All posts by James Reffell

Asimov, Robots, and War

Uncategorized

First, this post is total Adam Nash bait.

Today's Fresh Air had on P. W. Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. It's a pretty discussion on a number of fronts, including technical, ethical, policy, and even interface design issues. (Apparently, for example, the military based designs for some of their controllers on X-Box controllers, reasoning both that the video game manufacturers had done a bunch of ergonomics research for them, and that they could save on training costs since the typical military recruit would come "pre-trained" on such controllers.)

Isaac.Asimov02
But my ears really perked up when they started discussing the Three Laws of Robotics. For the rusty, that would be Asimov's laws of robotic behaviour, first included in his 1942 story Runaround:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Singer and Terry Gross talked about how quickly those laws break down when applied to warfare — since we already have semi-autonomous machines capable of taking lethal action out there, for example. I'm not sure Asimov ever tried to apply, or meant to apply, those laws to war — probably time for some rereading on my part. They did mention one slightly more sinister model: Ed 209.

That scene seems slightly less funny now that a South African military robot killed 9 people and wounded 14 because of a software glitch. That sort of thing starts making me think more of Skynet or, if you prefer less dorky time travel with your sinister future robots, Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series, in which self-replicating machines attempt to exterminate all life in the universe.

I'm definitely going to pick up Singer's book, but also revisit Manuel De Landa's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, written in 1991 and using early examples of the usage of robotics technology in the Gulf War (as well as much earlier examples, going back to the Renaissance.)

Decluttering my digital inboxes

Uncategorized

I'm a loose Inbox = 0 adherent. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can read plenty about it here.)

As an example, my personal email inbox is currently at 3, and my work email inbox is at 10. This is pretty damn good for me, and I've spent a chunk of 2009 so far getting to this happy place. Of course, those aren't my only inboxes! There's the physical mail inbox, of course, but recently my attention has been forced to include inboxes from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Livejournal, and Delicious. The inconsistency of how they handle messaging — and how I handle messaging from each source, which is in turn based on a mishmash of factors from quirks of their UI to the social nuances of who I'm connected to on each platform — means that I haven't been able to route all of those usefully into one box, so lo, there are many boxes. All of those currently set to 0, as part of the same New Year's … I can't quite say resolutions, because I haven't fully articulated them yet, but New Year's impulses. I'm also not counting on staying in this happy place, because life happens and you can't spend all your time making things unbold.

(On the other hand, I'm nowhere near as bold as Danah Boyd on the inbox front. I am full of admiration for her approach, however.)

And then there's my feed reader. I'm a happy Bloglines user, and I'm reasonably content with it — the recentish redesign removed some of the clunkiness, and at the time I made my fateful RSS Reader decision (do you know where you were when you decided on a RSS reader?) it was a pleasure to use a non-Google product because it was demonstrably better than the Google product. I understand that the tables may now have been turned, but I don't want to know about it. I'm a feed addict, and the thing had become a source of stress — too many feeds unread for too long, all that boldness taunting me with missed content. So, I'm in the middle of a huge revamp. The first step was ditching many feeds that I don't like, don't read often enough, or post too frequently. The second was adding a few — sparingly — that I want to follow in the new year. The third, and longest, is taking all of the pinned articles (and I had 1000+ of those) and either reading them, deleting them, or tagging them in Delicious. (I'm rapidly approaching the crazy person tier of Delicious users.)

This all may sound a little obsessive. Actually, it is a little obsessive. But if I clear the decks enough, it will remove some nagging sources of stress in my life while allowing me to keep up with what I want to keep up with, rather than running away from it all entirely (as tempting as that sometimes is). It's the digital equivalent of taking those 300 New Yorkers you have stacked up on your coffee table and packing them off to recycling, only you actually get to keep the good articles.

Next: more exciting obessiveness with feeds and emails!

Lettuce and 2009

Uncategorized

I'm going to try something a little different in 2009, now that this blog has been left fallow for a while. Now that the soil has had a little time to replenish itself and the pests have died down a bit, we can start again … and maybe not torture that metaphor any more than strictly necessary.

There's lettuce in my light well. Or, at least, there are lettuce seeds in my light well, nestled in about 5 gallons of organic potting soil from the Sloat Garden Center. (The one actually on Sloat.) The soil is in a self-watering container made from 5-gallon buckets, made using the instructions from The Urban Homestead (rather than the really nice video I just linked to because I only just found it). My daughter was fascinated by this process, and not just the dangerous bits with the saw and drill.

The hope is to start growing a little of our own food, even though we live in a tiny apartment near the beach. Despite my urges to the contrary, I'm trying to start small, and build up slowly to more ambitious tasks. Tasks that might involve worm poop, or chickens.

We'll see if this is the start of something, whether the lettuces actually sprout, whether this is a late-blooming manifestation of my British gardening fiend heritage, and whether lettuces alone will feed a family when the zombies come. Probably not, on that last one. Better get some more buckets.

Politics, brand, and graphic design

Graphic Design

Excerpt from an interview with Michael Bierut on the Obama campaign’s visual brand:

The
thing that sort of flabbergasts me as a professional graphic designer
is that, somewhere along the way, they decided that all their graphics
would basically be done in the same typeface, which is this typeface
called Gotham If you look at one of his rallies, every single non-handmade sign is in
that font. Every single one of them. And they’re all perfectly spaced
and perfectly arranged. Trust me. I’ve done graphics for events –and I
know what it takes to have rally after rally without someone saying,
"Oh, we ran out of signs, let’s do a batch in Arial." It just doesn’t
seem to happen. There’s an absolute level of control that I have
trouble achieving with my corporate clients.

Facebooked

Interaction Design

Fbkd_1Sometimes the difference between thinking about design and having design happen to you hits you in the face. This happened to me yesterday — I’ve followed the launch of Facebook’s Beacon program and ensuing controversy, and had seen screenshots of the feature, but had never seen it in the wild. Yesterday I was printing out tickets from Fandango for Sweeney Todd (quick review: well done but not for the squeamish and/or those recovering from the flu) and this little creature popped out at me (with a nice transition animation). Suddenly the theoretical was real, and frankly a little jarring.

My immediate reactions:

  • I noticed this, in a way that I would never see much similarly positioned pop-up ad crap. This is probably a combination of the smoothness of the animation and the clean design — I’m not sure if I immediately clocked that the message was from Facebook, but the design definitely cued "Not an ad."
  • I knew what it was. Unclear if I would have without being pre-informed, but it is pretty clearly messaged.
  • It was shocking in a way I didn’t expect — it’s one thing to intellectually grapple with the implications of a thing and another to actually be shocked by it. Apparently on some gut level I didn’t expect my personal habits to be (potentially) publicized in this context, even while I’m in the industry and know at a different level that it’s possible.

Fbkd_2At this point I was dragged out of the house by my wife, who wanted to make sure we didn’t let the process of design inquiry make us miss the movie. Afterwards, we talked it over and I thought a little more about my reactions, and also checked out the Facebook side of the interaction.

My slightly more considered reactions:

  • What is happening is pretty clearly messaged but what to do about it is not — it feels like they’re got disclosure down reasonably well, but the copy sets a pretty aggressive "this is hapening but you can make it stop if you must" tone that I’m not comfortable with, and which ends up being confusing (e.g. the uncheck-the-box-and-hit-OK opt-out interaction, which is a classic way to muddle folks up). I’m not sure whether this is intentional aggression or cluelessness.
  • Movies are actually a pretty good area for a feature like this — letting other folks know what movie I’m going to fits in well with the continuous partial attention-feeding nature of Facebook, Twitter, and etc., and they have a lot fewer downsides than other areas Beacon covers (movie-going is pretty low-risk from a privacy standpoint, and is less likely to ruin a surprise gift than broadcasting product purchases). If it had been, say, a book purchase, my negative reaction might have been even stronger.

So, not that last word on Beacon, or even my last word, just an interesting (to me) experience.

Book Review | Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

Book Review, Design Management

Gen-Xers got a bad rap for a while in the 90s. There was the whole "slackers" media craze in the 90s (which some of us recognized as not having much to do with true Slack, Praise "Bob"). In retrospect, all that was about was a bunch of relatively smart middle-class youths looking at the jobs the previous generation had in mind for them and thinking: "Nah …." Which is normal intergenerational behavior. But at the time, I recall a lot of Boomer fretting about lazy kids these days, etc. Funny thing was, (and I’m thinking in terms of zeitgeists here, not actual data), it seems like the minute there was something actually interesting to do — like a radical technological and cultural shift happening out in the fabled West, for example — there was a collective packing of bags, moving out, and suddenly all the former slackers were putting in 80+ hour weeks at dot-com jobs. Followed by a boom, then a bust, then a boomlet, and here we all are.

80+ hours can make (some) sense (in certain circumstances, for not too long) when you’re changing the world at a crazy start-up. But it makes much less sense as the crazy start-up starts to get big and stable — and it takes a toll when done over the long haul. Unfortunately, some companies have tried to keep that aspect of their start-up culture a little too long. Which brings us to Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom DeMarco.

Preston Smalley recommended the book to me, and I found it pretty compelling. It’s aimed primarily at managers of knowledge workers (e.g. designers and software developers), but could also be useful, or at least therapeutic, for folks who’ve been subjected to certain kinds of work cultures. It’s really a couple of ideas wrapped up in one (smallish) package:

  • When dealing with folks like designers and developers, many ways corporations have of maximizing "efficiency" have limited success, can actually backfire and make things slower and more costly, and have pretty serious consequences in terms of burnout, turnover, low quality, lack of innovation. 
  • Following these, it discusses more general management issues that spring from the overall efficiency culture he’s just poked holes in, taking on various management fads and failings like management by fear and overemphasis on process and quality. He also takes some swipes at Dilbert here, which is always nice.
  • Finally he wraps his recommendations for what to do as a manager of knowledge workers primarily around planning for change: ways of creating flexible groups that can adapt to changing circumstances, building slack into schedules to manage risk, and having trust in your team.

There were a bunch of "a-ha" moments for me in the early chapters — DeMarco has a nice way of capturing the absurdities at the heart of some cherished workplace cultural habits simply and neatly. The later chapters are a little more scattered, but then figuring out what to do is always a little harder than figuring out what not to do.