It's time to git yerself one, or two

If you are an OTA (over the air) television watcher and don't want to replace your analog TVs before the March 2009 official switchover to digital broadcasting, it's time to get your $40 coupons from the federal government, and buy a set top converter box. I went to Wal-Mart today and picked up the RCA DTA800 for $49.87 (so less than $10 after coupon). It's easy to hook up, and has RF (coax) and composite video-left/right audio output. Why no S-video or other output, you ask? Because to be eligible for the $40 coupon the box has to be minimally functional.

Just hook it up between your existing antenna and TV (or recorder). You don't get HD quality since you are still using your old TV, but you do get to watch the multiple digital stations (instead of just one analog signal per station you will probably get two or more) that are already available over the air, and you'll get simple on-screen TV schedule description.

What's available -- analog and digital -- in your area? Use Antenna Web to find out. You don't need to input your personal information, a zip code will do.

So join the 20th century before the first decade of the 21st is over :)

Unrelated trivia: What is the source of the electricity to run your converter box and old TV? See PG&E's "power mix".

Innumeracy, cats, and performance evaluations

Researchers from UCSB helped develop the Ocean Impact Map showing human influence on the oceans. The map is interesting. What really got me thinking is Ben Halpern's oft-repeated oceanographer's lament:

"The deep water is such a vast, relatively unexplored area, we just don't know what kinds of impacts we're having on those ecosystems," Halpern says. "We spend trillions of dollars going to the moon and we don't really know what's going on in our own oceans yet."

Trillions? Really? After poking around on the web a little, it looks like $25-28 billion in late-1960s dollars was spent on Apollo. Throw in another $2 billion to make an even $30 billion 1969 dollars. What's that worth today? About $176.24 billion (exercise for the reader: how does that compare to the cost of the second Iraq war?). What's an order of magnitude or so among scientists? One nice introduction to innumeracy I used in freshmen critical thinking classes was Hofstader's "On number numbness", a column he wrote for Scientific American and reprinted in the book Metamagical Themas.

The space-fans have their own oft-repeated "fact" (but I haven't had time to check the numbers):

During the same time period, [Americans] spent as much money on cosmetics as was spent on Apollo.

A couple other interesting bits of trivia about Apollo: how the Apollo 11 flag was engineered (much more interesting than it might sound), and how much better those awful black and white slow scan television pictures actually looked to the folks in Australia seeing the feed from the dish (a movie that you need to see :)

Two unrelated things: At LAX Thursday I saw several people reading Save the Cat. It's a book about screenwriting that I am thinking of reading to see if any of it is relevant to software engineering. Finally, Bob Sutton has another interesting take on annual performance evaluations of employees. Here's a great quote:

Then there is another, more extreme argument, that the performance evaluation process is fundamentally flawed. That doing it well is like doing blood-letting well -- it is a bad practice that does more harm than good in all or nearly all cases. This is the position taken by the famous quality guru W. Edwards Deming -- he was vehemently opposed to using them at all.

No need for GPS

This post via Steve got me thinking about the old strip maps I have from the 1920s and 1930s (Fresno to Huntington Lake, etc). USC has a nice collection of AAA strip maps from that era. Here is LA to Bakersfield, and LA to La Canada and Sunland.

Strip maps are an old idea, check out this one from over 300 years ago.

Strip maps have been extensively studied, such as in "A linear view of the world: Strip maps as a unique form of cartographic representation". This discussion of cognition:

One reason for the success of strip maps over time and across cultures is the advantage of process over state descriptions for route following. In addition, continued popularity of the format and potential for its expanded use may also relate to advantages of such maps in helping people develop a cognitive map of an unfamiliar environment.

reminds me of Edwin Hutchins' book Cognition in the wild, which you should have read by now.

David Rumsey let you play with his collection of historical maps online way before Google maps. We've looked at the user interface as part of the graduate HCI class.

About ten years ago I picked up one of the 1000 copies of California 49:

California was an unusual corner of the world. The Spaniards kept what little information they had under tight wraps. There were few reasons to visit today's California - little water, no obvious gold, and few people to exploit, so it remained a backwater for centuries. European mapmakers tried filling the vacuum, struggling with a lack of accurate information but always ready to copy from one another. This is how "the island of California" was born.

This intriguing anomaly has fascinated map collectors for years. The California Map Society decided to pull together important historic maps as a state sesquicentennial project. Their 1999 publication, "California 49," included forty-nine such maps. Printed in only 1000 copies, it quickly sold out. You might look for a copy in your local or University library.

Finally, sometimes I occasionally turn a map upside down, but I find this disturbing.

It's full of stars

Two quick things:

• Some amazing astrophotography (scroll down after clicking) taken from Bear Mountain near Meadow Lakes (famous for TV and radio transmitters). I thought their description of why and how they picked the site was interesting.
• What happens with all that stuff you leave curbside for the recycling service to haul away? It goes into athrough an eddy current separator, of course.

  ... a magnet pulls out any ferrous metals, typically tin-plated or steel cans, while the non-ferrous metals, mostly aluminium cans, are ejected by eddy current. Eddy-current separators, in use since the early 1990s, consist of a rapidly revolving magnetic rotor inside a long, cylindrical drum that rotates at a slower speed. As the aluminium cans are carried over this drum by a conveyer belt, the magnetic field from the rotor induces circulating electric currents, called eddy currents, within them. This creates a secondary magnetic field around the cans that is repelled by the magnetic field of the rotor, literally ejecting the aluminium cans from the other waste materials.

Now you know.

Space Food Sticks

A few blasts from the past:

If you were a kid in the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, you probably yearn for space food sticks (and remember this advertisement), washed down with Tang. Yes, space food sticks are available again. NPR did a "beyond Tang" story last summer.

Boingboing reminded me how kooky television was back then. It inspired me to find the Willie Mays warning that must have run daily after school, I think right after Gilligan's Island. I've still haven't seen a blasting cap.

A couple of things that aren't ancient history: I was surprised to see a paper in the January/February 2008 issue of Transactions on Software Engineering ("Applying formal methods to a certifiably secure system") describing techniques similar to what we were doing in the mid-1980s at UCSB with formal specification of critical systems. I've always liked the approach of formally defining a top level specification (TLS) and the critical properties, then showing that the TLS maintains the properties. The authors also talk about specifying "no changes", which was the topic of my first professional paper, presented at HICSS in 1986 :)

Speaking of formal specifications, at JPL we worked on formal specs in John Kelly's group. This is how I met PVS and John Rushby, whom the authors of the recent paper cite several times.

In any case, John Kelly has moved on from JPL and is at NASA headquarters. He is quoted in an interesting two-page article "Inspecting the history of inspections: An example of evidence-based technology diffusion" in the January/February issue of IEEE Software. Here's an excerpt:

“What was really convincing was the personal testimony and experience of people at JPL, plus they had data. Data is what speaks. If you’re going to take things to engineers, you have to have data." A common theme throughout our conversation was the need for both hard, quantitative numbers and anecdotal experience reports to convince potential adopters. Both data types played a role throughout the dissemination story.

Fresno State people can click here and Hawaii people here for the article.

The wild life of working at NASA JPL

I saw deer at the Jet Propulsion Lab, late one night after working on a presentation, but never a mountain lion. Nice picture and article. Here is a quote from someone who lives near JPL:

"You don't leave the kids alone in the backyard unattended -- ever," he said. "But the dog is really the canary in the mine. I figure it'll go for the dog and not the kids."

Here's another take on JPL wildlife, but I thought the characterization of JPLers the most interesting:

The JPL Engineers seem to really love what they do so it's fun to learn about their projects and help them with the best tech toys. Plus, they are so smart - it's like they glow with intelligence. Oh yeah, they love UNIX and OS X so I appreciate this as well.

Let's share

Recently we've been looking at desktop recording software, particularly cheap or opensource, and multiplatform. We're going to bring up Panopto (a CMU spin-off) and are examing Berkeley's OpenCast. And, this afternoon I was playing with Jing (I read about it on Michael Feldsten's blog). Jing is free, multiplatform, and good quality. It reminds me of Camtasia, but has a five minute recording limit. Wait, both Jing (free) and Camtasia ($$) are owned by TechSmith. I don't understand the business model I guess :)

Speaking of sharing, Software Joel is allowing use of the Copilot ("remote control someone's computer over the Internet") free on weekends.

More interesting, Joel uses a recent downtime to discuss reliability. I talk about "four nines", "five nines", "six nines" reliability in class, and try to give good examples, but unless you've been knee-deep in a situation, you don't realize what those nine really mean. Here is a quote from Joel's post:

Think of it this way: If your six nines system goes down mysteriously just once and it takes you an hour to figure out the cause and fix it, well, you've just blown your downtime budget for the next century. Even the most notoriously reliable systems, like AT&T's long distance service, have had long outages (six hours in 1991) which put them at a rather embarrassing three nines ... and AT&T's long distance service is considered "carrier grade," the gold standard for uptime.

Finally, Tufte has a short analysis of, and suggestions for, the iPhone user interface in this video (scroll down a little for the link).

While you are visiting Tufte, you might want to think about data sonification, something we tried to do at Fresno State back in the NeXT computer days. We never got farther than a proof of concept system, but you can listen to one of Tufte's favorite graphic devices, sparklines. Very cool to listen to (the entire sonification discussion thread on Tufte's site is here.

Finally, there increasing interest in "evidence based" software engineering (here's an article from IEEE Software -- Fresno Staters click here) inspired by "evidence based medicine". Bob Sutton (you've read about him here previously) looks at infant mortality from a management perspective. Very interesting:

Their findings are intriguing. As proponents of the quality movement would predict, when there was greater input from non-physicians in developing treatment plans and more communication among all members of the units, infant mortality rates were lower... Similarly, these researchers also found that when front-line workers collaborated more on making process improvements in the units, mortality rates were also lower... BUT the big surprise is that collaboration wasn’t all good. One kind of collaboration was linked to higher mortality rates. When front-line employees became more involved in unit governance -- doing things like being involved in decisions about who was hired and fired, the creation of new positions, scheduling, and budget allocation decisions – mortality rates WENT UP.

Disturbing images of buildings, and feet

MIT made a big splash with a crazy-cornered building for Computer Science, Philosophy, and Linguistics? Frank Gehry, the building's famous architect sounds like he is talking about software while defending his work :

“These things are complicated,” he said, “and they involved a lot of people, and you never quite know where they went wrong. A building goes together with seven billion pieces of connective tissue. The chances of it getting done ever without something colliding or some misstep are small.”

The February 2008 Fast Company talks about MIT's lawsuit against Gehry.

Maybe they should have asked Christopher Alexander to design the building, since he's revered in the software design pattern world :)

There's been at least one attempt to compare Tufte and Alexander: "Edward Tufte Meets Christopher Alexander" (Fresno State people can access the paper here and Hawaii people can click here).

The 9 October 2007 Radio Lab show, in addition to talking to Oliver Sacks about magnets, had an interesting segment about phantom limb syndrome (cured using a $2 mirror) and about how brain and body experience emotion. The interesting part isn't really about phantom limb syndrome, it is the lead-in about experiencing emotion including provocative questions about male-female differences, and whether quadriplegics experience emotion differently.

In the phantom limb segment they talk about a civil war photograph of a pile of feet. It's from the National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM) in Washington DC and if you want to see it, click here.

Bonus thought-provoking things: first, an online exhibit of bezoars from NMHM, including "Rapunzel Syndrome" requiring surgical removal of a trichobezoar.

Second, Duncan Watts takes Malc's tipping point to task: "Is the tipping point toast?"

Have a Happy Organize Your Home Day

Not only is 14 January Organize Your Home Day, it is also National Dress Up Your Pet Day, and National Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day, and the anniversary of Elvis' 1973 concert from Hawaii. I am not making this up.

Two things I omitted from yesterday's post:

• You have almost a year to learn your part for Messiah sing-alongs. This is one of the strangest learning aids I've heard -- pick your part (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) and the chorus. You'll hear your part on the left channel and the rest on the right. The strange thing is it's all MIDI (I think). If you are the book-learnin' music-readin' type, you can follow the score. Here's Beethoven's take on it.
  
• After coveting the computer science departments nixie clock for a couple of years, I decided to order my own. That new dishwasher will have to wait.
  

Don't tase me, bro!

• Can't we all just get along? The CSU trustees and the UC regents have taken a position against Proposition 92 which would guarantee more funding for community colleges. The community colleges are already under the mandated funding umbrella of 1988's infamous Proposition 98, so it seems a bit cheeky to ask for another constitutional amendment to guarantee funding. You might be thinking "wait, why is Proposition 92 a decade after Proposition 98?" It's because California's numbering scheme adopted in 1998.
  
• In news of the economy, Gene Simmons talked to Honolulu business group last week. You can watch "highlights" and hear why he wears sunglasses.
  
• I learned a new word for the next time I play Scrabble: parablepsis. I got to the word in a roundabout way: I was searching for something in IEEE Spectrum magazine, but ended up at SpectrumMagazine.org in a book review of Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman (professor at Univerisity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). I'd read that book a while ago to learn more about how errors creep in. Anyway, the writer of the review is someone from Fresno.
  
• Speaking of IEEE Spectrum, here is everything you need to know about tasers.
  
• Two things in the What-were-they-thinking department:
  
  • Powdered peanut butter. I just ordered a four pack from Bell Plantation :)
    
  • Wired says that the Boeing 787 isn't physically separating the public and business data networks? What?? Here's a rebuttal, and Bruce Schneier's initial take.
  
  

Pop versus soda, again? Meh.

Way back in 2006 I wrote about the geography (complete with maps) of pop-versus-soda and rilly-versus-reely. Lately I've been thinking about "meh". It's not in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but maybe someday:

No one is quite sure where it comes from. Graeme Diamond, principal editor of the new word group at the Oxford English Dictionary, says it's not yet suitable for the OED, but he does have a "meh" file, and the first recorded print usage occurred in the Edmonton Sun newspaper in Canada in 2003: "Ryan Opray got voted off Survivor. Meh."

There's more than just meh though: Slate.com's Ben Yagoda writes about (complete with audio and video examples) "The Internet and the rise of awwa, meh, feh, and heh." Fascinating.

Not what Tom Petty had in mind about free fallin'

Slashdot had an interesting pointer to a study at Baylor about perception of time during a crisis:

In The Matrix, hero Neo wins his battles when time slows in the simulated world. In the real world, accident victims often report a similar slowing as they slide unavoidably into disaster. But can humans really experience events in slow motion?

You can watch a video.

Speaking of scary things, I was reading an entry in Risks to the Public again, and didn't quite understand it, but it had an interesting link to Boeing slides called "Statistical Summary of Commercial Jet Airplane Accidents: Worldwide Operations 1959-2006". Page 22 shows interesting data. For example, 57% of a typical 1.5 hour flight is at "cruise", yet only 10% of the fatal accidents are at cruise. On the other hand, 32% of fatal accidents are in the 20% of the flight phases of final approach and landing. Anyway, I haven't finished thinking about this, but it does remind me of the non-linear relationship between software faults and failures observed by Adams, oft cited by proponents of statistical "usage based" software testing. In undergrad software engineering I've been known to say:

One of the classic papers in the field is by E.N. Adams from IBM. He analyzed volumes of failure data for IBM products. The only thing you need to look at is Table 2 on page 8 of Adam's paper. Adam's data showed that there are a few high-frequency faults and many low-frequency faults. If you want to find the high-frequency faults -- with the intent to fix them and thereby dramatically increasing MTTF -- test the way the software will be used. That is, generate random test cases that are typical of the way the software will actually be used. Because those random test cases are modeled after actual users' inputs, the test cases should expose the failures that your actual users would experience. The rarely-experienced failure will probably not be exposed by usage-based random test. On the other hand, your actual users probably won't experience those rare failures either.

Speaking of IBM, an article by Michael Swaine in the January 2008 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal reminded me of work done by IBM on physical environments for software developers (Steve McConnell -- you should be reading his blog -- talks about the IBM research in Rapid Development): "IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory - Architectural design for program development" way back in 1978 (flip through the paper to see floorplans and pictures). Swaine includes examples of how software developers use ambient interfaces to communicate project/process status.

If you're interested in this kind of stuff, take a look at McConnell's "Quantifying Soft Factors", the "Retrospectives on Peopleware" from ICSE 29, "Programmer performance and the effects of the workplace" by DeMarco and Lister, and "How Office Space Affects Programming Productivity" by Capers Jones.

Need something to listen to? mp3's and some mp4 video files are posted from the USENIX Security '07 conference. Two that caught my eye were probably the most non-techie:"How the iPod Shuffled the World as We Know It" by Newsweek editor Steven Levy who introduced Bill Gates to the iPod, and "Covering Computer Security in The New York Times" by John Schwartz. Speaking of security, Usenix is sponsoring a one-day workshop on Usability, Psychology, and Security.

Finally, here's a completely unrelated bonus link: What good is a state beach if you can't get to it?

Holiday parades as predictors of rocket launches

Tonight after watching the Reedley High School marching band at the Orange Cove electric parade we turned around and saw a Delta II launch of Italian COSMO SkyMed-2 satellites. You can see more than you ever wanted to know, down to the second, about the launch by downloading the mission booklet but I really like the real-time blogs from Spaceflight Now (which also includes the previous failed two launches). From the real-time blogs you get a feel for what is really going on and the decisions that are made. The blog for this launch even mentions the famous "BBQ roll", and that the strap-on solid boosters are left in place for a few seconds after burn-out so they won't fall on oil rigs :)

Polar launches from Vandenberg sometimes do a "dog leg" turn to avoid overflying land. In general, launches from Florida are not polar, in fact even "high inclination" orbits can be a problem. You can read about this super-secret-payload Space Shuttle launch that was given a waiver for overflying parts of the eastern US, here's a good quote:

So what are the records for inclination limits for the shuttle?

(i'm glad you asked).

The highest inclination mission was 62 degrees on the STS-36 classified DoD mission. According to industry reports Atlantis had to be stripped to the bare bones for this mission - even the EVA handrails were removed. Sources afterwards have verified that the mission was deemed to be of 'national importance' so a waiver was granted to permit the very low launch azimuth needed to achieve that orbit.

The shuttle had to travel closer to land than on any other mission - and actually overflew Cape Hatteras North Carolina and Cape Cod Massachutsets. The range safety folks made the decision that if the instantaneous impact point was over land (e.g. the place the shuttle will hit if propulsion is stopped) then they would not send the destruct command, and the shuttle would choose where it would fall. Military officials in those areas were notified and on alert, but the civilian population was not notified because it was a secret mission. There were plenty of delays though, and many news stories about the unusual flight path.

Some of you old timers (i.e., back in the 1980s) remember that "slick six" at Vandenberg was being remodeled for polar launches of the Space Shuttle.

More of a smorgasbord than a potpourri

A bunch of interesting stuff:

• Terry sent me the link for Douglas Crockford's talk at Yahoo about software quality. Software engineering students of mine will recognize several of the topics including order-of-magnitude performance differences between developers, Knuth's "literate programming", and design- and code-reviews.
  
  
• National Geographic's Traveler and Center for Sustainable Destinations published ratings of islands worldwide. It begins: "Tourism is a phenomenon that can cook your food or burn your house down. In other words, we all risk destroying the very places that we love the most." You can see a Hawaiian view of the study in a Honolulu Advertiser article. The software engineering connection is that they used a modified Delphi technique (made famous by Barry Boehm for software estimation): raters read each other's anonymous comments before submitting final ratings.
  
  
• A depressing take on a popular tourist destination is "Baja tourists face uptick in assaults, robberies" in the LA Times. Unrelated, but also in the LA Times is an article about Whole Foods new megastore in Pasadena:

  For a chain predicated on the notion that healthy ingredients make for healthy meals, Whole Foods also seems determined to get people out of the kitchen and eating the company's costlier prepared foods.
  
  It's telling that more space is devoted to prepared foods and other goodies at the Pasadena store than to produce.

  
  
  
• US News is rating high schools now. University High at Fresno State was 36th in the nation. Changing the subject slightly, all this talk of high school reminds me of Vans shoes, and how you can now have them custom made.
  
  
• Finally, this is sort of amusing. Apparently astronauts taking pictures of places like Area 51 have caused heartburn for our three-letter agencies. Skylab folks did it, and there were also concerns about Apollo astronauts taking pictures of the wrong stuff :)
  

Something from social psych and something from cog sci

I was reminded recently of two things, both with implications for human-computer interaction.

First, Bob Sutton (you'll remember my previous post about him) recently blogged about The Psychology of Waiting Lines. This reminded me of several connections to HCI:

• "Occupied Time Seems Shorter Than Unoccupied Time". We used this principle (as described in Tog's classic Keyboard v. Mouse and his update from the point of view of an airline passenger) in a HICSS article.
  
• After reading Sutton's message I vaguely remembered a study long ago that showed that telephone users take longer if they know someone else is waiting to use the phone. I found the article in Social Psychology Quarterly: "Waiting for a Phone: Intrusion on Callers Leads to Territorial Defense". Here's two sentences from the abstract: "Three correlational studies suggested that callers spent more time at the phone if they were intruded on. An experiment indicated that people stayed longer at the phone after an intrusion primarily because someone was waiting to use the phone rather than solely because of the presence of an intruder."

The other thing was seeing Stephen Pinker (a cognitive science person currently at Harvard) talk on BookTV about his latest book. You can see the same talk (with better audience questions) as given at Google, here. Caution! Pinker uses just about every swear word I've ever heard in his talk since he is discussing language and emotion. If you don't want to hear words like that, don't watch the video.

The part that reminded me of HCI is about 24:40 into the talk when Pinker discusses the Stroop effect. I have HCI students experience the Stroop effect themselves. It is a very robust effect, even if you try to avoid it. Try it yourself.

Anyway, Pinker discusses how swear words have a similar effect on performance. If you want to start with something lighter, Pinker was on the Colbert report, where he described in five words how brains work. Here he is, in two short videos: one, two.

Lessig-style update

Last year I gave a link to a talk by Larry Lessig to illustrate his presentation style, the visuals in particular.

The link I gave in my previous message doesn't work anymore, but you can see Lessig's TED talk from March 2007 "How creativity is being strangled by the law"

Made the big time: Slashdot

Speaking of Slashdot (see the end of this post), the grade changing indictments in the recent news spawned a Slashdot thread: "Does Hacking Grades Warrant 20 Years in Jail?".

N-version programming, and recalled algorithms

Software engineering notes always has a Risks to the Public distillation of the Risks Digest email list. One of the threads caught my eye (bad pun, you'll see). Since you need access to the ACM digital library to read SEN I've looked up the links to the Risks archives for the thread and put them below, in roughly the same order as they appeared in the September issue. Each post is a few paragraphs long, so if you are interested in software that might injury or kill someone, these are worth reading.

First, the FDA "recalled" two algorithms for two algorithms used by a LASIK eye surgery system.

This prompted a discussion of safety-critical software, and N-version programming. Some of the information presented about the space shuttle was wrong, but follow-up postings corrected the misinformation.

The LASIK issue prompted a suggestion about using more than one software"development team: "Improving reliability of health critical software, and some misinformation about the space shuttle software ("Improving reliability of critical software").

A wikipedia article is argued over, and then the shuttle software process discussed in two posts: "Space Shuttle uses 2-version programming" with further clarification "Re: Space Shuttle uses 2-version programming".

And finally, a some thought-provoking posts about events that almost never occur: "N-version programming & low-probability events" and "N-version programming -- the errors are in ourselves".

If you are interested in such things, don't forget a recent posting of mine.

Tarantulas, and brain implaints

Tarantulas make the front page of the winter 2007 edition of the Sequoia Natural History Association (SNHA) newsletter Seedlings. November is getting late to see them, but October is prime time for male tarantulas out of their burrows:

So, as the males make their journey to find a mate, we are able to enjoy this once a year visit outside their burrows. Unfortunately, the male spiders will only live a few months after mating while the females can live 25 to 30 years... but, there is comfort in knowing that their brief relationship will produce 50 to 2000 new offspring, some ready to visit us again in years to come."

A fun fact: tarantula hairs were the original itching powder. More creepily, tarantulas don't have red blood, instead they have blue haemolymph.

Changing subjects, deep brain implants are sometimes used to treat Parkinson's disease tremors. Spectrum has an article about an unintended side effect: patients acting more impulsively. If you're a computer person, you might also want to read the article about Slashdot.

And finally, something to ask Santa for: a personal submarine.

Warning: Major Geek Alert

Fathom is delivering mostly-live (the opposite of "mostly dead" -- see if you get that reference) events into movie theaters. A bit of the technology is explained here.

The majorly geeky part is for two November nights they will show The Menagerie from the original Star Trek series. Not my favorite episode, but I would like to see how the streaming high def video and audio work. Bonus geek points attending the 10:30pm Thursday evening showing.

Can The Princess Bride be far behind?

Extreme programming versus iterative development

This short report is a little dull, but the topic is important, and did I mention it was short?

Cusumano, M. A. 2007. Extreme programming compared with Microsoft-style iterative development. Commun. ACM 50, 10 (Oct. 2007), 15-18. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1290958.1290979

If you are a Fresno State person you can go directly to the article here.

University of Hawaii people can go here to access CACM, authenticate, then go to the October 2007 issue.

Space is a cold place

You might remember a recent incident where the International Space Station's (ISS) computers went down. Much international finger-pointing resulted. Now it turns out that condensation was the cause of the failure: an interesting summary of the NASA investigation.

Speaking of flying, many people use web-based "flight trackers" to check commercial flights. You'd assume that the flight trackers share the same base requirement of estimating arrival time. So, as Scott McCartney asks in his Wall Street Journal column, since when is four hours late considered "early"?

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’".