Encountered the following when downloading a file for proof checking from the Elsevier “E-Proofing” System web site1. Happily it turned out to be a mere 950 K not a gigabyte!
I’ve been reading Jeni (Tennison)’s Musings about techie web stuff XML, RDF, etc. Two articles particularly caught my eye. One was Versioning URIs about URIs for real world and conceptual objects (schools, towns), and in particular how to deal with the fact that these change over time. The other was Working With Fragmented Overlapping Markup all about managing multiple hierarchies of structure for the same underlying data.
In the past I’ve studied issues both of versioning and of multiple structures on the same data1, and Jeni lays out the issues for both really clearly. However, both topics gave a sense of deja vu, not just because of my own work, but because they reminded me of similar issues that go way back before the web was even thought of.
In my very first computing job (COBOL programming for Cumbria County Council) many many years ago, I read an article in Computer Weekly about choice of keys (I think for ISAM not even relational DBs). The article argued that keys should NEVER contain anything informational as it is bound to change. The author gave an example of standard maritime identifiers for a ship’s journey (rather like a flight number) that were based on destination port and supposed to never change … except when the ship maybe moved to a different route. There is always an ‘except’, so, the author argued, keys should be non-informational.
Just a short while after reading this I was working on a personnel system for the Education Dept. and was told emphatically that every teacher had a DES code given to them by government and that this code never changed. I believed them … they were my clients. However, sure enough, after several rounds of testing and demoing when they were happy with everything I tried a first mass import from the council’s main payroll file. Validations failed on a number of the DES numbers. It turned out that every teacher had a DES number except for new teachers where the Education Dept. then issued a sort of ‘pretend’ one … and of course the DES number never changed except when the real number came through. Of course, the uniqueness of the key was core to lots of the system … major rewrite :-/
The same issues occurred in many relational DBs where the spirit (rather like RDF triples) was that the record was defined by values, not by identity … but look at most SQL DBs today and everywhere you see unique but arbitrary identifying ids. DOIs, ISBNs, the BBC programme ids – we relearn the old lessons.
Unfortunately, once one leaves the engineered world of databases or SemWeb, neither arbitrary ids nor versioned ones entirely solve things as many real world entities tend to evolve rather than metamorphose, so for many purposes http://persons.org/2009/AlanDix is the same as http://persons.org/1969/AlanDix, but for others different: ‘nearly same as’ only has limited transitivity!
Fiona @ lovefibre and I have often discussed the worrying decline of language used in many comments and postings on the web. Sometimes people are using compressed txtng language or even leetspeak, both of these are reasonable alternative codes to ‘proper’ English, and potentially part of the natural growth of the language. However, it is often clear that the cause is ignorance not choice. One of the reasons may be that many more people are getting a voice on the Internet; it is not just the journalists, academics and professional classes. If so, this could be a positive social sign indicating that a public voice is no longer restricted to university graduates, who, of course, know their grammar perfectly …
Earlier today I was using Google to look up the author of a book I was reading and one of the top links was a listing on ratemyprofessors.com. For interest I clicked through and saw:
“He sucks.. hes mean and way to demanding if u wanan work your ass off for a C+ take his class1”
Hmm I wonder what this student’s course assignment looked like?
I’m wondering why people break things when they create new versions.
Firefox used to open a discreet little window when you downloaded papers. Now-a-days it opens a full screen window completely hiding the browser.
A minor issue, but makes me wonder about both new versions and also defaults and personalisation in general.
You would think crash reporting would be made as seamless and helpful as possible, after all your product has just failed in some way and you wish (a) to mollify the user; and (b) to solicit their assistance in obtaining a full report.
You would think …
In the following I will reflect on what goes wrong in Adobe’s crash reporting and some lessons we can learn from it.
Years ago I wrote a short CHI paper with Roberta Mancini and Stefano Levialdi “communication, action and history” all about the differences between language and action, but for the second time in a few weeks I am writing about the links. But of course there are both similarities and differences.
In my recent post about “language and action: sequential associative parsing“, I compared the role of semantics in the parsing of language with the similar role semantics plays in linking disparate events in our interpretation of the world and most significantly the actions of others. The two differ however in that language is deliberative, intentionally communicative, and hence has a structure, a rule-iness resulting from conventions; it is chosen to make it easier for the recipient to interpret. In contrast, the events of the world have structure inherent in their physical nature, but do not structure themselves in order that we may interpret them, their rule-iness is inherent not intentional. However, the actions of other people and animals often fall between the two.
In this post I will focus in on individual actions of creatures in the world and the way that observing others tells us about their current activities and even their intended actions, and thus how these observations becomes a resource for planning our own actions. However, our own actions are also the subject of observation and hence available to others. We may deliberately hide or obfuscate our intentions and actions if we do not wish others to ‘read’ what we are doing; however, we may also exaggerate them, making them more obvious when we are collaborating. That is, we shape our actions in the light of their potential observation by others so that they become an explicit communication to them.
This exaggeration is evident in computer environments and the physical world, and may even be the roots of iconic gesture and hence language itself.
In explaining how to make sentences more readable (I know I am one to talk!), I frequently explain to students that language understanding is a combination of a schema-based syntactic structure with more sequential associative reading. Only recently I realised this was also the way we had been addressing the issue of task sequence inference in the TIM project. and is related also to the way we interpret action in the real world.
Just scanning a few Google Tech Talks on YouTube. I don’t visit it often, but followed a link from Rob Style‘s twitter. I find the video’s a bit slow, so tend to flick through with the sound off, really wishing they had fast forward buttons like a DVD as quite hard to pull the little slider back and forth.
One talk was by Stuart Hameroff on A New Marriage of Brain and Computer. He is the guy that works with Penrose on the possibility that quantum effects in microtubules may be the source of consciousness. I notice that he used calculations for computational capacity based on traditional neuron-based models that are very similar to my own calculations some years ago in “the brain and the web” when I worked out that the memory and computational capacity of a single human brain is very similar to those of the entire web. Hameroff then went on to say that there are an order of magnitude more microtubules (sub-cellular structures, with many per neuron), so the traditional calculations do not hold!
Microtubules are fascinating things, they are like little mechano sets inside each cell. It is these microtubules that during cell division stretch out straight the chromosomes, which are normally tangled up the nucleus. Even stranger those fluid movements of amoeba gradually pushing out pseudopodia, are actually made by mechanical structures composed of microtubules, only looking so organic because of the cell membrane – rather like a robot covered in latex.
The main reason for going to the text talks was one by Steve Souders “Life’s Too Short – Write Fast Code” that has lots of tips for on speeding up web pages including allowing Javascript files to download in parallel. I was particularly impressed by the quantification of costs of delays on web pages down to 100ms!
This is great. Partly because of my long interest in time and delays in HCI. Partly because I want my own web scripts to be faster and I’ve already downloaded the Yahoo! YSlow plugin for FireFox that helps diagnose causes of slow pages. And partly because I get so frustrated waiting for things to happen, both on the web and on the desktop … and why oh why does it take a good minute to get a WiFi connection …. and why doesn’t YouTube introduce better controls for skimming videos.
… and finally, because I’d already spent too much time skimming the tech talks, I looked at one last talk: David Levy, “No Time To Think” … how we are all so rushed that we have no time to really think about problems, not to mention life1. At least that’s what I think it said, because I skimmed it rather fast.
I am reading Michel de Certeau’s “The Practice of Everyday Life“. The first chapter begins:
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.
I’ve given a number of talks over recent months on aspects of physicality, twice during winter schools in Switzerland and India that I blogged about (From Anzere in the Alps to the Taj Bangelore in two weeks) a month or so back, and twice during my visit to Athens and Tripolis a few weeks ago.
I have finished writing up the notes of the talks as “Touching Technology: taking the physical world seriously in digital design“. The notes are partly a summary of material presented in previous papers and also some new material. Here is the abstract:
Although we live in an increasingly digital world, our bodies and minds are designed to interact with the physical. When designing purely physical artefacts we do not need to understand how their physicality makes them work – they simply have it. However, as we design hybrid physical/digital products, we must now understand what we lose or confuse by the added digitality. With two and half millennia of philosophical ponderings since Plato and Aristotle, several hundred years of modern science, and perhaps one hundred and fifty years of near modern engineering – surely we know sufficient about the physical for ordinary product design? While this may be true of the physical properties themselves, it is not the fact for the way people interact with and rely on those properties. It is only when the nature of physicality is perturbed by the unusual and, in particular the digital, that it becomes clear what is and is not central to our understanding of the world. This talk discusses some of the obvious and not so obvious properties that make physical objects different from digital ones. We see how we can model the physical aspects of devices and how these interact with digital functionality.
After finishing typing up the notes I realised I have become worryingly scholarly – 59 references and it is just notes of the talk!
Alan looking scholarly