omenti

connecting the dots with curiously ripe technologies

This will be a very short, but hopefully fascinating, post.  

 

People ask me about some of the more interesting projects I've worked on in the past ten years.  Some of them involve clever hacks and some of the more interesting involve position information - feel free to ask for details.  I've mentioned some like Air Graffiti and there are several others that I can talk about and some I can't.

 

What strikes me as interesting is there are types of practical questions that can be answered with brute force and cubic money and, at the same time, have very clever solutions that depend on a wee bit of coupled orthogonal thinking.  The later approach often depends on foundational technologies and science in which there are few short cuts, but benefits extend beyond the wildest dreams of the original implementors. Exactly where connecting-the-dots and having a lot of interests and the ability to dance with others who are very different from you come in handy.  I should add that it is really important to have a rich problem space and can also help a lot to be resource poor (money and people), but connection rich (several people with very different backgrounds and someone who can tie everything together).  Large well-funded projects with massive teams are rarely clever - large organizations that field cleverness tend to use very small working groups.

 

Rather than my rambling on,  take a look at this talk by Googler Michael Jones at the US Naval Institute and see if it doesn't leave you with some interesting questions and ideas   -  its popcorn time!

 

mean free paths - from pinafore to removing risk to custom design

It was a beautiful late Spring day and I found myself of singing a song from The Mikado as I strolled down West College past the Conservatory.  I'm not a good performer, but my rendition must have been recognizable as a chap walking next to me took the one of the other parts and we were doing a bit of harmony as our paths became a formation.  We stopped for the light, stopped and continued until we had finished.  I smiled and nodded.  He reciprocated, but then he started into the first song from  Pirates - We sail the ocean blue.  He had a strong voice and I followed him in whatever harmony I could muster.

 

We crossed the street and continued a block to the intersection next to the conservatory and more magic - two others joined and we continued walking until the song was over smiling broadly and nodding before we parted.

 

Oberlin, Ohio is a tiny town and we had all probably overshot our destinations as we sang together that day late in April 12 years ago.   It was a powerful manifestation of how serendipity - at least a certain type of serendipity - is possible when the mean free path between people with similar interests is small.

 

In physics mean free path roughly means the mean distance between objects that may collide - the mean free path between molecules in a very high pressure gas is less than that of one at a low pressure.  There is also a social mean free path and it is one of the reasons why cities, Silicon Valley, the restrooms and central atrium of Pixar, the old Bell Labs, and any number of other concentrations of talent are important.  Bring people within a few meters of each other and they interact.  Bring passionate and talented people within a few meters of each other and you may just get the unexpected.

 

These clusters may not be stable over time as people migrated - Brooklyn has become one of the East Coast regions that shrinks the mean free path between creative residents. Take a look at the Outlier video Om has featured for an excellent example of what a low mean free path can mean for someone interested in something novel in dungarees.  

 

Brooklyn has become so important for a certain type of young creative that the new Pixar building in California is known in some quarters as "Brooklyn"...  

 

Now back to Oberlin ..  There is enough talent in the Music Conservatory that it is possible for someone without great means (me) to have a piece of music composed.  You need to be tapped into the roots of the beast - I was an adjunct professor there for several years as part of a joint AT&T Research/Oberlin College Music Conservatory project.¹  This position gave me a rich interaction with students and faculty often into the wee hours of the morning with drink and good food.  Ideas would bounce around and people began to sense a few new possibilities that would normally remain hidden.  These things can and do happen over the Internet, but their cross section - the probability of them happened and being recognized as interesting - is much lower.  Our online environment, rich as it is,  is much less sophisticated and rich than the real world

 

Under the right conditions the Internet can decrease the mean free path between parties. Long distance mentor relations and even a few projects.  The problem is finding people well matched for serendipity and creativity.  A large amount of research has gone into creativity in individuals and groups.  To date online creativity - the connecting the dots/serendipity kind - is still a loooooooong way from face to face human interaction.  

 

But the Net can help creative enterprises - often at crucial movements.  Om has recently talked about Kickstarter.  Now most projects proposed on Kickstarter fail, but well thought out and articulated projects do succeed providing enough money to get them over a critical initial hump.  

 

Perhaps just as important is a funded project also gives insight into potential market size.  I know someone with a fairly well known podcast.  Some people had encouraged him to make a transcript of all of the shows aired to date available for sale.  Unfortunately the problem with this is he had about sixty hours of material and even the cheapest transcription services would introduce a risk of several thousand dollars if people didn't purchase the final product.  There was also an issue of understanding how to price it and if a print or ebook version should be made.  

 

He decided to turn it into a Kickstarter project and learned (a) there was a market large enough to support the transcription and editing effort, and (b) the price he picked was considered reasonable by those who bit - two absolutely vital pieces of information acquired with almost no risk.  His success gave me paused and made me think of a few small projects I've seen fail due to incorrect estimates of these questions.  

 

The Kickstarter approach may be superior to funding it yourself even if you have the money as it provides a sandbox to answer potential market size and price questions

 

One of you (the Jheri of the Jeri/Jerry/Jheris I know) happens to be very tall and hard to fit - not only clothing, but also airline seats, countertops, chairs and so on.  She introduced me to her taller friend Colleen.  Both of them don't think about their poor fit that often as you get used to your environment and learn to compromise, but being different can take a physical toll with bad backs being far too common in that crowd.  It is good to have friends like this as they provide a rich problem space you may not have considered.

 

I decided to work on a simple cutting board for Colleen who happens to love to cook.  It turns out there have been numerous studies on work surface positioning for almost every body type and physical condition.  It became clear a raised wooden board would be the best bet and I had one made for her as the cost of hardwood is so high that a woodworking shop could do it at a lower cost than I could and they would probably do a better job.   The owner of the shop became interested in the idea of making this a product and Colleen put together a page promoting it as she loved hers.²  A bit of asking around got the attention of a well-known women's tv show and they wanted to feature it.  The problem was they also demanded a copy be given to everyone in the audience in a special "tall" show.  In the end the cost of doing that was greater than the profit made selling these online.  The product remains as it is custom made for the user, but I don't think they have made  profit on it.  

 

In retrospect this may have been a great Kickstarter project.  Although it is custom made by a small shop the more important function of Kickstarter would have been gauging the size of the market before any major effort was undertaken.  It may also have allowed a volume purchase of hard maple as well as specialized shipping materials.

 

The other project that should have been done on Kickstarter was an attempt to make very long inseam jeans for tall women.  The designer spent about a year online lining up customers, finding a boutique manufacturer and so on.  He rounded up about 2,000 firm commitments that they would buy - enough to allow an initial low volume production run and sell them at a reasonable price.  Based on these commitments he went ahead with a somewhat smaller run to err on the side of caution thinking 500 or so would bring him close enough to break even that he could proceed.  Unfortunately only about 25 orders materialized and he lost a large amount of money.³  The beauty of Kickstarter is that not only must a threshold be reached to start a project, but the money will be there once the threshold is signup period has successfully concluded. 

 

We are moving to a world where individualization and shared design and intellectual property will become much more common.  The Maker movement provides some fuel for this and grassroot interaction street fashion is likely to become important. Sites like Etsy as outposts for the tiny manufacturers and spaces like Pinterest for matching interests with the makers.  There will probably be a lot of evolution and new thinking in this area - current sites and tools aren't up to the task.  We may be at a diamonds on the beach period.

_________

¹ At once the least musical and most mathematical faculty ever associated with the place

² It turns out the standard countertop height in the US is 36" and was determined in an ad hoc fashion when cabinets began to be mass produced for the great suburban expansion after WWII.  This turns out to be optimal for a 5'4 to 5'5" cook.  Significantly shorter or taller cooks will have ergonomic issues and those who are seriously away from average can experience pain bending or an inability to comfortably reach the surface.  On the tall side the threshold is around 5'10 - certainly cooks 6' or taller should use a higher surface.  The shop own and I both thought this meant a market might exist. If you think you might use one I can give a strong recommendation to AWP.

Before settling on a simple raised table I was interested in an adjustable board.  It presented a challange so I attempted to crowd source some solutions from readers of another blog of mine  here and here adding some notes on design. Some ideas were submitted, but nothing earth-shattering, so I went with a simple table.  There are times when brute force is appropriate.

³ It turns out 20:1, 50:1 or even 100:1 ratio between people who say they will order a product and those who follow through is common in apparel

________________

And a recipe.  I needed chocolate and pistachios recently.  In order to manage my weight and deal with Sukie's chocolate allergy a few neighbors had a happy evening.

 

Chocolate Pistachio Cookies
 

Ingredients

° 185 g  (6.5 oz) shelled pistachios

° 28 g (2 tbl) unsalted butter

° 115 g (4 oz) unsalted butter, sliced into tablespoons

° 115 g (4 oz) bittersweet chocolate, chopped - I used Lindt

° 1.5 tsp vanilla extract

° 60 g (1/2 cup) AP flour

° 35 g natural cocoa powder

° 1/2 tsp baking powder

° 1/2 tsp fine grained sea salt

° 100 g (1/2 cup) white sugar

° 2 large eggs 

° 1.5 tsp vanilla extract - you need the real stuff - mine is rum based

° 120 g chopped milk chocolate - again I used Lindt ..  reliable for baking

Technique

* Place one oven rack at the center of the oven and preheat to 350°F

° Line two cookie sheetswith a silicone mat or parchment paper.

° Spread the pistachios on an unlined baking sheet and bake for ten minutes until golden brown, Remove from oven and immediately add the 28g butter and stir well. Set aside to cool.

* Melt chocolate and remaining butter together in a microwave oven. Stir together until smooth and set aside to cool slightly as you beat the eggs. While the chocolate is melting combine the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt in a food processor and pulse to blend completely. 

* Combine the eggs and sugar and beat until they become pale yellow and light in texture. Stir in the chocolate. When it is mostly incorporated, add the vanilla. When the vanilla has been incorporated, add the flour mixture and stir gently to blend. When the flour is almost completely absorbed, add the pistachios and milk chocolate folding into the batter. It will be dark and shiny with a texture similar to marshmallow Fluff.

° Spoon about a heaping tablespoon (or 1.5 inch ice cream scoop) of dough onto the sheet tray for each cookie, arranging them in a 3X4 pattern on the tray. Bake the trays one at a time on the center rack in the oven for 10-12 minutes. The cookies will rise slightly, develop a shiny crust and appear to be just set. Let them cool for two minutes and then loosen the bottoms from the lined tray. Let them finish cooling on the sheet trays or move them to racks depending on the final texture you want - experiment the first time.

 

 

 

leading horses as well as choosing them

Earlier today I received a note from Jheri about her grades for thetwo remote courses she recently finished.  I had offered to help her with differential equations if she had any problems with the course, but other than suggest and grade some interesting practice problems I didn't do anything.  She is exceptionally motivated and breezed through this and a biology course. It must have been challenging as she has a career that involves a boatload (well - planeload) of international travel.  

 

So three cheers for Jheri!  I am toasting her with some proper homemade ice cream tonight.

 

Jheri is now in her mid 20s and was a poor student in high school.  There were some reasons for this, but the bottom line is that she wasn't ready to learn.  We have an education system that assumes a readiness on the part of the student across many subjects that is probably optimal for a small minority.  But now she wants it and is focused on learning biology and has been finding math and science come easil to her.  I'm not surprised - she has a sparkling curious mind and has discovered the wonderful ignorance that science provides..  She has a career, but is getting a bit of schooling in her spare time and will soon quit and go full time.  I wouldn't be surprised to see her go on for an advanced degree.

 

I'm finding something similar about myself.  I was extremely interested in math and science as a kid and far to focused. (another Jeri knew me a bit then and will probably vouch for that)  Then I found myself as an undergrad in a school that was really a glorified trade school.  I tested out of many of the "non important" subjects and continued my singular focus.  Grad school was a mentor relation that focused almost entirely on physics.  As a result I'm extremely narrow - something that has been bothering me a lot. I have been developing interests in history, art and music playing with these a bit as a curious amateur. Perhaps one day I'll go to a real university and learn how to ask a few questions in these areas in much greater detail.  At least I am identifying my ignorance and am curious enough to learn.  It doesn't matter that I don't know much - at least not to me.  

 

Being ready to learn happens in areas you may not immediately suspect.  The men's volleyball team at UC Irvine took the NCAA Division 1 championship this past weekend.  Except for volleyball they have an unremarkable athletic department, but head coach John Speraw is one of those remarkable characters who is both cerebral and humble.  He knows that he doesn't know and seems to delight in learning.

 

Speraw hasn't been with Irvine that long, but has managed to put together three national championships.  During the last season he raised eyebrows when he hired a female psychologist with no volleyball experience as one of his assistant coaches - even though the program is too small to support full time assistant coaches.  This weekend he praised her noting she gave him and the team the right tools to do the remarkable.  Of course they, as an organization, had to be radically different from the standard men's volleyball team in order to understand, modify and implement what she was telling them.  Speraw observes, experiments and learns from his successes and failures.  He has turned his staff onto his techniques and the players are doing the same.  UC Irvine now has a learning organization that is crushing organizations with rich histories and much larger financial resources.  My guess is more than a few men's programs will hire psychologists and most (all?) of them will be too inflexible to learn and adapt.  In the meantime John will find other tools.

 

One wonders about the parallels with other organizations - corporations for example.  

 

When are companies ready to learn and can you identify them by the questions they are asking?  Does their thinking become calcified over time and do they see a need to learn and adapt?  Where do they find the questions to learn from and what are their mechanisms for dealing with the questions? Do they have an institutional learning process and an institutional memory to take advantage of their learnings?  Do they recognize the value of failure?  Do they recognize the value of play?  Are those charged with running the company curious enough to ask questions or have they followed a path that has given them success to date giving them an artificial sense of confidence?   How do they select and promote employees at all levels and is the ability and readiness to learn part of the process?

 

My guess is learning organizations are probably rare.  I'm reasonably familiar with Apple and Pixar and both are great examples where learning is central. I'm also familiar with many others that are mostly unable - or at least unready - to learn. 

 

Is your organization curious enough?  Does it actively identify, cultivate and celebrate its ignorance?  Is it diverse enough to connect dots and identify potentially new areas of ignorance  - areas that, when explored by the right people will illuminate opportunity that others hadn't considered.

 

Think about the last paragraph and imagine Apple and Pixar. Try it again with average organizations you know.

 

 It makes me think of how new ideas and techniques are identified and, if useful, implemented.   Many companies follow bandwagons - some companies sort out the world by asking the right questions and blaze their own paths, but many become little more than buzzword compliant with a considerable amount of time, talent and money in the process.

 

I think data mining and "big data" (I dislike both terms for a variety of reasons - sit me down with some cold milk and fresh cookies and I'll go into detail) are a great example of the potential success and failure of institutional learning.  A few organizations will understand what they are doing deeply enough to be able to play in this area effectively, but many are probably going to fail as has been true with many "next big things" over time.

 

You really need to understand something deeply enough to know if there is a there there.  I was drawn to physics as, in principal, it is so simple.  Simple enough that you have some hope of asking fundamental questions in a productive fashion.  But add a bit of complexity and the world rapidly becomes far too complex to understand at a fundamental level.  There may be levels of possible understanding that describe it that, if you are sufficiently clever, allow you identify those techniques that will work for your organization.

 

The term "data" is highly contextual - so much that I try not to use it.  It isn't a fundamental piece of information, but rather is a cloud of information surrounding the core of what you think it is.  Some of this cloud may be obvious and some may be hidden.  As an example consider this well-known description of an email problem.  The system is relatively simple (I've written successful email gateways so they must be simple), but the description assumes you have a bit of familiarity with the subject.  Feel free to skip over it if your eyes glaze over - the point is there was an obscure condition that eluded detection resulting in some puzzling behavior.

 

The following is the 500-mile email story in the form it originally appeared, in a post to sage-members on Sun, 24 Nov 2002.:

From trey@sage.org Fri Nov 29 18:00:49 2002
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002 21:03:02 -0500 (EST)
From: Trey Harris <trey@sage.org>
To: sage-members@sage.org
Subject: The case of the 500-mile email (was RE: [SAGE] Favorite impossible
    task?)

Here's a problem that *sounded* impossible...  I almost regret posting the
story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a
conference. :-)  The story is slightly altered in order to protect the
guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the
whole thing more entertaining.

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when
I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte.  "Come again?"

"We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated.  "A
little bit more, actually.  Call it 520 miles.  But no farther."

"Um... Email really doesn't work that way, generally," I said, trying to
keep panic out of my voice.  One doesn't display panic when speaking to a
department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like
statistics.  "What makes you think you can't send mail more than 500
miles?"

"It's not what I *think*," the chairman replied testily.  "You see, when
we first noticed this happening, a few days ago--"

"You waited a few DAYS?" I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice.  "And
you couldn't send email this whole time?"

"We could send email.  Just not more than--"

"--500 miles, yes," I finished for him, "I got that.  But why didn't you
call earlier?"

"Well, we hadn't collected enough data to be sure of what was going on
until just now."  Right.  This is the chairman of *statistics*. "Anyway, I
asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it--"

"Geostatisticians..."

"--yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within which we can
send email to be slightly more than 500 miles.  There are a number of
destinations within that radius that we can't reach, either, or reach
sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius."

"I see," I said, and put my head in my hands.  "When did this start?  A
few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at that
time?"

"Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it.
But I called him, and he said he didn't touch the mail system."

"Okay, let me take a look, and I'll call you back," I said, scarcely
believing that I was playing along.  It wasn't April Fool's Day.  I tried
to remember if someone owed me a practical joke.

I logged into their department's server, and sent a few test mails.  This
was in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and a test mail to my own
account was delivered without a hitch.  Ditto for one sent to Richmond,
and Atlanta, and Washington.  Another to Princeton (400 miles) worked.

But then I tried to send an email to Memphis (600 miles).  It failed.
Boston, failed.  Detroit, failed.  I got out my address book and started
trying to narrow this down.  New York (420 miles) worked, but Providence
(580 miles) failed.

I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sanity.  I tried emailing a
friend who lived in North Carolina, but whose ISP was in Seattle.
Thankfully, it failed.  If the problem had had to do with the geography of
the human recipient and not his mail server, I think I would have broken
down in tears.

Having established that--unbelievably--the problem as reported was true,
and repeatable, I took a look at the sendmail.cf file.  It looked fairly
normal.  In fact, it looked familiar.

I diffed it against the sendmail.cf in my home directory.  It hadn't been
altered--it was a sendmail.cf I had written.  And I was fairly certain I
hadn't enabled the "FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES" option.  At a loss, I
telnetted into the SMTP port.  The server happily responded with a SunOS
sendmail banner.

Wait a minute... a SunOS sendmail banner?  At the time, Sun was still
shipping Sendmail 5 with its operating system, even though Sendmail 8 was
fairly mature.  Being a good system administrator, I had standardized on
Sendmail 8.  And also being a good system administrator, I had written a
sendmail.cf that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable
names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark
codes that had been used in Sendmail 5.

The pieces fell into place, all at once, and I again choked on the dregs
of my now-cold latte.  When the consultant had "patched the server," he
had apparently upgraded the version of SunOS, and in so doing
*downgraded* Sendmail.  The upgrade helpfully left the sendmail.cf
alone, even though it was now the wrong version.

It so happens that Sendmail 5--at least, the version that Sun shipped,
which had some tweaks--could deal with the Sendmail 8 sendmail.cf, as most
of the rules had at that point remained unaltered.  But the new long
configuration options--those it saw as junk, and skipped.  And the
sendmail binary had no defaults compiled in for most of these, so, finding
no suitable settings in the sendmail.cf file, they were set to zero.

One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to the
remote SMTP server.  Some experimentation established that on this
particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a
connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.

An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100%
switched.  An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting
the POP and reaching a router on the far side.  So time to connect to a
lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be
governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by
incidental router delays.

Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:

$ units
1311 units, 63 prefixes

You have: 3 millilightseconds
You want: miles
        * 558.84719
        / 0.0017893979

"500 miles, or a little bit more."

 

 

This example is really easy - it involved a well-defined system built around logical constructs.¹  Understanding humans and human behavior is much more difficult and anyone who says they can is naïve and/or lying.  Data mining may give candidate shards of information, but they are highly contextual and you must know the steps used to gather, filter and process the information and how reliable they are.  You had damn well know the errors and error propagation.  And even then the resulting information may not be terribly useful as human behavior isn't exactly an axiomatic system.

 

It is more important to develop a deep understanding of what you need to know.  You must learn what it is you need to know and how to get a "good enough" approximation.  For companies like Apple, Pixar, Trader Joe's, and Lululemon success doesn't rest on data mining, but on other techniques.  It is likely data mining techniques wouldn't be terrible useful to these companies for their current products.  It may be that Apple finds some great uses as Siri builds out, but for now great design doesn't rest on it.

 

I suspect the companies successful with data mining will be vendors who sell to the masses and don't really care about the results as long as the money keeps coming in along with a few companies who have learned there is a solid niche for them and can ask the right questions to know the information produced is robust enough to make a material difference in their bottom line.  I suspect the later group will be made up with companies who are indeed ready to learn.

_________

I'm very proud of Jheri!  Here is the ice cream I'll make in her honor defrosting some wild blueberries that were picked last Summer at peak season.  I'll follow it with a quick recipe for something really simple.

The photo is of Colleen enjoying the same recipe on one of her visits.  You always give the dasher to the honored guest.

There are many ways to make ice cream - I use a simple refrigerated freezer that gets reasonably cold.  Liquid nitrogren techniques are even better if you have access.  Drop me a note if you are interested.  Also I have more than a few great ice cream recipes from years of experimentation starting with Steve in the dorm basement at Stony Brook.  We literally wore out three freezers during our experiments.

 

Blueberry Ice Cream

       Ingredients

           

        (all ingredients should be very fresh)

° 2 large pasteurized eggs 

° 1.25 c white sugar (if the berries are extra sweet, cut the sugar a bit)

° 2 c blueberries - or flash frozen from last season

° juice of 1/2 lemon

° 2 c heavy cream

° 1 c whole milk

Technique

• toss blueberries, lemon juice, 1/2 c sugar in a small bowl, cover and refrigerate for a few hours tossing every half hour or so

• wisk eggs until fluffy, wisk in the sugar a bit at a time and then blend in the cream and milk

• mash the berry mix by hand and mix with dairy mixture

• churn freeze and season if you can stand the wait - I usually just eat it immediately!

 

^{OK now the simple recipe.}

The Un-Egg Cream

Too simple to talk about ingredients or technique.  I like the idea of an egg cream and this is a simple variation.  Get some seltzer or, better yet, Cherry 7-Up chilled to near freezing.  Pour some milk based drink, properly chilled into the glass - perhaps 50 grams or so (about two ounces).  Pour about five or six times as much of the bubbly fluid on top and rapidly stir with a long thin spoon.  

Very refreshing.  My favorite combination is Sunkist Naturals Pina Colada Protein Smoothie and Cherry 7-Up (diet or regular ... diet is probably somewhat healthier)

^_______

¹ There is a class of computer "failures" that are, at their hearts, insufficiently understood systems.  Often "data" is the issue

the equal sign

=

 

Equations are profoundly simple in concept - two calculations (one of them may reduce to something trivial like a statement) that may seem quite unrelated that have the same meaning. The "=" sign makes the connection.  Oddly enough, even though mathematics is very old, the symbol has been around for less than 500 years.  

To avoide the deiouse repetition of these woordes: is equalle to: I will sette as I doe often in woorke use, a paire of paralleles, or gemowe lines of one lengthe: =, bicause noe .2. thynges, can be moare equalle. 

Robert Recorde coined it as a shorthand for "is equal to" when he wrote The Whetstone of Witte in 1557.  The OED says gemowe means something like twin.  It proved useful and stuck.

 

In math the meaning of the equal sign is usually rigorous.  In science and many other disciplines it is often more nuanced whether we appreciate it or not.

 

One of the profoundly curious things about Nature is that so much of her can be approximately described using the language of mathematics.  A theory is often stated as a formula and extensions are sometimes made using rigorous mathematical extensions that turn out to describe something previously unseen.  At the very least these formulae give a powerful mechanism for playing with Nature and trying to understand a bit more deeply.  

 

It is dangerous to become too enamored with these relationships as they can fall apart when you are in new territory or if you are in a bit past your own understanding.  In fact this can be precisely where life gets interesting.  You think your measurement of something will give a certain result, but a careful experiment gives a slightly different result. No one has ever made a measurement quite this carefully.  You suspect something is wrong with your experimental apparatus or the steps you used to process the calculation and painstakingly eliminate any potential mistake.  At some point you become convinced that your result is correct and submit your result for peer review.  Ultimately the piece is published and the world takes notice and attempts to replicate your result. When they do it is time to recognize we need a richer description. Theorists may have constructions that immediately work or there may be nothing for years.  You have learned something about Nature at a more fundamental level than anyone else.  It can be an electric moment - the profound discoveries in science are not "aha!" moments, but rather usually begin with "that's odd..."

 

Imagine the discoveries you would make if your measurement tool had been a black and white camera and you suddenly were able to see the world in color.

 

This is why  improved tools that allow you to measure Nature in previously unexplored areas and at better accuracy are important.  Our senses, which turn out to be much more powerful than those of most animals, turn out to have dramatic limits.  Hearing only gives access to a tiny portion of the world of acoustic sound, our vision only explores a tiny section of the electromagnetic spectrum 

 

But the old equation still works for any measurement less accurate than yours and it still may be very useful to people.  You may only be thinking at the leading edge preferring the delightful ignorance you have just uncovered, but most of the rest of the world may be built on the earlier theory.  

 

Many of us build models of one type or another.  It is centrally important to construct an appropriate model.  It may be simple or complex, but it should be appropriate.  There are times when what you are interested in may be too difficult to measure, but a simple model may allow you to easily set an upper and/or lower limit that gives you insight.  And you have to avoid bias and not wed yourself to a model or the conclusion that an inappropriate model or calculation might give.¹  Unless you are doing math it is critical to remember that the sweet little notation that Mr Recorde gave us may only give an approximation and you really need to calculate a confidence level to make your result strictly accurate.

 

Our models usually don't need to be perfect, but they are an important mechanism to find answers and sometimes a bit of insight.  But remember that a they are never perfect representations and learn where they break down.  So much of what we do is really grey rather than black and white.

 

A Danish friend who happens to be a great Lego fan pointed out this fascinating Marvin Minsky interview where he speculates that mechanical engineers who grew up with legos may be more limited than those who grew up with Tinker Toys. 

 

But Minsky's point is valid even if he said it in jest.  Some models provide a richer insight into how the world works than others.  Playing with a diverse set of models can be enormously important.

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¹ Biases are very common.  Recently there was a lot of speculation on the cause for a decrease in miles driven in the US.  Many suggested it was caused by a change in how people between the ages of 18 and 30 relate to cars.  It turns out a more careful analysis shows this is only a small component, but so many people wanted to believe that youth are falling out of love with the automobile that they seized upon it.  In science there have been dramatic examples like the cold fusion debacle.  People wanted to believe it - so they did for awhile.  Some still cling to the belief more than twenty years later.

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The photo is an Instagram photo by silverstar22b

ignorance and thrivable science

OK - Jean is sitting up now...

 

A few people have asked questions and commented about the notion of ignorance so I'll continue to explain ignorance as cultivated by scientists.

 

The popular form of ignorance suggests a state of being uninformed.  But I'm talking about something that is deeply honest.  A recognition that you really don't know something.  If it is an area you are curious about you can begin to explore.  Is it worthwhile? Do you have a sense it is something that can be explored, how connected is it to other lines of exploration?

 

The process of learning more and exploring is a sharpening of the ignorance. The process of this curiosity driven ignorance is very dynamic whereas the standard form of ignorance tends to be static and dogmatic.   Using the old black cat in a pitch block room that scientists like to use, there are a lot of these rooms - some are empty, some have black cats and some have black non-cats that we might imagine as well as those we may not.   There are some ideas that seem great, but after years of pursuing them carefully you may not find anything, but you have learned something and perhaps can find some other entrances to ponder.

 

This is very different from the public perception of science which favors the great discoveries.  This makes science seem to be a deliberate and reliable method for learning new facts and even getting things done -  Just to this research and you will get a new battery for an electric car.  All you need is a pile of money and a group of scientists.

 

That can work for developing existing ideas.  Frequently the problems are so constrained that you can be fairly certain solutions exist and a scientific approach just works.  This is more of an applied science or perhaps engineering research.  It is the sort of thing that allows people who know the field well to predict slices of the future.  Most industrial labs live in this space. A few, like the old Bell Telephone Laboratories and parts of IBM's Watson Labs, actually did real science.  They, at least pieces of them, focused on what wasn't known.  They relied on the cultivated ignorance of some very talented people and changed the world.

 

As an example I was part of an applied group that had a very good idea of where digital music might be going.  We weren't in a position to predict winners and losers, but it was easy to project that five years out X would be possible and 10 years out Y would.  And we did something very similar for location based services.  Not that any of this was useful to our employer.  It also wasn't science. (scientists can be very good at engineering research)

 

Prediction can be an excellent mechanism for cataloging ignorance.  If you sit a scientist down and ask them to predict what might be in their field ten or fifteen years out, you will get some educated conjectures.  It is really a list of ignorance she has identified as ripe for cultivation and perhaps she is even beginning to sharpen it.  Really good scientific projections are very rare and probably no more than statistic flukes.  But cataloging ignorance is useful as it can illuminate potential pathways and asking your scientist friend what may happen is a good way to engage them in what is, for them, a very exciting process.

 

Cultivated ignorance is terribly exciting. Science is not a terribly easy sport, but this drives scientists to do it.   Admitting ignorance and moving on it is the point at which the questions sharpen and become more real.  It is the start of the journey and the end of the journey, like a great road trip, is not the point.  At some point there may be a discovery, measurement or non-discovery (which, as we mentioned, can be extremely important!), but that is not the goal of science.  What happens along the path is the creation of new questions.  Questions that weren't accessible and perhaps not even possible to express before and you realize the game is still afoot.

 

All of this is self-sustaining and quite thrilling.

 

 It is, I think, a manifestation of what my buddy Jean Russell would call thrivable. 

 

Along the way you've probably wondered why I haven't mentioned hypotheses - after all, don't scientists observe or theorize, make a clever hypothesis and then test it?  

 

I'm not terribly fond of that model. For one thing the real process is much more messy than that simple model.  Another is a hypothesis can be far too limiting.  People tend to come to believe them and not be as skeptical and curious as they should be - at least when you are working in new areas. Too much belief in a potential outcome can often lead you astray or not be sufficiently careful with your experimental procedure.  But there is a place where hypotheses develop more formally and you have to deal with them.

 

Scientists rate the quality of their ignorance as well as their findings.  You measure and report a statistically sound confidence level (scientists tend to understand statistics deeply).  This can get in the way of conveying science to the public as nothing is really black and white - finding can be proven wrong by experiment if that is the way Nature really works.  There is always a chance you haven't measured carefully enough - that something is wrong with your technique or that some other signal is present.  

 

 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 public expects black and white pronouncements and this breakdown was exploited by the tobacco industry in the 80s and 90s and have been exploited by the fossil fuel industry for more than a decade.  A few weeks ago someone asked me about the consequences of a scientifically literate vs illiterate public and these are beautiful manifestations of some of the issues.¹

 

If you know a scientist and want to really learn more about what they might be doing, the wrong question to ask is "what do you do?"  Some friends have asked me this and I'm sure most come up with the conclusion that I have no discipline and can't describe something that simple.  The right question is "what are you trying to find out?", "what would you really like to know?", "where are you stuck?", "what is unknowable these days?", "is there any progress in how well you can measure something?", "what would be really exciting to work on, but the technology isn't quite there yet?", "tell me about some new questions you would like to ask of Nature that have come to you in the last six months..."  

 

I've spent quite a bit of time trying to explain energy and power at a layman's level and haven't been terribly successful. On the other hand, when confronted with questions - the sort of questions I can't answer, people around me tell me I can be animated and perhaps even a bit interesting.  The level of the material changes from Russian doll science 101 explanations where you keep having to define and explain one set of things to cleanly explain another, to something crisper and much more respectful of your attention and mind.  I'm still hunting for some clear ways to do this and think they are out there, but I need to be more clever.

 

And that is an interesting point - information is being generated at a fantastic rate.  There is no way to keep up with it and that makes any field you aren't a specialist in seem inaccessible.  It reduces experts to high priests in lab coats who speak in a confusing tongue.  It renders science intimidating.

 

Scientists don't really worry about the information explosion at a core level of their curiosity.  Sure they may as necessary part of something they are working on - just ask an experimental particle physicist about his trigger logic or someone sequencing DNA about their data handling issues.  The important task is not information driven, although that is part of the process at some level.  What is important is being curious and able to recognize and cultivate your honest ignorance.  

 

The scientist deals with the explosion of information by realizing ignorance is growing at a much greater rate and this is a good thing.  You can pick a bite-sized piece off and jump in!

 

Dealing with ignorance is something scientists are great at.  Science can thrive - the information explosion is something of a red herring here. Science makes the Universe more accessible and, hopefully, science itself can be more accessible to the public.

 

The black cat and pitch black room metaphor may not be the best.  A great professor of mine explained cultivated ignorance in terms of surfing (this was in Southern California, so do as the natives).  First click here to set the mood with a bit of background music - I loved these guys when I lived there and recommend the electronic version of Pipeline

 

Imagine surfing this big frothy wave.  As you act on your cultivated ignorance (he used the phrase targeted ignorance) you keep moving along and you begin to realize there are other waves that you never noticed before that you can move along to that will take you even farther.  Making it to the beach becomes just silly as you realize you can go forever.

 

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¹ As something is verified and re-verified with increasingly accuratue experiments its  confidence level increases it takes on a more solid nature - perhaps this is moving towards an honest and generally accepted hypothesis. Proving it wrong means you have to be increasingly careful when you do your experiment.  The speed of light, the core notion of evolution, and basic quantum mechanics have very high levels of confidence attached to them.  It makes sense to keep testing them as techniques improve, but it is unlikely that you'll prove them wrong (still it would be thrilling!)  

It is usually the case that science usually builds on itself rather than going through true revolutions.  Newtonian physics breaks down in certain areas - the very small and the very fast for example.  In these regimes quantum mechanics and special relativity are better descriptions of Nature, but they are no better than Newtonian physics at describing much of the world we live in.  We can say with some confidence that the simple Newtonian physics that describes the mechanics of a car will not change.  Relativity and Quantum Mechanics both reduce to Newtonian physics as speeds and sizes become closer to the physical world we feel and observe with our naked senses.

 

probing ignorance a bit more deeply...

I'm not happy with the way science is usually taught in secondary school.  It is rendered boring - memorize a number of "facts" and either replay them on a test or use some recalled formulae to plug in a few numbers to find an answer.  It completely misses the fun of science and also something rather fundamental about how new knowledge is found and why, at least to a scientist, answers and fact aren't the real product - even though they may be useful and advance knowledge.  It also creates a view of science that has opened a divide between scientists and non-scientists - something that in a society that depends so much on science and technology is a serious disconnect and perhaps a danger.

 

As it happens a beautifully cultivated ignorance and questions is more fundamental to the forward motion of science. I suspect applying some of the techniques may be very important to other fields where "out of the box" creative thinking is required and I sometimes rely on it in my consulting practice. The recent post on ignorance brought some email reaction, so it makes sense to wade in a bit deeper..

 

The general notion of what a scientist does is to collect data (information is a better term) by observing and manipulating bits of the natural world by doing something called experiment.  There is a methodology - the scientific method - which is based on observation, hypothesis, manipulation, further observation , a new hypothesis and so on...  There is a sense of order, but that turns out to be far from the truth.  You experiment to learn something - ideally to discover something.

 

Discover, dis - cover, is the act of revealing.  What is revealed can be very beautiful and it often becomes a "fact" in text books and teaching, but what many consider the end product of science are known to be unreliable to the scientist.  Nothing is safe - nothing is above question.  Not even something like the absolute speed limit of the speed of light.¹  Scientists don't know things absolutely, but rather report how well it is known.  Newtonian mechanics turn out to be incorrect - but at the scale where humans live and observe everyday things it is more than accurate enough that we still routinely use it as a "good enough" descriptive model.  We know where it begins to fall apart and have made other discoveries to more accurately describe those areas - special and general relativity for example.  

 

In the 19th century it was believed the universe was permeated with with a luminiferous ether to allow a substance through which light could propagate.  It was the wrong path and, in 1907, Albert Michelson became the first American physicist to be splashed with the Swedish holy water for failing to observe the ether in his extremely clever measurements of the speed of light. 

 

Think about it for awhile - Michelson got the Nobel Prize for an experiment that didn't work.

 

Some would later describe the ether as the black cat physicists had been theorizing about, experimenting and trying to measure in a pitch black room for decade.  Literally hundreds of approaches and many many scientist years of effort.  Michelson somehow found the light switch and it became clear the ether didn't exist to a rather high degree of accuracy.  The confusion that resulted led to an entirely new line of questioning - several doors to new rooms, all pitch black with their own black cats, appeared with the light provided by Michelson.  A patent clerk who went by the name of Albert was pushed to a line of novel questions that gave us a fundamentally new understanding of the universe.  And even better he opened the way for many rich new questions - questions that were beyond our imagination until we saw a bit of the nature of his black cat.  

 

Sure we had learned something, but  it gave us a new appreciation for how much more ignorant of the universe we really were.  

 

We keep discovering and adding to this area we call knowledge and people often make practical use of these discoveries, but the meaningful product of science is not facts or knowledge, but rather the expansion of an informed and cultivated ignorance.²  

 

One of my mathematical heroes is Kurt Gödel.  Mathematicians had a sense that everything - at least everything in mathematics - was comprehensible and could be explained with math itself.  Gottfried Leibniz, one of the inventors of the calculus, tried to construct an alphabet of human thoughts that would allow you to take combinations of thoughts and form any idea just as letters can make words and words can make sentences.  A few hundred years later David Hilbert made an attempt to similarly code knowledge. 

 

The impressive achievement of Gödel was to show that all of this was impossible.  Gödel was a shy and quirky person - hardly anyone's candidate for a revolutionary - but he is incompleteness theorems rocked mathematics and physics.  I can't give a rich general level discussion of what he did, but at its core he showed an consistent system in math (like the whole numbers and the operations - like addition, multiplication and so on) can't be complete and consistent.³ This may seem to be a depressing notion - finding a fundamental limit in mathematics, but rather it opened an incredibly rich source of new questions to Gödel and others.  It is fair to say that unknowability and incompleteness led to questions, reasoning and discoveries that have impressively benefited computer science - and to think that computer science is fundamentally based on absolute and complete logic:-)

 

This ignorance - the recognition that we really don't know something as deeply as we thought we did - is a fundamental driver of science.    The problem of the unknoweable isn't a real obstacle, but is really just a serious of paths to deeper understanding.  Also, to a scientist, the explosion of information isn't terribly important either - at least not at a fundamental level.  The rich sources of discovery are more dependent on new questions that arise from cultivated ignorance.  Questions are the goal of science - it just happens to generate results (with attached confidence levels!) that have historically advanced civilization and cultivated ignorance is a necessary component of making the process move.  

 

It is ignorance rather than data that moves science along.

 

A very import and somewhat subtle point of doing science is that scientists use ignorance to work and the management of this ignorance is incredibly important.  Sometimes it is called the taste in picking and progressing with problems.  It is often chaotic with communication and collaboration often being extremely important.  At the leading edge it is often cross disciplinary.  I have a tendency to not be able to describe exactly what I do.  This is really common among scientists and the area they are currently working in is often shifting dynamically.  It is messy and may even seem inefficient, but it is a proven path to real discovery.

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¹ Which is why the recent neutrino experiment got so much attention.  People have been testing the limit for over a century and so far all of the results that suggest it can be violated, including the most recent, have turned out to be so flawed as to be invalid.  A good deal of pseudo-science is based on experimental "results" that are incorrect - they are often trivial, but sold to non-scientists as something absolute.

² The time gap between discovery and practical use can be very long.  Faraday thought his early work with electricity and magnetism would have no practical use. A practical use for general relativity seemed a crazy notion for fifty years, but it turns out to be a critical component of making the global positioning system work as accurately as it does.

³ Consistency is the characteristic that a system's rules will not  result in self contradictory statements.  Think of science fiction as a rich source of counter examples - when Captain Kirk defeats machine logic with simple logic puzzles.  Take a card and write "the other side of this card is true" on one side and "the statement on the other side of this card is false" and think about it for awhile:-)

At least two readers of this blog are mathematicians and my appologizes for the very rough high-level treatment of something that is very rich and deep.  If you are a student just study the work!  If you aren't technical I strongly recommend Rebecca Goldstein's book on the subject.

 

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Maple pecan pie - really good with vanilla ice cream or gelato!

 

Ingredients

° 1 unbaked pie shell

° 215 grams/2 cups pecans (coarsely chopped)

° 55 grams/¼ cup dark brown sugar

° 25 grams/¼ cup tapioca starch

° 4.5 grams/ ¾ teaspoon kosher salt

° 240 grams/1 cup grade B maple syrup. Grade A or "fancy" may not be strong enough

° 60 grams/¼ cup heavy cream

° 4 grams/1 teaspoon vanilla

° 2 large eggs

 

Technique

° Preheat the oven to 425°F

° Place the chopped pecans in the unbaked pie shell. Whisk together the sugar, tapioca starch and salt in a medium sized bowl. Whisk in the maple syrup, cream and vanilla. Whisk in the eggs. Pour over the pecans.

°  Bake for 20 minutes and then turn the heat down to 350°F without opening the oven. Bake for an additional 30 minutes. Let pie cool at room temperature for at least 30 minutes before serving.

 

 

a pre-review

Jon Gertner's new book on Bell Labs has just been published and a few people have written to ask what I think about it.  I haven't read it yet, but am very curious as I was part of that organization from the end of its golden years through its demise.  It was a unique and amazing place - a fundamentally different approach to "innovation" than what is common today.  It isn't clear to me which approaches are better or worse - the old Bell Labs approach doesn't square with how companies work these days.

 

The old AT&T was a regulated monopoly divestiture in 1984.  A few percent of its income was channeled into running the labs - known as the Bell Telephone Laboratories and, through a series of regulatory consent decrees - funding was incredibly stable and sufficient to insure very long term research and development projects.  After a decree in 1956, inventions were licensed under very liberal terms to the rest of the nation and the Labs had become something of a national laboratory.  

 

I won't go into the history of the place and will be interested to see how it is charted in Gertner's book, but the core DNA of the place needs to be explained.

 

Innovation had a very specific meaning.  It didn't mean invention or discovery, but rather was discovery taken through stages of development and finally implemented at a scale that would change society.  

 

The Labs was primarily advanced and applied development with a core basic research arm (area 10 - later renamed area 11 about the time I joined it).  Fundamental researchers were presented with an amazing array from curious problems.  The notion was not the standard approach of engineering where you attack a problem by tallying your resources and try to build an optimal result, but rather something a bit more zen.

 

In the research unit you defined and attacked problems by looking for the unknown and then trying to understand as much as your could about it.  You had to go deeply into uncharted territory not knowing if your efforts would pay off or if you had the right intellectual tools for the job.

 

This approach - solving a jigsaw puzzle not by identifying your pieces and putting them together, but rather looking for the missing pieces and trying to solve a puzzle by understanding what was missing - required a multidisciplinary approach.  It is close to the approach of physics and basic research had a high percentage of Ph.D. physicists.  Really good ones.  Their specialties were not as important a their taste in problem solving.  I was an experimental particle physicist.  Bell Labs never dabbled in particle physics, but that was "the right stuff" and they saw an immediate match.

 

We worked with computer scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, opticians, chemists, acoustics experts, material scientists, psychologists, neurologists, biologists, musicians and artists to name a few backgrounds.  The central laboratory at Murray Hill, New Jersey was built around a five story corridor a quarter mile long with a sometimes maze-like structure of smaller buildings.  Going to lunch or visiting someone else's lab would force interaction with others. It was said a researcher going to lunch was like a magnet rolling by iron filings.  It was a brilliant architecture and aspects of it have been duplicated elsewhere.¹

 

Some of the projects had very long horizons - digital communications took about four decades and thousands of researchers years of effort.  This type of time frame is only seen universities and national laboratories these days and is rarely directly coupled efficiently with commercial development.

 

But the next step in innovation - and one where the majority of Bell Labs people worked - was development research and engineering.  This is enormously difficult to get right. Most of the projects were defined by either Bell Labs management based on needs of the Bell System or by the government for national defense.  Many were difficult projects that advanced the state of the art by an order of magnitude and this was something of a model for DARPA, which came about in the 1950s with a clearer focus on military needs.

 

As the applied research and development proceeded it was productized and turned over to Western Electric - the manufacturing arm.  People in the various units spent time with each other.  Small branch development labs were built into Western Electric factories and the development folks often worked directly on the lines to understand the problems.  

 

The approach wasn't as clean as I describe it and there were tensions that had to be dealt with, but it was an innovation engine that changed the world.  It even paid a lot of attention to education creating everything from science and engineering ciricula to identifying promising students - mentoring them and getting them through their Ph.D.s in the best universities at no expense.

 

A very different approach than what is used, and perhaps needed, today.  The model today has universities and national labs doing the basic work with companies mostly engaged in short term development - real corporate research is not common.  Even long term development is rare^.2  True corporate research is mostly dead as is an integrated multi-disciplinary approach.  

 

Companies identify the pieces of the puzzle they have and try to build something optimal rather than trying to understand the missing pieces deeply.

 

As the Labs started to crumble in the late 80s I switched my focus from physics to something more applied - broadband to the home.  The problems were how do you do it and why do you do it.  The later lead to work in digital music and both led me to the notion that I *really* needed to understand social research.  I immersed myself in a human computer interaction department and hopefully helped out a bit with a bit of experimental rigor, very different thinking and a lot of naïve questions that turned out not to be so naïve.  I learned a lot in the process, but the efforts of the group were never coupled to the company at that point.  We did a lot of neat stuff that is finally beginning to be realized now.

 

I still try to search for projects that are looking for a bit of deeper understanding when I consult.  There are a lot of diamonds on the beach these days - as there probably always are.  The approach is rare and I find it odd that I'm sometimes seen as much broader than I see myself.  It is really just a bit of curiosity and the luck of having an amazingly rich chance to work in an environment that makes places like Apple and Pixar look lame when it comes to "multi-disciplinary".  I think there is great value to bits and pieces of the approach as suspect we'll see more of it as the tech world matures and energy becomes a more pressing issue.

 

I don't know what picture the book will paint.  I was witness to an amazing dinosaur and hope some of the better features of the place can be replicated.

 

We had a crisp definition of innovation. The physics people had a crisp definition of data and information.  I find the physics defnition at odds with common usage and I'll post on that in the near future - I've hinted at it before.  Data isn't basic...

 

Om recently commented on creativity talking about John Maeda of RISD.  This caused me to think of some comments from the professor of a graduate physics course I took as an undergrad.  The professor was famous for his creativity having been sprinkled with Swedish holy water.  Somehow he wanted to get over a few points on being creative - he thought you could inspire it.  

 

from my notebook:

 

° be curious about anything and everything. expose yourself to different people and ideas

° don’t be frightened to try the unknown. Many solve puzzles by figuring out what they can do with the puzzle pieces they have. A better approach is to figure out the missing pieces and solve a puzzle you don’t know anything about by learning about them.

° remember it must be play

° the delight is not in finding the answer, but in coming to it yourself

° be totally honest

° deeply know everything about your problem

° real creativity simplifies – aim for simplicity as it is beautiful

° get into something so deeply you forget everything else. you need large pieces of uninterrupted time

 

much more on these later, but back to the old Bell Telephone Laboratories for a bit. When I first started I was delighted to learn that my first director was something of an aurora expert.  He was invovled in the Telstar communications project and was involved in the beginnings of creating the field of what is now called space weather. He would have loved this time lapse of the aurora taken from the ISS a few days ago...

 

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¹ Pixar uses centrally located washrooms and has a design that reminds me of Murray Hill on a much smaller scale.

² IBM, Intel and Microsoft do longer term work in the tech sector. Apple has a ten year horizon for some projects, but anything longer than three years is very rare in industry. One of the longer term interests was video telephony. Here is something on developments in color video telephony .... in 1930.

phase transitions and the ipad

Earlier today Om penned a delightful note on his and, more important, his mother's experience with the iPad.  It sparked a bit of thinking about my feelings towards the device and to technology in general..  

 

but first consider a bit of physics....

 

Imagine that you can watch the movement of water molecules an ordinary ice cube.  Cold ice.  Perhaps -20°C or so.  The water molecules are locked into a fairly rigid crystalline form.  There is a bit of jiggling motion that gets more intense as heat is added to the ice.   Temperature is a physical property of matter that turns out to be related to the intensity of the motion of the molecules.  The greater this motion - this kinetic energy - the greater the temperature.

 

Without becoming formal it is important to note that heat is not directly related to temperature.  To understand this turn keep transferring energy to the ice - heat it up.  As you transfer heat energy the temperature of the ice begins to increase:

 

-14°, -8°, -2°, 0°, 0° ‚0°, 0°, 0°,0° ...

 

Hold on .. something seems wrong.  We're adding heat energy to the ice and the temperature stopped increasing at 0°C.  Looking at the molecular scale you notice something else is taking place.  The nice crystalline structure is beginning to break down.  There is just enough motion that some of the bonds that have been locking the water molecules into a rigid body begin to break.  As the process continues order continues to break until almost all of the molecules have taken on a new order where a few of them link up and then break apart in an incredibly complex and chaotic dance.  The water molecules have a natural attraction to each other, but there is enough jiggling that they can only hold together in small group, typically about four or five water molecules at a time, for about a thousandth of a billionth of a second - a picosecond.¹  The resulting mass of water is no longer a crystalline form and is now a liquid.   The heat went to change the structure of the ice cube from a jiggling crystal to wildly dancing groups of water molecules.  The liquid water has a motion that corresponds to 0°C.  All of that energy being transferred to the ice crystal went into changing the structure of the ice rather than raising its temperature.

 

Now with the 0° liquid water, begin adding heat to the water and measure its temperature:

 

0°C, 6°, 12°, 18°, and so on

 

The change of physical state of the water from a solid crystal to a liquid that can easily flow is called a phase change.  It turns out that water requires a lot of energy to move from solid to liquid form, but to the naked eye you really don't notice much is going on other than you have to keep transferring a lot of energy to get the cube to completely melt.²

 

So what does this have to do with the iPad?

 

Nothing physically, but it is an interesting metaphor for me.  I'm very interested in transparent, some would call them liquid, interfaces where the machine seems to melt away and you find yourself directly manipulating information and concepts.  Such interfaces allow you to get deeply into a task and become oblivious to the machine.  Take Yo Yo Ma's cello as an example.  In his hands it is really an extension of his body - perhaps an extension of his soul - as he enters a flow and wonderful music comes from them.  The interface, for him, is perfect and he doesn't think in terms of playing an instrument.

 

I've had these experiences of flow with good paper and pencils sketching things or doing physics.  Colleen has had them playing volleyball.  You can probably make a list of interactions where you've had them.  They are enormously important for creative work and I find myself trying to create conditions that allow them.  I find, like Douglas Adams, that distractions can destroy flow and send you crashing back to the local reality.³

 

So a really good interface - more than that - a really good user experience does not distract as you move through the boundary into flow.   In a sense it has supported a phase transition in how you think.

 

The iPad has a very good user experience.  I don't own one, but I use Sukie's original iPad regularly.  I frequently find myself doing things and not realizing I'm using a computing device.  It has begun to melt away.  I've also noticed the retina display on my iPhone 4 makes displayed objects seem like they are on the surface of the glass and that I am directly manipulating them through touch.  The illusion can be quite strong in well designed programs.  But to date neither device supports the type of program that would cause me to rush out and drop five or more Benjamins to have my own.

 

About a month ago I found myself sketching a gift for a dear friend.  I tend to make gifts rather than buy them for those who are close and this one involved a trace-like flow as I sketched out the design.  At one point I realized I was really hungry and noticed six hours had gone by in a blink.  Then it became time to work on the final design using my Mac and a drawing tablet.  The fact that I am drawing on a surface that is disconnected from the display makes it very difficult to achieve flow and the result wasn't quite what I was getting with the paper and pencil.

 

The iPad 3, or whatever it is called, may have enough computational power and resolution to achieve the level of transparency that allows my creative phase transition to kick in and bring flow.  I'm going to be very excited if it is demoed with some killer drawing applications.⁴  To me a transparency of user experience that allows me to seemingly directly interact with information is the core of the post PC dream.  The price point won't be terribly important to me.  It would probably support any of the creative things I do with a pad and pencil and has the potential to go far beyond.⁵

 

The Mac was the first computer good enough to criticize.  I want something good enough to give my mind a bit of freedom.  I suspect we're very very close to the beginning.

 

________

¹ The chemistry and physics involved is *really* interesting and I recommend further study if you want to understand the nuts and bolts!  Basically the water molecules are attracted with a special class of dipole-dipole interaction known as hydrogen bonding.  Note that a picosecond is about the distance light travels in a thousandth of a foot - about a hundredth of an inch.

² Water has a very high heat of fusion (solid to liquid) and heat of vaporization (liquid to gas).  It turns out to be very important for weather and many other systems.

³ From The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where he describes how to fly.  Look up the text or listen to him read the section.

⁴ Procreate is probably the best iPad drawing program to date.  Add what I think the better display might give and some additional power to let the objects flow easily combined with iOS  and a pressure sensitive stylus and it can happen.

⁵ Consider what Garageband and some other music creation programs for the iPad have allowed ..  as well as transparent interfaces for music for Macs in general.  Just ask Björk.

 

 

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.  

 

__________

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 Rikon¹ 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

 

_________

¹ A review of the pressure cooker I use.  It was about $200 and worth every penny.

 

 

 

 

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.