...the meaningful display of information is about removing visual clutter, not introducing it.
True enough and the service is flawed by that standard but what it is trying to do is a bit more ambitious. As this writer puts it, the service is trying to map an abstract operation to an intuitive environment.
The type of displays that Tufte talks about are often trying to do the reverse: map an intuitive environment to an abstract display. An example would be a flight control system which maps a two dimensional radar screen with labeled, blinking dots to aircraft in three dimensions.
The service's use of SimCity as the intuitive environment is plausible since SimCity is fairly successful in mapping abstract processes in its domain. The problem is that Web site activity doesn't map very well to urban activity.
The extraneous details or visual clutter in conventional graphs are often what give a metaphore its power. What the service may need is simply a better metaphore.
Judging by the screen shots, the primary way of representing site activity is skyscrapers in a rectangular city grid.
The city-grid metaphor fails to capture the essential hierarchical structure of a Web site
In addition, showing page popularity by the height of buildings favours pages that are designed primarily to route users to other pages. For instance, the home page would typically get the most hits.
However, the objective of a home page is to route users to pages that provide some information specific to their interest. These pages are inherently less popular but what the site manager needs to know is whether people who go to the home page are ultimately getting to the less popular pages that interest them further down the hierarchy.
In effect, it's the traffic between pages that's more interesting than the hits on the page. The service does provide this information but in a more conventional form of percentages and lists.
A pinball machine metaphore might be more useful with visitors represented by the pinball. The pinball should get through the maze of bumpers with as few rebounds as possible before exiting the game. If users spend a lot of time bouncing around, the site is failing to get them to the pages that interest them quickly.
Those funds would be better awarded to a burn unit at a local hospital or some other worthy cause.
Just today, there's a story in the New York Times about a law being introduced in California that would give the state 75 per cent of punitive damages. The story says:
Eight states already have so-called split-recovery laws, which allocate part of punitive awards to state treasuries generally or to specific programs. Several have survived court challenges, though the Colorado Supreme Court struck down a ninth law as an unconstitutional taking of private property. Other states, including Florida, Kansas and New York, have repealed split-recovery laws or allowed them to expire.
One of the side effects of giving all the punitive damages to a single plaintiff is that in cases where the company is much less successful than McDonald's or might be bankrupted by the award, the money for future settlements has been reduced. For that reason, some argue that punitive damanges should be set aside to compensate victims in the future. The approach of turning over punitive damages for public purposes doesn't address this problem.
This woman was of the family and is in the best possition to know.
It appears her explanation was not based on any specific inside knowledge. As she explains in a letter, the interpretation "popped straight into my head", as she puts it, one day as she stared at the letters.
She suggests some other connections between the lines and the painting but another investigator calls her hypothesis "an intriguing red herring".
I have to wonder if quality will suffer as a result.
I would expect free textbooks to improve the quality of both free and non-free ones.
First, assuming that a qualified author writes a free textbook, there should be a fairly high base quality because the author's reputation among his peers is at stake. Another author of a non-free textbook would then have to write a better book than the free one if he expects to charge for it.
Second, because the free electronic books are subject to frequent revision, other experts and students can submit criticisms and suggestions that can be instantly incorporated.
Since the vast majority of authors can't afford to give away their work for free..
Actually, in the textbook field, they can afford to give their work away because they're paid by a university. One should not underestimate the desire for the esteem of one's peers in any endeavor.
Like Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage or Stunk and White's Elements of Style, for instance?
They'll tell you that "ain't", "not never" and other common constructs are ungrammatical and therefore unacceptable.
As Strunk wrote in the first edition of Elements of Style: "It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules. After he has learned, by their guidance, to write plain English adequate for everyday uses, let him look, for the secrets of style, to the study of the masters of literature."
The second, "to invite the obvious question, (with an inanimate subject) to raise the question", is now the most commonly heard use of the phrase
First, common use does not equal correct use.
Second, it is common because it is an example of a common tendency to use technical terms in common speech to sound more knowledgeable than one actually is.
Third, because there are two common misuses of the phrase ("to evade the question, to duck the issue" and the one cited above), no one can be sure in which sense the phrase is being used.
Fourth, no one who knew the meaning of the phrase in its original, technical sense would use it in either of the two common ways.
The article cited says: Many people unaware of the technical meaning of "to beg the
question" in logic use it in one of two looser senses.
Stated in one of the two looser senses, this statement begs the question of why people who are unaware of the technical meaning would use an odd phrase like "beg the question".
In idiomatic English, one would say "raises the question" and avoid the implication of ignorance masquerading as erudition.
Please note that having a bias, either liberal or conservative, and being fair and balanced at the same time are not contradictory. Nearly everyone has a bias or a deeply held belief or a considered opinion but can still give a fair hearing to other points of view.
In my admittedly narrow and limited experience with mass media, the programs with a liberal bias seem to give more time to other opinions than those with a conservative bias. The evidence from the Media Research Center Web site cited in the earlier post was that conservative heavyweights got a lot of air time on the Today Show. Perhaps that fact is also evidence of the Today Show's liberal bias.
This site is, in fact, evidence that NBC's Today show is fair and balanced. The site proports to show the "liberal bias" of host Katie Couric but in every case she's interviewing a conservative political figure.
What she's doing is what every responsible journalist does in an interview. She asks questions that challenge the person being interviewed. The alternative is to turn the show into a soap box.
She also asked a tough question in her interview with Bill Clinton, normally considered a liberal, although the site uses her question as evidence of her liberal bias.
What the site shows is that a large number of conservatives appeared as guests on the Today Show over the last 10 years and then somehow concludes from this fact that the show has a liberal bias.
Some posters perceive a climate of hostility on Slashdot to certain ideas, particularly pro-Microsoft and pro-government-regulation ones.
Although these ideas may attract a disproportionate share of hostile reaction, the very fact that they generate so much reaction indicates that people are interested enough in the ideas to debate them. It suggests that a large number users are looking for an argument.
Passionate intensity is no measure of truth and is often a mask for uncertainty. However, it can be a measure of the importance of an idea or proposition. It indicates that something important may be at stake.
The benefit for more dispassionate readers is that they often learn more when conflicting ideas are forcefully presented than when everyone takes a measured approach.
I once worked at a job where I had to use , csh (c-shell) , sh (original bourn shell) , ksh ( korn shell ) and bash (bourn shell ) on different linux, solaris and HP-UX boxes. It was a real headache maintaining the scripts.
Finally, an irrefutable argument for using Perl instead of shell scripts.
Here's a strength of the cli: quick show only files which end in.bat and contain the number 2003: ls *2003*.bat in a cli, impossible in a gui.
This example only shows the strength of the cli if the ls command doesn't return a large number of files that scroll off the screen.
If they scroll off the screen, you have to use some additional utility like less to view the list and even then you can't see the complete list at once.
The scroll bars on many command line sessions in GUIs are much more convenient than using less or more.
In fact, putting the command line in a resizable window with scroll bars, copying and pasting with the mouse, and some icons across the top with a configuration menu that lets you select a font all make the command line easier to use.
I've never seen a dedicated cli user refuse to use those features when they were available.
The implication of the article is that GUIs are a mistake of monumental proportions. All of the original testing at PARC and Apple were fundamentally flawed and the computer industry has blindly charged ahead on a false conclusion.
The fact that the author of the article had such success teaching the command line almost certainly more a tribute to his teaching skills and enthusiasm than virtues of the CLI. There's no question you'll learn more about using the computer from a good teacher than you will from GUI.
The irony that using a GUI is necessary to read his article should not be lost. Even reaching the article from a command line would have required typing in a 41 character url with no errors.
It sound like you're making an argument for simplified GUIs, not for the virtues of the command line. With a simplified GUI all of the original poster's arguments stand.
The Web browser provides just the simplified GUI that a newbie needs to get started. The success of the graphic Web browser proves that the difficulty of mastering a GUI is vastly overstated. The windows, mouse and menus are all transferable to other GUI-based applications.
There is a natural progression from simple GUIs to richer or more complex ones. A typical user who has mastered a browser and moved on to a more complex GUI would avoid all of your objections.
Based on my experience as a programmer in the business environment, statistics is by far the most useful math skill to have after algebra unless the programmer is in a scientific environment.
Businesses now have huge amounts of numerical data available. The analysis and graphic display of the data gives one a competitive advantage over one's colleagues who may be better/more experienced programmers.
Writing programs to analyze large data sets is a natural progression from writing programs to manage large data sets. Even doing conventional things like analyzing log files benefit from statistical methods.
Programmers who want to upgrade their skills might better look to statistics rather than another programming platform. You can carve out a niche in the company as part programmer, part business analyst.
Our Supreme Courts have lost all touch with the Constitution.
On the matter of industrial health and safety legislation, it's not just the U.S. Supreme Court. Every western democracy has stringent health and safety legislation, usually stricter than that in the U.S.
If a company wants the freedom to poison and injure its employees, it has to go to undemocratic countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America where presumably the courts are more in touch.
Ergo, OSHA is unconstitutional. Therefore, your argument falls apart.
We appear to be in agreement that the "free market" is irrelvant to determining the responsibilities of a employer. Rather it is the laws of the host country, in this case, the U.S.
If you had read a little further in the U.S. Constitution you would have found it is the courts and the legislature that are empowered to interpret and apply the Constitution, not the individual reader, such as yourself.
Industrial safety laws appear to have survived legal challenges and in general are becoming stricter and more numerous. Even the employers who oppose them do so on economic and competitive grounds, not constitutional grounds.
Unfortunately for employees, free society creates madmen...
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but at least in the 20th century, madmen are more typical of tyrannies and dictatorships than free societies. No doubt there are a few, but looking at the current group of democratically elected leaders, they all seem reasonably sane, whatever else their failings might be.
It is not the employer's responsibility in a free market to provide a "safe working environment."
I don't know about "a free market" but it is the employer's responsibility in the United States, which is where IBM was conducting business. In that country, an employer's responsibility is determined by democratically elected representatives, not the market or the employer's own notion of his responsibility.
The responsibility of the employer to provide a safe working environment is a relatively recent innovation in capitalism. The earliest industrialists provided horrendous working conditions for both adults and children as long as they could get away with it.
Fortunately for employees, a free society trumps the free market.
An historical analogy: the dreadnought was the first all-big-gun battleship...
The example of the dreadnought does not illustrate Schumpeter's thesis but in a way contradicts it. A dreadnought is indeed a "creative destruction" development but national rivalry produced it, not capitalism.
Capitalism will only employ creative destruction in a competitive situation. Monopolies, which are one possible outcome of capitalism, often stifle innovation.
Maximizing return on capital is the essential fact about capitalism. It chooses innovation or stifling innovation depending on which achieves that goal better.
Creative destruction is more a feature of technology, unfettered by market considerations.
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless."
--Lincoln, State of the Union address, 1862
Slashdot Mirror
True enough and the service is flawed by that standard but what it is trying to do is a bit more ambitious. As this writer puts it, the service is trying to map an abstract operation to an intuitive environment.
The type of displays that Tufte talks about are often trying to do the reverse: map an intuitive environment to an abstract display. An example would be a flight control system which maps a two dimensional radar screen with labeled, blinking dots to aircraft in three dimensions.
The service's use of SimCity as the intuitive environment is plausible since SimCity is fairly successful in mapping abstract processes in its domain. The problem is that Web site activity doesn't map very well to urban activity.
The extraneous details or visual clutter in conventional graphs are often what give a metaphore its power. What the service may need is simply a better metaphore.
Judging by the screen shots, the primary way of representing site activity is skyscrapers in a rectangular city grid.
The city-grid metaphor fails to capture the essential hierarchical structure of a Web site
In addition, showing page popularity by the height of buildings favours pages that are designed primarily to route users to other pages. For instance, the home page would typically get the most hits.
However, the objective of a home page is to route users to pages that provide some information specific to their interest. These pages are inherently less popular but what the site manager needs to know is whether people who go to the home page are ultimately getting to the less popular pages that interest them further down the hierarchy.
In effect, it's the traffic between pages that's more interesting than the hits on the page. The service does provide this information but in a more conventional form of percentages and lists.
A pinball machine metaphore might be more useful with visitors represented by the pinball. The pinball should get through the maze of bumpers with as few rebounds as possible before exiting the game. If users spend a lot of time bouncing around, the site is failing to get them to the pages that interest them quickly.
Those funds would be better awarded to a burn unit at a local hospital or some other worthy cause.
Just today, there's a story in the New York Times about a law being introduced in California that would give the state 75 per cent of punitive damages. The story says:
One of the side effects of giving all the punitive damages to a single plaintiff is that in cases where the company is much less successful than McDonald's or might be bankrupted by the award, the money for future settlements has been reduced. For that reason, some argue that punitive damanges should be set aside to compensate victims in the future. The approach of turning over punitive damages for public purposes doesn't address this problem.
This woman was of the family and is in the best possition to know.
It appears her explanation was not based on any specific inside knowledge. As she explains in a letter, the interpretation "popped straight into my head", as she puts it, one day as she stared at the letters.
She suggests some other connections between the lines and the painting but another investigator calls her hypothesis "an intriguing red herring".
I have to wonder if quality will suffer as a result.
I would expect free textbooks to improve the quality of both free and non-free ones.
First, assuming that a qualified author writes a free textbook, there should be a fairly high base quality because the author's reputation among his peers is at stake. Another author of a non-free textbook would then have to write a better book than the free one if he expects to charge for it.
Second, because the free electronic books are subject to frequent revision, other experts and students can submit criticisms and suggestions that can be instantly incorporated.
Since the vast majority of authors can't afford to give away their work for free..
Actually, in the textbook field, they can afford to give their work away because they're paid by a university. One should not underestimate the desire for the esteem of one's peers in any endeavor.
So there is NO WAY you will get a energy-yielding atomic reaction with hafnium and gamma/xrays.
You appear to be saying that the experiment is flawed because its results do not match the results predicted by current nuclear theory.
The experiment may in fact be flawed for many reasons but the fact that it has unexpected results is not one of them.
Read ANY book on language or linguistics
Like Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage or Stunk and White's Elements of Style, for instance? They'll tell you that "ain't", "not never" and other common constructs are ungrammatical and therefore unacceptable.
As Strunk wrote in the first edition of Elements of Style: "It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules. After he has learned, by their guidance, to write plain English adequate for everyday uses, let him look, for the secrets of style, to the study of the masters of literature."
The second, "to invite the obvious question, (with an inanimate subject) to raise the question", is now the most commonly heard use of the phrase
First, common use does not equal correct use.
Second, it is common because it is an example of a common tendency to use technical terms in common speech to sound more knowledgeable than one actually is.
Third, because there are two common misuses of the phrase ("to evade the question, to duck the issue" and the one cited above), no one can be sure in which sense the phrase is being used.
Fourth, no one who knew the meaning of the phrase in its original, technical sense would use it in either of the two common ways.
Yes it does.
Nope. Still doesn't
The article cited says: Many people unaware of the technical meaning of "to beg the question" in logic use it in one of two looser senses.
Stated in one of the two looser senses, this statement begs the question of why people who are unaware of the technical meaning would use an odd phrase like "beg the question".
In idiomatic English, one would say "raises the question" and avoid the implication of ignorance masquerading as erudition.
Please note that having a bias, either liberal or conservative, and being fair and balanced at the same time are not contradictory. Nearly everyone has a bias or a deeply held belief or a considered opinion but can still give a fair hearing to other points of view.
In my admittedly narrow and limited experience with mass media, the programs with a liberal bias seem to give more time to other opinions than those with a conservative bias. The evidence from the Media Research Center Web site cited in the earlier post was that conservative heavyweights got a lot of air time on the Today Show. Perhaps that fact is also evidence of the Today Show's liberal bias.
This site is, in fact, evidence that NBC's Today show is fair and balanced. The site proports to show the "liberal bias" of host Katie Couric but in every case she's interviewing a conservative political figure.
What she's doing is what every responsible journalist does in an interview. She asks questions that challenge the person being interviewed. The alternative is to turn the show into a soap box.
She also asked a tough question in her interview with Bill Clinton, normally considered a liberal, although the site uses her question as evidence of her liberal bias.
What the site shows is that a large number of conservatives appeared as guests on the Today Show over the last 10 years and then somehow concludes from this fact that the show has a liberal bias.
And if he wasn't a Unitarian this whole mess of ours would have been in base 3.
Perhaps then boolean logic would have adequately handled nulls.
Some posters perceive a climate of hostility on Slashdot to certain ideas, particularly pro-Microsoft and pro-government-regulation ones.
Although these ideas may attract a disproportionate share of hostile reaction, the very fact that they generate so much reaction indicates that people are interested enough in the ideas to debate them. It suggests that a large number users are looking for an argument.
Passionate intensity is no measure of truth and is often a mask for uncertainty. However, it can be a measure of the importance of an idea or proposition. It indicates that something important may be at stake.
The benefit for more dispassionate readers is that they often learn more when conflicting ideas are forcefully presented than when everyone takes a measured approach.
Try GNU utilities for Win32
Forward as well as backward slashes in file paths are accepted.
I once worked at a job where I had to use , csh (c-shell) , sh (original bourn shell) , ksh ( korn shell ) and bash (bourn shell ) on different linux, solaris and HP-UX boxes. It was a real headache maintaining the scripts.
Finally, an irrefutable argument for using Perl instead of shell scripts.
Here's a strength of the cli: quick show only files which end in .bat and contain the number 2003: ls *2003*.bat in a cli, impossible in a gui.
This example only shows the strength of the cli if the ls command doesn't return a large number of files that scroll off the screen.
If they scroll off the screen, you have to use some additional utility like less to view the list and even then you can't see the complete list at once.
The scroll bars on many command line sessions in GUIs are much more convenient than using less or more.
In fact, putting the command line in a resizable window with scroll bars, copying and pasting with the mouse, and some icons across the top with a configuration menu that lets you select a font all make the command line easier to use.
I've never seen a dedicated cli user refuse to use those features when they were available.
The implication of the article is that GUIs are a mistake of monumental proportions. All of the original testing at PARC and Apple were fundamentally flawed and the computer industry has blindly charged ahead on a false conclusion.
The fact that the author of the article had such success teaching the command line almost certainly more a tribute to his teaching skills and enthusiasm than virtues of the CLI. There's no question you'll learn more about using the computer from a good teacher than you will from GUI.
The irony that using a GUI is necessary to read his article should not be lost. Even reaching the article from a command line would have required typing in a 41 character url with no errors.
It sound like you're making an argument for simplified GUIs, not for the virtues of the command line. With a simplified GUI all of the original poster's arguments stand.
The Web browser provides just the simplified GUI that a newbie needs to get started. The success of the graphic Web browser proves that the difficulty of mastering a GUI is vastly overstated. The windows, mouse and menus are all transferable to other GUI-based applications.
There is a natural progression from simple GUIs to richer or more complex ones. A typical user who has mastered a browser and moved on to a more complex GUI would avoid all of your objections.
Based on my experience as a programmer in the business environment, statistics is by far the most useful math skill to have after algebra unless the programmer is in a scientific environment.
Businesses now have huge amounts of numerical data available. The analysis and graphic display of the data gives one a competitive advantage over one's colleagues who may be better/more experienced programmers.
Writing programs to analyze large data sets is a natural progression from writing programs to manage large data sets. Even doing conventional things like analyzing log files benefit from statistical methods.
Programmers who want to upgrade their skills might better look to statistics rather than another programming platform. You can carve out a niche in the company as part programmer, part business analyst.
Our Supreme Courts have lost all touch with the Constitution.
On the matter of industrial health and safety legislation, it's not just the U.S. Supreme Court. Every western democracy has stringent health and safety legislation, usually stricter than that in the U.S.
If a company wants the freedom to poison and injure its employees, it has to go to undemocratic countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America where presumably the courts are more in touch.
We appear to be in agreement that the "free market" is irrelvant to determining the responsibilities of a employer. Rather it is the laws of the host country, in this case, the U.S.
If you had read a little further in the U.S. Constitution you would have found it is the courts and the legislature that are empowered to interpret and apply the Constitution, not the individual reader, such as yourself.
Industrial safety laws appear to have survived legal challenges and in general are becoming stricter and more numerous. Even the employers who oppose them do so on economic and competitive grounds, not constitutional grounds.
Unfortunately for employees, free society creates madmen...
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but at least in the 20th century, madmen are more typical of tyrannies and dictatorships than free societies. No doubt there are a few, but looking at the current group of democratically elected leaders, they all seem reasonably sane, whatever else their failings might be.
It is not the employer's responsibility in a free market to provide a "safe working environment."
I don't know about "a free market" but it is the employer's responsibility in the United States, which is where IBM was conducting business. In that country, an employer's responsibility is determined by democratically elected representatives, not the market or the employer's own notion of his responsibility.
The responsibility of the employer to provide a safe working environment is a relatively recent innovation in capitalism. The earliest industrialists provided horrendous working conditions for both adults and children as long as they could get away with it.
Fortunately for employees, a free society trumps the free market.
The example of the dreadnought does not illustrate Schumpeter's thesis but in a way contradicts it. A dreadnought is indeed a "creative destruction" development but national rivalry produced it, not capitalism.
Capitalism will only employ creative destruction in a competitive situation. Monopolies, which are one possible outcome of capitalism, often stifle innovation.
Maximizing return on capital is the essential fact about capitalism. It chooses innovation or stifling innovation depending on which achieves that goal better.
Creative destruction is more a feature of technology, unfettered by market considerations.
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless."
--Lincoln, State of the Union address, 1862