"... you look smug. You don't seem to be working hard enough."
Probably not the first time PG has contemplated the reasons for this particular type of hate, since he parlayed a halfway-decent idea at the right time into a Massive Pulpit for Pontificating on Every Goddamn Thing in the Universe.
Blaming the victim in this case is perfectly legitimate. Most long cons like this involve an appeal to the element of criminality on the part of the victim. Why would this woman think that she is entitled to pull millions of dollars worth of free money out of Africa?
The basic Nigerian scam depicts a corrupt official stealing money who 'needs your help'. To fall for it isn't just stupid, it's venal.
No, poor people and teenagers who misuse language verbally or online are more likely to have their misuses faithfully transcribed, while higher-status people will often have them cleaned up. I made no statement about the relative frequency of these misuses.
Many grammar errors in English are a sign of over-regularization of the language. There's nothing inherently 'sloppy' about the thought processes behind a double negative, misuses like 'eated', or someone deciding that they've already conveyed how many of an object there were with the number. Sure, they're all wrong, but it's a matter of education, not an expression of a wonderfully logical mind behind the scenes.... also enjoying the use of the word 'verbatum' (sic) in a response that's all about how people with bad grammar should be shown up as 'sloppy thinkers'.
I'm reminded of this quote from the glory days of cmu.cs.opinion:
``Often when I hear someone flaming about English usage peeves, I get the definite feeling that this someone is massaging his balls and stroking his big, hard penis all the while thinking: `Hah, hah, that stupid a**hole could be as big as me if he'd just use the f***ing English language correctly.'''
If the person is a high-status, middle-aged white person, edit out all "umms", "ahhs", spelling mistakes, restatements, etc.
If the person is under 30, leave in all 'likes', 'ya knows', etc. If they are of appropriate class or race, feel free to transcribe all '-ing' endings as '-in', too.
So just follow this practice. Be sure to clean up high-status people if they are drivelling on, while doing verbatim quotes from teenagers, poor people, etc.
Banks has shown us the bottom of his bag of tricks
on
Matter
·
· Score: 1
Iain M. Banks used to be one of my favorite authors, and I still really like the earlier SF (Consider Phlebas, Player of Games, Use of Weapons, Against a Dark Background). But there's been a terrible feeling of sameness and lack of inspiration about the recent books. I can't say I really enjoy the parts which seem to be Banks trying to be Greg Bear (the tedious hard-SF of Excession and much of Matter spring to mind). But it's his obsession with recycling the same plot elements that really grates.
There's only so many times that the 'collision between the Culture and some ridiculously primitive society that it could wipe out in a millisecond' story needs to be told. OK, we get it, we get it, the Culture's interventions need to be super-subtle because that's the right way to bring along backwards civilizations (a rather ahistorical idea, but hey, it's his universe to play with). Take a ultra-cool Special Circumstances agent with some gnarly personal skeletons in the closet, give them a magical 'knife missile', and send them to some backwater to alternately fret about how they shouldn't intervene and eventually decide do to so (usually lots of lovingly described payback for equally lovingly described horrible torture and the like; this seems to be a rather ugly fixation of Banks that Richard Morgan appears to have decided to follow in full). We've read it before, really.
I am not sure whether this repeated motif is a clumsy metaphor for something about the real world (e.g. the collision between a possible near future super-enlightened 1st world - or at least, the West on one of its better days - and, well, everywhere else). If it is, it's pretty bloody silly. If it's not, it's a pretty strange motif to keep returning to.
Perhaps if we all chipped in, we could send Iain down to Africa and hire someone to kidnap a serial human rights abuser that he could beat up. It would be theraputic for him, and on his return, maybe he could write a new book. Maybe a Culture novel about the bloody Culture, for a change.
This is true as far as it goes, but not all the results of physics computations can simply be left on the GPU. This is OK for visual effects and improving animation, but if the outcome of a physics computation has an effect on the game world as a whole, then it needs to be sent to the CPU anyhow (as a rough example, suppose a defeated enemy drops his sword, which bounces down a cliff - this is more than just eye candy).
'Jiggle physics' and particle systems, of course, can stay on-GPU.
Nothing brings out the people proclaiming themselves 'smart' like a story about education or child-raising. There's seems to be no way that anyone can have a conversation on this topic that doesn't just slide off into self-praise.
Thank God I went to a selective public high school that nutured our great modesty as well as our astounding intellects, so I'll never fall into that trap. It must have been the way that I was raised to be both patient, hard-working and experimental, as well as my excellent genetic endowments for intelligence, sensitivity, creativity and emotional intelligence.
Yeesh yourself, twerp. I know coming off superior on Slashdot is usually aided by a blissful ignorance of any prior understanding of an issue (and apparently there are a bunch of people with mod points who are impressed by this), but there's a substantial history of touchscreens being incredibly uncomfortable for long-term usage, from people who have been forced to 'learn to do it'. Small, repetitive motions in front of your face are far from 'blacksmithing, weaving, farming,...': and where people in historical industries have been required to perform repetitive, awkward motions, there are often debilitating and painful overuse injuries as a result. There are dozens (maybe hundreds) of ailments that have names following the template "{ Housemaids, Miners, Weavers,...}'s { Knee, Hand, Hip, Elbow,...}". One suspects that you've met very few real live older working-class people (or haven't listened to them very hard), and are instead using them as a stick to beat up other Slashdot nerds.
I hate to burst your bubble here, but plenty of people exist who can bang out a big block of code or a theorem and are also socially acute. There isn't a zero-sum game going on here between empathy on the one hand and ability to focus on difficult things on the other. There's no tradeoff between artistic ability and mathematical ability. Attractive people or athletes aren't necessarily dumb.
I'm sure the zero-sum idea is a pleasant consolation, but it's not true. If it's like AD&D, it's more like barebones first edition 3d6 character creation: some people really do happen to roll all 16-18's, and some people don't have their weaknesses balanced by much of anything.
Most of the totally curve-busting smart people that I have known (from top-tier research labs, grad schools, and from the very upper ranks of undergraduate populations at large universities) have also been quite socially adept or at least, no more than a bit shy and awkward. A number are also quite gifted artistically or athletically, too.
I read the pdf letter. I don't have the background, but it does sound a lot like the New Yorker may have a case to answer. The article did seem like a bit of a hatchet job, and the complaints from several parties that their quotes were taken out of context seem like there may be something to this.
Of course, Yau's going to get slammed on Slashdot, where people love hackneyed ideas like "evil, hierarchical, credit-stealing Chinese mathematician" and "eccentric genius solving difficult problem on their own and getting denied credit" and so on. Why check the facts?
Anyone who thinks that a 0.02% change is likely to be statistically significant has to be smoking crack. Of course, with enough users and a rigorous enough methodology, it's possible, but I doubt it.
I agree with you about the 15-minute mini-exam. Unfortunately, many questions don't fit well in this format - some of the better exams I've sat are assuming that you are spending 40 minutes per question. The principle still holds, of course.
As for the 'woman' comment... Unfortunately, many people did get into the comment, and many of them said asinine things. I do recall reading some research on differences in gender-based outcomes on 'high-stakes, single-shot exams' that weren't reflected in other performance indicators, and this seems to have been supported by my experience. This sort of high-stakes exam is a confidence test, and men (even the incompetent ones) often seem more confident than women.
And to the assholes on the thread, it wasn't because the women are all cheating in their other work. As it happens, nearly every cheat that I've ever caught in my teaching career is male, and much of the detection of this was by automatic software plagiarism detectors (so it's not just because I'm nicer to women). Well, aside from the guy that I saw handing in his written assignment into the top of the pile and his friends into the middle of the pile - nice job, dude.
Nor is it because the women are necessarily weaker at IT or anything else (which wasn't even mentioned in the study I saw - I think it was a general difference).
The sad thing about this is that most professors know that this is happening. And the solution, well, a lot of people aren't going to like it. There's a principled answer (do lots of delightfully unique, practical assignments that can't just be cribbed; include a lot of 'called onto the carpet' type assessment where the students must verbally justify their essay/code/proof/whatever).
Unfortunately, the 'I don't have time or funding for anything special' answer to the problem is to move massive amounts of assessment into in-class, high-pressure exams. So, if you're like me (thrive in these kind of exams, don't mind cram-studying, etc.) you'll love it. But there are many smart people out there - especially, it seems, women - who do comparatively worse under these kinds of high-stakes, high-pressure assessment than they do under comparatively more realistic settings.
As an aside: As someone keen on maintaining the integrity of undergraduate education, I think it would be a great idea to seed sites like Student of Fortune with plausible answers that would slide by some cheating twit, but would instantly be detected by a TA or professor. I bet you could slide some really amusing stuff past these guys...
Wonderful. This will be a real plus in seminars, as people can't turn on their damn laptops without making a stupid noise. Or on an airplane. Or any other situation (with the kid sleeping in the other side of the room, for example).
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Unbelievably dumb. A massive triumph of marketing people over reality. How can this can be presented as a 'I see both sides of this fascinating argument' in the article? The argument that lots of other systems do this too is irrelevant; currently, you don't have to do this in Windows - why start making this mistake now?
Another fatuous article assuming strong AI
on
A New Kind of OS
·
· Score: 1
This article, like so many other ones, assumes that AI will make some sort of miraculous progress within the very short term. Many of the features mentioned are fairly banal and not really OS functions at all (application customization) and many others would be wildly frustrating unless the OS really did solve major unsolved problems in AI (the email agent that just miraculously knows whether I'll find an e-mail important and can be interrupted right now).
A related problem is that few OS's and applications do a particularly good job of setting out their static functionality, much less building good menu structures on-the-fly in reponse to my behavior (the trick of grouping frequently-used operations is such low-hanging fruit, and already done so many places, that it's hard to imagine this as particularly impressive).
Given all the real problems with current OS's (general usability problems, backward compatibility, stability, bloat, taking advantage of increasingly complicated hardware - GPUs and multicore spring to mind) it's hard to imagine some sort of spray-on AI layer being the answer to all of our prayers.
Feh. Tufte writes directly about computer displays in an earlier book. It's not immediately clear to me why, given that we will have to have some sort of widget to display information, why some people think that aiming to follow Tufte-style design principles is so obviously doomed to failure.
For a start, a lot of his suggestions are essentially mechanical tweaks (e.g. tone down the noisy grids, avoid 1+1=3 effect - this would be simple to ensure programatically, etc.). Other suggestions suggest individual widgets (e.g. the scatterplot with range bars) or widget grouping (enforcing parallelism across different visual elements).
Your response is analogous to the argument that because you can't guarantee that people will draw good diagrams with pencils, there's no real difference between issuing them with pencils or crayons.
Alright, you have a good point there, but to some extent you're attacking a straw-man. I don't imagine that a software library can magically make good visuals for me. Also, I never said that we'd get together a bunch of programmers (and only programmers) and make the perfect, beautiful widget set - obviously, designers need to help with individual components (and the overall layout if the overall layout can be determined ahead of time - see ahead).
However, there are so many cases where there are existing cliches that could be improved. For example, Tufte has a brilliant redesign of a scatterplot that uses pretty much every bit of ink on the screen to convey useful data (for example, the X and Y axes become range bars that show the univariate distribution of data). This could be hacked once and for all into a TufteScatterplot widget. And so on.
One of the major problems with the 'hire a graphic artist' approach is that frequently, we're dealing with systems that will display unanticipated data. I'm working with a statistical problem at the moment (and building some generalized tools to deal with it) and I have no way of knowing ahead of time whether someone is going to work with a model with 60 factors of which 5 are significant or 10 factors of which 7 are significant. I don't know what sort of names the person will give the factors. I don't know whether the significant factors will be all pretty much the same size (e.g. 1.5%, 2.2%, -1.3%) or hugely different (200%, -50%, 10%). When presenting 'significance' in a system, I can't have the system automatically call the nearest design school to handcraft a nice display. Thus, a system that makes a programmatic attempt at trying to achieve ideals of good design is much better than a system that doesn't even bother.
Of course, anyone will be able to cobble together a rotten-looking, dishonest and confusing interface out of these kind of components. So what?
I think the standard Tufte line on this, is that if a 'few words' are all you're going to get up there, then why not just say the words and leave the screen blank?
As a side bonus, you'll get eye contact from your audience rather than the disconcerting experience of looking out at a sea of faces who are all looking slightly to one side, peering at:
- Standard Tufte line
* high-data essential
- Good to have eye contact... or some low-information drivel like that.
But on the whole I agree that PowerPoint isn't inherently evil if used as a way of doing a nice slide-show of reasonably detailed elements (graphs, pictures, movies). The only problem is that the resolution of projectors is still pretty wretched compared to printed graphs.
I imagine that many people will get on and post all sorts of breathless praise about Tufte. This is well deserved. His design sense is first-rate, but what's really impressive to me about him is his emphasis on intellectual honesty and detail.
What I really would like to see is a new widget set (with lots of data presentation support - obviously most of the widgets should be quantitative displays) and a style written in some already well-supported widget set (Qt, Swing,...) that lives up to Tufte's ideas about maximizing data ink and minimizing junk. While I really admire the effects that Tufte and some of his acolytes achieve, quite frequently it seems that they achieve these effects by painstaking work in drawing or desktop publishing packages. More than once, I wince at some bit of graphics or interface that I've designed, thinking, "Damn, that's an embarrassing bit of work for someone who has read Tufte, but I just don't have the time or skills to fix it..."
This makes it a lot harder for schlubs like me who don't really have skills in this area, and don't have time to develop them. Further, it makes it more or less impossible to achieve these sort of fine effects programmatically - I'd like to see interactive displays that are informed by his sort of design sense, not just nice presentations (using hand-outs, of course:-) ), papers and books.
If anyone is interested in this - or knows of systems that go any decent way in this direction - please post or e-mail me at:
geoff AT cs DOT usyd DOOOOT edu DoT au
(sorry about the stylized "dot" silliness, but something tells me that the traditional foo AT bar DOT com is probably already being mined by spammers - or will be soon).
> but the fact of the matter is extremist Muslims just want to live simple (e.g. repressed) > lifestyles like they have for thousands of years before without any pesky outside influence > mucking things up
Most of your post is pretty reasonable, but this is bogus. Extremist Muslims, like many American conservatives, hearken back to a 'golden age' that never existed. The past is always rewritten as a wonderful place where all the rules were properly followed, regardless of how complicated things actually were.
As for 'pesky outside influences mucking things up', it's hard to find a period in Muslim history that wasn't full of this sort of thing, even before the West decided to carve up the Arab world into a bunch of subject nations. Take, for example, the utter destruction of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongols (which was probably the largest atrocity performed 'at short range' in human history - that is, while many 20th century incidents are bigger, they were generally not carried out with clubs, swords and knives).
Meh. Like many people have pointed out, the 5% (or whatever) is different from user to user. Mail merging and label printing in Word aren't in my 5%, for example, while occasional use of the (admittedly feeble) data analysis in Excel is. The reverse might be true for the secretaries down the hall.
And, at any rate, there are already conventional applications - for years! - that cost a fraction of what Photoshop costs (and, in my experience, it's almost unavoidable to get a bunch of them for free if you buy a new computer/scanner/printer/camera once in a while). Strangely, Photoshop hasn't become a marginal application since the advent of all of these applications.
The first article ("What every computer scientist should know...") is completely a must-read. Mod the parent up. Read the article. It's the sort of thing that I wish every undergraduate CS major was forced to chow down on at some point in fourth year...
It's amazing that parent is modded 'interesting' - apparently muddying the waters with context-less quotes is interesting on Slashdot.
The point is not that Exxon or DCI or the heads / major shareholders of these comparies or some random right-winger thinks Al Gore is a irrelevant blowhard. Any of these people and companies are entitled to their beliefs. The point is that these people are _pretending_ to be one of the "little people" you refer to. They are thus concealing a massive conflict of interest - that is, these are people who stand to lose a lot of money if Al Gore's policy suggestions are implemented. Concealing a blatant conflict of interest is disingenuous (at best), and frankly, it's quite stupid to suggest otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
"... you look smug. You don't seem to be working hard enough."
Probably not the first time PG has contemplated the reasons for this particular type of hate, since he parlayed a halfway-decent idea at the right time into a Massive Pulpit for Pontificating on Every Goddamn Thing in the Universe.
Blaming the victim in this case is perfectly legitimate. Most long cons like this involve an appeal to the element of criminality on the part of the victim. Why would this woman think that she is entitled to pull millions of dollars worth of free money out of Africa?
The basic Nigerian scam depicts a corrupt official stealing money who 'needs your help'. To fall for it isn't just stupid, it's venal.
No, poor people and teenagers who misuse language verbally or online are more likely to have their misuses faithfully transcribed, while higher-status people will often have them cleaned up. I made no statement about the relative frequency of these misuses.
Many grammar errors in English are a sign of over-regularization of the language. There's nothing inherently 'sloppy' about the thought processes behind a double negative, misuses like 'eated', or someone deciding that they've already conveyed how many of an object there were with the number. Sure, they're all wrong, but it's a matter of education, not an expression of a wonderfully logical mind behind the scenes. ... also enjoying the use of the word 'verbatum' (sic) in a response that's all about how people with bad grammar should be shown up as 'sloppy thinkers'.
I'm reminded of this quote from the glory days of cmu.cs.opinion:
``Often when I hear someone flaming about English usage peeves, I get the definite feeling that this someone is massaging his balls and stroking his big, hard penis all the while thinking: `Hah, hah, that stupid a**hole could be as big as me if he'd just use the f***ing English language correctly.'''
Current practice for verbal quotes:
If the person is a high-status, middle-aged white person, edit out all "umms", "ahhs", spelling mistakes, restatements, etc.
If the person is under 30, leave in all 'likes', 'ya knows', etc. If they are of appropriate class or race, feel free to transcribe all '-ing' endings as '-in', too.
So just follow this practice. Be sure to clean up high-status people if they are drivelling on, while doing verbatim quotes from teenagers, poor people, etc.
Iain M. Banks used to be one of my favorite authors, and I still really like the earlier SF (Consider Phlebas, Player of Games, Use of Weapons, Against a Dark Background). But there's been a terrible feeling of sameness and lack of inspiration about the recent books. I can't say I really enjoy the parts which seem to be Banks trying to be Greg Bear (the tedious hard-SF of Excession and much of Matter spring to mind). But it's his obsession with recycling the same plot elements that really grates.
There's only so many times that the 'collision between the Culture and some ridiculously primitive society that it could wipe out in a millisecond' story needs to be told. OK, we get it, we get it, the Culture's interventions need to be super-subtle because that's the right way to bring along backwards civilizations (a rather ahistorical idea, but hey, it's his universe to play with).
Take a ultra-cool Special Circumstances agent with some gnarly personal skeletons in the closet, give them a magical 'knife missile', and send them to some backwater to alternately fret about how they shouldn't intervene and eventually decide do to so (usually lots of lovingly described payback for equally lovingly described horrible torture and the like; this seems to be a rather ugly fixation of Banks that Richard Morgan appears to have decided to follow in full). We've read it before, really.
I am not sure whether this repeated motif is a clumsy metaphor for something about the real world (e.g. the collision between a possible near future super-enlightened 1st world - or at least, the West on one of its better days - and, well, everywhere else). If it is, it's pretty bloody silly. If it's not, it's a pretty strange motif to keep returning to.
Perhaps if we all chipped in, we could send Iain down to Africa and hire someone to kidnap a serial human rights abuser that he could beat up. It would be theraputic for him, and on his return, maybe he could write a new book. Maybe a Culture novel about the bloody Culture, for a change.
This is true as far as it goes, but not all the results of physics computations can simply be left on the GPU. This is OK for visual effects and improving animation, but if the outcome of a physics computation has an effect on the game world as a whole, then it needs to be sent to the CPU anyhow (as a rough example, suppose a defeated enemy drops his sword, which bounces down a cliff - this is more than just eye candy).
'Jiggle physics' and particle systems, of course, can stay on-GPU.
Seriously...
Nothing brings out the people proclaiming themselves 'smart' like a story about education or child-raising. There's seems to be no way that anyone can have a conversation on this topic that doesn't just slide off into self-praise.
Thank God I went to a selective public high school that nutured our great modesty as well as our astounding intellects, so I'll never fall into that trap.
It must have been the way that I was raised to be both patient, hard-working and experimental, as well as my excellent genetic endowments for intelligence, sensitivity, creativity and emotional intelligence.
... if this story is true.
Yeesh yourself, twerp. I know coming off superior on Slashdot is usually aided by a blissful ignorance of any prior understanding of an issue (and apparently there are a bunch of people with mod points who are impressed by this), but there's a substantial history of touchscreens being incredibly uncomfortable for long-term usage, from people who have been forced to 'learn to do it'. Small, repetitive motions in front of your face are far from 'blacksmithing, weaving, farming, ...': and where people in historical industries have been required to perform repetitive, awkward motions, there are often debilitating and painful overuse injuries as a result. There are dozens (maybe hundreds) of ailments that have names following the template "{ Housemaids, Miners, Weavers, ...}'s { Knee, Hand, Hip, Elbow, ...}". One suspects that you've met very few real live older working-class people (or haven't listened to them very hard), and are instead using them as a stick to beat up other Slashdot nerds.
I hate to burst your bubble here, but plenty of people exist who can bang out a big block of code or a theorem and are also socially acute. There isn't a zero-sum game going on here between empathy on the one hand and ability to focus on difficult things on the other. There's no tradeoff between artistic ability and mathematical ability. Attractive people or athletes aren't necessarily dumb.
I'm sure the zero-sum idea is a pleasant consolation, but it's not true. If it's like AD&D, it's more like barebones first edition 3d6 character creation: some people really do happen to roll all 16-18's, and some people don't have their weaknesses balanced by much of anything.
Most of the totally curve-busting smart people that I have known (from top-tier research labs, grad schools, and from the very upper ranks of undergraduate populations at large universities) have also been quite socially adept or at least, no more than a bit shy and awkward. A number are also quite gifted artistically or athletically, too.
I read the pdf letter. I don't have the background, but it does sound a lot like the New Yorker may have a case to answer. The article did seem like a bit of a hatchet job, and the complaints from several parties that their quotes were taken out of context seem like there may be something to this.
Of course, Yau's going to get slammed on Slashdot, where people love hackneyed ideas like "evil, hierarchical, credit-stealing Chinese mathematician" and "eccentric genius solving difficult problem on their own and getting denied credit" and so on. Why check the facts?
Anyone who thinks that a 0.02% change is likely to be statistically significant has to be smoking crack. Of course, with enough users and a rigorous enough methodology, it's possible, but I doubt it.
I agree with you about the 15-minute mini-exam. Unfortunately, many questions don't fit well in this format - some of the better exams I've sat are assuming that you are spending 40 minutes per question. The principle still holds, of course.
As for the 'woman' comment... Unfortunately, many people did get into the comment, and many of them said asinine things. I do recall reading some research on differences in gender-based outcomes on 'high-stakes, single-shot exams' that weren't reflected in other performance indicators, and this seems to have been supported by my experience. This sort of high-stakes exam is a confidence test, and men (even the incompetent ones) often seem more confident than women.
And to the assholes on the thread, it wasn't because the women are all cheating in their other work. As it happens, nearly every cheat that I've ever caught in my teaching career is male, and much of the detection of this was by automatic software plagiarism detectors (so it's not just because I'm nicer to women). Well, aside from the guy that I saw handing in his written assignment into the top of the pile and his friends into the middle of the pile - nice job, dude.
Nor is it because the women are necessarily weaker at IT or anything else (which wasn't even mentioned in the study I saw - I think it was a general difference).
The sad thing about this is that most professors know that this is happening. And the solution, well, a lot of people aren't going to like it. There's a principled answer (do lots of delightfully unique, practical assignments that can't just be cribbed; include a lot of 'called onto the carpet' type assessment where the students must verbally justify their essay/code/proof/whatever).
Unfortunately, the 'I don't have time or funding for anything special' answer to the problem is to move massive amounts of assessment into in-class, high-pressure exams. So, if you're like me (thrive in these kind of exams, don't mind cram-studying, etc.) you'll love it. But there are many smart people out there - especially, it seems, women - who do comparatively worse under these kinds of high-stakes, high-pressure assessment than they do under comparatively more realistic settings.
As an aside: As someone keen on maintaining the integrity of undergraduate education, I think it would be a great idea to seed sites like Student of Fortune with plausible answers that would slide by some cheating twit, but would instantly be detected by a TA or professor. I bet you could slide some really amusing stuff past these guys...
Wonderful. This will be a real plus in seminars, as people can't turn on their damn laptops without making a stupid noise. Or on an airplane. Or any other situation (with the kid sleeping in the other side of the room, for example).
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Unbelievably dumb. A massive triumph of marketing people over reality. How can this can be presented as a 'I see both sides of this fascinating argument' in the article? The argument that lots of other systems do this too is irrelevant; currently, you don't have to do this in Windows - why start making this mistake now?
This article, like so many other ones, assumes that AI will make some sort of miraculous progress within the very short term. Many of the features mentioned are fairly banal and not really OS functions at all (application customization) and many others would be wildly frustrating unless the OS really did solve major unsolved problems in AI (the email agent that just miraculously knows whether I'll find an e-mail important and can be interrupted right now).
A related problem is that few OS's and applications do a particularly good job of setting out their static functionality, much less building good menu structures on-the-fly in reponse to my behavior (the trick of grouping frequently-used operations is such low-hanging fruit, and already done so many places, that it's hard to imagine this as particularly impressive).
Given all the real problems with current OS's (general usability problems, backward compatibility, stability, bloat, taking advantage of increasingly complicated hardware - GPUs and multicore spring to mind) it's hard to imagine some sort of spray-on AI layer being the answer to all of our prayers.
Feh. Tufte writes directly about computer displays in an earlier book. It's not immediately clear to me why, given that we will have to have some sort of widget to display information, why some people think that aiming to follow Tufte-style design principles is so obviously doomed to failure.
For a start, a lot of his suggestions are essentially mechanical tweaks (e.g. tone down the noisy grids, avoid 1+1=3 effect - this would be simple to ensure programatically, etc.). Other suggestions suggest individual widgets (e.g. the scatterplot with range bars) or widget grouping (enforcing parallelism across different visual elements).
Your response is analogous to the argument that because you can't guarantee that people will draw good diagrams with pencils, there's no real difference between issuing them with pencils or crayons.
Alright, you have a good point there, but to some extent you're attacking a straw-man. I don't imagine that a software library can magically make good visuals for me. Also, I never said that we'd get together a bunch of programmers (and only programmers) and make the perfect, beautiful widget set - obviously, designers need to help with individual components (and the overall layout if the overall layout can be determined ahead of time - see ahead).
However, there are so many cases where there are existing cliches that could be improved. For example, Tufte has a brilliant redesign of a scatterplot that uses pretty much every bit of ink on the screen to convey useful data (for example, the X and Y axes become range bars that show the univariate distribution of data). This could be hacked once and for all into a TufteScatterplot widget. And so on.
One of the major problems with the 'hire a graphic artist' approach is that frequently, we're dealing with systems that will display unanticipated data. I'm working with a statistical problem at the moment (and building some generalized tools to deal with it) and I have no way of knowing ahead of time whether someone is going to work with a model with 60 factors of which 5 are significant or 10 factors of which 7 are significant. I don't know what sort of names the person will give the factors. I don't know whether the significant factors will be all pretty much the same size (e.g. 1.5%, 2.2%, -1.3%) or hugely different (200%, -50%, 10%). When presenting 'significance' in a system, I can't have the system automatically call the nearest design school to handcraft a nice display. Thus, a system that makes a programmatic attempt at trying to achieve ideals of good design is much better than a system that doesn't even bother.
Of course, anyone will be able to cobble together a rotten-looking, dishonest and confusing interface out of these kind of components. So what?
I think the standard Tufte line on this, is that if a 'few words' are all you're going to get up there, then why not just say the words and leave the screen blank?
... or some low-information drivel like that.
As a side bonus, you'll get eye contact from your audience rather than the disconcerting experience of looking out at a sea of faces who are all looking slightly to one side, peering at:
- Standard Tufte line
* high-data essential
- Good to have eye contact
But on the whole I agree that PowerPoint isn't inherently evil if used as a way of doing a nice slide-show of reasonably detailed elements (graphs, pictures, movies). The only problem is that the resolution of projectors is still pretty wretched compared to printed graphs.
I imagine that many people will get on and post all sorts of breathless praise about Tufte. This is well deserved. His design sense is first-rate, but what's really impressive to me about him is his emphasis on intellectual honesty and detail.
...) that lives up to Tufte's ideas about maximizing data ink and minimizing junk. While I really admire the effects that Tufte and some of his acolytes achieve, quite frequently it seems that they achieve these effects by painstaking work in drawing or desktop publishing packages. More than once, I wince at some bit of graphics or interface that I've designed, thinking, "Damn, that's an embarrassing bit of work for someone who has read Tufte, but I just don't have the time or skills to fix it..."
:-) ), papers and books.
What I really would like to see is a new widget set (with lots of data presentation support - obviously most of the widgets should be quantitative displays) and a style written in some already well-supported widget set (Qt, Swing,
This makes it a lot harder for schlubs like me who don't really have skills in this area, and don't have time to develop them. Further, it makes it more or less impossible to achieve these sort of fine effects programmatically - I'd like to see interactive displays that are informed by his sort of design sense, not just nice presentations (using hand-outs, of course
If anyone is interested in this - or knows of systems that go any decent way in this direction - please post or e-mail me at:
geoff AT cs DOT usyd DOOOOT edu DoT au
(sorry about the stylized "dot" silliness, but something tells me that the traditional foo AT bar DOT com is probably already being mined by spammers - or will be soon).
> but the fact of the matter is extremist Muslims just want to live simple (e.g. repressed)
> lifestyles like they have for thousands of years before without any pesky outside influence
> mucking things up
Most of your post is pretty reasonable, but this is bogus. Extremist Muslims, like many American conservatives, hearken back to a 'golden age' that never existed. The past is always rewritten as a wonderful place where all the rules were properly followed, regardless of how complicated things actually were.
As for 'pesky outside influences mucking things up', it's hard to find a period in Muslim history that wasn't full of this sort of thing, even before the West decided to carve up the Arab world into a bunch of subject nations. Take, for example, the utter destruction of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongols (which was probably the largest atrocity performed 'at short range' in human history - that is, while many 20th century incidents are bigger, they were generally not carried out with clubs, swords and knives).
Meh. Like many people have pointed out, the 5% (or whatever) is different from user to user. Mail merging and label printing in Word aren't in my 5%, for example, while occasional use of the (admittedly feeble) data analysis in Excel is. The reverse might be true for the secretaries down the hall.
And, at any rate, there are already conventional applications - for years! - that cost a fraction of what Photoshop costs (and, in my experience, it's almost unavoidable to get a bunch of them for free if you buy a new computer/scanner/printer/camera once in a while). Strangely, Photoshop hasn't become a marginal application since the advent of all of these applications.
The first article ("What every computer scientist should know...") is completely a must-read. Mod the parent up. Read the article. It's the sort of thing that I wish every undergraduate CS major was forced to chow down on at some point in fourth year...
It's amazing that parent is modded 'interesting' - apparently muddying the waters with context-less quotes is interesting on Slashdot.
The point is not that Exxon or DCI or the heads / major shareholders of these comparies or some random right-winger thinks Al Gore is a irrelevant blowhard. Any of these people and companies are entitled to their beliefs. The point is that these people are _pretending_ to be one of the "little people" you refer to. They are thus concealing a massive conflict of interest - that is, these are people who stand to lose a lot of money if Al Gore's policy suggestions are implemented. Concealing a blatant conflict of interest is disingenuous (at best), and frankly, it's quite stupid to suggest otherwise.