What's a Little Moral Panic Between Friends?
It’s been far too long since I have posted, and that made me think that my next post ought to be grand and meaningful, which in turn lead to even more time before a post was made. Instead, I’m going to start off with something completely trivial. I thought I ought to point out that after at least a decade of growing violent video game use and declining crime rates, the notion that there is some kind of relationship between the two is getting some serious debunking. It turns out you can let your five year-old play GTA all day without having to worry about them growing up to be hitmen. Note to parents: probably still not a great idea to have a five year-old play GTA all day. ;-)
A Cynical View of Tufte
A few weeks ago I participated in a one-day training course taught by Edward Tufte. The presentation is a great deal, because you get all four of his books, and the price is only $380/person (groups of 10 or more get a 25% discount and students pay only $200) while the collective list price of the books is like $200. So, even if he was a pretty poor lecturer, so long as you value his books (and these books a great in terms of aesthetics and content, as you’d expect from an expert on presenting data and information), it wouldn’t be too hard to get your money’s worth. Of course, Mr. Tufte is actually a pretty good lecturer.
In terms of style, the lecture was a mix of humorous bits, teaching key concepts through particularly powerful exemplars, and some self promotion. I couldn’t miss out on the irony of the experience though. A great deal of what he was saying boiled down to the notion that paper is a much better communication mechanism than… presentations. In other words: “you are all personifying false laziness by wasting your day listening to me talk instead of just reading my books”. At one point he poked fun of an executive who was such a “high level muckety-muck” that he couldn’t navigate through his presentation himself, despite the fact that Mr. Tufte himself had an assistant who handled manipulation of all the A/V visuals, including transitions between pictures. He also went in to great detail about the whole Skip Intro phenomenon, and then ended the lecture with a video of his latest abstract sculpture work… which started with a long, slow motion title sequence. In fairness though, he did mostly follow his own advise, pointing people to sections of the texts for each of his topical discussions, eschewing PowerPoint slides (it is possible Mr. Tufte hates PowerPoint and similar “pitch products” as he describes them even more than Peter Norvig), providing a folded 11x17 paper with the key information he was looking to convey, reveling in the information density of text and backing up his assertions with data.
Probably the oddest part of his presentation to me was the way he lovingly talked about the iPhone, or more accurately, the whole gestures based interface. Gestures aren’t exactly a new concept, and there are a lot of issues with them that he didn’t mention. He also went over some of the instances where the iPhone does a great job (and where it does a poor one) using minimal screen space to present maximal information. What confounded me though was his praise for the way you could go through slides “on the same surface” as opposed to the PowerPoint “same damn thing after another” interface. In reality here, the innovation here is simple a slide transition mechanism that slides one slide in as another leaves. If PowerPoint (I must proudly confess to barely being able to use PowerPoint, despite having done many presentations) can’t already do this, it wouldn’t take much more than a days work getting the job done, and I suspect that Mr. Tufte would be just as disgusted as he is with all of PowerPoint’s slide transition effects. I fail to see how a horizontal virtual desktop of equal sized windows, with smart scrolling (so transitions terminate on one particular window) is materially different in terms of how it conveys information from a traditional PowerPoint slide show.
What really struck me about his whole presentation though was that it was based around altruistic notions of what meetings, and presentations specifically, are really about. Mr. Tufte’s entire thesis is based on the notion that the purpose of a presentation is to convey information, despite the open acknowledgment that there are simpler, more efficient ways to convey information. I actually tend to buy in to this line of thinking, which I’d argue is one of my weaknesses as a presenter. Unfortunately, reality does not seem to conform to my outlook.
The problem is that in a business context, presentations are primarily an opportunity for the presenter to promote themselves. This is their moment to bask in the sun of everyone’s attention, and their success is very much driven by how well they pull it off. They do this not by conveying information so much as holding an audience’s attention and focus as much as humanly possible. They do this not by inviting analysis (if they did that, someone might notice something that would make them look stupid, or someone might say something that draws attention away from the presenter) but rather by presenting support for the conclusions they have drawn. Controlling the narrative, providing only enough information to support one line of reasoning, and locking the audience’s focus through sensory deprivation are all part of the process.
Unless you foster a work environment that breaks out of this mold of thinking, I don’t know that Tufte’s techniques will really be of much use.
Running Out Of Gas (not what you think)
Here’s a shocker for you…. according to this article in Wired, we’re going to run out of helium in 9 years. I don’t know about you, but that seems like a far more pressing, immediate and undenyable problem than concerns about running out of petrochemicals in decades to come. Here’s a question for those of us who think market forces can go a long way towards addressing resource shortages: given that we’ve only got a 9 year supply left.. why isn’t helium already ridiculously expensive?
It's Full Of Stars
Apparently Arthur C. Clarke is rendezvousing with Rama or whatever is out there. Really, there is too much to say to say anything at all. He was truly a unique and interesting man, and his contributions to science cannot be understated (really, when was the last time you thought about the contributions to science by a man known primarily for writing fiction?).
As If Programmers Needed Another Reason to Think They Are God.... 2
This is what happens when a programmer starts to dabble in biology. Keep this in mind the next time you meet someone with a bioinformatics background. Even if they aren’t dangerous, they probably think they are, and that’s reason enough to give them a wide birth.
I’m pretty sure one day we’re going to really understand DNA/RNA/etc., and then we’ll find a segment that translates to:
// Worst hack ever! // This doesn't actually make a rational decision, but instead just does what_I_want_to_do // without even looking at relevant_factors. // Returns a rationalization for what_I_want_to_do. struct rationalization make_decision(struct decision what_I_want_to_do, struct factors* relevant_factors)
Welcome to Planet Nimrod!
Folks in the US get a fairly distorted view of the world. Sometimes it can be depressing. You keep reading all this evidence that the US is populated with really stupid people (Bill Maher asks: “Why do we always have to be the stupid country?”), and you sometimes fail to grasp that in fact this is a global phenomenon. Every now and then though, you run across stories like this one, which warms the heart. See, there is good news: we’re all idiots.
Way To Go Al
Apple’s home page reflects the attitude I’d expected to see throughout the country upon the news that Al Gore, along with the IPCC, had won the Nobel Peace Prize. In case the page is gone by the time you check out this blog, here’s a link to the image. It reads: “Al has put his heart and soul, and much of his life during the past several years, into alerting and education us all on the climate crisis. We are bursting with pride for Al and this historic recognition of his global contributions.”
One of the preconditions for a country to be great is that it must forgo pettiness and embrace its moments of greatness. So surely, Apple’s home page is a reflection of the broader reaction across the country… right?
Of course not.
Instead of seeing universal national pride, I saw, as Der Spiegel did, that even one of America’s countrymen winning the Noble Peace Prize couldn’t unite the country in universal pride. Instead, political hacks, bloggers (typically conservatives), news services (particularly those owned by Rupert Murdock for some strange reason ;-), spent the day taking a swing at Al Gore, his apparently only recent interest in the environment (hello?, this is the guy whose pro-environment track record was so extensive that he was attacked on it by Bush Sr. during the ‘92 presidential campaign), his movie, the Nobel Peace Prize, the motives of the selection committee, liberalism, the stupidity of the rest of the world, and even Jimmy Carter (for the crime of having won the prize in 2002).
You know what guys? Just like anyone, he has his flaws. His words can easily be picked apart and fault found, just like anyone else’s. Like the work of any advocate, his actions are not always perfectly in harmony with his advocacy. That’s a conversation for another day. Can’t we, for just one day, collectively share pride in the fantastic recognition for the achievements of one of our countrymen? Do you realize how foolish and pathetic you look to the rest of the world?
Probably Best If I Say Nothing
I’ll just provide this link to a Psychology Today article and make no additional comments whatsoever….