Scandalous toes, revised and expanded

Earlier this month a plea for faculty to dress better (“There is something about the combination of denim and tenure that is inherently preposterous") reminded me of other fashion brouhahas, like flip-flops at the Whitehouse or Marc Andreessen's bare feet on an April 1998 cover of Time, or 60 minutes' Mike Wallace's "pterodactyl-like bare feet" on the cover of the Times.

More recently I was thinking about how folks at Fast Company's top 50 company dressed for their photo shoot -- they're pretty casual at Google.

I forgot to mention two other things the first time I posted this:

• Calpoly SLO's troubled proposal for an engineering program in Saudi Arabia:

  Over five years, Cal Poly would receive $5.9 million from the Saudi government to create an engineering curriculum, build labs and train teachers in Jubail, a sprawling oil center on the Persian Gulf. Only men would qualify to take or teach engineering classes, although the campus has separate classes in other disciplines for women.
  
  "No matter how you cut it, we're supporting the oppression of women," said Jim LoCascio, a professor of mechanical engineering at Cal Poly since 1981.

• and more from UCSB Oceanographer Halpern about human impact on oceans. Syvia Earle (saw her downtown six years ago) says:

  “We learned more about the nature of the ocean in the latter part of the 20th century than during all preceding human history,” Dr. Earle said. “But we also lost more.”

  
  
  Much as she knows about oceans, she was not a big fan of the Fresno Sanitary Landfill being designated a national historical landmark:

  It also was made public that the Park Service's advisory board had voted 10-1 to place the landfill on the landmark list. The lone dissenter, ecologist Sylvia Earle, stated, "Being designated as a historic landmark connotes a certain distinction that implies honor. It just doesn't measure up."

  Why would "a dump" be considered for historical designation? Famous garbage anthropologist William Rathje explains:

  You might read that the first sanitary landfill opened in England. Wrong. As the nomination papers document, the first working sanitary landfill was opened in the real world of Fresno by Jean Vincenz, a man with vision–a vision tempered and sustained by his travels throughout the US to learn from what others tried that worked and what they tried that didn't. It wasn't rocket science, but it was extremely creative for its day–with carefully structured draglines to position refuse, techniques to compact the refuse, and at the end of the day the same draglines to spread soil as daily cover that had been dug out to make room for the next day's refuse. This was Vincenz's "sanitary landfill" system, created at the same time that virtually all of the rest of the country and the world were feeding the fires and rats in open dumps or unleashing a black rain of cinders, soot, and ash from the chimneys of refuse-burning facilities appropriately called destructors.

  Dr. Earle must have missed that part.

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.