Key in the cognition

09:18 am - Approaches to life

There are 6 approaches (that I can think of, anyway - tell me if I missed any) to approaching the problems one encounters in life:

1. Anticipate and avoid them.
   
2. Fix the problems.
   
3. Pay others to solve them.
   
4. Adapt to the new situations so they stops being problematic.
   
5. Run away.
   
6. Ignore or accept them.
   

Current Mood: contemplative

02:52 pm - A trip to the SF zoo triggers realizations about species endangerment

I helped lead a landscaping project at the SF zoo this morning. Some of the volunteers wore wading boots and extracted weeds from a pit filled with mud. Every single one of them ended up covered in some pretty strong-smelling mud by the end. But at one point I overheard one kid saying to another, "I thought this would be boring and we wouldn't get to do anything fun but pulling stuff out of mud is awesome!"

As a token of appreciation, the zoo let all of us have free access to the zoo for the day. While walking around the primate discovery centre, I was struck by the degree to which other primate species are endangered by human activity. Comparing the population size of humanity with those of other primates casts light on a perspective we don't usually consider. While there are several billion of us on the planet, many other primates number in the thousands. If we take scarcity into account, the life of any other primate would be orders of magnitude more valuable than that of a human being.

That's a hard stance to wrap my head around because we're naturally inclined to empathize with other members of our own species but, as I watched some of these other primates interacting with other, I realized that they exhibit the same complex emotions and social relationships that cause us to empathize with other humans (not unlike elephants). It made me suspect that the mental limitations that allow us to indirectly inflict suffering upon millions people in far-flung parts of the world are probably the same ones that allow us to steadfastly decimate the struggling populations of many other species.

Current Mood: tired

08:32 am - Blue Angels @ Fleet Week

Diane and I went to see the Blue Angels perform for Fleet Week yesterday. They were pretty amazing to watch and I was glad I biked because those who drove had a terrible time getting their cars to and from the event. One of my roommates, however, does not like the idea of having an air-show at all. I'm in two minds about it. While I realize that it's a publicly funded recruiting event for the Navy and Marines that burns a lot of fuel, it's also a free public work of performance art enjoyed by a large number of people.

Current Mood: confused

07:19 am - Usability engineering applied to the law

While designing user interfaces at VMware, we take great care to ensure that all the text we display is succinct, clear and relevant. We do this because people simply don't read long swathes of text that aren't interesting or entertaining. Wouldn't it be wonderful if legal text was held to the same standard? ...if the entire body of tax law had to fit within a few thousand words instead of several million? ...if product license agreements were restricted to a few hundred words instead of being dozens of pages long?

If ignorance is not going to be accepted as an excuse for violating the law then it seems only fair that the law ought to be redesigned so it takes human cognitive limitations into account.

Update: evidently the Brit gov't agrees with me.

Current Mood: pensive

07:02 am - San Francisco is misunderstood

I was at an Easter party yesterday and, at one point, mentioned how I'd been surprised last year to discover that Good Friday isn't a statutory holiday here the way it is in Canada. A random person sitting beside me then remarked, "well, that's how it is when you live in a place where the government is hostile to religion". A little stunned by that apparently skewed perception, I turned to him and said, "what do you mean? I don't think the federal government is hostile to religion in this country!" He explained that he'd meant the municipal government of San Francisco. I explained to him that statutory holidays were determined at the federal (and sometimes state) level but never municipally. At that point the conversation drifted to something else but it got me thinking about the perception that this city is somehow hostile to religion. I don't get it. I've never lived in a city that was more in keeping with the core message of any decent religion: love and acceptance for the marginalized and the downtrodden.

Current Mood: confused

05:05 am - What price diversity?

Simplicity and efficiency are generally held up as virtues. So is diversity, which tends to breed innovation and harbour flexibility. But diversity exacts a price in the form of decreased simplicity and efficiency. Are the benefits of diversity worth the cost? Let's consider a few systems where this has been an issue.

For a long time the US population was racially stable with a ratio of about 8 whites to 1 black where the most powerful and wealthy elements of society were almost exclusively white. Under this environment there evolved a system of higher education where the best schools were attended by those who were either exceptionally brilliant or considerably wealthy. It allowed the powerful to maintain their position while simultaneously providing a way for the most naturally gifted individuals to contribute to society. And then the country began allowing Asian immigrants in.

Over the next few decades, these Asian immigrants steadily pushed out the predominantly white students in top schools, giving rise to the perception that Asians are somehow smarter than Americans. What most people failed to see was that this strange effect was simply the result of a system that hadn't evolved with this sort of diversity in mind. Immigration, you see, is a harsh filter. The Asians who enter the US legally are generally well-educated and extremely driven - it takes a special sort of person to leave behind everything they know and tough it out in a strange new world where everything is a struggle.

This meant that the relatively microscopic segment of the total US population represented by Asian immigrants was also possessed of a disproportionately high motivation to succeed and placed a disproportionately high priority on education. Like the Jews, who had been forced by centuries of ethnic discrimination to prioritize education and financial acumen - leading to the popular stereotype of them being professionals (mostly lawyers or doctors) - Asian immigrants first hit the fields where merit mattered more than social connections and cultural knowledge: science and engineering. Business followed suit but now even the humanities are starting to see an Asian influx. And this phenomenon isn't restricted to higher education: in Cupertino, which is one of the very few Californian cities with good public high schools, Asians have settled in droves to the point where you don't see that many white people any more.

Not surprisingly, all this has created some resentment among those who got pushed out by the Asian immigrants, sometimes leading to racial tensions. At the same time, the Asian immigrants have had a hard time integrating into mainstream society's melting pot because the disproportionate focus on education and financial success left little attention available for high-risk careers like professional sports, professional entertainment, politics, etc - the things around which American culture seems to revolve. Interestingly, these areas are also the ones most often criticized for being stagnant. Those who care frequently bemoan the blandness of Hollywood and the music industry as well as the declining interest in national politics. The same could easily be argued for having more women in technical fields. Well, how might we address this by making these spheres more open to diverse participants and is that really such a good idea?

I'd actually argue that change is already beginning to occur: the surging popularity of soccer and animé are both striking examples of this. Will we see Asians make headway in politics too? Intuitively, that seems less likely, although I'm not quite sure why.

Anyway, let's revisit the matter of diversity's cost on simplicity and efficiency. In a closed system, it might make sense to optimize for efficiency via a simple design. But we do not live in a closed system. In order to thrive in a globally competitive arena, innovation and flexibility are absolutely vital. And since flexibility supports diversity, which promotes innovation, it makes sense for both businesses and "new world" countries like Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand to foster an environment that is diverse in many ways. Furthermore, it actually makes sense for regions with mutually hostile ethnic populations to celebrate their diversity instead of striving for the red herring of ethnic purity, no matter how much it may appeal to those in love with simplicity.

Going down this line of reasoning some more, it actually makes sense to artificially preserve sectors of society that would otherwise be driven to oblivion by the harsh pressures of myopic competition. Failure to do so may favour simplicity and efficiency at the cost of flexibility until we create a situation with a single point of failure and disaster strikes. Consider the case of the Cavendish banana that dominates global production but is now in danger of extinction because it lacks genetic resistance to a disease that hadn't been much of a consideration in the past. Therein lies too the dangers of GMO crops. Good design works extremely well in the short term but the flexibility of an evolutionary system will always trump it in the long term. And evolution works best with immense diversity.

Take the hi-tech industry, for instance. In areas where there is fierce competition (databases, search engines, webmail, blog-hosting, instant messaging, VoIP, smartphones, home theatres, 3D graphics accelerators, videogame consoles, etc.) there is also steady innovation and a focus on customer delight, although consumers must put up with the pains of fragmentation. Conversely, in areas where there is a single dominant entity (desktop CPU architectures, office suites & Unix windowing systems, for instance) there's more consistency and a stable user experience but much less groundbreaking innovation (AMD's 64-bit extension to the x86 and Intel's multi-core chips being counterexamples born only of the fierce competition within the x86 CPU market itself). While IE was the unchallenged king of the Web browser market, Microsoft ceased working on it entirely and it took a strong assault from Firefox to force them into competing again. X11's entrenchment has meant that graphics on Unix systems (except for Apple's Quartz) suck. Nevertheless, people crave simplicity to the point where they will myopically relinquish the innovation that diversity delivers in order to hang on to simplicity. And in an environment where the barrier to entry is high, diversity is hard to reintroduce once lost. This is the danger posed by corporate mergers chasing economies of scale.

[Disclaimer: any opinions expressed above are my own and do not necessarily represent my employer.]

Current Mood: awake

01:05 pm - Daschund races and a major realization

My church held its annual daschund races today morning. I had no idea how prevalent those wiener-doogs were! In total there were 36 dogs entered into the event. There were a surprising number of long-haired daschunds too; something I'd never actually seen before. Not all of them were specimens of athletic prowess, however. During the initial 3-way heats many of the participants didn't appear to take the contest seriously, veering off course part-way through or stopping short of the finish line. In one of the races 2 dogs began fighting each other while the other one sailed to the finish line!

Yesterday afternoon my friend DJ called to see if I wanted to go see the Jays playing the A's today afternoon. He was given really good seats and thought I might be interested since I'm also from TO. While I would very much have liked to watch the game, there's no way I could have made it back from there in time for the Berkeley Hart concert tonight to which I've been looking forward for weeks. I briefly toyed with the idea of renting a car for the day but eventually I realized that being unable to drive to the game is part of my decision to not own a car in a small attempt to reduce the disproportionate resource-consumption of the industrialized world and the pollution generated by automobiles. Only about 8% of the world's population owns a car and the US, which comprises 6% of the global population, accounts for around 40% of annual resource consumption. This serves to remind me that I'm actually quite fortunate to have access to clean drinking water, sufficient nutrition and a safe home, not to mention reliable electricity and communication networks. I can handle missing a ball game.

Current Mood: grateful

06:22 pm - Am I a neo-luddite?

For somebody who makes a living working in hi-tech, there is a remarkably long list of modern technologies that I avoid using: cars, TVs, alarm clocks, VCRs, voice mail, painkillers, antibiotics, microwaves. That said, I do use computers, a cell-phone, the Internet, climate control, electric lighting, trains, aeroplanes, a digital camera and a hi-fi system, so I'm not all that much of a luddite.

I was just wondering what it is that makes me embrace certain technologies while shunning others. I think I tend to be attracted to technology that is useful without making me lazy or annoying me. I find that owning automobiles tends to make people dependent upon them to the point that they start using them even when it would quite reasonable to walk or bike. Similarly, painkillers (and alarm clocks) allow people to temporarily circumvent a biological message but it is too easy for us to fall down the slippery slope of using them on a regular basis to avoid the warning signs of unhealthy lifestyles. And easy access to cable TV encourages people to absorb information through a media filter without thinking about or questioning it and this information then silently shapes their perceptions of the world. VCRs and voice-mail, on the other hand, are just too complex for the utility they provide; that's why I use email and DVDs instead.

Current Mood: pensive

07:16 am - Why giving ignorant people the freedom to screw up is bad for society

I'd been thinking about putting this argument into words for several days now after discussing the issue with several people recently but this blog entry finally prompted me to actually do it.

adamspitz

Current Mood: determined

10:02 pm - Kefir >> milk

Ever since I was a kid I have been unable to drink plain white cow milk without suffering from a powerful urge to throw up. I'm not lactose intolerant because if I add a strong flavour to the milk I can drink it with no ill-effects. So for years I drank chocolate milk to get the calcium that it seemed was best absorbed from milk. That's actually how I ended up with the nickname QuikChange.

However, in the summer of 2003 I got a cold and my chest filled with phlegm. I don't generally get sick and I'm not a fan of taking medication unless absolutely necessary so I simply ignored the cold for a few days until my immune system vanquished it. The problem was that the phlegm didn't leave with the infection. It made me cough all day, which was very annoying. I was even having trouble sleeping at night and was forced to resort to taking NyQuil. It was a sad situation that went on for almost a month.

Then I went to visit shade_42's mom while in Montreal for a weekend. Upon hearing of my plight, she suggested that I discontinue drinking milk for a few days as it tends to prolong pulmonary congestion. I did as she suggested and in a few days I stopped coughing. At this point I was so relieved not to have my lungs filled with phlegm that I developed a reluctance to drink milk again. When I mentioned this to my vegan friend Caro she told me that milk is not really a very good source of calcium anyway and encouraged me to stop drinking it. And so I switched to drinking soy milk instead.

But a_chatterbox periodically warned me that I wasn't getting enough calcium by avoiding milk. And she's in SciBiz so she knows about that sort of stuff. For a long time I couldn't figure out what to do, with my granola-eating tree-hugging hippie/vegan friends telling me to continue avoiding milk and my biology-steeped dairy-industry-influenced friends telling me I needed to drink milk to get my RDI of calcium. Even the Carrotine Kid was perplexed.

But this weekend I discovered Lifeway kefir, which seems to solve most of my problems by providing a healthy source of calcium that I actually enjoy drinking and is produced from the milk of cows treated with love and respect. canoe_drew had actually introduced me to kefir back in 2003 but I hadn't thought of using it as a source of calcium until I saw the label advertising it as such in the grocery store today.

Current Mood: jubilant

10:02 pm - Making new friends at Stanford

After a week of settling into my new life down here, I finally got around to trying to make new friends with the locals. In the morning I participated in a youth group thingy after church where I met some nice people. And later in the day I went over to a Stanford dorm for dinner where I met more interesting people. It reminded me a lot of Spuc, actually.

I think I'll probably hang out with these people on weeknights from now on. I'm even considering becoming associate member of the dorm so I can have dinner there. The problem is that I'd need to make it there at 6pm every day and I'm not sure if I'll end up leaving work early enough to make that on a daily basis. But it sucks to eat dinner alone every day.

Current Mood: pensive

10:37 am - The UW perception skewing effect

On Wednesday I gave a talk about university to a grade 11 CS class at my former high-school. I was astonished by the lack of ambition and focus I encountered. Only a handful of students intended to go on to college and fewer still were considering university. Mind you, when I was in grade 11 I had no idea which university I wanted to attend either but at least I knew I want to go to one. And I don't mean to imply that university/college is the only way to go because the trades are just as worthy of consideration. However, none of the students I spoke to had given any consideration to an apprenticeship either.

What surprised me the most was that not a single person in that classroom was taking the course because they wanted to. Some were in it because it was the least horrible course that fit into their schedule, others because they had been forced to take it by their parents, and a few had been thrust into it by their guidance counsellors without consent.

Spending 6 years at UW has clearly skewed my perception. It seems most people are rather apathetic in comparison to the typical UW crowd. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing, actually. If it's possible to be satisfied with little then why is it better to be constantly driven to greater heights of accomplishment with no real end in sight?

Current Mood: shocked

11:03 pm - Corruption

Watching The Constant Gardener tonight got me thinking about how multinationals exploit people in poor countries. Generally they bribe some government officials to turn a blind eye to their activities. That means the problem isn't just due to the corporations trying to boost their bottom line at any cost but due to the corrupt government officials as well. If these officials weren't betraying the public trust by allowing foreign commercial interests to screw over the people whom they are supposed to serve, then most of these problems would not exist. As a corollary, the continued prevalence of such corruption will prevent the suffering people from getting out of their miserable situation, regardless of how much foreign aid is sent to them.

What follows from this is that the problem must be dealt with by one of 2 ways: either the corruption must be quashed or the offending corporations must be taken to task in their home countries. Neither of those options is easy but failing to do at least one will allow the problem to remain unchecked. Throwing relief money at the suffering people will only serve to alleviate the situation slightly on a temporary basis, not to fix the broken system.

Current Mood: pensive

09:25 pm - The old fogeys are going down

When I was asked to write research papers at UW, most of my profs were adamant about us not relying upon the Net for our research; some went so far as to point out that the goood stuff is only to be found in obscure journals with no online presence. This baffles me. Do these journals revel in their exclusivity? If not, why do they not publish online? The world is changing. These days, if you're not in Google, you don't exist.

Current Mood: optimistic

10:01 pm - Memories

I just went through a large box of stuff I'd collected over my 6 years at UW & threw out a whole bunch of things that brought memories flooding back from all the crazy times I had at school and on work terms. It's certainly been a long time since I marched into Spuc as a wide-eyed frosh!

If I were thewizard this is where I'd wax poetic for several paragraphs about each item and what it reminded me of. But I'm me so this is all you get.

Current Mood: nostalgic

03:08 am - Napping

I've been taking a lot of naps over the past several weeks; sometimes as often as thrice a day! Generally, I feel sleepy after eating a meal. Towards the latter half of this term I've been acting on this by napping for anywhere between 30 minutes and a couple of hours. Consequently, I feel well rested while awake. But it seems to be cutting into my traditionally high quantity of productive hours.

Napping after lunch is fairly common. However, napping after dinner is not really a good idea because I often end up waking up fully refreshed and then being unable to fall asleep for several hours. And napping after breakfast would be ridiculous if not for the fact that I've usually been up for a few hours already by the time the cafe is open for breakfast.

Current Mood: awake

09:13 am - Design

Design is what has allowed our species to adapt the environment to our desires in ways that no other species ever has. There are two sides to design: the first stems from art, focuses on form/presentation/austhetics, and results in style; the second stems from science, focuses on function/behaviour/usability, and results in engineering. We want things that work well to serve our needs/desires while simultaneously appealing to our senses in a manner that makes us feel good about using them.

Of course, the utility value of a thing will influence the balance of importance that each of these two side is given when designing it. For instance, style is more important in decorations and engineering is more important in medical equipment. But for most things both aspects of design are significant and neglecting either one will almost certainly result in a bad design.

We seem to be tackling this problem by getting people trained in the different sides of design to work together. Unfortunately, it doesn't usually work as well as we'd like. It's hard to collaborate on projects when we don't share the same mental frameworks.

It is a shame, then, that our formal education system pushes people to focus on one side at the expense of the other. Engineering students are given a scanty handful of electives and Arts students are effectively barred form taking engineering courses. I am concerned that this state of affairs is damaging our capacity to continue designing wonderful things by making the ability to do so into the exception rather than the norm.

Current Mood: creative

06:38 am - Meat! Is it evil?

I skipped out on most of Toast Talk last night because I had to study but I had a few thoughts about the topic: should we all stop eating meat?

Historically (over the past few millennia), societies that engaged in animal husbandry for consumption (specifically the rearing of cattle, poultry, swine and sheep) enjoyed a distinct competitive advantage against other societies because these livestock provided them with a high-protein diet. In recent decades, however, several things have changed. Globalization has been effectively turning the planet into a single giant interdependent economy in which any society can use the products created by any other society. And the human population explosion has meant that grazing is not as viable an approach to feeding livestock as it once was; instead we now resort to giant commercial farms to produce the enormous quantity of meat we consume.

One of the side-effects of having had meat as a status symbol and competitive advantage is that we tend to crave and enjoy it in much the same fashion as we do sugar (because fructose was once a competitive advantage). However, our bodies are not particularly good at self-restraint, leading to us consuming far more of such things (sugar, fat and meat) than we require; often more than our bodies can deal with in a healthy manner. Furthermore, the burgeoning levels of meat consumption have been taxing our natural environment as we push its resources increasingly further in the quest for meat.

Nevertheless, dropping meat from our diets altogether seems a bit drastic. Although it is possible to obtain all the nutrients, calories and protein we require without needing to consume meat (although we would still need dairy products for vitamin B12), it is clear that most people are not about to give up on meat anytime soon. Furthermore, abandoning meat in one fell swoop would have disastrous consequences on the livestock markets. A more pragmatic approach would be to reduce our meat consumption to a fraction of its current levels over the span of a few years. Many people have already done this.

How might such a plan be encouraged? Promoting quality over quantity would be one solution: we could eat only grain-fed or free-range livestock. These cost more so they impose an automatic dampening effect on meat consumption at both a personal and macro-economic level. In addition, they are a healthier source of meat. Organizations attempting to promote a reduction in meat consumption could help out by educating people about the advantages of grain-fed and free-range livestock, as well as providing information on how to replace meat with other sources of the same nutrients and protein.

Current Mood: curious