Malc at Pop!Tech

Another Malc video, this time he is talking at Pop!Tech 2008 about his book about genius, Outliers (there's also a Pop!Tech talk of his from 2004 discussing the Blink material).

In Outliers he talks about the "10,000 hour rule" for becoming an expert in just about anything, made famous in a 1993 article "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance" by Ericsson, Krampe, Tesch-Römer (Fresno State people can click here).

Tokeneer

Tokeneer sounds like a fan of the Lord of the Rings books and movies (OK, that would be Tolkieneer) but it is the latest of a public example of a "fully" formal software development effort. You can read a few paragraphs about it in the most recent Dr. Dobb's here and peruse the official website. Software engineering students will be interested in some of the statistics, particularly about productivity

The Tokeneer ID Station system’s key statistics are:

lines of code: 9939
total effort (days): 260
productivity (lines of code per day, overall): 38
productivity (lines of code per day, coding phase): 203
defects discovered since delivery: 1

In some ways I find this a little depressing since I see some of thee same people who were doing FM when I was doing my PhD in this area in the late 1980s (Tony Hoare, for example) and the number of lines of code that are being verified (my PhD advisor formally specificed and proved a secure UNIX kernel in the late 1970s, now doing voting machines).

That said, this NASA formal methods workshop at Ames sounds encouraging, and I recognize some of the names from people I bumped into when working with the formal specification of the space shuttle jet select group at JPL.

Pinker

I forgot to mention that cognitive scientist Steven Pinker (you remember him) was on BookTV this past weekend for, yes, three hours. He's an interesting guy, and there is at least one caller from Fresno.

Magazines

Two things from the latest MIT Technology Review:

• Simson Garfinkel's "Wikipedia and the meaning of truth"
• Cool pictures of brains in action

and an article from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin about using an 800mm lens to take pictures from the stands at a UH football game, and from Scientific American, a sort of ridiculous article about using "malevolent logic to define the dark side of the human psyche". hmm.

I never thought I'd see this

Hodgman doing a Ted.com video. I received his new book today, yay for Amazon.

Don't downsize the innovators

Bob Sutton has a great post about downsizing. Do you layoff employees, and if so, who goes? Or do you hang on and, since they aren't as busy, have the employees do more professional development in anticipation of an upturn? He also restates the common HR caution about not just hiring people who are like you, and especially, don't lay off the innovators

A downturn can be an opportunity to get rid of incompetent people and, of course, destructive assholes. But beware of the evils of using layoffs as a reason to expel everyone in your organization who does not act, think, and look like everyone else -- beware that most of us are prone to hold an overly narrow image of a "good employee." As I show in Weird Ideas that Work, since we human-beings have powerful and positive emotional reactions to people who are "just like us," and equally powerful negative reactions to people who are "different," the hiring process in most organizations acts to "bring in the clones."

Anyway, maybe it's not innovative, but I though the new PC-Mac "bean counter" ad was pretty good, but probably not a impressive as Hodgman's singing in a previous ad.

A clean cube is a happy cube?

A Money article is about "Audi's clean desk fetish". The clean desk versus clutter desk argument has been going on for a long time.

Some researchers, however, dispute the benefits of a spotless workplace. When Herman Miller (MLHR), an office furniture supplier, conducted an observational study of workplace organizational habits, they found that "filers" actually stored more useless information than their unkempt counterparts. The company identified a group of "work masters," or efficient employees, and reported that those staffers were more inclined towards piling than filing.

"When people place things on their desks, they're encoding information in the spatial connections and layers," says David Kirsh, a professor of cognitive science at UCSD. Kirsh, who studies workers in their natural settings, says many workers prefer to use a two dimensional surface. "If you disrupt that and force them to stack or file, you lose information."

Kirsch, that name sounds familiar doesn't it? Yes, he is the distributed cognition guy, along with Hutchins, whom I've talked about before. The famous paper (Fresno State people click here, everyone else here) is:

James Hollan, Edwin Hutchins, & David Kirsch (2000). Distributed Cognition: Toward a New Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction Research. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 7(2), pp. 174-196.

Sometimes the reason for a clean desk is a more about security (IBM used to be big on that) or safety, which is hard to argue against. But from a cognitive or productivity point of view, does a cluttered desk implies a cluttered mind?

Maybe not :)

"A clean desk isn't always the sign of a productive employee."

Phew.

"In fact, a clean desk can hinder worker efficiency."

I love this guy.

The premise is that people use their desk space as an extension of their minds.

"The human mind, specifically short-term memory, has a limited capacity," Brand said. "It has seven, plus or minus two, 'chunks' available for storing things.

Deconstructing the airport

Pretty interesting talk by Paco Underhill about "how to remake air travel for the twenty-first century". Malcolm Gladwell hosts -- his final question to the speaker is whether the airport experience is inherently unpleasant :)

More Malc videos here.

When to do what

Jakob Nielsen's alertbox column does it again: a really nice description of "When to use which user experience research methods". It complements something I posted earlier about software engineering experimentation.

Forgot one

Another thing that got me thinking about evidence-based-medicine (and evidence-based-software-engineering) was Bob Sutton's post about "... Ten Commandments for Minimizing Medical Errors":

He [Michael Guiliano] also cited some more general research showing that diagnostic error occurs in 10 to 25 percent cases in medicine in general... He went through many causes of these errors, but one I found especially interesting (in light of our emphasis on parents earlier in the morning) was research cited in Jerome Groopman's How Doctors Think, which discussed how badly doctors interact with and listen to patients -- including one study that found that the average doctor only waits 18 SECONDS before interrupting a patient who has begin to describe his or her symptoms.

It not only costs a lot and is inconvenient, it's not as good as it should be :(

A recent interview with Evan Handler (the actor) about his health care experiences

In his books "It's Only Temporary," and "Time on Fire," Handler wrote that during his months in the hospital, he was given intravenous drugs that were supposed to go to another patient, that nurses tried to give him medications his doctors had forbidden for him and that staff members refused to follow the hospital's posted hygiene precautions for immunosuppressed patients like himself.

and an October article in FastCompany

For patients, of course, getting what's been proven to work is nothing more than we expect from a Jiffy Lube. But according to a 2003 New England Journal of Medicine paper, only 55% of American patients get all the treatment that is generally accepted as necessary for their problems. To make sure the number at Geisinger is near 100%, surgeons, pre- and post-operation, face a computer screen that asks a set of questions: Is the patient on a beta blocker? A statin? Were antibiotics given at least 60 minutes before surgery and discontinued after 48 hours? A staffer sends an email query if there's no response to any of the 40 steps.

and Harold Thimbleby's article in interactions "Ignorance of Interaction Programming is Killing People" (watch the YouTube video of a medical interface) reminded me of the National Safety Council's "Odds of dying from injury" data.



What is your lifetime probability of fatality caused by "Complications of medical and surgical care and sequelae"? Take a moment to think about that. It's probably much worse than you think: 1 in 1,308. Pretty unbelievable. Although not as bad as lifetime odds for a transportation accident: 1 in 80. At NASA KSC I remember a briefing where we were told that the best guess of a fatal space shuttle accident (at that time) was about 1 in 84. More than you ever wanted to know about the PRAN (probability risk analysis number) here, and a quote:

In fact, the Shuttle’s real-world track record provides a bleaker assessment: The number of shuttle catastrophes (2) over the number of shuttle launches (114), places the statistical, historical catastrophe odds around one in 57, or 1.7%. This number is misleading, say NASA officials, because it doesn’t take into account lessons learned, and safety measures implemented to prevent similar accidents in the future

Changing the subject, computer security expert Bruce Schneier has a very interesting column on "The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists" in Wired:

Terrorists, he [Max Abrahms] writes, (1) attack civilians, a policy that has a lousy track record of convincing those civilians to give the terrorists what they want; (2) treat terrorism as a first resort, not a last resort, failing to embrace nonviolent alternatives like elections; (3) don't compromise with their target country, even when those compromises are in their best interest politically; (4) have protean political platforms, which regularly, and sometimes radically, change; (5) often engage in anonymous attacks, which precludes the target countries making political concessions to them; (6) regularly attack other terrorist groups with the same political platform; and (7) resist disbanding, even when they consistently fail to achieve their political objectives or when their stated political objectives have been achieved.

What is that?

Finally, a google maps application to answer the question "What can I see from here?" It actually accounts for the curvature of the earth, and refraction. Be sure to play around with the "visibility cloak" button. If you want to see how it's done, the FAQ is interesting.

Changing the subject, here are a couple of places for your next Fresno County vacation you can compare east side versus west side soaks: Mercey Hot Springs, and Mono Hot Springs. You might want to base the visits on which water appeals to you more: this or that.

McConnell on agility, and far-out pictures

Earlier this week Steve McConnell had a webinar about agile software engineering, sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society. I usually can't stand webinars, but this one is good. McConnell knows his stuff (I've talked about him several times). The archive of the recent webinar is here.

Someone at extremetech.com is fascinated with pixels and took close-up pictures of HDTV screens. See the slide show here.

Finally, I am thinking about how to use Google's real-time analytics for YouTube videos. It might be useful for usability tests, but I'm not sure yet.

Fossils and Petrifications

I was looking for something online today and accidentally found Memorial and Biographical History of the counties of Fresno, Tulare and Kern, California originally published in 1892. This section on "Fossils and Petrifications" is bizarre, especially the part about the "wonderful 'find' of a human petrifaction".

The most interesting of fossil discoveries was the exhumation of the mammoth and of man - "proof positive of the existence of both at the same time," and that "both occupied this country together with saurians the remains of all three being found in the same gravel deposit and stratum." The above is quoted from a history made of Fresno County in 1882. It is somewhat surprising to the writer that the broad claim should be made "proof positive" by one who has seen the wonderful conformations of California, and note the laws of nature as applied to other regions being here set aside. The strata are here more disturbed and thrown out of order than in any other country. The remains of the mastodon might have been thrown up from a burial place of centuries, and again submerged with that of man at a time when he, too, was destroyed by the mighty throes of Mother Nature. Finding the remains of mastodons, saurians and man in one common sepulcher proves nothing more than that they are there together; it does not even tend to prove they lived at the same period in the same locality. It is said that the first mastodon remains were found on the Fresno river, some distance above what is known as the adobe bottom. It measured twenty-two feet in length; the tusks were eleven feet, and curving upward; at the base they were five feet apart. The legs were short, but very heavy. The whole structure was complete, but with all the care and wisdom of the discoverers, they were unable to put the bones together so as to reproduce the animal. ...

As has already been stated in the geological summary of the valley, the Coast Range mountains contain numerous petrifactions. There was a wonderful "find" of a human petrifaction in Cantua canon near the Coast Range, in December, 1890. S. L. Packwood and I. N. Barrett of Fresno City were working in said canon on December 12, where Packwood owned a timber claim. They were seeking a suitable site to construct a dam to divert the waters of the canon upon a piece of land which was to be brought into cultivation, when Mr. Barrett discovered a human foot protruding from the bank of the stream. Both men viewed the object with amazement, and were the more surprised on feeling the foot and finding it to resemble stone. Their curiosity led them to unearth the remains, and soon they decided to take them to Fresno. The weight was about 500 pounds. Arriving at Fresno, the petrifaction attracted all, and several of the medical profession made a thorough examination, and took measurements of the petrifaction and pronounced it genuine and not of a "Cardiff" nature. The general appearance of the body led to the conclusion that he was a fine specimen of the Castilian race. He measured six feet four and one-half inches in height, foot eleven and one-half inches in length, length of arm sixteen and one-half inches, and length of forearm, twelve inches, and length of legs thirty-six inches. This is the most wonderful petrifaction found in the county and preserved.

If you want to see lots of fossils, take a tour of the Fairmead landfill, in Madera county. It is possibly the largest Pleistocene fossil deposit in the country, and pretty impressive to see. It looks like the Madera Mammoths website is still under construction.

The story of Jim Savage is for another day :) In the meantime, you can read about our local train robbers who hid in the foothills around Pinehust, Badger, Eshom, and Redwood Canyon. Their hideouts would make good but treacherous geocaches :) This picture will remind you that "crime does not pay" :)

Libraries and cannons

The recent hurricane Ike exposed a civil war shipwreck (that was also exposed in 2006). That reminded me of a big storm from UCSB days. It was the only time I remember full size trees washed up on the Santa Barbara beaches, along with the terrible smell of dead seal lions and elephant seals. A lot of sand was ripped from the beaches, also unusual. But that exposed old cannons on the beach just south of campus. This fueled a controversy about whether they were from Sir Francis Drake's ("His exploits were legendary, making him a hero to the English but a simple pirate to the Spaniards.") ship in the late 1570s. There is a great write-up (but you have to scroll down to Goleta Cannon Site). Any city proving a visit by Drake would have coveted bragging rights :) More than you ever wanted to know about Drake and whether he got his latitudes correct here -- including a discussion of astrolabs :)

Speaking of more recent history, every time I hear about a Carnegie library I am amazed at how putting public libraries in cities large and small (Orosi, Exeter, and Dinuba, but not Reedley?) changed the United States. Fresno's was impressive

Funded by a 1901 Carnegie grant of $30,000, and completed in 1904, the Fresno Carnegie Library was one of the earliest and costliest of the Carnegies.

but was a victim of the tear-down fever of the late 1950s to mid 1960s. Another casualty was the Fresno Country courthouse from 1875, you can see the dome crashing down here (page 73).

One more thing: these photos from the VAB at KSC reminded me of the few (two?) times I was in the building with a shuttle in some state of integration with the external tank and SRBs. I remember going in a side door where we were given a brief safety briefing (like the one you get on a tour of Vandenberg before go into a room with a missle) and we had to put our ID badges in slots on the wall before we went into the main part of the VAB. Our guide said it was so that if something went wrong they would know who was in the building :)

Software engineering students please read :)

Elon Musk's (of PayPal and Tesla Motors fame) SpaceX successfully launched today. SpaceX is very open about what goes right and wrong with their launches. Video was live from the booster, including first stage separation, which was really cool. Musk was overwhelmed and couldn't get many words out during a post-launch interview.

August's launch worked, but the spacecraft was unusable because after first and second stages collided during separation -- caused by a single line of code:

“The fix was also very simple, requiring one line of code to be changed,” SpaceX officials said in a weekend update.

Read more here. You can see the first and second stage collision (and the resulting tumble) by skipping to about the 2:40 point of this video.

Earlier in September the space station astronauts had to update antivirus software. What?? (emphasis added)

The updates are aimed at ensuring the space station’s computers continue to quarantine viruses like W32.Gammima.AG, a Windows-based worm detected and properly quarantined in the outpost’s computers in late July. The low-risk virus, which is designed to steal passwords for online computer games, was first reported on July 25 after being detected by the station’s protection software. It did not infect the station’s command and control computers and posed no threat to the orbiting lab, though NASA engineers were hoping to find out exactly how the virus reached the station.

Should have got a Mac :)

Two kinds of fish

First, well known humanities and law scholar, and NY Times columnist, Stanley Fish was interviewed on NPR's Talk of the Nation this week about liberal education and his book Save the world on your own time. One of the ideas is that university professors should stick to the academic inquiry approach in class and leave opinions out of class. In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, he says

the three-part mantra which organizes the book: Do your job, don’t try to do someone else’s job and don’t let anyone else do your job. And I think that if we as instructors ... would adhere to that mantra, we would be more responsible in the prosecution of our task and less vulnerable to the criticisms of those who would want to either undermine or control us

He's not a big fan of service learning.

Another thing that reminded me of fish was an letter to the editor of the newspaper recalling when fish would be dropped in to high sierra lakes. It's a pretty weird sight (seeing the bombers taking off today from the CalFire air attack base at FAT prompted me to write this). Planting fish from airplanes into lakes where they aren't native (and in fact into lakes that never had fish) went on for a long time (see this 1954 Popular Mechanics article), as has the controversy about non-native fish plants destroying native sierra amphibian populations. Which seems like a no-brainer, I've never really got the need to plant fish were they weren't in the first place. There is also the whole controversy of whether planted fish inbreed with native populations, something denied but apparently proved using DNA, but that is a topic for another day :)

Dave Barry even talks about the perils of fish bombs :)

P.S. to T-Fried

I forgot to mention that at the very end of his 3.0 keynote, Friedman has some good lines about how the "green revolution" isn't really a revolution since no one is getting hurt, and that what we need to do is "change our leaders, not our lightbulbs" :)

Bono quotes him at the end of this short YouTube video.

I think, but I'm not sure, that he used the line first in a NY Times column in December 2007, excerpted below

People often ask: I want to get greener, what should I do? New light bulbs? A hybrid? A solar roof? Well, all of those things are helpful. But actually, the greenest thing you can do is this: Choose the right leaders. It is so much more important to change your leaders than change your light bulbs.

... when leaders change the rules, you get scale change across the whole marketplace. And the energy-climate challenge we face today is a huge scale problem. Without scale, all you have is a green hobby.

Have no illusions, everything George Bush wouldn’t do on energy after 9/11 — his resisting improved mileage for cars and actually trying to weaken air-conditioner standards — swamped any good works you did.

T-Fried 3.0

Thomas Friedman gave a keynote address at an MIT Open Courseware event, updating his previous talk on The World is Flat to verson 3.0

You can see it here on YouTube, but you can also download it in better quality mp4 format here.

You are not expected to understand this

I read a few pages of Digital Apollo every day. Interesting (even talks about the X-15 flight control systems) and thorough to the point of being ... very thorough :) But good discussions of the engineering trade offs made between pilot- or computer-in-control, and MTTF. The author also has some good quips (p.124):

It has become fashionable to denigrate the computers of the past with phrases like "we flew to the moon with less computing power than I have on my wristwatch," or "can you believe the entire Apollo program fit into a mere 36 k of memory?" Simply focusing on memory size, or the computer's speed, however, misses the important engineering accomplishments of the Apollo computer. For who among us would risk our lives on our desktop computers, with all their speed, accuracy, and memory, and rely on their working flawlessly for two straight weeks? The space shuttle flies with five redundant computers,. Any fully digital airliner has a minimum of three. Apollo had only one. It never failed in flight.

I have a little quibble with that. As we know from watching Apollo 13, there were actually two computers along for the ride (the astronauts moved the navigation data from the CM computer to the LM computer before shutting down the CM).

In any case, the author attributes the following to "Opening lines of Apollo software source code" (p. 145):

Quest oculus non vide, cor non delet
What the eye does not see, the heart does not regret
"A lot happens that we are not telling you about."

Which reminds me of the famous comment in the UNIX kernel code "You are not expected to understand this" (but the professor in our graduate level operating systems class insisted that we did for the exam :)

Dennis Ritchie explains what they meant by that famous comment on his Bell Labs website (scroll down about a screen). He mentions Lions commentary and source code, which were the textbook for our operating systems class. You can still buy it, or download it and all the source code (see end of the Wikipedia entry for Lions' book.

The famous quote is in the body of swtch() at line 2238. Lions explanation begins in Section 8.9 of his commentary with "The comment which begins here is not encouraging." It is an amazingly clever way to do process switching though.