Don't fail to miss it

Spinal Tap is on tour again, this time Unwigged and Unplugged, NPR's Talk of the Nation interviewed the three surviving (i.e., not drummers) band members yesterday.

Talk of the Nation today had a more serious topic: whether the workplace should be colorblind. Interesting topic, but I couldn't get the link on the Exploring Race blog to the journal article to open. I think this is it: Is Multiculturalism or Color Blindness Better for Minorities? If you're a Fresno State person you should be able to get the PDF here.

What if your genes don't fit anymore?

This column from the NY Times reminded me of a couple of things: studies of identical twins, and a recent author who spoke at Reedley College and the Reedley Peace Center. First a quote from the NY Times column:

In one study, women whose identical twin suffered from depression were significantly more likely to have been assaulted, lost a job, divorced, or had a serious illness or major financial problems than people whose fraternal twin was depressed. ... These bad events did not occur because the women were depressed, as the correlations persisted even when women who were currently depressed were excluded from the study. Thus, genes can act on the same disorder by making people more sensitive to stressful environmental events and by making these events more likely to occur.

And for those of you "getting older", read the penultimate paragraph of the column.

The author I heard talk was promoting her book Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend. She gave almost the exact talk as she did on BookTV (even where she made a slight mistake in delivery), but if you watch the BookTV talk skip the introductions since the audio is terrible. It cleans up when she starts talking.

One thing that was in her Reedley talk but not on BookTV was a bit of a slam of Zimbardo's prison "experiment". I think that was a little unfair and is probably the result of an engineering professor's (her) definition of "experiment" compared to a social psychologist's view. She did made a good point that Zimbardo's prison experiment suffered from selection bias:

Also, it has been argued that selection bias may have played a role in the results. Researchers from Western Kentucky University recruited students for a study using an advertisement similar to the one used in the Stanford Prison Experiment, with and without the words "prison life." It was found that students volunteering for a prison life study possessed dispositions toward abusive behavior.

Anyway, after she started talking I realized that years ago I'd read her book about being an observer/translator on Russian fishing boats, as part of a US-Russian joint fishing effort. Interesting book.

Amish furniture

Admit it, when you can't sleep you've been tempted to buy a genuine electric Amish heater. Of course, it's an "'Amish' Heater the Amish Couldn't Use".



This is not to be confused with the Electric Amish band and their hit songs.

What I learned from tonight's Thomas Jefferson Hour

He had a pet mockingbird named Dick (at the end of episode 760 "Felons and ipods") that used to fly around the White House.

From the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia:

The mockingbirds Jefferson purchased in the 1770s came with only a stock of songs from the woods and fields of Charles City County. He must have provided additional musical instruction himself. If he in fact carried a bird to France in 1784, it may have added to its repertoire some sounds common to mockingbirds imported from America. After their month-long transatlantic voyage they interspersed their first European performances with long imitations of the creaking of the ship's timbers.

At least two of the birds in the President's House, however, had already received singing lessons when Jefferson purchased them in 1803 - for ten and fifteen dollars, the usual price of a "singing" mockinbird. Jefferson's butler, Etienne Lemaire, was apparently proud of their serenades, which included popular American, Scottish, and french tunes, as well as imiations of all the birds of the woods.

Age, narcissism, and fish

MacArthur genius Robert Sapolsky is interviewed on NPR about "Does Age Quash our Spirit of Adventure" and how a 20-year-younger assistant's musical listening habits drive him crazy. That prompted him to figure out how radio stations target audiences: the heuristic is that what you listen to when you are about 14 determines what you listen to for the rest of your life, and that by age 35 most people don't care about new music "but you can sell Billy Joel to those people for the rest of their lives". Same kind of results for food and body piercing :)

Hmm, that upcoming Styx, REO Speedwagon, and 38 Special concert is lookin' real good to some of you right now, admit it.

Is this related? A Slashdot article about "Narcissistic College Graduates in the Workplace". Maybe it is all the fault of Mr. Rogers (who actually did live in my neighborhood when I was sabbaticalling at SEI).

What about fish? Yes, Sapolsky talks about Nebraskan sushi-eaters in the interview I mentioned above, but what I am thinking about is an article about the Nature Conservancy teaming up with Morro Bay fisherpeople to figure out how to bring back the fish. Pretty amazing quote:

Things didn’t work out for other Morro Bay fishermen, either. Once an active port with a thriving industry for groundfish — including rockfish and sablefish — by the 1990s the fishery was dying a very public death. Most of the fish processors blew town. The boatyard and boat mechanics left. Between 1990 and 2006, the amount of seafood that annually crossed the docks at Morro Bay and neighboring Port San Luis plummeted from 14 million pounds to 1.2 million.

Trivia: one of Sapolsky's MacArthur award colleagues that year was David Rumelhart, of PDP/neural network/connectionist fame.

Bonus: I still can't figure out if Juan Enriquez's TED talk makes sense. Even if it doesn't make sense it is amusing and some of his visual are funny, especially the one where the people in the swimming pool have a power strip floating in the middle of the water. Yikes.

Brain activity during television commercials

This takes a couple of clicks, but is worth watching. Go to http://www.sandsresearch.com/ and click on "Examples" and then "2009 Super Bowl Ads and Rankings", then click on one of the ads (the Potatoheads were the most popular). You'll see the ad play and six synchonized views of brain activity, as well as graph of overall interest? activity? I"m not quite sure what they are measuring, I think they are calling it "sustained power level"?

By popular demand

I've told a few people about this and it seemed popular, so here it is. IEEE Spectrum has an article about "The death of business-method patents", and the article's illustrations showed ridiculous patented ideas, so I googled, and they are real patents. One is about cats and the other is an astounding way of swinging.

And I found this patent application about jokes too, including self-referential ones :)

Bonus: The Yes We Scan movement is already bringing fascinating things to you, like this short video of the SR-71 :)

Metacognition: Buy the Two Buck Chuck Wine?

Jonah Lehrer talks at the Commonwealth Club about metacognition and neurophysiology. He talks quite a bit about brain functioning and decision making, and cites some of the same studies that Malc does in Blink, but in a more scientific way. Very interesting way to optimally make car-buying decisions about 51 minutes into Lehrer's talk :) He also talks about wine tasting studies (read about it here).

NPR's Radio Lab at the end of 2008 had a show on "Choice" featuring a discussion of "seven plus or minus 2", Jonah Lehrer, and Oliver Sacks (I've posted many times about him, this time he is talking about buying $1 worth of 72% chocolate daily). The "cake or fruit" experiment reminded me of Eddie Izzard's "cake or death?" sketch.

Lehrer also had a recent opinion piece in the LA Times about airline pilots' "deliberate calm" in emergencies.

Another Lehrer to enjoy is Tom (here signing a WW III song, more complete collection here). Good to see the new generation appreciating his songs (and others based on Gilbert and Sullivan, such as this one about Google :).

Doctors, Quakers, and "relationships"

A simple take on using Quaker principles of community and consensus during tough budget times from Insider Higher Ed. "Friend speaks my mind" would shorten a lot of academic meetings :)

Provocative article from Newsweek about "Why doctors hate science". Where is evidence-based medicine (and software engineering) when you need it? Speaking of software engineering, Grady Booch has voiced all his "On Architecture" columns. The seventh one "The Irrelevance of Architecture" should be familiar to my former software engineering students: the users don't care how you built it.

Meterorite-hunters have found a debris field from the recent falling object in Texas. You have to scroll down a little for the pictures and a description of what they found.

Finally, slightly disturbing but not surprising things about how we make decisions. First, dating and poltics:

• Milisecond speed dating
• unconsciously choosing leaders based on looks, and
• men prefer red (maybe the first legitimate research using hotornot.com).

Second, from the academic world

• What do e-portfolios share with Oakland? I'm pretty sure the quote is about Oakland and not Los Angeles. And,
• what really goes on with peer review. Here's a quote from Michele Lamont, from an Inside Higher Ed article:

  One of the key findings was that professors in different disciplines take very different approaches to decision making. The gap between humanities and social sciences scholars is as large as anything C.P. Snow saw between the humanities and the hard sciences.
  
  Many humanities professors, she writes, “rank what promises to be ‘fascinating’ above what may turn out to be ‘true.’ ” She quotes an English professor she observed explaining the value of a particular project: “My thing is, even if it doesn’t work, I think it will provoke really fascinating conversations. So I was really not interested in whether it’s true or not.”

  Yikes. She even mentions C.P. Snow.

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.