a really interesting graphic that's a lot easier to understand.
  
• In September 2005 I noted that I wasn't much of a Prairie Home Companion fan, but you can listen on the Web. KFSR, the Fresno State radio station, will begin broadcasting the show in December. Some people are still upset that KVPR dumped Prairie Home Companion years ago.
  
• Over a year ago I posted a message about free viewers for Microsoft Office documents. I think that ThinkFree.com is a better way to view MS Office docs without buying office, and it works on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux. And it's free! You can download viewer widgets/gadgets/plugins or use their free online suite.
  

Nickel and diming it

During a boring summer job between high school and college I imagined my meager hourly wage as nickels dropping onto a pile.

The December 2006 SmartMoney magazine has four paragraphs on the "fastest way to earn 33 percent in 2006." I can't find a legitimate copy of the column on the web, but I found a blog entry where someone had typed it. Hint: it is about nickels. Disclaimer: I have no idea who the blogger is that posted the column -- it's the only copy that Google could find :)

The funny thing was that my nickel-visualizing job took place in a big vault. No, I was never locked in.

The beyond

No matter what your take on it, atheism is a hot topic right now. Besides the recent Wired article, Time also covered it, Julia Sweeney was interviewed in October on NPR's Fresh Air, and Penn Jillette did a "This I Believe" segment on NPR.

And, another plug for the Mennonite astronomer Owen Gingerich, his essay "Is the Cosmos all there is?" and his book that came out in September.

books

I am getting too many books that I don't have time to read, so here is a reminder to myself, in no particular order:

• The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream, by H.W. Brands.
  
• Thirteen Moons: A Year in the Wilderness, by Robert P. Johnson (UCSB alumnus whoo hoo).
  
• The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus, by Owen Gingerich, the most famous Mennonite astronomer :) I've read some of this one, pretty interesting. Trivia: his son Jon and I were at UCSB getting MS degrees in Computer Science at the same time, and I stayed in Owen's house while my advisor swapped houses with him for sabbatical. A few doors away lived Bill Walton when he played for the Celtics.
  
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. You can read an excerpt or the article from The Atlantic.
  
• Small is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas, by Seth Godin.
  
• The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire, by Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman. I'm not a big fan of Arax, but should read the book since it is about farming the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. If you are looking for something more inspiring, go for Epitaph for a Peach by Masumoto, or if you are from around here it will amuse you to recognize the thinly disquised characters in Fields Without Dreams, by Hanson.
  
• Garden of the Sun (second edition) about the early history of the San Joaquin Valley (and you might want to see A Land Between Rivers).
  
• First Man, biography of Neil Armstrong. I've read most of it and learned a few things, but for the big picture of the Apollo program I like Andrew Chaikin's book Man on the Moon (I got to meet him, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and Robert Jastrow on the same day in Pasadena a few years ago), or you can read transcripts of all the radio transmissions at the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.
  

Is that for here or to go?

A recent "Hey Mr. Green" column got me thinking again about whether it is better to use disposable or reusable cups. See the second question and answer in this column: "For occasional use, like a large church functions, disposables are not so bad, since it takes more energy to make a ceramic mug and wash it several times than to use several Styrofoam cups."

I've heard several times that you'd have to use a ceramic mug "a thousand times" before breaking even from an energy point of view, but I've never been able to document that.

But I did find this interesting document: "Report of the Starbucks Coffee Company/Alliance for Environmental Innovation Joint Task Force." What I really liked about the report is that they looked at lifecycle costs. Here is a quote from page 10:

The Alliance conducted an environmental analysis of the full life cycle of ceramic, paper,glass,and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic cups,from the extraction of raw materials to their manufacture, use, and disposal.The Alliance found that the breakeven point beyond which environmental benefits began to accrue was approximately 70 uses for ceramics and 36 uses for glass. Given that a reusable cup may be used, on average, 1,000 times or more (and is generally designed for 3,000 uses), the environmental benefits of using reusable cups in terms of reduced energy use,air and water pollution,and solid waste can be tremendous.

Also take a look at the Reusables Analysis on page 12 where the authors look at costs for a typical coffee shop, including annual water savings, greenhouse gas reduction, and solid waste reduction.

Now instead of cups, the conversation has shifted to the break-even point for hybrid cards and photovoltaic cells.

The New Yorker festival videos

The New Yorker magazine posted several videos from their festival earlier this month. You can see a talk by Malc about neural nets and how you know when a movie or song or whatever ... will be a "hit".

Those pesky IEEE Fellows predicting the future again

Previous I posted about the IEEE Fellows predicting future advances in technology. I think I called some of their observations "mundane" :)

You can listen to a podcast about the article (or subscribe to the IEEE Spectrum podcasts).

Speaking of listening to things, Richard A. Clarke gave the keynote address at the 15th USENIX Security Symposium. If you follow that link you'll be able to listen to Clarke's talk and the Q&A (as well as other talks from the conference).

AI and HCI

In the most recent interactions Jonathan Grudin discusses the ups and downs of AI and HCI. He has an interesting perspective since he's been an interface person in several AI teams.

Here's a quote to get you interested:"McCarthy and other mathematicians defined artificial intelligence. When you ask mathematicians to define intelligence, what do you get? Before the answer, some history..."

The article is "Turing maturing: the separation of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction". If you have a subscription to the ACM Digital Library, or on a campus that has a subsciption you'll be able to figure out how read it.

On the other hand, I've just googled "Turing maturing:" several times and always got a link that worked, like this one (YMMV).

Launch and re-entry

I didn't pay much attention to the most recent space tourist to the international space station, Anousheh Ansari (yes, of X PRIZE fame).

But I liked her frank descriptions of "The Trip Up" and "The Ride Down". Usually you don't read stuff like this from astronauts. The closest are descriptions of Jerry Linenger's experiences on MIR. Some of the experiences were scary (click and then scroll down to the paragraph starting "While living aboard the space station, Linenger and his two Russian crewmembers faced numerous difficulties...").

• Ansari talks quite a bit about her first experience on-orbit, and how "uncomfortable" it was.
  
• Starting about in the middle of this blog entry she desribes the experience of re-entry in a Soyuz spacecraft (landing on ground, not water!)
  

If that sounds boring, you can not only be a space tourist, you can take a walk outside ... for $35 million.

Quixotic Bubble Busting

The frequently-insightful Simson Garfinkel discusses design flaws of the Motorola Q phone, both software:

In other words, the Q succeeds in bringing the experience of Windows to the mobile phone. This is its failing.

and hardware. He includes what should have been a scenario for usability testing: moving an mp3 from your desktop to play on the Q. He points out one of my peeves, the developer's implementation model showing through to the interface:

Despite all the jazzy hardware, it's frustrating, not fun, to use the Q. This is a phone that should fit into the life of the user and the context of use, rather than forcing the user to understand its internal organization. ... Geeks might gravitate to the Q for the challenge of figuring out how it works, but most average users will be exasperated.

Is there anything more difficult than designing user interfaces? Maybe predicting the future (sorry about the lack of segue). The September 2006 IEEE Spectrum has the results of a survey of IEEE Fellows about "technology that is - and isn't - on the horizon". The results seem really ... mundane? Apparently not too many participate in SETI, 72.5% said it was unlikely that humans will "understand signals from extraterrestrial civilizations", although only 39.5% think it is unlikely that "humanoid robots" will "care for the elderly in their homes". What?

Tufte and Friedman

Two unrelated things I've blogged about before:

• A column about Tom Friedman's (I call him "T-Freed" :) presentation at the conference I attended this summer.
  
• A recent NPR story about Tufte. He talks about NASA's problems with PowerPoint slides.
  
• OK one other thing, an NPR story about why us oldsters get stuck in our ways.