I was listening to a panel discussion of elite sports psychologists, sports scientists, and a sports anthropologist when a question was posed:
Could a Ted Lasso exist?
If you haven't seen the show, Lasso is an American college football coach who is suddenly hired to coach an English Premier League team. He had success in his D-II school, but it was clear he was hired to fail. It turns out he didn't.
There was some laughter among audience members, but the panel members took it seriously. It could work. You'd need someone who was an incredible learner with success leading a team of some kind. Someone great at listening, observing and thinking. They've need a Beard - a character who happens to be a serious soccer expert (among other things), but would never cut it as a coach. Creating a bond with the players, listening to them, and be willing to experiment is key. You'd also need management willing to put up with the time required to create a success.
The anthropologist noted some of these qualities are missing in NFL, NBA, MBA, and NHL coaching. Coaches tend to be extremely confident of themselves and there is pressure to win. Team culture can suffer and creativity is low compared with some other types of teams. He pointed out some women's teams - particularly soccer and indoor volleyball - are extremely innovative with positive team cultures well beyond any men's pro team he's seen.
There was general agreement among those in the panel. Coaching has a way to go in the big pro leagues, but the types of coaches selected are an issue. A great women's soccer or indoor volleyball coach (several were mentioned) could be a Ted Lasso if they had a Beard at their side and the time to create change. As an example a women's volleyball coach was mentioned. Something of a household name in sports, he's as passionate figuring out how to coach a team of pre-teens as he is his countries national team. He's experimenting and learning and might make a discovery with some twelve year old kids that works with his olympians.
It's culture all the way down at the top. Maybe some of these multimillion dollar coaches aren't worth it, but it's unlikely the culture that selects them will change.
It's an interesting game to think about the question in teams outside of sports.
A few days ago I forwarded the first of what promises to be a series of pieces of a cultural study of Peloton users by Anne Helen Petersen. It’s interesting - she’s certainly an enthusiast and she’s making interesting observations. There was some interesting feedback- mostly on how big it might get, where Apple fits in and so on. I have some educated guesses where it sits in the home exercise stack and where Apple is as well as a very different direction they may take, but I think there’s something more interesting.
Around the world many found themselves isolated for a good deal of the past 15 months. Exercise equipment became an item for those with the money and time. Now that people in the US are coming out of isolation a good deal of that equipment, perhaps kit not as engaging as the Peloton, is turning up at yard sales.1 There are reports of more engagement in outdoor activities - amateur sports.
Over the years I’ve come across several social science papers on the sociology of exercise and amateur sport. Robert Putnam (the author of Bowling Alone way back when) pointed out that communal exercise - particularly amateur sports - creates a meeting ground where people of different beliefs and ideologies come together regularly. While they may not become close friends, many become familiar faces you look forward to seeing and chatting with. They're part of the 50 to 150 Robin Dunbar identifies as friendly familiars. More recently Putnam and others have talked about the service groups, amateur sports, etc that became popular during the Depression and persisted through about 1965.. a period of high social cohesion in the US (Putnam documents this more recently in his perhaps overly-optimistic book Upswing). Apparently it’s still true that social cohesion is high in these communal events - running, cycling, softball leagues, etc. etc. It’s certainly in evidence in pro-sports fandom worldwide - BBC's Why Factor had an excellent piece on the subject: Why do we care so much about games.
Norway has a unique approach to youth and adult sport and participation at the amateur level is much higher than any other country. The budgetary justification is two-fold: better health and better social cohesion. There's much more going on there and in the Nordics in general that leads to social cohesion, but in many parts of the world it seems to be decaying. Perhaps getting involved with others you don't know well at first is healthier for society than doing things by yourself or in your bubble.
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1 The need of social connection is strong. Peloton provides a bit, but it isn't rich and it's mostly tied to a rather narrow form of exercise - spinning. Isolated and semi-isolated workouts can be important, but I doubt it has a huge amount of growth potential unless it's very cheap. I think we're in a Peloton bubble that doesn't have much more life given an improving health outlook.
You've probably seen this excellent summary of issues associated with the Boeing 737 Max. The core message seems to be this:
They described a compartmentalized approach, each of them focusing on a small part of the plane. The process left them without a complete view of a critical and ultimately dangerous system." Few people get time to reflect and look at"inessential stuff" and few of those who can care to; they are used to be "focused."
Compartmentalization seems to be the default when it comes to complex systems. I think it's ingrained in our culture to appreciate specific easily identifiable acts. "Catalysts" and generalists are rarely appreciated. The move fast and break things mentality in certain quarters combined with interchangeable employees who fit certain descriptions is aspirational in certain quarters and it extends to education.
I'm reminded of an internal postmortem of an expensive disaster that occurred in AT&T's Allentown Western Electric facility in the early to mid 1980s. Western Electric was AT&T's manufacturing arm. The telephone monopoly built a dizzying array of almost everything it used - from relays and wires to telephones and building sized switches. Digital switches were built around computers and a specialized switching fabric that required a lot of memory. Manufacturing capabilities grew with the increasing need and AT&T, along with IBM, was inventing and developing a lot of core manufacturing technology as well as financing key pieces in Silicon Valley and beyond. By the early 80s these two companies were close to the leading edge of IC manufacture. The Allentown works was Western Electrics cpu, memory and custom silicon location.
Western Electric and Bell Laboratories manufacturing and technical directors began to appear for the increasingly specialized subprocesses of a complex larger process. They'd get together and meet regularly, but they each recognized they owned the most important part of the process. This focus and pride in specialization extended downwards. In a sense they were sort of right - many of them were critically important. They optimized their subprocesses measuring what they could find.
During the period a guy named Doug (I think) would wander around and talk to people. Almost no one knew who he reported to, but he was friendly and smart. Smart enough to let the engineers talk about what was going right and wrong. He'd take doughnuts around and show up at meetings and in the clean rooms. No one considered him an expert, but the doughnuts were really good. Every now and again he'd make suggestions being careful to let people feel it was really their idea. He was given a somewhat derisive nickname - The Mayor of Allentown.
Doug worked for an old line director. Someone who taught other companies how to make transistors in the early 1950s when AT&T, as a monopoly, was required to share their intellectual property. The director created Doug's position as kind of generalist's glue. Doug had a master's in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in anthropology. When the director retired the other directors absorbed his groups. None of them saw any need for the Mayor. - his skillset wasn't specialized enough to give value to the company. He was given an insulting offer and quit instead.
In a few months a series of process disasters cascaded through the works. Critical switch and computer components weren't available to the people who needed them. Other parts of the company had to do frantic redesigns to incorporate external parts. Losses were well over $40 million in early 1980 dollars. It took six months and an enormous revamp to get back on track. Western Electric never regained its position as a leading edge manufacturer.
It turns out you can still find excellent doughnuts in Allentown.
Two weeks ago the results of following contestants from the 2009 season of The Biggest Loser was published. It caught the news and was widely reported as the failure of dieting. The New York Times did a slightly better job - but there is more to think about.
Trying to work out the energy balance of eating - energy in and energy expended - is something of a fool's errand. The fundamental understanding of metabolism is lacking. It is possible, under careful laboratory conditions and using expensive techniques, to get the numbers right. What is found is the body can vary its efficiency. There is a connection that probably goes in both directions between the body you think of and your microbiome. The existence of a set-point - a weight your body to be at - hasn't been proven, but more than a few experiments suggest that you'll have difficulty maintaining a new weight after a large weight loss. The result reported two weeks ago has been seen in other studies. It also must be pointed out that large weight loss appears to be more difficult to maintain, but about ten to twenty percent of dieters who have lost a significant amount of weight have been able to control their weight over the long haul.
Some well established bottom lines are that you usually can't outrun your fork. Exercise is fantastic medicine by itself that is more powerful and effective than many of the drugs people take with few side effects. Just do it, but don't expect to lose weight. You can maintain weight with effort, but if you've lost a lot it can be extremely difficult. There aren't any magic bullets or diets, although some interesting signals are emerging.
We're alone among the great apes when it comes to body fat. Few of the other guys exceed three percent body fat and some are below one percent. It turns out we need much more energy, pound for pound, than the other apes. It has only recently been studied, but are resting metabolic rates are much higher - about 400 calories more than chimps, 650 than gorillas and over 800 more than orangutans.1 We need to do this to support our large brains - your brain accounts for about a fifth of your resting metabolism - and to have the ability to have more offspring. Along the way our bodies developed a kind of range anxiety - we can't let ourselves run out and developed the capacity to store a lot of energy in the form of fat. Most of our history had periods of food insecurity and we evolved to store energy whenever we can. Now that many of us have enough we're learning how difficult it is to fight our own biology.
These studies came as I was thinking about a terrific special April 29th issue of Science on the microbiome. Our relationship to it, or more properly another part of ourself, is tied into many things... notably metabolic disease and obesity. A bit of serendipity - I happened to catch Christina Warinner's SciCafe talk at the American Museum of Natural History a few months ago. She's a molecular anthropologist and has been working out how our microbiome evolved along with us. A terrific overview with some parts on food.
__________ 1 The study adjusted for body size and took into account activity levels.
In the past week at least a dozen people have asked if I will buy an WATCH. I tell them probably not - at least not this iteration. Watching reactions is interesting so I try to remain passive and let them take the direction of any discussion that follows. The categories so far:
° the death-knell for Swiss watch makers and the meaning of luxury
° speculation that this is the inflection point where Apple is finally doomed
° new forms of computation (a single case)
I have no idea if the watch will succeed or not, but am drawn to the last conversation type.
During my life the notion of computation has taken a variety of forms across range of devices. In high school my personal computer was a beat-up mechanical adding machine and slide rule. Some organizations were using electronic analog computers to solve differential equations and digital computing had made its move from universities to the military and a few industries. The public perception of a computer had shifted from a person, usually female, employed to do calculations by hand to a machine operated by men in white coats carrying boxes of punched cards. The digital computer was magical - unobtainable magic unless you were an organization.
Two millennia earlier there was the Antikythera mechanism - the earliest known mechanical analog computer. Earlier still were computers of place to mark celestial events - the alignments of celestial bodies with fixed monuments. Computation for religion, calendars and possibly a toy for the rich.
Navigation sparked the development of any number of analog mechanical computers. Astrolabes, sectors and so on. By the 19th century saw tide predicting machines were built to solve complex differential equations and the earliest naval fire control systems were fitted to long range guns to revolutionize warfare. Computation was driven by the needs of emerging technologies. Analog electro mechanical systems were built to understand and run the power network in the 1930s and WWII saw crash programs to build computational bomb sights and early code cracking electronic machines.
People very rarely transitioned from one of these computation systems to something newer. These were largely purpose built and used by experts. By the 70s a change was underway - the emergence of general purpose digital computing.
My perception of computing went from my slide rule to an account on a UNIVAC something or other in the engineering building and a growing understanding of WATFIV - a dialect of FORTRAN. I would drop off my jobs when I got up at 4am to get the lowest rates. The huge change came in grad school when my department let students use its minicomputers. There was direct access through a terminal - for the first time you were touching the heart of the machine. I started to play with networks - it hadn't occurred to me until then that a terminal on a network and some storage was beyond useful.
Personal computers were for the very dedicated hobbyist. By the early 80s I had logins on several UNIX machines connected to the ARPANET (my bang path ended up on samwise) and root on a few. Computing was democratizing and I helped start rec.pets.ferrets on USENET to connect with a larger community and learn how to support the fury family members.
At Bell Labs the day before Christmas was the best holiday of the year. Families would come in and people would mill about seeing what others were doing. Kids went wild with games they couldn't access at home. They had to be kicked off the machines to make way for others as the killed grues in Zork and fought off space invaders. We took this as a sign that our work must be cool. We missed the fact that the kids could care less about our work. Those from families of means were steering their families towards Radio Shack TRS80s and Apple ][s... the future of education you know:-)
1984 arrived. I had seen Xerox Stars and Smalltalk and later the Apple Lisa. Internally we had Blit terminals giving us a mouse driven windowing graphical user interface on our Unix Vaxen. It was clear this was the future so I spent a pile of money on a Mac (128k) on day one. It wasn't terribly useful and programming it was difficult, but something seriously important was in the air. The practical personal computer had nearly arrived. People were dreaming about mostly the wrong uses as they lacked experience with emerging use cases. IBM blessed PCs for business and the vast majority of action for a decade went in that direction. The Mac's user interface was dismissed. Real computer users (we had moved beyond programmers) used a text interface. A mouse based windowing system for most meant Windows 95 - which arrived around the time home Internet access exploded. A multi-pronged fork in the road had arrived and computing took them.
Everyone is familiar with what happened next. The rapid acceptance of the Internet as a primary reason for owning a personal computer followed by the an evolution to laptops and smartphones. Each of these came with its own blue sky. Initially the transitions appeared as failures to those who had been used to earlier forms of interaction. Tasks from the last generation of devices were often more difficult on these smaller form factors. Advanced users were too involved in their own world to understand that a much larger group of new users would come in and define new paths.
In the late 1990s our Human Computing Interface department at AT&T Research spent a lot of time worrying about the intersection of handheld computers with enough memory to run real operating systems with wireless communication, geolocation and photography. It was clear these would come together into a single device. We built a prototype based on a Compaq PDA we had convinced to run Linux. It was connected to other modules making it about the size of a brick, but it let the imagination run and we were given a view of what the world might be like in ten or fifteen years. We thought computing would go into the woodwork and clothing. Fashion as a matrix for intimate computation (the iCane, iBelt, iWatch concepts and smart shirts) and smartdust.
The iPhone isn't a phone or a Macintosh. The WATCH isn't a watch or an iPhone. I don't have much experience with the paths wearable computation might take. I think in terms of a path of types computation driven by specialized use and later by Moore's law and an exponentially increasing connected user base. Looking back I can see a clear path - a geodesic of computation - that runs from the Antikythera mechanism through the slide rule followed by a progression of mainframes, minicomputers, a series of Macs and the iPhone. It's smoothness is an illusion that only appears in retrospect. At each junction an increasing number of possible paths emerged. I found my thread of low resistance that met my use case and pocketbook.
Unlike the smartphone which we had crudely prototyped in 1999, I don't have enough experience with wearable interfaces to have a sense of my use case. I have my doubts about Apple's vision, but admit it is based on naivety. I don't know if they have found the right starting point, but suggest their new device represents a huge potential change that will roll out over the next five years. The wrist seems like a natural place for this amount of computation. There are so many other issues involved, but at least we have the first serious run at intimate computation.
A few final thoughts.
People who wear watches that cost more than a thousand dollars these days use them primarily as a social signal - as an element of fashion. That is an enormously large and complex subject. Smartphones flirted with the edges, but now it is front and center. The only things that seem certain are is devices will come back to our wrists for the first time since the mobile phone largely vanquished them and STEM education and thinking is for an earlier time.
I still use my slide rule, but increasingly I'm interested in the science of the aesthetics of materials and the culture we call fashion...
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Recipe Corner
I haven't made anything interesting other than a bit of experimentation with cold brewed chocolate. Chocoholics may want to give this a try.
... and does it seem like it is getting hotter to you?
While doing a bit of cleaning in the kitchen I found a surprise a friend had hidden nearly in plain sight. I was on the step stool storing some things that are rarely used high in the cabinets that are rarely reached. Looking around I saw the top of the refrigerator was very dusty. I pushed the stool over and found a smiley face that had been drawn with a finger looking back at me. A time capsule from the past.
This past week a kerfuffle erupted over a published Facebook experiment and I found myself thinking about social computing and the importance of filtering. I tend to think of three issues central to social computing - security, privacy and filtering. The first two are often confused and all three can be related. Issues of trust are tied to all of them. I'll approach it using filtering.
I didn't see the smiley face because my vantage point for seeing the world wasn't high enough. The person who drew it a few years ago is about a half foot taller than me and seeing the top of refrigerators must be a common experience for her. Making use of this she left a little time capsule in her plain sight using my comparative lack of height as a filter. Perfectly played:-)
Our senses only give a rough approximation of the world around us. We live slightly in the past due to neural signaling and synchronization speeds and some aspects of vision now appear to be averaged over very long periods (10 to 15 seconds) to beat down noise in the environment and our nervous system and to allow us to synthesize a stable image. Our vision is sensitive to a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum selected by evolution to correspond to the majority of sunlight that makes it through the atmosphere and that is energetic enough to cause chemical reactions without destroying chemical bonds. The signals from retina to to visual cortex undergo a good deal of processing and the effective data rate isn’t impressive — about the same as a twenty year old ethernet cable. We don't respond to fast or slow events, our sense of smell isn't up to that of our dog, and the list goes on and on. But from this highly filtered information we construct our own reality of sorts and we, at least I, find the result rich and compelling. We can and have managed through our wits to augment our senses and to quantify the result allowing for an empirical study of nature. And we have a brain that is powerful enough that we often can make empirical measurements and extend the range and variety of our senses.
One type of reality we construct is in the form of story. We experience the stories of others, construct our own and sometimes mix them. We are wired for patterns which can inspire them in our minds and fix some degree of trust to stories from others. Story telling is important to sociology, anthropology and the like is extremely complex and difficult to study. Complexity is tough.
An impressive amount of work goes can go into the storytelling in a movie. The music is carefully selected to enrich your experience — a filter. Consider this analysis of the main theme for ‘Frozen'
Facebook trades in stories. It wants to be the medium that people can share their own stories with friends and perhaps act on the stories advertisers are paying them to find an audience for. In my mind Facebook has two goals: first to keep its audience engaged in their conversations and second to serve their customers - the advertisers. Without the first the second is impossible. They need to understand how to keep and grow their audience and a firehose of data - very rich data.
Facebook needs people who can understand it and how it fits with their business. They employ a lot of data scientists, but data science is far from being a science. It is just a tool for addressing questions. It is important to ask questions that can be meaningfully answered.
The best people for understanding social systems are seasoned social science types. The good ones are driven more by research and the thrill of the hunt than by money. They often see the business world as limiting, but places like Google and Facebook offer treasure troves of rich data to play with.1
There was a failure in Facebook’s PR and legal departments. This type of internal research is very common and important for Google, Facebook and others. We did it in the data with call detail records at AT&T, dating sites and others do it all the time. Controlled A/B tests (and many other techniques) are how you figure out how to turn the knobs on your filters.
My hope is that there might be a conversation on filters. What they are, how they work, who controls them and so on. We’ve been dealing with filters for centuries. They impact politics, consumerism and even belief. … print, electronic and face to face: newspapers, radio, tv, used car salesmen, religion. Now they can be personalized (face to face has been able to do that for a long time, but it doesn’t scale well). A problems is filters can create signals that seem wrong or may have an unintended consequence. If FB tries to make people slightly happier in order to keep them it may be a mistake. For example some recent work shows that some people, when they see everyone else is happy, tend to get more depressed. The whole notion of what an emotion is turns out to be very fluffy.
I think the firestorm may be partly driven by an unease with 'big data' — few know what it is, how it is used and how it impacts them. They see ties into security and privacy - and now this may be illuminating filter manipulation for many.
Deeper issues why people are upset are largely overlooked. We have any number of signaling and out of band communication that are missed by the measurements of social media. They would completely miss the time capsule joke Colleen drew on the top of my refrigerator and millions of other subtle and not so subtle interactions.
We rely on computer aided networked communications to send fragments of larger stories, communication exchanges and other forms of signaling to others. It is a mistake to think this is sufficient and a greater mistake to attempt to curate it.
That may be a central point. In the past we have relied on media companies to give us books, movies, television and other types of media to consume. It is filtered culture, but we are mostly aware of that. We also rely on others to carry our remote communications - the post office and telcos. We have trusted them not to filter meaning. The phone company doesn't decide what is the the conversation we're having with our sister.
Media companies regularly do A/B testing to see what we will buy. Communication companies do testing of the quality of signal to optimize their networks. What interests me about Facebook is not that they have done A/B testing as organizations that have filtered information often do such things, but rather that they are filtering our personal culture - they have put themselves in the position of making some rather delicate choices that impact personal signaling and communication. We only have sketchy ideas of how they are doing this. I'm guessing their attempt to curate our personal culture may be at the heart of what is bothering so many.
I sent this image to a few of you the other day. A version of the famous duck/rabbit illusion, it shows how our brain can be on the fence making an image conclusion. Some practics data science poorly - a lot of not understanding the data, its errors or the questions. Pretty patterns are found - sometimes great effort goes into sorting out is it a duck or a rabbit, when in reality is is neither and had nothing to do with animals in the first place. It happens all to easily when there isn't enough information about the situation in the first place (it can also happen when there is too much information or a lot of noise). Social signaling and communication is much richer than what social media can deal with. Perhaps we have found a valley of social uncanniness with Facebook.2
We have a long way to go in our understanding of human interactions - I suspect current social media will be footnotes in the history of the subject a few decades from now. Hopefully we will begin to ask questions about filters and what they mean.3
___________ 1 It is very difficult to find this in the academic world and people will go into these companies with the intention of staying a few years and learning and then moving on. To keep them you can allow them to publish. Google mostly doesn’t and it shows. Facebook has tried a few times. My guess is this was part of a recruiting effort. The paper is ok - not brilliant or very descriptive. The problem it is addressing can’t easily be answered with the technique they used. They can get a sense of the windage and make adjustments. The nature of how the review board acted is under question, but that points to issues with academic review boards. I can’t see anything really wrong with this. The tech press went crazy, but it seems they weren’t parsing the meaning of some words that have very different definitions when used in academic research (a problem all researchers have when trying to communicate with the general public - I have failed terribly at times). It also strikes me that many people writing about this didn’t read the paper and certainly didn’t understand the context.
2 For the record I have a Facebook account, but only use it around my birthday and Christmas as something of an updated holiday card. I try to have deeper connections with those who are close to me. I also gave up on Google except for YouTube.
3 This will probably blow over like so many other issues do. It is important for us to have discussions and hold filtering companies accountable - or at least realize what is going on and make intelligent choices as users. Sadly the track record for society is not very good. Failure could be dangerous - we need to be asking ethical questions of filtering in everything from MOOCs to democracy. What is the public square anyway? What is the peronal discussion?
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Recipe corner
Grilling time!
BBQed Sweet Potato Fries
Ingredients
° 2 large sweet potatoes, cut in french fry like strips
° 2 tbl olive oil
° 2 tsp sea salt
° 1 tsp ground cumin
° 1 tsp chile powder
° 1 tsp paprika
° 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
° 1/2 tsp cayenne - more if you like hotter, less if milder
Technique
° toss sweet potatoes and oil in a large bowl
° combine spices a small bowl and mix
° add the spice mixture to the sweet potatoes and toss
° cook in a vegetable holder on a grill until the sweet potatoes brown nicely - alternatively cook them in a fairly hot (425°F or so) oven for about 25 minutes turning them halfway through.
° these can be very good with a yogurt or sour cream sauce. I made a yogurt sauce with plain yogurt, chili sauce, chopped cilantro, garlic, lime, pepper and salt .. what was around.
A dozen years ago I took a long and stimulating walk with an obscure designer who has since ascended into international prominence. Two weeks before a few of us had visited his company and somehow its CEO decided to invite me out for a private chat - part of this was walking with his favorite designer.
I'm not a designer by any stretch of the imagination, but the walk was fascinating - a discussion that bounced fluidly from material science, to Moore's Law projections, to the anthropology of Victorian women and how they dealt with sweating.
It was clear this was someone who was fascinated by connecting the dots and he somehow saw me as a like minded person. In the end his boss made an interesting offer, but I decided to stay where I was - perhaps a mistake and perhaps not as the next two years were remarkably productive for me.
One of the most curious parts of that walk centered around thinking where personal electronics might be in a decade. He was concerned with how people would relate to the devices as objects - very much part of the user interface in his mind. He was fascinated by the stones some Victorian women would carry on hot days. These were beautifully finished smooth pieces with just the right size, shape and density. They could be rubbed for a soothing feeling that might calm a person if they were nervous or if the temperature was too high - they were gateways away from the craziness of the moment to a calmer state of mind.
It was important that the hand have access to all parts of these stones and that placed an upper limit on the size. He noted that, given the average size of a woman's hand, it was unlikely that you could design something for handheld use with a diagonal measurement that exceeded four inches. He speculated that devices with screens would probably have that as an upper limit on the screen size if the device was meant to be as suited as these old Victorian stones were... We talked about such devices as a stepping stone and where you might go after that and a dozen other things.
It was an incredibly stimulating walk, but the four inch diagonal measurement notion somehow stuck with me.
Yesterday morning I got up around three and sat in bed wondering what the lines were like at the AppleStore in Bridgewater, New Jersey. I could drive there in about twenty minutes and my iPhone 5 pre-order had me scheduled for delivery sometime in October...
since I was already up...
To my surprise the queue wasn't terribly long - I was about 30 in line when I arrived a bit before 4 am. I've been to a few events like these and love the fact that a group of complete strangers is drawn to doing something that is simultaneously unusual and common. Someone brought some excellent chocolate chip cookies and someone else had what must have been a few gallons of hot chocolate. If you sit back and watch you can learn quite a bit.
On that walk in Palo Alto one of the topics of discussion was the Porsche 911. Although far from a general consumer vehicle represents a remarkable example of constant evolution of a design that was close to ideal for the task when first introduced.
It has a distinctive character as well as what should be an impossibly awful front to rear weight distribution. Almost everything in its design is meant to optimize its character and it can probably be considered one of the greatest automobiles of all time.
First introduced nearly five decades ago, the 911 has undergone a terrific amount of change, but current models are roughly the same size and shape of the originals. It is easy for someone with one from the 1970s to get into a current model and feel the sense of connection. The newer models are much "better", but they are also very much the same.
The designer wanted to make the point that the job of the designer was to help articulate this - to work with the engineers and those who build the car, those who have to repair it and those who will use it - to find the best compromise that will work at a given time and place. And then to participate in guiding its evolution. He made the point that these refinements produce something that is so timely that the notion of buying the latest and greatest isn't as important as just having one and taking delight in its use.
... then we talked about architecture, bicycles, violins, and watches ....
Apple has been updating the iPhone on roughly a yearly schedule. Generally there is a large change followed by a smaller change. Year to year it isn't particularly tempting to get something new. The latest phone has improvements over the last one, but not hugely so. But two years offers a large jump.
Most mobile contracts are two years. When your contract is up the latest phone represents a big jump in capability and that makes it desirable. At the same time you don't feel terrible a year into your contract when something new comes out. Apple also softens the desire for the mid-contract upgrade by offering free and roughly yearly updates to the iOS operating system. This works for about three years (four in the case of the 3GS), before a phone is too old to update. You buy into something that generally improves in capabilities over time and the process is mostly smooth and transparent.
The iPhone is not perfect, but there is a uniform design language and the lesson of the Porsche 911 is relevant. There isn't a huge amount of design difference between the original and latest iPhone - it is easy to recognize them as something from Apple. On the other hand there has been an enormous amount of refinement. There is a strong sense that, if you are satisfied with the product, you can comfortably stay with the line for a long time - assuming Apple remains true to the path.
It is popular for technical pundits to criticize new products. Most of these people have never designed, built or programming anything serious in their lives. They love to create specification checklists and use them as a proxy for comparing products. This rarely gets at the user experience, design, "character", ecosystem and the anthropology of something.
There is no way I can comment on these deeply enough, but a few of you asked for an iPhone 5 review. I'll offer a few comments now, but will put together notes for a more detailed review after I use it for a week or two. (I won't post it here as I'm not a reviewer, but let me know if you want a copy when I finish the notes.)
When I finally got inside the Apple Store I was paired with Jeff Stambovsky who turned out to be good at navigating an order that was complicated by the fact that I needed to cancel a previous online order and doing so would cause a problem with my carrier's ordering system - namely it would reset the fact that I had over two years on my last phone. He was able to contact the right people at Apple and my carrier and just make the process happen. On top of that, while we were waiting, there was good conversation and no sales pressure. Apple Stores do the highest sales per square foot of any store in the US. Other brick and mortar stores should study them and a few others who have interesting approaches and perhaps learn.1
Why do we think of these things and call them "phones"? They aren't for many of us. I was talking to a European friend who notes he pays full price for a smartphone and then gets an unlimited data plan for about $13 a month ... He never uses it as a phone, but does "voice" instead using one of several VOIP products. He has routed around his telephone service. Imagine being able to do that in the US.
Out of the box I was startled by the weight and "feel" of it as an object. It is very light for its size, but still has enough density to let you know it is metal and glass rather than plastic. The fit and finish are excellent and comparable to some very high end consumer objects. Perhaps not at the level of a really fine watch, but approaching it.
The screen is excellent and the diagonal measurement, ahem, is four inches - the measurement that has stuck with me over the years. Larger objects have their own niches, but will speak to different design languages. Apple is about focus and simplicity. There is a design balance and Apple speaks strongly on this - excessive choice can lead to some tragically awful design.2
Good design is often about what you leave out.
Many have criticized the eight pin connector. This is Apple at work and I'm amazed the old thirty pin connector survived as long as it did. The new charging connection is much more secure, can be inserted in two orientations and allows a much slimmer case design. Every change like this is criticized as a terrible Apple mistake and a sign the company is in a downward spiral. In the end it is necessary to destroy some of the old and replace it if you want to prevent a Windows-like complexity from taking over. This is an artifact of necessary housekeeping as the design evolves. At the same time it is clear why wireless charging is not good enough to include at this point, why NFC doesn't make sense and so on. Focus and elimination, properly done, are a good thing.
Transferring my mobile life from my old iPhone 4 was simple. You have your choice of Apple's online backup system or a backup on your computer. I chose the backup on my MacBook. It took a couple of clicks and a few minutes to complete the task. All of my apps, their layout, all of my accounts were duplicated - the iPhone 5 is very similar to my old phone. This backup feature has saved me a few times.
There is a big noise over maps that reminds me of the antennagate kerfuffle on the iPhone 4. I'm very curious as to why this happened and can imagine a variety of scenarios that may or may not be a power play between Apple and Google. I don't know if there is a single driver or if both are involved - I suspect the later. That said maps are difficult! Fleshing them out is going to take a lot of user time as well as licensing many new sources (Google licenses dozens and dozens). The databases will improve with time - it isn't as simple as going out and licensing or acquiring one source. I suspect the maps will be much better in six months time and dramatically better in 18 months.
The maps are represented as vectors and render much faster than the old Google supplied bitmaps. The interface strikes me as nicer and cleaner than Google's, but the flyover is only eye-candy. Google's street mapped view is actually useful.
There is something more interesting to note. You can always bookmark the Google maps webpage in all of its chewy HTML 5 glory, as an icon and use it as a proxy for the Google Map app. Apps, for the time being and foreseeable future, seem to work better than HTML 5 for many applications. Apple discovered this accidentally almost immediately with the original iPhone. Google has discovered it, Facebook stumbled and only realized it recently... 3
Speaking of antennagate, the antenna design seems to work well on the new iPhone, but I haven't tested it throughly. WiFi is much improved and it can do 5 GHz 802.11n. My old iPhone had to use the house 802.11b we provide for house guests.
Performance appears to be excellent - similar to our iPad 3 and vastly improved over the iPhone 4. I'm sure it will feel normal in a few days and going back would be impossible.
The screen is beautiful - colors are richer and more vivid and the off-axis viewing is much improved. The size works well in my sort of average sized hands. I wouldn't want something taller and certainly not wider - I find many of the current Android phones to be unusable as single hand devices.
Apple earbuds are not for serious music listening and the new design is not a huge improvement. It is better for calls and the microphone must be improved as four of the five people I've talked to have noted my voice sounds different and more natural. Perhaps I was having a more natural day, but I suspect it is improved. They stay in my ears much better than the earlier Apple-issued ear kit. If you listen to music carefully, you'll want some better earbuds or earphones anyway.
The camera continues to improve. I don't know how many panorama photos I'll take, but it works much better than the third party apps I've used. My trusty Sony NEX-5N is still a vastly better camera, but it is of no use if I don't have it and it is just too inconvenient to pack around.4
Passbook is a very interesting and potentially important experiment. It addresses areas where NFC fails and may even work socially. Really important to think about and understand. It isn't clear if it will succeed and what success might mean for the ecosystem and others, but its success or failure is important to understand.
The bottom line is I would recommend the new iPhone as a great smartphone if you are currently in the market. It is the best I've used to date. I'm a happy camper. I wish I was as pleased with my carrier.
Apple doesn't execute perfectly - far from it and they never have in the past. But it does have a core set of principles that it uses as a guide and perhaps Jobs' best contribution has been making them part of the company. It won't last forever, but I think it stands a chance of going on for some time. Over time I believe we'll see this combination of design, a deep desire for simplicity, an attempt to deeply understand a specific problem and a linkage of the social and technical move in an interesting direction.
There is something deep about good design and knowing something well enough to realize what gets in the way so it can confidently be left out. The principle applies everywhere and turns out to be a fundamental tool for dealing with information. We've touched on that before and are likely to return as so many fields depend on it.
... much more to say, but I've used 70 of my allotted 60 minutes at this point. I'll add a recipe and post this now. Oh - and for those who love hardware the just released iFixit teardown video.
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1 Apple Stores have evolved over the years, but have a common core design notion and mission. Copying them directly is probably a mistake as what works for them probably only works for Apple - the concept of brand comes into play. They aren't perfect, but they will probably continue their own evolution.
2 A rich subject indeed. Mass customization may offer meaningful choice and there are aspects that are very desirable, but much of the territory is unexplored. It will be fascinating to see how design couples with it. If you're curious about this it is an area that is of great interest to me and the reason why I spend time looking at where fashion may be going. There is much press given to 3d manufacture, but apart from prototyping and a few niches I think it is much too early to talk about if your horizons are anything under a decade. There are fundamental design and materials problems that need a much richer understanding than is currently available.
3 This is a really important point and helps define a minimal ecosystem. As much as I like some of Microsoft's current work and a few of the new phones, I doubt they'll gain enough traction to do very well. They have a real chicken and egg problem.
Today is the first day of Autumn and muffins are always good with breakfast as the weather chills and crisps. Here is an ancient blueberry muffin recipe I use. The secret to great muffins is to use very fresh ingredients and to barely mix the ingredients. Over mixing just kills them... I won't convert it to metric units.
Blueberry Muffins
Ingredients
° 8 ounces AP flour
° 6 ounces cane sugar
° 2 teaspoons baking powder
° 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
° 1 teaspoon un-iodized salt
° 8 ounces sour cream
° 1/2 cup vegetable oil
° zest and juice of one large orange
° 1 pint of blueberries (probably thawed frozen ...) extra points for wild blueberries
° optional - topping
° 9 ounces AP flour
° 9 ounces cane sugar
° 6 ounces butter
° 2 tablespoons cinnamon
Technique
° Preheat oven to 375°F with a middle rack in place
° Combine all the dry ingredients together and sift once into a large bowl, add the orange zest, and set aside.
° Separately mix the sour cream, orange juice, oil, and eggs until completely smooth.
° Mix the two very briefly on low speed for about one minute. The batter should be lumpy.
° Fold fruit into the batter gently into a greased muffin pan.
° optional
° mix topping together until coarsely mixed. divide on top of the muffins
° Bake until springy and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean - about 15 minutes.
Or a hairy ball for that matter.. at least not if you want to perfectly comb them so their hair lies perfectly flat everywhere on their surface.
Imagine you have an unruly donut hair covered donut and want to comb it flat (I can't imagine eating a hair covered donut). It turns out to be an easy task. Now think about the problem of combing a hair covered ball. It turns out you can't do it perfectly - the best you can do is to make the fur like flat (locally tangent to it's surface) at every point but one where you are left with a cowlick.
\A banana is really the same thing as a sphere topologically. Imagine the banana was incredibly pliable - really really ripe - and the skin just as flexible. You could push in bits here and pull out others there and change its shape into a sphere.1
The hairy ball theorem has been proven.2 Math, unlike science, is an areas where solid black and white proofs are possible.
It turns out there is always at least one point on the planet where there is no wind. This point is the eye of a cyclone or anticyclone (wind spirals around it - air can't flow into or out of it as it is static). So there is, and has been, at least one cyclone everywhere on Earth ever since there was an atmosphere. You can say the same about any body in the Universe with an atmosphere.
so if you want to take bets ...
And if you wonder what brought this on, the banana I had for breakfast this morning was on the verge of being too ripe and looked like it might be growing hair one of these days. I also have an unruly cowlick today - put this together and some math has to come out. Math is neat stuff!
While I'm far from being fashionable, some of you play it well. It is really fascinating to think about as there is an ephemeral nature and personal style can be very artistic. In the US personal style for many has been replaced by inexpensive, ephemeral uniforms. Getting something cheap that looks like something that a vetted style setter wears has become more important than finding a personal style. In theory there is much more choice in stores, but in reality this translates into a very narrow "look".
Jheri and I have been re-thinking our views on mass customization. The genesis of this was marrying some work I did for the Defense Department with the need of Jheri and some others to find clothing that fits. The notion was that mass customization was becoming easier and fit was the most important component. While fit still is the most important component there are clearly other drivers as well as roadblocks. Recently Jheri pointed to a new book on overly-cheap apparel (halfway into this post). The book is mostly about the over consumption of very low quality fashion and the dramatic change that has swept the industry. We are now wondering if some changes we're seeing among the 20 to 30 year old demographic may be important sources of kindling for the ignition of real mass customization - forget things like fancy printing technologies which are still a long way off from large scale viability ...
Apparel is still largely handmade at this point and the cost structure is going to keep it that way for at least another decade or two. A pair of jeans may have a few hours of hand labor in them, but if you can do that for two dimes an hour, why change? Major designers are now working for the high volume firms, but the quality of material and construction is poor. The middle tier of quality and manufacture has mostly disappeared. A few speciality makes have appeared that exploit this need - Lululemon is a good example.3 Their quality matches their pricing, but this is fairly rare - to first order even $300 dresses are very poorly made. Many consumers no longer have the ability to judge construction and material quality.
The signal we are seeing among at the edge - mostly in places like San Francisco, NYC (especially Brooklyn and lower Manhattan!), Seattle, Minneapolis and San Diego may be the rejection of overconsumption and more value placed on owning a smaller number of higher quality items that can last. These are also areas that tend to support the notion of a strong sense of personal fashion. There is more of the diversity you see in some European cities and mall uniforms are distinctly clueless.
New small business is emerging to fill these needs and some people are becoming craftsmen and artisans. Clothing repair and re-tailoring shops are exist in greater number and I even saw a few new cobbler shops in Brooklyn last week. While it isn't clear that this is a trend that will spread, it should be pointed out that the traditional apparel industry control on media is much weaker with forces like Pinterest exploding in popularity and Etsy creating a new channel for accessories.
It is very curious to note that those who ply vintage stores note that items at least thirty years old are worthy of salvage and modification - newer items become progressively more poorly made to the point where anything made in the past decade is so poorly made that it isn't worth bothering with.
There are some great opportunities for design tools and even manufacture automation that may come to the small scale shops before the large manufacturers. The big guys (like Levis) have tried what they thought was mass customization a decade ago and have mostly abandoned it. I think this is like Microsoft's decade old notion of the tablet - they simply lacked the chops to dive in deep and re-imagine that was really needed. TRVL is another example of a publication more properly reimagined for the iPad world - and a need to break beyond conventional tools (like InDesign and pdfs used by the publishing industry) and thinking. They were trying to hammer their square peg into a round hole and, guess what... it didn't work very well.
It is likely this won't be very large at first - a ten percent shift in the market within this age segment would be big in my mind, but very indicative of a major trend. We may see the re-emergence of the middle tier of apparel quality and manufacturing along with people taking a more focused interest in what fashion is - they may become their own artists rather than mere consumers.4 Remember - these are the guys who see iPads and creative tools. My generation tends to see them (and very improperly!) as consumption devices.
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1 Try a little experiment: The famous example would be to change a donut into a coffee mug - cookie dough will show the way and had a big advantage over modeling clay in that it is edible. This can make for a sweet introduction to topology:-)
2 There are many proofs. Most are pretty complex requiring some deep math - usually homology theory is involved. I could follow some in the day, but now I'm more rusty - you have to keep at this to be in good form. I did see an elegant and simple proof by John Milnor when I was a student and have it in my notes. Since at least one of you is a mathematician and several are physicists and serious computer scientists it is reasonable to show it. Normally it would take at least an hour to typeset it in LaTeX and arrange images to embed in html, but here is a nice reproduction in a math blog. The warning is this is probably greek if you haven't done an college level math - so please ignore it and accept this a proven result, but if you had an advanced calculus course, you have the tools you need and it is a sweet little proof.
3 I've visited their shops a few times. Once with Jheri trying to learn a bit and then out of curiosity when I was in Manhattan. Several of the customers told me construction and material quality is much more important than the very careful marketing - it represents good value and is what makes them repeat customers. The chain has established itself as one of the few mid-quality outlets in existance. Sort of a sad thing when mid quality is the highest level most of us have access to - and many of us can't even get that. A real opportunity space...
4 Distributed design and IP ownership needs tools that are probably closely linked with social media. Improved mathematical models to convolve design and fit patterns need to be made along with improvements in user/designer feedback. Automated and semi-automatic manufacturing tools. More uniform measurement tools, improvements in user and designer feedback, user and designer education tools ... the list goes on and on and the surface has only been scratched. But it is important to note that this is an enormous industry - something like a half trillion a year in the US. Even niches can be non-trivially large.
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Before getting on with the recipe, I'd like to make a recommendation. I'm afraid my education is very narrow. High school was ok, but in college I focused and spend most of my time in the physical sciences and math - placing out of other subjects where possible. A really big mistake in retrospect. Then on to grad school with a much more intense specialization.
I do read a lot and am reasonably curious, but there isn't a lot of structure to this approach. Recently I've been taking a few courses on iTunes U (there are other flavors of this sort of online learning). I'm not diving in deeply and doing the homeworks and all of the readings at this point, but am enjoying those with great lectures. It is an excellent way to pass time on long boring trips and during exercise sessions. Over a three week period, for example, I listened to all of the lectures in David Blight's excellent History 119 course at Yale: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era. Since then I've read a few of the books on his reading list. Great stuff and highly recommended!
All of the iTunes U online material is free and some of the classes are extremely interesting. It isn't a substitute for deeply focusing and doing all of the coursework and interacting with the professor, but it is so much better than TV or movies.
Here is a guide I use to hunt courses. I'm sure there are others - if you know of good ones, let me know. And a recommendation for me - an excellent short introduction to Quantum Mechanics from Oxford by James Binney. He does an excellent job. The warning is you really need to work out the problems to gain any understanding of the subject. The class notes, recommended books and problem sets are here.
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Recipe section
Yesterday saw 97°F here and the urge for a homemade milkshake was strong as recently I had a rather poor excuse from what had been described as the best ice cream parlor in the area.
Homemade tahitian vanilla bean ice cream, homemade chocolate sauce + broken bits of Lindt 72% (added after the blending). I used my antique Hamilton Beach milkshake maker from the mid 1960s - a very high speed spindle and careful attention is the trick for velvety textured, very thick shakes. This one was - well - perfect (sigh)……
I won't go through this one exactly, but rather give a cheater's version that may be just as good for you.
Chocolate-Chocolate Chip Milkshake
Ingredients (for one or two servings depending on how much you like milkshakes)
° a pint of super premium vanilla ice cream - I like Häagen-Dazs Five Vanilla Bean as it is reasonably well crafted, widely available and is very simple with only five ingredients. Depending on where you are you may be able to find better and a really excellent homemade can be far better.
° about 120g whole milk (a half cup)
° a good chocolate topping - I've been making my own and can't make a recommendation. I've seen many in stores.
° 20-40g dark chocolate chopped into small bits - I used Lindt 72%
Technique
° For a thick and velvety shake you really need a high speed spindle. I use an ancient Hamilton Beach single spindle unit from the 1960s. It's shaft runs at 17,000 rpm and should be treated with care. For a consistency like many current ice cream parlors use a blender, and for a very thick shake find a study container for the mixture and use a table knife and large, heavy spoon and a LOT of elbow grease.
° cool the milk to near freezing and let the ice cream sit on your countertop for about 3 or 4 minutes before starting to soften it.
° Mix the milk, ice cream and chocolate syrup and blend using one of the techniques above. I start with eight parts of ice cream for every part of milk - if you like them to be drinkable use a four to one mixture. If you are using a pint of ice cream, try about 2 table spoons of chocolate syrup for a very light chocolate and increase as desired. I like the lighter version.
° After blending mix in the chocolate chunks with a table knife.
° Pour into a chilled glass and, if you like, top with a bit of whipped cream and/or shaved chocolate. I couldn't take it anymore and just had it as is.
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. Horace Dediu has an extremely insightful blog and 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.
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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
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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.
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 paperlessatelier... Steve Jobs would not approve that I saw a few people frantically sketching with a conductive stylus for last second visual notes to be communicated to others. There was also a great deal of photographic annotation.
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And a recipe or two!
After a few people saw this post, two wrote and asked where are the recipes? OK - here is a fun one with a bit of science. But first a word on measurements.
Most of my recipes have approximate measurements. When cooking with fresh ingredients it is often necessary to adjust for the freshness and taste of the ingredients as well as your own tastes. I'll try to supply weight and volume measurements, but encourage you to move to just weight for anything that isn't a liquid at the very least when amounts are important - some types of cooking and most types of baking. Get an electronic kitchen scale that can tare - it will change your life in the kitchen. Good enough ones aren't expensive. I use the EatSmart Precision Pro- about $25.
Now on to the food!
Maillard Reaction Squash in a Pressure Cooker
The Maillard reaction is this wonderful event that takes place between an amino acid, a reducing sugar and some heat. Without going into details a complex mixture of molecules forms that are involve in the flavors and smells of many foods. The browning of meats, the browning on toast, french fries, fried onions, roasted coffee, the browned sections of cakes and cookies. In short it has a fundamental importance in baking and cooking.
Most of these reactions begin at around 300°F, although some start much lower - perhaps 250°F. It would be nice to cook with the reaction, but in a boiling or immersed environment. The trick is to use a pressure cooker. Most will go to 15psi - pushing the interior boiling temperature to something past the threashold for some of the reaction. Physics just works - increase the pressure of the gas over water and the boiling point increases.
It would be wonderful to get that great taste on something like squash in a pressure cooker. It turns out a bit of experimentation shows the way. Some of the experiments didn't work, but were edible none the less. Adding a bit of baking soda increased the reaction just enough to make everything work (alkali environments generally encourage the reaction - we're sitting on the fence at 15psi and need to be pushed just a bit)
This one works:-)
ingredients
° 55g (4 tbl) unsalted butter
° 0.75kg (1 1/2 lb) delicata squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into half inchish cubes
° 1/2 lemon grass stalk
° 1 tsp kosher salt
° 1/2 tsp baking soda
° honey to taste
method
1. Melt butter in a pressure cooker. Stir in squash, lemon grass, salt and baking soda. Cover tightly with pressure cooker lid and cook at a gauge pressure of 1 bar (15 p.s.i.) for 20 minutes. Begin the timing after the pressure has been reached.
2. Depressurize the cooker according to the pressure cooker's manual.
3. Remove lemon grass. Blend the squash to a smooth purée. Add honey to taste.
mmmm
Pressure cookers, if you haven't tried one, rule. I use a Kuhn Rikon1 and love it - spendy, but you probably won't find a better pressure cooker. A core component of the kitchen and safe.
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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
Preheat an oven to 350° F
find four oven proof coffee mugs or similar sized ramekins and put them on a pan
melt butter and chocolate in a double boiler and whisk until smoothly melted and mixed. Remove from heat and set aside
Stir eggs and sugar in a mixing bowl over simmering water until warm to the touch.
Beat egg mixture with a beater until light and fluffy - 3 to 5 minutes. Gently fold the egg mixture into the chocolate
Spoon batter into cups and add enough hot water in the pan to come up halfway on the cups
Bake until top of mixture looses its glossy look. About 15 or 20 minutes.
Remove and let cool to a bit above room temperature on the outside. Put on whipped cream and serve
wicked fine
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1 A review of the pressure cooker I use. It was about $200 and worth every penny.
why are we in a hand basket and where are we going?
... and does it seem like it is getting hotter to you?
While doing a bit of cleaning in the kitchen I found a surprise a friend had hidden nearly in plain sight. I was on the step stool storing some things that are rarely used high in the cabinets that are rarely reached. Looking around I saw the top of the refrigerator was very dusty. I pushed the stool over and found a smiley face that had been drawn with a finger looking back at me. A time capsule from the past.
This past week a kerfuffle erupted over a published Facebook experiment and I found myself thinking about social computing and the importance of filtering. I tend to think of three issues central to social computing - security, privacy and filtering. The first two are often confused and all three can be related. Issues of trust are tied to all of them. I'll approach it using filtering.
Our senses only give a rough approximation of the world around us. We live slightly in the past due to neural signaling and synchronization speeds and some aspects of vision now appear to be averaged over very long periods (10 to 15 seconds) to beat down noise in the environment and our nervous system and to allow us to synthesize a stable image. Our vision is sensitive to a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum selected by evolution to correspond to the majority of sunlight that makes it through the atmosphere and that is energetic enough to cause chemical reactions without destroying chemical bonds. The signals from retina to to visual cortex undergo a good deal of processing and the effective data rate isn’t impressive — about the same as a twenty year old ethernet cable. We don't respond to fast or slow events, our sense of smell isn't up to that of our dog, and the list goes on and on. But from this highly filtered information we construct our own reality of sorts and we, at least I, find the result rich and compelling. We can and have managed through our wits to augment our senses and to quantify the result allowing for an empirical study of nature. And we have a brain that is powerful enough that we often can make empirical measurements and extend the range and variety of our senses.
One type of reality we construct is in the form of story. We experience the stories of others, construct our own and sometimes mix them. We are wired for patterns which can inspire them in our minds and fix some degree of trust to stories from others. Story telling is important to sociology, anthropology and the like is extremely complex and difficult to study. Complexity is tough.
An impressive amount of work goes can go into the storytelling in a movie. The music is carefully selected to enrich your experience — a filter. Consider this analysis of the main theme for ‘Frozen'
Facebook trades in stories. It wants to be the medium that people can share their own stories with friends and perhaps act on the stories advertisers are paying them to find an audience for. In my mind Facebook has two goals: first to keep its audience engaged in their conversations and second to serve their customers - the advertisers. Without the first the second is impossible. They need to understand how to keep and grow their audience and a firehose of data - very rich data.
Facebook needs people who can understand it and how it fits with their business. They employ a lot of data scientists, but data science is far from being a science. It is just a tool for addressing questions. It is important to ask questions that can be meaningfully answered.
The best people for understanding social systems are seasoned social science types. The good ones are driven more by research and the thrill of the hunt than by money. They often see the business world as limiting, but places like Google and Facebook offer treasure troves of rich data to play with.1
There was a failure in Facebook’s PR and legal departments. This type of internal research is very common and important for Google, Facebook and others. We did it in the data with call detail records at AT&T, dating sites and others do it all the time. Controlled A/B tests (and many other techniques) are how you figure out how to turn the knobs on your filters.
My hope is that there might be a conversation on filters. What they are, how they work, who controls them and so on. We’ve been dealing with filters for centuries. They impact politics, consumerism and even belief. … print, electronic and face to face: newspapers, radio, tv, used car salesmen, religion. Now they can be personalized (face to face has been able to do that for a long time, but it doesn’t scale well). A problems is filters can create signals that seem wrong or may have an unintended consequence. If FB tries to make people slightly happier in order to keep them it may be a mistake. For example some recent work shows that some people, when they see everyone else is happy, tend to get more depressed. The whole notion of what an emotion is turns out to be very fluffy.
I think the firestorm may be partly driven by an unease with 'big data' — few know what it is, how it is used and how it impacts them. They see ties into security and privacy - and now this may be illuminating filter manipulation for many.
Deeper issues why people are upset are largely overlooked. We have any number of signaling and out of band communication that are missed by the measurements of social media. They would completely miss the time capsule joke Colleen drew on the top of my refrigerator and millions of other subtle and not so subtle interactions.
We rely on computer aided networked communications to send fragments of larger stories, communication exchanges and other forms of signaling to others. It is a mistake to think this is sufficient and a greater mistake to attempt to curate it.
That may be a central point. In the past we have relied on media companies to give us books, movies, television and other types of media to consume. It is filtered culture, but we are mostly aware of that. We also rely on others to carry our remote communications - the post office and telcos. We have trusted them not to filter meaning. The phone company doesn't decide what is the the conversation we're having with our sister.
Media companies regularly do A/B testing to see what we will buy. Communication companies do testing of the quality of signal to optimize their networks. What interests me about Facebook is not that they have done A/B testing as organizations that have filtered information often do such things, but rather that they are filtering our personal culture - they have put themselves in the position of making some rather delicate choices that impact personal signaling and communication. We only have sketchy ideas of how they are doing this. I'm guessing their attempt to curate our personal culture may be at the heart of what is bothering so many.
We have a long way to go in our understanding of human interactions - I suspect current social media will be footnotes in the history of the subject a few decades from now. Hopefully we will begin to ask questions about filters and what they mean.3
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1 It is very difficult to find this in the academic world and people will go into these companies with the intention of staying a few years and learning and then moving on. To keep them you can allow them to publish. Google mostly doesn’t and it shows. Facebook has tried a few times. My guess is this was part of a recruiting effort. The paper is ok - not brilliant or very descriptive. The problem it is addressing can’t easily be answered with the technique they used. They can get a sense of the windage and make adjustments. The nature of how the review board acted is under question, but that points to issues with academic review boards. I can’t see anything really wrong with this. The tech press went crazy, but it seems they weren’t parsing the meaning of some words that have very different definitions when used in academic research (a problem all researchers have when trying to communicate with the general public - I have failed terribly at times). It also strikes me that many people writing about this didn’t read the paper and certainly didn’t understand the context.
2 For the record I have a Facebook account, but only use it around my birthday and Christmas as something of an updated holiday card. I try to have deeper connections with those who are close to me. I also gave up on Google except for YouTube.
3 This will probably blow over like so many other issues do. It is important for us to have discussions and hold filtering companies accountable - or at least realize what is going on and make intelligent choices as users. Sadly the track record for society is not very good. Failure could be dangerous - we need to be asking ethical questions of filtering in everything from MOOCs to democracy. What is the public square anyway? What is the peronal discussion?
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Recipe corner
Grilling time!
BBQed Sweet Potato Fries
Ingredients
° 2 large sweet potatoes, cut in french fry like strips
° 2 tbl olive oil
° 2 tsp sea salt
° 1 tsp ground cumin
° 1 tsp chile powder
° 1 tsp paprika
° 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
° 1/2 tsp cayenne - more if you like hotter, less if milder
Technique
° toss sweet potatoes and oil in a large bowl
° combine spices a small bowl and mix
° add the spice mixture to the sweet potatoes and toss
° cook in a vegetable holder on a grill until the sweet potatoes brown nicely - alternatively cook them in a fairly hot (425°F or so) oven for about 25 minutes turning them halfway through.
° these can be very good with a yogurt or sour cream sauce. I made a yogurt sauce with plain yogurt, chili sauce, chopped cilantro, garlic, lime, pepper and salt .. what was around.
Posted at 01:22 PM in anthropology, building insight, critical thinking, food, general comments, society and technology | Permalink | Comments (0)
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