Cable cars

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

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

Mental gridlock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Updates

Here's a few updates on previous postings:

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

Nickel and diming it

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

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

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

The beyond

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

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

books

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

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

Is that for here or to go?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Yorker festival videos

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

Those pesky IEEE Fellows predicting the future again

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

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

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

AI and HCI

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

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

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

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

Launch and re-entry

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

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

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

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

Quixotic Bubble Busting

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

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

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

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

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

Tufte and Friedman

Two unrelated things I've blogged about before:

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

The party of the first part vs. the part of the second part

TheSmokingGun.com is well-known for its extensive collection of performers' contracts. The Los Angeles Times recently printed details of not only some of the Orange County Fair's performers' backstage requests, but also their performance fees.

For example, Paul Simon is getting $325k plus 85% of gross box office revenue. Michael Bolton: $85k plus a $10k bonus for a sold out show.

Brats, bibliographies, peer review

Two things that caught my eye this week:

Lamentations on user interfaces. In the July+August issue of interactions the editor has a rant about "woe-besieged" users. He says

Office productivity tools make you do somersaults to undo their automatic formatting. .. When you try to do something that a product's designers didn't anticipate, some products exact their revenge. They do the digital equivalent of throwing everything into a heap, leaving it up to you to clean up the mess all by yourself. This is marginally acceptable behavior from a two-year-old child...

Also this week I read an insightful rant by a writer for MIT Technology Review talking about Web 2.0. The part that I thought was interesting was when he says that most users need very little of the functionality provided by software manufacturers. This might remind you of the 90-10 (or 80-20, or ...) heuristic.

Here's the relevant quote:

For years, software makers, notably Microsoft, have struggled with the bloatware dilemma. A small fraction of their users want specialized, elaborate new functions; moreover, the software makers themselves need to keep adding features to justify upgrades. But the more niche features they add, the more complex, buggy, and expensive their programs become, and the more off-putting they can seem to most users. The likes of Voo2do, iOutliner, Google Calendar, and the new Google Spreadsheets have solved this problem by ignoring it. They do most things that most users of their desktop counterparts want -- but almost nothing that the specialized user might. Writely lets me make bullet-point lists and choose from several fonts -- but I can't add footnotes or easily change the column layout. Google Spreadsheets lets me enter formulas and values as easily as Excel does, but it cannot produce graphs or charts. And the online to-do list systems lack some of the more sophisticated features I like in BrainStorm and Zoot. The result of this short-tailism might be a curious new "long-tail" division between online and desktop applications: the free online apps will be for ordinary users under routine circumstances, while for-pay desktop apps may become even more bloated and specialized for high-end users.

Publication and knowledge. Also in the July+August interactions Aaron Marcus asks "Where do we turn for advice?" and goes on to talk about the user interface tomes. He begins by talking about the third edition of The Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics and says

There are two other competing handbooks with almost identical titles: The Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction,by Helander, Landauer and Prabhu, whose second edition published with Elsevier, with 1,582 pages, appeared in 1997, and the equally monolithic The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook by Jacko and Sears, whose first edition of 1,277 pages appeared in 2003... The second of these three handbooks features an editorial board of 14 and 104 contibutors to 62 chapters. The third compendium features 23 advisory board members and 121 contributers to 64 chapters... Other than giving a large number of people opportunities to expound on topics of their expertise, experience, and interest, are these documents worth their weight, to say nothing of their cost?

He goes on to talk about online resources, speculating that "the younger generations may grow increasingly fond of Internet-based resources and eschew the classic paper-oriented resources".

Finally, in the same issue of interactions, Jonathan Grudin has an article you'd never read based on the title: "Death of a Sugar Daddy: The Mystery of the AFIPS Orphans". It's actually a story of looking for the owner of the copyright of classic computer science works. But for me, the most interesting part was his characterization of the state of computer science publishing:

In many fields, journals rely on peer review and conferences use more inclusive approaches as a way to build community. But much of US computer science has shifted its quality showcase from journals to highly selective peer-reviewed conferences. Journal peer review is an awesome resource-free consulting by experts - and journal acceptance rates are higher than those of our conferences, because journals make heavy use of "revise and resubmit" decisions. Last week I spoke to a researcher who said "when I was coming up for tenure I stopped submitting to conferences and just submitted to journals. I've never had a journal submission rejected, but about half of my conference papers are rejected."

OK, I said two things but there is one more. In the July issue of CACM Michael Cusumano writes "What road ahead for Microsoft and Windows?" It's a perfect story for a software engineering class: 50 million LOC and "gridlock".

Making even small changes in one part of the product led to unpredictable and destabilizing consequences in other parts since most of the components were tied together in complex and unpredictable ways. Even 4,000 or so software developers and an equivalent number of software testers was not enough to get Longhorn working.

Less carbon, fewer reporters, great books

Three unrelated things:

• My previous post was about carbon dispensations. The conference I am attending is cooperating with CarbonFund.org and for only $25 I can assuage my guilt, and get a button to wear at the conference.
  
• Back in my UCSB days I was an apologist of the local newspaper, the Santa Barbara News-Press. The paper is in the news with seven editors and reporters resigning in the last two days. A quote from the LA Times article about the News-Press' local zillionaire owner Wendy McCaw:
  

  
  McCaw, 55, bought the paper in 2000 for an estimated $100 million or more, using a fortune she built from a divorce settlement she won from cellphone magnate Craig McCaw.
  
  She immediately gained a reputation as an iconoclastic newspaperwoman, favoring strong environmental protections in many instances but also demonstrating a libertarian's distrust of government. An early editorial during her tenure called for an end to the Thanksgiving tradition of eating turkey because of the suffering of the "unwilling participant."
  

  
  
• The British Library digitized 15 amazing old books, from da Vinci, to Mozart, to Blackwell's botanical illustrations. There default interface is really annoying (Shockwave) but you can click on "alternative versions" for a more normal web interface.
  

Carbon dispensations

Have a desire to be "carbon neutral"? Several sites calculate your share of a flight's CO2 emissions and allow you to purchase a dispensation :)

For example, www.offsetters.com says my part of a LAX-HNL roundtrip's CO2 emissions can be offset for $39.60 (Canadian dollars), which is about ... $33.34 USD.


www.atmosfair.de is a more complicated site (Conde Nast Traveler says "It offers a complete exegesis of its emissions calculator's figures and methods, which have been vetted by Germany's Federal Environment Agency") and even allows you to select the type of aircraft.

I'm not sure what those companies do with the conscience-clearing money you send in. So, since I've been supporting Trees for the Future for decades, so I think I'll just continue that :)

Rules for Developing Safety Critical Code

Since I've spent quite a bit of time at JPL, some of it doing formal specification and verification, this article in the latest IEEE Computer caught my eye.

It's a short essay giving ten "rules" for safety critical software development. Some of it reminds me of cleanroom software engineering (with the exception of Rule 10 :)

UC bad news, whale good news

Two unrelated things:

The chancellor (many universities would call it "president") of the University of California, Santa Cruz jumped to her death. What do you think of the excerpt below from the local newspaper article?

But many have said Denton was unhappy at UCSC, reported John Wilkes, recently retired director of the Science Communication Program.

"No one could say quite why — it was just a bad fit," he said. "She might have been unused to dealing with people outside of science and engineering, because she never had to deal with them before."

How does a UC campus choose a chancellor? UC Merced is losing both their founding chancellor and provost. Here is a brief description of the chancellor-selection process. Also, UC Merced is losing their provost (to become president of UNLV!) 1 July.

I previously posted about UC woes.

Changing subjects completely, adding to my previous postings about whales, here is a video of a whale examining some underwater equipment. But where was the underwater equipment? That video says Perth, while a rival YouTube site says Galveston, Texas :)

Big Island coastline

I previously posted a link to images of the entire California coastline. Now someone has done the same thing for the Big Island of Hawaii. You can read an article from the Star Bulletin, or go directly to the photographer's page.

It's a little annoying since you need to click on either "Aerial Photographs" or "every square inch of coastline". But after you pick a spot to start, you can go forward and back just like the California coastline website.

I like this quote from the article:

Powers flew his single-engine Piper Cherokee 160 at 500 feet, holding his Nikon D100 camera out the window and firing off pictures of the nearly 300 miles of coastline.

"It took some practice. You have to do two things really well: You have to be able to take good photos and be a good pilot," Powers said. "You can't focus too much on either one."

If you are, say, going to attend a fascinating workshop on IT planning at HICSS in January, you might want to stay at the conference hotel. You can see it by clicking on "Waikoloa Resort" on the Big Island map.