omenti

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.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

on the fantastic flying books of mr. lessismore

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

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

(sigh - they have made this link private...)

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

global efficiency and flexibility through local inefficiencies

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

This illustrates something deep.

 

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

 

 

_________

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

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

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

 

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

David R. Carrier, Christoph Anders, and Nadja Shilling

Abstract

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

[friend] How so?

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

apple stores and jc penny

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Something is working.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

° Attack the sizing issue

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

 

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

 

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

 

° Get social locally, nationally and internationally

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

 

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

 

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

 

° Teach people more about creating their own look. 

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

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

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

 

° Curate collections - emulate Trader Joe’s

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

 

° Improve the fitting experience

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

________

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

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

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

³ Some good information from the horse's mouth here

 

 

 

 

bicycles are not made of cheese and frosting

The real reason for Thanksgiving is the gathering of friends and family in gratitude for the food and company.  It may be the purest and most perfect holiday we have.

 

Last Monday evening we were lucky enough to attend a fine Thanksgiving dinner with friends in the city.  The food was excellent  and the careful orchestration in the kitchen and service caused my mind to wander...

 

What if food could be used to describe 3d printing?

 

Presentations could be mind-bogglingly complicated and would be perfect down to the millimeter.  Chefs could describe any presentation they could imagine, exchange their presentations with other chefs around the world possibly making a bit of money on the side.  Home cooks could have machines in their kitchens and reproduce anything they could afford.  The amount of preparation time would be well-known making it easier to bring all of the dishes in a dinner together at the same time.  Experimenters could create designs on their computers and know how they would turn out in advance.  Neat, but there is a nagging problem ...

 

Materials

 

 
Three dimension printers can only deal with a limited palate of materials.  To make the analogy with the current world of 3d printers imagine machines where one model could only deal with a four varieties of cheese.  It might be very good with cheddar and less good with three other hard varieties, but no other cheese would work with it.  Another printer might be very good working with ice while still another model does a fine job with frosting.  The cheese model allows you to print with colored cheeses and that feature will be added to the frosting model sometime next quarter.  There is a home model planned based on a hobbyist kit that can print spam (the stuff from cans rather than the email variety).  

 

Materials and how they are treated during manufacture are really important!¹

 

Most of us don’t think about it much, but consider the thousands of fabrics used in clothing, the complexity of materials that go into food, the hundreds of different woods used in building, the thousands of materials at an architect’s command when a building is designed, the exotic materials of a turbine blade in a jet engine or that make up one of the billions of transistors in your phone.  

 

A good designer needs a fundamental understanding of the materials used in their domain.  

 

3d printing is still very primitive.  It has enormous value fabricating prototypes, but there isn’t much flexibility in material choice.  It is like living in a culinary world limited to spam, icing, hard cheese and ice. 

 

Some disciplines push material use and design more than others.  Bicycles and airplanes are among the most interesting as the final vehicles should be strong and lightweight.  The bicycle is particularly fascinating as it is both elegant and simple.  It is still possible for a single designer to make most of the choices alone rather than relying on a large design and engineering team.  Airplanes were once that simple - when two bicycle mechanics from Ohio created the revolution, but the sport now requires large teams.

 

At about three to four times as efficient as walking, bicycles are the most efficient way to move a person using only muscle power.   There isn’t a lot of material, but a frame can be very strong often support fifty or more times its weight.  The shock of uneven roads is absorbed without losing much efficiency while the bike is rigid at the same time.  The drive train can transmit as much as 98% of the power you supply to the wheel and simple brakes that weigh a few ounces can dissipate the energy of a racer flying downhill at 50 miles per hour in a few seconds.  All of this is done by a machine that can be beautiful.  A bike is one of those places where art and technology come together.  

 

Twenty years ago most bicycles had steel frames. The type of steel and construction technique used were a function of the cost and purpose of the bike and high end bikes like my old Raleigh Professional were made of hand brazed exotic steels like Reynolds 531.  This made them light for the day and imparted a certain signature quality to the ride of the bike.

 

About then bikes with aluminum frames started becoming practical.  Aluminum has very different characteristics than steel and was difficult to manufacture, but Trek and others started using hydroforming techniques and prices dropped.  The bikes could be lighter than equivalent steel frames, but the ride quality was different.  Some of us preferred high quality steel, but there was a choice.

 

China builds an enormous number of bikes and began to export them.  A decision was made that bike technology is strategic for China.  Learning how to make aluminum bikes was seen as a way for China to dominate the international bike market as well as learn how to world with leading edge aluminum fabrication techniques.  What works for bikes also works for airplanes and thousands of other products.  

 

The first Chinese models were awful. but they stuck with it through partnerships and got to the point where they pioneered some techniques of their own.  in large quantities a low end bike frame from China now sells for about $4 - probably less than the cost of the electricity used to make the aluminum in many parts of the world.  China may be losing on the frames, but they own the market and make enough other high value parts to end up winning.

 

Now they are working on reducing the price of carbon fiber.  

 

Carbon fiber is found in most racing bikes.  I’m not fond of its ride quality, but it is stiff and very light.  It is possible to make a frame that weighs under a pound with a final, albeit exotic, bike tipping the scale at under ten pounds.  The Union Cycliste Internationale responded to this by requiring bikes to weigh at least 6.8 kilograms - about 15 pounds.   The bikes are lighter, but carry some electronics now.  Racing is an arms race in many dimensions.

 

Good carbon fiber frames are difficult to make with a large amount of labor and high material prices.  A few years ago a reasonable frame might start at three thousand dollars and unless your name was Lance Armstrong, fabricating one to exact dimensions was usually not practical. Now the price has fallen by about an order of magnitude as, once again, China has determined that carbon fiber fabrication techniques are a strategic need and a good are to gain focus and experience is the bicycle industry.  Such techniques have great application in aviation, wind turbines and will become common in the automobile industry during this decade.  it is possible the scale of the carbon fiber industry dwarfs the automotive battery industry.

 

But back to the basic bicycle.  It is possible to make bikes from other materials.  Titanium has desirable characteristics, but is expensive and difficult to work with.  Bamboo can be used by itself or as a composite material and can create beautiful bikes with a ride quality some people find wonderful.  And cranky purists like Dave and I have a variety of steels and techniques to chose from.

 

About two years ago a special bike was created for Colleen - a good friend who happens to be approximately tall.  Her body happened to beyond the limits of the CAD tools common to bike design and a careful bespoke design was called for.  It was decided to base the design on an upright commuting bike rather than a racer and ride quality was important.  The issue was the frame was so tall that to get the right shock absorption, rigidity and “feel” the steel tubes used had to be carefully tailored.  The project required carefully measuring her with the precision normally reserved for racers.  This made sense as it was an entirely new design.  The steel was Reynolds 953, an exotic stainless steel requiring unique manufacturing techniques.  There is only one company on the planet that can make this stuff The wall thickness on the tubing is very thin - less than a half mm and as little as about a third of a mm - with tubes being carefully matched to produce the right ride quality.  

 

Jony Ive at Apple showed the world that consumer products can become art when mixed with great design and an informed materials choice.  My MacBook Pro has a body machined (!) from a single piece of aluminum stock.  An expensive process, but the quality shows and laptops from other manufacturers feel like toys to me even before the machine comes to life.

 

We live in a material world that is not made of hard cheese, frosting, ice and spam.

 

As it is Thanksgiving eve it makes sense to finish with a recipe that celebrates the enormous amount of material and fabrication choice available to the cook along with a bit of simplicity.  

 

On Monday we had some excellent roasted asparagus as part of an early Thanksgiving dinner in the city with friends.   There were asparagus dreams that night andI  had to make some on Tuesday.

 

I usually make asparagus when it is in season, but roasting gives you a bit of latitude and if you are willing to sacrifice a bit of the produce, you can still get great results.  I bought about a pound of ok looking stalks yesterday and fired up the oven.  The warning is the measurements are guesses as I cook mostly by throwing things together.  (baking is where I’m careful)

 

• Pre-heat oven to 400° F

• Snap off the bottoms of the stems at the natural breaking place (I used these for asparagus soup later, so they aren't wasted).  These weren't great asparagus, so I peeled the bottom inch or so 

• Put on a baking sheet, drizzle on some olive oil.  Add a bit of a good sea salt (Maldon for example), grind some pepper and toss.  Now arrange on the pan so the stalks aren't touching.

• Bake for 20 minutes  and plate

• Melt a half ounce of butter and add 3 or 4 chopped cloves of garlic.  Heat until about the time the butter starts to brown.  Drizzle/spoon or whatever over the asparagus  (note - the heart healthy way would be to use olive oil here.  I strongly prefer butter and rationalize it with the idea that each of us is only getting a quarter ounce.

• Sprinkle with chopped pecans or walnuts  

• Squeeze a bit of lemon juice on top or a drizzle good aged balsamic vinegar.

 

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

_____________

¹ I note that 2d printing is just cutting flat objects and technologies abound that allow a great choice of materials.  We will see, and are seeing, dramatic change here well before 3d printing becomes important outside of a few niche markets like prototyping.

 

a non recommendation

The right tool for the job - perhaps I can save you a bit of money...

 

Earlier in the week I attended a two day event in Manhattan that brings investors and tech industry types together.   I somewhat belong to the later group and the mixing is interesting - particularly the one-on-one conversations you find yourself in that would probably not occur outside this venue. Mixing people up is often brilliant.

 

As four people asked what I thought about Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs it seems reason to write a bit about it.  Usually I stay away from making negative comments about books as I’m not a good writer and it seems wrong to judge someone who is a successful author.  But the book has serious flaws, so here goes...

 

I bought the book with a some misgivings as his book on Einstein biography left me cold.  It was an interesting read, full of details about his life, but Isaacson struck me as an incurious author.  There were technical mistakes (I’m a physicist) and, worse, directions that should have been explored.  It may be just his style and the fact I know the field and had read several biographies (if you have a scientific bent go for Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais)¹, but it left me with enough of a distaste that I wish I would have waited a bit before making the a decision about buying it.

 

I won’t give a review, but there are numerous technical and historical mistakes.  Some quotes are incorrect (for example he has Bill Gates noting a certain type of optical media didn’t make sense because it had too short a latency) - something I don’t like to see from a “name” biographer.  Some of these indicate it was a rush job, and I’m sure it was so it could be on the market at the optimal time, but deeper problems lurk.

 

Jobs told Isaacson he wanted him as the biographer as he could get people to talk.  Fair enough.  A remarkable range of people were interviewed and Isaacson appeared to have great freedom.  The problem is that Isaacson wasn’t curious.  He was getting bits and pieces of a larger story and failed to pursue several interesting paths.  The whole book felt like a series of Time magazine articles stapled together.  If he had been curious and followed these leads the book may have given real insight into how Jobs thought and how Apple, under Jobs, functioned.  As it is there is little new information on those subjects.

 

The personal side of Jobs is something that is of interest and perhaps he got more of this right.  Jobs does come over as the nasty self-important jerk many have reported, but I didn’t get any insight on how this was important to Apple and Pixar.  It didn’t seem to go deep enough.  There are aspects of his personality that I have been exposed to in a few meetings as well as one-on-one conversations that were simply missing.  I saw a bit of the nasty side, but not much.  What struck me was how intellectually curious he could be and how he took delight in playing with concepts.  I was struck by his sense of humor and think that may have been part of how he interacted with people. 

 

I wish someone who understood the industry and happened to be very curious had been anointed as the chief biographer.  To do a reasonable job would probably require quite a bit of time after Jobs’ death.  It seems like a lost opportunity.  Hopefully people close to him will write.  I’d love to hear what Jony Ive would say.  In the meantime we'll probably see more tone-deaf pieces like Gladwell's New Yorker essay on the "tweaker" ...

 

The book did serve the purpose of making it as a best-seller and perhaps that was the primary intention.   

 

I can’t recommend it if you are trying to understand Jobs more deeply and particularly if you want to understand the history of Apple, NeXT and Pixar.

________

 

The flaws of the book  did make me think about what Amazon’s Kindle Fire is. 

 

Apple is very good at discovering the core of something and moving towards simplicity.

 

I have a tendency to disregard consumer electronic reviews from industry pundits.  The lens they view the world from is often that of the engineer, which is one of the reasons Apple has been so successful.  Most of Apple’s competitors are primarily engineering companies making it easy for Apple.  Apple moves towards simplicity and the competition doesn't.  Apple has done a lot of things right, but probably not as much as it seems.  Some of their luster comes from the fact their competition is ill-equipped to make great products.  It is good to have incompetent competition.

 

If someone who understands the space comments, I listen.  Marco Arment does understand tech and user experience. His review, combined with notes from a few user experience people, tell me the Fire is an incompetent tablet measured by the bar set by the iPad.  You would do much better spending your $200 on a used first generation iPad.  You probably don't want to gift one.

 

Perhaps the real question is: "what is the Fire?"  It may look like a tablet, but perhaps it isn’t. 

 

The iPad wasn’t really a tablet as envisioned by Microsoft and many who believed Microsoft’s vision dismissed it initially.  It was a collection of functionality that would be useful to someone who is moving around a house and holding something as they would hold a magazine.  It was also initially seen as a consumption device, but it has much more flexibility and is finding new uses.  The iPad is evolving and creating new niches even now.

 

My gut tells me the Kindle is a pure consumption device that strongly ties you to Amazon.  It is a key piece of their evolving platform and, as such, can be somewhat orthogonal to the iPad class of tablet.  Think of it as an Amazon vending machine that you can carry around.  A machine that Amazon gets you to buy.  Pretty neat for them if they can make it work.  At this point it appears there are issues that may render it frustrating as a vending machine.  Amazon will have to address them if they want to grow their platform.  It probably makes sense for them to support iPads and Android devices too - after all, those are just customers coming in through different doors.

 

It will be interesting to revisit this in six months. 

________

¹ If you want to get a sense of how revolutionary Einstein's ideas are I would recommend learning a bit of special relativity if you haven't tackled it.  It only requires high school level math and is is exceptionally clear and logical.  You get a much deeper insight by playing with it rather than just reading about it.

Similarly trying to design a simple interface to something can be an incredible learning experience.  I've done a few and have found it humbling, but I've learned a lot with each try.  

Passive interaction does not lead to depth in a subject. You need to go out and engage in a bit of play.

 

 

open the pod bay doors, hal

try that request if you have an iPhone 4S...

 

There were several interesting things to note about the iPhone 4S announcement.  For me the most significant are Apple’s ability to use relatively modest hardware and still squeeze out a superior user experience compared with much Android devices using much less energy and Siri.  I’ll concentrate on Siri.

 

Siri was purchased by Apple a few years ago and they’ve clearly done a lot of user interface design and speech recognition work, but Siri has a very interesting background - DARPA”s PAL project.

 

The Personalized Assistant that Learns was a massive five year program that was managed by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI).  DARPA focuses on blue sky projects that have the potential to provide enormous change - the internal benchmark is any project should have a tenfold improvement in performance over what current exists - or it should open an entirely new area.  DARPA projects have included the GPS system and what became the Internet.  They’ve also had a lot of failures as many of these are very speculative, but DARPA is all about getting a few home runs.  The only industrial organizations since WWII that have had such speculative projects have been Bell Labs and IBM’s Watson Labs - and both of those pretty much abandoned the highly speculative route by 1980.  

 

The SRI folks called the project the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes - CALO for short.  In their talks they would mention the name was from the Latin calonis - or soldier’s servant.  It was clear where this might be used.

 

It was very multidisciplinary - I’m looking at one of their foil stacks.¹  “Over 300 researchers from 25 of the top research Universities in the US with the goal of building a new generation of cognitive assistants that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.”

 

also from the foils

 

CALO assists its user with six high-level functions:

1. Organizing and Prioritizing Information: As the user works with email, appointments, web pages, files, and so forth, CALO uses machine learning algorithms to build a queryable model of who works on which projects, what role they play, how important they are, how documents and deliverables are related to this, etc.
2. Preparing Information Artifacts: CALO can help its user put together new documents such as PowerPoint presentations, leveraging learning about structure and content from previous documents accessed in the past.
3. Mediating Human Communications: CALO provides assistance as its user interacts with other people, both in electronic forums (e.g. email) and in physical meetings. If given access to participate in a meeting, CALO automatically generates a meeting transcript, tracks action item assignments, detects roles of participants, and so forth. CALO can also put together a "PrepPak" for a meeting containing information to read ahead of time or have at your fingertips as the meeting progresses.
4. Task Management: CALO can automate routine tasks for you (e.g. travel authorizations), and can be taught new procedures and task by observing and interacting with the user.
5. Scheduling and Reasoning in Time: CALO can learn your preferences for when you need things done by, and help you manage your busy schedule.
6. Resource allocation: As part of Task management, CALO can learn to acquire new resources (electronic services and real-world people) to help get a job done.

 

 

Very disruptive stuff if you can pull it off.  There were several commercial spinoffs from the work.  One was a small company called Siri (a play on SRI).  Their intention was to apply some of the tech to mobile phones.  Ideally some mobile tasks could have a viable speech interface - this would get around some of the problems of typing, multiple clicks and screen loading.  This clearly doesn’t work for all tasks, but there is great potential for many.  

 

Apple bought Siri for something like $200M a few years ago.  There was obviously a lot of user interface work as well as getting untrained speaker recognition working.  There is clearly a lot of work to be done.  At the moment their information supplying partners are not very rich.  Wolframalpha is interesting as they provide query responses in the form of images to prevent search engines from mining them.

 

I was amazed by the fact that it worked at all in some of the Youtube videos I’ve seen.  It is not clear to me where this fits in - and that is largely as I haven’t been able to live with it and think about it a lot.  That will have to wait until June for my mobile contract to expire.  There is real potential.  I would guess Siri a year from now will be a very different service.

 

It would be interesting to see how the computational load is distributed.  Just what is happening on the iPhone and how much time is allotted for the various critical steps.  

 

Really interesting stuff!!  You see thing like this and realize that, going forward,  the mobile phone makers without interesting platforms are toast.  Features like Siri may differentiate and seriously enhance Apple's iOS platform even if it is far from a polished state now.  Only time will tell...

 

Oh - Siri is a not too uncommon Nordic women's name.  I know a Norwegian woman named Siri.  She has a very quirky personality and I would hope Apple builds a lot of quirkiness into their Siri.

 

_______

¹ I'm certainly not an expert in AI or NLP, but worked in a research center that had AI and strong NL departments and follow some of the work in industy and moreso at DARPA.

If anyone wants to buy me an unlocked iPhone 4S I'll happily play and investigate:-)  Sadly my AT&T mobile contract is far too restrictive for me to consider getting a new phone before June, 2012.

 

 

thinking about tablets...

I'm recovering from what appears to be a successful operation and have been distracting myself from the pain by following some interesting threads and thinking about Android.

Samsung's willingness to remove two UI features in the Galaxy Tab 10 dispute with Apple in Australia represents a big turning point for Android on tablets.  It sends a signal to other tablet makers that they will probably have to follow suit.  The best case for Apple would be if this takes place non-uniformly across time and manufacturer as it would introduce new levels of Android fragmentation across the tablet market that will drive up  costs and frustrations for developers.  The current level of fragmentation is already unpleasant for the developers I know (in full disclosure I'm on the TAB of one of the larger app developers and have a one-time student who has a six person shop that does iOS and Android apps).  Google is already blessing certain phone makers - I wouldn't be surprised if this will have to occur for tablet makers too.  And if Google keeps Motorola and tries to make a go of it life gets even more interesting for the other manufacturers.  (I would now be willing to make smallish bets that Google will do this)

Fragmentation is an interesting phenomena to study in its own right.  It is very difficult to avoid in an "open" software world (this has always been true).  It takes place when there is little in the way of careful UX planning and is one of the larger unintended consequences of letting engineers run the show by themselves.  In some areas this approach doesn't make a lot of difference, but if you want a superior consumer level experience and external software developers it can be poison.  This has been a major topic of conversation among some of my colleagues for about 20 years now.  I became very sour on open projects that use third party software and are  aimed at mass markets where UX is important when I was working with my HCI department.  Life is hard enough for successful "closed" core platforms as different versions emerge over time unless you also lock the hardware to the software as much as possible.  The lack of control can make an already difficult process impossible.

Amazon's OS - I'll call it FlameOS as it is no longer Android and I don't know what to call it  - has the potential to become a very desirable destination for developers if Amazon wants to encourage third party development.  They may not need to though.  It is possible their big market is only at the low end … the people who rarely buy apps (you see this on phones and PCs - I'm impressed by some of the information on app buying habits of feature phone users who are buying smartphones … basically they leave them almost stock.  It is certainly true for a huge number of commercial PC buyers as it is true for most consumer products …  I can offer more thinking on that as it is not counter indicative of mass customization trends).  Amazon has the potential of making FlameOS very stable and with a good enough UX and UI.  They only need a base hit in their first at bat as their ecosystem is so attractive to many consumers. They'll have a year or two to make it good enough and this is going to kill the Android tablet market.  Apple could drive a stake into that market by lowering the price of the iPad2 to $350 when the iPad3 comes out if the 3 is a big improvement over the iPad2 - they used that strategy about three years into the iPod lifecycle.  Margins are so tight at that level that only low end hardware can compete and Amazon will probably own that part of the market.  A not unrelated note is the issue PC makers are having with the MacBook Air and ultrabook margins.

Bezos stated the guys who only make hardware will fail and I can't agree more with him on that observation.  The rush to the bottom will be dramatic.  You can already buy a Playbook for $300 even though it has a different OS and UX/UI.   Based on my experience with it I wouldn't consider it worth more than $200 of my one dollars and I'd much rather use the Fire as the Amazon ecosystem is so much more attractive.

What is interesting and almost beautiful is that we are seeing some successes and failures that are driven by some basic principals of design, open vs closed, and scope of ecosystems.

What a fascinating period.

 

building things yourself

I'm far from being a craftsman, but I'm a big fan of building things.  As a kid I built my old eight inch Newtonian telescope, a spectrometer, several amateur radio transmitters and receivers, model airplanes and a few rocket motors and rockets along with bookshelves and other items for around the house.  Not elegant stuff, but great learning experiences that have given me an appreciation for those who know what they are doing along with a deeper understanding of how items are designed and made.

Amateur radio and astronomy were very good vehicles for learning some physics and engineering without realizing it.  Not textbook learning, but rather a good practical sense of how to play with light, understand how radio works (what I picked up there turns out to be deeper than a few engineers I've met), as well as what it takes to move a project from dream to completion on an extremely limited budget.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that most physics graduate schools mandate a shop class. I took metal shop and glass blowing.  After demonstrating competence you were given a shop key and the run of the place as long as you didn't break yourself or the tools.  It was a great playground.  For fun I designed a small two cylinder stirling engine and fabricated it out of aluminum, brass and stainless steel.  It only developed about 100 watts at about 5000 rpm, but was a great project.

These days schools seem to have eliminated shop - an enormous loss I think as this is the only place many kids are exposed to building and tools.  On a more positive note the maker movement is alive with people pooling resources and sharing equipment, spaces and expertise in several cities (there must be a dozen shared spaces in Brooklyn).  Ideally more experienced people will be able to mentor beginners and this can grow.  Unless you have access to a good enough shop, this can't be don't remotely and some of the mentoring is best done face to face.  Other programs like Dean Kamen's FIRST are wonderful for some kids, but more are needed.

Every few years I sit on a committee that looks for interesting young people to invite to a very well-known science college.  Even though this is one of the most competitive schools in the country, it is still important for them to actively search for talented and driven students who might not otherwise apply.  The most important criteria is how much amateur science they've done as teenagers. Much of this involves building apparatus (when looking for the diamonds in the rough we don't look for those from elite schools with established corporate mentors - those students already have a large advantage).  There are some amazing teenagers with great fire out there and this is a delightful task.

What triggered this piece was a video link noted by a friend.  I  built water rockets as a kid, but fifty feet was an impressive altitude for my designs.  The video is much more impressive and might spark a teen to think about the physics, engineering and design - perhaps enough to build something even better.

 

These days I no longer have regular access to a good shop and have to look around.  When something nice has to be made I either restrict myself to very small items that I can handle at home.  

If you have a teen or pre-teen who is interested in how things and nature works I strongly recommend they learn how to make things and perhaps they'll get to the point where they understand and can design.  Not all of them will take a science or engineering route.  Some may mix it up with art or music and explore other wonderful areas - I've had the discussion with Jony Ive and a fashion designer and found both were passionate about building and understanding as teens.  

Of course there is no reason not to take this up as an adult - I should think it very important if your business is trying to understand consumers and design and it is never too late deepen your education.