Devil's Pocket

ungrounded

2011-11-30T12:00:00.000-08:00

Once, when I was testing out some ideas that would eventually go into a journal paper on applying Activity Theory to peripheral displays I went into Peter Lyman's office. I figured Lyman, an expert in qualitative studies and ethnomethodology, would have a solid grounding in the area and would be able to help me navigate some of its exceptionally convoluted nuances. But when I asked him he just smiled and looked at me and said, "I don't do theory, sorry." At the time, that was shocking to me.

Lyman also said things at other times that made me think he had an appreciation for the style of work we did in the HCI branch of the CS Dept at Berkeley -- lite with theory and heavy with iteration. Reflecting back on these comments, I think that his attitude toward his work relied upon a relatively unusual metaphor, one that I'll call (forgive me) the Rauschenberg.

There are many researchers who apply a house-building metaphor to their work -- they pour a foundation (deep theory), construct the framework (hypothesis and experiment), and if it stays up they embellish the work (generalization, discussion, etc.), or strike the lot. Metaphors can only go so far, of course, and sometimes it is necessary to explain results with a different foundation than what one started with. But the end result is a solid thing that others can see, repeat, build upon, etc.

This is a great metaphor to rely on for scientific work. It is useful because the component of the work that is most generalizable is the product.

But I think that it is a poor metaphor for others, like Lyman, and as strange as it may seem, builders in general. The difference is that for others the goal is not to create a thing that itself is a generalizable contribution, but to go through a process that ends in an interesting or useful result but not one that is necessarily more or less valid than any other.

This is where we get to the Rauschenberg (Robert Rauschenberg was a Neo-Dada artist who would create sculptures ["combines"] by selecting pieces of detritus that he saw on a walk-about around an urban setting). The idea is to pick a certain frame, say discarded street signs, and collect data with that frame in mind. Since there is not necessarily any theoretical underpinning, the selection of a frame is more-or-less arbitrary. And indeed the results for any frame could lead nowhere (if so, pick a new one). Because the frame is ephemeral, you can basically discard it as you move to the next stage, interpreting what you have collected to meet some goal. For the artist this goal is a personal aesthetic (I suppose), but for designers the goal would be something more like usefulness to particular people. Now we can start down the traditional iterative cycle, getting feedback, iterating, throwing away what does not work, etc. But crucially you can throw everything away, including the materials and original frame, because there's no particular spec you are necessarily building to. At the end of this process you have a product that solves a much more specific set of problems and that in and of itself is not at all generalizable.

Clearly this second approach is not science -- it is design.

But then, can it also be research? To the extent that doing research is roughly equivalent to the generation of novel results that can potentially be built upon by others, then yes. Instead of the end result being the contribution, though, it is usually the new tools and techniques that had to be developed in the process of making the final product.*

Such contributions have actually enjoyed some respect in the HCI research community, usually as toolkits. But I think the approach taken in tool and toolkit research is problematic because researchers too often apply the house-building metaphor when the Rauschenberg would do better. That is, they treat the tool or toolkit as a first-order goal, a result in-and-of itself, presumably to appear more scientific (an ongoing concern in the academic HCI community) or futuristic (in the case of tools at least). Most useful tools and toolkits tend to emerge, I think, when the primary goal is a product or application (as is the case with so many platforms today). This type of work, to confuse metaphors again, tends to be more grounded. **

This is all too bad, really, because what is wrong with being a design researcher, making one app or explaining one set of people in one place at a particular point in time, while documenting the tools and techniques you develop along the way?

* One might argue that this would ultimately lead to focusing only on short term products. I think you can expand the types of work you develop, though, by requiring a higher level of technological savvy from your user base, trading off its potential size of course (see earlier post).

** This line of reasoning is related, I think, to the overemphasis on design method that Jon Kolko describes. While methods can play an important role, they should be connected directly to, and always in service of, the construction of a usable thing.

deep drive

2011-11-14T22:56:00.000-08:00

The last few years has seen a surge in technologies designed to motivate people to get fit, reduce emissions, save money, etc. These tools take the form digital widgets that modify cute icons, dole out points to encourage competition, or issue tokens to be exchanged for real goods.

Digital widgets and virtual credits can address motivation about as well as a smiley face sticker can address depression.

Every weekend I run a up a mountain somewhere in the Bay Area.

Why?

When I was young I would take trips out to Colorado in the summer to visit my Grandmother. We would drive into the Rocky Mountains and she and I would take long hikes, sometimes in the forests, but also on the high tundra. I would race ahead and double back and she would point out wildflowers she had found during my absence.

When I got older there was no longer anyone there to double back to. So I just kept running.

And since then I have run with foxes, hawks, dolphins, and owls. I've nearly run into wolves and wild hogs and turkeys. I've navigated around horses, cows, and tarantulas on the trail and hunted down old growth redwoods off the trail. I've lept over snakes (always still as stone), helped lost and weary hikers find their way back to their cars (I hope). I've watched storms move across the ocean while running across high ridges. I've put my daughter in a stroller and run her through poppy fields and up foggy mountain slopes. I've dodged falling trees (definitely they make noise -- lots of logs in the woods, not so many flattened squirrels). I've run in valleys filled with the eerie, booming echoes of rounds fired from nearby shooting ranges.

“The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his incouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

This is why. I want to get out there and take in as much as I can, to relive those sublime summer days in the high woods with my Grandma*. So that I am able to do those 10-25** km runs up one or two thousand feet (or more) I of course have to crosstrain the rest of the week. But with that reward in mind, training is easy.

I think there are parallels. When I was young I drove long distances to school across Atlanta and witnessed gruesome accidents; hideous, rageful screaming matches between drivers that sometimes came to blows; and at best I not-so-patiently suffered through seemingly endless, boring traffic. So now I live close to work and often bike or walk.

And I don't know how you can have a child and not be fiscally responsible.

Motivations run deep. The best an app can do is to lead you to the edge of the mine.

* I do occassionally run in races, though I am not sure why -- perhaps just for the sake of variety. I never stay for the award ceremony.

** I am no ultramarathoner. For me the negatives of running overwhelm the positives at about 25km (on mountain trails anyway).

average margin launch

2010-12-10T00:33:00.000-08:00

I've finally rolled out average margin. For now, all men's college basketball game scores and average margins will be posted to a Twitter account (I may change the way scores are published at some point). The basic idea is that by adding just one more number to a score bug you can get a lot more information about how the game went.

A good example is tonight's game between second-ranked Ohio State and lowly IUPUI. The Jaguars lost to the Buckeyes by 11, so just seeing the final score scroll across the bottom of your TV — 75-64 — you might not give the game a second thought. But average margin reveals a surprisingly tight contest. Here's the tweet for that game:

*ohio state 75* iupui 64 | avg margin: ohio state +0.8 #closerthanthat http://goo.gl/LIzV4

Ohio State in fact only took control late and so won average margin by less than 1 point.

That tweet also includes a tag "#closerthanthat" which is applied to games in which average margin reveals a much closer game than the final score would indicate. The reverse case, in which a close final score fails to reflect a game that one team actually had control of, I tag with "#notthatclose". Here's an example:

*unlv 75* boise state 72 | avg margin: unlv +12.5 #notthatclose http://goo.gl/wIB8L

UNLV was in control of this game most of the way — Boise State only made a push late to close the gap.

Finally, tweets can include another tag, "#veryclose", that indicates that a game's final score was close *and* the average margin was close, which probably means a great game to watch. Another example:

*missouri 85* vanderbilt 82 | avg margin: missouri +0.6 #veryclose http://goo.gl/zwLge

As you can see from following the link, the game was within a bucket or two almost the entire way.

There are a few other things I might add at some point, including the difference between the average margin and the spread, but this is a start.

PS To calculate average margin I use game flow data from StatSheet.

the problem with paper

2010-10-05T12:47:00.000-07:00

A writer for the TC blog, Erick Schonfeld, recently posted a description of an encounter he had with a Stanford student at a drug store trying to recruit users to experiment with a paper prototype. The prototype and study were being carried out as a requirement for an HCI course the student is taking. The TC writer, in short, found the whole experience ridiculous, especially with respect to all of the whiz-bang, interactive demos he is used to seeing. While, as many point out, paper prototyping is a standard technique in HCI, that does not mean that it always works or is always appropriate. In fact, in my experience with early stage prototypes I was overall underwhelmed with paper prototyping. But I realized over time that experience did not reflect a problem with the prototyping tool per se, but rather a lack of understanding of the context of the user.

I conducted countless paper prototypes during my graduate school career, and time-and-time again I encountered users similar to Schonfeld. I saw a lot of strange looks and cocked heads. Because I was in a more constrained setting (a lab as opposed to a drug store) I was usually able to take the time to explain what it was we were doing and why it was important. But users were rarely as invested as they were in later stage testing. This eventually led me to the conclusion that HCI tends to treat users far too monolithically.

In testing a paper prototype it is important for the user to set aside some concerns while focusing on others, and some users are able to do this more readily than others. In particular, I think there are at least four groups (hastily sketched in the diagram below): your design team, your liminal colleagues or (using Rogers' term) innovators, early adopters, and the early majority. Just as you choose the right experimental technique to fit the current stage of your prototype, you also must choose the right group to test your ideas (this critique is similar to Greenberg's and Buxton's). At the earliest stage, when you are just beginning ideation, it is likely that only your design team has the context necessary to understand what it is you are really getting at (that is, only they have the necessary grounding). The next step is to make those paper prototypes, but at that point you can only target other colleagues or people comfortable with taking large leaps of understanding with prototypes. Early stage interactive prototypes can be tested with early adopters. Finally, only when you have something pretty close to a traditional beta release should you approach the early majority (the people you might expect to see at a drug store in Silicon Valley). But doing so beforehand is usually a waste of time.

The other thing to keep in mind is that "innovator", "early adopter", etc. are just hats that people put on and they're not wearing them all the time. Someone who is usually an innovator may be much more conservative if they've just stepped off a red eye flight. This means that any quantitative questionnaire to determine which group people are in is nearly useless. It is probably best to catch people when they are likely to be in a certain frame-of-mind (innovators might be more likely to think like innovators at a trade show, for example).

bigotry should never get a pass

2009-11-04T16:38:00.000-08:00

I lose patience with the argument that because of someone's time, his limitations are therefore excusable or even praiseworthy. It is not true that it was impossible in that time and place to look any higher. Think of Wendell Phillips, who commenting on Abraham Lincoln's proposal to colonize Black people out of the country was sarcastic. He said, "Colonize the Blacks? A man might as well colonize his own hands, or when the robbers are in his house, he might as well colonize his revolver."

Barbara Fields

Open-access publishing

2009-09-03T15:41:00.000-07:00

Laurent and I recently published an article (SeeReader: An (Almost) Eyes-Free Mobile Rich Document Viewer) in the special issue on Pervasive Computing in the International Journal of Computer Science Issues (IJCSI). The IJCSI is open-access, meaning that the content is not hidden behind a paywall. Open-access journals are still seen as dubious by many, and perhaps rightly so. These journals are universally new and tend to enjoy less prestige and quality than mainstream journals. In return, though, they offer fast turn-around times and wide indexing.

Mike Taylor provides a good overview of the tradeoffs between publishing in traditional journals versus open-access journals, albeit in a different domain. In it, he writes:

There are (at least) two reasons to favour open-access journals: the pragmatic one is that it's the best way to make sure that anyone, anywhere in the world who's interested in your work can get it -- whether professor, curator, student, interested amateur or vaguely interested high-school kid. The other reason is that it's just right. We're talking here about the world's accumulated knowledge, in many cases acquired by publicly funded research programs. It is simply and plainly wrong that this work should be shut up behind paywalls where the people who paid for it can't see it.

One issue that seems to make detractors queasy is registration fees. But of course publishing, even primarily online, has some cost, and if the papers are being given away for free then the publisher must be recouped in some other way. As this article points out, paper fees are a common approach.

Another argument against open-access is that, if you're interested primarily in dissemination, why not simply post the paper to a blog? My take is that there are really two bars that a paper needs to cross to be published in a traditional journal or conference. The first bar is simply whether or not the work seems reasonable. That is, does it appear to make some type of contribution, is it well argued, and does it spark at least some interest? The second bar is whether the work is framed correctly for a particular conference or journal and whether it builds significantly on other work in the particular sub-fields important to the publication. My sense is that in most cases roughly half of the submitted papers pass the first test and about a quarter pass both. But now that sharing, annotation, and commentary are ubiquitous on the Internet, it is not clear to me how important that second bar is. Why not, after a sanity check (the first bar), release your publication to social review? This might even encourage cross-polination of sub-fields that are all too often sequestered.

That said, I would not advise anyone to move (yet) to an all-open access approach. I think it is important to show that you are capable of publishing in any type of venue, and that open-access is a choice, not an act of desperation. I think they are especially useful for fields that are moving fast. There is usually less than two months from submit to publish for open access journals, which includes 2 reviews, feedback, and one revision, often with immediate publishing to the web and follow-up in print. This beats the pants off of most journals and even conferences. For a field (like, currently, mobile technologies) near the inflection point of the S-curve, I believe it makes sense to push some ideas to open-access journals, especially, if as was the case in our paper, they are specific applications and not general models.

It is also important to note that there are hybrid models supported by many traditional publishers (including Elsevier and Springer). In those cases, authors can choose to pay to have their paper made available publicly. However, this only solves one part of the problem -- access -- and does not address speed.

Other projects go further, cutting out the paper altogether and exposing instead raw scientific workflows (it will be particularly interesting to follow the impact this has on the social construction of knowledge). In general, like other publishing industries, as more people gain confidence in the Web as a publishing medium, academic publishing will have to change.

Ada Lovelace Day

2009-03-24T00:09:00.000-07:00

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Given that I've named my child after Ms. Lovelace, I feel obligated and honored to take part in the pledge to "highlight [a] women in technology" that I look up to.

While I've many present and past fabulous female colleagues, if I'm to chose one to write about it's a no-brainer.

Jennifer Mankoff is an associate processor at the Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon University. Jen was my graduate advisor at Berkeley, seeing me through a master's and PhD. Perhaps "nurse" is a better word, as she not only worked tirelessly with me to improve my abilities but at times literally cared for me when I was ill.

Jen is a whirling dervish. A good Samaritan. A force of nature.

Jen's genius is her ability not only to handle adversity but to turn it on its head. When Jen was a senior graduate student at Georgia Tech, she suffered a severe injury to her hand that made it difficult for her to type more than about half-an-hour a day. For any student trying to write her PhD thesis, this would be a huge obstacle, but for a student studying computer science having such a limited ability to type could be devastating. Jen instead used this as an opportunity to teach herself how to break down tasks into small, well-defined chunks, map out a detailed course of action, and then relentlessly focus for the half-an-hour a day she had to work. She was able to complete her thesis on time using this approach, and she extrapolated from that success a methodology for working that has allowed her to pursue a mind-boggling array of world-class research projects while raising two children and fighting through a difficult, debilitating illness.

And this: Jen is honestly trying to change the world for the Good. She has pursued breakthrough research on improving access to digital technology for people who are disabled, and she started an ambitious sustainability project well before the Obama administration took such work mainstream. I am afraid that my disposition is too cynical to believe completely in such utopist technological innovation, but bless her for trying.

When my daughter, Ada, is older I will tell her stories about Jen, about how she fought for gender equality in faculty hiring practices at Berkeley, how she would conduct research meetings while nursing her newborn, how she worked with students at Berkeley to create an information service in the wake of 9/11, and many other stories. Ada will learn from Jen's example how women can succeed in technology, obliterate misogyny, and still fulfill their familial desires.

Boccioni's nightmares reimagined

2009-02-20T16:06:00.000-08:00

In a recent email Eric Paulos writes:

100 years ago today, on 20 February 1909, The Futurist Manifesto, written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, was published in French in the Le Figaro newspaper. It launched an art movement, Futurism, that rejected the past; celebrated speed, machinery, violence, youth and industry; and sought modernization and cultural rejuvenation.

Today, as an homage we present a manifesto of Open Disruption and Participation.

I do not know what to make of this. Eric often writes with an enigmatic doublespeak -- an undercurrent thrusts through his lofty prose like a dagger. Still. The Futurists were misogynistic, hyper-technophilic war-mongers. Association with the Futurists is not something to be taken lightly.

Futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia wrote:

From an architecture conceived in this way no formal or linear habit can grow, since the fundamental characteristics of Futurist architecture will be its impermanence and transience. Things will endure less than us. Every generation must build its own city.

This "impermanence and transience" was expected to derive directly from the devastation of war. In the Futurist Manifesto, Marinetti writes:

We will glorify war, the world's only hygiene, militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.

What Eric goes on to write in his treatise, however, is much more prosaic. For example:

We must change our mantra: not usability but usefulness and relevancy to our world, its citizens, and our environment.

This is a restatement and broadening of the thesis of Greenberg's and Buxton's recent paper. I agree with the former part of this sentiment. Usability, while vital for products, is far less so for research with a time-to-market horizon of more than a few years. The extension to solving the world's problems on a grandiose scale is a tricky one, though. Eric continues:

The research we undertake and the applications we build often employ technology primarily for improving tasks and solving problems. While these are indeed noble and important areas of research that we must undertake, we claim that the successful ubiquitous computing tools, the one we really want to cohabitate with, will be those that incorporate the full range of life experiences.

...

In any case, the same cultural practice instilled in our ubiquitous computing technology, characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share, and public participation, we be central to the problem solving effort.

...

Let us choose to make a difference!

Solving specific problems is not merely noble, but more convincing, and in the long run helps keep one's identity small. Adopting a cause can be a slippery slope to irrational dogmatism and holier-than-thou posturing. Ultimately I think another danger of such techno-centrism, contrary to the text above, is the centralization of authority amongst an elite class. As Tim O'Reilly has noted, "[t]he paradox in Web 2.0 is that applications built off open, decentralized networks lead to concentrations of power."

Tools are not goals. It is important to separate clearly one's goals (be they political, economic, etc.) from the artifacts required to implement them -- lest we make the same rhetorical errors as the Futurists.

Update: A related pet peeve of mine is the use of dystopian visions of the future from mainstream movies to motivate ubicomp research. The most frequent offender is Minority Report. Of course aspects of the movie are now being realized, but it was fundamentally a cautionary tale (not a goal!).

The practice of conservativism should not be tolerated

2008-10-27T19:12:00.000-07:00

In an essay written during the last election cycle, Phil Agre stripped bare the goals of the conservative movement in a way rarely heard in our current media ecology of equivocation:

"Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world."

Perhaps the most important thing Agre does is to point out how conservatives adapt language to fit an audience with no regard to rational discourse or consistency (Lakoff also documents this well). This is how it is possible to have George Will and Sarah Palin in the same party. Will adopts the language of the intellectual to sell "aristocratic domination," to wrap around this goal layers of misdirection such that an authoritarian point-of-view often ends up seeming like a bedrock of democracy (e.g., this column). On the other side, the authoritarian world view is transformed through religion to paternalism. Palin's speech at the RNC was more-or-less a string of ad hominem attacks, but since fundamentally her argument is that hers is the party of God, a rational argument would have been moot.

When conservatives do make an argument, it usually relies on a misdirection in which a program that clearly benefits the proletariat is made to seem connected to an emotionally charged issue:

Conservative argument (appeal to communism):
Welfare -> requires higher taxes -> big government -> communism -> bad

Liberal:
Welfare -> insignificantly higher corporate/estate taxes -> people don't starve -> good

In this case, the first link is misleading (welfare taxes could be on corporations, or could simply result from better corporate oversight). And, at any rate, big government does not necessarily mean communism (see Scandinavia).

Conservative (appeal to the children):
Estate tax -> families lose hard earned income -> think of the poor children! -> bad

Liberal:
Estate tax -> more money for destitute -> a handful of uber-wealthy brats have one fewer yacht -> meritocracy -> good

Conservatives have to do a bit of double-speak with this argument. After all, isn't the popular vision that the founders wanted America to be a place where anyone could make his own way regardless of his father's lot?

Conservative (appeal to choice):
Privatize social security -> people can chose which fund to invest in -> freedom -> good
Vouchers -> people can chose which school they want -> freedom -> good

Liberal:
Privatize social security -> private funds fundamentally insecure (we're seeing this now)
Vouchers -> destitute try to ship kids away from community -> community schools fail for lack of funding -> community decays -> crime up -> bad

The appeal to choice is particularly deceiving. Usually, it means that those with money will be able to make a choice, and those without money should, well, get some (the slackers!).

Liberals often find it difficult to understand how people in the middle- and lower-classes can possibly identify as Republican, even when the party so clearly does not represent their interests. They shouldn't be. People living on the edge of homelessness are extremely worried and stressed. A strong leader who speaks in certain absolutes goes a long way toward making folks feel safe. Authoritarian regimes throughout history have fed on the anxiety and fear of the lower castes.

This is why liberals need to move beyond a culture of tolerance. After all, there are many practices we do not tolerate as a society. Of course, we do not tolerate murder, burglary, etc., but that is not what I mean. I mean that when someone makes racist statements, while we celebrate their ability to do so because of our country's democratic free speech provisions, we calmly, cooly, but forcefully denounce them and otherwise use social pressure to mitigate their influence. The same should be done with conservativism.

Addendum

I wrote this months ago but only now got around to publishing it. It will be interesting to see how the conservative movement relaunches itself after the GOP's impending obliteration.

led

2008-10-27T17:47:00.000-07:00

"This isn't philosophy or critical literature. In this class, you build your board and flip the switch and the light goes on or it doesn't. That's it."

-- EE professor at UNM

At different points of my life, I've thought that quote reassuringly straightforward or stereotypically naive.

Now? Subtle, sublime, humbling.

Grandiose discourse wins admirers but undercuts creativity.

pgh blues

2008-07-14T00:04:00.000-07:00

I lived in Pittsburgh for about one and a half years. Not long. But I think it was enough to get the gist of the place.

I couldn't stand it.

Before moving there, and since leaving, I've heard lots of people say exactly the opposite. They mostly say how surprised they were when they first arrived -- it was nothing like the dark, smokey, depressing place they envisioned. And that's true -- Pittsburgh looks pleasant enough. Picturesque, even, especially in the fall. So I mostly just assumed that our differences of opinion where purely subjective. To each his own.

But after looking at some data, I think I was wrong. I think something else is going on. But before that, let's review the data:

Air and water quality

This is one of those things that impresses newcomers. This New York Times article sums it up well -- Pittsburgh "has undergone a striking renaissance from a down-and-out smokestack to a gleaming cultural oasis." That's right, the smoke is gone and the skies are clear!

Except, well, no. In fact, according to the American Lung Association, Pittsburgh has more short-term particle pollution than any other city in the country, and more year-round particle pollution than any city other than LA (link).

On top of that, the rivers are still quite contaminated from the city's manufacturing heyday (link and link).

There is at least some good news on this front -- Pennsylvania did recently ban smoking in some indoor areas. However, the ban is comparatively incomplete (link). Also note that it took an act by the state to cut down on public smoking -- the county tried for years to pass such a ban with no success.

Weather

On top of that, the sun doesn't get a chance to shine much anyway -- Pittsburgh is usually cloudy (link). Also, like most of the northeast, it is unpleasant outside a majority of the time. Muggy summers combined with frigid winters leave only a few months a year when it is genuinely nice to be outdoors.

Of course one can bear it -- I certainly did my share of jogs through snow and ice in December, and through thick, sweltering heat in July (though the summer was nothing like the Georgia summers of my youth). But it made exercise more of a chore than something to enjoy. Still the worst for me, and this is certainly quite subjective, was the lack of vegetation in the winter months. There were no leaves on the trees for six months, and the surrounding forests are mostly deciduous. So, for half the year nature is a dull gray. The runs I did in March on Laurel Ridge though the drab forest would have been too depressing to bear if it weren't for a few crazy wild turkeys who have a tendency to startle easy, get disoriented, and run into things.

Transport

Most people I talk to say that the bus system seems to work well. That the city has only a meager light rail system should not be held against it -- most American cities don't. But the roads are crumbling. Literally (link). I remember driving over potholes in the bridges so deep you could see down to the river below. Overall, though, it could be worse.

Education

The biggest problem with public education in Pittsburgh is that nobody is going (link). Schools are closing left and right because there aren't enough kids to fill them up. I can't say for sure that this is a bad thing, but it seems awfully depressing to me.

Food

It is certainly possible to find good food in Pittsburgh. But it takes effort. More specifically, there are plenty of great pizza places, but only a handful of good Asian and Mexican restaurants.

I think this derives from Pittsburgh's overall lack of demographic diversity. According to a report by CMU's Heinz School, Pittsburgh is "one of America's least diverse regions in terms of foreign population" (link). This actually impacts the city in many other ways. In this sense, Pittsburgh reminds me of Atlanta 20 years ago when the city was almost completely black/white and it seemed like every issue was about race. Atlanta has since seen an infusion of Asian and Hispanic populations. Actually, I think this is perhaps the biggest problem with Pittsburgh -- dichotomized groups often lead to dark places.

Economy

Of course the bottom fell out of the manufacturing component of Pittsburgh's economy a long time ago. But even the city's efforts to encourage other growth industries aren't really working (Richard Florida has written extensively about this). On top of that, the 2000 census showed that 20% of the population lives below the poverty line (link). It also doesn't help that Pittsburgh has one of the highest tax rates in the country (link).

Crime

This another one of those things that I've heard newcomers cite as being a positive of Pittsburgh -- low crime rates! Except again this is completely wrong. The data show that crime rates are higher than the national average across almost all types of crime (link).

Conclusion

In short: Pittsburgh lacks diversity, it is one of the most heavily polluted cities in the country, its coffers are empty and it is shedding crucial public services left and right, its crime rate is much higher than the national average, and it is gloomy. I think this is enough evidence to say objectively that on average Pittsburgh is not a good place to live.

So what's going on? Why are there so many people who think that Pittsburgh is so great? I mean, its not just people I know -- The New York Times is in on it too. Besides the recent article I cited above, the Times wrote a similarly glowing review way back in 1985, using very similar language, in fact (pointed out in this article in Reason).

I think a few things are happening. One is the expectation effect (link), which shows that people will tend to find ways for a situation to fit with their expectations of that situation. This seems like a counter-argument at first, but Pittsburgh has been getting "Best Place to Live" and "Most Livable City" awards for many years now, and I think that's actually what people expect to find when they get there. The second is that people may think that because industry has left town, and there are no smokestacks in the city per se, the pollution's not really there. Finally, people who decide to move to Pittsburgh and spend years of their life there will tend to rationalize their decision post hoc (as Daniel Gilbert's pop psychology book "Stumbling on Happiness" points out, all of us do this all the time).

Still, it is telling that, for all the accolades it receives, Pittsburgh is losing population in droves. As the Reason article points out, "since 2000 Pittsburgh has lost more people -- almost 60,000 -- than any other metropolis in the country except for poor New Orleans."

Addendum

Of course, there are still many reasons to like the place, and it works for many people. But it does need help and I think it does the city a disservice to say otherwise.

If the city does rebound, I think it will be because of CMU students. I've never witnessed people with more drive than those at CMU, so I think if enough of them start to care about the city they could make a lot of progress (though, of course, there's just nothing to be done about the gloom).

Update

Popsci.com has listed Pittsburgh as one of "The World's Dirtiest Cities" (link). Ouch.

class and the academy

2008-06-23T15:47:00.000-07:00

"High school is a microcosm of nothing."

- Bay area cab driver

I attended a liberal high school that prided itself on individualism. We didn't have cheerleaders. We didn't have prom. We had ultimate and drum circle. Still, while I was there I couldn't help but feel that something was wrong. One day early in my junior year, I remember walking to school and seeing the headmaster overseeing some of my friends picking up wood chips that had been scattered from the yard onto the sidewalks. This was a first-offense punishment at my school -- these guys had done some minor hacking on the computer lab's machines -- but other students had been made to do this for being late to class or bad-mouthing a teacher. In this moment, a long string of events came into focus for me: the dissolution of the independent newspaper earlier in the year, the push for more rigid, college-credit courses, the endless SAT prep courses. This school, it occurred to me, was similar to others in one important regard: a rigid class system kept students in their place, effectively infantilizing them. It told students to color inside the lines and be on their way to the private liberal arts school that the college administrators deemed best for them.

What was amazing was the extent to which students internalized the attitudes of the administration at a school that supposedly prided itself on skepticism. I often overheard seniors extolling the merits of their chosen private liberal arts school and shaking their heads at the poor fate of those destined for overcrowded public schools.

I decided that day to leave high school as soon as I could -- without finishing my degree. And to go a public university as far away from the Ivys as possible.

Following through on that decision took courage. But I failed to take the bigger leap: opting out of the system entirely. Because the class system does not end there. If anything, it gets much worse.

"... life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system."

- William Deresiewicz (from The Disadvantages of
an Elite Education)

I think I failed to see it at first because you do get some basic rights in college. Going to class is a right not enforced by some external penal system, for example. But the reality is that the class system in the university system is monolithic and crushing. The distinction between the classes -- undergrads, grads, post-docs, and the various shades of professors -- is absolute. Professors have complete control over material and how it is conveyed. The manner in which it is conveyed varies based on the class-relationship, of course, but there is never anything but a dichotomy of power. One of the reasons this happens is that professors perceive themselves to have succeeded where others below them have not (yet). Of course, this requires an extremely narrow notion of success, but the insular nature of the academy ("the ivory tower") encourages such pigeon-holing.

My experience has been that graduate students respond to their situation in one of three ways: 1) assimilation then advocacy, 2) resigned, weary acceptance, or 3) dropping out. Students in the first group tend to go on to serve in the academy and continue the cycle. Those in the second group tend to be cowed and easily manipulatable.

"The educator for liberation has to die as the unilateral educator of the educatees, in order to be born again as the educator-educatee of the educatees-educators."

- Paulo Freire

I think there are a couple of simple ways to uncover monolithic class systems: look for strict correlations between years in a community and power, and architecture. In the academy, there is almost a 1-to-1 correspondence between number of years in a community and power, regardless of people's actual (and externally useful) accomplishments. And architecture usually reifies class (guess who hangs out in the basement of Soda Hall? The top floors?).

This is one of the reasons I like silicon valley so much. I have been to countless talks in which a 20-something entrepreneur is lecturing to a room of seasoned PhDs about the system he hacked up in his garage while ignoring class assignments. A PhD is not a gateway to good ideas or good implementation. That is not to say that there isn't value in attending an elite school. You get to hang out with other smart, motivated people, for example. But group projects with friends still usually happens in the margins.

"If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn't think of himself as a waiter. And when I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do real work."

- Paul Graham (from What You'll Wish You'd Known)

So what to do about school? Ignore it? Follow Graham's advice and treat it like a day job? The first thing to do, I think, is to detach yourself from grades. Grades are one of the principle instruments of oppression in the academy. This is difficult, especially for people who consider themselves high achievers. It takes more self confidence than I ever had to decide to ignore them and determine success for yourself. But I think it is necessary.

If you want to take a more active approach, you could work toward change. But I do not think the best way to go about that is through the system itself, or even expressly against it. Like most systems, the academy will eventually be made irrelevant as some other approach S-curves its way past. What that will be, no one knows. Turn on, tune in, drop out, start up?

Addendum: I realize that by writing this I may be perceived as burning some bridges. Eh.

is there room for usability testing in it research?

2008-05-12T23:32:00.001-07:00

In their CHI 2008 paper, Greenburg and Buxton distinguish design sketches from prototypes, arguing that "early designs illustrate the essence of an idea ... " and help "make vague ideas concrete, reflect on possible problems and uses, discover alternate new ideas and refine current ones." They go on to argue that standard usability testing often only inhibits these early ideas, because at the earliest stages finding the "right design" is more important than "getting the design right." I found that this paper mirrored some of my own frustrations with academic HCI: incrementalism, an over-emphasis on novelty in early stage design, and the dominance of user studies, regardless of their pragmatic utility.

The language of the Greenburg and Buxton piece mirrors somewhat Paul Graham's 2003 essay Hackers and Painters. Graham argues that hacking more closely resembles craft than science, and yet is shoehorned into the awkward "computer science" moniker in the academy. The result is that academic success tends to be a poor predictor of hacking ability. Greenburg and Buxton argue that HCI has a similar bias toward science and therefore inevitably away from open-ended creativity and innovation (although Jono would beg to differ). This necessitates a focus on incrementalism since only the well known can be thoroughly tested. It is not surprising, then, that many, indeed most, truly innovate technologies have percolated outside of the bonds of scientific rigor.

Furthermore, countless times in graduate school I witnessed an advisor or senior student collapse a project or idea only because something similar had once been described in a paper, or, even more astonishingly, that some technique described in a paper could possibly be made to do something similar. This misses the point of early stage sketches. As Greenburg and Buxton write, design sketches are not necessarily "suggestive of the finished product," but instead serve as a means of exploration. Or as Schrage put it in "Serious Play," these early sketches "externalize thought and spark conversation." That is, the sketch is the conversation. Ideas and talk are cheap: speculation about an idea is just that.

This leaves me with a quandary for my work now. After all, I did a methodology thesis. But I am reluctant to apply most methods to my work now because they are so cumbersome that they can drag-down otherwise exciting sketching/iteration (although it is even worse for academics who have to worry about IRB). I think that for researchers "finding the right design" is more-or-less the name of the game. And frankly, the best place to "get the design right" is probably not academia, but a startup where the pressure is much higher to succeed (and the need to publish much lower) and there can be just as much of a user-centered focus as in mainstream HCI. So... I think I have argued myself out of the utility of my thesis (but that was inevitable ;).

environmental trends deserve some skepticism

2007-10-29T08:35:00.000-07:00

I am a member of the Sierra Club and am a supporter of environmental sustainability. However, I am skeptical about the current trends sparked by An Inconvenient Truth, in particular in the research community. It is not so much the movie itself that I take issue with -- though it contained some inaccuracies, the general point, that the global increase in carbon dioxide is at least in part caused by humans and is affecting the earth's climate, seem sound. My issues are these:

There is no correct state for the earth.
Carbon offsets are misleading.
Solutions targeted at wholesale behavior modification are inefficient.
The notion of behavior modification may impede innovation.
The most effective solution is still to use political force to eliminate market externalities.

There is no correct state for the earth. Many environmental advocates seem to assume a priori that humans' impact on Earth is necessarily bad. In particular, that there was a time, roughly in the 18th century or so, during which the Earth's atmosphere had the correct composition. Putting religious beliefs aside, this is not reasonable, and it is up to us to determine the best state for the climate. It may be, for example, that the Earth would be better off if its atmosphere contained more carbon dioxide. This is a minority view, but it should not be dismissed out-of-hand. We should be asking first, I believe, what climate we believe would be best and do what we can to make that a reality.

Carbon offsets are misleading. I am often dismayed at the smugness with which people argue away their impact on the environment with promises of carbon offsets. Unfortunately, one's overconsumption is not erased just because someone somewhere promised to plant a few trees on one's behalf. I think this practice may be particularly damaging because it can cause people to pigeon-hole carbon dioxide output in lieu of other environmental impacts. I have heard it suggested, for example, that a large conference integrate carbon offsets into its registration process. Certainly, carbon offsetting does not come close to erasing all of the impact of such an event (including all of the infrastructure and maintenance required to run a conference). Furthermore, this could have the negative effect of encouraging people to believe that they have dealt with the problem and thenceforth dismiss it. In my opinion, as I return to below, this short-term, low-impact activity gets in the way of long-term innovation.

Solutions targeted at wholesale behavior modification are inefficient. There are many research efforts to change people's behavior so that they will use less energy. Frankly, I have always been skeptical of behavior modification research -- a bit too Orwellian. And I find it especially unnerving when it comes from the Ivory Tower -- a bit too Hegelian. My approach would be to get the information out there and let people make up their own minds as much as possible. Regardless, though, these projects will only see measurable success if millions change their habits. This is just an enormously difficult thing to do from the bottom up.

The notion of behavior modification may impede innovation. Furthermore, most of the suggestions these behavior modification efforts supply require people to make tradeoffs. As a good friend once told me, innovation often occurs when someone rejects a tradeoff. For example, I should be able to use an electric razor and save energy, take lots of trips to the store and save gasoline, take a shower or bath and save water, keep the temperature where I want it and use less natural gas, keep my cellphone charger plugged in all day and generate power, etc. Let's focus on moving forward, not rolling back to 1710.

The most effective solution is still to use political force to eliminate market externalities. The principle problem with pollution is, and has always been, that companies can consider it a market externality. Before pollution laws were more strictly enforced toward the end of the 20th century, companies could ditch waste in a nearby swamp and effectively write-off the cleanup to an external process (the backside of the invisible hand of the market, if you will). Legislation and legal action have proven the most effective approaches to curtailing these practices and forcing corporations (and individuals) to dump less upon the commons.

So, my advice is this: Do not shiver in the cold and take 1-minute showers. Enjoy a bath, grab a fully-charged laptop, and bang out some letters to your senators and congressmen and congresswomen to encourage strong oversight, tax increases on gasoline and other harmful pollutants, increased funding for public transportation, and increased spending on innovative tools and fuels. Or, better yet, innovate solutions on your own.

diffusing conflict through innovation

2007-10-22T20:09:00.000-07:00

The other night I nearly ran into someone in a parking lot. The parking lot was nearly empty, and we saw each other coming on from opposite ends of a row. Yet we just about collided as we both pulled into spots across the lane. In this case, the other guy was going the wrong way on a one way lane. So, as he made a face that seemed indicate that I was the one at fault, I got upset and we had words. He left shaking his head, making it clear he still thought I was at fault, making me even madder since, again, he had gone the wrong way.

As I walked off my anger, I realized that this was completely the wrong thing to have done, not because of the pettiness of the incident, but rather because, as my friend Jono says, every conflict is an opportunity for innovation. It struck me later that this would be a great way to treat these kinds of incidents in the future, especially for people like me who do not handle confrontation too well. The idea is, whenever you experience a conflict, immediately go meta and figure out what design flaws led to the conflict. I don't know if there are always design flaws, but with respect to cars, at least, I bet they are there 90% of the time. This approach would also likely diffuse the incident that precipitated the conflict, if only because the other party would find your behavior so strange.

So what's the solution to the parking lot problem? Well, the short answer is that I think it must simplify to a graph minimization problem. Let's say we built an automated system that latches onto cars somehow and parks them automatically. First, would this be socially acceptable? As long as you optimized for getting people as close as possible, I think it would. People tend to be willing to give up liberties for menial things, and parking seems menial enough. Second, how to solve this problem? Well, let's reduce this to a graph. You've got a couple of sources (driveways), a directed, connected graph of parking spot nodes, and a couple of sinks (stores). The metric is pretty simple -- get as close as possible to the store. In the case of multiple stores, this could be simulated by randomly coloring points as they enter the graph, where each color corresponds to a store. Now optimize, handle some outlier cases (handicapped spots, maybe via sensing systems), etc. It gets trickier when you consider that you also have to solve the reverse problem (exiting), and both in real time, but I bet it would be possible to come up with a heuristic algorithm that could be tweaked for a while with a simulator. And voila, IP!

I'll try this the next time I get in a conflict and report it on this blog.

average margin

2007-07-25T08:50:00.000-07:00

(this post was copied over from the more-or-less defunct sports innovation blog)

Ill: 62, Duke: 72 ... Xav: 80, L'ville: 70 ... Sports fans' lives are inundadted with numbers like these. They stream by on tickers, refresh on browsers, and arrive in inboxes. They are ubiquitous. And yet while they do tell the most important results -- who won or lost and by how much -- they convey little else. I think there may be an opportunity here to convey just a little more information that better contextualizes the result.

I started thinking about this idea with the advent of second-by-second score keeping in sports. The use of such data was especially important to the derivation of player metrics, such as plus-minus ratings in basketball, that determine how well a team performs while a given player is on the court/pitch/etc. But this also had some advantages for fans, such as the graphs below that show the score progression for a series of basketball games (all copyright ESPN).

These graphs are fun to pour over when you get in front of a computer, but they aren't as useful for ticker-tape scores. What if we could instead boil this down to a single piece of data that could accompany these scores?

The most obvious statistic to try is average margin, and actually, after trying several more complicated statistics I think this ends up being the winner. I will express average margin as avgM and use the sign to indicate whether it favored the winning team (positive) or losing team (negative).

So let's look at some examples. The first two scores listed above are both 10-point margins. But as you can see from their associated graphs, in one game a team (Duke) slowly built a lead over the course of the game and therefore the average margin slightly tilts in their favor (+3.0 avgM). In the other case, though, one team (Xavier) came back after trailing most of the game and the average margin actually tilts toward the other team (-3.4 avgM). This second case is also similar to the third game, in which one team (Illinois) has a large advantage in average margin, but actually lost the game (-7.5 avgM). The next two games I threw in to show how huge leads at the end of a game can be deceiving. The final scores of these two games are similar. However, in the first case, one team (Illinois) dominated the other for the entire game and let up a little at the end (which often happens when the second or third string comes on when a game is no longer in doubt) (+17.1 avgM), while in the other case, the winning team did not put the game away until very late, which is reflected in a low average margin (+4.5 avgM).

In summary, from the final score, the first game looks like a solid win, and average margin shows that for the most part it was. The second game also looks like a solid win, but average margin shows that it was anything but. The third game looks like a tight battle, but average margin shows that the losing side controlled the game most of the way. The next game looks like a blowout that was , and the next game looks like a blowout that wasn't.

As I mentioned, I have toyed with other statistics (such as one that calculates the amount of time a team has been recently "winning" the game [using a one-minute kernel]), but I think average margin is by far the clearest metric.

It may also be interesting to automatically detect and report last second comebacks (this could be fed into "you've got to see this" SMS or email notifications). To illustrate this, I used the score graph from one of the greatest comebacks of all time in basketball -- Illinois win over Arizona to make the 2005 final four (-1.3 avgM). But this also serves to illustrate that, in the end, the numbers are nowhere near a replacement for the real thing.

Illinois: 62 Duke: 72 03/26/2004	Xavier: 80 Louisville: 70 03/19/2004
Illinois: 64 Ohio State: 65 03/06/2005	Illinois: 91 Wake Forest: 73 12/01/2004
George Washington: 76 Wake Forest: 97 11/15/04	Illinois: 90 Arizona: 89 03/26/05