Key in the cognition

07:41 am - The dollar value of a human life

This BizWeek article about preemies brings up the issue of how much money it is worth spending to save a human life. A popular knee-jerk reaction is to claim that you cannot put a price on the life of a person. It's easy to demonstrate that this is not true. All I need do is point out the large number of people who die every day from causes are trivially preventable at pretty low costs, often in the double-digit range per person. If we are to make sweeping generalizations about the value of a human life then we need to be consistent about it. A 22 week old foetus in the USA should not have a higher value than an 11 year old child in an impoverished developing country.

No, the truth is that human lives are worth different things to different people. To your immediate family that value may be infinite or priceless but to random strangers (the majority of the worlds population unless you are extremely famous) that value is going to be very low, possibly even zero. It's interesting to think about about the value we place as individuals on the lives of complete strangers. If you haven't already seen the infomercials, I'll enlighten you now that it is indeed possible to keep alive perfectly healthy children for as low as a dollar/day. If you aren't doing that already then you've established the value that you personally place upon the lives of strangers. And it's not very high.

So what are the factors that determine how much society values a human life? For people to whom we don't have an emotional attachment that value is influenced primarily by utility and scarcity just like most other things. If the human race were in danger of extinction then every life would be treasured. With more than 6 billion people alive, there is no scarcity, driving down the value of a life. That leaves utility. It's difficult to calculate the utility of a person because that value is different for every beholder, which is why we probably have slightly different values for the lives of strangers. The labour market is a crude approximation of this value but it has enough problems that we certainly shouldn't rely on it to determine how much people's lives are worth.

Of course, in the absence of a way to measure what we want, humans tend to instead measure they closest approximation we can get. Cory Doctorow described a better system that sounds intriguing, although I'm not sure if it would work in a scarcity-based economy.

Current Mood: pensive

08:02 am - Moral Foundations

Apparently I'm a Liberal. Whoda thunk?

Current Mood: amused

08:58 am - Observations on watching a kid use a computer

Yesterday I was helping a kid edit an essay at the Pirate Supply Store - it's a front for a writing clinic - and couldn't help but notice some interesting characteristics of the manner in which he used the computer.

Like many people, he was using webmail as online storage. Surprisingly, he was using his mom's Yahoo/SBC account instead of having one of his own. I've heard that Google was surprised to discover how many people type entire domain names into their search box instead of the browser's address bar but watching this in person is still pretty weird. The kid typed "yahoo.com" into the Safari search box, which brought up Yahoo as the top hit. That's when it got even more bizarre. Google had conveniently provided links to the commonly used subsections of Yahoo in the search result. The first of these was Mail, on which I expected to see the kid click. Instead he just clicked on the main link and went to the yahoo home page before eventually logging in and arriving at his inbox.

The next observation to surprise me was the difficulty he had selecting text with the mouse. I'd previously assumed that any middle-school kid in San Francisco would be an expert mouse-user and he certainly displayed no other signs of impeded dexterity so I am tempted to attribute this difficulty to unfamiliarity with basic usage of a mouse. My hunch is somewhat supported by his complete surprise at my introduction of the scroll-wheel to his arsenal of mouse-using techniques. Later on I noticed that he tended to backspace his way through multiple words upon realizing that he'd mistyped one instead of just repositioning the cursor. Admittedly, I have seen this behaviour in expert computer users as well.

Made me wonder how much exposure kids really get to computers in school and how many kids in this city lack access to one at home. Maybe desktop computers are just getting old though, since he seemed to have no trouble using his cell-phone. Finally, I can't help but wonder if there's a way to make the enormous number of people currently using webmail as storage to start using the more effective tools we now have available for storing dynamic textual documents on the Web.

Current Mood: amused

11:13 am - Here we go again

Despite having wreaked havoc by tampering with things we don't understand on countless occasions, it seems we humans just can't bring ourselves to stop. One of the 6 ideas that Esquire claims will change the world is the idea of sequestering the CO₂ we generate (from burning fossil-fuels to generate power) under the ocean's depths. They quote Kurt House saying "there isn't any major life at that depth" but there's no way that he nor anybody else can know this since we haven't been able to explore those depths yet.

Current Mood: cynical

09:05 am - Professional sports as opiate of the masses

While watching a baseball game a few weeks ago, I wondered why people have affiliations with sports teams. What makes them care so much about the fortunes of an organization from which they receive no tangible benefit? More surprisingly, why is it that so many people care more about the progress of the sports teams they follow than they do about things that directly affect them in significant ways, like local and national politics or environmental dangers to their health and well-being? I have a friend who eschews the nightly news in favour of ESPN. Newspapers have long known that they could finance the rest of the paper by selling the sports section. Why is this?

Current Mood: surprised

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

07:33 am - The art of exploiting stereotypes for fun and profit

In honour of yesterday's festivities, I wish to write about ignorance. And stereotypes. As human beings we all rely upon stereotypes as a means of dealing with the cognitive burden of information overload. The sophistication of those stereotypes depends upon the breadth of knowledge we have about the world. Yesterday I was at an independence day party and at one point we were playing "n truths and a lie" in teams. Knowing how people usually stereotype me, I took the opportunity to flagrantly exploit that tendency.

On my team, I had everybody else write down the wackiest truths about themselves, which were relatively tame, and then put down my lie as "Tony once taught yoga in Egypt". Despite the outlandishness of my claim, it fooled everybody. But the most amusing thing was a conversation that took place amongst another team:

Tony could definitely have taught yoga. Look at the way he's sitting on the grass; nobody is that flexible!
But he told me he grew up in Pakistan and has never been to India...
Well, Pakistan is right next to Egypt!
No, it's not!
Well, those countries are all next to each other in the middle-east.

Current Mood: naughty

07:25 am - To whom does your target audience think you're speaking?

Last night, as I was about to fall asleep, I had a great idea for evaluating the effectiveness of marketing materials. I'm not sure if this is a known technique or not but I thought I'd describe it just in case it isn't.

The idea is remarkably simple. Find a representative sample of your target audience, let them (individually) study your marketing materials, then get them to try and describe the audience to whom they think the materials are targeted. For this to work effectively, the subjects will need to believe that they are a random sample of the population at large or were somehow selected for their particular expertise but they shouldn't be aware that they are actually members of the target audience. And to encourage thoughtful responses, provide an incentive to them based on the accuracy of their guesses.

My hunch is that this will reveal an enormous deal about how the target market perceives the brand based on its marketing materials. This information is most likely to be useful in markets where customers are particularly image-conscious but the truth is that practically everybody is subconsciously influenced by image.

Current Mood: jubilant

05:21 am - Extending patience with regular progress updates

It's a widely held misperception that people are impatient. In reality, people just want to be reassured that progress is being made. As long as they perceive that to be the case, it is possible to keep them waiting indefinately with little to no ill-effect.

One approximation of regular progress updates is the deadline. It is true that people are much more conducive to long waits if they are given a completion date. However, I posit that this is because they subconsciously translate such a deadline into a sequence of stages that can be treated like progress markers. But you can usually avoid guaranteeing a completion date entirely by simply providing progress updates at a sufficiently high frequency. Furthermore, people will be more receptive to this approach. Now, there are certain conditions under which a deadline is required, such as when people are faced with an externally imposed deadline for a task that depends upon the one you are performing for them, but in those cases people are generally amenable to having their request turned down entirely, as long as this is done up front before they waste time waiting for the completion of a task that may not be done in time. The caveat, therefore, is that the approach described herein applies only when people are waiting for something that they want, rather than something they need within a specific timeframe.

Here are my hypotheses as to why this approach works. For starters, the primary reason people become impatient is usually boredom; they are far less likely to grow impatient when distracted by something. This is why, for instance, waiting rooms stock magazines for people to read while they wait. Another contributing factor to impatience is frustration at a lack of control over the process. Providing regular and frequent progress reports goes a long way toward alleviating that because it gives people a very convincing illusion of being in charge, especially if you provide them with some rudimentary control, such as allowing them to opt out of the process at each stage and providing them with opportunities to specify particulars about how they want some subtasks performed. Note that these details should always be optional as the people ought to have been asked to specify them at the beginning, since they should never be expected to pay attention to any of the status updates along the way. Finally, people frequently grow upset while waiting due to the perception that they are being ignored or that nothing is being done to help them. Again, providing progress reports stifles that quite effectively.

The level of granularity with which progress updates should be provided depends principally upon the length of the task in concern. Unsurprisingly, longer tasks merit more granular updates. But length should be measured relative to the time people will normally expect the task to require, since impatience tends to balloon after a task has exceeded the duration that people initially expected it to take. A good rule of thumb would be to increase update granularity as the progress falls behind typical or initial estimates. Doing the converse (reducing granularity when progress turns out to be significantly quicker than usual/estimated) may be a good idea as well. Of course, dynamic changes in update granularity should be accompanied by an indication that this is being done so as not to jeopardize the veracity of the communication. People hate feeling like they're being lied to. In keeping with this idea of full disclosure, it is no less vital to inform people when an unexpected event is causing a delay. This minimizes their natural tendency to blame you for any perceived delays.

This approach may be successfully applied in any situation where people must be kept waiting for the completion of a task, especially those on which they do not have a crucial time-sensitive dependency. Suggested examples include user interfaces in computer software (usually implemented as the ubiquitous progress dialog/bar), transportation holdups (anything from traffic signals to delays on mass transit systems), customer-service queues (e.g. grocery store checkout, bank teller line-ups, etc.), geographically displaced product preparation/repair (e.g. appliance repair, custom-built items, etc.).

Current Mood: artistic

09:05 am - Don Juan & human nature

Stanford Theatre is trying something new this summer: pay-what-want productions. Last week ayanosuke and I tried to attend one. All seats had been reserved by the time we called them (an hour before the performance began) but they start handing out unclaimed tickets to people on the wait-list a few minutes before the play starts. We added ourselves to the wait-list and hung around as tickets were dished out. Many people who were on the wait-list had not actually stuck around to claim their tickets so we were hoping that we would be able to get in. Most annoyingly, they ran out immediately before our turns came up.

Realizing that reservations were free and that they had a good system for dealing with unclaimed reservations, I decided it would be foolhardy not to make reservations for the next performance, even if I ended up being unable to attend it. So I reserved 4 seats and only ended up claiming 2 of them to watch last night's production of Don Juan. I can't understand why more people don't exploit the system this way!

The play itself, whose plot is roughly explained here, was entertaining for the most part and I quite enjoyed some of Don Juan's witty and eloquent speeches. I thought the costumes and set design were done well too. The acting was variable; while most of the main characters were played extremely well, a couple of the supporting roles stumbled now and then.The only major flaw was the ending, which was decidedly anticlimactic and left me feeling unsatisfied.

Current Mood: artistic

12:47 am - The office of the future

last week's HCI seminar was about research into improving the workflow of knowledge workers. After telling us about his discoveries from the experiments that he had conducted over the past decade in France, he left us with a valuable pair of requirements lists for designing and deploying new systems within an organization.

What you need for a successful deployment:

• No training requirements
  
• No initial configuration requirements
  
• No regular maintenance requirements
  
• No impact on current work environment
  
• No complexity in usage
  
• No monetary cost
  
• No privacy infringement
  
• Immediate benefits for individual users
  

• Get the high-status individuals to start using it and the rest will follow
  
• Make it trivial to enrol as a participant
  
• Demonstrate the system instead of explaining its benefits
  
• Empower & socially reward users
  
• Offer a free trial until users are addicted
  

Current Mood: optimistic

04:45 pm - The art of working with broken systems

We get a lot of junk mail and mail for people who once lived here. Every couple of days or so one of my housemates empties the mailbox onto the dining table. Because we're all messy slobs the pile of unopened unimportant mail has been steadily growing. This is now a problem because it is pretty easy for one of us to miss an important piece of correspondence if it gets lost in the mess on the table. To avoid this I have attempted to get my housemates to deliver anything addressed to one of us by leaving it on the floor immediately outside our rooms. This way the mess on the table can grow unchecked without causing any immediate catastrophes.

In the real world™ we frequently encounter broken systems. It's not always feasible to fix them all immediately so we usually need to work with them to the best of our ability while they are being fixed. But it's important not to normalize the broken systems or they will never be fixed.

Current Mood: mellow

12:37 am - A motley collection of thoughts

On Friday night I went to listen to Norm MacDonald do stand-up comedy in San Jose with 2 of my housemates. He was pretty funny, although he did make several racist jokes. I'm not sure what to think of that. On the one hand, I believe in absolute freedom of expression and think that humour should be immune to social taboos, but on the other hand, just because people have the liberty to make culturally insensitive remarks does not mean I have to listen to them (much less pay for the privilege). What bothered me more than his use of cultural stereotypes was the perception that he actually lacks the ability to distinguish stereotype from reality. Of course, it is entirely possible that he was simply putting on an act to amuse us. And I suppose that if it doesn't bother me when Chris Rock uses stereotypes then it's only fair for me to extend the same liberty to Norm MacDonald while he's on stage.

On Saturday morning I helped prune rose bushes at a municipal garden in San Jose. Pruning feels like having a very slow conversation with the plant in which you negotiate what gets removed by iteratively evaluating each twig and branch according to whether it enhances or detracts from the overall beauty of the plant. The idea is to remove branches that are growing into other parts of the plant as well as those that are growing sideways instead of upward. It was a rewarding experience and I think I would like to do it again.

My friend Rob is in town for the week so I've been trying to see as much of him as I can while he's here because we don't see each other often any more now that he lives in Dublin. On Saturday night I had dinner at The Cheesecake Factory with him and a few other googlers plus our mutual friend Paul. Upon our arrival at the restaurant we were presented with a device that would vibrate and flash when our table was ready, which they estimated would happen in about 40 minutes. Once 45 minutes had passed Paul began to get rather annoyed. Apparently he hadn't caught onto what I've come to realize is the standard procedure at restaurants for getting people to stick around instead of seeking food elsewhere: they lowball the expected wait in the hope that patrons will be increasingly unlikely to walk away as the time they've already invested in waiting for a table increases. I used to find this annoying once too but then I began to mentally inflate the provided estimates by 50% before deciding whether or not to wait it out.
After dinner Paul and I went to hear Anya Marina singing at a little coffee shop in Cupertino. Anya combines witty lyrics and catchy tunes into a terrific show. And then she bought both of us beers after the show at a pub where we met her friends!

Usually when I meet people for the first time, I effect my best approximation of normalcy so as no to scare them off. Then, if they seem worthy of being friends, I slowly ease them into the phenomenon that is me. However, when greeted with a hug I unleash the full Tony experience, complete with random thoughts, bad analogies, strange noises, playful antics, a constant stream of smart-ass remarks and periodic exhibitions of eye-popping flexibility. If people want to hang out with me a second time after that, it's an as-yet-infallible indicator of awesomeness.
On Sunday I was fortunate to have spent the entire afternoon and evening with a few such people. Alan's girlfriend Flo is in town for the week to see some friends and scout around for job prospects so she wanted to see me while she was down here. They picked me up in Palo Alto and, after a brief stop at Stanford, we headed over to The City, where we wandered around Fisherman's Wharf, ate clam chowder, drove down Lombard Street, trespassed on private property in a ritzy neighbourhood and had dinner at Calzone's. Not wanting to get lost, they had acquired a handheld GPS navigator of which we made extensive (and often frivolous) use.

Since Monday was a holiday for President's Day, I visited Berkeley (for the 1st time since Fall 2003) with Shawn and the 2 friends (Sean and Shawn) who are visiting him this week. The Berkeley stereotype was confirmed when we were offered 'shrooms before even having managed to park the car! Because the university is set into the side of a hill, there was a lot of climbing involved before we eventually ended up at the hippie market on Telegraph street, where we had lunch and browsed through various random stores until we had to leave in order to return the rented mustang before the deadline.

Current Mood: exhausted

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

06:33 am - The science of group social activities

While interacting with people in an informal setting this weekend I made an observation that I hadn't explicitly realized until now: people + food + trivial activity = good time.

That seems to be time-tested formula for creating an enjoyable social event. While the food part is not absolutely vital, it helps a great deal. However, the key is the trivial activity. See, if you collect a bunch of people and tell them to have fun, most people will be unable to deal with the sudden lack of structure and resort either to clumping together in cliques of comfortable friends or being miserable in the company of strangers. Adding an activity to the mix gives them a fleeting sense of purpose; that's all it takes for them to begin interacting. And soon enough they will get distracted from the task at hand and begin having fun with each other, occasionally reverting to the task for a while when a conversation reaches approaches its natural conclusion.

It's important that the task be trivial though. If it seems too serious, complicated or important then people get too wrapped up in the task itself for those all-important distractions to occur with sufficiently high frequency and duration to make the event enjoyable. This little constraint is sometimes not realized by people who take the activity more seriously than its intended purpose requires. For the most part, however, the formula is reliably effective. It can be observed in party games, group retreats, frosh week, etc.

And this shouldn't come as a surprise to most people because we already knew this implicitly. But knowing something explicitly makes it easier to adapt to uncommon situations. In this case, it is now easier to understand why group work is frequently a disaster: the setting is easily unconsciously mistaken for an informal social activity and people get distracted into having a great time instead of completing the assigned task. Ergo, to increase the odds of getting work done, it is necessary to tweak the setting so it appears less like a soiree and more like a work environment.

Current Mood: calm

09:44 am - Sony begins to feel the pain of market rejection

For the past few years I have watched as Sony continued to flout consumer preferences in favour of pushing it's intellectual property. They avoided open standards like CompactFlash & MMC (and even licensable collaborative ones like Secure Digital) in favour of their home-grown Memory Stick technology that had to be licensed from them. As a result, anybody choosing to purchase an electronic device made by Sony usually ended up being locked in to their proprietary storage media that cost much more than any of the alternates.

They also made the ill-fated move of acquiring media companies, thereby entering the music and film industries. This produced some internal turmoil because of the inherent opposition between the market desires of media companies and consumer electronics companies. Media companies want to make sure that no device is capable of permitting their customers to share content with each other for fear of rampant copyright infringement. They seek this goal regardless of how unusable it makes the devices. Consumer electronics companies, on the other hand, want people to buy their products. This generally entails making them both useful and easy to use. But people like to share stuff. So the successful consumer electronics companies put the bare minimum of restrictions of their hardware. Unfortunately, this turned Sony into a rather conflicted corporate entity. And it showed in their product offerings.

Given that there was plenty of competition from Apple, Casio and the like, Sony is now reaping the fruit of its bad judgement as it is forced to abrogate 10,000 employees in a desperate attempt to trim some fat and become relevant again. But I don't see it gaining the focus it needs yet...

Current Mood: predatory