Veneral disease as it relates to cognition... a.k.a. just say no

I slowly bulldozed my way through fifty of the densest pages I have ever read today for my class on the Social Analysis of Technology. The book was “Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact”, and it covers the epistemology of Syphilis as a concept leading up to and during the early twentieth century. Swiss publishers released the initial pressing in 1935. I have a translation. When trying to find the definition for hypertrophy on the internet, I came to understand that Joanie Laurer a.k.a. Chyna has an enlarged clitoris.

I am wondering if all of this reading and research was truly necessary to get the point across that we create scientific knowledge rather than discover it. I am tired of reading about epistemology. I am tired of looking up obscure words in medical dictionaries. I know more about syphilis and bacteriology in the 20’s than I want to. I am uncertain an academic career here at Irvine was the right choice. I am consciously avoiding the fifty-five more pages of Syphilis waiting for me.

My bag of runes is telling me to “practice the art of doing without doing”.

The revolution will not be televised!

Microsoft has a new design approach for the next generation of Office that uses command "tabs" that group functions into relevant areas instead of drop down menus and toolbars. And it’s about goddamned time. In the current version of Office, the drop-down menus are impossibleto use and the tools in the toolbars are irrelevant the majority of the time.

For example, if I go to the Insert menu in the most recent version of Word, there are four initial options, with one option leading to the Picture sub-menu. That is, unless I click on the double down arrow in the circle, which shows me the extra eleven options in the Insert menu, brings the available sub-menu count to three, and adds nine additional sub-sub-menus under the Autotext sub menu. Now if I didn’t like what I inserted and want to try again, I have to browse the menus for the option that I selected once more, assuming that I found it in the first place. Menus blow because you have to know what you are looking for and know that it is there and move through the menus multiple times to get to it if you want to do it again. Adding to that, the toolbars in Office are a waste of space. I almost never use them because they are rarely relevant to the task at hand. If I am writing, then why am I seeing Excel chart tools in the toolbar? Why do I always see them when I never use Excel except when forces beyond my control compel me?

I have the burden/joy of taking Human Computer Interaction and Social Analysis of Technology this semester, and we have spent copious amounts of time talking about the legacy of the Xerox 8010 and human factors in computation. The lessons I have learned so far are that you should not make people think, search, read, or study in order to do anything. They should be able to grasp it instinctively. Toolbars with umm… let me count… thirty options (with maybe a third grayed out) make me have to do at least two of the above, and the menus with shifting numbers of options in the high teens probably make me do three of the above at any given time. With the new version of Office and the command “tabs“, I might have to do one, max.

If I had a million dollars, I would thrash the Barenaked Ladies to within an inch of their lives and then buy couple of drinks for the Office boys as those Torontites bled on the ground. I would need a group of commandos, though, because I hear Canadians are all about the martial arts.

Does this mean I should hate myself?

Until I get my head correct and upgrade this site, I’ll have to rely on email from two of you who actually read what I write to find out how well I am handling the enormous responsibility of writing commentary that attempts to be Big Trouble in Little China meets Waking Life. I am much stoked that in the past week, I received not one but three emails about this site from some of the coolest people I have ever gotten drunk with. Here’s what they said…

“I like your writing style...keep it up”

“That AJAX article that you linked to has to be the dumbest technology article I've read in a long time”

“I've never seen so many words strung together in a row that make absolutely no sense”

From these brief snippets, I can tell that both you and I (and by you I mean the great big collective you, a.k.a. the “Royal“ you) like irreverent gibberish, dislike people who don't understand what they are talking about, and can't understand what I am talking about the majority of the time. I think this means I am doing a really good job.

I think.

This is so f*cking hard

I spent three hours today transcribing class notes on “the ethnography of technology” for a paper next week, and another couple of hours assembling material for part of a presentation on instrument-mediated design. Right now it's midnight on a Saturday and I am researching Hidden Markov Models on the internet because one of two papers that I have to understand by Monday for my seminar in Ubiquitous Computing uses them to determine what a user is doing by the things that he touches with an RFID enabled glove.

Tomorrow I need to email some professors to find out if I can sit in on Discrete Mathematics for Computation with the computer science freshmen, even through this quarter only has two months left, so that I can build up the computational knowledge for Fundamentals of Data Structures and Algorithms.

Finally, next week I start my part time internship at Filenet where I will be working within the development team on an upgrade to their enterprise-level data management software.

I am looking forward to the internship. That shit is going to feel like a vacation.

When academia attacks

I went to a presentation by Susanne Boll this week that centered on the creation and capture of context in multimedia engineering. The methods that Dr. Boll presented to contextualize multimedia records, such as digital photographs, were interesting in that they approached the problem from the point of view of the machine rather than that of the user. The majority of the talk covered possibilities in the detection of context both during media capture and through analysis of data, an interesting alternative to user tagging when organizing (i.e. contextualizing) multimedia data.

I am still not convinced that this is a plausible method of contextualizing data, but I do hate tagging my images on Flickr and would prefer a more automated alternative, although I am not sure that such an alternative is possible. It takes many widgets to capture context automatically and those widgets will only record machine-measurable data. It also takes a lot of programming to analyze data for measurable traits like spatiality and those analyses will never to take into account emotive meaning. So the resulting contexts might not be so useful in terms of the way that people associate meaning and quality to pictures, but it will be interesting to see how her project turns out.

The most surprising part of the presentation, however, was when one of the attendees asked if it were feasible to create a generic context framework outside of the domain of multimedia that would be applicable to all types of data. My first and continuing thought is that the individual is an idiot. A generic context framework applied to data is a contradiction in terms. Such a framework would be the same thing as having no framework or an infinitely extensible framework, because it is the combination of object’s properties and its environment of usage that determines its relevant context. Context is contextual by definition, not something that can be planned for in all of its eventualities, and can only be structured within a given context, such as digital imagery.

Now watch me be the idiot ten years from now when I am a lowly serf in his coder plantation after selling myself into servitude to access to his marvelous context machines.

P.S. Contrary to what one of the other attendees brought up, context is not the same thing as metadata. It’s just not. Metadata does not take into account the currency of an environment. Booya, of course, will always be the sound that a shotgun makes.

P.P.S. If you are the idiot I was talking about and would like to defend yourself, just email your defense to me and I will post it for everyone else to see, all flames included. I prolly deserve it.

Old school beats still make your head rock

I just had an overwhelming moment with a couple of chapters from Readings in Human Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000 that detailed the growth of field from the 1950's to the late 1990's. Watching all of the interfaces that I take for granted unfold through the lens of history not only puts my craft into perspective, it also encourages me to challenge current conventions and follow in the footsteps of the few who stood up and said, “We can make this world easier to understand”. So many people dedicated their lives towards a humanist ideal of the future where computers were more than tools, but less than individuals, almost like extensions or enhancements to the natural world to make the foundations visible. Computation would be a layer that you could add to any process to make it easier to share and realize your dreams. Sort of like a condiment for cognition.

I never thanked the Vannevar Bushes and Ted Nelsons and Doug Englebarts of the world for all of their work towards the concept of a more productive humanity. They and everyone of their ilk have changed our lives in such fundamental ways that I think it is safe to say they forever altered the course of history for every person on the planet, and that is some sincere shit for the ages.

Please, stop for the love of god

I cannot stand it when people make inane predictions based on new technological paradigms without thinking first about what they are saying and how they are saying it. The creation of more web applications that use AJAX and web services does not eliminate the need for the application server. It just doesn't. The statement doesn't make any sense, and while I doubt that was what the author intended to say, there has to be some accountability in producing such drivel. It's the equivalent of saying that fuel efficient cars have eliminated the need for gas stations.

Maybe now that the world is flat we have a most flattest flat-off as well.