Making Sense With What You Got

Last Tuesday I asked readers to suggest 10 ideas to incorporate into a single story for Tuesday, which happens to be Story Day on a friend's website. I'm always ready to steal a good idea when I see one (credit due, of course), and I thought it would be an interesting design challenge.

Here's what 9 individuals contributed as elements to be incorporated into the story (read the original comments for the full treatments):

1. A bee facing management challenges.
2. Bee dancing and finding new pollen sources in the face of two suns, which makes the dancing pretty difficult (there's BEE SCIENCE behind this one!)
3. Einstein & Relativity.
4. An overachieving college student with height issues.
5. A Hamster seeking Lettuce and Bee Companionship.
6. Gojira on the loose.
7. Some kind of “meta-pun”
8. A flower in a field of flower. The coastline of an ocean. Both or either.
9. The French.

At first glance the list seems pretty daunting...how the hell am I going to integrate all these elements into a single cohesive story? On the other hand, this is exactly what I love about design: the challenge of finding the underlying themes that make the ideas cohere together. It's not unlike dealing with regular clients; if it's challenge you want, lead a client meeting with the heads of engineering, sales, and marketing at the same table. The contradictions in need of resolution are awe-inspiring in their scope. You'll need to go through the same process of identifying underlying common themes and principles, so that the overall strategy makes sense to everyone; I can see the relationship between creating a story from semi-disparate elements and what I wrote about story-based design.

Sometime late Tuesday I'll post the story, written quickly in first-draft form. No promises whether it will be good. I've been reading some children's books lately for fun, so doubtless whatever I come up with will have a similar vibe. We'll see what happens... I'm a little bit nervous, but also excited by the challenge.

READ MORE

Part I of the story is posted!

Scanner, or ADD?

When clearing out my RSS reading list, came across this post on Talent Develop on Scanners:

• "I can never stick to anything."
• "I know I should focus on one thing, but which one?"
• "I lose interest in things I thought would interest me forever."
• "I keep going off on another tangent."
• "I get bored as soon as I know how to do something."
• "I can't stand to do anything twice."
• "I keep changing my mind about what I want to do and end up doing nothing."
• "I work at low-paying jobs because there's nothing I'm willing to commit to."
• "I won't choose a career path because it might be the wrong one."
• "I think everyone's put on this earth to do something; everyone but me, that is."
• "I can't pay attention unless I'm doing many things at once."
• "I pull away from what I'm doing because I'm afraid I'll miss something better."
• "I'm too busy, but when I do find time I can't remember what I wanted to do."
• "I'll never be an expert in anything. I feel like I'm always in a survey class."

"If you've ever said these things to yourself, chances are good that you're a Scanner, a very special kind of thinker. "

"Unlike those people who seem to find and be satisfied with one area of interest, you're genetically wired to be interested in many things, and that's exactly what you've been trying to do. "

That sounds like me. The excerpt goes on to provide some insight into the problem of being expected to conform to the "one skill, one direction' mindset that most people have. I myself have struggled with this in the definition of my own specialty, gravitating toward fields that have very broad problem spaces where being multi-interested in things pays off.

Cold Case: Carl Friedrich Gauss and the 100 Integers

Remember the story of that kid who was given a class assignment to add the first 100 integers together, and solved it almost immediately to the astonishment of his teacher? That was Carl Friedrich Gauss, famed 19th century mathematician. A lot of us have heard this story in school, but American Scientist editor Brian Hayes got to thinking about its inconsistencies: was the story really true or even that amazing? Hayes writes:

The story was familiar, but until I wrote it out in my own words, I had never thought carefully about the events in that long-ago classroom. Now doubts and questions began to nag at me. For example: How did the teacher verify that Gauss's answer was correct? If the schoolmaster already knew the formula for summing an arithmetic series, that would somewhat diminish the drama of the moment. If the teacher didn't know, wouldn't he be spending his interlude of peace and quiet doing the same mindless exercise as his pupils?

This article has also clarified something to me: the essential aspect of academia is documention.

When I was in grad school, the vibe I got from academia was that the process was a sort of hazing ritual you undergo, before you're allowed "in the club" and can get your degree. However, the academic process, once you subtract the research lab drama and interdepartmental politics, is critically useful when it comes to "debugging" long-held assumptions. Without that paper trail of insight, we'd be doomed to repeat our mistakes or re-discover concepts the hard way. A true scholar has a deep understanding of his chosen field, and thusly stands on the shoulders of those who came before. The result: we can reach a bit higher than before.

The issue I have with academia is similar to the one I have with organized religious organizations: dogmatic, organization-centric protectionist thinking. This is perhaps inevitable when the academics (rich with generations of carefully documented theory) meet the street implementors (rich with what actually is working). Both camps circle the wagons when they encounter each other:

• The academics, stung by how years of research have caused them to lose touch with working reality on the street, cling to the tradition of scholastic rigor as their prime differentiating factor. "We've got the discipline and the minds" they assure themselves. "We don't just make stuff up and hope it works. This is valuable, and this approach is the very foundation of our modern civillization. Even if these guys who are making more money than us think otherwise."

• The street implementors, practical nuts-and-bolts people who have apparently rediscovered the classics, are stung by the academic position that, yeah, it's been done before, and we've got a jargon-rich citation trail to prove it...what is your degree in again? So the street implementors, vaguely threatened by these claims and yet unimpressed by them (they've been scammed by such claims before) , cling to the idea that "what works is what matters". But secretly...they wonder if they just aren't smart enough.

Although I started out on the academic path, I became disenchanted with its emphasis on credentials and lineage within the school...when human selfishness to "work the system" for personal gain obscured the "purer mission". In other words, I let the bastards get to me, both in organized religion and in academia. This is a second, significant personal datapoint. How many babies have I tossed out with the bathwater?

My takeaway from the article (and this is just something that is occuring to me as I type) is at a very minimum, it was academic process and organization---the libraries, the use of citation, and old-fashioned research---that allowed Hayes to even start to answer his question. As he uncovered citations and references, the search became more than "what's the literal truth". He came upon the natural human tendency to tell stories and embellish events that unintentially cause deviations from the source; these are the dirty pawprints of undeclared agenda. These are the very forces that the acadmic process seeks to minimize; through documenting a line of reasoning and stated assumption, transparent to all who would take the time to follow it again, academia does keep ideas moving forward.

There's a parallel idea in journalism: the reporting of fact, citation of sources, and documented first-hand accounts is very similar in that it keeps our understanding of our society moving forward. However, the mainstream media has shifted to news as content, as opposed to news as documented reality. Consuming "news as content" is the equivalent of imbibing nutritionally-empty calories, temporarily satisfying our sweet tooth but ultimately killing us in the end.

We are doomed to repeat our mistakes when we don't have a sense of history. Even worse, it's far too easy to insert fabrications into the continuity of events because no one is checking up on them. It takes too much effort for the average citizen to work through the news media channels to verify a story, so the news media catches a break due to its unresponsive Jabba-the-Hutt like mass. And this makes the news media subsceptable to manipulation...witness the role of P.R. agencies that can insert news into tired journalists newstreams. Or the power of lobbyists in Washington, knowing that if they can inject their issues directly into the sensorium of the politicians themselves, they have the jump on the rest of America. And the system is fragile: in shows like 24 and Prison Break, we can see this illustrated dramatically, as "evil government agents" casually corrupt the information stream by subverting the systems that allegedly record it. It's only possible because these systems---the organized media, corporate accounting systems, and government agency---are not transparent in a way that is accessible to the individual. We instead must observe by proxy. And we've learned to distrust the old proxies, because we know they are at best incomplete. At worst, they are incompetent. If this seems preposterous to you, just think of a more local example: spreading a rumor based on a half-truth. While ideally we can have a system where there really is an emphasis on trust, pragmatically speaking you can't have trust without a means of verification. Yeah, I know..."trust but verify".

In this atmosphere, it's not surprising that blogger-journalists are on the rise. Though the "real" reporters poo-poo the lack of professional standards, they miss the point: the real journalists have already lost credibility because their organizations can't compete with the new medium's ability to transparently provide meaningful continuity. The blogosphere is self-documenting and self-validating, thanks to the low threshold of entry and concentrated fact-checking power of the Internet. We have Google, pings, trackbacks, and services like Technorati, we do have the infrastructure to rebuild our foundation of trusted sources. We can even incorporate old media sources back into the validation chain through hyperlinking, digital imaging, and audio sampling. We can finally follow the trail again. I am starting to believe that while Content is sexy, it's Continuity that reigns in the long run.

AdSense Revisited

I've been running AdSense for about 6 weeks, and appear to be making enough to cover my monthly hosting bill or a dinner for four at the local McDonalds. So that's great...actual passive income! This was just with ads appearing on 10 or so specific posts that had retail possibilities.

Here's what I've noticed about the effectiveness of the placement on this site, and how I'm trying to figure out how to best optimize ads without being overly commercial.

The big tradeoff, in my opinion, is having terrible advertisements appear that were out-of-context with the content. That sucks. I had to test each post to check whether "good ads" would appear. Sometimes the results were surprising. One of my favorite posts, "Crafting for Manly Men", is all about awesome tools and gear I want to buy; I figured I'd get some neat tool ads. But no...instead Google served up "men in high heels". So no AdSense for that post. Posts that were specifically about product, such as the one about my light saber replica, did much better.

Last week, with the introduction of QuickPosts, I thought I'd put advertisements on each of the permalinked pages. My reasoning was that these were very targeted posts, so they might serve up more traffic. I created an AdSense channel for this so I could isolate the specific traffic that these ads got. After a week...nothing. I should really run it longer, but I really hate the way they look and have removed them, but here's one last ditch effort to use that channel...

Heh :-)

This week's experiment is to put advertising on some of the Printable CEO pages. It also has its own advertising channel. I had avoided putting ads on these pages because I think of them as being "all me", a service to the world that is also a testbed for my own design experiments. But recalling Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #109: "Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack", I thought I should see if I can derive additional revenue from that. My justification is that more revenue from the site means more resources I have to actually pay for some prototyping I'd like to do. In any case, it's worth running this experiment for a week or so to see if any clicks are derived from it.

My biggest complaint about AdSense is its inability to serve relevant ads for the kind of writing I do. Clever headlines rank you lower than literal headlines. Anecdotes diffuse the search relevancy of your content, or confuse the AdSense service into providing completely inappropriate ads. Long articles that explore the boundaries between different disciplines and ideas also end up confusing AdSense. I've heard that Yahoo Ads allow you to choose the category of advertisement, but I haven't tried it.

Typing Out Loud

I was just reading about a trio of grad students who, using nothing but a 10-minute audio recording of a person typing, were able to recover 96% of what was typed. Very cool. It turns out you don't even need to have a calibration pass to match the subtle variations in sound of each key.

Since there is one key for every letter, I'm guessing the students are doing a type of frequency analysis, a cipher-breaking technique dating back to the 9th century. It works like this: though at first you don't know what key makes what sound, you do have a lot of sounds collected. For the English language, we know that certain letters are more likely to appear than others. This information is found in a "letter frequency table", and you can make your own by counting letters in enough text. So see which letters seem to be occuring most often, and you can guess that those letters correspond to the top entries of the letter frequency table. Plug 'em in and see if it makes sense.

Also, in two- or three-letter words, we have a good chance of guessing that they're words like THE, A, and IN. And once we have those letters matched, we have a good chance of uncovering other letters through context...if you're good at "Wheel of Fortune", you get the idea. Now imagine a computer doing this all for you. Scary!

BTW, there's a cool collection of maritime posters at the American Merchant Marine at War website.

Via Freedom To Tinker...quite some time ago :-)