You mean the Sun doesn't go around the earth?

A Nature Conservancy blogger says that scientists are to blame for an anti-science country (the part about writing passively is amusing):

Between 2002 and 2007, nearly 32,000 Ph.D.s in science were awarded in the United States. These not so-young Ph.D.s (median age for receiving a Ph.D. is 33) are trained to become like their mentors — college professors, even though at best only one in 10 will actually land a tenure-track job. And that was before the recession. These scientists are deft at statistics and experimental design, and have been schooled in writing passively, without adjectives or storyline or anything that could capture the interest of anyone other than the 17 other specialists working on the same research topic.

He even talks about C.P. Snow at the end, who's famous lecture is 50 years old. Snow was the topic of one of my first posts.

Finally, during jury duty in April and May I spent a lot of time looking at the Security Bank building out the window. They look like great lofts, but pricey.

More UCM woes

An article from Inside Higher Ed is about the newest UC campus at Merced. Putting on my three-time UC alum hat, it should have been in or near Fresno. Clearly it's not a matter of being in the valley or close to a CSU (UCD and Sac State seem to be doing OK). I remember the UC president at the time being tired of hearing from Fresno-area alumns about picking the wrong site :)

Physician envy?

Steve's thoughts about software development as a stochastic art (you should read it) got me thinking again about how software developers look to the medical field for inspiration, or at least metaphor, or analogy?) But the question that has nagged me for a couple of decades is why we would want to model ourselves after an industry in which all the users die and is running us out of money :)

Some random thoughts about health care and software development:

• Back in 1992, Tom McCabe and Charles Butler suggested that cyclomatic complexity and essential cyclomatic measures could be used like blood pressure measurements to determine the health of code. A high cyclomatic complexity can be treated by restructuring the code (abstraction, essentially), but a high essential complexity is more difficult to address since it means that the essence of the code's structure can't be reduced beyond this point. There's a scanned PDF version here, but you'll have to scroll about 60% down, and look for "A clinical approach to reverse and reengineering" (IEEE Software, January 1992).
  
  
• Over thirty years ago chapter three of Fred Books' The Mythical Man-Month describes the surgical team (aka Chief Programmer Team) organization for software development. Amazingly, this is yet another idea that originally came from Harlan Mills, a great thinker who most developers never heard of (chief programmer teams, cleanroom software engineering, structured programming, ...)
  
  After reading Brooks back in the day, I first started thinking about the big "individual differences" in programing performance and how to leverage that (McConnell has a nice discussion).
  
  
• Although I think he gets a little "out there" at times, in Jim McCarthy's Dynamics of Software Development is suggestion that we "Be more like the doctors". I can't find my copy right now, but a good quote is here:

  For now, we really need to learn to be like doctors. They are able to say, quite comfortably and confidently and with conviction, "These things are never certain." Doctors seldom if ever state with certainty what the outcome of any procedure might be. Yet software managers, operating in a far less disciplined and less data-driven environment... blithely promise features, dates, and outcomes not especially susceptible to prediction.

  Interestingly, the uncertainty that McCarthy cites is a motivation of the evidence based medicine (and evidence based software engineering) movements.
  
  You can watch a really old video of McCarthy giving his famous "23 Rules of Thumb" here. You can tell it's an old video since they talk about consultation fees being $100/hour:)
  
  
• Anecdotally, when expert systems burst on the software stage, the software was better at diagnosing rare diseases than human physicians were. I'll have to try to find some citations. But is there something in that we can transfer to software development? As I remember, Feigenbaum's systems being pretty good, but Lenat's CYC not being so good at diagnosis (concluding that Lenat's rusted-pocked car had chicken pox :) Britannica has an intriguing summary of Feigenbaum's work:

  Experience with DENDRAL informed the creation of Feigenbaum’s next expert system, MYCIN, which assisted physicians in diagnosing blood infections. MYCIN’s great accomplishment lay in demonstrating that often the key is not reasoning but knowing. That is, knowing what symptoms correspond to each disease is generally more important than understanding disease etiology. At a basic level, MYCIN also demonstrated that the means of navigating the reasoning tree and the contents of the different branches can be treated separately.

  
  
• Finally, one of my favorite examples of a disconnect between software developers and physicians is here: "Building an Information System for Collaborative Researchers: A Case Study from the Brain-tumor Research Domain". A lot of stuff to think about, unfortunately I can't find a free copy to link to. But if you have access to Science Direct or the ACM Digital Library you can read it.
  

Bottom line -- for anyone working in requirements, the paper above is probably the most important thing in this post. The other big ideas to think about are putting software development (and medicine) on a firm evidence-based foundation.

Mother knows best?

Mother Earth News is still published. Or should that be Mother Earth News is still published? Yes, and "fascinating" as ever, for example readers report their most amusing superglue accidents, and an interview with radical farmer Joel Salatin. Here's an excerpt from "Everything he wants to do is illegal" about vegetarians:

This philosophical and nutritional foray into a supposed brave new world is really a duplicitous experiment into the anti-indigenous. This is why we enjoy having our patrons come out and see the animals slaughtered. Actually, the 7- to 12-year old children have no problem slitting throats while their parents cower inside their Prius listening to “All Things Considered.” Who is really facing life here? The chickens don’t talk or sign petitions. We honor them in life, which is the only way we earn the right to ask them to feed us — like the mutual respect that occurs between the cape buffalo and the lion. To these people, I don’t argue. This is a religion and I pretty much leave it alone.

What?? Sounds like Ted Nugent with a dose of anthropomorphism :) Anyway, at least there doesn't seem to be as many weird personal ads in Mother Earth Newslike there were in the 1970s. Shudder.

More interesting, because of the state budget and work furloughs, I'm reading Getting even: The truth about workplace revenge and how to stop it. It's not about workplace violence and "going postal", but about little things that people do for the sake of "workplace justice". Here's a little bit from the introduction:

... managers already spend an inordinate amount of time trying to sort out conflict. One study showed that middle managers spend an average of 25 percent of their time on this effort, while the numbers were even higher for first-line supervisors. The same study found that CEOs spend 26 percent of their time dealing with conflict... we argue that the motivation for revenge is primarily rooted in the sense of injustice. Further, revenge should be seen as actions intended to restore a sense of justice.

Bob Sutton liked the book.

40 year anniversary

Since the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing is coming up, here's a few things:

• The Kennedy presidential library has a real-time replay of the mission. All the audio, plus things you can click on.
• Walter Cronkite didn't quite make it to the 40th anniversary, but his reaction was pretty memorable at the time.
• Three new books to check out: The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Spacesuits by Amanda Young, a spacesuit curator. Lots of good pictures. Speaking of pictures, Apollo through the eyes of the astronauts combines images, text by the astronauts, and a forward by Lucy and Stephen Hawking. Andrew Chaikin (I previously talked about him) returns with Voices from the moon: Apollo astronauts describe their lunar experiences.

Finally, I finally finished Dragonfly: NASA and the crisis aboard Mir. It is a 500 page book that I read a few pages at a time, like I did with Digital Apollo. The book discusses scary events, like a fire onboard the Mir space station, a collision with a Progress cargo ship, a decompression, leaking cooling systems and an airlock door held in place with C-clamps. That was on the Russian Mir, and the NASA astronaut selection and training side of things was just about as scary. It's amazing no one died. ISS still uses Progress cargo ships - and sometimes amateur astronomers gets pictures of ISS and Progress from their home telescopes.

Bonus: an amusing Q&A with "the third one", a grumpy/lucky Michael Collins.

Underdog strategies

Malcolm Gladwell's been writing about underdog strategies, and one example is using the full court press in basketball. He writes about the success a novice coach and inexperienced young players have using the press (and relates it to other struggles in history). He's also going back and forth with ESPN's Bill Simmon's about not only the press, but the NBA draft. So I asked one of our local basketball gurus, Jack Fertig to comment (Jack was head of basketball operations for Tark when coached Fresno State). Jack's interesting response is here.

Gladwell's original New Yorker column is pretty good, here a sentence describing the approach of a coach with no previous basketball experience:

The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.

Update: I forgot another summer reality show I should have included in a previous post: Discovery Channel's Treasure Quest. Interesting show about looking for shipwrecks using high tech gizmos. The technology turns on them sometimes, for example they complain that the public database of ship locations tips off their competitors to their finds. Here's the map of real-time shipping (click to zoom). It reminds me of the flight map.

Maybe I'm just on parole

What's happened since I was locked up? Well, NPR interviewed the author of You are here:

Ellard also examined why men have a reputation for not asking for directions. He found that men may not ask because they have greater difficulty following turn-by-turn directions. Whereas women navigate using routes, men navigate using compass orientation.

Lehrer has a great review of Ellard's book here. Speaking of brains, Harvard Business discussed Robert Macnamara's brain:

... McNamara was a hedgehog rather than a fox, an engineer rather than an ecologist. The hedgehog knows one big thing, and for McNamara that was rational systems analysis. If he'd been a fox, he'd have brought additional perspectives to America's pressing problems. Like a dogged engineer, he believed that you could model and manipulate the inputs and outputs of any system. Unlike the ecologist, he didn't seem to appreciate the complexity of systems involving living things. If the variables explaining poverty or victory in guerilla warfare were unwieldy or unmeasurable, he simply ignored them.

National Geographic's Secret History of Gold makes a provocative statement about how all the gold ever mined would fit in the base of the Statue of LIberty, i.e. "All the gold in the world still isn't very much" (see video).

Since there's not enough gold to go around, IEEE Spectrum has ideas for getting and giving recognition at work which reminds me of UH's "making the elephant dance" award.

What else? The CMU prof who came up with the now ubiquitous captcha has an amusing blog, this post is about doing high production value videos of his lectures. Speaking of university professors, are there too many scientists?

Over the last few days there's been a couple of launches (a successful SpaceX satellite) and, finally, a space shuttle. One day the shuttle launch was scrubbed because of lightning. I like this explanation about why lightning is a concern:

"The concern really is mostly in those pyrotechnic systems," he said. "There are a lot of things that have to go right. You need the SRB igniters to fire, you need the separation bolts to fire to release the SRBs from the mobile launch platform, you need the separation motors to fire to separate you from the external tank. We don't like to talk about it, but you need the self-destruct system to work if you truly needed it to work.

Finally, more about feet and those funny looking shoes I mentioned before, and a possible relationship between the spacing of birds on a wire and parked cars.

Free at last

My blog was flagged as spam and locked for a week until a human could look at it and set me free. While I was locked out, I watched the finale of one of the more interesting reality shows, the History Channel's Expedition Africa. Great HDTV scenery. The NY Times had an amusing review, but I liked studio daily's article about how it was produced and filmed since it was all about the logistics and lugging the equipment around yet staying out of sight.

Yes, in addition to Expedition Africa, your summer could be filled with new episodes of Ice Road Truckers (why's that on the History Channel?), Deadliest Catch, Whale Wars, and starting this Sunday, Pawn Stars. And if you are going to watch Big Brother, at least don't admit it to anyone.

Updates

You might remember previous posts about sandwiches, grilled cheese in particular. Sunset magazine picked up the theme -- since I am overwhelmed with apricots this year, I need to try this.

Also, without mentioning his name, I've posted previously about guitarists like Trace Bundy. You should also consider James Blackshaw (profiled on NPR, and you can listen to a few songs, including Bled).

Finally, for basketball fans who remember the Tark the Shark era at Fresno State, an recent article about Chris Herren. And, Tark's former head of basketball operations, Jack Fertig, is an entertaining and prolific blogger particularly about sports and character.

It's possible, but just barely

Hmm, what's an "unused" 150 foot dish antenna owned by the federal government, SRI Interntional, the moon, and a ham radio operator from Reedley have in common this weekend?

“It is the thrill of pulling a weak signal out from a long distance that excites the amateur radio folks,” said Jim Klassen, a ham in Reedley, Calif.

The dish has even bounced signals off of Mars.

But I wonder what they really used that dish for in the early 1960s -- scattering of radio waves by the ionosphere, riiiiiiight :)

Hot, Flat, Crowded

Thomas Friedman gave a good talk yesterday at a great venue about his latest book. You can watch a video of an almost identical talk here. The advertisement on his first slide is provocative.

Mythbuster Adam Savage got an $11,000 bill from AT&T wireless for web surfing in Canada from his phone.

The recent election in Iran is suspicious since the least significant digits of the vote counts aren't uniformly distributed.

Alan Bean is the most famous moonwalker-turned-painter. Nice guy, and recently profiled in the NYT. Although not a moonwalker, Michael Collins from Apollo 11 paints also, usually nature scenes.

Lecture as performance

What do Malcolm Gladwell and TED have in common? The well-crafted show:

But this wasn’t a book reading or a Q&A session of the kind authors traditionally submit to. Neither was it a slide show, as you might expect to find at a lecture. Instead, the author recounted a single vignette from the book – the tale of why a plane ended up crashing, from the perspective of the pilots and those in the control tower – and burnished it into a narrative with all the chill and pace of a traditional ghost story. Even the lighting was kept deliberately low to create the right atmosphere. The performance lasted precisely an hour and five minutes, and no questions were invited after Gladwell had finished speaking. Rather than a talk about a book, it looked more like a carefully choreographed stage show.

and you've heard about the TED Commandments for presentations, worth reviewing occasionally.

I'm not a big Financial Times reader, but the article is something to think about for anyone who gives presentations.

Speaking of lecture as performance, Thomas Friedman coming up on Thursday.

Baseball, and raising business morale

The economy is tough, so what can be done to reward employees that doesn't cost much money? Company picnics or other group activity? Nope. Flexible work times and leaving early on Fridays were the big winners.

We respond to different rewards. Office Team studied the "forms of recognition valued most by administrative professionals, as ranked by managers and support staff". There's a disconnect. It reminds me of Steve McConnell's section in Rapid Development about the disconnect in what software engineers find rewarding compared to what their managers find rewarding.

How about taking your officemates out to "the thinking man's game", baseball. Whoops, only 26 of major league players and managers have college degrees. Not 26 percent, 26 total. The brainiest team is the Oakland A's.

Being green, again

A couple years ago I was thinking about whether ceramic mugs or disposable cups make the most sense when you consider life-cycle costs (here and then here). In the most recent Mr Green, the Prius lifecycle costs are considered (the biggest issue is the battery).

Other good stuff in this issue of Sierra: "How not to die in the woods", a 100 mpg Prius mod, dumb questions asked by Yosemite tourists:

My favorite encounter came early one morning when I was working at the general store and three guys in my checkout line plopped three cases of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale on the counter. They weren't among our alcoholic regulars, and I thought it was odd they were buying beer so early. I asked if they were stocking up for a party that night. No, they replied. "We're going to be the first people to get drunk on top of Half Dome!"

These guys intended to carry a case of beer each on the 8.2-mile trail that culminates in a precipitous 400-foot climb assisted by metal cables. ("Since 1919," the National Park Service's Web site helpfully notes, "only a few people have fallen and even fewer have died.") They probably didn't need a case each: Drinking at 8,842 feet lowers even the sturdiest tippler's tolerance.

One of the Fresno Bee's front page stories today was about the Kings River Conservancy (and the local El Rio Reyes Conservation Trust -- more river trails at Reedley College!).

If you're going to be hiking, better get some of those funny looking shoes I talked about earlier, because you walk wrong.

Bonus: Krakauer's book and Penn's movie were probably wrong about Chris McCandless dying in the Alaskan bus -- interesting graph showing his BMI and that essentially he starved to death, and that he had identification and money. I've ordered the DVD.

Be careful out there

Another person died at the Half Dome cables. That makes one serious injury and one death this year. One of the creepiest pictures is here -- he barely had enough friction to keep from slipping, for hours until a helicopter arrived.

I wonder if Vibram's "Five Fingers" shoes would be good on granite?

I haven’t climbed any mountains yet, but they sure did freak out the people at the convenience store.

If those look too strange for you, consider the VivoBarefoot line of shoes.

In other news, men in D.C., New Jersey, and Hawaii are least likely to have vasectomies.

"It's on a lot of guys' lists to do this," but it usually ranks low, he says. "If it gets near the top, they decide it's time to paint the house instead."

Finally, no matter what they guy on the radio says, paying off your mortgage early might not be a great thing to aspire to, although I like the interactive mortgage calculator to check for yourself.

Birds of two kinds

I have a nesting pair of Cooper's Hawks in my yard. Strange vocalizations (but much different than the Red Tailed Hawk sounds you hear on movie soundtracks a lot). Not surprisingly, I no longer have a pigeon problem.

A website about metallic birds is one of my new favorites. In the entry on the AF Airbus 332 crash there's an interesting timeline of the automatic messages sent from the avionics:

02:10Z: Autothrust off
  Autopilot off
  FBW alternate law
  Rudder Travel Limiter Fault
  TCAS fault due to antenna fault
  Flight Envelope Computation warning
  All pitot static ports lost
02:11Z: Failure of all three ADIRUs
  Failure of gyros of ISIS (attitude information lost)
02:12Z: ADIRUs Air Data disagree
02:13Z: Flight Management, Guidance and Envelope Computer fault
  PRIM 1 fault
  SEC 1 fault
02:14Z: Cabin Pressure Controller fault (cabin vertical speed)

At 2:10Z time, "FBW alternative law" says that the fly by wire system switched algorithms from, essentially, one that prevents pilots from potentially hurting the plane to one that allows pilots to do drastic things that shouldn't happen during normal flight. TCAS is the Traffic alert and Collision Avoidance System, a favorite among computer scientists interested in software safety and critical systems, like Nancy Leveson. The pitot tubes, along with static ports, are basically how the the instruments figure out how fast the plane is flying through the air.

PRIM 1 and SEC 1 are the primary and secondary flight control computers.

Airbus and Boeing take different approaches to FBW, you might want to read about it. There's more about the Airbus 330 system at Reply 12 (I couldn't figure out how to link directly to the post) in this thread.

Leaning towers

This optical illusion using identical pictures of Pisa's leaning tower is strong even when you know it is an illusion. How do children learn to judge the size of objects? Cognitive Daily explains.

Bonus:

• Amusing spoof of the "reinventing GM" advertisements.
• With the wild weather we are having today it is snowing in the Sierra again, for example at Sierra Summit, or check out the fire lookout cams (Mineral King was getting snow now).
  
  Here's a picture at Huntington Friday morning,

First cats, now birds

Anyone with a resident backyard mocking bird knows these research results are true: " mockingbirds were able to spot their intruder out of the hundreds of people who passed within meters of their nest each day". They're also good at tormenting cats by dive bombing and pulling out fur.



There is also this Ted.com talk on the intelligence of crows and a vending machines for crows.



Not really related to birds, other than flight, tonight's National Geographic World's Toughest Fixes was about the preparation and launch of a communication satellite from French Guiana. Although it is sort of aimed at kids, they showed quite a bit of stuff, and at a level of detail, that you rarely see from NASA or the US commercial launch services.

What's with all the cats?

The NY Times' "Dot Earth" blog talks about "The truth about cats and birds", including a quote from Flyaway:

Precautionary measures simply do not work. During an 18-month period, a single cat roaming a wildlife experiment station killed over 1,600 birds and small mammals. A study in England showed that cats wearing bells killed more birds than cats without them; during a study in Kansas, a free-roaming declawed cat killed more birds than the cats with claws.

The Audubon Society recommends bibs. Apparently they are effective, maybe because the cat feels so embarrassed.

The June 2009 Scientific America includes "The evolution of house cats":

Recent genetic and archaeological discoveries indicate that cat domestication began in the Fertile Crescent, perhaps around 10,000 years ago, when agriculture was getting under way.

Get your mind out of the gutter

Spaceflightnow.com reports as of 16:00 PDT today:

Attachment of shuttle Atlantis atop the modified 747 carrier jet is underway at today at the gantry-like Mate-Demate Device structure. The orbiter has been hoisted up and the aircraft towed underneath Atlantis in preparation for the duo to be bolted together.

This is so Atlantis can be ferried back to KSC after landing at Edwards last week.

In the past there's been some giggling when I've regaled you with stories of the Mate-Demate Device. But it's all true, and here's pictures to prove it. Note that NASA people sometimes have a sense of humor -- see the instructions on this mount point on a 747.

Rarely, a shuttle has to land in New Mexico. Do they have a MDD also? As of the end of 2006, apparently not:

"The concern out at White Sands is not with the runway facility, but with the turnaround," Shannon said. "We don't have the large mate-demate device that we use to lift up the orbiter and put it on the back fo the shuttle carrier aircraft (for transport back to Florida). Also, we don't have as much equipment there to service the vehicle. Basically, you power it down and wait for the calvary to arrive."

Just in case, two C-17 cargo jets were called up to ferry backup equipment from Kennedy to White Sands, including a purge unit to pump nitrogen gas through the shuttle's plumbing and a power system to run various heaters and other systems to defend against expected freezing weather Saturday night. Rocket nozzle covers also are being sent to keep out gypsum dust, which caused major contamination problems after Columbia landed at White Sands in 1982.