My nemesis

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

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

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

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

Here's even more pictures, courtesy of UCB.

Jumpseats, Cars, Beaches

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

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

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

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

Polio? yuck.

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

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

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

Enhanced color vision

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

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

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

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

Time: Subjective and Objective

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

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

Santa Barbara whales

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

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

P.S. about Einstein

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

My Einstein inadequacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not exactly UFOs, but strange flying things

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

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

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

disposable or reusable revisited

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

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

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

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

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

Duh.

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

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

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

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

How about this (emphasis added):

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

Isn't data interesting :)

More Malc

A few more Malcolm Gladwell videos:

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

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

Things higher-ed related

A few things related to universitying:

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

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

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

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

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

Cleaning a whale from the inside

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

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

Quay Valley Ranch

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two recent newspaper articles

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

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

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

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

Beverage recommendations

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

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

That is all.

People still use film?

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

And then there is the shoe carnival.

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

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

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

You can read more about it here.

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

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

The revenuers are coming

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

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

Hey! Watch out for that fomite over there!

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

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

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

:)

Getting better and better at not caring

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

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

The ethical mind (and bonus link)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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