I miss my bright red Aztek

Finally, someone who understands

That car is the despised Pontiac Aztek, an almost universally loathed vehicle that established the paradigm for the Terrain: the crossover SUV, a half-car, half-truck concoction that is one of the fastest-growing vehicle categories. GM needs to remember the Aztek, because it represents the kind of risk-taking design that the post-bankruptcy firm will need to go forward.

I never thought I'd see an Aztek compared to an Apple Newton :)

In terms of innovation, the Aztek shares DNA with some surprising relatives, like Apple’s early, failed PDA, Newton, or its first stab at a portable, proto-laptop Mac. Apple (AAPL) didn’t succeed with these products, but the company began to define new markets with them.

The Montreal police were styling in their Aztek too :)

Learning, or not, from the past

In the reinventing-the-wrong-wheel category, Nielsen and Norman lament user interface mistakes in the latest incarnation of gestures for devices such as the iPad. Norman also says that gestures are not uniformly interpreted across cultures, and that generally, we've been down this road before:

The problems faced by gesture developers remind me of similar issues that arose during the early days of development of the GUI. Thus, in the development of the early Xerox PARC systems, when one moved the icon of a file across the screen to a file folder, it was natural that the icon would disappear into the folder. Similarly, when a file was moved to the trash, it was natural that the icon--and the file--disappeared from sight. But this movement principle got into trouble with the printer: Moving the file to the image of the printer caused the item to be printed, but it also caused it to disappear from the screen. Much rethinking took place then. Much rethinking is required now.

While you are poking around Nielsen and Norman's websites, or waiting in a checkout line, you can learn about the psychology of waiting in lines, without all the mathematics we used in graduate queueing theory class.
Speaking of math, crunching the PGA data shows that Tiger Woods (pre-Thanksgiving incident) is 2.65 strokes better than the professional average, mathematically-speaking:

"In 2008, for example, Tiger computes to being 2.65 strokes per round better than the average," says the professor of mathematics at Roanoke College in Salem, VA. "He rates 1.4 stokes per round better than any other golfer on tour. Over four rounds of a tournament, this predicts that Tiger wins by at least 5.6 strokes."

Finally, a couple of things from the world of social psychology. I usually point out a couple of these in my HCI class. First, some "practical business lessons" (you'll remember primacy and recency from Intro Psych class, and social loafing from any team you've been on), and "psychological influence" (check out "people want shortcuts" and "emotional narratives are remembered best").

Oh, and Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U I talked about previously, was interviewed on C-SPAN, and you can watch it (and read the transcript).

Beyond slides: Animated talks

Very interesting talk by Dan Pink about what motivates employees. Essentially for mechanical tasks, greater reward yields greater productivity. But for cognitive tasks, that's not the case. He talks about autonomy, mastery, and purpose. "Management is great if you want compliance, ... but self-direction is better", citing studies from MIT and CMU, among other places. Even if you don't buy what he is saying, check out the way it is animated, instead of using static slides. Really well executed. You can see the traditional video of the talk (as well as other animated talks) here.

The drawing-while-talking reminds me of Bill Verplank from the HCI and design world. You can see one of his talks as part of Bill Moggridge's book "Designing Interactions" I recommended when it came out in 2007. Great book, and if you are patient you can download essentially every chapter. In any case, Verplank is low key, patient, and persuasive.

An end of semester pan-pan

I like to ask my nephew, after we've done something mundane like eat lunch, "So what did we learn from this?", and I/we find a silly answer. Today I leaned that there is a something between everything's-OK and Mayday-Mayday-Mayday, and that's pan-pan.

Here's something fun: Eugenie Scott gave a science-and-skepticism talk you can watch on Fora.tv. If you skip to chapter 09 "Debunking dowsing", the Central Valley is mentioned (along with Kentucky), and in chapter 10 she talks about "Why direct observation is overrated", and uses a cute video demonstration. The same site also has an example of the infamous ball-passing awareness demo (I first blogged about a similar video and "inattention blindness" over four years ago).

Finally, for all you fans out there, "Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage", is coming to the Tower Theater in June.

Inspring, Scary, and Typical: three unrelated things

One inspiring thing, one typical thing, and one scary thing.

First, two English profs from Rutgers, Richard Miller and Paul Hammond, gave a talk at the Apple Higher Ed conference. Their English department has its own IT department of five techs! The two profs are better writers than speakers, although the video is worth watching. The good stuff comes during the Q&A beginning at about 32:28 minutes into the video. This is some of the most inspirational stuff I've heard in a long time about using technology to promote deep thinking. A couple of quotes from the report (you'll need to scroll down about 40 percent to page 26 get to their presentation), first about technologists and their relationship to faculty:

Question: What advice would you give us technologists who have to work with the same type of faculty you do? They are not looking at technology as being integrated.
Richard: I appreciate this even more now that I am the acting head of IT. I had to fire the head of IT because he was a Web 1.0 person and he refused to move into the Web 2.0 world. In the old model, IT has the expertise and users are idiots because they don’t have it. We have to move beyond this to a collaborative way of working together. The five IT people I work with now were used to saying two things: “No,” and “That’s a security risk.” “And if the second one doesn’t apply, see the first one.”
What we have to decide is what is the priority here—to keep things bulletproof or to advance the mission of the university?

and about deferred maintenance of the physical plant and "slow reading"

Question: Technology begins with one specific goal in mind, for example, Guttenberg and the Bible. Then it’s driven to scale by something else—pornography. We heard from a panel earlier about students not going to class and so on. And that removes from the university something that has always been so important and that is the social aspect of it.
Richard: Rutgers is a place that is behind in basic maintenance. Through our spaces, we tell students that what you do here is not important. So for us it’s absolutely that we create a pedagogy that is critical to the experience we provide and that’s thinking. Because it’s not available anywhere else. Reacting—expressing a loud opinion—those things are available everywhere. Thinking isn’t. Thinking is hard, it’s frustrating, it can be humiliating, it can be boring. We want to provide that experience to our students in an environment that is not available anywhere else in the world.
We also teach courses in slow reading. I teach a course that meets once week and I don’t allow technology. I assign ten pages per week and there are two rules. 1) You cannot read ahead. 2) The work that comes at the end is to do what the book does, which is to think over a long period of time.
This is how it goes. I ask them, “What did you think of the reading?” They say, “Boring.” I ask, “Well, what research did you do after reading?” They say, “It was only ten pages.” I say, “Who is...” and then I name a person relevant to the reading. And they say, “I don’t know.” And I say, “You had only ten pages to read and you have the best research tool in history and you did nothing?”
It’s the most painful mental experience in their lives. But if we don’t teach people how to think, it’s a lost opportunity not only for education but for humanity.

Second, the scary thing is an American Airlines pilot on the 6 May LAX-JFK flight declared an emergency because he didn't want to land on the runway ATC OK'ed. I've never heard anything from ATC like the mp3 recording, but you don't need to listen to that to get a feel for it, the forum discussion is scary enough. One post says they landed with less than 7000 pounds of fuel, yikes.

Third, Don Norman (author of the Design of Everyday Things, the second week's reading in my graduate HCI class) being typically Don Norman ("I never know what I’m going to do until I’m finished -- but once I’m finished I’m not interested anymore") is interviewed about design and engineers. I've talked before about similar multidisciplinary programs such as Stanford's d.school.

Guesstimating

Lynda sent me a link to today's Chronicle article "The gospel of well-educated guessing". A couple of things reminded me of what I talk about in software engineering classes: Zipf's Law, and Jon Bentley's classic "The back of the envelope" from Programming Pearls. Great stuff.

Zipf's law comes up in so many contexts, from estimating the length of software to the odds of seeing a state's license plate while on family road trips to the size of metropolitan areas.

Back to back of the envelope estimation, when I used to teach CSci 1 Critical Thinking and Computer Science I had the students read Douglas Hofstadter's "On number numbness". I've talked about that chapter and innumeracy before.

The CSci 1 students liked this excerpt:

I once taught a beginning physics class on the thirteenth floor of Hunter College in New York City. From the window we had a magnificent view of the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan. In one of the opening sessions, I wanted to teach my students about estimates and significant figures, so I asked them to esimate the height of the Empire State Building. In a class of ten students, not one came within a factor of two of the correct answer (1,472 feet with the television antenna, 1,250 without). Most of the estimates were between 300 and 500 feet. One person thought 50 feet was right - a truly amazing underestimate; another thought it was a mile. It turned out that this person had actually calculated the answer, guessing 50 feet per story and 100 stories or so, thus getting about 5,000 feet. Where one person thought that each story was 50 feet high, another thought the whole 102-story building was that high. This startling episode had a deep effect on me.

.
Three unrelated bonus topics: stand up meetings became popular in Silicon Valley and are regularly rediscovered, and how to use your phone to capture and transcribe meeting notes from a whiteboard, and Gartner's 2009 hype cycle for HCI.

DIY Seth

Seth Godin has an interesting take on higher ed, and references the DIY U book I mentioned in a presentation at our campus's main IT meeting a couple of weeks ago. See "The coming melt-down in higher education (as seen by a marketer)".

The always interesting Michael Feldstein also has a take on DIY U.

Godin mentions Deep Springs College, across the Sierra from us. I've never felt the need for a formal mentor, but the guy I learned the most about higher education was a Deep Springs alumnus and president, Brandt Kehoe (quoted in this article from 1985).

Speaking of the Sierra, having gotten giardia on a backbacking trip to Blaney Meadows, I found "Livestock waste is polluting the Sierra's water" interesting.

500 frames per second

Lately I've been able to regale people with tales of my past. The stories aren't all boring since some are about interesting people :)

For example, in graduate school we worked on security-related software. My advisor's group is continuing in that field and recently took over a famous, malicious botnet!

I also learned something new this week. I didn't know that the Saturn V main engines (which burned kerosene (RP-1) and LOX) were actually started with hypergolics. Reminds me of using starting fluid (ether) on an old lawn mower. On second though, probably not a good comparison :)

Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera E-8 from Mark Gray on Vimeo.
The video also shows the amazing amount of water dumped on the launcher to suppress sound.

There's also video around from those days showing staging. I think this one is in real-time, and this one slowed.

Next thing you know, we'll be talking about ullage motors.

Where's Lafayette Radio when you need it?

Wired had another great article, this time about the extreme makeover of Radio Shack. In junior high I built a bunch of these P-Box kits (here's a nice picture).

Speaking of kits, I still have a screwdriver that says Lafayette Radio. I built this KT-135 regenerative shortwave receiver (tubes!) -- painful to the ears :)

I never made any Heathkit stuff, but several things from SWTPC. Cool stuff, but was cutting edge (a lot of ICs) and components got pretty hot. For high school electronics class I built this 198/A preamp (the pushbuttons never worked right, even after I replaced them, and the sometimes you got a weird high pitched oscillation when you were going from one button to the next) and the 540 power amp. Each amp (it was stereo :) had an IC with a weird looking heat sink that made it look like something from The War of the Worlds. The top cases of both the preamp and amp were vinyl covered wood. I was always afraid of getting shocked :)

PAiA was more famous for synthesizer and guitar effects boxes, but I built at least one of their things, I think a wireless mic. I'm pretty sure that both PAiA and SWTPC had Theremin kits.

Another blast from the past: Robert Tinney cover art from Byte. I received the Koenigsberg one as a college graduation present. Other famous covers are for artificial intelligence and for Smalltalk.

Anthrax, Ham radio, and liquor

Occasionally a phrase will amuse me, I'm not sure why. I try to use those phrases in titles of blog posts, but I couldn't figure out what I could say under this post's rubric, other than link to an article explaining it. The phrase is the refrain from a song by Clutch (whom I know next to nothing about):

“Anthrax, ham radio, and liquor” from “50,000 Unstoppable Watts”
“We rehearse very close to the Fort Detrick Army base,” Fallon explains. “That’s where the Army does some real neat-o stuff with chemical weapons. Around the neighborhood are a lot of ham antennas, probably relics from civil defense. On my way home one evening, I stopped by the beer store there in Frederick because the ones around my neighborhood are terrible. Thus: Anthrax, ham radio, and liquor.”

Here are some of my favorite blog post titles:

• "Man does not whiter at the thought of dancing. But it is generally to be avoided." April 2009
• "I've always wanted to be someone, but I should have been more specific." May 2008
  
• "In most men there lurks a lesser man, and his presence smells in the sun", April 2008 and ""There is a degree of mercy beyond which any man is rude to inquire", also April 2008
  
• "We have merely nodded to fear. Now we must shake its filthy hand." March 2008.

You know who you are

A few years ago I talked about traffic-circle haters. You know who you are.

Still doubting? Spend five minutes of your life with this Ted talk. Not only are traffic circles safer, they save time and money.

Three bits of inspiration this week

Three good talks found me. The first is "The Art, Technology and Science of Reading" from this week's MIX user experience conference. The talk is a really nice research-driven presentation about reading from a display, fonts, and how our visual system works. It's DS07 on the list of conference videos. The presenter's blog is here.

Not as research driven, is a talk by the always interesting Seth Godin about "Why marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department".

At school we've been talking about classroom or lecture capture systems. We currently use NCast, as did CENIC for their conference this week. Most of the presentations were captured and are available for viewing. I highly recommend Ed Lazowska's keynote about e-science it was 11am Tuesday. He's given similar talks before, but he's definitely worth watching if you haven't.

ICT

Where else would but Freeman SD would you see a Schmeckfest shirt. Yes, the Wichita airport. And that wasn't the only "interesting" thing in ICT last weekend, Brett Wagner, actor, and spokesperson for Bad Boy Mowers waited to take the flight to DFW.

Coming in to ICT was actually interesting. Preflight the flight deck door was open and I could watch the pilots go through the checklists using CRM techniques such as pointing and repeating settings aloud. More exciting though was the missed landing coming in to ICT.

Speaking of airports, it would be great to get the FAT-HNL nonstops back. It's been a long time.

Three more things: an article about JPL using formal methods on Mars mission code, an essay on breaking the rules from Harvard Business Review, and one of my HCI students' favorites, a treemap (this time of the top 100 Internet sites).

Highed ed

Today's post is all related to higher education.

First, one of my favorite profs Bob Sutton has a take on the infamous tenure vote discussed in Inside Higher Ed. I've participated in some lively tenure votes, but nothing where branding was involved:

When Reader learned that Hodson planned to recommend against awarding tenure, he made the bizarre decision to expose scars on his arms where he had used a branding tool to burn the words “comfort” and “truth” into his flesh.

Shudder. There's also something that must give people with nonacademic jobs a good chuckle:

To exact his revenge, faculty were told, Reader imagined one day being able to schedule them for teaching on Friday afternoons, the report states. Reader has denied saying he was "out to get" anyone, and he's disputed the claim that he hoped to someday create undesirable schedules for those who voted against him.

Class on a Friday afternoon? Preposterous!! :)

A lighter topic: besides "Writing across the curriculum" a few colleges have tried mathematics across the curriculum. Dartmouth's website says

In the same way that all students should be able to write an essay in any subject they have studied, all students should be able to look at a problem or situation or experiment and ask suitable mathematical questions. They should then have some idea of how to seek the answers to their questions. This is inevitably tied to the reduction of a lot of anxiety about the use of mathematics among the students and, we cautiously point out, the faculty.

Mount Holyoke's classes sound great.

Two things on NPR today reminded me of previous posts: "Humans were born to run barefoot" (remember I already talked about the Vibram FiveFingers shoes), and "California budget woes hurt university system".

Finally, y'all should be listening to Grammar Girl.

Brain strangeness, electric cars

As usual, good stuff in IEEE Spectrum: how our current grid is not build to charge many electronic vehicles overnight, and a piece on "why the Chevy Volt will fizzle" (as part of the January issue's Winners & Losers). About the grid:

EVs need lots of power, especially when charged quickly. Utilities bet that most buyers will want a 240-volt charger that can "fill the tank" of a modest-size EV in 2 to 3 hours, four times as fast as a standard 120-V charger can. Such "AC Level 2" chargers, as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers' emerging J1772 standard, draw up to 6.6 kilowatts. Turning one on is like adding up to three homes to a neighborhood, and that's with the air conditioning, lights, and laundry running.

Interesting college factoid: Of KIplinger's top ten best values among California public universities, only one has more male students than female students.

Also, the Sacramento Bee published a stunner: an examination of the top 120 college football programs showed that athletes were more likely than general applicants to receive special admission.

I've posted before about perception of time. The NYT's has a nice review "Where did the time go? Do not ask the brain" (info about Bob Levine's Geography of Time book here). You might also remember this previous post about the perception of time during crisis.

Speaking of brain-strangeness, we also have seating preferences in theaters based on dominant brain hemisphere. It doesn't have anything to do with brains, but you should probably also read about "The unfortunate sex life of the banana". You'll find out what bananas and navel oranges have in common.

Two final things: more from Doug Engelbart and the invention of the mouse. I talked about other Engelbart stuff back in 2005. Finally, something I didn't know existed until this week -- The Mid-Atlantic accent. That explains why people in old movies sound strange :)

My mistake

I admit it, I was wrong, in the previous post I said "This guy ..." has a vegetarian crock pot blog. I was chromosomally wrong.

And now I really want to try her crock pot tamale recipe. We recently lamented the lack of holiday tamales this year, and this looks like a good solution. Although I might use fake pork.

Starting 2010

This is additional 2009 wrap-up, but I'm too late for that. Here's more:

Security

Always good to see what Bruce Schneier is thinking about "TSA Absurdity and the Need for Resilience". This time, in The Atlantic.

Obsolete learning technologies

Including a link to 21 technologies that became obsolete in the 2000s.

The serendipity of Google Streetview

Lots of people are finding interesting things on streetview, so I looked around Fresno and found these folks downtime. OK, not very interesting.

Cool cities

There more to it than attracting knowledge workers, see "Attracting "Knowledge" Workers is a Bad Strategy".

Water

A provocative piece on "Unpacking the Central Valley “dust bowl” lies". You can also watch the recent 60 minutes segment.

Slow cookin'

This guy "started an experimental crock pot based vegetarian lifestyle in September 2009" and blogs about it daily, well almost.

Wrapping up 2009

I'm using the holiday to go through a bunch of clippings (physical and electronic) so here is what Alex Trebek would call a potpourri:

Student ratings

There's always angst when it comes to student ratings of faculty instruction ("student evaluations"). Research shows it doesn't take much time for students to form an opinion of the instruction (something Gladwell also mentioned in Blink):

So we do appear to be quite effective at making judgements about teaching ability even after viewing only a total of 6 seconds of actual teaching, and without even hearing the teacher's voice.

This is related to quick judgements of traits, see "How many slices does it take to accurately judge personality and intelligence?"

So using a bunch of judges to watch short clips of behavior can be a good way to judge personality and attention -- but only up to a point. Once you exceed six judges, there isn't much improvement. And watching these thin slices of behavior doesn't work as well for every personality trait: while it works pretty well for intelligence, it's not so useful for judging conscientiousness.

Programming languages

The September 2009 ACM Software Engineering Notes included links to programming language comparisons. The first of the two Programming Languages links has a nice matrix of PLs and properties. One property I point out to software engineering students is the last row "Capers Jones language level". Essentially this tells you how much bang you get for each LOC. You can see similar information on LOC per function point. Roughly speaking, it takes 200 lines of assembler but only about 50 lines of Java or 20 lines of Smalltalk.

Critical systems

Two interesting slide sets from two smart guys: Peter G. Neumann's "Hierarchies, Lowerarchies, Anarchies, and Plutarchies (Parallel Lives)", and John Rushby's "Composition of Critical Properties". The stuff we did in graduate school is back in style again, see "Using formal specifications to support testing" from the February 2009 Computing Surveys and "Correct OS kernel? Proof? Done!" in the December 2009 issue of usenix's ;login:

Wind chimes

Yesterday at Buttonwillow Nursery I looked at pricey wind chimes, If you are going to spend that much money, you might as well listen to them first (click on a tuning to get to the mp3s).

Last words

Speaking of critical systems, you can read transcripts of cockpit voice recordings for quite a few accidents. AA965 is a classic example of interface problems and the important of situation awareness. About a year ago (and a year before that), I also posted something about cockpit dynamics.

Root crops and moon rocks

Two unrelated things: First, I was surprised that people have suffered botulism posioning from fried onions and baked potatoes. The common cause is naturally occuring bacteria in the soil that then multiplies in an oxygen-poor environment: onions slathered in margarine and foil-wrapped potatoes. Amazing. And don't eat green parts of potatoes either :)

Second, I like moon rocks as much as the next guy, but some of this seems a little strange:

• Countries keep losing their goodwill moonrocks (from 2004) or misidentifying petrified wood as their country's goodwill rock (isn't this obvious to anyone who's seen petrified wood?). Good to know they'll be sticking with the paintings

  The Rijksmuseum, which is perhaps better known for paintings by artists such as Rembrandt, says it will keep the piece as a curiosity.

• sending a moon rock to the International Space Station? Does that make sense? The plastic holder/display thing looks good,
• and I was going to buy this, it's only $35k, but they don't take paypal so forget it :) I might have to settle for Apollo 17 surface-flown film.

Tweckling

Another example of technology making something possible in a big way that's been going on for years: using twitter (tweckling) during conference presentations. Two recent examples are the disastrous SXSW "interview" and the HighEdWeb keynote.

It reminds me a bit of the more constructive real-time "fact checking" that students do now using google and email. When I started teaching online I quoted one of the patriarchs of the field. One of the students -- demonstrating the hierarchical flattening of the Internet -- emailed him and asked about the quote. Which he denied saying. Which was interesting since the quote came directly from an interview he'd given a couple years earlier in a reputable professional publication. Hmm.

Electronic veracity checking is interesting to think about. Over a decade ago a Major Company Whose Name You'd Recognize flew me to Newark as part of a day to talk to about software for safety critical systems. At lunch, one of the other presenters (I still think his undergrad software engineering books is one of the best) made a statement about formal methods and Dr. XYZ (who I would say is still top in the field). I said well I think XYZ's views are a little different, and actually closer to other presenter's position. He said, essentially, no no Dr. XYZ would never say that. But, I had XYZ on video saying exactly that during his guest lecture the month previous for my satellite-delivered class (this was before the days of LMSs :)

Back to tweckling, I first saw at that in the early 1990s at a HICSS conference. HICSS was big on the latest in DSS (decisions support systems) and GSS (groups support systems). Back then, conference rooms would be set up with computers at every seat with software that allowed you to chat, ask questions, and organize information in collaboration with other attendees. One of the presenters was not pleased with the background conversation going on about his talk :)