omenti

the intersection of tech, art and the social - and the beginnings of change

People are often perplexed when they learn I have an interest in fashion. No one has successfully accused me of being a snappy dresser or understanding trends, but it does happen to be one of those areas with rich and dynamic intersections of other fields - specifically the arts, social sciences, and technology.  It also happens to be an enormous worldwide industry and one that is likely to undergo enormous change in the next decade or two.  Observing and trying to understand a developing revolution is, for me, time well spent.  If Apple has Apple TV as a hobby, this is sort of my hobby at this point..

 

About two weeks ago I visited Fashion Week in New York mostly to observe and listen.  I set up a few interview sessions, spent a bit on snacks and coffee and went into learning mode.  After thinking about the experience for awhile, I wrote a brief note to capture what seemed significant.  The note went out to a few people and two encouraged me to expand it in a blog.  To save time I’ll do the next best thing.  Here is the letter followed by some other comments that may be of greater interest to this group. (for those who have read it, I changed a few bits)

 

I have an interest in the social mechanisms of fashion, the changes being driven by a shift in communication modalities and emerging changes in manufacturing and distribution.  Fashion Week in NY is a good place to observe and ask questions.  I have a close friend who happens to be a well known model - this is her fifth year,  She has her own perspective and helps getting contact with interesting people.  This year talking to some small designers as well as the street fashion people and some fashion bloggers.

 

I went in on three days and the two of us talked to about 20 young women, a few other models and some people associated with one name and three small labels.  It turns out that a top model is attracts a lot of attention among the young street fashion types.  There were four discussions in a cafe with five or six of them at a time running an hour or so each.  I bought the coffee and a few pastries (the beer and pizza technique and the cheapest way I know to conduct this sort of interview).   The labels were by separate introduction.  It is good to know fashion royalty.

 

The industry has a very convoluted structure that defines a series of "looks" for a season and has rather strictly defined roles and information sources (last year I sat down and came up with a diagram showing the flow of information, material and money at a high level - ugh).  This traditionally comes out of an interplay between the designer and influential magazine editors. Prototypes are show to buyers who must sort out what will work in their stores about six months down the road.  Orders are placed and a rather clunky mass production web starts into action. Recently the time from prototype buy decision to delivery to the shelf has been dramatically tightened - down to a few weeks.  A few retailers (Zara, H&M,etc) have achieved a more or less constant flow of new fashion that is less coupled to the traditional model.

 

Fashion distinguishes itself from apparel by being all about an out of band communication - one that tends to be more important for women than men (and nearly non-existent in people like me). Its social nature means someone usually goes to a store and puts together the basis for combinations of pieces using what is available as a their pallet.   There is a lot of reference to what other people are doing and this is shifting away from the magazines -- quickly in fact. Fashion sites and blogs, at this point, have probably replaced physical magazines as a core sources of ideas.  The magazines all seem to have their sites, but the street fashion people and their followers aren't paying much attention.  There seems to be an explosion of interest in street fashion over the past few years.

 

Bringing up the subject of Pinterest brought a lot of conversation and debate.  It is clear there is a love/hate relation with it …  mostly love from the sample I spoke with.  It seems to be a natural extension of the pinboarding activities common among teenage girls - only it is now distributed to a larger group.  It involves this same out of band communication - or at least part of its vocabulary and I suspect it can be considered basic.  It certainly isn't optimized and one suspects more specialized versions will either emerge organically and/or be supported by Pinterest.  It is not the sort of thing I can imagine Google or Facebook - or Apple or Amazon for that matter - pulling off well.  I can imagine some of them getting involved as partners.

 

In the twenty and early thirty year old group Facebook is still a necessity - but something that can be frustrating and isn't the sort of thing people find cool anymore.  Time is still being spent there, but some of the apparel makers I spoke to suggested FB has almost no value to their business. They all have presences, but none of them can show the time and money they have put into it has been rewarded. Pinterest, on the other hand, is already making a change and driving business.  It is much more closely linked to the model of how some people communicate what "the look" will be - at least among their group.

 

"The look" is something very important that needs a lot of consideration.  It used to be dictated, but now there is a lot of communication from people who wear clothing.  There are still constraints as the pallet of available clothing is limited, but that is changing as mass customization emerges.  The industry has always been plagued by misjudging what the look and in recent years there have been more mistakes than the sour economy might suggest among the major players.  It is probably part of the growing disconnect between magazines and the consumer as the later group patches into different sources of active and passive communication. 

 

The structure of the industry is cumbersome and reminds me of the talent/production/distribution mechanism of the music industry fifteen years ago.  To the labels the end customer is really the store buyer - not the consumer.  Similar to the cellphone manufacturers - where most see the mobile service providers as their primary customer, and the four ecosystems - where Google and Facebook have different primary customers than the end user. In the examples of the music and fashion industries this creates opportunity.

 

There was an awareness of mass customization.  Most see the real benefit as better sizing, but freedom of personalization is also a benefit.  This is interesting as the size variation of the groups I was with is much less than the general female population (they were all young and mostly thin) where the need for better sizing is much stronger.   I brought up Threadless vs a few others as examples of image customization and a few of the shoe companies.  In general the Threadless model was preferred - very interesting as it is also constrained.

 

Many other questions come to mind, but time was limited and I was mostly injecting questions along with my model friend (who is absolutely great at this) and observing.    

 

I'd hate to be in the fashion magazine business

 

Separately my friend notes, and I saw a few examples, of how the catwalk itself is changing.  Tech is mixing in as part of the art, but also video is important.  All of the important shows were streamed and most had expert commentary and/or community commentary - almost like a sporting event. Some of the labels produced separate video spots that allowed a much closer look at the piece and there was experimentation with letting the model have a personality.  Probably due to the economy there were more beginning B-list models being used …  the sort who will probably not walk next season.  The whole notion of what a model does seems to be changing a bit, although high fashion runway models are still pretty much unchanged from those 10 years ago.  I'm told catalog modeling has seen a much larger shift as online catalogs become more important - things to say on the modeling piece, but I'll stop here…

 

A few additional observations:

 

° iPads, iPhones and MacBook Airs were everywhere.  The great majority of those I spoke to had Apple kit and 100% had smartphones. I asked a few questions and the fact this group has bought into the Apple platform is key.  Their music is from iTunes, apps are *extremely* important, and the Air is the only laptop they consider.  Granted this group is obsessed with style and fashion, but there is certainly no movement to Android.  I was frankly amazed by the acceptance of the Apple platform. 

 

° Most of them owned iPads.  It is seen as being hired for a different task than the iPhone or the Air, but the fact that these products link up and synchronize through the cloud mostly seamlessly was important.  The cafes I used had net and there were people, mostly women, watching the walks in being streamed live from the runways across the street.  There was a lot of social commentary going on face to face (ear to ear?) as well as in chat windows and text messages.  Twitter seemed to be an important space for commentary. Facebook seemed absent.

 

° People couldn’t stream to their phones or iPads.   An iPad linked to WiFi might seem to be the ideal viewing platform, but it was impossible as Flash was used.  They complained about the failure, but didn’t blame Apple.  The blame goes to whoever was doing the streaming.  There were also complaints about poor cellular service in the area - again it was not seen as Apple’s responsibility.  Flash on tablets and phones really is a non-starter at this point.

 

° Space doesn’t permit me to write the pages I learned about street fashion, which may be a central piece of the developing future as magazines lose influence and the process of fashion becomes even more social.  Material, money, and information flows are all in the process of changing.

 

° The backstage use of iPads surprised me.  I don’t think I’ve seen that density outside an Apple Store.  There appear to be several important custom apps as well as regular commercial apps.  One young designer joked that they are moving to the paperless atelier...  Steve Jobs would not approve that I saw a few people frantically sketching with a conductive stylus for last second visual notes to be communicated to others.  There was also a great deal of photographic annotation.  

 

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And a recipe or two!

 

After a few people saw this post, two wrote and asked where are the recipes?  OK - here is a fun one with a bit of science.  But first a word on measurements.

 

Most of my recipes have approximate measurements.  When cooking with fresh ingredients it is often necessary to adjust for the freshness and taste of the ingredients as well as your own tastes.  I'll try to supply weight and volume measurements, but encourage you to move to just weight for anything that isn't a liquid at the very least when amounts are important - some types of cooking and most types of baking.  Get an electronic kitchen scale that can tare - it will change your life in the kitchen.  Good enough ones aren't expensive.  I use the  EatSmart Precision Pro- about $25.

 

Now on to the food!

 

Maillard Reaction Squash in a Pressure Cooker

 

The Maillard reaction is this wonderful event that takes place between an amino acid, a reducing sugar and some heat.  Without going into details a complex mixture of molecules forms that are involve in the flavors and smells of many foods.  The browning of meats, the browning on toast, french fries, fried onions, roasted coffee, the browned sections of cakes and cookies.  In short it has a fundamental importance in baking and cooking.

 

Most of these reactions begin at around 300°F, although some start much lower - perhaps 250°F.  It would be nice to cook with the reaction, but in a boiling or immersed environment.  The trick is to use a pressure cooker.  Most will go to 15psi - pushing the interior boiling temperature to something past the threashold for some of the reaction.  Physics just works - increase the pressure of the gas over water and the boiling point increases.

 

It would be wonderful to get that great taste on something like squash in a pressure cooker.  It turns out a bit of experimentation shows the way.  Some of the experiments didn't work, but were edible none the less.  Adding a bit of baking soda increased the reaction just enough to make everything work (alkali environments generally encourage the reaction - we're sitting on the fence at 15psi and need to be pushed just a bit)

 

This one works:-)  

ingredients

° 55g (4 tbl) unsalted butter

° 0.75kg (1 1/2 lb) delicata squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into half inchish cubes

° 1/2 lemon grass stalk 

° 1 tsp kosher salt

° 1/2 tsp baking soda

° honey to taste

method

1. Melt butter in a pressure cooker. Stir in squash, lemon grass, salt and baking soda. Cover tightly with pressure cooker lid and cook at a gauge pressure of 1 bar (15 p.s.i.) for 20 minutes. Begin the timing after the pressure has been reached.

2. Depressurize the cooker according to the pressure cooker's manual.

3. Remove lemon grass. Blend the squash to a smooth purée.  Add honey to taste.

 

mmmm

 

Pressure cookers, if you haven't tried one, rule.  I use a Kuhn Rikon and love it - spendy, but you probably won't find a better pressure cooker.  A core component of the kitchen and safe. 

_____

 

And a somewhat unhealthy, but delicious bonus.  This is especially good on a chilly night and guests love it.

 

Baked Hot Chocolate

 

ingredients

° 250g (9 oz) very very good quality semisweet chocolate (Lindt, Scvharffen berger, Guitard, etc) - maybe 60% to 70% - finely chopped
° 85g (6 tbl) unsalted butter cut up.  excellent grade butter only
° 4 large eggs
° 50g white sugar (1/4cup)
° whipped cream to taste

method

1. Preheat an oven to 350° F


2. find four oven proof coffee mugs or similar sized ramekins and put them on a pan


3. melt butter and chocolate in a double boiler and whisk until smoothly melted and mixed. Remove from heat and set aside


4. Stir eggs and sugar in a mixing bowl over simmering water until warm to the touch.


5. Beat egg mixture with a beater until light and fluffy - 3 to 5 minutes. Gently fold the egg mixture into the chocolate


6. Spoon batter into cups and add enough hot water in the pan to come up halfway on the cups


7. Bake until top of mixture looses its glossy look. About 15 or 20 minutes.


8. Remove and let cool to a bit above room temperature on the outside.  Put on whipped cream and serve

wicked fine

 

 

rules of thumb and approximations

An aspiring chef was taking about some of the rules of thumb she is learning 

 

° to tear Saran Wrap, put your thumb on the W of the box

° for potato salad use one and a half medium potatoes and an egg per person

° good popcorn pops to 33 cups for every cup of seeds

° use a third the amount of a dried herb to replace its fresh version

° food cost is usually about 25% to 30% of sales

° drive through sales are 40% to 50% of a fast food restaurant's business

° hamburger should be cooked to at least 155° F 

° for catering you should have a half pound of uncooked meat and three quarters of a pound of side dishes per person

° leave the oven door cracked open when broiling in an electric oven, closed when using gas

° ...

 

I mentioned a calendar trick and, without effort, dozens come to mind: 

 

° In any calendar year 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10 and 12/12 will fall on the same weekday - Wednesday for 2012...

° An average adult of normal weight requires about 100 watts of power from food

° skeletal muscle is about 20% efficient

° a car with an internal combustion engine radiates about three quarters of the energy in the gasoline it burns as waste heat 

° a person on a bicycle is about three times as efficient as someone who is just walking

° the average adult male in good physical shape should be able to provide a kilowatt-hour of physical work in a day.

° the average home uses about one kilowatt of power

° the average nuclear power plant generates about a billion watts of power - so it can run the homes in a city with a million residents (San Diego is very close to this)

° electric motors are about 90% efficient

° a pound of fat is equivalent to about 3,500 Calories

° fat, pound for pound, has a similar amount of energy as gasoline

° losing more than three percent of your weight per month in a diet is medically dangerous

° fewer than five percent of dieters are at or below their starting weight two years later (the surest way to gain weight is to go on a diet)

° there are about Pi * 10⁷ seconds in a year and about 8,800 hours in a year

° it takes about an acre of land to feed a person

° getting your energy from beef requires about ten times as much plant energy as just eating the plants

° about 1000 watts of solar power per meter makes it to the ground with the Sun directly overheat on a perfectly clear day

° molecules in an ideal gas at room temperature have an average kinetic energy of about 1/40^th of an electron volt.

° digital music needs to be sampled at least at twice its highest frequency

° when estimating angular widths stretch your arm out: your finger tip is about 1°; the distance across your index, middle and ring fingers is about 5°; your fist 10°; the space between your outstretched pinky and index finger 15°, and the span between your outstretched thumb and index finger is about 25°

° the angular size of the sun and moon are both about a half degree

Any field will have rules of thumb for quickly making approximations with very little work.  You can probably list a few dozen with five minutes of reflection (if you have some interesting ones add them as comments).

 

The etymology of the term is hazy, but the sources I've seen either relate it to an approximation for length based on the thumb (inch and thumb are commonly linked in European languages) or for some agricultural purpose like the depth for planting seeds. 

 

I find it useful to make many back of the envelope calculations as I come to grips with a problem.  There are a lot of tricks - units analysis (which tells you mc² has the units of energy, mc³ or mc don't.  Many calculations are speeded along with drawings for visualization and approximations for doing mental or back of the envelope math.   I'm a big fan of slide rules.  Learning to use one gives you a natural sense of what a logarithm is.  You had to know roughly what the answer might be and keep track of the order of magnitude in your head.  I was banned from using mine when invited to some corporate strategy sessions at a big telecom that I used to work for -- I was out-calculating the guys who were using laptops (they often got their answers wrong to 8 significant decimal places) and it was somehow wrong to have a researcher doing that...  I recommend learning how to use one if you want a more intimate relationship with back of the envelop calculations.

 

There is probably a lot of information about any field embedded in its rules of thumb and how they change with time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the delight of playful creativity

At five thirty this morning I made my way to the basement for the morning rowing.  I sat on the machine, cued up the WBUR OnPoint podcast (I usually listen to whatever is current on Thursdays) on the iPod, pushed play and pulled backwards.  Little did I know...

 

Forty seven minutes flew by and I was ready for the next podcast to begin.  I knew I had something to blog about, that was different from what I was thinking about at five twenty five as I started to the basement, and I knew an apology would be necessary.  I rowed on in silence lost in thought and stopped about forty minutes later.  My ergometer said I had delivered 202.4 watt-hours to the flywheel.  Better than 150 watts on average - not bad for me.  

 

Before getting into what I was thinking and why I saw the need for an apology you need to listen to the show. (mp3)

 

Trust me - it is worth the time.

 

An interview and some samples from beatbox cellist Kevin Olusola.  While he's not technically a great cellist, he did get Yo-Yo Ma's attention.  Kevin's playfulness and experimentation and curiosity inform his creativity.  In creativity and playfulness he reminds me of musicians cellist Zöe Keating, Björk, and Reggie Watts and more than a few scientists.¹

 

When you are exposed to something like this you want to find more and let your friends know.  That made me think of one of you - Jheri.  

 

Jheri is this amazing person - creatitive, funny and kind.  The sort of person who amazes you by being a friend.   She knows exactly what I mean when I say play is a fundamental component of creativity and she is off-scale playful.  She also happens to have a hearing impairment.  I want to share this with you Jheri, but I know it won't work so I must apologize... 

 

or maybe not...

 

This is an opportunity.  Jheri is amazingly perceptive visually.  She is aware of the nuances of out-of-band communications that take place in face to face communications that most of us tend to miss.  She sees much more deeply than the rest of us and is a natural empath.  So while people like Niki, Lorraine, Linda and a few others will probably love listening to Kevin, I began to wonder about the part of the world Jheri sees that I am visually deaf to...

 

This is a chance for serendipty. Jheri - perhaps we can  investigate the parts of the world that are beautiful to you that are mostly invisible to people who hear well...   I know they exist - would you like to collaborate and sort a bit of this out?  Thinking about that excites me much more than listening to Kevin's wonderful music.  It is much more fun playing and learning than sitting back - even if what you are witnessing is as wonderful. 

 

Kevin is having wonderful fun and is bringing pleasure.  He started with a simple set of questions.  There is no reason why you can't have the fun in your domains.

 

Let's play Jheri

 

In the meantime I strongly recommend listening to the interview!

________

¹ Reggie performed just before my TED^x talk and his performance completely captivated me.  Look him up - he's amazing.  We were talking immediately after TED and it turned out he is from Great Falls, Montana - he lived about 500 feet from our house.

selling a dream

Two multibillion dollar industries - do they work?

 

Weight loss is a massive business in the US and online dating is large and growing rapidly.  Both attempt to satisfy very deeply seated desires and both have a lot of customers.  It seems reasonable to examine how effective they are.

 

Weight loss is certainly possible with hundreds of businesses and thousands of self help books helping people take in less energy than they use.  Losing weight can take a lot of effort, but millions of people do it every year.  One of the problems is a good fraction of those millions turn out to be the same people.  

 

It turns out the regulation of metabolism is a complex thing and cultural issues associated with food and exercise are equally complex.  As science probes these questions it is becoming clear that, while a reasonable percentage of people can lose weight, the percentage who keep it off for even a few years is very small.  It appears if someone has become overweight for some length of time - probably at least six months - their metabolism is permanently lowered, but their hunger levels remain high.  They begin to overeat relative to the level of someone who has always been at their current weight. Frequently all of the weight - or even more - is regained.  

 

Many researchers say "one of the best ways to gain weight is to go on a diet" ...  The community is beginning to talk about getting people as healthy as they can be at their current weights with additional exercise and good nutrition and recommend weight loss only when people are dangerously overweight.  They feel the place to focus efforts are on the young - it is critically important to make sure they never become overweight in the first place.

 

 "Overweight", although the societal norm at nearly 70% of the adult population in the US, is still not considered "beautiful" or "young".  It seems likely the weight loss industry will be in good shape for a long long time.   If science can provide interventions that regulate weight, it is likely they will become very popular - even if there are unhealthy side effects.

 

Online dating is another interesting business.  Millions want to find serious romantic parters and a few large businesses have emerged to create what they advertise as high probability matches.   The ads sometimes suggest a science based selection.

 

The problem is these services don't meet the standards of the scientific method.  There methods aren't testable by peers, and it is unlikely, given the sort of information they take the tests could even be cleanly done.  Science requires a hypothesis be falsifiable. Basically the logical possibility that an assertion, hypothesis or theory can be contradicted by an empirical observation.¹  If you can't do that it isn't science.

 

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.  - Richard Feynman

 

The claims of "science" are not universal in this business, but billions are spent and it is reasonable to probe how effective this approach is.  A nice paper was recently published that addresses the question (pdf).²

 

Great businesses for different reasons.  

 

One is not effective in the long term and ensures a growing number of customers who are serial failures.  They may jump around from plan to plan in a nearly hopeless effort to find something that works.³   The other addresses a fundamental human need and tries to make it somehow easier.  Much is lost in the initial communication and the matching techniques may be non-robust.  It is likely that many of the approaches will produce a higher percentage of solutions than conventional techniques.  Work needs to be done to settle that question.  Online dating is also fascinating in that it is an example of "big data" that may not have very much behind it.  Getting to the right questions and adding the right information is what is critical.⁴

 

note: based on a discussion with one of the readers I want to point out I am not dissing online dating.  It obviously works for some and doesn't for others.  What I do object to is the marketing use of "scientific" as it fails that defnition.  Since so many people use it and spend so much, it would be reasonable to better understand what is going on - perhaps to learn where it is applicable and where it isn't.  The paper is a good starting point.

 

Also - "big data" is very much in vogue these days.  To be useful it must be coupled with intelligent questions.  Frequently it isn't and since humans are good at finding patterns, a lot of false patterns are being "discovered".

_____

¹ Falsifiability does not mean something is "false", but rather that if it is false a repeatable empirical observation or experiment will produce a result in conflict with it.  When falsifiability is applied to pseudosciences like astrology, much of the global warming denialism examples, homeopathic medicine, intelligent design, etc. - the theories and assertions that underlie them are quickly rendered false.

² Abstract 

Online Dating: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of Psychological Science

Eli J. Finkel, Paul W. Eastwick, Benjamin R. Karney, Harry T. Reis, and Susan Sprecher

Northwestern University; Texas A & M University; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Rochester; and Illinois State University

Abstract

Online dating sites frequently claim that they have fundamentally altered the dating landscape for the better. This article employs psychological science to examine (a) whether online dating is fundamentally different from conventional offline dating and (b) whether online dating promotes better romantic outcomes than conventional offline dating.The answer to the first question (uniqueness) is yes, and the answer to the second question (superiority) is yes and no. To understand how online dating fundamentally differs from conventional offline dating and the circumstances under which online dating promotes better romantic outcomes than conventional offline dating, we consider the three major services online dating sites offer: access, communication, and matching. Access refers to users’ exposure to and opportunity to evaluate potential romantic partners they are otherwise unlikely to encounter. Communication refers to users’ opportunity to use various forms of computer- mediated communication (CMC) to interact with specific potential partners through the dating site before meeting face-to- face. Matching refers to a site’s use of a mathematical algorithm to select potential partners for users. Regarding the uniqueness question, the ways in which online dating sites implement these three services have indeed fundamentally altered the dating landscape. In particular, online dating, which has rapidly become a pervasive means of seeking potential partners, has altered both the romantic acquaintance process and the compatibility matching process. For example, rather than meeting potential partners, getting a snapshot impression of how well one interacts with them, and then slowly learning various facts about them, online dating typically involves learning a broad range of facts about potential partners before deciding whether one wants to meet them in person. Rather than relying on the intuition of village elders, family members, or friends or to select which pairs of unacquainted singles will be especially compatible, certain forms of online dating involve placing one’s romantic fate in the hands of a mathematical matching algorithm.Turning to the superiority question, online dating has important advantages over conventional offline dating. For example, it offers unprecedented (and remarkably convenient) levels of access to potential partners, which is especially helpful for singles who might otherwise lack such access. It also allows online daters to use CMC to garner an initial sense of their compatibility with potential partners before deciding whether to meet them face-to-face. In addition, certain dating sites may be able to collect data that allow them to banish from the dating pool people who are likely to be poor relationship partners in general. On the other hand, the ways online dating sites typically implement the services of access, communication, and matching do not always improve romantic outcomes; indeed, they sometimes undermine such outcomes. Regarding access, encountering potential partners via online dating profiles reduces three-dimensional people to two-dimensional displays of information, and these displays fail to capture those experiential aspects of social interaction that are essential to evaluating one’s compatibility with potential partners. In addition, the ready access to a large pool of potential partners can elicit an evaluative, assessment-oriented mindset that leads online daters to objectify potential partners and might even undermine their willingness to commit to one of them. It can also cause people to make lazy, ill-advised decisions when selecting among the large array of potential partners. Regarding communication, although online daters can benefit from having short-term CMC with potential partners before meeting them face-to-face, longer periods of CMC prior to a face-to-face meeting may actually hurt people’s romantic prospects. In particular, people tend to over interpret the social cues available in CMC, and if CMC proceeds unabated without a face-to-face reality check, subsequent face-to-face meetings can produce unpleasant expectancy violations.As CMC lacks the experiential richness of a face-to-face encounter, some important information about potential partners is impossible to glean from CMC alone; most users will want to meet a potential partner in person to integrate their CMC and face-to-face impressions into a coherent whole before pursuing a romantic relationship. Regarding matching, no compelling evidence supports matching sites’ claims that mathematical algorithms work—that they foster romantic outcomes that are superior to those fostered by other means of pairing partners. Part of the problem is that matching sites build their mathematical algorithms around principles—typically similarity but also complementarity—that are much less important to relationship well-being than has long been assumed. In addition, these sites are in a poor position to know how the two partners will grow and mature over time, what life circumstances they will confront and coping responses they will exhibit in the future, and how the dynamics of their interaction will ultimately promote or undermine romantic attraction and long-term relationship well-being.As such, it is unlikely that any matching algorithm that seeks to match two people based on information available before they are aware of each other can account for more than a very small proportion of the variance in long-term romantic outcomes, such as relationship satisfaction and stability. In short, online dating has radically altered the dating landscape since its inception 15 to 20 years ago. Some of the changes have improved romantic outcomes, but many have not.We conclude by (a) discussing the implications of online dating for how people think about romantic relationships and for homogamy (similarity of partners) in marriage and (b) offering recommendations for policymakers and for singles seeking to make the most out of their online dating endeavors. 

³ I lost quite a bit of weight last year. I'm well aware that I am likely to fail if I'm not diligent. I've been at my goal weight for about three months now and find I must constantly monitor and count Calories and exercise. It is more difficult than losing weight so far. I can see why most people fail - in fact studies that look at people with long term success (only one to two percent of dieters keep at their goal weight for more than five years) note that daily diligence is the only method that seems to work. An excellent reason for never gaining weight in the first place.  

⁴ This will be the subject of several future posts - the often clueless reliance on having lots of data can be a trap.  It is like the kid who doesn't know how to work the problem on the test and puts down the wrong answer to nine significant decimal places because he used the wrong model and blindly plugged input into his calculator trusting that a result was a solid answer.  I can't tell you how often I've seen this in organizations that should know better.

 

on the fantastic flying books of mr. lessismore

The first release from Moonbot Studios, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Lessismore, has been out for awhile, but I tend to discover things at a slower pace.  The illustration is quite wonderful and there is a distinct style that has a fine antique feel to it.  There is much to recommend as you will see with the video, but you should know that you shouldn't watch it.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

 

You see the real experience is to be had in the iPad version and its interactivity.  Every page has a bit of something and the viewer becomes engaged leaving passive viewing behind.  And this interactivity is artistic and engaging.  It points in the general direction of the future.

 

Play with something like this and $10 seems like way to much to spend for a movie.  Perhaps $2 seems like too much ...

 

It will take decades for Hollywood - or whatever that becomes - to discover how to use the power of an interactive digital network connected sheet of paper that goes to someone's lap, but there will be illuminations along the way.  This is the first I would consider worthy of the new medium.  There have been a lot of experiments, but this one also mixes in real storytelling and art.

 

I'm guessing a lot of lightbulbs have been fired over the heads of the artistic set.   If you worry about this sort of change you really need to explore with an iPad.  But if you don't have one yet, I would wait a few months ...

 

(a short post as I spent most of the time with the "book")

 

 

 

seeing the future

And inventing it in an industrial lab...

This morning I found myself chatting with an old friend and client.  I did some physics related work for his firm as they were heavy with computer science people, but lacked background in the physical sciences and suddenly found themselves in need.  He noted some of the things he learned from our interaction was outside of the primary work - namely he came to recognize the importance of mobile devices and good user experiences as gating factors for a revolution.  Sadly he retired - he was complaining about all of the fun he had missed.

 

Twenty years ago we had been at the same place - the Bell Laboratories.  He had been there longer than me - I joined shortly before AT&T was broken up into AT&T and the regional Bell Operating Companies and a few other pieces - but both of us had a good window into the most productive and exciting periods of the place.  AT&T had been a regulated monopoly - a mishmash of the good and the bad.  One of the good pieces was a real honest to goodness R&D lab could be supported.  The Bell Telephone Laboratories was probably the best industrial lab of the 20^th century and fundamental research as well as the invention of the scientific and technological underpinning of electronic communications happened there. 

 

These days real industrial soup to nuts R&D is very rare.  While there is a lot of development, there is very little pure research - even applied research is not terribly common.  It exists, but massive laboratories where the atmosphere is charged with the possibilities of chance collaborations and the serendipity that result are gone - relegated to Universities and government laboratories where departmental barriers tend to be high.

 

BTL was where I learned the importance of connecting the dots and learning things outside of my normal areas of math and physics.  That continued even as the place began to crumble and I found myself bridging into areas I didn't know existed.  The trick was being curious and walk around listening to people who were excited by something, learn about it, find a common language and jump in with both feet.  You also had to be open to inviting those who were interested in your projects to your corner of the sandbox.

 

What we have now is still very interesting, but this is a different time and companies have to be more opportunistic.  Some of them, like Apple, have been brilliant about recognizing technology by itself isn't enough and have profited enormously.  A few other companies have been doing this at a smaller scale and we are on the edge of several disruptions.  I see new structures that allow serious dot connection and play beginning to emerge.

 

This morning's a wave of nostalgia caused me to remember some of the old AT&T ads another friend sent a few months ago.  AT&T had a strong public outreach for STEM education as well as general public relations pieces.  Some of this appeared in ads that ran in places young males (sadly not many women were encouraged although we had a few superstars) might find time - these ran in Boy's Life Magazine in the early 1960s a year after Echo, but before Telstar...  

 

with that, Chip Martin - College Reporter:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

celebrating lá fhéile bríde

Lá Fhéile Bríde is winding down - the candles are still out and it has been a very satisfying meal and general family companionship.  A great time for a holiday.

 

Lá Fhéile Bríde?

 

Here is a note I sent to a few people today...

 

It  turns out Groundhog's Day is a cross quarter day - specifically Imbolc (spelling depending on which tradition you are using).  The cross quarter days mark the halfway points between the seasons and many cultures use them.  I like them because they tend to represent the season you are currently in rather than the starting point.

My grandmother was Irish and celebrated Lá Fhéile Bríde, which is the feast day of St Brigid in Irish.  It is roughly the time you would see the earliest beginnings of Spring in Ireland - namely the ewes would be getting ready to have lambs.  The holiday was a big thing with her and had candles, rich foods and a huge family dinner.  The ashes of the fire were sorted through to make predictions and she said the proper way to do this was with a bonfire.  You would also look for signs of certain animals - the hedgehog was one - for signs of the future.

 

The curious part is it is the time of the hag  (Cailleach in Gaelich).  This is an old wise woman often dressed in rags and carrying a bundle.  She is supposed to be a magical being like a fairy.  On Imbolc she carries firewood for the rest of the Winter.  One of her powers is controlling the weather, so if she is going to make Winter last a long time she makes certain the day is bright and sunny so she can find as much firewood as possible. Poor weather means she must be sleeping or wants a short Winter and it will soon be over.

 

The more modern celebration (since Catholicism) is also called Candlemass and is associated with St Brigid in some way I can't remember other than young unmarried women make ribbons for an effigy of her.  St Brigid is supposed to visit households in the night (sort of like Santa Claus) and if she has the household is blessed and protected.  You check the ashes of the fire that has burned overnight for signs, but I never spent enough time with her to figure that out…

 

So many traditions out there -- it is neat how this one got tangled up in a day that is noted still.  

 

To try and keep touch with tradition and remember my grandmother we have a big family dinnerwith a lot of rich foods and lots of candles.  We don't have a fireplace, but we sing and generally do music.  It would be nice to have a bonfire some day.

oh - the pronunciation is ~  law ay-leh bree-djeh       imbolc is usually pronounced with a hard c, although I've heard it with a hard g and sometimes the c is silent…  I don't know the preferred.

 

 

Understanding a bit of culture is critical these days and that means diving in and appreciating some of the myths that often bring color and meaning to culture.  You don't have to buy into them, but understanding gives appreciation.  

 

I'm half Irish and it makes a lot of sense to understand where you came from. The bonus is early February is a fine time for a family get together with rich meals, story telling, music and light from fires.

 

Indeed, Spring is on its way.

 

and, in the spirit of combining cultures, this bit of fun.  An appropriate song to sing might be "I Got You Babe" in Irish Gaelic: (rough machine translation)

A: Deir siad go bhfuil muid óg agus níl a fhios againn
Ní féidir linn a fháil amach go dtí go fhás muid
AIR: Bhuel níl a fhios agam má tá go léir go fíor
'Cause fuair tú dom, agus leanbh a fuair mé leat

AIR: Babe
AN DÁ: Fuair ​​mé tú babe
Fuair ​​mé tú babe

A: Deir siad nach mbeidh ár ngrá an cíos a íoc
Sula tá sé tuillte sé, ár n-airgead caite go léir
AIR: buille faoi thuairim mé go bhfuil sin, nach bhfuil againn pota
Ach ar a laghad, tá mé cinnte de na rudaí fuair muid

AIR: Babe
AN DÁ: Fuair ​​mé tú babe
Fuair ​​mé tú babe

AIR: Fuair ​​mé bláthanna san earrach
Fuair ​​mé tú a chaitheamh mo fáinne
A: Agus nuair atá mé brónach, tá tú clown
Agus má fhaigheann mé scanraithe, tá tú i gcónaí ar fud

A: Ná lig dóibh a rá tá do chuid gruaige ró-fhada
'Cause Is cuma liom, a bhfuil tú ní féidir liom dul go mícheart
AIR: Ansin cuir do lámh beag i mianach
Níl aon cnoc nó sliabh nach féidir linn a tóg

AIR: Babe
AN DÁ: Fuair ​​mé tú babe
Fuair ​​mé tú babe

AIR: Fuair ​​mé tú a bheith i seilbh mo lámh
A: Fuair ​​mé tú a thuiscint
AIR: Fuair ​​mé tú ag siúl liom
A: Fuair ​​mé tú a labhairt liom
Fuair ​​mé tú Goodnight a póg
Fuair ​​mé tú a bheith i seilbh daingean mé
Fuair ​​mé tú, ní bheidh mé in iúl go
Fuair ​​mé tú grá dom mar sin

AN DÁ: Fuair ​​mé tú babe
Fuair ​​mé tú babe
Fuair ​​mé tú babe
Fuair ​​mé tú babe
Fuair ​​mé tú babe

 

global efficiency and flexibility through local inefficiencies

My sister Corinne has a great love for horses.  Part of it is the beauty of their motion. There are four natural and distinct gaits.  The walk with its left hind, right hind, right front, left front four beat cadence transitions to a two beat gait called the trot as the horse speeds up.  Now its legs are moving in unison in diagonal pairs. It is a very stable gait and the horse’s head is often very steady.  

 

As the horse speeds up the cantor appears.  Now you hear three beats and a pause and then three beats and a pause as one of the rear legs supports the horse as the other three move forward. 

 

As the horse accelerates a four beat gait emerges.  The horse is still pushing off with a rear foot -  for brief moments it has entirely left the ground and is flying.  The full gallop -  as fast as a horse can move.

 

Galloping is not terribly efficient and the horse will tire quickly.  The cantor is more efficient, but not by much.  Walking and trotting, on the other hand, are great paces for a horse if it is to travel long distances.  Horses have very narrow  ranges of optimum speeds.  People can tweak these ranges through breeding altering musculature and leg length, but the horse is a four speed creature with two economy speeds.

 

You might think leg length is an important determinant of the best running speeds in humans, but a look at elite runners - both distance and sprint - show they are mostly of average height.  At six foot five Usain Bolt is a rare exception, but he is the exception in several other metrics.  

 

An examination of the energy used to travel a fixed distance in running is fairly constant over a wide range of speeds - something that is unexpected and very different from horses and other four legged mammals. Adding to the puzzle is the most efficient walking speed.

 

I like to walk and have been on long walks with a variety of people. Most of us are of differing heights, but the average speed we walk at tends to be not that much different from the speed we use when we’re walking along.  Most people walk somewhere between 3.0 and 3.4 miles per hour.  The efficiency of walking is strongly peaked.  If you walk at your own natural cadence you will burn fewer Calories per mile than you would if you were walking at a faster or slower pace.

 

This is very curious as people have very different leg lengths.  At six foot one, but long waisted my 31 inch inseam gives me much shorter legs than six foot seven Colleen’s 40 inch inseam measurement, but her optimal walking speed is only a bit higher than mine and is a small amount lower than another friend who has shorter legs than me.  We give up some efficiency, but it is generally easy for us to adapt our speeds to that of our friends and visa-versa.¹

 

The physics and biology of mammalian location is non-trivial and still under active investigation.  A recent paper that looked into the activity of some skeletal muscles involved in walking and running gives some fascinating insight that paints a picture deeper than the problem at hand.²

 

It turns out it is difficult to directly measure the efficiency of a specific muscle while it is working, but measuring its electrical activity with electromyography is a good proxy and you can estimate efficiency.  Seventeen people were wired up and put on treadmills and asked to move at a variety of paces.  Thirteen muscles were monitored and the muscle activity per distance travel was recorded.

 

 

The results are fascinating.  The plot on the left shows the speed at which a particular muscle was most efficient with walking in black and running in grey.  The plot on the right shows the speed of peak efficiency for each subject for walking and running.

 

Note that the muscle efficiencies don’t peak at the same walking speed - there is quite a bit of variation, particularly in running.  Individually our leg skeletal muscles are not optimally efficient at a single speed. 

 

You might think this is some sort of evolutionary failure, but it is probably the opposite.  We don’t spend our time walking at the same speed even though we do have an optimal walking speed.  We have the need for doing many other activities.  We climb, dance, kick, sprint and have the need to match speeds of others.  These different activities involve each of the muscles in different degrees.  We don’t have the best possible efficiency at our optimal walking speed, but we have a huge amount of flexibility and we have a very wide range of running speeds at ok efficiencies.  Often we are more efficient than the horse - my niece Magi participated in a man vs horse race and dropped all of the horses. 

 

This illustrates something deep.

 

The best general purpose optimization often involves a mixture of non-optimized components.  Making each component as good as it can be by itself and allowing it to operate where it runs best usually results in a larger system that is far from optimal.  This is central to engineering which is the practice of finding and harmonizing a variety of pieces into a whole which is the best compromise.³

 

 

_________

¹ How people communicate the proper walking speed is a fascinating look into the subtle non-verbal ways we communicate with others.

 Note if you are walking for exercise and walk over a fixed distance slowing down or speeding up from your normal pace will burn more energy. Speeding up burns the most and if you are walking for a fixed amount of time - say and hour - the higher speed will usually burn the most energy.  

The relationship between efficiency, performance and physical size is a rich subject area and sport is an excellent lens to illuminate interesting questions.

 

² The musculoskeletal system of humans is not tuned to maximize the economy of locomotion

David R. Carrier, Christoph Anders, and Nadja Shilling

Abstract

Humans are known to have energetically optimal walking and running speeds at which the cost to travel a given distance is minimized. We hypothesized that “optimal” walking and running speeds would also exist at the level of individual locomotor muscles. Additionally, because humans are 60–70% more economical when they walk than when they run, we predicted that the different muscles would exhibit a greater degree of tuning to the energetically optimal speed during walking than during running. To test these hypotheses, we used electromyography to measure the activity of 13 muscles of the back and legs over a range of walking and running speeds in human subjects and calculated the cumulative activity required from each muscle to traverse a kilometer. We found that activity of each of these muscles was minimized at specific walking and running speeds but the different muscles were not tuned to a particular speed in either gait. Although humans are clearly highly specialized for terrestrial locomotion compared with other great apes, the results of this study indicate that our locomotor muscles are not tuned to specific walking or running speeds and, therefore, do not maximize the economy of locomotion. This pattern may have evolved in response to selection to broaden the range of sustainable running speeds, to improve performance in motor behaviors not related to endurance locomotion, or in response to selection for both.

 

 

³ A week or so ago I was in an email conversion where someone noted a Steve Job’s quote and I reacted.  I think Apple is an excellent example of a company that understands not only how to make these engineering compromises, but also that the final product involves more compromises than are possible if you “just” use the discipline of engineering.  Consumer electronics has evolved beyond engineering.

 

[friend quoting Jobs} “When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.” - Steve Jobs

 

[me] Absolutely - and this is *so* different from ordinary engineering and product development. 

 

[friend] How so?

 

[me] This is a *very* long subject so I'll try to just hit a few points.  Engineering is all about finding a compromise among various components to create something that makes specifications.  Great engineers are really good at this and I have enormous respect.  The key point is there is an end point - after all, something has to ship on a certain schedule.  When you are doing this you can only work within a fixed domain.  It can happen that you bump into something new as you work on something, but that is rare and certainly not your job description.  In recent years the goals of a product are specifications and hitting price targets.

 Apple certainly does engineering, but it is a different scale.  Other non-engineering disciplines are involved.  During the design phase there is this tendency to keep going deeper.  Occam's razor is a fundamental driving principal.  You need to simplify wherever possible *even* if you didn't think it was possible at first.  There is also a sense of artistic elegance and pride that comes into the optimization.

All of these competing subcomponents and pieces of software have qualities of their own - along with time dependent evolution curves.  You need to be suboptimal on several to make the global result better.   Much of conventional engineering ignores the fact that real consumers also like to see elegance and a simple UX mixed in too … in fact those may be the defining characteristics of a product.  And the product needs to dance properly with other products in addition to the person who uses it.  Getting these details right is an entirely different skill set and Apple has built an organization that understands this deeply.  Artists get it deeply. 

 Jobs once described himself not as a technologist, but rather as an artist who paints with technologies.    

My heritage and way of looking at the world is through the perspective of science.  Here you are trying to figure out how nature works.  There is an absolute you are working towards, but she tends to reveal herself only when questioned properly and then only a bit at a time as you need to find better questions to progress.  I was not attracted to biology or chemistry as they are so complex.  (they are still very beautiful - but it is a preference of mine)  I found physics to be my sport as it is so simple - you only look at the most simple systems, but you want to go in as deeply as possible. The idea is to find the really fundamental questions.  I find the people who have sensibilities most similar to mine are artists and composers.  

Apple is the company with these sensibilities as they are trying to peel the onion back as they progress.  The analogy isn't great - they are probably closer  to biology as they are working in a complex environment -- Jobs, in a different time and if he would have had academic leanings - may have made a great biologist.

As these products that combine art, electronics and computation progress conventional engineering is going to be an increasing failure as a global solution.  It is a piece of what needs to be done, but the integration with other disciplines is central and, I think, a requirement for success in at least the consumer product environment.   There are so many things that need this approach.  It is terrifically exciting. 

 

apple stores and jc penny

I found myself thinking about Apple Stores the other day...

 

It turns out I know a bit about audio and it occurred to me that I should ask for help in selecting audio gear for a household that has iPhones and iPads given how many manufacturers have entered the market.  How would they steer me?  As there are 11 Apple Stores in NJ and several in Manhattan I would have a chance to get a reasonable sample.  So I went in asking the questions of an average consumer who doesn’t know much about audio ... five stores in about a week and very similar answers at each.

 

All of them, despite the large number of customers, took their time with me and four of them pointed me to the resident expert who knows about audio.  All of them gave an answer that would give me minimal configuration grief, good enough sound quality given my tastes, and a reasonable cost to fit my budget.  In fact three of the audio experts gave excellent advice that would save money encouraging buying kit not in the store.

 

Very different answers than I would have heard at a big box store, a Bose mall store or a dedicated audio shop.  What I got was a pragmatic answer with several viable options.¹

 

Something you couldn’t get at Amazon either as there is far too much noise in the recommendations.

 

Something is working.

 

When I first visited an Apple Store in the early days (my first purchase was the original iPod on the day they were released), it was a place where Mac fans gathered.  Sort of a clubhouse where people went to talk.  The first visit saw me purchase the iPod, but I hung around chatting with other customers and employees enjoying cookies and fruit juice provided by the store.

 

Over the years the cookies and fruit juice disappeared and were replaced by increasing numbers of non-Mac customers.  Curiously those of us who knew something about Macs or iPods would give advice to other people who were waiting for a clerk or just looking.  Showing up a few hours early to buy a new version of OS X or the latest iPhone was a fun experience.  The place was incredibly social.  

 

Some of the stores developed reputations.  Since you could use available Macs for anything as long as you weren’t getting in the way, students would use expensive software to get work done.  It was common to see teens working on video and music projects after school often with help from the store clerks.  The stores started hiring software specialists.

 

The SoHo store in Manhattan developed a reputation as one of the best places to pick up dates for awhile and people in their twenties made trips just to hang around.  A few of the stores, including that one, began to offer live music nights as a part of promoting iTunes music.

 

There has been a constant evolution within the stores, but there is a strong link between the functionality of the product and making the customer happy.  You generally have just enough choices to consider and helpful people - employees or other customers - to guide you through the choices.  Pricing tends to be stable so you don’t have to worry about wading through  another layer of information.  There is some of it that feels very much like Trader Joe’s. ²

 

And now Ron Johnson, the guy who was responsible for Apple Stores, is running JC Penny and they have begun to announce their changes.   Many companies just redesign logos and shuffle management, but I suspect Johnson will go far beyond the new logo and simplified pricing they've announced.

 

Department store retail is as broken as computer stores were and much can be done.  It made me wonder about areas that are ripe for change and what that change might be.  This certainly isn’t advice for Mr Johnson as he has undoubtedly spent a lot of time thinking wrestling with the issues and is a proven expert in retail change, but it is interesting to think through this sort of thing as it will differ widely across companies.  What would you change and what changes would you make in your company or companies you regularly deal with? 

 

JC Penny sells a lot of clothing.  Women are primary customers and there is a lot of research, including my own, that shows the shopping experience is far from optimal.  Sizing is broken, selection is often broken, there is a need for information on what looks good on a person, getting good clerks is often difficult, pricing is confusing and so on...

 

At the same time apparel is a large part of the economy and we all need clothes.  Fashion can be very enjoyable to many as can be an artistic expression and enhancement of self - amplifying good features and hiding the less than good - and is a form of social communication. 

 

I spent some time talking with Sukie and some female friends about this and adding my own thoughts.  So in addition to things like lining up the right brands for the customers and other normal approaches here are a few thoughts from the peanut gallery.  The caveat is obvious if you've ever seen my clothing, but Sukie and some friends have excellent fashion taste and I listen well.

 

° Attack the sizing issue

This will take a long time to get right, but a good start would be to match someone up with clothing that is likely to fit and to concentrate the selection.  Since different lines have roughly consistent sizing within the line it might be possible to take someone’s measurements as well as a list of clothing that mostly fits and make predictions.  If the store is made of of small regions each of which represents a different line, the shopper could then visit areas with much higher probabilities of finding a fit.

 

Have some tailors on hand and take a complete set of measurements a few times a year as part of the experience.  This can be kept on file and used to match people directly with the clothing.  A database of preferences can also be assembled and folded in with current street fashion information.

 

There can be expert advice from the tailors as well as from street fashion experts - sort of a genius bar for fashion.

 

° Get social locally, nationally and internationally

Understand Pinterest.  Have staff members who understand street fashion and get involved in it.  Be able to help customers get social advice and feedback from the segments of the population they want their fashion to communicate with.  You don’t need experts in each branch of fashion at every store, but you might have someone who can bring in these people on video chats.

 

Create social fashion places on the web that the customers can be part of.  Pinterest is a much better potential partner than FaceBook or Google and it may make sense to have a dedicated site if it can be scaled, but getting customer involvement would be a big thing.  

 

Encourage expert street fashion bloggers in different regions.  What is going on in Manhattan vs Chicago?  It would be difficult to find people at the Bill Cunningham level, but they are extremely important.

 

° Teach people more about creating their own look. 

Seminars in store and online.  Don’t worry about bringing in third parties - you might tell someone she would be terrific with something from Etsy for example.  Involve some of your customers in this as advisors and teachers.  Create a Fashion U.  Give several levels of interest reason to visit at least once a month.  

Recognize that fashion can and should be very personal.  It is much more rewarding for the wearer if she participates in the act.  That may be putting a wardrobe together completely from store purchased pieces or it may be more customized than that, but the final result can be special and may even be unique.  Fashion is meant to be an ephemeral expression and the creativity and participation of the wearer must be considered and respected.  You are not merely selling clothing, you are providing the raw materials of expression.  Perhaps the best service you can provide is to figure out how to enable her craft.  How does she collaborate, what inspires her and how does she create?

In many ways this may have come under the "get social" bullet

 

° Curate collections - emulate Trader Joe’s

Give customers concentrated selections of what they are likely to want.  This may be very regional and street fashion may inform you better than the ready-to-wear Fashion Week designers.  Channel Bill Cunningham locally.

 

° Improve the fitting experience

Solve issues of fitting and understanding what clothing will look like you under different lighting and with other types of clothing.  There are several technical solutions ranging from trivial to leading edge.  There is great opportunity to innovate and lead.

 

° Work towards the future - mass customization/made-to-measure

Move towards manufacturing made-to-measure clothing.  Even if you are matching people more closely with clothing there is still a frustration that not all interesting choices can be made to fit or are in the right color or style.  Reasonably priced made-to-measure is the disruptive future.  You can lead.

 

There are many other departments within Penny’s, but better apparel solutions would make a huge dent in the problem.  Beyond fair and square pricing and store design and functionality it will be fascinating to see where Johnson goes.³

 

How would you change a telco?  a movie company?  a restaurant chain? ...  your company?

________

¹ Drop a note if you are interested in comments and suggestions on inexpensive and low hassle room stereo solutions for AirPlay enabled devices. It was fascinating hearing what the Apple Store employees said and squaring that with my own recommendations.

² If  you are a fan of the store you know what I mean.  They do many things correctly and don't follow.  It certainly wouldn't hurt to have Trader Joes's or Apple Store calliber employees.  This part of the TJ's Fortune link is telling:

... "In the early days we never tried to be the neighborhood store," says a former employee. They didn't have to: Trader Joe's was the neighborhood store. And yet walk into the Chelsea location on a busy weekday night and you'll see something you almost never see in Manhattan: strangers chatting with one another. Veteran customers tell newbies what products they absolutely have to try, and serious cooks share tips on how to spike sauces and semi-prepared foods to make them even tastier.

³ Some good information from the horse's mouth here

 

 

 

 

tools for the mind

Much of the playing around with ideas that I do relies on visual thinking and drawing diagrams and just sketching an extremely important tool for me.  So important that I wish I had taken formal art classes.  Paper and pencil are great, but for standing or collaborating with others in a room I can think at a whiteboard, but a quality slate blackboard and good chalk “feels” better to me.

 

In the mid 90s AT&T split into AT&T and Lucent.  I had been working at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ but my move to AT&T Research meant a move to Florham Park, NJ.  The new location was a nice building in a very nice setting and a lot of attention was given to making us comfortable.  We had a lot of choice when it came to our office furnishings and - to me - the most important choice was slate vs whiteboard.¹

 

My first office had a great view and an even better piece of slate on the wall.  Bliss.  All was well with the world, but  and all was well with the world but a year later I moved to a different office with - shudder - a white board.  A bit of after-hours reconnaissance turned up a few slightly damaged slate boards in the basement and a Ben Franklin slipped to the head maintenance guy with my help at 6 am caused the white board to disappear and be replaced by the slate.  The chalk wasn’t great, but I knew where to buy the good stuff.

 

Sadly I’m no longer there - a loss of several fine minds and that big piece of slate.  As it happens one of the readers of this blog is now occupies that room enjoying “my” old slate.  Tom, I hope it is as good for you as it was for me. 

 

I use computers for sketching ideas, but the interface is not just as nice as the physical world   I use a Wacom tablet and SketchBook Pro on my Mac - good enough, but not great.  Better yet is Procreate on an iPad.  A third party pressure sensitive pen will be out in a few months and, if the iPad 3 appears, I may cave and make the purchase.

 

But for working something out nothing comes close to pencil and paper.  I constantly doodle and sketch as part of thinking and manipulate a lot of equations by hand. Pencils and paper are a wonderful technology for this purpose.²   But they begin to fall apart when you start to worry about authoring and making work, probably more polished work, available to others.

 

In many settings - particularly education - books still rule although many of them are appearing on ebook readers of one form or another.  I’m of the opinion that technology can be used as a supporting tool that can be used to help revolutionize education. It should not be central and arguably a revolution can take place without technology - my path was reasonably computer-free until I was in college and might be considered revolutionary by today’s standards.  But I think it is important to rethink the interaction between teacher and student as well as among students and rethink what a book is.  Augmented books show a lot of promise and may fit into some rethinking of education, although it will take decades to really sort out what works and what doesn’t - but for the time being there is a large authoring problem.

 

 

ebook authoring tools basically suck and there are a variety of standards.  Without waking up that dragon I note that Apple’s iBook Author and iTunes U announcement represents the first easy to use authoring tool for next generation ebooks.  There are any number of issues and the program is in its infancy.  Hopefully others will compete and hopefully they’ll create human usable tools.  I do worry that it may take a for profit company to play this game as the open source community has a poor track record when usability is involved. 

 

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I spent the morning playing with Apple’s program and sent this note to some folks who are interested in education.  Any comments about this class of learning are appreciated - if anyone wants to talk about such things.  This was a quickly written email that was just capturing my immediate thoughts.  They’ve advanced a bit since then, but this captures what struck me at the time

 

I like playing with tools and product rather than reading reports, so when I found myself with three spare hours this morning I decided to spend it with iBooks Author - the free iBook authoring tool Apple announced yesterday along with the expansion of iTunes U and iBooks 2.  It gave a few answers and opened many more questions.

 

To first order Author is a mixture of Pages and Keynote - since I don't use MS Office I'm reasonably skilled in both of these and my learning curve was small. For test content I tried a few chapters of the energy book I had been writing with my volleyball friend Colleen as well as a couple of chapters I had contributed to a technical book (astrophysics) a few years ago.

 

There is a huge need for a good ePub3 authoring tool and I was hoping for just that.  It is not a generic tool for any sort of publication.  The EULA restricts you to selling through Apple if you want money - you can put it up for free and (presumably) publish in other places.  Of course Amazon (unlike everyone else) doesn't support ePub3, so that is another issue.

 

Author can't handle technical formatting.  Equations are mostly laid out in LaTeX these days and it just doesn't work with that.  In theory you can use a third party app that allows you to render and put LaTeX into Pages and then import, but those tools are not very good and the one that sort of works costs about $60 for an academic license. This is a big hole for any middle school or beyond science text or any math book.  I tried to import a Pages document that had embedded LaTeX, but there were issues with the rendering and it was not possible to make changes in Author.  A big lose for me…

 

If you are adding multimedia, photos, slide presentations - etc - the process borders on being trivial.  The tool seems to be set up for fairly complex books - textbooks - with chapters, sections, subsections, appendices, glossaries and so on.  You could, in principle, create simpler books using it, but there is way too much stuff getting in your way.  I was hoping for something that I could just important a Pages document and use it for adding bits and pieces rather than getting involved in a major project.  This isn't it.  This is so much easier to use than Adobe or other standard authoring tools that there just isn't any comparison.  It is also $0 vs $a lot.  Of course you don't have many options if you want to make money.

 

It seems very well suited for largish projects that a textbook maker might do.  It also seems excellent for the sort of publications that some teachers might produce as their Summer projects  - it is almost tailor made for that.  

 

Well - almost well suited I should add.  There are no provisions for collaboration and none for automation - both seriously important if you have more than one person involved and if you plan on regular updates or perhaps a serialization.  Of course this is 1.0 and *every* 1.0 Apple product has been an outline of what eventually rolls out.  Perhaps Apple wants to get people used to the simple tool rather than overwhelming them (how un-MS and un-Adobe!)

 

The iBooks 2 app, and I didn't get to play with it much as Sukie owns the family iPad, in conjunction with iTunes U strikes me more as a course syllabus tool rather than a simple book reader.  You can, in theory, do a lot with it and it is much cheaper (free) than Blackboard which is a somewhat ugly and expensive, but nearly ubiquitous tool at many Universities.  Apple may have something here for HSs and Universities - but I would wait for comments from the edu crowd before commenting more than I have.

 

Apple tends to start small and then grow products.  There is a huge need for a simpler tool (yes - Pages can output ePub, but it isn't a real authoring tool for a book).  It would probably be too much for Apple to just announce something like that now - plus the people who would benefit are those who are motivated to sell on Amazon.  I suspect something will happen - perhaps it will be Pages '12 when that is finally announced.  It isn't a great leap to see Apple doing this.

 

They need to add bits and pieces that would make this a better technical tool. That means LaTeX or similar support.  They might also do something with Wolfram (a trusted source told me they have recently looked at buying Wolfram, but I have no idea what the status of that is - it certainly makes sense as it links in with Siri)

 

In the end Apple wants to sell hardware.  I can't see many k12 schools jumping with the current book selection and shoes have to drop for that to improve.  Maybe a year from now. I can imagine a boatload of teachers creating content for it this Summer though and that may be important. If I was making ebook textbook content I would certainly consider a branch and the basic port would be easy … making it dance much more difficult.

 

The iTunes U part is potentially big and college students would be the ones buying the iPads rather than school districts.  There is a chance for some disruption here and the price of college texts is high enough that an iPad would pay for itself if you could get half of your books this way.    The openness of iTunes U and the universities offering free courseware is such that it would be very attractive for lifelong learners - I will certainly be using this part of it.

 

The K12 piece requires a cheaper iPad.  It appears that the iPad2 will continue to be sold - and that would be Apples standard pattern - iPods and iOS devices traditionally see version 2 models sold at a lower price point when version 3 is announced. If history is a guide I would expect a $349 price..  Apple may also add a stripper with limited memory (the additional memory isn't expensive, but it is an easy way to create a bump) or possible not having the camera - for $249 or $299.   If it was featureless enough - say 8 GB RAM and no camera, the $349 regular iPad 2 would still sell well along with the $499 iPad 3 (picking arbitrary numbers).  Of course pure speculation - but Apple needs to announce a cheap edu model and the announcement has to fit the k12 procurement cycle.

 

It strikes me this could be a powerful tool for eMagazines.  Not what currently exists, but the basic bits and pieces are there.  

 

There is a lot of promise, but there are some big holes that need filling before it is a real offering.  My guess is the holes are not there out of cluelessness….

 

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I welcome what Apple has done.  They are doing it primarily to make money, but it may ignite a competition to come up with something - one of the basic cogs of education - that better.  That is exciting.

 

And if you want to make a difference in your own visual thinking as well as that of your kids or students I strongly recommend learning a bit of art - just basic sketching.  Mine is self taught and crude, but has proven to be enormously powerful.  I frequently use it as a repeatable entry point for achieving “flow”.  It is a shame that art and music (also very important for thinking - more on that in a post to come) are not taught much these days. These are important tools for learning how to “connect the dots”.

 

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¹ I talked to the guy who runs the company that made the slate boards.  The last of the breed in the US and most of their business came from math and physics departments.  I assume if I hadn’t discovered the feel of a good piece of slate as an undergrad I would have come to love white boards and the smell of magic markers.

² Paper and pencils are a very personal thing.  Mostly I use art sketchpads, but I also love bound notebooks from Field Notes.  They have fine pencils too, but you need some sharpening technique.  pencilrevolution is  good resource for all things pencil.