Weeping asterisks and flying snowflakes

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

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

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

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

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

The complex expensive toaster? I bet it sells well.

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

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

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

Hey! You! Pay attention!

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

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



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

Audiophilin'

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

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

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

Three HCI things, and other stuff

Three recent HCI-UX related things:

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

And now for the other stuff I promised:

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

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

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

Getting to "yes"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do NBA players experience time differently than shorter people?

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

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

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

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

Bob

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

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

Growing your own

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

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

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

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

then, the money side:

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

Speaking is not an act of extroversion

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

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

Fresno State Myths to Live By

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stuff from the cog psych world

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

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

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

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

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

Hackin', figurin' odds, and valuable finds

A couple of interesting articles about hacking critical systems:

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

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

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

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

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

Snakes and software requirements

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

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

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

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.