The paperless office - closer than you think

Crooked Timber tells us that US paper consumption has been falling for years. It's easy to miss these slow changes, but I can confirm that my use has been declining.

Large screen high resolution dual monitors have reduced my need to use paper as a transient "screen extender" and full text search that works (Spotlight on OS X, Windows desktop search on XP*) has increased the value of digital documents. I still take notes on paper; the more decrepit my brain gets the less bandwidth I can spare for managing computer interaction -- also it's faster.

What does get printed now is transient. It's printed, distributed, read and recycled.

* Yes, I've gone to the dark side for XP search. Google Desktop Search is not as good, Yahoo gave up the ghost, and X1 is vanishing now that Vista has integrated search.

Hume: The greatest philosopher?

I'm seeing quite a bit of Hume recently. The more I read or hear (In Our Time) the more impressed I am. Hume deserves much more attention ...

Designs, Intelligent and Stupid | Cosmic Variance

...In a word, Cleanthes, a man who follows your hypothesis is able perhaps to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, sometime, arose from something like design: but beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance; and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis. This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him....

I wonder if Hume knew of Bonsai trees? If he did he might have come up with another explanation for the twisted state of a designed world...

See also:

• In praise of David Hume (2008)
• Reality, perception, Hume, the red pill - and John Tierney (2007)

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell - a review

A colleague who favors instinctive decisions urged me to read Blink! I decided to overcome my stodgy resistance to pop-psychology books and see if I should be paying more attention to unreasoned impulses. I was surprised to discover that the book is rather more ambivalent than my colleague thought (did she read the whole book?), though it is also a big muddled. Here's my Amazon review ...

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking: Books: Malcolm Gladwell

The strangest thing about Blink! Is the contradiction between the contents and the cover. Did any of the people quoted on the back cover actually read the book? (Hint: Blurb writers rarely read the books they comment on.) The quotes rave about the power of snap decisions, but Gladwell is much more ambivalent. He's particularly concerned with how racial stereotypes misinform judgments, so much so that Gladwell finds he has an intuitively negative opinion of African Americans -- despite being a black man. I suspect he spent some time thinking about when he was going to introduce his Jamaican mother; the book itself is an experiment in the power of framing and bias.

Contrary to the back cover, and the subtitle of "the power of thinking without thinking", this is a book about both the power and the treachery of the unspeaking mind. On the one hand we have powerful non-verbal detection of deception and emotional context, on the other hand we have unconscious bias based on height and ethnicity, the election of George ... err .. Warren Harding and the shooting of Amadou Diallo.

I'd been expecting a superficial justification of impulsive thinking, so I was pleasantly surprised to find Gladwell's Blink! is a much deeper wrok. On the other hand, the book is also somewhat muddled. Once Gladwell moved away from domains in which natural selection has build powerful non-verbal tools, such as deception, mating and eating, his examples of good impulsive analysis became much less persuasive. The "red team" commander's success seemed to owe much more to correct and measured analysis than impulsive decisions (I'd read the story before by the way. The US military needs to retire a lot of generals.). The Cook County MI algorithm story is about the superiority of an analytic decision tree over both analytic human reasoning and non-verbal impressions. I couldn't tell what the Diallo story was trying to communicate, I think he was saying that under high stress situations human reasoning collapses (the autism connection is highly speculative and has no biological foundation). That's certainly true, but hardly novel.

In other cases I had a "Blink" type suspicion that we was cherry-picking and shading anecdotes. I'm particularly suspicious that there was more to the Cook County story than we were told -- it would be very odd for a test to be so sensitive and specific that prior probability of disease was irrelevant. In an afterword he introduces new research findings that contradict the simplistic models in the early book; that's commendable but it doesn't make the book more cohesive.

I think Gladwell lost out by omitting an evolutionary context to human thinking -- a choice that may reveal his biases. An evolutionary approach to cognition explains why the "silent mind" can do so well with decisions lizards, birds and primates evolved around, such as mating, eating, fighting and deceiving. It also explains why the non-verbal mind can make terrible mistakes when evaluating CEOs, presidents, or cell phones. He could have connected the evolution of mind with his thesis experts do best when they combine the silent mind with formal symbolic analysis (words).

I did learn one or two new things. I was impressed by the research on how easy it is to alter emotional state through priming methods. Maybe those days when everyone around me seems to be driving badly are the results of some particularly noxious talk radio show.

Ultimately Gladwell comes across, to me, as suspicious of the intuitive mind. I think he decides that non-experts should "trust" their intuition in domains where natural selection operates, but that even there they need to identify and adjust for bias based on appearance, gender, ethnicity, race, etc. Domain experts do best when they combine non-verbal intuition with analytic reasoning; they can use the intuitive input as a guide to developing a rational and defensible decision (something non-experts are said to have great difficulty with).

That sounds like a plausible path. When making expert decisions in the non-primeval world, write down that initial "Blink!" impression -- but don't trust it. Adjust for bias and use it as the basis for a time limited and bounded analysis by translating it into a defensible rationalization. Then attack the rationalization. If it survives, then credit the silent mind. If it dies, recognize the failure of the paleolithic mind in a technocentric century.

Boingo - how to run a business - into the ground

Boingo teaches us that great wealth brings great ... stupidity?

Our local airport has outsourced their wireless services to Boingo. Fair enough, I thought, I'll just get an $8 day pass. I've done that with T-mobile and they have a reasonable approach. Enter a credit card number, get access.

So, I click and wait, and wait, finally the service responds. It tries twice to sign me up for a 3 month pass, but I'm trying to keep this simple. I don't want a relationship with Boingo, I want net access.

Ok, I finally get to the day pass. Now sign up requires an email address (so they can send me spam) and an username and password. I guess they really do want a relationship.

I give 'em my spam address (only spam goes there, occasionally I retrieve product trial keys from it) and my usual username. It's in use. I probably signed up once before. Ok, I'll try another. It's in use too. This is getting annoying. I start using scatological usernames, like "idiots" and "stupidboingo" and, finally, fckboingo. In use. All of them. Including the last.

Boingo clearly has a less than delighted customer base.

I give up. Is Boingo some sort of evil psychology experiment? A Scientologist [1] plot to activate deeply buried engrams? More proof that there's no sense to where money flows? Or all of the above ...

[1] Boingo's CEO, Sky Dayton, is a prominent Scientologist.

Fraud and Globalization: Toy Story III

The NYT has 3 related globalization and fraud stories in their top 25 list today, and they are 1,2,3 in the business section rankings:

• Thomas the Tank Engine Toys Recalled Because of Lead Paint
• A Lesson That Thomas Could Teach
• As More Toys Are Recalled, Trail Ends in China
  

This is, of course, really a story about fraud. Buyers think they're buying one thing (safe toys), but they get another.

Some useful quotes:

China manufactured every one of the 24 kinds of toys recalled for safety reasons in the United States so far this year, including the enormously popular Thomas & Friends wooden train sets, a record that is causing alarm among consumer advocates, parents and regulators...

...Scott J. Wolfson, a second Consumer Product Safety Commission spokesman, would not say how long ago RC2 discovered the problem or when it first reported it to federal authorities.

In the last two years, the staff of the consumer product commission has been cut by more than 10 percent, leaving fewer regulators to monitor the safety of the growing flood of imports.

Some consumer advocates say that such staff cuts under the Bush administration have made the commission a lax regulator. The commission, for example, acknowledged in a recent budget document that “because of resource limitations,” it was planning next year to curtail its efforts aimed at preventing children from drowning in swimming pools and bathtubs. ..

and

... Over the last two decades or so, American companies have generally followed a two-pronged outsourcing strategy. First, the companies have tried to move as much of their manufacturing as possible to places where wages are just a fraction of what they are here. Second, the companies have distanced themselves from their overseas production. They usually don’t own the factories and refuse to say much about them.

The current issue of The Atlantic Monthly has a fascinating cover article by James Fallows taking readers on a tour of Shenzhen, a southeastern city of eight million people (stunningly, up from just 80,000 a generation ago) that isn’t far from the factories that make the Thomas trains. Many of the world’s best-known companies — like a company that Mr. Fallows describes as a “very famous” American retailer — get products from Shenzhen. But he didn’t get permission to connect any of the individual factories in his article with a specific brand.

“In decades of reporting on military matters, I have rarely encountered people as concerned about keeping secrets as the buyers and suppliers who meet in Shenzhen and similar cities,” he wrote.

This secrecy brings a number of advantages. It keeps competitors from finding out tricks of the trade. It keeps consumers from discovering that their $100 brand-name shirt comes from the same assembly line as a $40 generic version. And it prevents activists from criticizing a company for the working conditions in a factory where its products are made. The companies get the cost advantages of outsourcing without the publicity disadvantages.

In the days since the Thomas recall was announced, the company that owns the Thomas brand, HIT Entertainment, has stuck to this script. HIT is an English company that holds the rights to a number of popular characters, including Barney and Bob the Builder, and then licenses the toy manufacturing to companies like RC2.

Except for a small link on the Thomas Web site to RC2’s recall announcement, HIT has otherwise acted as if it has nothing to do with the situation. Its executives haven’t even said that they regret having been promoting toys with lead paint in them. They haven’t said anything publicly.

When I suggested to the company’s public relations agency, Bender/Helper Impact, that this might not be the smartest approach, the agency e-mailed me a two-sentence unsigned statement. It said that HIT appreciated the concerns of its customers and was working with RC2 on the recall, but that the recall was “clearly RC2’s responsibility.”

In effect, HIT has outsourced Thomas’s image, one of its most valuable assets, to RC2. And RC2 has offered a case study of how not to deal with a crisis, which is all the more amazing when you consider that the company also makes toys for giants like Disney, Nickelodeon and Sesame Street.

When it first announced the recall, RC2 said that its customers would have to cover shipping costs to mail back the trains. It reversed that decision after parents reacted angrily, but it is still going to wait about two months to send the postage refunds. Why? “Because finance is in another building,” as one customer service employee on RC2’s toll-free hotline told me.

Most important of all, the company hasn’t yet explained how the lead got into the trains or what it’s doing to avoid a repeat. Like their counterparts at HIT, the RC2 executives have stayed silent...

There's not much new in either story. The last ends with a feeble hope that consumers will "punish" companies with unsafe products. They could do this, for example, by not buying toys. Gee, maybe that would work food and medicine too. If we stop buying food, toys and medicine maybe things will get better ...

I don't have that much faith in our overwhelmed populace. I have much more faith in the hunger of our lawyers. If they can find a way to sue the British based HIT Entertainment then we might see some changes. Alternatively, they can in future sue Walmart (for example) for selling items that any reasonable person would expect to be unsafe. If Walmart starts to worry about being sued, I'm reasonably sure toys from China will become much safer ...

Battle of the titans: Google, Microsoft and drawing on your screen

This is fun to watch, albeit scary. The frozen world of vector graphics (you know - maps, drawings, presentations), the long neglected alternative to bandwidth sucking 19th century raster graphics, is warming up. Is there any future for Adobe, or will they throw themselves into Google's arms? Can Apple "punch about its height" and somehow swing the market away from the dark shadows of Silverlight? Will Google pluck the long neglected W3C "structured vector graphics" from the grave?

The next few months may tell the story ...

The 36 (+10) classic mistakes of software development

This list is frighteningly familiar. I'm posting it so I can read it daily ...

Coding Horror: Escaping From Gilligan's Island

Which is why you should have every single one of the 36 classic mistakes outlined in McConnell's Rapid Development committed to memory by now....

... Making mistakes is inevitable, but repeating the same ones over and over doesn't have to be. You should endeavor to make all-new, spectacular, never-seen-before mistakes. To that end, Steve McConnell highlighted a few new classic mistakes in his blog that he's about to add to the canon, 10 years later:

Google.org - its mission

I feel this nagging obligation to try to save humans from themselves. Really, it's a nuisance; with the notable exception of my extended family and friends humans are not even a particularly attractive species. Anyway I'm stuck with it, but since I have no power this could get frustrating ... except that Google has it covered:

Google.org - mission

1. Global Development: develop scalable, sustainable solutions to poverty by focusing on economic growth in the private sector and improving access to information and services for the poor.
2. Global Public Health: enable the world to better predict, prevent and eradicate communicable diseases through better access to and use of information.
3. Climate Change: mitigate the effect of climate change on the poor by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving energy efficiency, and supporting clean energy sources.
   

Thanks Google. Now how about world peace?

Lessons for the iPhone from browsing with an old version of Internet Explorer

Have you ever refreshed an old machine with XP? It's a very tedious process. You do the install, then hours of repeated updates to get the machine to a semi-modern state.

In the midst of all this tedium you may need to fetch some code from the net.The reasonable way to do this is to download and install Firefox and use that. The suicidal approach is to skip both the five minute Firefox install AND the 12 hour Windows update process, and browse to a slightly shady web site to download something using an antique copy of Internet Explorer.

Jeff Atwood, who definitely knows better, decided on impulse to use an non-updated version of IE to fetch some code. Essentially, he figured the risk of infection was low enough for a non-critical system to justify saving five minutes. He was wrong, one of the sites he used turned out to be far sleazier than he'd imagined. His misadventures led to a good essay, so it wasn't a total loss. It's dramatic story of how quickly an old version of IE will be compromised when exposed to the wild*, but within it there's one sentence in particular I'll comment on (italics).

Coding Horror: How to Clean Up a Windows Spyware Infestation

... it's a wonder people don't just give up on computing altogether. Once the door is open, it seems the entire neighborhood of malware, spyware, and adware vendors take up residence in your machine. There should be a special circle of hell reserved for companies who make money doing this to people.

At first, I was mad at myself for letting this happen. I should know better, and I do know better. Then I channeled that anger into action: this is my machine, and I'll be damned if I will stand for any slimy, unwanted malware, adware, or spyware that takes up residence on it. I resolved to clean up my own machine and fix the mess I made. It's easier than you might think, and I'll show you exactly how I did it...

As Jeff probably knows, there's no "wonder" here because, in reality, people do "give up on computing altogether". They may still have a computer, but they don't use it very much because it's so unstable and unresponsive. Eventually it gathers dust.

The only reason my mother's computer still runs and works, despite having not been patched in the past six months ** is that she's running OS X and browsing with Safari. She's not a significant target and she mostly browses a few major news and weather sites. For most people in her situation, the computer just stops working and they don't go back.

Which may, despite all the conspiracy theories, be the real reason the iPhone is a closed system. In other words, Jobs was almost telling the truth (shocking, I know). Apple wants a closed iPhone not because a phone is a particularly bad thing to hack (though it may be), but because Apple is trying to produce a computing platform that will be relatively reliable for the average user.

--

* Web stories on old systems dying within minutes of net exposure are mostly baloney -- almost no-one every runs a PC with a direct IP connection. We all have NAT redirectors and de facto firewalls, even many users aren't aware they exist.

** I don't want her to deal with the patch process, and remote control and maintenance solutions for OS X have not been nearly good enough to be worth my using them. I've been betting we could get buy with my maintaining the system every 6 months or so, and that's been working well.

Update 6/25: Coding Horror (Jeff Atwood) wrote a f/u piece quoting a security expert, Adam McNeill, who analyzed how the attack occurred. Here's an excerpt:

...GameCopyWorld displays a "Find Your Love at Bride.Ru" advertisement. That advertisement "refers" to linktarget.com in order to display an advertisement for the DVD software produced by Slysoft.com. That advertisement "refers" to 39m.net which in turn creates an [iframe] to buyhitscheap.com. Buyhitscheap.com in turn calls fkdomain.info who attempts to deliver a series of exploits to a users system in hopes of installing a trojan dropper. The fkdomain.info site attempts to exploit the following...

It's interesting to imagine the reaction of someone from 1994 reading that summary. The emergent sophistication of a modern security attack is fascinating and reminiscent of how prison exploits evolve. Atwood, who I think has been guilty of previously deprecating the importance of running as a non-administrator admits that a non-admin user would not have been vulnerable. He manages not to mention that OS X defaults users to non-admin status and it works very well (except for a few Adobe applications, which is a good reason not to buy them).

Stop electing judges

The numbers are looking bad: The Best Judges Business Can Buy - New York Times. We can only fight corruption on so many fronts at once, popular election of judges simply opens another front. Let's concentrate on reducing corruption in the state legislature and return to a system of appointing judges.

Yes, we could move to public financing of judicial elections, but why only for judges?

In any case, I am rarely able to find any useful information to guide my judicial votes. I end up simply voting the MN DFL party line, so the whole process is a waste.

Food labeling is being discussed now

The Feds are talking food labeling now. Lots of very wealthy and very interested parties don't want labels to describe where things come from. If you disagree, write your Elected and Appointed Officials.

If the label's not big enough, then require producers to include a URL with the details as well.

Youth baseball, education and health care performance measures

Whether you're coaching youth baseball, running a school, or taking care of patients, there's one sure-fire way to improve your rankings.

Eliminate the weak.

Oh well, we'll just run the experiment again anyway. Just because it's failed every other time it's been done there's no reason it won't work this time. Right?

Charles Stross dismantles the High Frontier

I loved O'Neill's 1976 High Frontier; I still have two of the books. The orbital colonies came first, then came microwave beaming of solar power as an attempt to justify the beautiful tori. I even had a personal connection, an aunt worked for the O'Neill Foundation for years. Once I considered presenting at one of their meetings, but I couldn't make it fit my schedule.

There's not much left of the High Frontier now. The Wikipedia entry is about one paragraph, though the old visions live on in space operas (science fantasy). Charles Stross, a first rate writer and thinker, is old enough to have fallen in and out of love with the High Frontier, and today Stross dismantles it. It's harsh reading for folks who, like me, went to college hoping to join the astronaut program, but it's familiar stuff. It's been clear for some time that biological organisms are not going to travel to the stars.

Inorganics, yes, organics, no.

I think he's a bit pessimistic about the rest of the solar system however. If our civilization manages to survive a few hundred more years the energy and environmental challenges may seem pretty doable. It just won't happen as fast as Kennedy once imagined.

Dowd asks a good question, hell freezes

At the very end of one her typically silly columns Dowd actually asks a good question:

Can He Crush Hillary? - New York Times

.... The Clinton financial disclosures raise a big question: Do we want the country run again by a couple who get so easily wrapped around the fingers of anyone who is rich? As long as a guy was willing to give them millions, would it matter if his name were Al Capone?

John Edwards. Al Gore. Maybe even Obama if he can get straight about his smoking habit and if he turns out to be relatively skeleton free...

The evolutionary biology of aging: Zimmer's links

In a quite brief post Carl (The Loom) Zimmer gives us a small set of brilliant links into the modern evolutionary biology of aging. Absolutely fascinating. I've long thought one of the most instructive examples of mammalian aging lived right by our feet, so I jumped right to the entry on Canis familiaris. It's weaker than it should be. It records the far end of canine longevity (at least 24 years, possibly 29) but misses the Great Dane -- old by six years. (One might argue breeding Danes is a crime despite their charm and beauty.)

That's a pretty impressive range for one species -- 400%. Should be some lessons there.

Wolves, by comparison, seem to live fairly readily to age 16-19 in captivity. This suggests we ought to be able to breed a mid-sized dog that would have at least 16 healthy years. That's much better than our genetically abused companions get these days. I'd like to see a derivation of the Australian cattle dog bred for long life but a more family friendly temperament.

Update: By the way. Delayed sexual maturation is a marker for longer lifespan. The age of menarche has fallen from about 16 to about 12 in the past forty years. Draw your own conclusions ...