Satellite debris or meteor?

Central Texas had a good show this morning: it was either a meteor or space junk (possible from the collided satellites)? A Discover magazine blog is covering it, and you can watch more video here.

You certainly don't want to be hit on the head by this stuff.

And some doomsday scenarios are not supported by science :) Is this related to my previous post?

Bonus: the DVD of the Big Creek/Huntington Lake episode of California's Gold is available. You might be able to catch a rerun on your favorite PBS channel.

A new Nigerian scam

Wow, renting-out other people's houses on craiglst.

The sacred and the secular

First, something cool from Lehman's Hardware: a wooden canteen, lined with paraffin (if you'd prefer a pitch lining, click here, or for plastic-lined, here).

Changing the subject, one of my colleagues sent me a link to "Born believers: How your brain creates God", which references an article about how "loss of control" changes our perception of patterns

Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas in Austin and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, asked people what patterns they could see in arrangements of dots or stock market information. Before asking, Whitson and Galinsky made half their participants feel a lack of control, either by giving them feedback unrelated to their performance or by having them recall experiences where they had lost control of a situation.

The results were striking. The subjects who sensed a loss of control were much more likely to see patterns where there were none. "We were surprised that the phenomenon is as widespread as it is," Whitson says.

We were already looking at that article to see if we could relate it to how people perceive the veracity of websites, something we've looked at before, most recently described in: "Web site credibility: Why do people believe what they believe? " published in the January 2009 issue of Instructional Science.

Back to the "Born believers" article, here's a statement to ponder: "While many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance."

Debugging your car, and wiretaps

Another provocative IEEE Spectrum article, this time claiming that a modern "premium class" car contains about 100 million LOC. Impressive, but could the decimal point be off, since even the article says that a Boeing 787 has 6.5 million LOC (I previously talked about the software architecture of the Boeing 777). Here's a quote:

John Voelcker, IEEE Spectrum’s automotive editor, wrote in April 2007 about the GMC Yukon hybrid automobile and its Two-Mode Hybrid automatic transmission. Voelcker told me that “of all the staff hours in the entire program to build the Two-Mode Hybrid transmission…some 70 percent…were devoted to developing the control software.”

Other tidbits:

• Does this mean that the realign-your-jaw procedures pushed by dentists is bunk? Bonus: bogus food allergies.
• How we choose candidates: "While gender bias related to a female candidate's attractiveness was consistent across both male and female voters, good looks was almost all that mattered in predicting men's votes for female candidates. And, true to prevailing stereotypes, competence was almost all that mattered in predicting men's votes for male candidates."
• Didn't we already know that altitude is bad for your brain, and that you never really "get used to it"? Edmund Hillary et al. studied it over 40 years ago during their "silver hut" expedition.
• Finally, success in graduate school is about gettin' stupid

Finally, we previously talked about how transpacfic cables come ashore near Morro Bay. The recent infuriating PBS Nova about the NSA listening to network traffic talks about the site and asks why the NSA put the supersecret listening equipment in San Francisco (where it was quickly found) instead of a remote building near San Luis Obispo. That part is the last few minutes of the video's Chapter 4.

From serendipitous rocket science to Sakai via 1856

I was googling for something last week and accidentally found a funny anecdote about "kindergarten rocket science".

But I think what I was looking for at the time were the 1856 reports authorized by congress to find railroad routes to the west and in California. That's because I was able to buy two more color engravings on ebay that had been removed from the reports. If I can find them cheap I hang on to them until someone shows a slight bit of interest in local history, then I gift them a print or two :) Volume V (scroll down) includes central California. Another interesting source is "Reconnaissance of the central San Joaquin Valley".

I'll scan them in color sometime, but there are low resolution black and white scans at the University of Michigan of the volumes, The most relevant lithographs to this area are: "plain between San Joaquin and King's rivers", "valley of the Kah-wee-ya river (Four Creeks)", and "plain between Kah-wee-ya and King's river". But there are also wood engravings in the text, such as "Tulare Valley, from the summit of the Tejon Pass".

Bonus: you really should spend some time with the Rumsey map collection.

Additional bonus: whinging and why you shouldn't do it. The talk is supposed to be about open source but is really about doing-not-just-complaining. Speaking of open source, you might want to watch a demo of the new Sakai 3.0 user experience, or watch the infamous Michael Wesch talk about "from Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able: Experiments in New Media Literacy" (you can skip the first 8 minutes of introductory comments).

Marshmallows as a personality test

The almost always interesting psych professor from Stanford, Philip Zimbardo, has a new book about how we experience time. This is indeed the guy you read about in your intro to psych class about the "Stanford Prison Experiment".

One of the things he talks about is another famous experiment tempting four year olds with marshmallows. You can see the brief video (and pitch for his new book) here. They retested the children 14 years later, and the kids that could delay marshmallow gratification were ... well I won't spoil it for you.

If you want more, there is video of his November 2008 presentation to the Commonwealth Club. Too long, but he also talks about how anti-drug programs like DARE don't work (and about addiction in general), risky driving, Monterey Bay sardines, and predictors of whether patients will complete their physical therapy.

At about 50:30 in the Commonwealth Club talk, Zimbardo talks about Fresno State prof's Bob Levine's book A Geography of Time. It is a different approach to time, and has some interesting culture-clash stories.

Bonus: More famous psych experiments you may have heard of: Elliot Aronson's "jigsaw classroom" technique for cooperative learning, and Stanley Milgram's shocking experiment.

Exercise for the reader: Design an experiment using marshmallows to screen applicants for software engineering jobs :)

Ah, multicast video

Was the inauguration a good case for multicast video? This summary from Merit Network said

Multicast connections, where multiple users are served by a single outgoing connection, provided Merit's members who are mulitcast-enabled with a more consistent rate of traffic, while campus networks that served unicast streaming traffic, with one stream for every single connection, experienced an exponential spike in traffic.

"Our Members who took advantage of multicast to view the Inauguration not only got great service, but didn't contribute to the traffic surge," Welch said.

"The impact of using multicast was significantly less for those Merit Members without a doubt," added Bob Stovall, vice president of network operations and engineering.

The graphs of traffic are interesting.

So is multicast the answer? Maybe not. Check this out: sending traffic from New Zealand to San Francisco and back to New Zealand because of cost.

Note to self: here is the online form to request CENIC to turn on multicast. Here's some of the 'channels" that are out there now.

Cockpit dynamics, undersea cable, national security

Another great post by Bob Sutton, this time about the recent airliner crash in the Hudson River and how no one died. He cites work by one of his mentors about the NASA cockpit studies I've talked about. Some highly excerpted quotes:

Richard [Hackman] is the world's expert on group effectiveness and I am lucky to count him as one of my mentors ... Some people in the groups area are more well-known in business circles, but Richard is the best, especially if you care about evidence rather than faith-based practices.

One of Richard's biggest research projects was on the dynamics of airline cockpit crews, and he devoted many days -- for over a year of his life -- sitting in the jump seat of the cockpit and observing and coding the dynamics if the dyad or triad. One of the main lessons that came from this --and related -- research is that the less time that a crew has been together, the more group dynamics problems they have and the more mistakes they make.

Bottom line: tired crews who've worked together make fewer mistakes than fresh crews who are new to each other.

As Hackman writes, he sometimes has the impulse, when boarding a commercial flight, to stick his head in the cockpit, and ask the crew if it is there first flight together -- the odds against an incident are very low even on first flights, but Hackman points out that your risk as a passenger would be far lower if you avoided first flights together.

Funny/sad bonus topic: AT&T is proposing bringing more transpacific fiber connections from Hawaii and Asia into their facility near Montana de Oro on the central California coast. You can see the environmental study (adverse effects are minimal since the conduit and facilities is already in place). But the funny/sad comments are here. In case they go away, here's the funny one -- "Is this necessary? I talk to Hawaii all day long using VOIP. We really don't need anymore fiber optic cables. Landlines are on the way out" -- and the both at once uninformed (there are already fiber optic cables coming onshore at that location) and corrective comment -- "It certainly doesn't sound good for Montana De Oro and I'm also against that location choice. That being said, fiber optic cables are the necessary 'backbone' that connect wireless and wired voice and data everywhere - how do you think your VOIP gets to Hawaii?"

There's a nice detailed list of Pacific undersea cables here. More information about the Montana de Oro and the Grover Beach cable landings on this guy's blog.

Another bonus topic, this one pretty sad, and something the new administration will need to pay attention to: the security situation in Mexico (see AP story, Reuters column, and WSJ column).

Good enough software

Steve's post about zen and software for some reason reminded me of James Bach, the famous software consultant. Note that the name of Bach's website is satisfice.com. He's known for the idea of good enough testing and software, but "good enough" in a good way -- see the Herb Simon idea of satisficing.

Before you know it, Steve will be posting about the application of Carse's Finite and Infinite Games to software development -- but wait, Peter Denning and Alistair Cockburn beat him to it :)

Bonus Alan Kay quote (from when he was leaving Atari): "'I guess the tree of research must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of bean counters.''

Rebooting and security

This week in San Jose the National Science Foundation is bringing together academics and industrialists at the Rebooting Computing: The magic and beauty of computer science symposium. The list of participants is amazing. Here is an example, but you'll have to sign up (free) on the reebootingcomputing.org site for an account, and then login before you can see this -- a forum thread where Alan Kay, Gene Spafford, Grady Booch, and Dennis Frailey talk about open source software, security, and trustworthyness. After you login in, here are links to:

• Frailey on defense contractors and FOSS
• Spafford's response, talking about security
• Alan Kay (and if you scroll down, Booch and Vint Cerf) respond.

One of the better signal to noise ratio discussions I've read in a while.

I've also posted two comments to Steve's post about security. No guarantee about my signal to noise ratio :)

Software engineering, inauguratorial regalia

Was JFK the last president to wear a top hat at inauguration? If you are a little late putting together your wardrobe for the 20th, I recommend this or if you are feeling more patriotic, this.

The IEEE Computer Society is commemorating 25 years of Software magazine. Some of articles are available to nonmembers and some are interesting (feel free to draw your own Venn diagram):

• C's Brian Kernighan on sometimes the old ways are best (he complains about linux breaking wc)
• Niklaus Wirth's (father of Pascal) brief history of software engineering
• and the "top 35" articles published in Software so far. I think I have just found the syllabus for a intro software engineering graduate class :)

Bonus: A free 2009 downloadable calendar from Dr. Dobbs. Believe me, if you are a software developer, you need it for your cubicle.

Bonus bonus: Technology Review created an oral history of space tourism by interviewing five of the six Soyuz passengers to the space station and interleaving their responses. Just like with commercial airlines, Anousheh Ansari's luggage was lost and she ended up with men's shaving cream and cologne instead of her stuff.

Doesn't it seem like microgravity would be good for back pain? But astronauts frequently complain of lower back pain maybe because the spine decompresses.

Methodist Ministers and other topics

Assorted things:

• Bob Sutton uses a study of Methodist ministers to draw conclusions about leadership.
• The Dirty Jobs host talks about peripeteia, anagnorisis, and finding value in your work.
• One of my neighbors has a stinky fireplace, I hope they are consulting this.
• Kathy Sierra from the 2008 O'Reilly emerging technologies conference mentions the Alan Kay video I've talked about previously.
• And Kent Beck from the 2008 O'Reilly Rails conference retrospects about the last 20 years of his work in extreme programming, Smalltalk (there's Alan Kay again), design patterns, and the influence of physical architecture.
• Guy Kawasaki at the November 2008 Commonwealth Club on "No Bull Shiitake". He talks about Steve Jobs, Woz, Obama, the best part of working at Apple in the early days, funding young entrepreneurs.

Unintended user interface consequences

NASA released the report of the Columbia accident. The gruesome stuff was redacted, but there is plenty description of how things ended. But I was interested in the following user interface problem (I've italicized the interface problem, and ACES = Advanced Crew Escape Suit, i.e. pressure suit):

Deorbit burn occurred at GMT 13:15:30 (EI–1719/TIG+0). The burn was nominal, and Columbia began entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Per the checklist, a few tasks remain to be completed after the burn, including stowing the last laptop computer, which requires a crew member to be out of the seat. Crew equipment configuration items on the entry checklist (all crew members seated and strapped in, helmets and gloves donned, and suit pressure checked) were not entirely completed prior to EI. At least one crew member was not wearing the helmet and several were not wearing gloves. The flight deck video shows that conditions on the flight deck were nominal during the entire time of the video recording. The video shows the flight deck crew finishing most checklist tasks close to the planned times. However, one flight deck crew member did not yet have gloves in place in time for the ACES pressure check. One event of note occurred at GMT 13:36:04 (EI–485/TIG+1234) when the CDR bumped the rotational hand controller (RHC) accidentally. Movement of the RHC out of the centered position caused the digital autopilot (DAP) to “downmode” from the “Auto” mode to “Inertial” mode. When this occurred, a “DAP DOWNMODE RHC” caution and warning message was displayed, the INRTL button on the C3 panel was illuminated, and a tone, which can be heard in the recovered flight deck video, was annunciated. An immediate reactivation of the autopilot was performed by the CDR. The capsule communicator (CAPCOM) in the Mission Control Center (MCC) then requested the CDR to enter “another Item 27,” which is a command to fully recover the vehicle attitude from the bumped RHC. Bumping of the RHC is a relatively common occurrence by either the PLT or the CDR because the ACES is bulky and the area near the controls is confined. Such RHC bumps with prompt recovery represent a very low hazard to the crew. The original design specifications of the orbiters were for a shirtsleeve environment (i.e., no special clothing needed to be worn). Although pressure suits have been worn during launch and entry since the Challenger accident, no modifications were made to displays and controls to accommodate the ACES.

So as a result of the previous Challenger accident and the requirement to wear a pressure suit, bumping the controller is "relatively common".

The mention of the Digital Autopilot (DAP) caught my eye since back in the day we looked at reverse engineering formal specifications for a small portion as a demonstration. Also in the Columbia report is a discussion of the reaction control system (RCS) jets, that were firing continuously just before loss of control, trying to correct the flawed flight. That also reminded me that the bigger group we were associated with at NASA JPL was looking at formally specifying the RCS "jet select" system.

Office Space

We've previously talked about office space for knowledge workers, and Joel's post on the new Fog Creek offices (see slideshow) got me thinking about it again. Joel has some funny quotes

And I also knew that if I wasn’t intimately involved in every detail of the construction, we’d end up with the kind of life-sucking dreary cubicle hellhole made popular by the utopian workplace in “Office Space.”

Joel likes his Herman Miller and Arne Jacobsen chairs.

I like an Aeron chair and multiple big monitors as much as the next guy, but is it really worth it to have custom remodeled office in Manhattan? I've asked the same questions about ACM's NYC headquarters. How about puttin' it in Minot and saving us ACM members some money? :)

But seriously, I have no problem with providing a good environment to keep software people productive and satisfied. When I was at the Software Engineering Institute every office had a french door, and either a window or a view to the outside through the french door. The building was designed for the SEI (a description in architect-speak is here). One thing that didn't seem to work was from each office to the outside hall or lobby was a large but short conduit. I think the idea was to keep noise down by putting the computer outside in the hallway. I didn't see anyone actually do that :) Other things I seem to remember is people putting their MBTI diagram outside their office door so that you knew the personality you'd encounter, and a heuristic about office doors: closed and latched means don't bother me, closed but ajar means knock and come in if it's important, and open meant all visitors are welcome :)

Probably the nicest place I hung around was the short-lived Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, famous for its graduate software engineering program. It was a former seminary in the New England woods, and had its own pond. The key to the rowboat could be checked out from the receptionist; the boat was great for thinking. The library was the former chapel. Great place, but while we were there Dr. Wang announced he was closing the Institute.

In contrast, JPL and KSC tended to be DIlbertian cube farms for the most part, and unfortunately that's essentially what we have at Digital Campus now at Fresno State.

Bonus: the sad state of the Open Office (OO.o) project: "it should be clear that OO.o is a profoundly sick project, and worse one that doesn't appear to be improving with age."

Bill-Bill-Bill-Bill-Bill Nye the Science Guy

After his short lived marriage (or non-marriage) to the author of Mozart in the Jungle (a steamy look at the world of classical musicians) Bill Nye is back on the air with Stuff Happens.

I watched the "Where's the Beef" episode where Bill says that cows make more greenhouse gases than planes and cars combined, and that if you eat the US average amount of beef, it's like driving an extra 5000 miles/year. He also had some interesting things to say about organic wines vs wines from organic grapes, and cloth versus disposable diapers. As he points out, the latter question is not easy to answer, sort of like the disposable versus ceramic cup question.

Trivia:

• Blair Tindall, Bill's ex who once put a menacing coffee pot on his porch, interviewed Oliver Sacks for the LA Times about musicophilia.
• While I was at the Pasadena convention center waiting for the Mars Polar Lander to arrive at Mars (it never did), I was able to talk to Andrew Chaikin, Robert Jastrow, and Bill himself (as well as be within spittin' distance of Story Musgrave, and hearing Gary Sinise talk about the disappointing Mission to Mars)

Bob Sutton again

Another good post by Stanford business professor Bob Sutton. This one is "in praise of simple competence", and quotes someone who quotes someone: "Strategy is for amateurs; execution is for professionals".

Other ones you might remember:

• Downsizing
• Car horns
• Perverse incentives
• Medical bullies
• Performance evaluations
• Infant mortality
• Waiting in line
• Indifference

MacHEADS, the next Trekkies?

MacHEADS The Movie: A documentary of Apple users, see the trailer and blog. Reminds me a little of Trekkies (and Trekkies 2).

Is that the one where Shatner tells a convention hall audience to "get a life"? No that was a Saturday Night Live skit. I can't find a legal copy of that, but you can watch John Belusi as Kirk, Chevy Chase as Spock, and Dan Aykroyd as McCoy. You though that was bad? The infamous Congress of Wonders on their 1970 album Revolting did an 11 minute parody infused with drug and sex references. You can listen to it by clicking on the picture of the two CoW guys to pop up a list of audio files (but you've been warned).

Speaking of Shatner, you can now watch episodes of his Biography channel Raw Nerve. So far I've learned that Valerie Bertinelli would be difficult to live with, and that Kelsey Grammer surfs.

Sixty minutes

Interesting 60 Minutes tonight: A story on airport "security theater", with substantial clips of security expert Bruce Schneier (we've talked about him before), another on our governor and his vegetable oil powered Hummer, and a story on orphaned elephants.

Maybe elephants, like octopuses, prefer high def television. I know I do.

A pedestrian scramble

Three short things:

• A funny little column about roadway terminology in Spectrum (we previous talked about traffic calming).
• An article about my Ph.D. advisor's software safety group and what they've found out about electronic voting machines.
• An American Airlines pilot details his last flight before retiring, including what those chimes mean during the flight.

Sugar and poinsettias

The LA Times reviews an end of the year issue of the British Medical Journal summarizing weird things (you can listen to the podcast here). Some things aren't too weird -- I though that poinsettias aren't poisonous is common knowledge. But kids and sugar? This shouldn't be too surprising:

Studies showed that children who consume large amounts of sugar are no more hyperactive than those who don't. But parents who think their kids have eaten sugar, even when they haven't, tend to rate them as being hyperactive.

Another thing in the news lately is a about workplace friendships. Actually, it is about workplace socializing (more about workplace friendships later):

Pentland and Waber found that the badge wearers with more social connections -- and more interactions with coworkers in their social network -- had the highest productivity, whether they were talking about work or, say, basketball. And people who spent the most time "in the groove," moving rhythmically as they went about their work, had higher productivity levels than others.

The badges

kept track of the wearers' location, direction, and voice inflections. When one badge wearer met another, the length and tone of the wearers' conversation was measured. The badges could even track subtle body shifts when wearers were sitting down. Then the researchers compared that data with the wearers' productivity.

You can read their paper from the April 2008 Journal of Information Processing and see data from one conversation among four people in Figure 1.

Does this offer anything to the long debate about workplace friendships?