Getting better and better at not caring

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

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

The ethical mind (and bonus link)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Giant Orb from Niihau

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

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

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

More trouble than they're worth

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

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

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

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

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

Computer Science bachelor's and graduate degrees

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

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

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

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

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

Now that you are fascinated with landing an airplane

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

Pray that your electronics and autopilot are reliable.

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

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

What are they thinking up front?

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

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

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

Spaf on security

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

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

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

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

HICSS slides

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

Sittin' on a plane

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

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

A few more notes from HICSS:

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

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

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

Do you aspire to be a Scrum Master?

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

Some very interesting comments made by the speakers such as

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

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

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

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

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

A Goshen College - University of Hawaii connection

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the answer.

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

From today's LA Times article about libraries:

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

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

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

Copyright? Copyright? What's that?

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

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

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

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

A aircraft-like black box for your car?

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

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

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

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

From a strange comic blog

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

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

Cable cars

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

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

Mental gridlock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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