Something from social psych and something from cog sci

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lessig-style update

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

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

Made the big time: Slashdot

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

N-version programming, and recalled algorithms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tarantulas, and brain implaints

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

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

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

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

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

Warning: Major Geek Alert

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

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

Can The Princess Bride be far behind?

Extreme programming versus iterative development

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

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

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

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

Space is a cold place

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

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

Glass cockpits, social interfaces

The October 2007 issue of Computer has a good two page article about software and modern avionics. This is one of the few places where you will find definitions for such things as "full-authority" digital engine control. Here's a quote:

GE aircraft engines can downlink operational data during flight to GE's Remote Monitoring Center near Cincinnati, Ohio. The center can analyze the data in real time, thereby enabling the scheduling of essential maintenance if necessary while an aircraft is still in flight.

The article is available to everyone without subscription. Thank you John Knight.

If that interests you, I suggest looking at Lala and Harper's paper " Architectural principles for safety-critical real-time applications". Since that paper was written in the mid-1990s, the Boeing 777 avionics were being developed:

The Boeing 777 flight control computer ... takes design diversity well beyond what has ever been tried in pratice or even in a research laboratory. The initial concept rested on three quad redundant computers with each of the quads implemented in dissimilar hardware and programmed in dissimilar software ... The software design diversity has since been simplified to use only Ada, although three different compilers are still under consideration to generate code for the three types of microprocessors ... The hardware design has also been simplified to a 3 by 3 matrix of 9 processors.

Changing the subject, I like reading Joel on Software, but cringe when Joel goes too far. The almost-always-interesting Michael Feldstein takes Joel to task about social interfaces. It's from a couple of years ago, but still interesting.

Joel may be off about social interfaces, but he has an interesting recent post about a disturbing bug in Excel.

Harvard Business Review cartoons

Many of the cartoons from the Harvard Business Review are online free (most the articles are pay-to-read). The October issue has a cartoon that cubicle dwellers understand. I haven't figured out how to go directly to arbitrary HBR monthly comics, but here is the link to October's, and you can see more by using the Browse Issue function on the right, pick the month you want, and then click Cartoons.

Besides the cube cartoon, farther down the page is a good one for anyone going to too many meetings.

Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations

This is a good time in the semester to review students' options for common tasks like word processing, spreadsheeting, and presenting.

Microsoft is encouraging students to "steal" Office for $59.95. Frugal users of the free demo versions may be able to get through the semester before reaching the 25 use limit:

Eligible students may have free access to Microsoft® Office Ultimate 2007 Trial for a limited amount of time. Each trial provides (1) 25 application launches (each launch of an individual Office Ultimate application is counted as one launch) before the software goes into reduced functionality mode (at which time your software behaves similarly to a viewer, you cannot save modifications to documents or create any new documents, and additional functionality might be reduced)...

A free alternative is Google Docs, and with a recently added presentation tool, you have the triumvirate of word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations anywhere you are online and have a web browser. If you aren't doing anything too fancy, you should be able to load your Microsoft Office files into Google Docs. It's also easy to share all of the above with other users. And, it's free.

Another free alternative (if you are comfortable with installing open source software) is OpenOffice. A plus for OpenOffice is it's multiplatform.

More open source software: for Macs, for Windows.

Sakai usability, short low fidelity training videos

Michael Feldstein has hope that Sakai's user experience is getting the attention it needs so much of:

Sakai has had some fairly serious usability problems since its inception. The development community has been aware of these problems for some time; however, the efforts toward improving the situation have been sporadic and fragile to date. Today, I’m happy to point to some tangible signs that this is changing, and that we have a good chance of seeing some real improvement starting with the next release.

(For all you HCI students out there, they even do UX walkthroughs).

Speaking of users, the Common Craft Show is a nice example of short online training videos that remind me of the interface development technique of paper prototyping. You should watch this one about social networking and del.icio.us. Note that they provide captioned versions, and a transcript. (I show a bit of Jakob Nielsen's video about paper prototyping to my HCI class, it's amusing).

Two bonus things:

1. The author of Debunking the myths of innovation is interviewed on the UIE site. Here's a couple of sentences:

   I think it's pretty rare that "the best" idea among experts in any field becomes the dominant, mass popular leader. HTML is not the "best" programming language. Certainly few computer scientists believe Microsoft Windows is the best operating system, and very few doctors believe Airborne is the best cold remedy.



2. The New York Times has given up its online paid service Times Select. Now your T-Fried is free, but you will see ads :)
   

Two things I learned today

Since you learn something new every day, and I learned two things today, I am going to take tomorrow off.

First, I learned about this interesting cross-platform, web-based drawing tool called gliffy (you can see a demo video).

The second thing I learned about are funkenrings. Penn Gillette suggested it to mythbuster Adam as an inexpensive way to add sparkle to the practical jokes on the electricians and sound people. Funkenrings are discussed about 34 minutes and 50 seconds into this interview of Adam on Penn's defunct radio show.

Tickets are on sale for the Mythbusters' Fresno State visit on 12 February 2008. If you are really into this, you can see Penn, Adam, Jamie, and Kari on YouTube.

I'm kidding about taking tomorrow off :)

Classic books and new citations

Over a year ago I posted about the effort to put classic computer science books into the ACM Digital Library. Now you can peruse the ACM Classic book series, including the Macintosh human interface guidelines, Essays in computer science, The elements of programming style, Cryptography and data security (I knew it well in UCSB days), Papert's Mindstorms, The multics system, and others. If you are a Fresno State person you can access the classics here, and if you aren't, you can go here.

The ACM also semi-quietly announced that online publication is primary, with hardcopy "simply a secondary distribution mechanism unbundled from the official publication in the DL" [Digital Library]. You can read the short article here or if you are a Fresno State person, here. The new style bibliographic entry looks like

Demaine, E. D., Iacono, J., and Langerman, S. 2007. Retroactive data structures. ACM Trans. Algor. 3, 2, Article 13 (May 2007), 20 pages. DOI = 10.1145/1240233.1240236.

Note the DOI.

Avionics, datelines, and shopping carts

The Risks Digest (volume 24, issue 58) described the F-22 Raptor software glitching at the international date line when the planes were going from Hawaii to Okinawa. Pretty interesting (and there is a footnote about the apocryphal F-16 that flipped crossing the equator). Someone who worked on the F-22 system responded to the reports.

Another short, interesting article is in the September 2007 IEEE Computer. "Online experiments: Lessons learned" is about testing prototype interfaces and systems. Here's two paragraphs:

Experimenters often ignore secondary metrics that impact the user experience such as JavaScript errors, customer-service calls, and Web-page loading time. Experiments at Amazon.com showed that every 100-ms increase in the page load time decreased sales by 1 percent, while similar work at Google revealed that a 500-ms increase in the search-results display time reduced revenue by 20 percent.

You can read it here (or if you want to see the official citation, it's here).

Speaking of JavaScript, Jim Horning noticed his typing deteriorating, so went to a doctor for neurological testing. The diagnosis was IE 7. See his message and follow-up. All you really need is a mid-1980s Mac anyway.

Outposts, process, and brains

Microsoft is opening a software development outpost in Honolulu. I didn't know they had such things, but the article says there are also groups in Reno and Fargo.

Something else that caught my eye recently was a three paragraph column in the September Harvard Business Review about process improvement. The webpage might say something like "subscribe to read the rest of the article" but you've already read it on the preview page, it really is only three paragraphs long :)

And I'm not sure why, but I was reminded again of Oliver Sacks (you'll remember that I mentioned him back in April). His The man who mistook his wife for a hat is one of the influential books on my academic career (and in 2006 was named number 18 on Discover magazine's top 25 science books of all time). The book, and access to colleagues and interesting data at the UCSF Fresno Medical Education Program inspired a short presentation that we never got to follow-up. Anyway, Sacks was recently appointed an "artist" at Columbia University, so he can do what he wants :)

Sacks isn't a great speaker, but he seems a lot better than when I saw him at Caltech. He gave a interesting, about 25 minute long, keynote at an MIT conference about disabilities and technology. You can click on the button to go straight to the keynote (but why is MIT using Real video format?) -- and John Hockenberry is pretty good too (he talks about how typewriters were initially hyped as a way for the blind to write).

The New Yorker also has audio of an interview where Sacks talks about music and the mind -- it's amusing.

One other crazy thing: When in Tuscon as one of ACM's judges for the 1996 International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) I drove out to Biosphere 2 to peek in the windows (and buy a refrigerator magnet memento). Biospshere 2 was sold this summer to housing developers, although the University of Arizona says they will continue research in the big greenhouse.

Chess, trailers, and grapes

The latest Technology Review has an column by cognitive scientist/philosopher Daniel Dennett about the tenth anniversary of Kasparov losing a match to Deep Blue (free registration is required). I happened to be at the ACM conference the year before where Kasparov lost a game to Deep Blue, but won the prize money. I remember his chess-equivalent-of-a-rock-star entrance (and entourage) at the awards banquet to receive his $400,000 winner's check :)

Also in Tech Review is a profile of a controversial researcher who believes resveratrol is a key to long life, so keep eating those grapes (or drinking red wine). Here's a quote from the article:

Sinclair's basic claim is simple, if seemingly improb­able: he has found an elixir of youth. In his Australian drawl, the 38-year-old Harvard University professor of pathology explains how he discovered that resveratrol, a chemical found in red wine, extends life span in mice by up to 24 percent and in other animals, including flies and worms, by as much as 59 percent. Sinclair hopes that resveratrol will bump up the life span of people, too. "The system at work in the mice and other organisms is evolutionarily very old, so I suspect that what works in mice will work in humans," he says.

Some NASA news: Dawn sent me this link about how the Apollo 12 quarantine trailer ended up on a fish farm in Alabama.

Finally, in local news: The first meeting of the Central Valley Cafe Scientifiqué is in October about sea otters. And, the securities and exchange commission (SEC) charged a local company with an illegal stock scheme involving about $1.5 million. If you lost money, you might remember some of the players from IQ Biometrix days.

Corn, spy planes, tunnels, and vanity

Some miscellaneous stuff: An article about "The Ethanol Scam" from Rolling Stone magazine.

An ABC News reporter gets a ride in U2 spy plane.

Shocking tales of the underground (tunnels on university campuses) and more about university tunnels and even more about Caltech's and Columbia's tunnels.

Finally, I was surprised to see how many times I came up in a search of NASA documents.

Security

Back in April I wrote about ONE QUART ZIP TOP BAGS. Airport security is in the news again:

• A new TSA directive as of yesterday about what kinds of electronics needs to be removed from your carry-on luggage for scanning (in addition to laptops computers).
  
• A summary of a Q&A with security expert Bruce Schneier at DefCon. An excerpt:
  

  
  The first thing he talked about was the need for ID to fly on US airlines, or lack thereof... Bruce says you simply need to go to the airline and say that you don't have an ID. You will be issued a boarding pass with "No ID" on it... So, the whole no fly list thing just went out the door. If you are an evildoer, just buy a ticket under someone else's name, go up and say you lost your ID, and go on through. Security theater at it's finest. Luckily, this only inconveniences you if you are honest.
  

  
  
• Schneier does his own Q&A with the head of the TSA.

asps

Steve's gopher snake picture (click on "Mill Creek is completely dry") reminded me of these two rattlesnakes on the Sierra Foothill Conservancy property. It's a busy place: you can read about a three-way bobcat fight, or rowdy hummingbirds. Here's a quote:

As you may suspect by observing the behavior of males around a feeder, they are so busy threatening their rivals that they may lose as much as 20% of their body weight during the mating season.