Spirited Thought

ICANN is loosening the rules around domain suffix at the detriment of having any meaning and comprehension embodied in a hostname. URLs need more thought, not freedom. Even ICANN’s CEO brings the move down to vanity plate level contribution. Apparently, the Internet was running out of space.

The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the Net,” said Dr Twomey. “It’s a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of the Internet.

We have numerous examples of shooting ourselves.

Nine kids under 19 years of age will be killed with a gun today. 30% will have intentionally taken their own life. Even if we want to dispute the fact, suicide by handgun exists and people are not managing their relationship with firearms well. Consider the recent Supreme Court ruling objecting to a Washington D.C. ban on hand guns. Sustaining laws like this one does not actually make things safer, it just makes them illegal. We have speed limits and many of us do not follow those. Yet cars kill just fine at a rate of five to six thousand teenagers per year.

Some schools in some states attempt to teach safe sex. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reports that children have sex at around age 17. Include other forms of sex and those polled report almost 50% of males having received oral sex and 39% gave. So kids are sexually active and there is a movement to focus on not having sex, not how to do it safely or how to be smart about it. An NPR story reported…

…Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government finds that only 7 percent of Americans say sex education should not be taught in schools.

If we are in such agreement, we should start measuring how many of our children’s decisions around sex are well informed. Remove the issue of if their decision is something we personally agree with and simply ask if they felt they were informed.

No one disputes, though, that many were delighted to discover they were pregnant. “Sweet!” one of them shouted in the school nurse’s office. The school superintendent admitted: “They were not trying very hard not to get pregnant.”

From Financial Times, The ideology of teen pregnancy (Gloucester High School Pregnancy Pact) by Christopher Caldwell

Prescription drugs seem to be all the rage. Some might naively interpret that the war on drugs must be almost over if kids are turning to medicine cabinets. Or we could simply be inspired by Dr. Twomey and say that we have a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of drug market.

Structured naming lets us work and communicate meaning. Our world works in abstractions. We cannot possibly consider the totality of our own lives, the community, the nation or the world without coming to a screeching halt. Abstractions allow us to consider just enough of reality to work with it. Loosely regulated naming is not a good thing. One lesson we can apply from corporate life is that things done by committee often fail or are fraught with issues. It lacks leadership and puts the idiocracy into the lead.

A recent article in the Atlantic, Is Google Making us Stoopid? by Nicholas Carr, talks about our increasing reliance on the intelligent Internet and our own asymptotic tendency away from our rich, educated and thoughtful past. One can only hope that Internet naming is just a fluke, that this is not just another data point of stupidity.

Clippinger turns to Robin Dunbar and colleagues to show that there is a correlation of neocortex development (thinking and problem solving) and membership size in social groups.

…the evolutionary success of Homo sapiens can in large measure be attributed to its ability to manage complex social relationships.

Page 57 from A Crowd of One

Clippinger pulls a great passage from Dunbar that describes the notion that what challenges an individual animal is tracking the societal groups in which it partakes. Dunbar then offers another view that maybe it is not the quantity, but the quality of the relationships. The following page explores the famous statistic that people successfully organize informally at groups of 150-200.

This book continues to have botox on the brain moments with the occasional brilliant series of pages. It is as if Clippinger started with a fantastic 80-page paper that inflated to fill a book. Regardless, the gems make you want to commit concept to memory.

One behavior that continues is the incessant friending activity on social sites, regardless of the site’s purpose. Sites even suggest other people you might know and connect. As interconnections grow, the network inherently diminishes in quality. The notion of identifying a connection with another person, community or organization is a simple enough activity. Maybe adding the need to classify those connections beyond a binary state was an inhibitor to adoption. Was this something FaceBook noticed, or was it simply that the creators never had higher intentions?

Moving beyond high-level classification, the next useful articulation is quality – how connected are we? There is plenty of work and math that can analyze these issues, however it all presumes having access to the data. Moreover, are my behaviors in online social spaces reflective of connected I am to my network? The data analysis is inherently reliant on the accuracy and relevance of the data. Might I love someone dearly that I hardly interact with online? Again, this level of analysis introduces yet another step to organizing our view of the societal graph and might be prohibitive to adoption.

On a related but separate note, some interesting user experience work is being done in the MIT Media Lab around visualizing and managing the adhoc face-to-face social network. Check out the project called Snap N’ Share by Nadav Aharony, Andrew Lippman and David Reed.

This brings us back to the point that humans are able to execute each of these tasks – identification, classification and qualification – without trouble. Short of disease, it is safe to assume that forgotten people accurately reflects their status on our societal radar. The hope of the articulated social graph being leveraged by technology is that maybe we will finally see what we are missing.

What is beautiful about the notion that humans have been so successful because of our ability to manage relationships is that it is startlingly not about being an individual. At an individual level, it is the quality of the relationships we create, but it is the group that benefits. What would we even do with an optimized view of society and is that discussion really absent from society?

The success of social spaces rests in their ability to create and support meaningful relationships. The proliferation of week ties in the social graph is noise in what could be a high fidelity signal. In the end, meaning is embodied in the people and the technology is just an enabler. What might these spaces be like if the only goal was to support meaningful connections?

For my birthday, I received a new book that I had been eyeing, Happiness by Richard Layard. I am about a quarter through it and while I am not so hip to his writing style, I am enchanted by the information presented. You see, Layard is actually an economist that worked with a variety of others – psychologists, philosophers, sociologists etc. Just as you get through the initial premise you begin to think, “yeah, but how about this other aspect, you cannot discount that?!” and then he answers you before the chapter is over. You feel smart until you realize that Layard has done his home work and you, well I, get giddy being the student.

On the way into New York City, on an early train, I started scribbling some thoughts on the back of an old business card. They apply to more than just happiness and obviously resonate with my current outlook.

It is not how good it is, it is how good people think it is.

This came out of a section where Layard presents how over time people have become wealthier while happiness has stayed constant. He presents a series of examples where people show that wealth relative to others is more important than absolute increase in wealth – it is all about where people perceive they are in relation to others. Given the opportunity to have more relative to others, people elect that over an increase in wealth and no upward mobility.

It is not how good it is, it is how good people think it is.

This seems to be all that matters and all that is important in so many circumstances – politics, relationships and commercials to name a few. Everything is impression management and very often, the altruistic among us (that includes me) feel like there should be some kernel of purity worth worshiping beyond the manufactured experience. Relating this to the field of user experience design, all that matters is what users think.

What people experience is not our reality it is theirs. We do not get to decide, which really refocuses the importance of other related elements. Very often technology gets a lot of focus when, for the most part, a user rarely interacts with it – even more so when on the web. What server, middleware or backend is employed, the user has no idea or cares. As technologists, we use technology as a way of expressing ourselves, but fail when all we see is a technical problem. In the end, all that matters is what people think, in which case, as technologists we need to be far more sensitive to how we create delightful experiences. Extend that to any relationship.

Every day, we have the opportunity to create life-long memories, even more so if we pay attention to how people experience us. Who doesn’t want to be that impactful?

Neuropsychology could have easily been my first profession. My fascination for the brain and appreciation for how little and much we know of it has always captivated my logical and imaginative thought.

I just finished the book, Wider Than The Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness, where Gerald Edelman, M.D., Ph. D. covers an impressive amount of information refuting that consciousness is solely metaphysical. While anyone can argue there is mystery to the brain, Edelman’s work is persuasive – there are neurological constructs which give rise to consciousness.

Quale (IPA [ ˈkwɑːle]) is the way something feels, an experienced conscious moment. The definition’s subtly fails to describe the complex recipe that comprises a feeling –

sensory input, consequences of motor activity, imagery, emotions, fleeting memories, bodily sensations and a peripheral fringe. (p. 61)

Our experience, being conscious of being conscious naturally contains all of these things all of the time. It would be trivializing to say it is like a movie where only audio and visual aspects are perceived. Qualia consider the past, the current and the possible future, all at the same moment, all the time, becoming part of the categorized catalog of discriminated conscious states influencing future qualia.

In order to fully understand the data set that is flowing throughout the brain, we would actually need to be that body, that brain. The information outside of that context can only be imagined. An example used was, “what would it be like to be a bat?” illustrating the complexity – it would actually be easier to understand what it would be like to be another human, but is quite literally, impossible.

Recently on CBS Sunday Morning, Mo Rocca questioned if as we live longer and medical technology continues to deliver higher quality transplant and artificial replacement, will you still be you? Assuming that the replacement of an organ is successful, the brain would read the new organ as part of new quale. What happens to the qualia associated with the failed organ? Does the brain simply treat those discriminations as part of a phantom part of a quale – similar to the sensation some people experience when losing a limb, or, is some of the data lost forever? Does the new organ have the ability to read the data stream as part of the body and brain? Does the replacement organ, know something that the failing organ did not?

So, Mo, I think the answer is yes, probably, you will still be you, but a different you.

Josef Albers’ book, The Interaction of Color, was my first real look at color. Ever since I have been eyeing original silk-screens and playing with color. In a first exploration, I dusted off my Macromedia Director hat and threw together a simple visualization to explore color blending, mottling and motion.

The algorithm is pretty simple: given the surrounding boxes, average their colors to determine the current box’s color. On a 10 x 10 matrix, I introduce two pebbles to drop in the pond, one is under the user’s control and the other is related, moving opposite to first and controlled by the computer. Each square has determined a random color and clicking on a given box will reassign it another color. The order in which you calculate the average impacts the visualization – consider that each square is an object, completely self-sufficient. To provide a little more interest, I have forced the rendering to occur around the vertical mid-point.

Clicking on the image will launch the Shockwave version.

I once heard that eighty percent of what we think of today, we thought of yesterday. I enjoy optimizing my world, so increasing the percentage of new thought seems a worthy goal.

Wikipedia lists the United States having a 99.9% literacy rate, citing the CIA World Fact Book. Check the footnote reading that 44 million people (one in seven) can read but not to level of understanding a job application, a food label or utility bill. Consider the fact that when I consider literacy, I do not include this group of 44 million.

Among the educated workforce – college level and above – I routinely witness great disparities in literacy. Being able to read and write are the single most important capabilities of an educated mind and those who write well often read.

Reading is an activity where the brain is engaged. Active readers comprehend the content, exploring what it means. The content influences the formation of language and founds our ability to create more complex conceptual relationships. This complexity adds layers of depth to our thinking and appreciation of the world around us.

Add to the list of what it means to be literate the appreciation of art and music and we get closer to what real literacy is about. There is a texture that only can be felt by wide exposure to new ideas through the mediums of text, images and sound. More importantly is for us to share the pieces of our overwhelming vast and growing collection of media that we believe are of meaningful quality.

The more we read the more we change and the less yesterday’s thinking is today’s.

This past Friday afternoon, I was having an interesting conversation with a friend from work. We were talking about spas and more particularly massages – the general need and healing from being touched by other humans.

This morning on CNN a story ran on a child who never felt pain. I made a comment that it reminded me of the stories one might find by Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and more specifically the one about the woman who could not feel her own body.

CIPA (congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis) is an inherited degenerative disorder affecting the autonomic nervous system – a big deal, as this is where the heart comes in and the nervous system lives. Two key symptoms surface as the lack of feeling pain and the lack of perspiration. In CNN’s story about Roberto, they mention he can not be held, because he sucks the heat out of you. My comment was not speaking to the scientific characteristics; instead it was one of the social impacts of not feeling.

What kind of mental model for pain would a person who can not feel it, have? What kind of mental model for world pain (not individual human suffering) would they have? If they do not have the concrete knowledge of pain, how would they work with the abstract concept when applied to thoughts, imagination, inanimate objects or abstract concepts like a country?

Reach back into a psychology class and thinking about Skinner and conditioning. Try and recall the experiment where the animal, I think it was a rodent, was provided food when it hit a lever – reward the rat and the rat will continue. Map this back to people with CIPA. In the absence of sensory stimuli and limited interactions with others (not being able to be held, presumably cuddled), what is created to match the Skinner-stimuli we all use to operate in the world? Roberto might be aware of a lava stone massage one might get at a spa, but not think much of it. For those who see touch as healing and the need for it, what does it mean for those with CIPA?

The Big Moo is a book that I found refreshing, both in format and in content. It had many authors, each with their own story and that was part of what made it compelling. After the read I started looking up the authors of interest and landed on Amit Gupta’s blog. Amit has been involved with several ventures, one of them called ChangeThis.com.

ChangeThis starts with the premise, that in a world of brief MTV moments, where the attention span of almost every modern human would qualify for Ritalin, there are actually people who have a voice, an argument, one that is well thought out and crafted to be declared a manifesto. Manifestos worthy of reading will propagate organically through the digital waves into the hands of people that get turned on by thinking and possibly changing their point of view. Published in Adobe Acrobat format means virtually universal accessibility. The design, common across all manifestos, is easy to read on digital screens. Each inherits the same navigation and focus on the content. The best part is that ChangeThis is not about making a buck, something that is rare in our jazzed Web 2.0 sphere.

While my blogging is not habitual, this certainly was a delayed post. It came inspired by a most recent The Rewritten Rules of Management by Tom Ehrenfeld. Funny enough, Ehrenfeld rated Moo a “B,” which is actually quite fair– it probably depends on how any one of the 33 stories impacts the reader. The person that gained irreversible insight probably gave it an “A+.” The manifesto is about Bill Swanson’s recent plagiarism. Which reminded me of an article in the Communications of the ACM, “Plagiarism on the Rise” by Ronald Boisvert and Mary Jane Irwin. It discusses the general reasons for the increase in plagiarism and introduces the new ACM Plagiarism Policy. One would think it goes without saying that taking another persons work and calling it your own is problematic. In fact, I thought this type of behavior was already prohibited in the ACM Code of Ethics under the section of honesty. Conceiving and nurturing an original idea is hard work and for some impossible.

A professor once told me, there are no new ideas, and for the ones that are genuine there is someone on the other side of the world that thought of the same thing at the same second and its all a race to see who is capable of communicating it first. I have seen so many people hand me documents that were from a website verbatim, that I think it might actually be part of a new generation of thought – why actually try to think when others have thought for you… just remember to give credit to the people who took the time to think. And, by the way, Ehrenfeld’s manifesto is about a “B.” It could have been shorter, tighter and delivered with more consequence.

My introduction to Tufte was a gift back in 1999-2000 as we finished up the first version of IBM’s Next Generation Internet site. Mike Nelson, currently the Director of Internet Technology and Strategy, sent the team The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. It was not until recently that I ordered two more Tufte works, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint and Envisioning Information. James inspired me to revisit these views on effective use of the high-bandwidth visual channel.

I read all the reviews on Amazon.com on The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint before succumbing to the “add to cart” button. I figured for $7, if I learn one thing from the short essay, that it would be worth the purchase of what ended up something anyone who is already aware of the overused boiled down messages, bumper stickers for stupid people and irreverent use of cheap clipart trash knows. The value is in the thorough academic review and argument of what you might understand intuitively. It is either a validation of your current perspective or an enlightening read, because you are one of the world’s PowerPoint sinners.

Creating presentations is a necessary evil. I say evil because if we had enough time and a more literate workforce, we would have conversations and share papers. In fact, anyone who has given any number of presentations will tell you that it is all about the interaction in the room or on the call – otherwise it is just a one-way experience with limited value and increasing boredom. Yet, businesses and authors offer education on how to better deliver messages through presentation packages, regardless of their impact to ideas. There in lies the key to presenting – no amount of visual distraction or simplicity makes up for the lack of quality thinking. Fluff sounds like fluff even if it is animated.

One of my first internships was with VSI Communications Group in South Norwalk, CT an interactive production house (now called Mentor). These guys made their bread and butter on impactful communication presentations that companies were not capable of producing, but were willing to pay for. Every presentation had an art director, artists, content authors, project managers and developers looking to assemble and deliver a final self-running, cross-platform product in Macromedia Director. What made them successful was their ability to mix art, experience design and marketing to deliver a total package. If a handout was needed or a 3D animated exploratory walk through was required, it was all part of what the client was paying for.

I might be particularly sensitive to effective communication through some of my design background or general business knowledge. I have often thought of writing a book on the effective display of software architecture. An area that is often seen as a complicated series of boxes, arrows and notation that no one but the technical folks need to understand. If you have had the pleasure of being shown these types of diagrams, it usually takes at least one person or an additional thousand words of text to understand what is being depicted. I suggest this is an indicator that, regardless of standards we might adopt to represent architecture and software design, we need more focus on making these diagrams effective beyond our narrow target audience. If we can communicate our intentions to those who do not speak our language, then surely we will all understand what we are trying to do even better. There is nothing wrong with domain specific notation, but our impact is limited by our ability to translate it to those who do not understand us. If it takes special acumen to appreciate my message then I am almost literally talking to myself, something I would like to think is a rarity – after all I am not interested in thinking alone.

I just came across an article by John Biggs on the new Creative Zen Vision:M in the Circuits section of the New York Times. Creative’s new personal media player is positioned to compete with the Apple iPod, and it will undoubtedly fail.

Very often, businesses and people identify the best practices of the current time and employ them to better their position. In many occasions this is a prudent course of action. In Creative’s case it ensures that the Zen Vision:M will never be remarkable. Creative’s new offering looks like a copy cat with its rounded corners, large display and minimal controls. It is priced in the same range as an iPod. It plays various bits of media – more variety than an iPod. It offers a touch sensitive scroll bar as its primary navigation interface. Creative’s brightest minds can only hope that consumers are looking for an iPod alternative – maybe they can take some of Apple’s potential customer base.

As the new owner of a black video iPod, I might be biased, but I doubt it. I just finished up Donald Norman’s Emotional Design. Apple is all about their emotional brand and their emotional designs. A purchase with Apple grants access to the identity and mystique of what Apple and, in this case, the iPod have become to the modern world. What do white ear buds mean to you? What do you see when someone draws a rectangle with a circle in the lower half? Those who are not members wish they were or, at the very least, are curious as to what it might be like. For all we know, the Zen Vision:M and the iPod are manufactured by the same company and in the same factory in China, but no matter what Creative does, the emotional component of the personal music player remains with Apple.