It was just floating around, who's to say who owns it?

I enjoy James Oberg's take on space programs (not just NASA). With the last flight almost here, the most recent IEEE Spectrum has Oberg's "12 Space Shuttle Missions That Weren't". I like 1980's proposed "Satellite Snatch" (I've emphasized my favorite line):

A key scenario among the planned missions that drove the shuttle's design was the Pentagon's need for a superfast, single-orbit mission that would deploy or retrieve a military satellite. Strictly speaking, the retrieved satellite need not have been the property of the United States. The shuttle was built to enable this, but the idea was soon abandoned.

Read the entire list here.

The "1986 California (Space) dreaming" reminded me of touring Vandenberg AFB and going out to SLC-6 that was being refurbished to support launch of space shuttles into polar orbit. I can't remember what year we were there, but it must have been pre-1986. By the time I was at NASA KSC for my first summer in 1989, NASA employees and contractors had been cannibalizing the Vanderberg site for equipment for a while already. If I recall correctly, this was mostly equipment to keep the Firing Room operating until the major hardware and software refresh.

An inspiration for teaching videos

As part of the application for the provost's award for Technology in Education I wrote a short narrative about finding academic technology no matter what I do. In the narrative I briefly recounted the live satellite-delivered graduate class I taught from the Software Engineering Institute at CMU (but didn't talk about a mistake I made with an algorithm live in class, whoops). But until recently I'd forgotten that during those record cold -20 degree F days in Shadyside I'd watch TLC back when TLC showed programs like James Burke's Connections and The Day the Universe Changed instead of, well, what it carries now.

Burke is famous for bringing history and science to the masses, but there are two shots that made him legend among "television people": the 300-something foot narrated continuous tracking shot, followed by the perfectly-timed launch. You can see the video here (it's only about two and a half minutes long).

More interesting, in Re-Connections Burke explains how they did the shots, and the flak he got about how they were "vulgar". The explanation is here. At 3:30 he talks about using humor to make learning interesting, and at 4:44 he explains the tracking shot, the launch shot, and the criticism he took from television people ("it must have been back projection") to the critics pooh-poohing the work.

You can watch everything online through the magic of YouTube.

Amazing guy, I was glad to see him when he spoke as part of the San Joaquin Valley Town Hall in 1995.

BTW, during one of the summers I was at KSC we went up on to the pad, and they never told us about this place. Amazing. Another good Burke video about the Apollo suit.

Here lies an agglomeration

With the end of the semester comes more time to think. Maybe. Here are a few things.

It's quite common to do a "What X can learn from Y" article. Here's one about what designers can learn from an HBO show featuring standup comedians (Louis CK, Ricky Gervai, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, Louis C.K.). The following part reminded me of the Dirty Jobs guy's take on labor:

... Chris Rock talks about what a pleasure it is to watch anyone do anything really well, even a great truck driver. "I just saw this guy park an 18-wheeler into this narrow space," he says. "And I said I guarantee you there's heart surgery that's not as hard as what this guy just did." Louis agreed. "I watched a guy pull into a loading dock, and I stopped and said, 'That was amazing.' And he was like, 'Yeah, I know, I know.'"

Just to tech this up a bit, the September 2005 issue of IEEE Computer contains "Presentation lessons from comedians" by Bob Colwell:

... the audience isn’t expecting much, so even modest improvements in your ability to make a presentation can elicit gasps of appre- ciation from your audience. The bar just isn’t all that high.

and Colwell even takes "a Tuftian digression".

Slate and the Guardian are going back and forth about whether punctuation belongs inside quotations or if quotations are literal ("logical punctuation"). If you've taken programming, you know the answer. Putting commas and periods (I mean, "full stops") inside quotations doesn't make sense :) Ben Yagoda in Slate:

Why has this convention become so popular? I offer two reasons, one small and one big. The small one is a byproduct of working with computers, and writing computer code. In these endeavors, one is often instructed to "input" a string of characters, and sometimes (in the printed instructions) the characters are enclosed in quotation marks. Sticking a period or comma in front of the closing quotation marks could clearly have bad consequences.

Many of you are familiar with the physics of baseball (Adair's book, or the website or the DamnInteresting article.). But what's the optimal route around the bases after you put one over the wall? Now you know.

But let's get serious for a moment. The Group of 8 industrialized nations issued a statement about water quality. You might remember the "Poop is funny, but fatal" UNICEF video.

Second, UCSB researchers found some surprising results about "localized" eating. I was reminded of it since after lunch we bought blueberries right out of the field. That's a story for another time -- California's increase in blueberry production. Back to the UCSB study,

The researchers found that more than 99 percent of the produce grown in Santa Barbara County is exported, and more than 95 percent of the produce consumed in the county is imported, some of it from as far away as Chile, Argentina, and New Zealand. The study also found that, surprisingly, if all produce consumed here was grown in the county, it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions less than 1 percent of total agrifood system emissions, and it would not necessarily affect nutrition.

Third, a quality of life study was published by the American Human Development Project. With the exception of a few areas near Fresno State and "east Fresno" (does that mean Clovis? :) in the "Main Street California" category, the rest of the San Joaquin Valley is in the "Struggling California" or "Forsaken Five Percent" categories. The "Fact Sheets" are here.

Besides the grim news, there are some interesting statewide tidbits, like "foreign-born outlive the native-born by an average of four years in California" and "for every 100 men who get a bachelor's degree today, 134 women do", but we knew the latter just from college demographics now.

We need to end with something not so serious. Was the Rosewell incident really a crashed Soviet spy plane? Cue creepy music:

According to Annie Jacobsen, the reporter who authored "Area 51," the spaceship was actually a Soviet spy plane that came down during a storm. Jacobsen claims it was filled with bizarre, genetically engineered child-sized pilots in an attempt, by the Soviet Union's leader Joseph Stalin, to cause widespread panic in the U.S.

Jon Stewart does a good job with it :)

You're like a Doug Henning of the GUI interface

The Stanford Human-Computer Interaction seminar (free to watch!) is one of my regular Internet stops. I haven't watched the whole talk yet (you might have to click back and forth on the Lectures and Course Topics tabs until you can access all the lectures), but Lecture 3 for this quarter (15 April 2011) is about magic. I was impressed by the speaker's baccalaureate degree in magic from Hampshire :)

The relationship between magic and interface design has been explored before, in fact I've talked about Tog's classic "Magic and Software Design" CHI conference paper before.

Weeping asterisks and flying snowflakes

I'm sometimes puzzled by "universal" street signs and button-icons. In my HCI class I have the students guess the meaning of the icon bar from my credit union's bill pay interface. No one gets close to the right answer.

An article in Slate about the incomprehensibility of European appliance interfaces...

Rather than words such as bake, broil, clean, European ovens almost always mark their controls with a library of comically obtuse Euroglyphics. Some of these symbols indicate whether the oven's heat comes from below or above and are relatively easy for a chump from the colonies to guess. Others are harder to fathom: the P with swirls around it, the P with somewhat larger swirls, the swirls inside a circle between two horizontal lines, the snowflake (odd for a device that we generally expect to heat its contents), and the weeping asterisk.

... reminded me of Don Norman's CACM column ("Simplicity is highly overrated") and response. He says:

Make it simple and people won’t buy. Given a choice, they will take the item that does more. Features win over simplicity, even when people realize that it is accompanied by more complexity. You do it too, I bet. Haven’t you ever compared two products side by side, comparing the features of each, preferring the one that did more? Why shame on you, you are behaving, well, behaving like a normal person.

The complex expensive toaster? I bet it sells well.

He goes on to cite the Joel on Software column about "Simplicity".

Don't miss the "American vs. European Domest Appliances" slide show.

A long time ago I couldn't figure out the meaning on an icon in an airplane bathroom. I asked one of the flight attendants and we figured out it was the flight attendance call button. But only to fetch flight attendances that looked like flattened ancient Egyptians.

Hey! You! Pay attention!

Most people have heard the term "dead man's switch" and know that it has to do with train locomotives, and maybe even know that there might be a pedal or a handle that the engineer had to push or manipulate or else the train will automatically stop. Anecdotally, if it's a pedal to be depressed, a brick would do, and you could go about your business :)

For my HCI class I show a brief clip from a History Channel documentary about locomotives. I recently found it on YouTube. You can see a modern "alerter" (instead of a dead man's pedal) and the engineer's explanation from 6:50 to 7:35 in the video.



The March/April 2011 Technology Review showed a "drowsiness detector" that works on the same principle but for automobiles.

Audiophilin'

When I was in junior and senior high school I played around with a lot of electronics stuff, and I really like the look of glowing vacuum tubes (ah, McIntosh amps), so as an adult when I could afford it I bought a nixie clock :)

There was an article in Spectrum a while ago about how digital audio "doesn't sound right". The comments ripped the article and were the most interesting part. One of the links was to this video about "audio myths". Between 1:06 and 5:17 one of the speakers describes a cute single-blind experiment where he got an old tube amp and a SWTPC solid state amp and a switch and ... I won't spoil it for you :) Nice experiment, I think I'll show my students about perception.

The rest of the video is a presentation by Winer and more than you ever wanted to know about mixing, recording, dithering, jitter, distortion, ... and some good quotes like "16 bits through a sound card beats the best analog tape" (I think I got that right). The audio support files are here.

Three HCI things, and other stuff

Three recent HCI-UX related things:

• Anthropologist Hank Delcore (Fresno State) and Kirsten Medhurst (Pelco) are interviewed about a great academic-industry synergy to improve user experiences of security products.
  
• NPR featured a story on automation in the cockpit, and what can go wrong. "Automation surprise" indeed. You can also watch the recent PBS Nova on the crash of Air France 447 because they lost all airspeed indicators.
  
• The March/April issue of Technology Review has an illustration showing "The need for speed: Even slight slowdowns online frustrate people and cost companies money". In 2000, according to Akamai, user would wait 8 seconds for a web page to load before navigating away. In 2009 it was down to 3 seconds. The entire article is "The Slow-Motion Internet", but I think you have to be a subscriber to read it online.
  
• OK, one more thing. One of my favorite 90 second Don Norman videos that I've been showing students since 1994 has finally been uploaded to YouTube. It's a cute example of the difference between the users conceptual model and the underlying implementation model.

And now for the other stuff I promised:

One of the stranger DIY projects: hacking a manual typewriter for use as a computer keyboard.

Is the lifetime cost of LED light bulbs worth it? And, legendary Bell Labs engineer Robert W. Lucky gets phished and pays the price.

Really interesting Wired article about sports statistics: how consistent home field advantage is, and how umpires expand and contract the strike zone based on game conditions (scroll down to see the illustrations).

Getting to "yes"

I've talked about Getting to Yes before, and use parts of it in second semester software engineering as pointers for negotiations between software developers and clients.

One of the author's Ted talk is now online. Some of the comments are brutal (they obviously haven't read the book :)

But what if the TSA scanning machines were *in* Denver?

A few more things today. A comment to a blog entry about the TSA scanner talks about exposure:

Just for fun, I'm expressing the Reported Dose from a typical body scan in an adult (2.6 microRem) in terms of Time Spent in Denver. The answer? Atmospheric annual exposure in Denver (Not including Radon!) = 1.8 mRem or about 1,800 microRem per year. Calculate: (1800 microRem/ year) x (1 year/365 days) x (1 day/24 hrs) = 0.2 microRem per Hour for just standing around in Denver. So the scanner gives you about half of a day in Denver- now you've got something to think about during your layover. ;)

The Frontal Cortex post "The cognitive cost of expertise" reminded me of expert-novice differences when it comes to working with images such as schematics and visual programming languages. The author says "Now for the bad news: Expertise might also come with a dark side, as all those learned patterns make it harder for us to integrate wholly new knowledge." Novices experience the opposite of this -- they can't see the patterns and are lost in details, or misidentify patterns. A great summary is Marian Petre's "Why looking isn't always seeing: readership skills and graphical programming" from the June 1995 issue of Communications of the ACM or the always popular "Visual Depiction of Decision Statements: What is Best for Programmers and Non-Programmers?" by Kiper, Auernheimer, and Ames published in Empirical Software Engineering.

Just two more things: Did you know that the unnecessary "camera sound" made when you take a picture is called a skeuomorph? The author of "Is realistic UI design realistic" says

There’s no complex mechanical mirror assembly swinging upward when the shutter opens. No matter, though. The cigarette box sized camera burps out a faux ka-click anyway. The mechanism producing this noise was quite necessary for its predecessor, the SLR/DSLR camera, but now functionally irrelevant in the newer point-and-shoots. This design cue (audible in this case) inherited from an ancestor is referred to as a skeuomorph, and they can be found everywhere in our daily lives — air intakes on the electric Chevy Volt, window shutters that don’t shut, copper cladding on zinc pennies, nonwinding watch winders. Even the brown cork-pattern on cigarette tips is a holdover from the days when cork was used as a filter.

I thought the camera-sound was part of the "Cell phone predator alert act" (see Wired's take). Did it become law?

And finaly, Danny Hillis, the Long Now Foundation clock guy, works at a great place, see this article - scroll down to see the illustrated "Nerdvana". Pretty cool.

Levers shifting by themselves, buttons being pushed, instrument readings changing.

Even stranger than relativy (see previous post) is ESP or psi or ... whatever you want to call it. I can't figure out if this article is serious or not, but it is being published in an APA journal, and the authors have something interesting to say about random numbers (more on that later).

"Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect", Daryl J. Bern, Cornell. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1037/a0021524. You can read a preview here and a critique. From the abstract of Bern's paper:

Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual’s current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective. This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by “time- reversing” well-established psychological effects so that the individual’s responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur.

This reminds me of the second pilot episode of the original Star Trek series, Where No Man Has Gone Before, where two crew with highest "ESPer ratings" get shiny eyes and havoc ensues. Classic dialog :)

KIRK: Extrasensory perception. Doctor Dehner, how are you on ESP?
DEHNER: In tests I've taken, my ESP rated rather high.
KIRK: I'm asking what you know about ESP.
DEHNER: It is a fact that some people can sense future happenings, read the backs of playing cards and so on, but the esper capacity is always quite limited.

You might as well watch it now, you know you want to.

Back to the Bern paper. The way I understand it, and there is a good chance that I am wrong, is that subjects were told something like "you'll be shown two blank boxes on the screen labeled 1 and 2. One of them hides and image and the other nothing. For each trial, tell us behind which number is the image." Simple enough. But the interesting part is that the number of the box hiding the image was not determined until after the subjet made their choice. And, the number was not always generated by a typical pseudo random number generator, they used a hardware device to generate random numbers:

... if a true hardware-based RNG is used to determine the left/right positions, the next number in the sequence is indeterminate until it is actually generated by the quantum physical process embedded in the RNG, thereby ruling out the clairvoyance alternative. This argues for using a true RNG to demonstrate precognition or retroactive influence.
But alas, the use of a true RNG opens the door to the psychokinesis interpretation: The participant might be influencing the placement of the upcoming target rather than perceiving it, a possibility supported by a body of empirical evidence testing psychokinesis with true RNGs [reference to D.I. Radin, Entangled minds: Extrasensory experiences in a quantum reality, 2006].

But, like I said, I don't really understand the paper. Back to watching Sally Kellerman and Gary Lockwood and their shiny eyes.

Do NBA players experience time differently than shorter people?

Sometimes things are true but just don't make sense. Physics for example: if you have two clocks and hold one slightly higher than the other -- about a third of a meter in the following experiment -- the clocks will run at different speeds. Strange but true. In "Channeling Einstein and Bending Time", scientists do just that. I think a corollary is that taking lots of trips zipping around in airplanes makes you younger (although you might feel older) -- I'll have to think about that more. What is an everyday example of this spacetime stuff? GPS. From the article:

Previously, this could only be seen on much larger scales, like clocks on GPS satellites running faster than clocks on earth. The NIST aluminum ion clock shows that time is moving measurably faster or slower based on even the slightest changes in gravity or velocity. ...
Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, says that this finding drives home that the laws of physics can apply at any size.
"To me, it means a lot that we can measure the fact that spacetime is curved here in my house," he says. "This abstract idea from Einstein ... it really happens. It's measureable. It's always a good thing to get data that tests these ideas."

The strange thing about GPS is that both general and special relativity apply, one making it appear that the GPS satellites' clocks run slower than ours on earth, and the other making the orbiting clocks run faster. RC Davison summarizes:

The changes in time due to these properties of relativity total to an increase of about 38,700 ns/day and will conspire to make your GPS receiver build up errors in location that could cause it to be off on the order of kilometers after several hours—up to 10 km (6 miles) per day! The system is designed to correct for these errors by setting the atomic clocks on board the satellites to run slower than their corresponding reference on Earth before launch, so that once in orbit, and the effects of relativity take hold, the satellite’s clocks speed up and very closely match the reference on Earth.

Bob

My favorite Stanford professor, Bob Sutton, gave a talk at the Friday HCI seminar about his new book Good Boss, Bad Boss. If you search my blog for Sutton you'll see how often I refer to him (probably more than to Malc and T-Fried combined :)

You can see the video here. During the Q&A, about 77 minutes into the video, he talks about one of my favorite psych papers that made its way into my research and software engineering in general: "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments"

Growing your own

Classic (2004) HBR article (via LeaderLab) about "The Risky Business of Hiring Stars". Great teaser:

Odds are, the superstars you eagerly and expensively recruit will shine much less brightly for you than for their previous employers. Research shows why -- and why you're usually better off growing stars than buying them.

Lots of good stuff to think about for anyone interested in how we develop as co-workers. Another quote, first something that sounds straight out of Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month:

The arrival of a highflier often results in interpersonal conflicts and a breakdown of communication in the group. As a result, the groups's performance suffers for several years. Sometimes, the team (or what is left of it) returns to normal only after the star has left the company.

then, the money side:

The money that stars make isn't the only problem. Their coworkers often become demotivated because they feel they must look outside the organization if they want to grow or to occupy leadership positions. Their suspicions are fueled by the fact that senior executives provide more resources to a newly hired star than to a company stalwart even if both have performed equally well.

Speaking is not an act of extroversion

I've posted quite a bit about Gladwell (I call him "Malc"), and this week I'm having my graduate HCI class watch his TED video on spaghetti sauce and his 2004 PopTech talk about chairs (and Coke vs Pepsi).

In this brief interview (in which the interviewer has crazier hair than Malc), he talks about being a shy public speaker, and how we are spend more money to see performers live than buy their material (since it is downloadable "free"), which is flipped from the way it was when he grew up. It used to be that concerts were cheap, and you paid for media (vinyl audio recordings, books), now we spend hundreds of dollars for a concert ticket and little for the media.

Fresno State Myths to Live By

Last week I was walking to my car and overheard three frustrated students loudly discussing a professor who is late for class. The students recounted how you "only have to wait 15 minutes" for a full professor. Everyone knows that, right? I heard about in the late 1970s when my dad was teaching part time at Fresno State.

This rule -- The Obligatory Wait -- about how long Fresno State students are expected to wait (based on the academic rank of the instructor) is famous enough for Jan Harold Brunvand to document in one of his books or urban legends, The Baby Train.

You probably know the punchline: there is no such rule :)

One question that seems to puzzle all new college freshmen is "How long are students expected to wait for a tardy professor?" Fortunately, most of the more-experienced students are ready with an answer. Unfortunately, their answers vary wildly, and most of them are wrong.

Also interesting, "The Myth of the Lazy Professor" from the Chronicle.

Had a CT scan and lost a band of hair? Here's a toupee.

Oh man, another radiation treatment system gone wrong. Back in the day of the Therac-25 one suggestion was to pry the offending key off the keyboard. Now if you lose a strip of hair after a CT scan maybe you'll be offered a wig.

A quote (and the pictures of patients are amazing) from "After Stroke Scans, Patients Face Serious Health Risks" from the NY Times:

... amid concerns that patients are getting more radiation than necessary, the medical community has embraced the idea of using only enough to obtain an image sufficient for diagnosis.

To do that, GE offers a feature on its CT scanner that can automatically adjust the dose according to a patient’s size and body part. It is, a GE manual says, “a technical innovation that significantly reduces radiation dose.”

At Cedars-Sinai and Glendale Adventist, technicians used the automatic feature — rather than a fixed, predetermined radiation level — for their brain perfusion scans.

But a surprise awaited them: when used with certain machine settings that govern image clarity, the automatic feature did not reduce the dose — it raised it.

Stuff from the cog psych world

"Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits" in the NY Times reviews research saying it is better to study in more than one location, and more than one related subject:

... instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing...
“The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.

BTW, The Frontal Cortex blog moved to Wired. The entry on "The Identifiable Victim Bias" should be read by anyone in the nonprofit world soliciting donations.

We are much less interested in helping a victim – we only want to help the victim. (This bias is known as the identifiable victim effect, since it suggests that we react much more strongly when the victim can be specified.) Why do we this? Because human charity is ultimately rooted in our compassionate feelings, and not in some rational, utilitarian calculations. We are not Vulcans.

Changing the subject, if you live in California you can see if your physician's been busted lately at this Sacramento Bee database.

Hackin', figurin' odds, and valuable finds

A couple of interesting articles about hacking critical systems:

• "Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile" talks about accessing the networks in a modern car. Schneier summarizes, and the entire article is here
• and the UCSB group goes after electronic voting machines: "An Experience in Testing the Security of Real-World Electronic Voting Systems". Both papers are in IEEE publications.

Before I forget, a couple of things about statistics. Is Deadliest Catch (crab fishing on the Bering Sea) really the deadliest catch? Nah.

And, what about things parents shouldn't worry about?

Speaking of probabilities, in the past I've talked about the "Odds of Dying From ... ". Make sure you click on the Odds of Dying graphic link on this page.

OK, a little more upbeat, what were the five most valuable things on PBS's Antiques Roadshow?

Snakes and software requirements

No real connection between the two, but another rattlesnake story, scroll down to Roger's Remarks.

Voas and Laplante discuss "Effectively defining 'shall not' requirements". I've always liked Voas' idea of "software fault injection".

And, I always have my undergrad software engineering students read RFC 2119 about "shalls", it is usually their first experience to language used in that way.