Big companies will slowly suck the life out of you. That’s one way of summarising Paul Graham‘s latest essay. To maximise your freedom, he says, join a start-up or start one yourself. It’s a theory that I find very appealing.
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Gary Busey: bizarre
This is bizarre. Ryan Seacrest of KIIS FM and E! was doing an interview of Jennifer Garner and Laura Linney at the Oscars when Gary Busey interrupted the interview and kissed Garner on the neck. The next day, Busey calls Seacrest on his radio show and, well, I’m not going to try to explain it. Just listen to it. Watch the Oscars incident first…
… then visit this site and click the first “play” button on the right.
Credit to the Breakfast program on Triple J for bringing this to my attention a few weeks back.
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The Book Depository
Karen came across a fantastic online book store called The Book Depository. Its prices are highly competitive. But the best part is that they offer free shipping worldwide. We’ve already ordered five books from them: That’s Not My Puppy; That’s Not My Lion; Dear Zoo; The Art of the Start; and Programming Collective Intelligence. They arrived separately, but all within a week, in well padded packaging. One word of caution: be sure to visit the right web site. It’s http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/, NOT http://www.thebookdepository.co.uk/.
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A contrarian view on climate change
I’ve put this here, not because I agree with it, but because this kind of thing frequently goes unreported by the mainstream media. To me, this is worthy news, even if it’s not particularly good science.
Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change
“Global warming” is not a global crisis
We, the scientists and researchers in climate and related fields, economists, policymakers, and business leaders, assembled at Times Square, New York City, participating in the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change,
Resolving that scientific questions should be evaluated solely by the scientific method;
Affirming that global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life;
Recognising that the causes and extent of recently observed climatic change are the subject of intense debates in the climate science community and that oft-repeated assertions of a supposed ‘consensus’ among climate experts are false;
Affirming that attempts by governments to legislate costly regulations on industry and individual citizens to encourage CO2 emission reduction will slow development while having no appreciable impact on the future trajectory of global climate change. Such policies will markedly diminish future prosperity and so reduce the ability of societies to adapt to inevitable climate change, thereby increasing, not decreasing, human suffering;
Noting that warmer weather is generally less harmful to life on Earth than colder:
Hereby declare:
That current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity’s real and serious problems.
That there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.
That attempts by governments to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations without affecting climate.
That adaptation as needed is massively more cost-effective than any attempted mitigation and that a focus on such mitigation will divert the attention and resources of governments away from addressing the real problems of their peoples.
That human-caused climate change is not a global crisis.
Now, therefore, we recommend —
That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as “An Inconvenient Truth.”
That all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.
Agreed at New York, 4 March 2008
My note: The International Conference on Climate Change is sponsored by the Heartland Institute, which is a libertarian think tank, and may be partly funded by oil companies. The conference was attended by over 500 people.
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Dressing for work
Proceed with caution: Ricky writes about fashion!
Lately I’ve noticed that I tend to dress differently for work depending on what I’ve got on my agenda for the day. Knowing that I’ve got something particular to do on a particular day is an improvement on the past for a start, and I put this partly down to GTD. Anyway, I seem to dress very casually (sometimes shorts and sandals) when I’ve got coding to do, colourfully when there’s an internal meeting to attend (e.g., a brainstorming session) or when I’ve got artsy/communications type stuff to do, and a bit more formally when I’ve got meetings with external parties. Dressing in a particular way seems to help me to get into the right frame of mind for the task at hand. This is a change from university days when shorts and sandals were the norm.
Today I’m wearing my stripy purple shirt with the sleeves rolled up and Hard Yakka drill trousers: a compromise given I started the day with a staff meeting and finished it in the coding trenches.
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Unit testing
Okay, I have something to confess: my record on using testing frameworks to debug software is not good. In fact, my record might show that pretty much all the testing I’ve done in the past has been conducted on an ad hoc basis, using a combination of debugger and strategically placed “print” statements. The only time I can remember having used a proper testing framework with repeatable tests was at Sun Labs as an intern, and that was because it was already set up for me. Perhaps it is common for a researcher to have shoddy testing procedures in place – I don’t know. All I know is that mine have been bad.
For the first time, I’m using the JUnit framework to conduct repeatable tests, and I’m doing this from within the Eclipse IDE. On the first day of use, it’s already paid dividends, quickly honing in on problems in my code. Running JUnit in combo with the debugger has proved especially useful. The only reason I decided to look into testing frameworks was because I’ll probably be handing this code over to someone else to work on soon, and that provided an incentive to be a bit professional about the way I’m doing my coding work. I should mention that it took absolutely no time at all to set up my environment, though it can take a little bit of time to get each unit test just right.
Of course, none of this will come as any surprise to many of the readers of this weblog (i.e., that researchers might have questionable software engineering practices and that repeatable tests are good).
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Ricky 1, go card 0
So I bought a Translink go card yesterday. Up to now I’d been using paper weekly tickets, but because I work at home on Wednesdays, this wasn’t the most cost-effective solution. 10-trip savers would have been the best option, except that I sometimes catch the train. So go card it is. My first experience with the go card was good for me, but not so good for Translink: the card readers on the bus were not operational. Free ride. I love the go card.
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Another tangible user interface
The GroupLab at the University of Calgary has published a technical report describing Souvenirs, a tangible user interface for sharing digital photos in the home environment. It is very similar in spirit to Bowl, which I’ve previously blogged. Souvenirs will be formally published in the Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.
Image credit: Nunes, M., Greenberg, S. & Neustaedter, C. (2007) Sharing Digital Photographs in the Home through Physical Mementos, Souvenirs, and Keepsakes. Research Report 2007-875-27, Dept Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4. July.
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Apple crack
If Apple went bust, people would have withdrawal symptoms. If a rival company went, people would buy another computer.
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Finding a human need
I’ve been reading over old ubicomp papers in preparation for a new project at NICTA. So it was that I found myself reading “Charting Past, Present, and Future Research in Ubiquitous Computing“, by Gregory Abowd and Elizabeth Mynatt (whom, incidentally, should surely be listed among those ubiquitous computing researchers who inspire me – particularly Abowd, whose work I’ve followed since my Honours year in 2000, and whose books were often referenced in the HCI course I took a couple of years before that). One of the most important passages in that paper, to my mind, was tucked away in section 6.1.1, Finding a Human Need (the emphasis is mine):
It is important in doing ubicomp research that a researcher build a compelling story, from the end-user’s perspective, on how any system or infrastructure to be built will be used. The technology must serve a real or perceived human need, because, as Weiser [1993] noted, the whole purpose of ubicomp is to provide applications that serve the humans. The purpose of the compelling story is not simply to provide a demonstration vehicle for research results. It is to provide the basis for evaluating the impact of a system on the everyday life of its intended population. The best situation is to build the compelling story around activities that you are exposed to on a continuous basis. In this way, you can create a living laboratory for your work that continually motivates you to “support the story” and provides constant feedback that leads to better understanding of the use.
Designers of a system are not perfect, and mistakes will be made. Since it is already a difficult challenge to build robust ubicomp systems, you should not pay the price of building a sophisticated infrastructure only to find that it falls far short of addressing the goals set forth in the compelling story. You must do some sort of feasibility study of cutting-edge applications before sinking substantial effort into engineering a robust system that can be scrutinized with deeper evaluation. However, these feasibility evaluations must still be driven from an informed, user-centric perspective—the goal is to determine how a system is being used, what kinds of activities users are engaging in with the system, and whether the overall reactions are positive or negative. Answers to these questions will both inform future design as well as future evaluation plans. It is important to understand how a new system is used by its intended population before performing more quantitative studies on its impact.
It strikes me that too few ubicomp research groups heed this, seemingly obvious, advice, including our own. Though we might occasionally attempt to build a story, it is not often compelling, and I’ve read far too many papers that suffer from the same problem (caveat: I specifically exclude Karen‘s work from this blunt introspective analysis because her work is typically very well motivated, and compelling; and she read the paper I’ve just quoted early on in her Ph.D. and took note of it). I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the most successful ubiquitous computing researchers have taken this advice to heart. I want to make sure that the new project at NICTA does do these things properly.