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.

How can school be starting and it's not September yet?

With school starting there are many posts about how to get back into the academic mode. I like Guy Kawasaki, and most of his "Back to School Special" pointers but have a few quibbles. Let's look at a few in detail:

How to talk to your boss.

Bringing questions to office hours is something I expect from undergrads, but I expect grad students to bring answers, which is what he says happens in the real world.

How to survive a meeting that's poorly run, and

How to run a meeting

Great advice, I particularly like

"First, assume that most of what you’ll hear is pure and petty, and it’s simply part of the game. This will prevent you from going crazy. Second, focus on what you want to accomplish in the meeting and ignore everything else. Once you get what you want, take yourself “out of your body,” sit back, and enjoy the show. Third, vow to yourself that someday when you’re the boss that your meetings won’t work like this."

How to negotiate

His five step process is essentially Getting to Yes, complete with BATNA.

How to use PowerPoint

ten slides in twenty minutes? I'm OK with twenty minutes, ten slides is a little slow. Go PechaKucha!

How to leave voicemail

Great advice, please please do this. Leave your number twice, once and the beginning, once at the end.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has "How to Avoid Being a Jerk in the Classroom". Here's a good one:

"Do you say things like "I can't bear to read that crap" about student effort? Maybe another line of work would suit you better? "Don't talk shit about your students outside of the classroom. That attitude is harder to switch off than some teachers seem to think. And the rest of us don't want to hear it anyhow," via Mike Garcia."

Something common to these guidelines are to not reveal too much personal information. In "Ways That We Irritate Our Students", Delaney Kirk says

"Sharing too much personal information. I had a colleague years ago that had several dogs that were essentially her "children." She brought up the dogs in every class. The students started rolling their eyes whenever she mentioned them. Sharing some personal info is ok if it is relevant to the class. However, the students are not your friends and don't need to know the details of your everyday life."

Finally, you might want to listen to "Women are Over-Mentored (But Under-Sponsored)", which is really more about the world in general, not specifically academics.

Snakes and card tricks

The lakes and rivers are full, and that sometimes means homeless rattlesnakes. I haven't seen any snakes yet this year, so here's someone else's rattlesnake story (scroll down to Roger's Remarks). Someday I will regale you with my story of following a rattlesnake around our property for about an hour watching it hunt.

Other unrelated stuff to consider:

Executive compentation

The more they make the meaner they get. From Harvard Business Review.

Longevity

It's in your genes (more here). Reminds me a bit of Martin Seligman's book What you can change and what you can't.

V.D. Hanson on

There is no history apart from war: talk at the Commonwealth Club.

Learn

A card trick from David Blaine.

Picture books

Take a book in the public domain and illustrate every page. Here's Moby Dick. I'd don't like every image, but I really like the idea. And pages 261 and 262.

It reminds me a bit of computer science patriarch Don Knuth's book 3:16. He translated the 16th verse of the third chapter of each Biblical book (or made other arrangements), and then had well known calligraphers illustrate. Knuth explains his motivation, and relationship with Hermann Zapf, in these short videos.

Speaking of illustrations, you might remember I previously posted about a talk by Zimbardo and using marshmallows to predict personality. A similar Zimbrado talk about the "secret powers of time" has been animated in the style of Dan Pink's motivation talk.

I never was much of a peener.

Popular Mechanics has a list of 50 essential tools and how to use them. I've had a ball-peen hammer (number 39) since I was a kid, but I have to admit to not being much of a peener. Bugs me that some of the tools are pictured upside down, like the adjustable wrench, and hack saw.

I just got a new computer and was looking for some speakers. I like the looks of these ceramic speakers, but I think they would clash with the subwoofer.

In other unrelated news, the Cassini spacecraft did an incredible dip into the atmosphere of one of Saturn's moons, and lived to tell about it.

In HCI class I always talk about eye tracking studies, particularly the Poynter studies. Here's an interesting summary of work by the venerable Jakob Nielsen on using eye tracking to increase comprehension of web sites.

Finally, this is pretty good: Malcolm Gladwell talking about growing up in the midst of a conservative Mennonite town in Canada.

Light reading

Having a break from work is good for catching up on a lot of things, including the Harvard Business Review :)

Much as I dislike HBR's and EBSCOhost's linking policies for online classes, there's almost always something interesting. A recent blog entry is "Why controlling bosses have unproductive employees" describing a classic psych experiment:

... if your employees consider you a controlling person, even an unconscious thought of you can have a negative effect on their performance. If, for example, they were to happen to subliminally see, out of the corner of their eyes, your name flash for 60 milliseconds, you could expect them to start working less hard. Even if they didn't intend to slack off.

A featured story of the June issue is "The Productivity Paradox: How Sony Pictures Gets More Out of People by Demanding Less" (if you are a Fresno State person the fulltext link is here, for others it is here).

... we encouraged Sony to make two fundamental shifts in the way it manages employees. The first was to stop expecting people to operate like computers ... and to recognize that human beings perform best and are most productive when they alternate between periods of intense focus and intermittent renewal. The second was to move from trying to get more out of employees and instead to invest in systematically meeting their four core needs... These four core needs are physical health (achieved through nutrition, sleep, daytime renewal, and exercise), emotional well-being (which grows out of feeling appreciated and valued), mental clarity (the ability to focus intensely, prioritize, and think creatively), and spiritual significance (which comes from the feeling of serving a mission beyond generating a profit).

Bob Sutton also recently posted his "12 things good bosses believe" at the HBR The Conversation blog.

Win place, or show

Here's a goal: I want to be a finalist in the New Yorker cartoon caption contest. They didn't see the genius of my first entry, apparently, for contest 235 :)

While you are on their site, you might as well read Rebecca Mead's "Learning by degrees" about whether a college degree is "worth the money", or if you keep up with the search-for-the-historical-Jesus folks like Crossan, Adam Gopnik's "What did Jesus do?". First use of the word "dogsbody" I recall seeing. I'd rather be an amanuensis.

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).