just running (and the odd walk)

Posted on September 3, 2014 by alan

I now feel little more prepared for Sunday’s 35 mile Tiree ultramarathon, which is following the coats of the island as closely as possible. Sort of a bit like my walk around Wales, but on a smaller scale!

Tiree Ultamarathon Route

I’m planning to do a mix of run and walk. The target is to get round in 10 hours. This would be a doodle if it were all road and beaches as I can average 4 miles an hour fast walk, but the rough ground sections will be slow, so I need to run when I can to make up.

Today I ran and walked the section of the route that goes round the east end of the island, 11.5 miles on Sunday’s route, then 2 miles back across the island to home, and then, to cap off threw in a little 7.5 mile run down to Hynish and back. In all 21 miles in five and a quarter hours, so the running and slow walking averaging out at 4 miles an hour, on track. I’m bound to slow a little as the day wears on, and the weather is set to be less good on Sunday, but it’s good to know I’m in the right ballpark.

My only problem is eating enough while moving. I did manage to eat a Mars bar, but find it hard to eat when I’ve just been running, so had to wait for the long walk sections — I guess why the professional runners all use those gel packs. I think I’ll get some more Kendal Mint Cake as that is far easier to simply suck/crunch and swallow, and no load on the stomach — straight sugar!

Of course, now it is evening I have to try and catchup with all the work I should have been doing in those five and quarter hours :-/

I’m not really doing it ‘for’ anything , but if you feel inspired the JustGiving pages on AlanWalksWales are still open for donations.

big brother Is watching … but doing it so, so badly

Posted on September 2, 2014 by alan

I followed a link to an article on Forbes’ web site¹. After a few moments the computer fan started to spin like a merry-go-round and the page, and the browser in general became virtually unresponsive.

I copied the url, closed the browser tab (Firefox) and pasted the link into Chrome, as Chrome is often billed for its stability and resilience to badly behaving web pages. After a few moments the same thing happened, roaring fan, and, when I peeked at the Activity Monitor, Chrome was eating more than a core worth of the machine’s CPU.

I dug a little deeper and peeked at the web inspector. Network activity was haywire hundreds and hundreds of downloads, most were small, some just a few hundred bytes, others a few Kb, but loads of them. I watched mesmerised. Eventually it began to level off after about 10 minutes when the total number of downloads was nearing 1700 and 8Mb total download.

It is clear that the majority of these are ‘beacons’, ‘web bugs’, ‘trackers’, tiny single pixel images used by various advertising, trend analysis and web analytics companies. The early beacons were simple gifs, so would download once and simply tell the company what page you were on, and hence using this to tune future advertising, etc.

However, rather than simply images that download once, clearly many of the current beacons are small scripts that then go on to download larger scripts. The scripts they download then periodically poll back to the server. Not only can they tell their originating server that you visited the page, but also how long you stayed there. The last url on the screenshot above is one of these report backs rather than the initial download; notice it telling the server what the url of the current page is.

Some years ago I recall seeing a graphic showing how many of these beacons common ‘quality’ sites contained – note this is Forbes. I recall several had between one and two hundred on a single page. I’m not sure the actual count here as each beacon seems to create very many hits, but certainly enough to create 1700 downloads in 10 minutes. The chief culprits, in terms of volume, seemed to be two companies I’d not heard of before SimpleReach² and Realtime³, but I also saw Google, Doubleclick and others.

While I was not surprised that these existed, the sheer volume of activity did shock me, consuming more bandwidth than the original web page – no wonder your data allowance disappears so fast on a mobile!

In addition the size of the JavaScript downloads suggests that there are doing more than merely report “page active”, I’m guessing tracking scroll location, mouse movement, hover time … enough to eat a whole core of CPU.

I left the browser window and when I returned, around an hour later, the activity had slowed down, and only a couple of the sites were still actively polling. The total bandwidth had climbed another 700Kb, so around 10Kb/minute – again think about mobile data allowance, this is a web page that is just sitting there.

When I peeked at the activity monitor Chrome had three highly active processes, between them consuming 2 cores worth of CPU! Again all on a web page that is just sitting there. Not only are these web beacons spying on your every move, but they are badly written to boot, costuming vast amounts of CPU when there is nothing happening.

I tried to scroll the page and then, surprise, surprise:

So, I will avoid links to Forbes in future, not because I respect my privacy; I already know I am tracked and tracked; who needed Snowdon to tell you that? I won’t go because the beacons make the site unusable.

I’m guessing this is partly because the network here on Tiree is slow. It does not take 10 minutes to download 8Mb, but the vast numbers of small requests interact badly with the network characteristics. However, this is merely exposing what would otherwise be hidden: the vast ratio between useful web page and tracking software, and just how badly written the latter is.

Come on Forbes, if you are going to allow spies to pay to use your web site, at least ask them to employ some competent coders.

The page I was after was this one, but I’d guess any news page would be the same. http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardbehar/2014/08/21/the-media-intifada-bad-math-ugly-truths-about-new-york-times-in-israel-hamas-war/[back]
http://www.simplereach.com/[back]
http://www.realtime.co/[back]

JavaScript gotcha: var scope

Posted on August 7, 2014 by alan

I have been using JavaScript for more than 15 years with some projects running to several thousand lines. But just discovered that for all these years I have misunderstood the scope rules for variables. I had assumed they were block scoped, but in fact every variable is effectively declared at the beginning of the function.

So if you write:

function f() {
    for( var i=0; i<10; i++ ){
        var i_squared = i * i;
        // more stuff ...
    }
}

This is treated as if you had written:

function f() {
    var i, i_squared
    for( i=0; i<10; i++ ){
         i_squared = i * i;
         // more stuff ...
    }
}

The Mozilla Developer Network describes the basic principle in detail, however, does not include any examples with inner blocks like this.

So, there is effectively a single variable that gets reused every time round the loop. Given you do the iterations one after another this is perfectly fine … until you need a closure.

I had a simple for loop:

function f(items)
    for( var ix in items ){
        var item = items[ix];
        var value = get_value(item)
        do_something(item,value);
    }
}

This all worked well until I needed to get the value asynchronously (AJAX call) and so turned get_value into an asynchronous function:

get_value_async(item,callback)

which fetches the value and then calls callback(value) when it is ready.

The loop was then changed to

function f(items)
    for( var ix in items ){
        var item = items[ix];
        get_value_async( item, function(value) {
                                do_something(item,value);
                          }; );
    }
}

I had assumed that ‘item’ in each callback closure would be bound to the value for the particular iteration of the loop, but in fact the effective code is:

function f(items)
    var ix, item;
    for( ix in items ){
        item = items[ix];
        get_value_async( item, function(value) {
                                do_something(item,value);
                          }; );
    }
}

So all the callbacks point to the same ‘item’, which ends up as the one from the last iteration. In this case the code is updating an onscreen menu, so only the last item got updated!

JavaScript 1.7 and ECMAScript 6 have a new ‘let’ keyword, which has precisely the semantics that I have always thought ‘var’ had, but does not seem to widely available yet in browsers.

As a workaround I have used the slightly hacky looking:

function f(items)
    for( var ix in items ){
        (function() {
            var item = items[ix];
            get_value_async( item, function(value) {
                                    do_something(item,value);
                              }; );
        })();
    }
}

The anonymous function immediately inside the for loop is simply there to create scope for the item variable, and effectively means there is a fresh variable to be bound to the innermost function.

It works, but you do need to be confident with anonymous functions!

Christmas and the Foundational Myths of Social-Anthropology

Posted on January 1, 2014 by alan

I have started to read “Unwrapping Christmas” (David Miller ed.) a collection about the modern celebration of Christmas from an anthropological and sociological perspective.

So far I have read just the first two chapters: an attempt to synthesise ‘A Theory of Christmas‘ by Miller and a translation of Lévi-Strauss’ 1952 article on ‘Father Christmas Executed‘ (Le Père Noël supplicié). These have been fascinating both in their intentional insights into Christmas, but also their unintentional insight into mindset of social-anthropology, the foundational myths of the area

I came across the book as it was mentioned in an article I was reviewing and I realised it is something I should have read years ago when I was first writing about virtual Christmas crackers many years ago¹.

It was published in 1993, and both Christmas, as a global festival, and anthropology/sociology have developed since then, so in some ways a snapshot from 20 years ago. It would, not least, be interesting to see an update on post-9/11 Christmas in Islamic countries

Miller starts his investigation into a ‘theory’ of Christmas by noting that anthropologists take a largely ‘synchronic’ view of phenomena, “detailed observations of current practices” as opposed to folklore research, which is more focused on “survivals”. However, despite this, he allows himself an historical detour.

He starts, as is traditional, with the Roman midwinter festivals. However, I had not realised that there were several of these, deriving it appears (based a little wider reading, not Miller) from a variety of different pre-Roman, midwinter traditions possibly dating back to Babylonian times. First there was Kalends², which was known for present giving, unusual, freedoms for slave and child, and holding lightly to money. Second, there was Saturnalia, a period of feasting and gluttony, which even in Roman times was seen as “crass materialism”. Finally, there is the latecomer Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the Sun God’s feast, set on 25th December.

The last is the reason I have always heard for the choice of the date of Christmas, a deliberate borrowing of a popular pagan festival, and then ‘Christianising’ it in the same way that many churches were built on pagan religious sites. Except, when I started to look a little more deeply at this, I found that this account, that I had always heard, is now challenged, by a more modern account based on the earlier supposed date of conception of Jesus (the Annunciation)³.

The evidence for either derivation appears at best circumstantial and partial, and whether or not Christmas was deliberately dated to coincide with these pagan festivals, the driving force of midwinter festivals, the need for consolation in darkness and the hope of new light, is undoubtedly also one of the reasons for the ongoing popularity of Christmas. Furthermore, it is undoubtedly the case that many rituals connected with the Christian Christmas, such as the Christmas tree, are deliberate or accidental adoptions of pre-Christian symbolism.

However, the origins and strength of the academic myth of the pagan date of Christmas, whether or not it turns out to be true, is an interesting story in itself. It appears to have arisen in the 18th and 19th centuries. During this time and running into the early years of the 20th century, there was a popularity for studies of folklore and myth to seek syncretic origins, to see common underlying mythic stories across all cultures. I guess Freud and Jung can be seen as part of the tail-end of this tradition.

This can be seen as a modernist agenda, albeit with a slight trace of the Victorian love of occult, seeking singular causes, and seeing all ancient accounts as not just mythic, but entirely fictional. This hyper-scepticism was severely challenged by Calvert and Schliemann’s discovery of Troy in the 1860s⁴, which had been believed to be purely mythical. Now-a-days historians take a critical but more open-minded approach to documentary evidence, but the remnants of Victorian hyper-scepticism were still evident in Biblical scholarship, certainly until the late 20th century.

Miller ends up with a two-stranded theory.

One strand is externally focused on the carnival aspects of Christmas as a way to connect to a wider world, and through a temporary overturning of order with (almost Easter-like, but to my mind stretched) echoes of the killing and renewal of the Lord of Misrule. A more cynical view of carnival, might be of a periodically sanctioned inversion of establishment, in order to channel and control dissent. However, Miller offers a more generous life affirming view.

The second strand is internally focused on family, and in particular the nuclear family. Miller sees this as a response to society under threat; in modern times in response to “the threat posed by the sheer scale of materialism“. That is, if I have understood right, Christmas as reaction against, rather than slave to, market culture.

As an investigation of the global secular Christmas, the account makes virtually no reference to religious origins of Christmas. Indeed, the desire to distance itself from Christian theology and symbolism is sometimes arcane. At one point Miller suggests that:

“The birth (sic) of Christmas is itself an attempt to anthropomorphize the divinity in the form of the domestic family unit …”

This is stated with no reference to incarnation, or the origins of the early celebration of Christmas when theology of Christ’s humanity and divinity were being contested. I could not decide whether this was deliberate irony or culpable ignorance.

The relation between Christmas as religious rite and secular festival is not only problematic for the anthropologist. Church writers decried the intemperate and potentially licentious festivities throughout the first millennium, and Christmas was banned entirely in Puritan England. Within living memory, Christmas Day was a normal working day in the Calvinist Protestant areas of Scotland, and in the 1970s there was a campaign to “put Christ back in Christmas“, not least in reaction to the growing use of ‘Xmas’. Many Christians find the figure of Father Christmas problematic. At the very best there is a fear of confusing children, captured perfectly in ELP’s “I believe in Father Christmas“:

They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a Silent Night
And they told me a fairy story
‘Till I believed in the Israelite
And I believed in Father Christmas
And I looked to the sky with excited eyes
‘Till I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn
And I saw him and through his disguise

At worst Father Christmas, often with attendant fairies and pixies, is seen as verging on the demonic.

Conflict between secular and religious Christmas seems particularly strong in the US with, it appears from this side of the Atlantic, endless tales of cribs or Christmas trees being banned from schools or public places for fear of hurting the feelings of other religions (which almost universally seem to reject any problems), not to mention the anodyne ‘Happy Holidays’. However, similar stories hit the news in the UK also, with one Vicar suffering the ire of the national media for telling school children about the (somewhat gruesome) historic origins of Saint Nicholas, and in so doing undermining their faith in Father Christmas⁵:

“… horrified parents said the talk would give their children nightmares and make them start to disbelieve in the magic of Father Christmas and his reindeer.”

Lévi-Strauss’ ‘Father Christmas Executed‘ picks up precisely one such point of Christmas conflict in Dijon in 1951, when the local clergy publically burnt an effigy of Father Christmas. It appears, from the France-soir report that Lévi-Strauss quotes, that the children actively took part in this mock execution, so maybe French children in the 1950s were made of stronger stuff that UK children today. Naughtily, I cannot but help think that the Dijon clergy may have unwittingly captured the neo-pagan spirit of the burning of wicker men. Certainly the France-soir reporter saw some of the irony of the situation noting that, “Dijon awaits the resurrection of Father Christmas“, who was to speak from the Town Hall roof later that evening.

Writing in 1952 Lévi-Strauss is fascinated by the ostensive rejection of American culture and values in France, and yet the speed at which American Christmas had infiltrated French nativity. He attributes this to ‘stimulus diffusion’, where the external system (American Christmas) evokes pre-existing ideas or needs.

He makes excursions across various related beliefs and ceremonies, including, inevitably, Saturnalia, but also, in passing, mentioning the display of antlers in Renaissance Christmas dances, prefiguring Santa’s reindeer (Herne and the Wild Hunt transfigured to Rudolph with his nose so bright). However, eventually settles that the “beliefs linked to Father Christmas relate to the sociology of initiation (and that is beyond doubt)“, based partly on practices of Pueblo Indians placating the spirits of past dead children by giving gifts to their own live children, the lessons from which “can be extended to all initiation rites and even all occasions when society is divided into two groups.” — well, of course.

As an example of a literature-based study of homo anthropologist, I found the following statement particularly fascinating:

“Explanations in terms of survivals are always inadequate. Customs neither disappear nor survive without reason. When they do survive, the reason is less likely to be found in the vagaries of history than in the permanence of a function which analysing the present allows us to discover.”

The discussion of the Pueblo Indians is deemed powerful precisely because there are no historical connections and therefore any (strained) parallel is connected to deep underlying human needs and aspirations, the “most general conditions of social life.”

Ignoring the validity of the analysis of Christmas, itself, one cannot help but see the parallels with the Victorian folklorists desire for deep universal structures. Of course, here there are, in addition, historical cultural connections within academia, but also this desire for the singular casual explanation is surely one of the “general conditions of academic life.”

As mentioned, writing in 1993, 40 years after 1952 Lévi-Strauss’ article, Miller starts by noting a ‘synchronic’ focus of anthropologists, and in the list of contributors Lévi-Strauss is described (and undoubtedly was) “the most distinguished anthropologist of his generation“.

It almost feels as though the quote from Lévi-Strauss is a statement of a foundational myth of the discipline.

The statement is not absolutist, indeed in ‘Father Christmas Executed‘ Lévi-Strauss triangulates his synchronic analysis of Christmas with a diachronic excursion into Abbé de Liesssse, Julebok and the Lord of Misrule amongst others. However, note the emphasis of the statement, “less likely to be found in the vagaries of history than in the permanence of a function“, gives a primacy to ahistorical accounts.

Ethnography developed as a recording of people’s behaviours and customs without imposing external values or systems of thought, the cultural equivalent of a physical observation, but with the understanding that the observer needs to get inside the subjective experience of the participants. This methodological focus has perhaps transposed into an ontological one, the importance methodologically of focusing on the present, becoming a primacy of the present, the avoidance of external value systems tainting historical analysis.

Maybe the field has also been wary of ubiquitous historical determinacy such as colonial accounts of the inevitability and superiority of 19th century civilisation, Marxist belief in its inevitable downfall, or the more recent narratives of western democracy.

However as rhetoric, this ahistorical focus feels rather like pre-ecological biology. A simple view has animals evolving to fit into environmental niches, just as Lévi-Strauss sees American Christmas ideas finding a place in a French cultural niche. However, biological systems are now seen as reflexive, co-evolutionary, the environment is shaped by the species just as the species is shaped by the environment.

This is a less comfortable and less stable world that challenges the enduring Darwinian myth of optimality. Species (including humans) are no longer the best possible creatures for their environment but historically contingent and part of an ongoing dynamic.

Similarly cultural practices do not simply sit upon universal human and social functions as a singular causation, but those functions, the underlying human needs, change due to the practices in which we as individuals and as societies engage.

The weakness of ignoring this can be seen in Miller’s view of Christmas in relation to the nuclear family. To the early readers of Matthew and Luke’s gospels, the story of the woman giving birth away from extended family must surely have been strange if not shocking. Indeed early icongraphy is much more focused on mother and child than the classic modern family crib scene (although both are found, and the history of woodworking tools is indebted to depictions of Joseph the carpenter).

However, if we imagine recently industrialised and urbanised 19th century Britain, with extended family often far away in the country, or recent migrants or settlers in the US, the non-traditional nativity scene must surely have framed and helped build the very notion of nuclear family. This is particularly obvious in the account of Christmas in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie“.

Similarly, is the global popularity of Christmas also in part due to the 18th and 19th century combination of colonisation and missionary movements that helped establish globally what we now deem to be ‘universal’ ideas of ethics and rights; ideas, of course, derived in no small part from the Christmas story? Although, in their part, these ideas maybe had impact precisely because they touched universal needs in the human heart.

To try out virtual crackers go to vfridge.com/crackers/, to read about them see my chapter “Deconstructing Experience – pulling crackers apart” or shorter Interactions article “Taking fun seriously“.[back]
Strictly, Kalends were the end of any month, but there appeared to be particular celebrations at the end of December.[back]
For more discussion of the date of Christmas see The Date of Christmas and Epiphany and Catholic Encyclopedia: Christmas.[back]
The Wikipedia page on Troy describes the early archaeology, but not the previous scepticism, which is in more detailed accounts. [back]
Vicar tells primary school children Santa Claus is NOT REAL and reveals gruesome legend. Express, 12 Dec 2013. [back]

A sleepless night; do you have a b**ping mobile phone?

Posted on November 23, 2013 by alan

There are many reasons to swear at your mobile phone. I’ll talk about just one.

I have just had a sleepless night.

I was staying in an Oban hotel and needed to get up at 5:45am for the Tiree ferry. I went to bed early, but not too early, intending to get a good night’s sleep before the early start. But I seemed to spend the entre night tossing and turning. In fact there will have been moments of sleep in between, but it felt like I was always wide awake, not even drowsy.

It was only in the morning that i realised the reason, one I should have thought of the night before.

My phone is a beeper.

Maybe you have never had one, but if you have you know exactly what I mean.

I have two phones, an iPhone (which I will return to later) and a Samsung ACE Android. I usually use the alarm on the iPhone, but last night, knowing it was important I did not oversleep, I set the alarm on both. Maybe it was just late and after a three week trip away from home, simply tired, but I forgot …

… my Android phone is a beeper.

Maybe all Androids are, or maybe all Androids with a particular version of the operating system, or maybe just the Samsung ACE, but certainly mine is. It is why I normally have it switched off at night.

Is your phone?

At random moments, without rhyme or reason it just beeps: little chirrups, very jolly sounding, but often utterly incomprehensible. Some I understand: a message has arrived, the power has been connected, it is fully charged and wants to be disconnected. But other times, I hear the beep, look at the phone, and there is no apparent explanation.

Of course in the night the beeps wake you up, but as they are short, you don’t realise why yo are awoken. I should have remembered, It is not the first time I have had a beeping phone.

My first awareness of beepers was nearly ten years ago. For a period of nearly two years I had continuous insomnia. I would go to sleep, but I would wake nearly (in retrospect probably exactly) every hour. One day I was at a hotel and something else must have woken me and before I fell back to sleep I heard a beep.

I think I had a Sony-Erikson phone at the time, and when it was fully charged it beeped. If you ignored the beep it would wait an hour and then beep again, and again, and again. In the daytime I had hardly noticed the habit, but in the night it woke me, but of course I had never realised what had woken me, until that moment. The next night I turned off the phone and used a separate alarm clock. For the first time in two years I slept through the night.

Walk around your house at night: it is now rarely dark, every device has an LED some, continuous, some flashing; indoor light pollution. Have you, like me, sometimes had to cover a laptop with a T-shirt to stop its flashing keeping you awake? Less obvious are the various beeps, buzzes, and chirrups. Some are loud, long and insistent, the ring of a phone, or loud ding of a microwave when ready. Others are short and sharp, deliberately low-key so as to remind, but not annoy. In our house the tumble drier gives a small periodic beep to remind you that the programme has finished.

During the day time these are just part of the backdrop of life, indeed if you live in town they may well be drowned by the background drum of distant traffic.

However, if you find yourself unaccountable waking at night, seek out the audio polluters of your home.

Because these reminder sounds are short, you never know what woke you, but like any unexpected sound in the night, they hit your deepest startle responses and leave you suddenly, unaccountably, wide awake.

Of course, the phone knows the time of day – that is why I used it as an alarm – so why not mute the less critical sounds during the night. And yes, I have tried lots of settings to quieten it, but some, particularly power-related beeps, seem insensitive to my attempts to silence them. And of course I do not want to silence the potential emergency phone call in the night, just the inconsequential reminders.

Of course, if the phone does insist on beeping at least it could have some sort of notice to say why!

It is not just these notification beeps that can cause problems. IT systems, and phones in particular, seem remarkably time insensitive.

My first mobile phone was on Orange, supplied by my university when I was an Associate Dean and part of ‘management’. Orange specially modify their phones, so that, even on early phones, you got visible indications of phone messages. Furthermore, if someone rang you and left a message while you were on the phone or temporarily out of signal, you would get a call back from the answering service as soon as you were available.

Later, when I had a phone of my own, it was Vodafone. Vodafone’s answering service on their mobile network appears to be completely separated from the actual phone system. There is some sort of ‘redirect on busy’ that takes you through to the separate system, but, unlike Orange, it has no way of knowing when you are next available.

Now-a-days it seems to only text you, but, maybe because the service started before text messaging was common, the early versions worked by ringing you back. However, being unaware of your availability, it simply rang you back at increasing intervals: first of all immediately the message had been left, then a few minutes later, then a slightly longer gap, until eventually it would give up for several hours before trying again.

You can probably already imagine the story. It was quite common to have long phone conversations with family members late at night, maybe at 10:30 or 11pm for an hour. During that time someone else would try to ring and leave a message. The answering service would try to ring, but of course we would still be on the phone, then a minute later, five minutes, ten, twenty minutes, but we were still on the phone. Eventually it would give up and wait two or three hours. At 2am when we were fast asleep the phone would ring. Thinking it was a dire emergency, we would leap out of bed, only to find a short message saying, “sorry to miss you, will try again tomorrow”.

How difficult would it have been to alter these timings at night?

I said I used the iPhone as my normal alarm. It does make the occasional incomprehensible beep, but usually only just after you have been using it. I assume these are due to some operation started by your interactions completing, maybe mail arriving, but I can never tell. Just as on the Android, would it be too much to ask, even if only as a UI guideline, that every audible notification has a clear visible explanation as well?

However, on the whole it is a silent sleeping partner.

Well, with an exception.

I have iCal connected between phone and laptop and also to my Google mail. The default import seemed to set both the Google events and events received by email as ICS attachments to have a 10 minute notification. Although I didn’t necessarily always want this, it was not a big problem. Except for all-day events. These are recorded specially on both platforms and iCal certainly knew they were day events. An example might be that a conference was on.

We now come to what the telecoms industry calls a ‘feature interaction‘ problem.

Although iCal knew it was an ‘all-day’ event, for notification purposes it treated the event as if it was a timed event from midnight to midnight. So at 11:50pm, the night before the start of an event, a notification (with associated beep!) would sound on the phone. I rarely go to bed before midnight, so this was not usually a big problem, except when travelling abroad. In Italy this is at 12:50am, in Greece 1:50am.

When I first noticed the problem, I was back to turning off the phone and using an alarm clock.

I tried to simply turn off the notifications, but here I hit another feature interaction problem …. except here the ‘feature’ that caused it was equally incomprehensible.

When an event comes in via email, iCal regards it as in some way ‘not your own’ and (on the laptop version) you cannot edit it, only delete it. The event is not live linked, it is merely a copy, so I can understand in some way marking it as edited, but why prevent you from editing it? For example, if I have had an email notification of a meeting and then a call to say the meeting has moved, I can only delete the original (with its associated notes, distribution list, etc.), and create a new one.

Some years ago a colleague sent an invite to a regular Thursday meeting. When the meetings stopped, he sent a cancellation. iCal associated the two, and so the meeting stayed in my diary, but ‘crossed out’. Years later my diary still had this regular meeting, but I was worried about deleting it (the only action available), for fear of loosing the old meetings that had actually happened and might have important information attached.

Enough time has passed and I just tried. Sure enough it did delete all copies of the meeting past and future, with no dialogue to ask or confirm. Furthermore, (a) the action was not undoable and (b) a few moments later, I got the following error message.

Oh dear!

So far, so bad, but, on the iPhone, iCal not only does not allow you to edit these ‘foreign’ events, but you cannot even delete them. So, even when I can see that an event will wake me in the middle of the night I cannot get rid of it except from my laptop.

While I still cannot delete these events from the phone, at some stage I have managed to find the right setting so that the notifications do not come in the early morning, so now the iPhone is usable at night.

So let’s summarise design lessons from this:

do treat all notifications with care, are they necessary, when are they likely to be useful
if you deliver an ephemeral sound notification, do make sure there is some visible indicator of what it was about
whether and when you produce notifications, or any behaviour, they should be sensitive to time of day
try to be aware of feature interactions – but I know this is hard
do not create Fascist systems (Apple that includes you) – it is my device and my data. Surely retain some marker or indication that I have edited things that originated elsewhere, but if it is on my machine I decide what can and cannot be edited or deleted.

That’s all for now; I need to catch up on some sleep …

Edinburgh days

Posted on October 12, 2013 by alan

I’ve just spent most of the last week in Edinburgh. This was mainly for a one day update meeting for the projects in the Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture in Scotland, who funded the An Iodhlann mobile app Frasan. However, such are the logistics of Island life that I spent four days on the road, but, in the process, saw friends and family and came back with a three-foot long box.

The previous meeting had been between the March Tiree Tech Wave and Miriam’s wedding, so I ended up taking a plane on the day, taxi across from Glasgow to Edinburgh¹ and arriving for the last two hours of the afternoon. This time I was a little more leisurely! I didn’t want to do another guerrilla attendance, but weather was looking uncertain for Wednesday, and so I ended up flying over on Tuesday and back on Friday, all booked on Monday as I’d missed the critical emails earlier.

However, I did make the most of the journey.

On Tuesday I stopped off at Haymarket and went to Maplin for an LED sign. I’d tried to get a reconditioned unit by mail order, but it had got lost in the post, by which time they had run out of online stocks, but did have them in store. The sign is for experimenting with digital signage at Tiree Tech Wave. We have pico projectors for hi-res stuff, but this means we can also play with simpler, daytime-visible signage.

I also got a chance to meet with Owen and Natasha, my nephew and … whatever you call the person married to a nephew … niece-in-law? They both work for Scottish Government, and kept very busy not least with the additional load in the run-up to the independence referendum next year. Chatting to them I realise that the Scottish Government already does so much, and whatever the results of the referendum certainly the role of Scottish and Welsh Governments will grow in coming years.

After the debacle of the electoral reform referendum, which was fought on a “do you really want more Clegg?” basis, I am just hoping that the debate over Scottish independence is more reasoned, but, sadly, so far disinformation and prevarication are more common than plain speaking. I am appalled at the constant stream of news headlines, that warn of some economic post-independence catastrophe, only to find, buried on the past lines “according to …” some anti-independence spokesperson or think-tank.

My recent favourite was the Times article prophesying the collapse of company pension funds. The full story hinged around the use of Scottish Limited Partnerships, SLPs, a special legal instrument, and would only cause problems for south-of-the-border companies and then only if a post-independence Westminster, in a fit of pique, chose to damage its own industry.

On Wednesday I had dinner with Sandra Cairncross and Tom McEwan and later Tom and I met David Benyon at the World’s End. So an evening of discussing higher education, the transformation of research into the digital economy and the state of the Scottish brewing and distilling industry (the last using empirical methods).

The Nesta meeting was a joy as always. Good to meet old faces from Nesta, the other arts and culture projects and CReATes the research team. It was especially good to meet Lorna Edwards who has taken over from Gillian Easson as Programme Manager for Nesta in Scotland (three weeks into the job and learning fast!) and also to meet Louisa from CReATes who is going to be at the next Tiree Tech Wave. It was a wonderfully open environment discussing problems as well as successes as the ultimate aim of Nesta is the learning of how collaborations work between arts/culture and technology partners.

And finally, defining images of Edinburgh, a city that seems hell bent on becoming a pastiche of itself, and yet failing utterly to bury the grey-sooted round-towered tenements and volcanic remains that rise above the river-like flow of clan-less tartan and plastic claymores.

A shop window: “sporrans half price”.

A bagpipe busker playing “The Wheels on the Bus”.

A grimy-windowed, grim-painted workshop where bagpipes are still fashioned by skill, sweat and oily wood shavings.

A living city where tomorrow’s government, age-old traditions and tourist frippery coexist.

Why are there no direct shuttles between Scotland’s principle airports and cities? You have to take bus then train, and so I’ve often had to take taxis when pressed for time. It is even hard getting from Prestwick Airport to Glasgow Airport. Two circular shuttle routes could take in Glasgow, Prestwick and Edinburgh airports, turning them into a single transit hub, like the way Gatwick and Heathrow are treated as one for many purposes. [back]

Unnatural Winter

Posted on September 29, 2013 by alan

Through cloud haze
A snow field
Green and mud-red become
A grey-white sheep-fleece palette of crop and earth
Rectilinear pieces puzzle-fit between ice-flow river-paths.

Below a town.

Bare, ringed toes tread wind-ground rock-ice dust
Lime green and dull gold sari
Sways sharp colour
In monochrome streets.

A charcoal cow etched immobile in the road
Tent-hung fatless flesh no insulation
Hoar-frost fingers clutch
Once blood-traced retina
Behind chill impassive eyes.

(written on a flight from Bangelore to Delhi, 29th Sept 2013)

India and APCHI

Posted on September 28, 2013 by alan

I am sitting in the Crowne Plaza hotel in Bangelore looking down over the city spreading seemingly endlessly as far as I can see. Here, out in the suburbs and in the heart of Electronics City, the Hi-Tech enclave, the view is a mix of green trees, concrete offices and small apartment blocks in a pastel palette of lime greens, mauve tinted blues and burnt umber. There is an absence of yellow and red apart from the girder work of a partly constructed building and airline-warning red and white mobile antennae tower; maybe these are inauspicious colours. A major highway and the raised highway cut across the view and the airport is presumably far out of site in the afternoon heat haze, it was a near two hour ride away on Wednesday when I arrived in the midst of rush hour, but hoping it is a shorter journey tomorrow morning when I need to catch 6am flight.

I’ve had a wonderful time here seeing many old faces from previous visits to India a few years ago, and also meeting new people. It was especially great to see Fariza as I hadn’t realised she was going to be here from Malaysia. It was also wonderful seeing Dhaval and spending time with his family after the end of the conference yesterday, and today reading some of his recent work at ABB on bug reproduction in software maintenance.

Seeing Dhaval’s work and talking to him about it reminded me of the debugging lectures I did some years ago as part of a first year software engineering module. For many years I have been meaning to extend these to make a small book on debugging. It is one of those areas, like creativity, where people often feel you either have it or not, or at bets can pick up the skills one time. However, I feel there is a lot you can explicitly teach about each.

Yesterday was my closing keynote at APCHI 2013. I’ve put the slides and abstract online and I am working on full notes of the talk. It felt odd at times talking about some the the issues of rural connectivity and poverty raise by my walk around Wales given the far greater extremes here in India. However, if anything, this makes the messages for both public policy and design more important.

As I talked both in the keynote and one-to-one with people during the conference, I was constantly returning to some of the ways that in the UK we seem to be throwing away many of the positive advances of the 20th century: the resurgence of rickets and scurvy amongst poor children, the planned privatisation of the Royal Mail, one of the key enablers of the 19th century commercial revolution, and most sad of all the depraved demonisation of the poor that is rife in politics and the media.

There were many interesting papers and posters. Two demos particularly caught my eye as they represented different aspects of the link between physical and digital worlds, issues that Steve, Devina, Jo and I have been exploring in TouchIT and the Physicality workshop series. One was a system that augments paper textbooks with electronic resources using a combination of computer vision (to recognise pages in the book) and semantic extraction (for example getting historical timelines from Wikipedia). The other was a physical ‘drop box’, where you put papers into a slot and then they were copied as images into your DropBox account. It made me think of the major scan and bin exercise I did a few years ago drastically reducing my piles of old papers.

However, the high spot of the conference for me was Ravi Poovaiah‘s keynote “Designing for the next billion” on Thursday about design for the ‘middle of the pyramid’, those who are out of abject poverty and therefore have access to basic IT and so the design community can do most about. This does not reduce the needs of those at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’, for whom basic education and healthcare are the most immediate needs.

In the UK not only are the extremes less, few except the homeless would qualify as ‘bottom of the pyramid’, but also they tend to be more segregated. Here a modern glass fronted international retail chain can sit next to a semi-derilict (to western eyes) motorbike repair shop, with used tyres piled on the pavement. This said, to my mind, with my aesthetic of decay that is maybe the privilege of those who do not have to live it, the latter is far more engaging. One of India’s challenges is whether it can move through its economic explosion without the attendant dissolution of local identity, culture and family that is the legacy of the industrial revolution in the UK.

HCI 2013

Posted on September 15, 2013 by alan

Yesterday I got back from HCI 2013, the British Human–Computer Interaction conference in Brunel: lovely people, stimulating papers, and ceilidh dancing to boot.

My first ever paper in computing¹ “Abstract models of interactive systems” was in the first British HCI conference, although I didn’t go to the conference and it was presented by my co-author, Colin Runciman. Since then I have published and presented many of my favourite papers at HCI, including much of my early work on time in the user interface². So the conference has many memories for me.

For various reasons I’d not attended much over a number of years. I don’t really know why, some years I’ve been external examining, some years not had money in the right pot at the right time, sometimes simply travelled too much in the year already. Happily for the last three years I have managed it, and, whenever I go, I come away feeling positive, encouraged, wanting to spend longer lingering.

I can’t help comparing this with CHI, which, in HCI, is the place to be. It similarly has many lovely people, albeit lost in a crowd of 2-3000, including many I would be unlikely to see any other time, and there is some wonderful stuff at CHI, I recall this year a demo by Japanese students wiring up forks to give tiny electrical stimuli as you eat that mimics the effects of saltiness and so helps you reduce salt intake in food, but, despite all this, I still always end up, at some stage of CHI, sitting in my room, feeling depressed, and thinking “I want to be home”.

I have a short attention span and the child’s love of novelty, and so the breadth of British HCI contributions is always so enjoyable … I actually go into paper sessions, and I am stimulated by them. CHI’s relative narrowness (in the past) of the concept of HCI as a field was one of the reasons I never published there in my early years; at that stage I was working mostly in formal methods in HCI and this simply fell outside the CHI imagination. To be fair this has changed dramatically, and now CHI has a very broad remit, I think of some of Bill Gaver’s papers over the years on the artistic/design side of HCI, hardly conventional; however, I still cannot imagine David England’s paper on Category Theory at this year’s HCI being accepted even in Alt-CHI.

It is always a little insidious to name high spots, but David’s paper was certainly one, although I am probably a little biased here as I am one of the few people to have actually used Category Theory in HCI³. I should also mention Janet Read’s description of stroppy teenagers and Juha Leino who made a study of the pedagogical use of five star vs binary recommendation systems fascinating.

I was at HCI primarily with a Talis hat on and so both the HCI education session at the conference (including Leino’s paper) and the HCI educator’s workshop, were particularly important. At HCI educators I was particularly struck by Helen Sharp’s contribution telling us about the cultural differences between both students and educators on the same OU course taught in Botswana and UK. Also I lead a short discussion on MOOCs partly reporting on my own experiences in delivering HCIcourse.com and partly using that as a means to stimulate discussion of the role of MOOCs vis-a-vis (so to speak) conventional face-to-face teaching.

If you are interested in teaching using materials from HCIcourse.com, or would like to share our own learning materials, do get in touch. If you want to study the course yourself it is still available at HCIcourse.com and will soon relaunch at interaction-design.org.

Next year’s HCI conference will be in Southport, hosted by the ChiCi group at UCLAN. Submit a paper, run a workshop, or simply come and join HCI at the seaside!

I had previously published in agricultural engineering research when I worked at the National Institute of Agricultural Engineering.[back]
Time papers at HCI: HCI’87 — “The myth of the infinitely fast machine“; HCI’92 — “Pace and interaction“; HCI’94 — “Que sera sera – The problem of the future perfect in open and cooperative systems“.[back]
I worked with Roberta Mancini and Stefano Levialdi in Rome in the late 1990s on undo systems, and Roberta used Category Theory in her thesis to prove uniqueness properties of certain classes of undo systems. If I recall right, the Category theory itself was only in the thesis, but the machinery leading into it was described in “The cube – extending systems for undo“.[back]

the economics of misery

Posted on August 28, 2013 by alan

It is agreed, by academics and politicians, if the poor are always to be with us, it had better be grinding poverty.

Last week I spotted an interestingly titled “A strong faith ‘can weaken the economy‘” in The Times (22/8/2013, p. 25). This was reporting on a recent academic article¹ in “Social Psychological and Personality Science” (it is ‘science’ so must be true.). The first sentence of The Times report reads:

“Too much religion can harm a society’s economy by undermining the drive for financial success, according to study.”

(N.B. see coda below for what the academic article actually says.)

I at first thought this must be some sort of study looking at different countries’ rates of growth vs religiosity or something like that, maybe a counter to the ‘protestant work ethic’. However, it was instead a study of happiness. basically religious people are happier in general, but most critically poor religious people were, in some cases, most happy of all.

Critically for the non-relgious, richer people are a lot happier than poorer people. Yep, surprise, surprise; despite all those worries about which new SUV to buy, or watching the uncertain future of their stock portfolio, rich people’s woes do not compare with wondering where you are going to find the next meal for your children.

From this The Times report’s conclusion follows, that religion is clearly bad for the economy, because poor people have less incentive to become richer. I guess this is neo-lberal equivalent of Marx’s “religion is the opium of the masses”. Well, something that Thatcher and Trotsky could have agreed on.

Strangely, given the rich are happy, surely it would be better if they were less happy and therefore more incentivised to be even richer and thus work harder to grow the economy. Maybe a better headline would be “Happy rich people ‘can weaken the economy'”? I wonder why the The Times didn’t report that.

On a similar theme, in yesterday’s Times, on the front page, another episode in the long running feckless poor saga, with a headline “Benefits fuel workshy culture, says pensions czar” (27/8/2013, p.1), reporting on a statement from Lord Hutton, who was once part of the Blair government and now a cross-party peer and the coalition’s pension advisor.

Yes, it is official, poverty is not enough, the only route to economic regeneration and growth is grinding poverty and misery to boot.

Coda — what the academic article actually says

I found a copy of the full article on Southampton’s eprints server. The actual words in the conclusion, from which The Times makes its summary are:

“Consequently, as long as religiosity fosters anti-wealth norms, it may undermine financial strivings and success both at the individual- and culture-level. This may be a mixed blessing: religiosity may curb ever-needed economic growth but may also thwart individuals and cultures from making risky financial decisions.”

Ignoring the implicit assumption that growth is ‘ever-needed’, it is interesting that The Times headline did not read “A strong faith could have prevented financial crisis“.

Furthermore, the phrase in quotes in the headline ‘can weaken the economy‘ does not actually occur anywhere in the pre-print of the paper.

Two other things were interesting to note.

First, despite the paper’s title and abstract that mentions “religiously diverse cultures“, in fact the study is of 11 European countries (not including the UK)), only one of which (Turkey) is not predominantly Christian. Interestingly Turkey is one of the countries (with Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands) that showed the opposite trend to the norm. Given this, maybe The Times headline should have been “Muslim faith can ‘strengthen the economy’“.

Second, it was interesting to note the superficial knowledge of actual religious teaching evidenced in the article. Following the general European-Christian theme, all the quotes in the paper are Judeo-Christian, and quite rightly the paper numerous cites texts that comfort the poor and warn of the danger of riches (e.g. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God”, Mark 10:25).

While this Biblical ‘Bias to the Poor’ (as the late David Shepherd put it), is accurate, the article also cites Moses’ destruction of the Golden Calf in Exodus, which the paper deems to be a parable about gold. Of course, the point of the story is not about the fact that it is gold but that they are worshiping an idol not the true God, this would have been a problem were it made of gold, clay or Brighton Rock. Indeed later, the Ark of the Covenant, where the tablets of the law brought down by Moses are stored, incorporates gold and other precious materials (Exodus 25).

Interestingly, given The Times doctored a quote from the article, the article doctors a quote from God, inserting the word ‘golden’ into his command to Moses to go down from the mountain (Exodus 32:7-10). To be fair, being good academics, the word ‘golden’ is in square brackets, academic speak for “I know it doesn’t really says this, but I’m inventing words to make my point anyway, and hoping you read it without noticing”.

You see, we academics are honest about our deceit. … now I’m sure there is something in the Ten Commandments about that …

J. E. Gebauer, A. D. Nehrlich, C. Sedikides and W. Neberich. The Psychological Benefits of Income are Contingent on Individual-Level and Culture-Level Religiosity. Social Psychological and Personality Science. September 2013, vol. 4 no. 5, pp.569-578.(published online before print December 20, 2012), doi:10.1177/1948550612469819. abstract at SagePub, full text at Southampton eprints.[back]