Category Archives: books

bookshelf in Rome

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I posted a few weeks ago about books I had got to bring to Rome.  Since then I got another small collection because I had done some reviewing for Routledge.

Mostly philosophy of the mind and materiality … the latter to help as we work on the DEPtH book on Physicality, TouchIT

  • Shaun Gallagher, Dan Zahavi. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science, Routledge, 2007.
  • John Lechte. Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Post-Humanism, 2nd Edition, Routledge, 2007.
  • Jean-Paul Sartre.  Being and Nothingnes: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, 1943.  Routledge Classics, , 2nd Edition, 2003.
  • Jay Friedenberg. Artificial Psychology, Routledge , 2008.
  • Max Velmans.  Understanding Consciousness, Routledge, 2009.
  • Peter Carruthers. The Nature of the Mind, Routledge, 2003.

In fact, with these and the previous  set I had far too many even for a month of evenings, and below you can see the books I actually brought.

As well as a selection from the academic books also some fiction/leisure reading, some old favourites and some new ones:

  • How Green was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn – a Welshman has to read this :-/
  • The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger – a classic I’ve never read
  • More of the Good Life – the TV series was formative for me as a child, but 40 seemed so far away
  • Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson – some years since I’ve read it last, and have been loving the TV series, but I don’t think it has stayed very close to the book!
  • Nella Last’s War – this is the book that was the basis for the TV drama Housewife 49 and part of the Mass Observation that collected diaries from ordinary people across Britain during the Second World War.
  • Ruth, Elizabeth Gaskill – another classic that I’ve not read yet!
  • As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.  Laurie Lee’s account of travelling in Spain in the run up to the Civel War.  I read it in school for O’level.
  • Swallowdale, Arthur Ransome – Couldn’t find Swallow’s an Amazons, I think one of the girls might have it on their shelves!
  • The Shining Company, Rosemary Sutcliff – we have loads of her histroical novels for children.  I find that good children’s writing is so much better than most adult books, which often feel they need to be incomprehensible to be good.
  • The Growing Summer, Noel Streatfield – lovely story, children visiting a quirky old lady in west coast of Ireland.
  • Hovel in the Hills, Elizabeth West  – another book I’ve read many times, but not for many years.  True story about a couple who buy an old house on a Welsh hillside.

In addition, but missing from the picture, is one I borrowed from my daughter, Tamara Pierce’s  The Healing in the Vine, and one I’ve borrowed from Tiziana Catarci during my visit the Languages of Art.

So, two weeks in and how far have I got …

Well, been a little busy, two journal papers, a book chapter, an interfaces article, two 3 hour lectures to the masters students here, a seminar, reading thesis chapters and helping with two grant proposals … so not got very far through the bookshelf.

In fact, to be brutally honest, so far only finished the Tamora Pierce and nearly finished Gibson (just conclusions to go):

As you can see LOTS of notes on Gibson, I will write a very long blog sometime about this, but several others in line first!

But next week several train journeys, so may get through a few more books 🙂

the ordinary and the normal

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I am reading Michel de Certeau’s “The Practice of Everyday Life“.  The first chapter begins:

The Practice of Everyday Life (cover image)The erosion and denigration of the singular or the extraordinary was announced by The Man Without Qualities1: “…a heroism but enormous and collective, in the model of ants” And indeed the advent of the anthill society began with the masses, … The tide rose. Next it reached the managers … and finally it invaded the liberal professions that thought themselves protected against it, including even men of letters and artists.”

Now I have always hated the word ‘normal’, although loved the ‘ordinary’.  This sounds contradictory as they mean almost the same, but the words carry such different connotations. If you are not normal you are ‘subnormal’ or ‘abnormal’, either lacking in something or perverted.  To be normal is to be normalised, to be part of the crowd, to obey the norms, but to be distinctive or different is wrong.  Normal is fundamentally fascist.

In contrast the ordinary does not carry the same value judgement.  To be different from ordinary is to be extra-ordinary2, not sub-ordinary or ab-ordinary.  Ordinariness does not condemn otherness.

Certeau is studying the everyday.  The quote is ultimately about the apparently relentless rise of the normal over the ordinary, whereas Certeau revels in  the small ways ordinary people subvert norms and create places within the interstices of the normal.

The more I study the ordinary, the mundane, the quotidian, the more I discover how extraordinary is the everyday3. Both the ethnographer and the comedian are expert at making strange, taking up the things that are taken for granted and holding them for us to see, as if for the first time. Walk down an anodyne (normalised) shopping street, and then look up from the facsimile store fronts and suddenly cloned city centres become architecturally unique.  Then look through the crowd and amongst the myriad incidents and lives around, see one at a time, each different.

Sometimes it seems as if the world conspires to remove this individuality. The InfoLab21 building that houses the Computing Dept. at Lancaster was sort listed for a people-centric design award of ‘best corporate workspace‘.  Before the judging we had to remove any notices from doors or any other sign that the building was occupied, nothing individual, nothing ordinary, sanitised, normalised.

However, all is not lost.  I was really pleased the other day to see a paper  “Making Place for Clutter and Other Ideas of Home”4. Laural, Alex and Richard are looking at the way people manage the clutter in their homes: keys in bowls to keep them safe, or bowls on a worktop ready to be used.  They are looking at the real lives of ordinary people, not the normalised homes of design magazines, where no half-drunk coffee cup graces the coffee table, nor the high-tech smart homes where misplaced papers will confuse the sensors.

Like Fariza’s work on designing for one person5, “Making a Place for Clutter” is focused on single case studies not broad surveys.  It is not that the data one gets from broader surveys and statistics is not important (I am a mathematician and a statistician!), but read without care the numbers can obscure the individual and devalue the unique.  I heard once that Stalin said, “a million dead in Siberia is a statistic, but one old woman killed crossing the road is a national disaster”. The problem is that he could not see that each of the million was one person too. “Aren’t two sparrows sold for only a penny? But your Father knows when any one of them falls to the ground.”6.

We are ordinary and we are special.

  1. The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil, 1930-42, originally: Der Mann ohne Eigenschafte. Picador Edition 1997, Trans.  Sophie Wilkins and  Burton Pike: Amazon | Wikipedia[back]
  2. Sometimes ‘extraordinary’ may be ‘better than’, but more often simply ‘different from’, literally the Latin ‘extra’ = ‘outside of’[back]
  3. as in my post about the dinosaur joke![back]
  4. Swan, L., Taylor, A. S., and Harper, R. 2008. Making place for clutter and other ideas of home. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 15, 2 (Jul. 2008), 1-24. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1375761.1375764[back]
  5. Described in Fariza’s thesis: Single Person Study: Methodological Issues and in the notes of my SIGCHI Ireland Inaugural Lecture Human-Computer Interaction in the early 21st century: a stable discipline, a nascent science, and the growth of the long tail.[back]
  6. Matthew 10:29[back]

bookshelf

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Got some books to fill my evenings when I’m in Rome during May, mostly about physicality and relating to DEPtH project.

Several classics about the nature of action in the physical world:

  • James Gibson,. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New Jersey, USA, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1979
    Actually a bit embarrassing as I have written about affordance and cited Gibson many times, but never read the original!
  • Martin Heidegger.  Being and Time. Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition, 2008
    Similarly how many times have I cited ‘ready to hand’!  But then again how many people have read Heidegger?
  • Martin Heidegger.  Basic Writings. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008
    This is a ‘best bits’ for Heidegger!
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty.  Phenomenology of Perception. London, England, Routledge, 1958
    Everybody seems to cite Merleau-Ponty, but don’t know much about him … except all that French philosophy is bound to be heavy!

A couple more with a human as action system perspective, that seem to be well reviewed (and I’m guessing easier reads!):

Finally three about memories: linking generally to memories for life and also designing for reflection, but looking at them more specifically in relation to Haliyana‘s photologing studies.

  • Paul Ricoeur.  Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago University Press; New edition,  2006
  • Paul Ricoeur.  Time and Narrative, Volume 1, Chicago University Press; New edition,  1990
    More classics … and I suspect heavy reads, got another Rocoeur already, but it is still on my “to read” pile.
  • Svetlana Boym.  The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2008
    Just sounded good.

Will report on them as I go 🙂

Searle’s wall, computation and representation

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Reading a bit more of Brain Cantwell Smith’s “On the Origin of Objects”  and he refers (p.30-31) to Searle‘s wall that, according to Searle, can be interpreted as implementing a word processor.  This all hinges on predicates introduced by Goodman such as ‘grue’, meaning “green is examined before time t or blue if examined after”:

grue(x) = if ( now() < t ) green(x)
          else blue(x)

The problem is that an emerald apparently changes state from grue to not grue at time t, without any work being done.  Searle’s wall is just an extrapolation of this so that you can interpret the state of the wall at a time to be something arbitrarily complex, but without it ever changing at all.

This issue of the fundamental nature of computation has long seemed to me the ‘black hole’ at the heart of our discipline (I’ve alluded to this before in “What is Computing?“).  Arguably we don’t understand information much either, but at least we can measure it – we have a unit, the bit; but with computation we cannot even measure except without reference to specific implementation architecture whether Turing machine or Intel Core.  Common sense (or at least programmer’s common sense) tells us that any given computational device has only so much computational ‘power’ and that any problem has a minimum amount of computational effort needed to solve it, but we find it hard to quantify precisely.  However,  by Searle’s argument we can do arbitrary amounts of computation with a brick wall.

For me, a defining moment came about 10 years ago, I recall I was in Loughbrough for an examiner’s meeting and clearly looking through MSc scripts had lost it’s thrill as I was daydreaming about computation (as one does).  I was thinking about the relationship between computation and representation and in particular the fast (I think fastest) way to do multiplication of very large numbers, the Schönhage–Strassen algorithm.

If you’ve not come across this, the algorithm hinges on the fact that multiplication is a form of convolution (sum of a[i] * b[n-i]) and a Fourier transform converts convolution into pointwise multiplication  (simply a[i] * b[i]). The algorithm looks something like:

1. represent numbers, a and b, in base B (for suitable B)
2. perform FFT in a and b to give af and bf
3. perform pointwise multiplication on af and bf to give cf
4. perform inverse FFT on cf to give cfi
5. tidy up cfi a but doing carries etc. to give c
6. c is the answer (a*b) in base B

In this the heart of the computation is the pointwise multiplication at step 3, this is what ‘makes it’ multiplication.  However, this is a particularly extreme case where the change of representation (steps 2 and 4) makes the computation easier. What had been a quadratic O(N2) convolution is now a linear O(N) number of pointwise multiplications (strictly O(n) where n = N/log(B) ). This change of representation is in fact so extreme, that now the ‘real work’ of the algorithm in step 3 takes significantly less time (O(n) multiplications) compared to the change in representation at steps 2 and 4 (FFT is O( n log(n) ) multiplications).

Forgetting the mathematics this means the majority of the computational time in doing this multiplication is taken up by the change of representation.

In fact, if the data had been presented for multiplication already in FFT form and result expected in FFT representation, then the computational ‘cost’ of multiplication would have been linear … or to be even more extreme if instead of ‘representing’ two numbers as a and b we instead ‘represent’ them as a*b and a/b, then multiplication is free.  In general, computation lies as much in the complexity of putting something into a representation as it is in the manipulation of it once it is represented.  Computation is change of representation.

In a letter to CACM in 1966 Knuth said1:

When a scientist conducts an experiment in which he is measuring the value of some quantity, we have four things present, each of which is often called “information”: (a) The true value of the quantity being measured; (b) the approximation to this true value that is actually obtained by the measuring device; (c) the representation of the value (b) in some formal language; and (d) the concepts learned by the scientist from his study of the measurements. It would seem that the word “data” would be most appropriately applied to (c), and the word “information” when used in a technical sense should be further qualified by stating what kind of information is meant.

In these terms problems are about information, whereas algorithms are operating on data … but the ‘cost’ of computation has to also include the cost of turning information into data and back again.

Back to Searle’s wall and the Goodman’s emerald.  The emerald ‘changes’ state from grue to not grue with no cost or work, but in order to ask the question “is this emerald grue?” the answer will involve computation (if (now()<t) …).  Similarly if we have rules like this, but so complicated that Searle’s wall ‘implements’ a word processor, that is fine, but in order to work out what is on the word processor ‘screen’ based on the observation of the (unchanging) wall, the computation involved in making that observation would be equivalent to running the word processor.

At a theoretical computation level this reminds us that when we look at the computation in a Turing machine, vs. an Intel processor or lambda calculus, we need to consider the costs of change of representations between them.  And at a practical level, we all know that 90% of the complexity of any program is in the I/O.

  1. Donald Knuth, “Algorithm and Program; Information and Data”, Letters to the editor. Commun. ACM 9, 9, Sep. 1966, 653-654. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/365813.858374 [back]

nice quote: Auden on language

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Was thumbing through Brain Cantwell Smith’s “On the Origin of Objects”1, and came across the following quote:

“One notices, if one will trust one’s eyes, the shadow cast by language upon truth.”
Auden, “Kairos & Logos“

This reminded me of my own ponderings as a school child (I can still hear the clank of china as I was washing cups in the church at the time!) as to whether I would be able to think more freely if I knew more languages and thus had more words and concepts, or whether, on the contrary, my mind would be most clear if I knew no language and was thus free of the conceptual straitjacket of English vocabulary. Of course all shades of Sapir-Whorf (although I didn’t know the term at the time), and now I hold a somewhere in-between view – language shapes thought but does not totally contain it2.  Is that the moderation of maturity, or compromise of age?

  1. Trying to decide whether to start it again, as Luke Church, who I met at the PPIG meeting in September, told me it was worthwhile persevering with even though somewhat oddly written![back]
  2. I discuss this a bit in my transarticulation essay and paths and patches book chapter.[back]

Christmas services

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Lots of travelling about to see family and lots of deadlines over Christmas period, but now back on Tiree and it’s New Year’s day, so time for a short breather.

All the travelling about meant we didn’t seem to get to as many carol services and the like before Christmas, so it didn’t really feel as if Christmas Day was near until it was upon us.

Miriam is in the choir at Birmingham Cathedral and was singing at both the midnight service on Christmas Eve and the Christmas Morning service, so we all spent Christmas with her.  To be honest I expected the Cathedral services to be beautiful, but lifeless affairs.  I was very wrong.

The midnight service was full-on bells-and-smells with smoking incense wafted over Bible, congregation and anything else in range.  Poor Fiona, who had a cough anyway, struggled to breath through the rich spicy fumes and one other girl had to step out for air.  As well as the people, but I’ll come to those later, the turning point to me was when the priest, dressed in a white surplus with beautiful and intricate embroidery,  came to the centre of the aisle to read the New Testament lesson, flanked on either side by candle bearers in cassocks …  of course all heavily wafted in incense … and she began to read.   Clearly she too found it hard to breath in the smoke (Miriam told us later that the incense was only occasionally used in the services, so she had little practice reading under adverse conditions), but, as her head moved from side to side reading the lesson, the light caught a sparkle of glitter in her hair and suddenly the solemnity of the occasion, her own humanity and the joy of the celebration all came together.  A sparkle in the hair a parable for the message of incarnation.

To be honest tired after so much driving, thesis reading, etc., I fell asleep through some of the sermon … and yes, sometimes if you notice me in a talk with my eyes closed it is rapt attention, but sometimes …

Christmas services are always times which bring in the once-a-year visitors as well as the weekly faithful, so always difficult for the preacher.  Some primarily address the latter, hoping that the former will absorb the message and the occasion, often appropriate in small communities.  The opposite alternative is to treat it as an ‘opportunity for evangelism’ addressing the newcomer, but risking treating them as gospel cannon fodder and maybe even neglecting to focus on the celebration that is Christmas. This seems particularly difficult in a cathedral, which is both a place of worship, but also part of civic life; there to serve the city, to welcome people in on their own terms and yet offer them more.

Again, being honest, I expected the preacher to ‘play safe; bland words and a Christmas greeting, but instead (between my naps) he seemed to get it just right, not ‘preachy’ but welcoming yet leaving no doubt that we were not gathered just to sing a few nice songs, but there to celebrate the birth of a real baby, who became a real man, offering a rich promise, and making real demands on our lives.

However, what struck me most was not so much the ‘front activity’ of  priests and candles, lectern and Bible, or even bread and wine, but the people in the congregation. So varied: the lady in ‘Sunday best’ everybody’s image of the librarian or old-style school teacher, three men with tightly cropped hair like the Mitchell brothers in Eastenders, a group of young women maybe going to a party later, a girl in a heavy-metal sweat shirt, and a young couple punctuating their devotions with the occasional hug.  I wondered at their stories, some regulars, some who, like us, had come especially for the service, some who maybe wandered in.

On the Sunday after Christmas we were all in Kendal and went to the morning service at Sandylands, our regular church while we’d lived at Kendal.  Being the post-Christmas service, one of the readings was the familiar story of when Mary and Joseph took the new baby Jesus to the temple to make their offering of two doves after the birth.  Simeon is an old man but had been told that he wouldn’t die until he has seen the Messiah … he sees the baby Jesus and recognises him.

As this was read, the mathematician in me woke up and I did some quick sums, probably a few 100,000 in Palestine at that time, birth rate for replacement maybe 3%, so thousands of babies a year brought to the temple, maybe a few dozen babies every day … and out of  all these Simeon spots one.  I was reminded of Ursula le Guin’s book “A Wizard of Earthsea“.  It is set in a world of oceans and islands … not so far different from the Hebrides … all interlaced with magic.  The young wizard Sparrowhawk is on a quest and in a tower in the far north is lead into a deep room where a great treasure is stored.  The room is empty, but amongst the flagstones on the floor, he spots one, a small insignificant stone, worn from depths of ages, but so so old and holding a deep ancient dark power.  Like Sparrowhawk, Simeon spots the one of great value amongst the many; does it take special eyes or a special gift to see, or just willingness to look?

Although the old dark powers in “A Wizard of Earthsea” are just a story, the Christmas celebrations are themselves set at midwinter at the time of many old pre-Christian festivals.  The early Christians saw no problem in embracing pagan places and even names  (even the English word Easter!) so long as they were consistent with the Christian purpose. Indeed,  it is commonly assumed, there being no indication in the Gospels as to the time of year when Jesus was born, that the early Christians chose the Roman feast of Sol Invictus, the official State sun god so as to declare Christ the Son’s place at the heart of formal society; like those in Birmingham today, treading a difficult line between personal devotion and civic religion.

The parties, eating and drinking of Christmas capture some of the spirit of pagan midwinter, celebrating the sun’s return, and not entirely absent from cathederal mass … see the sparkle in the hair amongst the robes and dress coats of formal civic celebration, but both raw humanity and ordered civilisation give way to something greater.   There is a logic that is not the tit-for-tat logic of base human nature, nor the clinical logic of pure reason (although both are part of us), but instead is a logic that takes all the problems and pain of the world and answers them in a tiny wriggling baby.

reading: Computing is a Natural Science

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I’ve just been re-reading Peter Denning’s article “Computing is a Natural Science”1.    The basic thesis is that computation as broad concept goes way beyond digital computers and many aspects of science and life have a computational flavour; “Computing is the study of natural and artificial information processes“.  As an article this is in some ways not so controversial as computational analogies have been used in cognitive science for almost as long as there have been computers (and before that analogies with steam engines) and readers of popular science magazines can’t have missed the physicists using parallels with information and computation in cosmology.  However, Denning’s paper is to some extent a manifesto, or call to arms: “computing is not just a load of old transistor, but something to be proud of, the roots of understanding the universe”.

Particularly useful are the “principles framework for computing” that Denning has been constructing through a community discussion process.  I mentioned these before when blogging about “what is computing? The article lists the top level categories and gives examples of how each of these can be found in areas that one would not generally think of as ‘computing’.

Computation (meaning and limits of computation)
Communication (reliable data transmission)
Coordination (cooperation among networked entities)
Recollection (storage and retrieval of information)
Automation (meaning and limits of automation)
Evaluation (performance prediction and capacity planning)
Design (building reliable software systems)
 categories from “Great Principles of Computing“

Occasionally the mappings are stretched … I’m not convinced that natural fractals are about hierarchical aggregation … but they do paint a picture of ubiquitous parallels across the key areas of computation.

Denning is presenting a brief manifesto not a treatise, so examples of very different kinds tend to be presented together.  There seem to be three main kinds:

  • ubiquity of computational devices – from iPods to the internet, computation is part of day-to-day life
  • ubiquity of computation as a tool –  from physical simulations to mathematical proofs and eScience
  • ubiquity of computation as an explanatory framework – modelling physical and biological systems as if they were performing a computational function

It is the last, computation as analogy or theoretical lens that seems most critical to the argument as the others are really about computers in the traditional sense and few would argue that computers (rather than computation) are everywhere.

Rather like weak AI, one can look treat these analogies as simply that, rather like the fact that electrical flow in circuits can be compared with water flow in pipes.  So we may feel that computation may be a good way to understand a phenomena, but with no intention of saying the phenomena is fundamentally computational.

However, some things are closer to a ‘strong’ view of computation as natural science.  One example of this is the “socio-organisational Church-Turing hypothesis”, a term I often use in talks with its origins in a 1998 paper “Redefining Organisational Memory“.  The idea is that organisations are, amongst other things, information processing systems, and therefore it is reasonable to expect to see structural similarities between phenomena in organizations and those in other information processing systems such as digital computers or our brains.  Here computation is not simply an analogy or useful model, the similarity is because there is a deep rooted relationship – an organisation is not just like a computer, it is actually computational.

Apparently absent are examples of where the methods of algorithmics or software engineering are being applied in other domains; what has become known as ‘computational thinking‘. This maybe because there are two sides to computing:

  • computing (as a natural science) understanding how computers (and similar things) behave – related to issues such as emergence, interaction and communication, limits of computability
  • computing (as a design discipline) making computers (and similar things) behave as we want them to – related to issues such as hierarchical decomposition and separation of concerns

The first can be seen as about understanding complexity and the latter controlling it.  Denning is principally addressing the former, whereas computational thinking is about the latter.

Denning’s thesis could be summarised as “computation is about more than computers”.  However, that is perhaps obvious in that the early study of computation by Church and Turing was before the advent of digital computers; indeed Church was primarily addressing what could be computed by mathematicians not machines!  Certainly I was left wondering what exactly was ubiquitous: computation, mathematics, cybernetics?

Denning notes how the pursuit of cybernetics as an all embracing science ran aground as it seemed to claim too much territory (although the practical application of control theory is still live and well) … and one wonders if the same could happen for Denning’s vision.  Certainly embodied mind theorists would find more in common with cybernetics than much of computing and mathematicians are not going to give up the language of God too easily.

Given my interest in all three subjects, computation, mathematics, cybernetics, it prompts me to look for the distinctions, and overlaps, and maybe the way that they are all linked (perhaps all just part of mathematics ;-)).  Furthermore as I am also interested in understanding the nature of computation I wonder whether looking at how natural things are ‘like’ computation may be not only an application of computational understanding, but more a lens or mirror that helps us see computation itself more clearly.

  1. well when I say re-reading I think the first ‘read’ was more of a skim, great thing about being on sabbatical is I actually DO get to read things 🙂 [back]

strength in weakness – Judo design

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Steve Gill is visiting so that we can work together on a new book on physicality.  Last night, over dinner, Steve was telling us about a litter-bin lock that he once designed.  The full story linked creative design, the structural qualities of materials, and the social setting in which it was placed … a story well worth hearing, but I’ll leave that to Steve.

One of the critical things about the design was that while earlier designs used steel, his design needed to be made out of plastic.  Steel is an obvious material for a lock: strong unyielding; however the plastic lock worked because the lock and the bin around it were designed to yield, to give a little, and is so doing to absorb the shock if kicked by a drunken passer-by.

This is a sort of Judo principle of design: rather than trying to be the strongest or toughest, instead by  yielding in the right way using the strength of your opponent.

This reminded me of trees that bend in the wind and stand the toughest storms (the wind howling down the chimney maybe helps the image), whereas those that are stiffer may break.  Also old wooden pit-props that would moan and screech when they grew weak and gave slightly under the strain of rock; whereas the stronger steel replacements would stand firm and unbending until the day they catastrophically broke.

Years ago I also read about a programme to strengthen bridges as lorries got heavier.  The old arch bridges had an infill of loose rubble, so the engineers simply replaced this with concrete.  In a short time the bridges began to fall down.  When analysed more deeply  the reason become clear.  When an area of the loose infill looses strength, it gives a little, so the strain on it is relieved and the areas around take the strain instead.  However, the concrete is unyielding and instead the weakest point takes more and more strain until eventually cracks form and the bridge collapses.  Twisted ropes work on the same principle.  Although now an old book, “The New Science of Strong Materials” opened my eyes to the wonderful way many natural materials, such as bone, make use of the relative strengths, and weaknesses, of their constituents, and how this is emulated in many composite materials such as glass fibre or carbon fibre.

In contrast both software and bureaucratic procedures are more like chains – if any link breaks the whole thing fails.

Steve’s lock design shows that it is possible to use the principle of strength in weakness when using modern materials, not only in organic elements like wood, or traditional bridge design.  For software also, one of the things I often try to teach is to design for failure – to make sure things work when they go wrong.  In particular, for intelligent user interfaces the idea of appropriate intelligence – making sure that when intelligent algorithms get things wrong, the user experience does not suffer.  It is easy to want to design the cleverest algotithms, the most complex systems – to design for everything, to make it all perfect. While it is of course right to seek the best, often it is the knowledge that what we produce will not be ‘perfect’ that in fact enables us to make it better.

Comics and happy problem solving

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I am in Eindhoven doing CSCW, silly ideas and other things with the USI students here. On the book shelf here is Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” I picked this up last year and couldn’t put it down until I had read it all. There is another book on the shelves this year “Reinventing Comics” and I daren’t pick it up until I’ve done all the work I want to today!

Understanding Comics is both an apologetic for comics as an art form and also an exploration into what makes a comic a comic and how comics manage to captivate and give a sense of narrative and action through what are basically static images. As well as being a good read about comics and about art there seem to be many lessons there for other forms of narrative and animation especially on the web.

As far as I can see (without starting to read it and not being able to stop), Reinventing Comics seems to be about the way online delivery trough the web is giving new opportunities for Comic art … but maybe when I finish everything today I will find out.

Less graphic and less fun, but no less fascinating, I have been dipping into chapters of “The Psychology of Problem Solving“, which was also sitting on the USI shelves. I was particularly enthralled by descriptions of experiments where subjects were asked to accomplish divergent thinking tasks whilst either pushing their palms upwards from under a table, or pushing down from on top. The former a positive, ‘come to me’ gesture elicited more diverse ideas than the latter, negative, ‘go away’ gesture, even though the only difference was the muscle groups in tension. I’ve seen other research that shows how our brains monitor our body state to ‘see how we feel’ (like smiling therapy), but this was one of the most subtle and conclusive.

During the week I have had the USI students work through a design brief starting with silly ideas then moving through  structured analysis to good ideas. Perhaps I should have had them pushing up on tables in the first part and down in the second?

pantoum amongst the lost emails

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About to go off to Edinburgh for 2 day meeting of the Branded Meeting Places project in

Doing quick check on my outbox for 1/2 written emails that I need to finish … and then found the following from July 2006

spring flowers in the meadow
gold sunshine glinting
the grass between lies
cool and smooth

gold sunshine glinting
across the rippling waters
cool and smooth
towards the lonely isle

across the rippling waters
birds fly gently
towards the lonely isle
majestic but desolate

birds fly gently
spring long past
majestic but desolate
the snow buried grass

The Making of a PoemI recall the context now. I has been reading “The Making of a Poem” a lovely book, that discusses different poetic forms both history and current use and with loads of examples of each, classic and modern. I was talking to Masitah about the pantoum, a Malay poetic form where the 2nd and 4th line of each verse become the 1st and 3rd line of the next verse. I constructed the above as an example as we chatted! I had typed it into an email to save it and there it has lain, forgotten, ever since.

I think traditional pantoums have a particular rhythm structure within each verse, so my attempt above has the right line structure structure, but not the right metre. However, I did like the way it created an apparent continuity, yet the meaning could shift underneath – in this case from spring to winter.

My favourite in the book was a modern pantoum by J. M. McClatchy. He repeats the sound of the lines … but not necessarily the words … so in the first verse, the second line is “Seem to pee more often, eat” and in the beginning of the second verse this becomes “Sympathy, more often than not“. Or in the middle “The hearth’s easy, embered expense” becomes “The heart’s lazy: remembrance spent“.

Now back to looking for those urgent mails before the train!