tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21505633098226662402024-03-14T00:49:04.856-07:00XRM ContentThis blog is a growing archive of columns Richard Mateosian has written for IEEE Micro since 1987.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.comBlogger77125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-30969251748813277742017-01-01T20:52:00.000-08:002017-08-03T20:55:15.852-07:00Resistance is Futile<div class="MsoNormal">
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This time I look at a book that claims to reveal the shape
of our technological future. The technological climate is changing. Ice is turning
to water, and there’s no going back.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces
That Will Shape Our Future</i> by Kevin Kelly (Viking, NY, 2016, 336pp, ISBN
978-0-525-42808-4, $28.00, <a href="http://www.penguin.com/">www.penguin.com</a>)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Kevin Kelly has been on the forefront of the online
connected world for more than 30 years. He contributed substantially to the
Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL, the Hackers Conference, and Wired Magazine. In
his 1994 book, <i>Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems,
and the Economic World</i>, he was already exploring some of the themes that
appear in <i>The Inevitable</i>. His 2010 book, <i>What Technology Wants</i>,
(Micro Review March/April 2011) explores the idea that technologies have
characteristics that make them likely to evolve in some directions but unlikely
to evolve in others. This is the basis for “inevitable” in his current title.
Kelly’s technological forces are what we might call trends, and because he
describes them as processes, he assigns a present participle to each. This is a
little contrived, as when he uses the participle “cognifying” to describe using
artificial intelligence (AI) to make devices or processes more capable.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The trends Kelly describes are in plain sight, but what he
reports as already happening on the leading edges of those trends was new to
me. He also shows ways in which these trends interact and reinforce each other,
magnifying the effect of each. For example, one of his themes is the maturing
of virtual reality, which Kelly claims has not become more capable in the last
nearly 30 years but has become much cheaper because of technologies developed
for mobile phones. High-resolution screens and motion sensors cost a tiny
fraction of what they cost in the late 1980s, so inexpensive systems now
provide a realistic sense of being somewhere you’re not, while AI and big data
enrich the experience. <o:p></o:p></div>
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AI</h2>
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Since at least as far back as the 1960s, AI has been just
around the corner. We’ve turned that corner now, but not in the way many of us
feared. Rather than the moody and self-protective HAL 9000 of Arthur C.
Clarke’s <i>2001</i>, we see application-specific bits of intelligence. Driven
by our ability to handle big data and our drive to collect and annotate
information about everything anyone does, artificial intelligence will be cheap
and ubiquitous. As Kelly puts it, “Even a very tiny amount of useful
intelligence embedded into an existing process boosts its effectiveness to a
whole other level.” He imagines a grid from which you can take as much cheap,
reliable AI as you need. Like electricity a century ago, this capability will
spawn countless new businesses built on the model of adding AI to some
previously unenlightened process. For example, intelligent clothing will communicate
with washing machines to control water temperature, the amount of soap, and the
intensity of the agitation and spin cycles. More significant than such trivial,
but potentially lucrative, applications are AI-enhanced medicine,
transportation, weather forecasting, and investing. Such applications exist now
and will become more sophisticated tomorrow.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Kelly attributes the success of today’s AI, despite all the
false hopes of the past, to the following factors: cheap parallel computation,
big data, and better algorithms. Hardware like multi-core microprocessors or
massively parallel graphics processing units (GPUs) make possible analytic
techniques that would have been prohibitively expensive with older equipment.
Huge collections of data about everything from chess games to search results,
to tracking cookies make it possible for AI to learn and improve. Hierarchical
algorithms, called deep learning, make full use of parallel computation to
support such AI successes as IBM’s Watson or Google’s search engine.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Sharing</h2>
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Our digital culture is communal to a high degree –
socialism, but without the state. Wikipedia, Creative Commons permissions,
crowd funding, peer-to-peer loans, Tor, Digg, Reddit. Pinterest, and Tumblr are
all examples of it. Many people contribute, and everyone consumes without
charge. Apache and Linux have unpaid workforces the size of a small town. Over
the last hundred years, free markets solved problems that governments could
not. Now collaborative social technology is solving problems that the free
market cannot. Google, Facebook, and Twitter depend on such collaborative
contributions to provide valuable services free of charge, but make huge
amounts of money by using AI and big data to deliver targeted advertising. The
bottom-up model of user-generated content is a wonderful way for new ideas to
evolve and bloom in niches, but as Wikipedia and other examples show, some
top-down curation is necessary as collaborative projects grow and mature.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The nature of bits</h2>
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Several of Kelly’s trends arise from the nature of bits.
Because bits are ephemeral, they are easy to gather, duplicate, and rearrange.
From this he deduces the inevitability that they will be gathered, duplicated
and rearranged, despite attempts to prohibit these actions. This situation
stresses our legal and social systems and changes our way of life. Ownership
gives way to access. Like the hunter-gatherers we descended from, we’ll soon
own nothing but have access to whatever we need. Solid products give way to
fluid services that keep updating. A black touch-tone phone on a desk gives way
to a continually updated smart phone with much of its data stored elsewhere.
People consume music, movies, and “books” online rather than filling their
homes with the concrete embodiments of those things. They actively mix, match,
and hyperlink fragments of audio, video, text, and images into new creations
that befuddle existing copyright laws. Because copies are free, you must make
your living by selling trust, immediacy, personalization, discoverability, and
other things that can’t be copied. Bits exhibit a network effect. A bit is more
valuable if accompanied by metadata – other bits that describe it. A bit is
more valuable if linked to related bits. The cloud draws its value from its ability
to support and leverage the nature of bits.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Remixing</h2>
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Duplicating and rearranging bits is called remixing.
According to Brian Arthur (Micro Review March/April 2011), all new technologies
derive from combinations of older ones. The same goes for combinations of bits.
Copying, rearranging, annotating, and linking to text is easy because of our
tools. Future tools will enable us to do the same with images and video. Kelly
envisions the ability to link from an article on Asian clothing to the fez worn
by a character in the movie <i>Casablanca</i>. This will depend not just on new
tools but on automated assignment of metadata to every bit of information in
the cloud – a small extension of what Google already does. Already, trillions
of photos are online, and AI has produced filmable 3D images of many things
(for example, the Golden Gate Bridge) from those photos. In a gesture toward
recognizing intellectual property and ownership amid all this remixing, Kelly
alludes to Jefferson’s distinction between a house and an idea. He proposes to
distinguish between copying and transforming and to give free license to the
latter, a departure from current copyright law.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Tracking</h2>
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One form of gathering bits is tracking. Websites, cell
phones, social media, and credit cards track our visits and actions, but we
also track ourselves. We continually track our exercise, vital signs, and other
measurements. This can lead to establishing baselines to support personalized
medical treatments. We collect email, record public talks, and may someday, as
a few people do now, automatically record all of our interactions. This can
give us augmented memories of people, places, conversations, and events – an
enhancement of our natural abilities that I’m sure we’ve all wished for at one
time or another. In addition to data from tracking ourselves, the internet of
things (IOT) gives rise to huge tracking possibilities. Kelly recognizes two
models for tracking. In the big brother model, “they” know everything about
you. You know very little about them. In the small-town model, tracking is more
transparent. You know who’s watching you, and you have a good sense of what
they’re planning to do with the information. Bitcoin and public key encryption
illustrate the small-town model. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Kelly imagines a slider you can use to control the balance
between privacy and openness in your public dealings, and he points out that
most people seem to prefer openness. This is because the more you reveal of
yourself, the more personally others can treat you. The more private you are,
the more generic the services you receive. When it comes to anonymity, the
ultimate privacy, Kelly says it’s like a heavy metal – essential to your
nutrition, but fatal if you get too much. Everyone who has read anonymous
online comments knows this. Privacy depends on trust, which requires a persistent
identity. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I find Kelly’s vision of the future of tracking a little
ominous. He sees the volume of tracked data growing to the size of an elephant,
compared with the mote of dust we track now. This qualitative difference puts
it beyond what humans can comprehend – if it isn’t already. He sees all of it
reorganized into structures that only machines and AI can work with. They will
parse this huge body of information into tiny elements and recombine them in
unimagined ways. How we will relate to this planet-sized machine is unclear.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Filtering</h2>
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Our attention is a scarce commodity. Humans have limited
capacity, and there is little we can do about that. According to Kelly, each
year brings 8 million new songs, 2 million books, 16,000 films, 30 billion blog
posts, and 182 billion tweets. Many filters are available – for example, the
Amazon or Netflix recommendation engines, driven by big data and AI – but even
if you filter out everything that isn’t perfect for you, you still don’t have
time to consume it all. And behind the scenes, a gigantic filtering mechanism
matches advertisers with opportunities, trying to show you ads you’re likely to
respond to. This is a multi-billion-dollar industry. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Filtering can lead to the kinds of sharp divisions seen in
political systems. If different groups see only material that comports with
their views, those groups might stop listening to each other and ultimately
live in separate realities. Kelly offers no answer to this problem.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Jobs</h2>
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This is a technology book, not a political one, but as
anyone who paid attention to the 2016 US election knows, people care about
jobs. Kelly believes that humans should not do anything that machines can do.
Rather we should work alongside robots, treating them, <i>a la</i> McLuhan, as
extensions of ourselves. He is sure that we will dream up new jobs that we
can’t imagine now, just as farmers of the early 1800s could not imagine the
jobs of their twenty-first century progeny. This may be true, and perhaps
that’s all he needs to say, but it certainly raises questions. For example, can
an economic system that efficiently allocates scarce resources adapt to the
case in which resources are plentiful and necessary jobs are few? <o:p></o:p></div>
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Questions</h2>
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Raising questions ties to one of Kelly’s themes. Today,
humans ask the internet two trillion questions each year and get good answers –
a service that’s valuable but free. That number will grow rapidly as technology
enables answers to more personal questions like “Where’s Jenny?” or “When is
the next bus?” Kelly thinks search will become an essential universal commodity
in the next few years. But answers are not as important as questions. Kelly
quotes Picasso as saying in 1964 that computers are useless because they only
give answers. Someday computers may be good at asking questions, but for now,
this is one of the jobs Kelly reserves for humans. For example, humans will
probably always be better at asking, and answering, questions about what humans
would like to do with their free time or how they’d like to use each new
technology. Kelly makes an analogy between surfing the internet and dreaming.
Both feature quick changes of focus and mix the real and unreal. Both blur the
distinction between work and play. Both seem like a waste of time, but both can
lead to novel juxtapositions of ideas. Ultimately, they can engender questions
as profound as Einstein’s asking what you would see if you were travelling on a
beam of light. It may be a long time before machines can ask questions like
that.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The holos</h2>
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Kelly’s timeline for most of the inevitabilities he
discusses is the next 30 years, but he describes this as the beginning of a
century-long process. All his trends merge into one large invention: a new mind
for our old species. The new mind has planetary scope and gives us perfect
search and total recall. He calls it the holos and defines it as “the
collective intelligence of all humans combined with the collective behavior of
all machines, plus the intelligence of nature, plus whatever behavior emerges
from this whole.” The hardware of the holos already comprises a sextillion
transistors, a trillion times the number of neurons in a human brain. And
everyone who surfs the web teaches the holos something about what we consider
important. By 2025, Kelly estimates, 100% of the planet’s population will have
nearly free access to the holos.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Kelly likens these developments to a phase change, like the
transition from ice to water. He rejects the term “singularity” in the sense of
an exponential growth of AI that makes humans irrelevant. Instead he sees a
symbiotic relationship between humans and technology. The details of how it
works are unknowable, but the general direction, in his view, is unmistakable.
Time will tell whether he is right or wrong, but reading his book is an
eye-opening adventure. I recommend it highly.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f6f6f6; font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif; font-size: xx-small;"><b>This article appears in slightly different form in the Jan/Feb 2017 issue of IEEE Micro © 2017 IEEE.</b></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-38629181442446533132015-09-01T20:44:00.000-07:002017-08-03T20:48:09.844-07:00DITA<div class="MsoNormal">
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The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) emerged
from a long line of internal IBM projects based on an earlier markup language
called SGML. Approximately 10 years ago, IBM bequeathed DITA to the world as an
open source project. You can read all about it at dita.xml.org. DITA is based
on the idea of semantic markup, that is, embedding metadata in a document to
describe the structural roles of its elements without prescribing formatting
for those elements. This has many benefits but can impose a large overhead cost
on writing projects. Managers of small projects find it hard to justify that
overhead, but tools keep getting better and simpler.<o:p></o:p></div>
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DITA is highly flexible, but in its most common use it
marries semantic markup with another long-developing trend in technical
writing: topic-based writing, that is, writing small, independent topics that
can be assembled into documents and help systems by means of external
structural descriptions called maps. This enables reuse and single-sourcing.
When the resulting material needs to be translated into additional languages,
this approach can save large sums of money. If you say something in only one
place, then you don’t have to translate many similar versions of the same
information.<o:p></o:p></div>
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DITA’s version of topic-based writing rests on the idea that
each topic can consist purely of one type of information: concepts, reference
material, or procedural instructions. Unlike its underlying markup language,
XML, DITA uses a system of specialization and constraints rather than arbitrary
extensions, so different DITA projects can make sense of each other’s
customizations. This makes it easy for DITA-based projects with different
customizations to share topics.<o:p></o:p></div>
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DITA also provides mechanisms for decoupling
cross-references from content, making sharing and reuse easier. Using maps to
define documents as combinations of topics is one aspect of that decoupling.
The other is an indirection method called keys, which enables dependencies to
be confined to maps. A topic can refer to another topic -- or even a bit of
text -- using a key, and different maps can associate that key with different
topics or bits of text. The contents of the topic do not need to change.<o:p></o:p></div>
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While you are free to define your own means of transforming
a map and the topics it refers to into a document, most projects build their
DITA production on top of the DITA Open Toolkit (<a href="http://www.dita-ot.org/">www.dita-ot.org</a>), a set of Java-based open
source publishing tools. The combination of DITA and the toolkit presents a
steep learning curve for most writers, and the available support – not bad, but
about average for open source projects – makes the climb even harder. This
situation cries out for third-party books, and there are a few.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In the July/August 2014 Micro Review I recommended <i>DITA
Best Practices: A Roadmap for Writing, Editing, and Architecting in DITA</i> by
Laura Bellamy et al. It’s an excellent book, but I have nothing new to say
about it. In the July/August 2006 Micro Review, I wrote about the first edition
of the Comtech book <i>Introduction to DITA -- A User Guide to the Darwin
Information Typing Architecture</i>. DITA was just out, and the book showed
signs of being rushed into print. This time I look at the second edition.
Finally, anyone who wants to understand the thinking behind the DITA standard
should read Eliot Kimber’s book, <i>DITA for Practitioners</i>, supposedly the
first of two volumes, though it has been out for more than three years and he
hasn’t started writing the second volume yet. I talk about that book here as
well.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>DITA for Practitioners, Volume 1: Architecture and
Technology</i> by Eliot Kimber (XML Press, Laguna Hills CA, 2012, 348pp, ISBN
978-1-937434-06-9, xmlpress.net, $29.95)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Eliot Kimber really knows DITA. He is a DITA consultant and
a voting member of the Oasis DITA Technical Committee. He has written a book
for “people who are or will be in some way involved with the design,
implementation, or support of DITA-based systems.” The book is not for authors
who just want to use DITA, though everyone who works with DITA can benefit from
learning its architecture and main technical features. For example, many
authors would benefit from understanding the indirect addressing provided by
keys, but books aimed mainly at authors usually tiptoe around that topic.
Because I have a technical background that includes system architecture and
design, this is my favorite DITA book. But I certainly understand why DITA
users without that background might prefer books that more specifically target
their needs and concerns. JoAnn Hackos’s book, described elsewhere in this
column, is closer to that category.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Kimber makes the point that just as there are many XMLs --
making teaching someone to use XML difficult -- there are also many DITAs.
Authors of how-to books must pick a specific way of using DITA (usually,
something akin to designing topic-based online help systems) before they can
provide clear, simple instructions and examples. Kimber’s approach is to survey
the architecture as an introduction to the DITA standard, focusing on the parts
that might confuse experienced XML practitioners. With that background you can
then read the standard. With this approach it might be months before you can
apply DITA to your documentation projects, but when you do, you’ll know what
you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how to investigate and correct problems.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Fortunately, Kimber provides an intermediate path. The
longest chapter of his book (102 pp) is a tutorial, though a more conceptual
than procedural one. It covers all the main steps in producing a DITA-based
publication. Reading it exposes you to the main aspects of using DITA. His
procedural steps, however, are not always simple and direct. Here, for example,
is a step in a procedure to reuse the topics of an online help system to create
a printed version:<o:p></o:p></div>
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4. In the DOCTYPE declaration,
change “DITA Map//” to “DITA BookMap//” and “map.dtd” to “bookmap.dtd”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Note the uppercase “M” in BookMap.<o:p></o:p></div>
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You don’t actually have to change
“map.dtd” to “bookmap.dtd” because you should always be resolving the public
ID, not the system ID, for the DTD. But people will get confused if you don’t
change it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The best thing about this book is the sense it gives you of
an ongoing technical conversation within the DITA community. For example, in
discussing the DITA 1.2 key reference facility, he talks about a limitation in
the way DITA constructs the global key space, then adds, “Without [the
limitation], we would not have had time to get any indirection facility into
DITA 12.” This tells me that key scoping is not a mysterious fact of life, set
in stone, but a technical feature that DITA architects continue to try to make
more flexible.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Sometimes the conversation goes against Kimber. For example,
he notes that many DITA users use keys for variable text like product names. He
points out that this implementation falls short of how programmers expect
variables to behave and advocates that DITA provide a separate variable
mechanism – a position that the rest of the DITA Technical Committee disagrees
with. This sort of information is fascinating, but of little use to readers. It
is one of the ways in which this book is like no other DITA book.<o:p></o:p></div>
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If you really want to know how DITA works, if the idea of
understanding and even participating in this kind of technical conversation
appeals to you, you should read this book.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Introduction to DITA, 2<sup>nd</sup> ed: A User Guide to
the Darwin Information Typing Architecture Including DITA 1.2</i> by JoAnn
Hackos (Comtech, Denver CO, 2011, 430pp, ISBN 978-0-9778634-3-3, <a href="http://www.comtech-serv.com/">www.comtech-serv.com</a>, $50.00)<o:p></o:p></div>
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JoAnn Hackos’s name did not appear on the first edition of
this book, but she founded Comtech Services in 1978 and has been its leader
ever since. She is the author of several well-known and highly respected books
on managing technical communication. She is a Fellow and former President of
the Society for Technical Communication (STC). She is known for being thorough
and methodical – in her books and in highly regarded seminars, workshops, and
conferences. Her workshops are expensive, but people seem to find them worth
the price.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This book is much more clearly a tutorial than Kimber’s
book, but Hackos does not aim just at authors. She includes tutorials for
system architects as well. She covers every aspect of setting up and using DITA
to support topic-based authoring, but she says little about the technical
decisions that underlie the publishing system she helps you set up. She calls
the book a reference manual as well as a learning tool; that is true in the
sense that most readers will not go through all of the tutorial topics. They
will learn the basics, start writing their own documents, then come back for the
more advanced parts when they run into something they don’t know how to do.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Hackos spells everything out, and the result uses the print
medium inefficiently. This is typical of workshop handouts, which are often
distributed as large three-ring binders, but not so common in published books.
If you buy this book, you pay extra for the redundancy, but you’re never in
doubt about the context of what Hackos is saying.<o:p></o:p></div>
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While Hackos is careful about the technical accuracy of her
examples, the text is, surprisingly, not well copyedited. I bought my copy of
the book directly from Comtech just a few weeks before I started writing this
column – years after this edition came out – but the book still contains errors
that a competent editor could have corrected before publication, or even in a
subsequent reprinting. Sadly, the lack of editing of technical books is
widespread, but given the cost of this one and the prominence of its author,
I’m disappointed that the editing isn’t better.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Many readers will find this book too thorough and methodical
for their taste. They will be frustrated by the slow pace of the tutorials. But
if you persist, you will know the basics, and the later chapters cover material
that most how-to DITA books don’t. If you’re new to DITA and you want to buy
just one DITA book, this one is a good choice.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<h2>
Windows 10</h2>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Recently Microsoft started bombarding me with notices about
Windows 10. I had been running Windows 7 and had seen – and disliked –
instances of Windows 8.1. I am usually cautious about operating system
upgrades. I wait until the new version has been out a while. But I had heard
good things about Windows 10 and sensed that Microsoft was making a special
effort, so when the little window popped up at the bottom of my screen to tell
me that my free upgrade to Windows 10 was on my machine and ready to install, I
said “Go for it!”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I had seen a number of posts about how to respond to the
Windows 10 privacy options. So when the installer asked if I’d like the default
settings, I said no and turned off anything that seemed at all problematic. I
am sure there are other settings that they don’t let you turn off as easily, or
at all, but I felt I had done what I could. If you search online for
information about Windows 10 privacy settings, you should find lots of
guidance.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The installation and startup were the simplest and smoothest
I have ever seen, and I have seen all Windows upgrades since version 3.1. When
it was done, everything was in place and running, and it was hard to notice the
small differences from Windows 7. I have been running Windows 10 for more than
a week and have had no trouble. Chrome and Firefox quickly adapted, and it
wasn’t hard to turn off Edge (the new Internet Explorer).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Once everything was running, I upgraded Office to Office
2013. That also went relatively smoothly, though I had some trouble with
Outlook PST files. Microsoft had known for more than a year, but didn’t bother
to tell me, that I had to upgrade them explicitly to Office 2013 format. When I
did so, they worked fine.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
That one glitch aside, I am amazed at how smoothly it all
went. Watch out for the privacy settings, but if you run Windows, be sure to
upgrade to Windows 10.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: #f6f6f6; font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif; font-size: xx-small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the Sept/Oct 2015 issue of IEEE Micro © 2015 IEEE.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-66369033657725856372015-05-01T20:39:00.000-07:002018-06-06T22:15:31.308-07:00Writing Well<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
This time I review an unusual style guide, but to fully
understand it, you should know about -- and I hope look at -- four other books, which I discuss briefly in
notes at the end.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<i>The Sense of Style:
the Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century</i> by Steven Pinker
(Viking, NY, 2014, 368pp, ISBN 978-0-670-02585-5, <a href="http://www.penguin.com/"><span style="color: black; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: black;">www.penguin.com</span></a>,
$27.95)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Steven Pinker is a cognitive scientist, linguist, and --
as the dust jacket of his book announces -- public intellectual. He is the
author of many well known books, and he chairs the usage panel of the <i>American Heritage Dictionary</i>. With these
credentials in hand, he sets out to solve one of the most vexing problems of
our day: bad writing. Not just any old bad writing, but bad writing by smart,
well educated people with significant things to say. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Pinker loves reading and writing English. He reads style
guides and plays with words. The title of his book is a play on two senses of
the word "sense." He wants to help you develop an intuition for how
to write well, but he also wants to explain how stylistic choices arise from
underlying principles of cognitive psychology and an understanding of English
grammar. By "grammar" he does not mean the hodge-podge of rules,
shibboleths, and hobgoblins formerly taught in schools and still perpetuated by
most traditional style guides. He means the research-based discoveries and
formulations of Huddleston & Pullum's <i>Cambridge
Grammar</i>, which substantially revises the vocabulary of English grammar. If
you do not want to invest $250 and many hours of your time to read a 1200-page
grammar book, turn to the glossary of Pinker's book for a summary of the
grammatical categories and functions that underlie the Cambridge system.
Reading that glossary before reading the main text helped me understand
Pinker’s arguments more quickly as I went along.</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<h2>
Bad writing and how to fix it</h2>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
So how does Pinker hope to stanch the torrent of bad
writing? If you want the punch line
without Pinker's significant contributions, start by reading Thomas &
Turner's <i>Clear and Simple as the Truth</i>.
The authors describe the classic style, in which the writer knows the truth
about some subject and presents it to the reader without bias, as if in a
conversation between equals. The reader may not previously have noticed this
truth, but immediately recognizes it. The presentation is like a clear,
undistorting window. The writer shows but never tries explicitly to persuade.
Pinker says that classic style is the strongest cure he knows of for "the
disease that enfeebles academic, bureaucratic, corporate, legal, and official
prose." <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
A great virtue of the classic style is that it describes
its subjects with fresh wording and concrete images. Pinker quotes a few
paragraphs from a book by physicist Brian Greene to show that the style can be
a perfect vehicle for explaining highly complex and abstract topics. Greene
makes the abstractions concrete without oversimplifying them.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Incidentally, classic style is close to the style that
technical writers aspire to, as exemplified in Jean-luc Doumont's <i>Trees, Maps, and Theorems</i>. But the styles differ in that technical
writers and readers are not engaged in conversations between equals. Readers
seek specific information, and technical writers, as experts, provide it. They
often use standard, predictable structures to enable readers to find
information quickly, while classic style does not dictate specific formats.
Also, most technical writers are taught to avoid passive voice, but the classic
style freely uses the passive when it improves clarity. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
So what is the disease for which classic style is the
cure? Pinker calls it the curse of knowledge, a term he borrows from economics.
All writing guides tell you to “consider your audience,” but audiences are made
of different people with different levels of knowledge. The set of things we
can safely assume they know is far smaller than most writers think. As Pinker
puts it, "The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of
imagining what it's like for someone else not to know something that you
know." There are other causes, of
course, but Pinker argues that the best known suspects (per Calvin and Hobbes) – <span style="background: white; color: #222222;">“to inflate weak
ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity” <span style="color: black;">–</span> are minor contributors, as are stodgy
academic style guides.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
The curse of knowledge puts specific pitfalls in a
writer's path: jargon and abbreviations, chunking, and functional fixity. Every
field has its own vocabulary, but replacing jargon with a plain term can often
improve the clarity of your prose without making you seem less credible to your
peers. Some acronyms and abbreviations can be replaced with their fully spelled
out forms -- wasting a little space but helping many readers grasp the material
more quickly. Your peers know less than you think they do, and even those who
have seen a technical term or abbreviation may not recognize it instantly.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Chunking is gathering simpler concepts into more abstract
ones with their own names and properties (for example, the Federal Reserve Bank
buys risky mortgages to make bankers’ lives easier, and we refer to that action
as "quantitative easing"). Chunking is essential to thinking clearly
about complex subjects, but it often leads you to substitute nouns for verbs,
thus making prose harder to understand. And if you mention a chunk that a
reader doesn't recognize, that reader may be unnecessarily derailed.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Functional fixity is focusing on how you use something,
rather than seeing it as the kind of tangible object that classic style calls
for. Pinker gives the example of a researcher who showed people sentences
followed by the words TRUE or FALSE. In the paper that described this research,
the researcher called that action "the subsequent presentation of an
assessment word." But research shows that people remember facts presented
in concrete terms better than they do the same facts presented abstractly.
Pinker suggests, for example, changing a functional phrase like
"participants were tested under conditions of good to excellent acoustic
isolation" to a concrete phrase like "we tested the students in a
quiet room."<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
One easy antidote to the curse of knowledge is to ask
someone else to read what you've written (or, as you should not put it, conduct
informal usability studies on your composed output). You don’t have to accept
every suggestion -- your friends have blind spots and hobbyhorses too -- but
you may be surprised at how hard your prose is for them to understand.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
As you strive to overcome the curse of knowledge, your
next challenge is to put together comprehensible text. A style of syntax
diagramming created in the 1870s was taught in American schools recently enough
that many people still remember it and bemoan its loss. Pinker, however,
celebrates its loss, because it is unintuitive, ambiguous, and based on an
outmoded view of grammar. The <i>Cambridge
Grammar</i> syntax diagrams, which Pinker uses, are based on psycholinguistic
studies of how people process language. They are the first of the trees Pinker
uses to map the words and concepts in our heads into text understandable by
others. The syntax trees show how to map the interconnected words in our minds
into syntactically correct English sentences. They give Pinker a way to show
graphically why some sentences are incorrect or hard to understand and to
explain how to correct those problems. They also help him illustrate how poorly
some writers of style guides understand English grammar.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
One problem made evident by considering syntax diagrams
is what Pinker calls garden paths. Here, the same sequence of words might
result from two different diagrams. For example, “fat people eat accumulates”
has two readings, one of which can be eliminated by inserting the word “that”
before “people.” Pinker advocates inserting such “needless words” into
sentences to make them clearer. He also advocates reordering techniques to
support what he calls monumental principles of composition: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
* <span style="background: white; color: #333333;">Save the heaviest or
most difficult information for last.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="background: white; color: #333333;"> *
Introduce the topic before commenting on it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="background: white; color: #333333;"> *
If the sentence contains both old and new information, put the old information
first.</span> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Chief among these reordering techniques is the passive
voice. Pinker recognizes the problems that have given passive voice a bad name,
but he also provides examples in which the passive-voice version is clearer and
more graceful than active-voice alternatives. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The second kind of
tree describes a document and helps us organize our thoughts into coherent
arguments. A weak understanding of modern English grammar may give rise to lots
of nonsensical stylistic advice, but a bigger cause of bad writing is fuzzy
thinking. The document-level trees are outlines of coherent themes, deductions,
and generalizations. Even if you don’t commit either kind of tree to paper,
keeping them in mind can help you construct texts that readers can easily
understand and follow. Incidentally, these trees are essentially the ones
Doumont talks about in <i>Trees, Maps, and
Theorems</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Document-level trees
help solve a problem that Pinker describes as follows: “Even if every sentence
in a text is crisp, lucid, and well formed, a succession of them can feel
choppy, disjointed, unfocused – in a word, incoherent.” An outline, which
Pinker calls a tree lying on its side, shows the hierarchical structure of your
ideas, but while English grammar limits word order in sentences, no syntax
rules control the order of ideas in a document. Nor must all documents be
hierarchical. Sometimes you want to develop several themes in parallel, and
even if you have only one theme, the sentences you produce are related to the
sentences around them in various ways. You have a complex network of ideas in
your head, and you hope that by writing sentences you enable readers to
integrate parts of that network into their own mental networks. Pinker uses the
term “arcs of coherence” to describe the parts of a document that don’t follow
the tree structure but, as he puts it, drape themselves from the limbs of one
tree branch to the limbs of another.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To help explain how
to construct coherent texts, Pinker focuses on the idea of a topic. The point
of a sequence of ideas is the topic. If readers don’t know the topic of the sentence they are
reading, they are no longer on the same page as the writer. Pinker picks apart
an incoherent introduction to a highly regarded book to make this point with
excruciating clarity.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Pinker refers to
Joseph Williams' <i>Style: Toward clarity
and grace</i> as a source of practical advice on how to manage the complexity
of multiple themes running through a document. One important technique is to
call the same thing by the same name. Another is to explain how each theme
relates to the topic, so readers understand why you’re talking about it. For
example, if you think Jamaica is like Cuba because it is a Caribbean island and
that China is like Cuba because it has a communist government, you can’t just
write “countries like Jamaica and China” without saying that you’re lumping
them together because each shares a characteristic with Cuba.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h2>
The style guide</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The final third of
Pinker’s book is devoted to the topics that arise in traditional style guides:
rules of correct grammar, word choice, and punctuation. It gives Pinker a
chance to express some of his own pet peeves and to add a little prescriptivist
seasoning to the descriptivist underpinnings of the book. This section is not
meant to replace the <i>Chicago Manual of
Style</i>, but rather to provide data and principles to help you make choices. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Pinker ridicules the
supposed war between descriptivists and prescriptivists, in which the
prescriptivists fight to stave off the obvious decline of our language, while
the descriptivists accelerate the decline by endorsing abominations like <i>ain’t</i>, <i>brang</i>, and <i>can’t get no</i>.
According to Pinker, the purpose of prescriptive rules is not to tell people
how to speak or write but to codify the tacit conventions of a specialized form
of the language, namely, standard written English. While explaining the
importance of prescriptive rules, he rejects the idea that “every pet peeve,
bit of grammatical folklore, or dimly remembered lesson from Miss
Thistlebottom’s classroom is worth keeping.” He calls these <i>bubbe meises</i>, Yiddish for grandmother tales, and he cites
their principal sources:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
* English should be like Latin<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
* Greek and Latin must not mix<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
* Backformations are bad<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
* Meanings can’t change (the etymological
fallacy)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
* English must be logical<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I don’t have room to
go into his debunking of these “rules.” Read the book for that.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Pinker provides “a
judicious guide to a hundred of the most common issues . . . in style guides,
pet peeve lists, . . ..” He groups the
issues into grammar, expressions of quantity and quality, word choice, and punctuation,
and he brings his expertise to bear on them.
For example, he talks about problems that arise from the fact that
coordination is headless in the syntax tree. Thus Bill Clinton said “Give Al
Gore and I a chance to bring America back,” and few people registered it as
unusual; if he had said “Give I and Al Gore a chance,” everyone would have been
startled. I found all 100 issue
discussions fascinating, and I hope you’ll get the book and read them.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This book is not a
traditional style guide. You can’t go to it for definitive rules or cite it to
defend your stylistic choices. But it does provide a framework and basis for
thinking about stylistic issues. It gave me a lot to think about, and if you
want to write English prose, it will probably give you plenty to think about
too. I recommend it. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h2>
Books referred
to</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
[Doumont] <i>Trees,
Maps, and Theorems: Effective communication for rational minds</i> by Jean-luc
Doumont (Principiae, 2009) I reviewed
this book in the Sep/Oct 2011 Micro Review. It is still the book to read if you
can only read one book about technical communication. Doumont focuses on how to
organize and present technical information. He has almost nothing to say about
grammar or word choices.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
[Huddleston & Pullum] <i>The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language</i> by Rodney Huddleston
and Geoffrey Pullum (Cambridge, 2002). The authors describe it as "a
synchronic, descriptive grammar of general-purpose, present-day, international
Standard English." This would be a good example of the curse of knowledge,
but the authors mercifully explain all of those terms.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
[Thomas & Turner] <i>Clear
and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose</i> by Francis-Noël Thomas and
Mark Turner (Princeton, 1994). Thomas and Turner describe the classic style in
terms of the choices it makes about certain basic elements -- like the
relationship between reader and writer and whether truth can be known. They
provide many examples of classic style and contrast it with styles that differ
from it in varying degrees.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
[Williams] <i>Style:
Toward clarity and grace</i> by Joseph Williams (Chicago, 1990). The author's
stated goals are to help writers move from a first draft to a version crafted
for readers, diagnose the causes of bad writing and overcome them, and handle
complexity. Williams began the work as a textbook and was approached by the
University of Chicago Press to make it available to a wider audience. While
most popular guides are aimed at beginners, Williams addresses the issues that seasoned
writers must master to move to the next level.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<span style="background-color: #f6f6f6; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: xx-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #f6f6f6; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: xx-small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the May/Jun 2015 issue of IEEE Micro © 2015 IEEE.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-68560755832275227442015-01-01T20:31:00.000-08:002017-08-03T20:34:56.533-07:00The Future of Work<div style="background-color: #f6f6f6; color: #9e5205; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 20.8px; font-stretch: normal; letter-spacing: -1px; margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
This time I look at a book that describes the author's
experience working for a company with essentially no physical offices and with
workers all over the globe. He draws some conclusions about the future of work.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<i>The Year Without Pants: Wordpress.com and the Future of
Work</i> by Scott Berkun (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, San Francisco, 2013, 266pp, ISBN
978-1-118-66063-8, <a href="http://www.josseybass.com/">www.josseybass.com</a>,
$26.95)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
In the July/August 2010 Micro Review, I briefly discussed
Scott Berkun's <i>Confessions of a Public
Speaker</i>, a book he wrote while trying to make a living as a talking head. But
in the 1990s Scott distinguished himself as a development manager at Microsoft,
where he was instrumental in making Microsoft's belated embrace of the web and
browsers successful. His other books qualify him to be called a management
guru, so it was with trepidation that he stepped back into a management job.</div>
<h2>
<br /></h2>
<h2>
The back story</h2>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
About the time my review of his last book came out,
Berkun was a WordPress blogger and a consultant to Matt Mullenweg, the creator
of the WordPress blogging software and founder of Automattic (note the extra
"t" so the company name includes Mullenweg's given name). Automattic
runs wordpress.com, one of the most popular sites in the world. Approximately
half of all WordPress-based blogs are hosted there for free. Mullenweg wanted
to try a new organizational approach within Automattic. Partly as a result of
Berkun's advice, he split the company into ten teams, and he invited Berkun to
lead one of them. Berkun agreed to join the company as an employee. Going in he
made it clear that he would leave to write this book in approximately a year.
He wound up staying for a year and a half, the last few months of which as a
team member after recommending that one of his team members be promoted to
succeed him.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
The book tells a fascinating story -- fascinating because
of both the personal details and the company's unique organization. In the
early 1980s I read Tracy Kidder's _Soul of a New Machine_, and the personal
side of Berkun's book reminds me of Kidder's story. Kidder was a reporter and
not a participant, but he did see some of the same dynamics at work as the ones
Berkun describes. The workers who were passionate about the goal made the
project succeed by working behind the backs of the hard-driving project
managers. At Automattic, there are no hard-driving managers, and everything is
out in the open -- almost painfully so -- but passion and commitment are the
prime motivators.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
As a development project leader in the 1960s, I read John
Kenneth Galbraith's _New Industrial State_.
Galbraith said many things in that book, but the one I remember nearly
50 years later is that in order to succeed, companies must abandon top-down
decision making and recognize that
management will increasingly lack the knowledge needed to make day-to-day
operational decisions. In this era of agile organizations, that seems like a
quaint insight, but getting from there to here was a long, bumpy ride.
Automattic, as described in Berkun's book, seems like the culmination of that
journey.</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<h3>
<br /></h3>
<h3>
A virtual company</h3>
</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
In January 2003 Matt Mullenweg established the WordPress
open source community by forking code from b2/cafelog, a GPL-licensed open
source project whose founder had stopped
supporting it. Mullenweg's founding principles were transparency, meritocracy,
and longevity. In August 2005, distressed about the existing options for
deploying WordPress-based blogs, he founded Automattic with three community
volunteers and no venture backing. They designed an anti-spam plugin called
Akismet -- still one of the first things a new WordPress blogger installs --
and used income from that to keep Automattic afloat until they could obtain
more substantial financing. Toni Schneider joined the company as CEO in
November 2005, and he and Mullenweg jointly managed a totally flat organization
until they created teams in 2010, when the company had 60 employees.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Automattic has a simple business model. They sell
upgrades to bloggers who want more than the many features they can get for
free. They sell advertising on a few popular blogs, and they work special deals
with premier clients like CNN, _Time_ magazine, CBS, and NBC Sports, which host
their websites on WordPress.com.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Because of the way the company started, it was completely
natural for everyone to work where they pleased. While the company eventually
acquired highly desirable premises on Pier 38 in San Francisco, employees
rarely used them, though Mullenweg occasionally called on locally based
employees to come in as props when media representatives or premier clients
came calling. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Mullenweg regards remote working as ideal. It flattens
everything, producing higher lows and lower highs -- a generally more mellow
experience. Automattic can afford to be a low-friction company because it
supports the WordPress community and relies on satisfied customers. It feels
little competitive pressure. It doesn't need schedules because it doesn't do
marketing. It has minimal hierarchy, so decisions can be made with little fuss.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Most of the time employees communicated on IRC and their
team blogs (known as P2s). While email was by no means prohibited, few
Automattic employees used it, because it is closed. If you do not receive a
copy of an email message, you have no way to find out about it. Every word ever
typed on IRC or a P2 is archived and available to every employee.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
The whole company held occasional all-hands get-togethers
face to face in exotic places, and teams did the same somewhat more frequently.
A tradition for these events, which usually lasted several days, was to decide
on team projects to develop and publish before going home.</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<h3>
<br /></h3>
<h3>
Berkun's role</h3>
</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Berkun's team was called Team Social. Their job was to
invent things that made blogging and reading blogs easier. In his year leading
that team, they developed Jetpack, a WordPress plugin designed to make
wordpress.com features available to WordPress-based blogs hosted on other
sites. It's the other first thing a new WordPress blogger installs. They also
unified the commenting facilities of all WordPress blogs in order to integrate IntenseDebate,
a popular commenting product that Automattic had acquired because it worked on
other blogging systems as well. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
The integration was called Project Highlander to suggest
(a science fiction allusion) that it was a fight to the death between IntenseDebate
and the other WordPress commenting facilities until only one survived. With 120
blog themes, WordPress had a large variety of ways of making and presenting
comments, and those had to be unified before Project Highlander could succeed.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Project Highlander called on project management skills
that Berkun brought to Automattic from his days at Microsoft -- skills that
pushed Automattic in the direction of a more mature development process. This
was a recurring theme of Berkun's time there. In terms of Eric Raymond's
classic book _The Cathedral and the Bazaar_, Automattic had grown up at the
Bazaar end of the spectrum. Berkun, based primarily on his time at Microsoft,
brought in aspects of the Cathedral approach whenever that was a more effective
way to approach a problem. Automattic had 60 employees when Berkun joined and
170 by the time he finished writing this book, so some evolution in the
Cathedral direction was inevitable, but Berkun's expertise made it easier.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
While embracing the Automattic way of working, Berkun
also struggled against it. He had mastered the techniques of face-to-face
interaction -- maintaining eye contact, reading body language, detecting
emotional nuance, and so forth. He had to learn to compensate for the fact that
virtual interactions made most of those techniques nearly impossible to use. In
fact, one of his accomplishments was to move team meetings out of IRC and into
Skype video.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Another problem Berkun identified, but really had no
answer for, is the dynamics of online threads. You might make a thoughtful post
about an important issue and see no responses. You have no idea whether anyone
has read it or continues to think about it. Or someone might react to one small
point in your post, and the thread mutates to focus on that point rather than
on the one you set out to direct attention to. Berkun raised this issue by
posting about it, and the responses frustratingly exhibited the very problems
he hoped to highlight.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Berkun liked the company culture of fixing things
immediately, but he noted that people respond to the most recent problem, and
if something doesn't get fixed right away, it tends to be forgotten, regardless
of its importance. Berkun tried to introduce a system of priorities that would
make it more likely that tricky but important issues would not be swept under
the rug. He hoped to engender more strategic thinking to go along with the
company's tactical mindset.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Berkun also tried to institute some sort of usability
testing. The programmers who worked on WordPress features generally came from
the WordPress community, so they had reason to feel that they understood their
target audience, but Berkun was able to identify many areas where users had
difficulties that simple design changes would alleviate.</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<h3>
<br /></h3>
<h3>
Highjinks</h3>
</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
A major part of the story Berkun tells is about the
people he worked with, how they worked together, and how they coalesced into an
efficient team. Many of Berkun's anecdotes concern his team's meetings in
places like New York, Seattle, and other more exotic places.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Seen from the outside, the team seemed like a bunch of
hard-drinking young men, a few years out of college (more than a few in
Berkun's case), who enjoyed playing around the edges of trouble. For example,
on the way to a bar in Athens after the one they'd been drinking in closed at
2:00 am, one team member miraculously escaped serious injury. On a dare he
jumped between 3-foot high traffic bollards spaced 4 feet apart and missed his
second jump, crashing toward the sidewalk. As Berkun describes it, "either
through Australian training for drunk jumping or a special Krav Maga technique
he'd learned, midfall he realized his predicament and managed to tuck and roll
. . . The silver-dollar sized patch of skin missing from his elbow seemed a
fair price to pay, and he was glad."<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Despite this sort of incident, their meetings in exotic
places were highly productive. Their time together seemed to fill a need that
their usual distributed virtual interactions did not. Oddly, though, when working
side by side, they often continued to communicate through IRC and their P2, as
if they were continents apart.</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<h3>
<br /></h3>
<h3>
Lessons</h3>
</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
The first lesson learned from Automattic is that a
virtual company can exist and be productive. It's not the only such company;
GitHub has a similar distributed structure. But Google, the dominant force in
Silicon Valley, believes in co-location and with few exceptions requires
employees to work in the office, not remotely. With Marissa Mayer's move from
Google to the helm of Yahoo, that meme has taken root at Yahoo as well. Many
other Silicon Valley companies have also held that belief for years. Partly,
they believe it's a more efficient way to develop software, and partly they
don't trust their employees.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Trust is the key. Automattic believes in hiring great
people, setting good priorities, granting authority, removing distractions, and
staying out of the way. The way Automattic works makes it no harder to detect
slackers than if you were looking over their shoulders every minute of the day.
But most Automattic employees come from a tradition of working remotely on
open-source projects. They are self-sufficient and highly motivated, passionate
about what they hope to achieve. Their way of working might not work for
everybody, but it works for them.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Berkun believes that Automattic has answered many
questions that the working world is afraid to ask. Results trump traditions,
and the most dangerous tradition is that work is both serious and meaningless,
as exemplified by _Dilbert_. A short definition of work is "something I'd
rather not be doing." Automattic's management -- with its vision, mission,
and long-term thinking -- may be atypical, but they have given work meaning.
Automattic's workers have great freedom and take great pride in their work. And
as Berkun's anecdotes show, they have a lot of fun.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: #f6f6f6; color: #9e5205; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 20.8px; font-stretch: normal; letter-spacing: -1px;">
</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
This short and seemingly lightweight book actually
contains a lot of meat, and I haven't covered all of it here. If you're
interested in the future of work, you should read it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-4768391375931637500" itemprop="description articleBody" style="background-color: #f6f6f6; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: xx-small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the Jan/Feb 2015 issue of IEEE Micro © 2015 IEEE.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-47683913759316375002014-07-01T21:57:00.000-07:002015-05-04T20:40:12.783-07:00Words<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the Jul/Aug 2014 issue of IEEE Micro © 2014 IEEE.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">This time I look at books that talk about how to do
something. All of the somethings are related to words and writing.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i><b><span style="font-size: small;">Making Word 2010 Work for You: An Editor's Intro to the Tool of the Trade</span></b></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">by </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Hilary Powers</span></span> (</span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]--></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Editorial Freelancers Association, NY, 2014,
140pp, ISBN 978-1-880407-35-6, <a href="http://www.the-efa.org/">www.the-efa.org</a></span></span>, $20)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">The 2007 edition of this book, without a version number in the title, focused on Word 2003 but attempted to address all varieties of Word in general use at the time.</span> I reviewed the 2009 update in the July/Aug 2009 Micro Review. The book was highly acclaimed among its target
audience, and they have been clamoring since then for an updated version. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Now in her <a href="http://www.salamanderfeltworks.com/">fourth career</a>,
Hilary Powers has been a freelance editor since 1994. She says she chose
editing to enable her to emulate Nero Wolfe, that is, never to have to leave
home on business. Before her first year as an editor was done, she had
abandoned paper. She works only online, a fact that necessitated her mastery of
Microsoft Word. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The 2009 edition was 80 pages, but the target
audience of this larger volume is still anyone who edits for a living. If you
use Word in any capacity, however, you will find useful information here. For
example, editors must master Word's change-tracking facilities, but many
non-editors use that feature too, and practically everybody finds it maddening.
The display can be a garbled mess, hiding important information while revealing
what you'd rather keep private. Sometimes the same change can appear clear or
confusing, depending on how you make it. Powers knows all the tricks. In 11
pages, she tames the feature's wildest aspects and brings out its good points.
She can't remove all of Word 2010's quirks, but she shows ways to work around
the worst of them.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Macro programming is another powerful feature of Word
that will quickly repay your learning how to use it well. Powers shows you
where and how to use macros and provides free downloads of her own macros (<a href="http://www.powersedit.com/ftp/Word2010exercises.zip">here</a>)
to help you learn the details.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Powers says,</span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> "Macros and templates are at the
absolute heart of making Word 2010 your own."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> This has been true for many
versions of Word. More than 20 years ago, I had to maintain a 1000-page manual
in Word for Windows 2.0 and publish both the printed Word version (before PDF
came on the scene) and a text version to be read online (before HTML and
browsers). Without writing 8 pages of macros, I could never have done it.
Nowadays, things are easier, but well-designed macros can still save lots of
time. Templates provide the modularity necessary to have different
configurations and sets of macros for different kinds of jobs. Powers devotes
27 pages, nearly 20% of the book, to the chapter on macros and templates. The
Microsoft documentation of these subjects is arcane, but Powers explains the
features clearly.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">One huge frustration for most experienced Word users is
the Word 2010 ribbon. At first glance, it looks like a huge change in the user interface.
It takes all those menu commands, whose locations you finally memorized, and
rearranges them in ways that may make sense to at least one person at Microsoft.
Unfortunately, the rearrangement makes no sense, especially at first view, to
most of the rest of us. Some people refuse to use the ribbon and seek out
aftermarket programs to emulate the old menus -- forgetting how much they hated
that interface before they saw the new one. Let Powers lead you through the
desert to the promised land. When she gets through showing you how to customize
the interface, you'll never want to go back. And, to keep you sane while you're
learning, she gives you a few tricks for finding what you know must be there --
because over the last 30 years, no feature of Word has ever gone away.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This book removes your excuse for avoiding a range of
troublesome tasks -- from mastering macros to simply selecting configuration
options. If you're like most Word users, you could do a lot of what this book
recommends without reading it, though you'd have to figure out a lot of things
that Powers has already figured out for you. And once you read about the huge
increases in efficiency that she achieves through those techniques, you won't
be able to resist the urge to tinker.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
I have known Hilary Powers for many years, so I
can testify that she writes the way she speaks. Her style is clear and
colorful, never boring. The topics she covers are practical and directly
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<![endif]--><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><b>DITA Best Practices: A Roadmap for Writing,
Editing, and Architecting in DITA</b></i></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">by </span><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]--><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Laura Bellamy et al (<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]-->IBM Press/Pearson, Upper Saddle River NJ, 2012,
296pp, ISBN 978-0-13-248052-9, <a href="http://www.ibmpressbooks.com/">www.ibmpressbooks.com</a>,
$42.99)</span></span><br />
<br />
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<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;">In the Mar/Apr 2012 Micro Review, I reviewed the <i>IBM
Style Guide</i>. This book is a companion to that style guide. It focuses on the
Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), an XML-based system for
authoring and publishing technical information. Originally an IBM project, DITA
is now an open-source toolkit, managed by the independent global consortium
Organization for Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).</span><br />
<br />
DITA provides a technical infrastructure for topic-based
writing and publishing. Following a model that evolved from the online-help
systems of the 1990s, DITA starts with the idea that most technical
documentation can be broken into chunks, and that each chunk falls into one of
the following basic categories: procedures, concepts, and reference. The Darwin
part of the name comes from DITA's use of inheritance to allow different
projects to extend and specialize the basic categories. Unlike DocBook, another
popular XML schema for technical publishing, DITA has an associated set of
tools for building an automated process that supports publishing multiple
documents to multiple output media from a single database of content.</div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;">This book provides a clear treatment of metadata and DITA
maps. Metadata -- data about the content -- provides one key to achieving
DITA's benefits. Properly designing and using metadata makes your content
easy for you to manage and for your users to find, and it helps you provide
different output to different audiences. While much of the DITA metadata stays
with the content, a significant portion of it can reside in DITA maps --
structures that define documents in terms of the topics that comprise them and
the relationships among those topics. Becoming thoroughly familiar with DITA
maps is an important step on the road to feeling comfortable with DITA. </span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Understanding DITA, especially its architectural aspects,
entails digging into the details. DITA is conceptually simple but the details
are hard for most people to wrap their minds around. This book helps you
understand the details and, by laying out best practices, makes a lot of
choices for you, simplifying your task of getting up to speed. The authors are
aware of the learning difficulties DITA presents for many users. For example,
they begin the chapter on metadata by saying, "If your writing team is
just learning about DITA elements, don't scare them by using fancy words such
as metadata at team meetings. Otherwise the guy who brings the donuts might not
come anymore." </div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
Like the <i>IBM Style Guide</i>, this book is sure to
become a standard. If you want to work in DITA, you need this book. If you're
not sure you want to work in DITA -- it's overkill for many applications,
though new tools and techniques keep lowering the bar -- the detailed
information in this book will give you a basis for deciding. </span><br />
<br />
<br />
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<![endif]--><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i><b>Word Up!: How to Write Powerful Sentences and
Paragraphs (And Everything You Build From Them)</b></i> by Marcia Riefer Johnston
(Northwest Brainstorms, Portland OR, 2014, 268pp, ISBN 978-0-9858203-0-5,
howtowriteeverything.com, $19.99)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Marcia Riefer Johnston is a popular blogger about
writing. This book is essentially a collection of blog posts, arranged to
support the theme that the subtitle of the book suggests. Yet as pedestrian as
that sounds, the book builds momentum and ends powerfully. Johnston succeeds
where most blog rehashes fall flat, because she digs new and interesting
material out of veins that have been mined again and again. Besides, she may be
the only person I know of who quotes from S. I. Hayakawa's <i>Choose the Right
Word</i>.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
</span>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Johnston starts by taking a position in the pointless but
heated debate over whether language mavens should prescribe rules for others to
follow or just describe the way others speak. Her position, sensibly, is
squarely on the fence. On the prescriptivist side, she says, alluding to a
formulation by Bryan Garner, "After a quarter-century of professional
writing, I still yearn for linguistic guidance, and I still struggle with
editorial predicaments." After my <i>half </i>century of professional writing, I
can tell her that the next quarter century probably won't be any easier. There
will always be plenty of work for the prescriptivists. On the other hand, she
also bows to the descriptivists. In her essay "To Each Their Own,"
she pragmatically acknowledges a place for a singular "they," though she
tries to avoid it. On the other hand, her prescriptivist side inveighs against
computer-generated abominations like "Mary updated their profile." </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
</span>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
</span>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Johnston is more engaging when, rather than taking a
position on some tired old question, she shines fresh light on an unexpected
topic. By examining the question rather than answering it, she takes us
somewhere new and interesting. Should you end a sentence with a preposition?
Who cares?! The interesting question is, "What is a preposition anyway?"
Is "from" a preposition? Are prepositions really parts of speech, or
should they be demoted, like Pluto, to something less grand?</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
</span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
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Book publishers nowadays use Google as an excuse to skimp
on indexes, but Johnston knows the value of a good hand-crafted index. She created
her own and proudly introduces it by calling attention to entries she's
especially proud of. Indexing mavens have long maintained that indexing helps
to identify structural problems in a book. However, professional indexers
usually receive books when the content is frozen, so nobody corrects the
structural problems. Johnston points out ways that she was able to strengthen
her book while indexing it.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
In the final chapter of the book, Johnston tries an
exercise that many writers would find terrifying. Emulating William Zinsser,
she presents a piece of her own writing about a meaningful personal experience,
then goes through it step by step, explaining the options she considered and
the decisions she made to arrive at the final version. I found it enlightening.</div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">When it comes to details, I disagree with some
of the things Johnston says, but I like her basic message of loving the
language and using it precisely. Not everybody wants to work at learning to
write well, but if you do, you'll enjoy reading this book, and you may decide
to follow Johnston's blog.</span></span> </span><br />
<br />
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<![endif]--><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i><b>Be
the Captain of Your Career: A New Approach to Career Planning and Advancement by
Jack Molisani</b></i> (Precision Wordage Press, Pasadena CA, 2014, 148pp, ISBN
978-0-9627090-2-9, <a href="http://www.precisionwordage.com/">www.precisionwordage.com</a>,
$15.95)</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Jack Molisani is founder and principal of Prospring Staffing and
executive director of the Lavacon conference. He is a Fellow of the Society for
Technical Communication (STC) and a frequent speaker on career-related issues.
I have heard him speak many times, and this thin book perfectly captures his
basic message: face the truth and deal with it, but no matter how bad things
get, stay optimistic and keep working toward your goals. Jack suffered a big
setback in the 2008 downturn, and he used his own methods to come back strong.
This is an inspiring book, but it is filled with simple, practical advice. I
recommend it.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span></span><br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-1980176573327693512013-11-01T21:17:00.000-07:002015-05-04T20:39:28.077-07:00Design<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the Nov/Dec 2013 issue of IEEE Micro © 2013 IEEE.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This time<span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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insight into how to solve technical design problems.</span></span><br />
<br />
<h2>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Design Appreciation</span></h2>
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<![endif]--><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i><b><span style="font-size: small;">Design for Hackers: /Reverse-Engineering Beauty</span></b></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">by </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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ISBN 978-1-119-99895-2, <a href="http://www.wiley.com/">www.wiley.com</a>, $39.95)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">David Kadavy is a user interface designer working in Silicon Valley. Despite the general title, he has written a book about visual design. He sets the following goal for this book: </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If you want to learn to create great design yourself, if you want to gain design literacy, there simply is no way to do so with lists of rules. Instead, I want to provide you with a new set of eyes through which you can see the world anew. </span></blockquote>
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<![endif]--><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">This is the sort of goal a course in art appreciation or,
changing eyes to ears, music appreciation might aim at. Knowing you (his
audience), Kadavy uses the term "reverse engineering" to get your
attention. Once he has your attention, however, he gives you a tour of subjects
you didn't know you were interested in. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Kadavy begins with the Pantheon (not the Parthenon).
Having been there, I can attest that it doesn't look particularly distinguished
as you approach it from the streets of Rome. Once inside, most visitors are
taken aback. If you have never seen the building, find an online reproduction
of eighteenth century painter Giovanni Paolo Panini's The Interior of the
Pantheon, and spend some time admiring it and taking in the geometric
relationships. Proportions and the harmony of geometric shapes are design elements
Kadavy wants your new eyes to see.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Built in 126 by the Emperor Hadrian, the Pantheon is
meant as a monument to all of the Roman gods and designed to inspire awe in the
mortals who enter. Its 142-foot spherical dome is the largest unreinforced
concrete dome in the world. At the peak of the dome, a circular opening 30 feet
in diameter provides natural lighting for the interior. As you enter, Kadavy
says, "you're enveloped by another world, complete with its own sun."
Kadavy explains how Hadrian's objectives combined with significant engineering
challenges to produce the widely admired, frequently imitated design. For
example, the square recesses in the dome not only create a striking pattern,
but also help to reduce the weight of the dome to make it more supportable.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Kadavy tells how, when he was in Rome studying the
origins of modern typography, he would go to the Pantheon just to watch
people's reactions as they entered. This interest in how designs affect people
is one of the reasons his book is so informative. Unfortunately, his interest
in the origins of typography leads him to say more on the subject than his
theme requires, so you might wish to skim that chapter. My first draft of my
book Inside BASIC Games (Sybex, 1981) started with a lot of fascinating but
barely relevant material, including an elaborate metaphor for computer
programming that involved a player piano. My editor, the great Salley Oberlin,
persuaded me to toss out the first 130 pages, and I've never been sorry. I
think this book could have benefited from similar advice. Kadavy has excellent
points to make about type, but he didn't have to go back to cave painting to
lay the groundwork for them. Similarly, he could have gone directly to his
points about color without rehashing the philosophy and physics of
electromagnetic radiation or repeating information about perception that is
handled more thoroughly elsewhere. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The publishers use the back cover to focus attention on
Kadavy's discussions of why designers hate the Comic Sans font and why the
Golden Ratio is no more useful in laying out designs than simpler ratios like
3:4. These are interesting topics, but marginal. The main topic of the book is
visual design, and Kadavy's main point is that design occurs at all levels of a
product. An elegant veneer added after the fact is not necessarily good design.
It may just be lipstick on a pig. The pattern of square recesses in the dome of
the Pantheon is good design, because it arises from the engineering needs and
the objectives of the building. The Apple Aqua interface is good design because
it exploits previously unavailable technology and responds to cultural forces
and user expectations in ways that Kadavy explains.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Kadavy uses the metaphor of learning to dance. You need
to learn the basic moves before you can tie them together. Kadavy tries to
teach the individual moves (for example, using white space or exploiting type
characteristics) by providing examples that vary one design move while holding
others constant. This can make for tedious reading, but if you persist, you can
learn the moves -- and then start to
dance.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">One topic that lives up to the promise of the book's
title is Kadavy's discussion of search engine optimization (SEO). He ties it to
visual design by saying that design has always been about conveying information
to the right audience. I would have accepted that premise and gone on, but he
backs it up by digressing on what Aldus Manutius was doing in 1501 and what Jan
Tschichold wrote in 1928.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
Despite Kadavy's maddening propensity for
cluttering his narrative with digressions -- something I'm sure he would never
do in a visual design -- this is an interesting and informative book. I
recommend it.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<h2>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Design Recipes</span></h2>
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<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><b><span style="font-size: small;">101 Design Ingredients to Solve Big Tech Problems</span></b></i> by
Eewei Chen (Pragmatic Bookshelf, Dallas TX, 2013, 290pp, ISBN
978-1-93778-532-1, <a href="http://www.pragprog.com/">www.pragprog.com</a>,
$36.00)</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
</span><br />
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<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The book jacket describes Eewei Chen as a digital tech
strategist, former team leader at Microsoft, creative director at Conchango and
at ThoughtWorks Europe, and more. Elsewhere (<a href="http://haayaa.com/">http://haayaa.com</a>)
he describes himself as a technology futurist, agilest, and lean design
philosopher who has worked in the new media creative industry since 1993. He is
apparently a very busy person, which, along with his lean design philosophy,
may explain why he wrote such a concise handbook. He provides 101 ingredients,
each on a two page spread that follows a precise format. He follows these with
ten recipes. Their format is also constrained. Each is four or five pages. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">One of the key reasons this book communicates effectively
is its illustrator, Robert André. For each design ingredient and recipe, he
provides a one-page illustration that conveys the basic idea, enabling Chen to
describe it in a few words, accompanied by links to other material. Of the 266
pages in the main body of the book, 111 are devoted to André's illustrations.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Each ingredient has a captioned illustration on the left
page and four elements on the right page: a quote, a sentence labeled The Problem,
a section labeled The Solution, and a section of footnotes consisting almost
entirely of hyperlinks. The solution section consists of a short paragraph
followed by three bullets. Each bullet contains a pithy title followed by a
brief explanation. Most have a footnote.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Each recipe has an illustration, then lists six
ingredients taken from the list of 101. Each ingredient is accompanied by an
icon derived from its illustration. The six recipe steps correspond exactly to
the six ingredients. Each recipe ends with a section titled Tips on How to
Apply This Recipe. Each ingredient is a principle (for example, Lead by
Example), not necessarily tied to a specific company. Each recipe is associated
with a company. For example, the recipe for effective leadership focuses on Jeff
Bezos's leadership of Amazon. One of that recipe's ingredients is Lead by
Example. The recipe for world domination consists of Chen's idea of the six
ingredients of Google's success, though he seems to be undecided about the
sixth ingredient.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Many people have noted that a rigid format (for example,
a sonnet, a limerick, or a haiku) leaves plenty of room for creativity.
However, the structure Chen has chosen makes it hard to tie things together.
For example, ingredient 60 is Check the Data. On the left page is an
illustration of a teacup with a teabag steeping in it. The caption says </span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">"People may be taking a break, not stumbling across a barrier." </span></span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The
right page begins with a quote from Albert Einstein: </span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">"Not everything that
can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." </span></span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The
problem is stated as</span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> "Companies don't monitor customer usage closely
enough to see what's really going on." </span></span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The solution is stated as </span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">"Analyze and interpret data as part of the design and build process. Shed
light on uncertainties, especially if you aren't sure why they really
exist." </span></span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The three bullets that elaborate on this solution are as follows:</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Have assumptions to test. There is no point to looking
at data if you do not know what you are looking for to start with. List your
biggest assumptions and measure success by seeing if they have led to
improvements to key performance indicators or success metrics. The footnote
leads to a page on the Advanced Performance Institute website that defines and
discusses key performance indicators.</span></span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Monitor changes over time. Don't just take one random
look. Continue to monitor performance each time you make an improvement, and
track changes with groups of users. This is known as batch and cohort analysis.
The footnote leads to a blog post by Ash Maurya about using actionable metrics
in a lean startup.</span></span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Don't make things up. There is no such thing as random
data--there is only data you have not interpreted yet. Get to the bottom of any
unusual behavior, and don't go for the obvious, unfounded answer just because
it's easier to accept. You'd be succumbing to the false-consensus effect. The
footnote leads to a blog post entitled "Why We All Stink as Intuitive
Psychologists: The False Consensus Effect."</span></span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Chen uses this ingredient in "A Recipe for Lean
Startup in Large Organizations," in which he describes techniques used by
his collective, HaaYaa. He says in the recipe instruction associated with the
Check the Data ingredient:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"></span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Identify data across key experiences that indicate
success and failure. Analyze the data; gain enough insight and validated
learning to make improvements. To keep track of the results of these
improvements, I set up customer-experience teams to work with data-analytics
teams on monitoring usage stats to see each improvement's effect on groups of
cohorts. I also recommend running multivariate tests on variations of a design
concept to see which one is most successful.</span></span></div>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Chen obviously knows a lot. This book organizes
a great deal of information into a concise presentation. If you like material
explained in a leisurely way, this is not the best book for you. But this is a
great example of a minimalist style. It might take a while to dig out
everything Chen hints at, and along the way you may take some interesting side
trips. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-74017555717871128892013-05-01T18:43:00.000-07:002013-05-04T19:52:32.788-07:00Unconscious Meaning<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the May/Jun 2013 issue of IEEE Micro © 2013 IEEE.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This time I look at a short work that contains a
large number of surprising ideas.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><i>A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning</i></b></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">by Ray Jackendoff (Oxford, New York, 2012, 274pp
ISBN 978-0-19-969320-7, <a href="http://www.oup.com/">www.oup.com</a>, $29.95)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">According to Steven Pinker's blurb on the dust jacket, </span><br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"Ray Jackendoff is a monumental scholar in linguistics who, more than any
other scholar alive today, has shown how language can serve as a window into
human nature. Combining theoretical depth with a love of revealing detail,
Jackendoff illuminates human reason and consciousness in startling and
insightful ways." </span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Jackendoff is the author of many books on linguistics
and cognition, but in this one he presents an overview of some key concepts to
a broad audience. He says that as a traditional scholarly treatise it would be
a thousand pages long -- if he ever finished it. The usual downside of
presenting lots of ideas in a short space is that a book can become, like
McLuhan's <i>Understanding Media</i>, too dense for ordinary humans to grasp. But
down-to-earth examples, simple diagrams, and a few cartoons -- which provide
the revealing detail Pinker refers to -- make this book a pleasure to read. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<h2>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Cognitive Perspective</span></h2>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The heart of Jackendoff's argument is that thought and
meaning are almost completely unconscious; we are aware of pronunciations,
sentences, visual surfaces, and a small set of inklings that arise from
unconscious processes. The inklings, called character tags, give us the
feeling, for example, that a certain sound or visual surface is meaningful,
significant, good, taboo, based on sensory input, and so forth. If you say
"thit," I'm aware that you said something meaningless, but the mental
processes that produce that awareness are as unavailable as those that tell me
when to breathe. It's hard to explain what happens in your head when I say,
"Osculating means doing this."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Jackendoff presents dozens of small examples that refute
many widely held ideas and lead him to conclude that meaning is unconscious.
Reading them is enlightening and delightful. They often contrast the ordinary
perspective -- the one we're all born with -- which is natural, but can lead to
paradoxes (there's no such thing as sunsets), with the cognitive perspective,
which always asks, "How does the brain do that?" For example,
"John slept until the bell rang" entails a single sleep, while
"John jumped until the bell rang" entails potentially many jumps.
Nothing in the actual sentences conveys that difference. We can use
words after the fact to explain the difference, but it is
immediately apparent without that step. Whether the jumping is a one-time event
or a repeated activity is an aspect of the unconscious meanings that the
sentences don't express.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This book is about software in the sense that Jackendoff
is concerned with how the brain provides the experiences of language, thought,
and meaning that we are all familiar with. From the ordinary perspective we
have no trouble understanding that "the bear chased the lion" and
"the lion was chased by the bear" mean the same thing. From the
cognitive perspective, we know that this understanding arises from brain
activity. But just as we don't look at
digital signals to figure out how a computer executes an algorithm written in
Java, Jackendoff doesn't try to explain this phenomenon by looking at neural
and chemical activity. He focuses on data structures, information flow, and the
states of character tags. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Many people have tried to explain consciousness (for
example, see Micro Review, Mar/Apr 1992, where I review Daniel Dennett's
<i>Consciousness Explained</i>). Jackendoff reviews some of the more popular theories
and challenges them to explain the observed phenomena. He believes that
whatever consciousness is, it enables us to perform certain language-based
kinds of reasoning, but it gives us limited access to the most important and
powerful brain activities that support the way we attach meaning to events in
the world. Sentences like "the bear chased the lion" and "the
lion was chased by the bear" are different handles for closely linked
entries in unconscious data structures. Those structures contain information
about lions, bears, chasing, and English grammar. They provide the means by
which we can recognize "the wargon chased the olifump" as likely to
be an instance of the same sort of activity, even though we don't recognize the
words "wargon" or "olifump." The structures also define the
conceptual relationships that show types and characteristics: bears are
animals, mammals, predators, intelligent creatures, four-legged, and so forth.
They exhibit mother/child relationships similar to but different from those of
lions or humans. If we see a bear, we know it's a bear even if we have never
seen that particular bear before. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Jackendoff, unlike his mentor Noam Chomsky, thinks
communication is why language developed, with rational thinking as a side
benefit. Rational thinking is important, but it isn't what most of us think it
is. As Lewis Carroll pointed out in What the Tortoise Said to Achilles, every
syllogism relies on a hidden syllogism in an infinite regress. When we say,
"All humans are mortal; Socrates is human; therefore, Socrates is
mortal," we have a hidden syllogism that lets us reason that this is of
the form "All A are B; C is an A; therefore C is B," and that if we
can line up humans, mortal, and Socrates with A, B, and C, then the statement
about Socrates is true. Ultimately, we
rely on an unconsciously generated character tag to tell us whether the
reasoning is correct.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In <i>Thinking Fast and Slow</i> (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2011), Daniel Kahneman popularizes System 1, the fast, intuitive mode of
thought and System 2, the slow, rational mode of thought. Jackendoff says these
correspond to his ideas of unconscious and conscious thought and that they are
not separate. System 2 rides on top of System 1 and uses its capabilities. If I
encounter a bear with its cubs in the woods, System 1 tells me to head immediately
in another direction, while System 2 helps me reason about what the bear might
do. System 2 is thought that is linked to a cognitive correlate of
consciousness, namely, a data structure that corresponds to our subjective
experience of hearing language in our heads and provides a handle for the
unconscious thought. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Images, smell, taste, touch, and even the sense of where
we are in the world (proprioception)
provide additional handles to unconscious meanings and structures. Blind
children, led along two walls of a room to an opposite corner, have no trouble
returning along the diagonal to their starting point. This shows that we have
unconscious spatial maps that are distinct from visual images.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Jackendoff speculates on the structures that support
unconscious thinking. In addition to meanings linked into conceptual structures
and spatial maps, every entity that we deal with in the long or short term has
a reference file, which holds everything we know about it. The reference file
for the mama bear lets us keep her in mind while we ponder other facts that
may be helpful. Rational (conscious) thinking enables us to create reference
files for thoughts, so we can manipulate and explore them without losing track
of them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Character tags -- of which Jackendoff postulates fewer
than a dozen -- play an important role in his model. They explain how we
perceive the world as "out there" and how we distinguish actual
perception from mental images or dreams. He postulates a character tag that
gives us a sense of whether the visual surface in our head arises from our
minds or from sensory input. This character tag is often ineffective during
dreaming, and it sometimes gives schizophrenics the wrong message. Another
character tag provides a sense of whether we are in control of ongoing events.
This forms the basis of our sense of free will. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<h2>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Implications</span></h2>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Jackendoff's model of unconscious structures and
character tags does more than simply explain the relationships between
language, thought, and meaning. It provides a coherent explanation of how we
understand and experience the world. For example, from the ordinary
perspective, we ask, "What is truth?" Jackendoff answers by showing
that question to be hard to answer. He shows pictures of men of varying degrees
of baldness, looks at the one in the middle and asks, "Is Ed bald?"
He prefers the cognitive perspective, which asks, "What does the brain do
when it judges a statement to be true?"
This leads to the conclusion that judging truth largely happens unconsciously,
and that the well known phenomena of confirmation bias and denial play a part.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The fact that meaning is unconscious and that System 1
thinking is fast and pretty accurate does not mean that rational thinking is
useless. In fact, rational thinking is a large part of what distinguishes
humans from other animals. Language, which characterizes System 2 thinking,
enables us to give thoughts reference files of their own, describe and
manipulate the information provided by character tags, and engage in hypothetical
reasoning. We can transform the results of intuitive reasoning into explicit
steps and challenge each one. The famous
example is the bat and ball that cost a total of $1.10, with the bat costing a
dollar more than the ball. Intuitive reasoning immediately says that the ball
costs ten cents, but rational thinking, plodding along methodically, arrives at
the correct answer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">All of this has implications for teaching, learning, or
becoming a virtuoso of art or science. Jackendoff, an accomplished concert
clarinetist, illustrates this by telling how his chamber group spent 15 minutes
deciding how to play the first six seconds of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet. From
this he extrapolates to how to integrate rational and intuitive thinking in
music, theater, sports, art, writing, and every other skilled activity -- even
reasoning itself. The goal is always "flow" -- that state in which it
all goes so well we surprise ourselves. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Jackendoff tries to show that the arts matter as much as
science. I believe that he is correct but it's a hard argument to make.
Rational thinking, because it is based on language, conceals aspects of thought
that language cannot express. Science resonates with the rational while the
arts resonate with the intuitive. Science looks for ever broader
generalizations that minimize the surface of appearances. Artistic appreciation
seeks intricate and subtle details and patterns. It reveals the character of
the surface -- not what is said, but how. Because System 2 rides on System 1, you
can't have rationality without the underlying intuition, and the better you
train the intuition, the better the rationality will be. As I said, it's a hard
argument to make. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The book is a deceptively easy read. I got through it
once and realized that I had missed many key points. I had to start over and
take careful notes. The book is densely packed with insights and ideas, which
are well worth the effort of grasping them. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-50042798393202408892013-04-01T17:26:00.000-07:002013-05-04T17:40:04.829-07:00Ethics of Big Data<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the Mar/Apr 2013 issue of IEEE Micro © 2013 IEEE.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This time I look at a book that anyone who has
ever done anything online should read.</span><br />
<br />
<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Ethics of Big Data</span></i></b><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> by </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Kord Davis with Doug Patterson (O'Reilly,
Sebastopol CA, 2012, 82pp, ISBN 978-1-4493-1179-7, $19.99, <a href="http://www.oreilly.com/">www.oreilly.com</a> )</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Kord Davis played with technology from an early age, and
he loved learning its underlying principles and mechanisms. He chose to study
philosophy because it gave him the best of both worlds: rigorous analysis and
uncovering the way things work. Now, with a degree in philosophy from Reed
College, he advises high-tech companies about how to align their business
practices with their values and principles. Doug Patterson teaches business
ethics. His discussions with Davis led to many of the ideas in this book.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For many years society has struggled with the
implications of gathering and analyzing personal data. The vastly increased
speed and quantity of such activities have created a qualitatively new
situation, generally known as big data. Some of the hardest questions
businesses face today arise out of big data. For example, with enough
information about your environment, someone can know a lot about you without
knowing your name or Social Security number. And by combining such troves of
information from disparate sources, an organization can build an intrusive
dossier about you without actually violating the well-intentioned privacy
policies of the organizations that originally collected the data.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Davis defines the forcing function of big data as the
push, whether we like it or not, </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"to consider serious ethical issues
including whether certain uses of big data violate fundamental civil, social,
political, and legal rights." </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Companies were once thrilled at the prospect
of knowing which color car is purchased most often in Texas in the summertime.
Now they can know how much toothpaste your family bought from them last
year. Does it matter if Target knows you
are pregnant before your husband does?
What if your boss does?
Considering such issues falls outside the usual business discussions,
even at the strategic level. Davis presents a framework for such consideration.
Because each business situation is different, he includes both abstract and
specific elements.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Davis begins with the basic concepts: identity, privacy, ownership, and reputation.
These concepts are central to many ethical discussions, so he wants to
establish their definitions and scopes. Identity concerns the relationship
between our online and offline lives. Privacy issues boil down to who should
control access to data. Ownership concerns not just who owns collected data but
which rights can be transferred and what obligations collecting or receiving
such data entails. Reputation is about what you can trust. Big data provides
both sources of error and checks and balances.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In addition to these abstract elements, each business has
its own values and principles. Big data is ethically neutral, that is, the
ethical questions arise from aligning organizational and societal values with
organizational actions. Davis presents a system for carrying out this
alignment. He believes that by gaining competence in this area, organizations
can help to shape public opinion, not just react to it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Many people are concerned with their right to privacy.
Davis feels that using the term "privacy right," because of its
connotation of absoluteness, can prejudge some of the ethical issues that arise
as organizations try to align their policies with their values. He prefers the
term "privacy interest," which covers the gamut from no interest to
absolute rights. That is, a right is the strongest kind of interest.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Similarly, Davis avoids the term "personally
identifying information," because the technological limitations that
define that term are constantly changing. What was once not considered
personally identifying can, with new technology, be easily associated with a
person. Davis uses the term "personal data" to refer to any data
generated in the course of a person's activities. Digital transactions in
business or social areas capture related information distinct from the data of
the transaction, and by this definition, all of it is personal data. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Davis contrasts the digital and non-digital situations.
If you show someone a picture at a party, the event leaves little residue. Post
the same picture on your Facebook page, and the permanent record includes
plenty of ancillary personal information. Deciding which personal information
is ancillary and which is not has an ethical impact. Davis advocates explicitly
and transparently evaluating that impact. Doing so starts with articulating
organizational values. Values can change over time, and trying to align values
with actions can lead to reconsidering those values. Thus, Davis defines an
ethical decision point as a cycle, iterated
indefinitely, consisting of the following activities: inquiry, analysis,
articulation, and action.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Inquiry means discovering and discussing the
organization's core values. Sometimes organizations have one set of values in
their founding documents or public relations literature but show by their
actions that they have a different set of unstated values. Inquiry aims at
discovering the organization's actual values. An example of a value is "We
value transparency in our use of big data."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Analysis means reviewing the organization's actual or
proposed data-handling practices and determining how well they align with the
identified values. For example, analysis might ask whether deducing that a
woman is pregnant and placing ads for nursery furniture in front of her aligns
well with a stated value of telling customers how the organization uses their
personal information.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Articulation means writing the results of analysis, that
is, stating explicitly where values and actions align and where they don't.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Action means producing and executing plans to close
alignment gaps and to prevent new ones from developing. For example, you might
decide to place a button labeled "Why am I seeing this ad?" next to
the ad for nursery furniture.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Deciding which organizational activities require this
ethical decision point process is tricky. One method, which Davis recognizes as
not entirely satisfactory, is to look for the "creepy" factor. Like
the Supreme Court's definition of pornography, this determination involves the
phrase "I know it when I see it."
For example, it strikes many people as creepy when a retail firm
determines whether a woman is pregnant based on her online behavior, so the
organization should use the ethical decision point process to evaluate any
actions it takes in this area. A health maintenance organization engaging in
similar behavior might seem less creepy, so the ethical decision point process
might be less important in that case. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Davis talks about ethical decision points in the context
of big data, but the methodology is applicable to all sorts of situations. We
all have values, and we all do something like ethical decision point analysis
in our everyday lives. The speed and scale of big data technology make it
essential for organizations develop the ability to carry out the process
explicitly and transparently as a core competency. This reduces the risks of
unintended consequences and provides a starting point for a clear and immediate
response when things go wrong.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To determine the current practices of large
organizations, Davis visited the websites of the top 50 of the Fortune 500
companies in the Fall of 2011. Few of these organizations understand and
articulate sets of values that customers can use to interpret the
organizations' imprecise policy statements. Most focus on "privacy"
with little mention of identity, ownership, and reputation. Most are concerned
with "personally identifying information" but fail to define that
term. Most say that they don't sell personal data, but none claim that they
don't buy such data. There is much more information in Davis's summary of his
findings. Things may have changed for the better since this survey, but what he
found was not encouraging.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Davis sees hope in the fact that the organizations he
studied have many strong capabilities in place: leadership and management,
strategic planning, a product development process, communication, education and
training, and a process for initiating change. But he also notes that not
everyone in an organization has the same values and that different roles within
an organization have conflicting interests in transparency and alignment. And
in the face of tactical pressures, it's tempting to kick the can down the road
by avoiding ethical discussions entirely. Davis hopes to overcome these
difficulties by taking a cookbook approach. The final third of this short book
lays out his alignment methodology framework in more detail, complete with
forms and a case study. The forms help you define value personas, an analog of
customer personas, which most executives and marketing personnel understand.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This focuses on a critical area for every company that
deals with big data and every person who engages in online transactions. As
Davis points out, if you ask people what they want, they will tell you. By
insisting on definitions of terms and explicit statements of values and how
actions align with those values, he creates a framework in which people can
discuss difficult issues without unnecessary confusion or rancor. I highly
recommend this book to everyone.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-32454744526208637852012-10-01T17:08:00.000-07:002013-05-04T17:51:45.268-07:00Prominently Introduced<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the Sep/Oct 2012 issue of IEEE Micro © 2012 IEEE.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Each of the books in this column has a foreword
written by someone substantially better known than its author.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<h2>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><b>Presenting Numbers</b></span></h2>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Painting With Numbers: Presenting Financials and
Other Numbers So People Will Understand You</span></i></b></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> by </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Randall Bolten (Wiley, Hoboken NJ, 2012, 342pp,
ISBN 978-1-118-17257-5, <a href="http://www.wiley.com/">www.wiley.com</a>,
$39.95)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Randall Bolten spent many years as a financial executive
in Silicon Valley, and he certainly knows how to get into the nuts and bolts of
financial analysis. But what distinguishes him, and this book, is his passion
for communication. If you go to the Wiley website, you find the book listed
under Business Statistics and Math, surrounded by titles like Data Driven
Business Decisions and SPSS Version 18.0 for Windows. Even his publisher fails
to understand the first sentence of chapter 1: "This book is not about
numbers." It's about communication.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Tom Campbell represented Silicon Valley in the US
Congress for five terms. He has a PhD in economics from the University of
Chicago. He is a law professor, dean of a law school, and former dean of a
business school. When he ran for statewide office in California in 2009, he
retained Bolten to prepare his economic and fiscal policy handouts. In his
foreword, he says,</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> "I feel strongly that clearly and honestly presented
data is essential to an informed electorate, and Randall made it possible for
me to put that belief into practice." </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As if that weren't enough to
establish Bolten's credentials, the back of the book has blurbs from a former
Director of the Office of Management and Budget (Randall's brother Joshua) and
the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bolten has mastered the main tool of his trade, Microsoft
Excel, but the book is not about Excel. He includes a number of Excel tips and
tricks, all of them excellent, but he focuses on communication. His tips on
formatting and presentation are independent of subject, but he does talk about
the content of some common financial reports. The furthest he goes into the
weeds of financial minutiae is to critique generally accepted accounting
principles (GAAP) which, ironically, are based on concrete rules, not general
principles. He also devotes a chapter to understanding and designing profit and
loss statements, but anyone who has much to do with running or investing in
businesses has run into more than one P&L.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Key to Bolten's approach is to know and respect your
audience. For example, your first step in putting together a numerical report
is to lay out the final summary page, then get feedback from the audience to
find out whether your idea of what they need matches theirs. Then work backward
to design supporting reports, and finally figure out where and how to get the
numbers. Starting this process from the other end can easily lead you to
reports that miss the mark and are hard to repair.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bolten lays out a three-stage path to mastery. First, you
must understand the rules and best practices. Bolten gives you a tour of these,
with special emphasis on 18 deadly sins. The second and third stages are
complementary: understand your audience and become a subject matter expert.
Bolten doesn't say how to accomplish the second and third stages, but his
deadly sins often reflect failures in those areas.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bolten's first 10 sins are about presentation. They deal
with columns of numbers that don't line up, vast seas of white space caused by
a long column label, reports that fit on a single page only because the font is
illegibly small, and so forth. But they also deal with more substantive
matters, like presenting numbers without context or using imprecise or
inaccurate column labels. And some are general advice that everybody has heard
before: don't use visual effects without a good reason, and never use pie
charts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The next 8 sins are about your behavior. Their underlying
theme is your attitude toward your audience and your craft. The deadliest of
these is the one he compares to the sin of pride: "I'm more focused on
content than presentation." Every profession has its own version of this
self-righteous utterance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Economists talk about key indicators. Bolten points out
that these are always ratios. He sees a deep principle here. A raw number means
nothing out of context, and comparing it to another number provides that
context. The fact that your favorite baseball player has 47 hits so far this
season is interesting, but if you divide that by his 117 at-bats, you see that
he is hitting .402, which you can compare with other players' batting averages.
Whenever you present numbers, look for the key indicators that will resonate
with your audience. Also (the negative of this is one of Bolten's deadly sins),
include somewhere on the page the two numbers whose ratio yields the key
indicator.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bolten's primary audience is other financial
professionals, but none of the material is arcane or esoteric. I am far from
being a financial professional, but I find the book useful and fascinating. The chapter on terminology is a treasure. It
ought to be required reading in all high schools. I hear financial terms all
the time, but until I read this chapter I had no idea of the many subtle
distinctions between similar sounding terms. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I have heard Bolten speak about the material in
this book. In person or on the page, he is a skilled communicator. Regardless
of your background, you can sit down with this book and read it in a day or so.
I learned a great deal from it, and I think you will too.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<h2>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Finding a Job</span></h2>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><b>Cracking the New Job Market: Seven Rules for
Getting Hired in Any Economy</b></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> by </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">R. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">William Holland (AMACOM, New York NY, 2012,
256pp, ISBN 978-0-8144-1734-8, <a href="http://www.amacombooks.org/">www.amacombooks.org</a>,
$17.95)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I have reviewed many books about job hunting and résumés,
and after a while they all look alike. The first thing that intrigued me about
this one is that it has a foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich is author
of Bait and Switch (Metropolitan Books, 2005), a book about unemployed
white-collar workers. Ehrenreich feels that these workers are underserved and
exploited. Her concerns led her to found United Professionals (UP), and Bill
Holland became its president. Holland is a career-management consultant and a
former human resources manager. According to Ehrenreich, he </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"has a
sophisticated understanding of what is happening in the job market and what to
do about it on a personal level." </span></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The old job-hunting rules were to assemble your career
highlights into a résumé, study interviewing techniques, prepare for tricky
questions, and do a lot of face-to-face networking. Holland sees a fundamental
change in the market and puts together new rules. He gives the usual advice
about demonstrating your value to potential employers, and he lays out practical
techniques for doing so. But each job is different, and you must attack each
one on its own terms.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Holland says to start by identifying the key items that
the hiring manager is looking for and organize your job application and
interviews around those items. The key items point to what the company is
looking for, that is, the value they are willing to pay you to create. Holland
lays out a procedure for highlighting aspects of your experience that show how
you have created similar value in other jobs. You use that information to
tailor your résumé and cover letter and to help prepare for an interview.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Holland assumes that you can mine job ads for the key
items that signal what the employer is looking for. As we all know, the people
who write ads for high-tech jobs often have little idea what hiring managers
are really looking for, so finding the key items may require you to do some
digging behind the scenes. Social media can help here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Holland believes in using social media. He notes the
standard advice about the "hidden job market" available only through
face-to-face networking, but says that the statistics usually cited to support
that advice are unverified. In any event, new rules apply to the world of
social media, where weak ties are just as effective as strong ones. A LinkedIn
chain leading to someone you hardly know can bring you essential information
about potential jobs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One of Holland's seven rules is that interviews are
"about the value you demonstrate." In applying for a job you aligned
your résumé with the value the employer wants you to create. Prepare for the
interview by reviewing that alignment and learning everything you can about the
company. You can't memorize an answer for every possible question, but if you
relax, you can bring whatever comes your way back to the question of the value
you can create.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Holland believes that in the job market, women are
different. He devotes a chapter to women who take career breaks. In essence, he
advises continuing professional activities, and staying up to date. Network on
the Internet. Start a blog. When they ask about your career break, you can say, </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"Career break? What career break?"</span></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Holland has good advice for young people choosing a
career and for their parents. College administrators invented the term
"helicopter parent" to make parents leave them alone, but colleges
have not earned a free rein. They don't typically help students prepare
effectively for careers. Any major can lead to a job, but not all majors lead
to a marketable education. Good jobs need critical thinking, complex reasoning,
and skill at written communication. Parents should not wait four years to see
how college works out but should help their children assess their own progress
at least annually.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Holland sprinkles many facts and statistics throughout
the pages of this book. They give an overall picture of the current job market.
Absorbing that picture can provide context for informed career decisions. Those
decisions can make job hunting unnecessary or at least easier if the need
arises.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If you're looking for a job -- your first or
your umpteenth -- you need all the help you can get, and Holland's book is
filled with excellent, up-to-date advice. If I were looking for a job, I'd
spend the first day studying this book.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-55129329830447857092012-04-01T17:05:00.000-07:002013-07-14T17:43:29.343-07:00Miscellany<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the Mar/Apr 2012 issue of IEEE Micro © 2012 IEEE.</span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This time I look at a variety of books. I read several of them carefully with an eye toward writing full-blown reviews, but then decided that what I have to say about them doesn't warrant a complete column. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><b>Infinity</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><b>Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity</b></i> by David Foster Wallace (Atlas/Norton, New York, 2010, 376pp, ISBN 978-0-393-33928-4, www.wwnorton.com, 15.95)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">David Foster Wallace was the author of <i>Infinite Jest</i> (Little, Brown, 1996) and other novels. Many regard him as one of the great thinkers of our time. Twenty years of depression, however, led him to take his own life at the age of 46. This edition of <i>Everything and More</i>, appearing several years after Wallace's death, benefits from a foreword by Neal Stephenson, who, like Wallace, grew up in a midwestern American college town. Stephenson sees Wallace's writing about an abstruse subject in which he was not academically trained as a perfectly normal reflection of that upbringing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Though his graduate degree was in fine arts, Wallace distinguished himself in his undergaduate studies at Amherst by writing a prize-winning thesis on the arcane subject of modal logic. Thus he was well prepared to examine the philosophical and mathematical precursors of Georg Cantor (1845 - 1918), who establised a consistent mathematical basis for studying the infinite. Cantor died as a result of mental illness, as did Kurt Gödel after him. Wallace considers this evidence of the dangers of abstract thinking. He defines sanity as the ability to cut off a line of abstract thinking that won't end. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Wallace has stylistic quirks that make him difficult to read. He seems obsessed with saving space. He uses abbreviations frequently. For example, he may mention the Bolzano-Weierstrass Theorem in one paragraph, then without warning refer to it as the BWT a few paragraphs later. He also uses footnotes extensively for digressions. He provides codes designed to help you decide how important these digressions are, but it's safer to ignore the codes and read all of the digressions. He begins the book with a "Small but Necessary Foreword." Unfortunately, none of the chapters have titles, and the transition from the end of the foreword to the beginning of the first chapter is so slight that I read hundreds of pages thinking I was still in an ironically named foreword.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Cantor's work comes at the end of a long journey that begins with Zeno's paradoxes. Wallace follows the philosophical, logical, and mathematical paths that lead from antiquity to Cantor. If you enjoy reading about modern mathematics, you'll enjoy this fascinating story.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Friedman Again</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><i>That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World it Created and How We Can Come Back</i></b> by Thomas L Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2011, 396pp, ISBN 978-0-374-28890-7, www.fsgbooks.com, $28.00)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In earlier columns I reviewed two of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's books: <a href="http://xrmcontent.blogspot.com/2005/06/world-is-flat.html">The World Is Flat</a> (May/June 2005) and <a href="http://xrmcontent.blogspot.com/2009/01/hot-flat-crowded.html">Hot, Flat, and Crowded</a> (Jan/Feb 2009). This time Friedman teams up with his friend Michael Mandelbaum, a professor of foreign policy. The book returns to many of the themes of Friedman's earlier books. Unlike those earlier books, this one explicitly explores the implications of the authors' findings for American domestic policy.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Both men grew up in 1950s middle America and are alarmed at some of the changes they see. They identify four major challenges facing us, and they prescribe a return to the formula for success that they believe the country followed in the days of their youth. The challenges are as follows: </span><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Adapting to globalization.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Adjusting to rapid advances in information technology.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dealing with deficits, debt, and future obligations.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dealing with energy consumption and climate change.</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The formula, based on the principle of using public funds to share burdens, is as follows:</span><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Provide public education for all.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Provide and maintain infrastructure.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Assimilate substantial waves of immigration.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Support research and development.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Regulate private economic activity.</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>That Used to Be Us</i> shows how to apply the formula to the challenges. The details are political as well as technical. It's an easy read and well worth your time.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Teaching by Manga</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Manga are, in essence, comic books done in a specific style. Developed in Japan, they are now popular in America and elsewhere. The following books exploit manga conventions to convey serious messages. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><b>The Adventures of Johnny Bunko</b></i> by Daniel H Pink, art by Rob Ten Pas (Riverhead Books/Penguin, New York, 2008, 160pp, ISBN 978-1-59448-291-5, us.penguingroup.com, $15.00)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Trained as a lawyer, Daniel Pink served as a speech writer during the Clinton administration. Now he publishes books and articles on business and technology. In 2007 he won a fellowship to go to Japan to study the manga industry. When he came back, he worked with a manga artist to write a self-help business book, <i>The Adventures of Johnny Bunko</i>. I bought this book on the recommendation of my friend Andrea Ames, a senior technical staff member at IBM. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Johnny Bunko is new to the workforce. He likes art, but on his dad's advice, he majored in accounting so he would always have a job. Now, as a clueless new accountant at the Boggs Corporation, he is floundering. Eating Japanese takeout at his desk late at night, he discovers that by snapping apart his wooden chopsticks, he can make a magic career consultant appear. To make a long story short, she leads him through a series of work situations, each of which teaches him a new lesson. The lessons are as follows:</span><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There is no plan -- you can't predict what's going to happen, so you might as well do what you like.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Think strengths, not weaknesses, that is, you're better off developing your strengths than trying to shore up your weaknesses.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It's not about you -- focus on your customer.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Persistence trumps talent -- keep trying and eventually you'll get there.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Make excellent mistakes -- it's better to try something big and fail than to be too cautious.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Leave an imprint -- don't wait until your career is over to ask what you'll be remembered for. </span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The manga tells a coherent, engaging story that drives these lessons home. It's well worth the hour or so it might take to read it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><i>The Manga Guide to Statistics</i></b> by Shin Takahashi (No Starch, San Francisco, 2008, 224pp, ISBN 978-1-59327-189-3, www.oreilly.com, $19.95)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This is one of a series of Manga Guides to technical subjects -- not the newest, but the one judged by my in-house manga expert (my daughter) to be the most successful of the lot because it is both a good manga and a good textbook. Bright, boy-crazy high school girl Rui decides that she wants to learn statistics because her father's handsome young employee, Mr Igarashi, is a statistics whiz. Her father agrees to have her tutored in the subject but to her disappointment substitutes another young employee, Mr Yamamoto, whose most prominent feature is his nerdy eyeglasses.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Yamamoto teaches her all about statistics using believable examples from high-school life. She learns about numerical and categorical data, distributions, probabilities, correlations, and hypothesis testing. If she reads the appendix, she also learns how to use Excel to store and manipulate data. In the end, Mr Igarashi turns out to be married. Yamamoto's eyeglasses break, and Rui sees his face for the first time and falls for him instead.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">If you know any manga fans who want to learn basic statistics, get them a copy of this book.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Publishing Effective Books</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The next two books deal with the art and craft of turning thoughts into professionally published works. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><b>Developmental Editing</b></i> by Scott Norton (Chicago, 2009, 252pp, ISBN 978-0-226-59514-6, www.press.uchicago.edu, $35.00)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Many factors go into making a good manuscript -- the writer's knowledge, perceptiveness, and imagination to name some important ones. But the step from a manuscript to a successful book requires a different talent, one that many writers do not have. That is where developmental editors come in.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Scott Norton is developmental editor and project manager for science at the University of California Press. As Norton points out, the process of developmental editing is not only complex but also difficult to illustrate by simple examples. He creates several extended narrative examples and uses them to illustrate different aspects of the process he follows when working with manuscripts. The narrative examples are sufficiently detailed to illustrate his processes yet much easier to work with than actual manuscripts. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The intricate way Norton put this book together enables him to convey a lot of material in ten short chapters. Creating the examples was a deceptively difficult task, which he accomplished highly successfully. The book is worth reading simply to admire the craft with which Norton constructed it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The craft of developmental editing, as Norton presents it in this book, can be learned. If you are doing other kinds of editing and wish to branch out, this book will help. If you are an author who reads this book in order to work more effectively with developmental editors, you may find that Norton's perspective helps you improve your writing. In fact, if you have anything at all to do with writing and publishing, I think you'll enjoy this book. I have done developmental editing, but I still learned a lot from reading it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><i>The IBM Style Guide: Conventions for Writers and Editors</i></b> by Francis DeRespinis et al (IBM Press/Pearson, Upper Saddle River NJ, 2012, 416pp, ISBN 978-0-13-210130-1, www.ibmpressbooks.com, $39.99)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Style guides have an important role in any publishing process. Even a single work by a single author can benefit from a brief list of names, product terminology, or style choices, so that they remain consistent throughout the work. Several writers collaborating on an online help system for a large software package need more substantial lists, and corporate style guides arise from such needs. These guides are often amalgams of style rules, publishing procedures, and guidelines for using software packages or markup languages. Creating a corporate style guide can be a long and acrimonious process that duplicates a lot of work that others have done better.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The style guides of large organizations like the University of Chicago Press or Microsoft often receive wide distribution outside those organizations and establish standards for whole industries. The most successful corporate style guides delegate most style decisions to such standard guides and focus on styles and terminology that are important in their product documentation. <i>The IBM Style Guide</i> follows this model to some extent, delegating many decisions to the <i>Chicago Manual of Style</i>. But it also covers a wide range of material of interest to others in the computer industry. Because it is clear, consistent, and thorough, it seems likely to become an industry standard.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Style guides can turn arbitrary choices into annoyingly rigid rules. <i>The IBM Style Guide</i> presents the reasons behind its choices, and I haven't found any choices that would bother me if I had to follow them. The explanations also make it easier to make good decisions about issues that the guide does not address. The guide is exceptionally well written -- not always the case with style guides -- though I did notice one dangling modifier in a table in an appendix.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I have seen many computer industry style guides. I believe that the Microsoft guide is the most widely used, but <i>The IBM Style Guide</i> has a good chance to supplant it. I do not like the early versions of the <i>Microsoft Manual of Style</i>. I have seen previews of the upcoming fourth edition, and it looks much better. If you are writing about Microsoft products, that is an added reason to use the Microsoft guide, so I'm sure it will remain popular. Nonetheless, <i>The IBM Style Guide</i> is superior to any version of the Microsoft guide that I have seen so far. If you are part of a writing group looking for an industry standard style guide, consider this one.</span><br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-86717376511588268222011-10-01T15:44:00.000-07:002012-06-30T15:58:13.437-07:00Effective Communication<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the Sept/Oct 2011 issue of IEEE Micro © 2011 IEEE.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><b>Trees, Maps, and Theorems: Effective communication for rational minds</b></i> by Jean-luc Doumont (Principiae, Kraainem Belgium, 2009, 190pp, ISBN 978-90-813677-07, www.treesmapsandtheorems.com/, $96.00) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">If you can read only one book on technical communication, pick this one. In a magnificent illustration of his own methods, the author lays out basic principles, then applies them to the main types of communication that we all struggle with: documents and oral presentations. He also applies the same principles to producing graphic displays, procedures, meeting reports, scientific posters, websites, and email. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Jean-luc Doumont is a professional speaker -- in English, French, Dutch, and Spanish. He has a degree from the Louvain School of Engineering in Belgium and a PhD in applied physics from Stanford University. He wrote this book in English. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I first met Doumont when we were fellow speakers on a lunchtime panel at the 2006 IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society Symposium in San Francisco. We invited engineers to bring their lunches into a large presentation room at the Moscone Center and listen to our advice about making effective presentations. I don't know how much the microwave engineers learned, but I was impressed by Jean-luc's professional approach to the project. In the months before the event, he raised many issues about our presentations and the room's logistics. Now, having read his book, I understand what lay behind those issues. His theories and practices have evolved from his long experience as a speaker.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><b>Principles </b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Doumont believes that effective communication entails optimization under constraints. We want our audiences to get as much as possible from our communications, but we can't control everything. This leads to his three laws of communication: </span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Adapt to your audience, because you can't usually control its composition. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Maximize the signal-to-noise ratio, so others can receive your message with a minimum of loss. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Use effective redundancy, to compensate for losses you can't control. </span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Adapting to your audience is the most important of these rules and the hardest to follow. The audience members are constrained by language differences, their background knowledge, and even the amount of time they have to spend. You must anticipate their needs and expectations, and you must structure your arguments along their lines of reasoning. If they fail to understand, then you fail. If your first efforts don't succeed, you must try, try again.
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio is tricky because it goes against some of our instincts. Everything matters. What does not help detracts; words, gestures, typos, flashy graphics, the keys in a speaker's pocket -- all qualify as noise. Question the relevance of anything you plan to present. Emphasize by suppressing, not by adding. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Effective redundancy arises from simultaneously providing the same message in different media. Doumont's exemplar of effective redundancy is the stop sign. The octagonal shape, the red color, the position in the driver's field of view, and the word STOP all combine to reinforce a single message. Many speakers, however, make the mistake of providing different messages simultaneously. I have seen highly intelligent people project paragraphs of dense text onto a screen and say, "You can read that for yourself," then begin immediately to discuss the topic in different words. Doumont makes the point that if you simultaneously speak and project words on a screen, the text in the two media should be the same. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Doumont explores the role of visual elements in communication. To do so he generalizes the distinction between pictures and words; he creates a taxonomy of communication types. The taxonomy has three axes: verbal/non-verbal, rational/intuitive, and sequential/global (that is, serial/parallel). A string of text on a screen is verbal, rational, and sequential. An audience, seeing that text and hearing you repeat it, can simultaneously process a picture on the screen. They might receive a different, even contradictory, message from the picture. This is bad for communication, though it might be effective as irony, or for sublimnal persuasion. We have highly developed filters for evaluating text, so it is hard for someone to mislead us with words. We have far fewer filters for images, which we process intuitively.
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Unfiltered intuitive processing can mean that a picture of what not to do can fail to have the desired effect. A graph with a widely spread out axis can make a small difference look deceptively large. This extends to other non-verbal cues. Your clothing, stance, voice, and movements as a speaker can affect your credibility. Doumont's bottom line is that every non-verbal message that does not reinforce your verbal message is noise. You should eliminate it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In 1956 the cognitive psychologist George Miller published a paper that led to the notion that our short term memories can accommodate between five and nine items. This has given rise to the widely promulgated rule of thumb that says that lists, procedures, and so forth should be limited to six items. Doumont uses a different numerical analysis to arrive at a smaller number. He also notes that humans can process balanced hierarchies more easily than linear lists. He gives guidelines for the width and depth of such hierarchies. I enjoyed reading Doumont's numerical theories, but I trust his conclusions, which are based on experience, more than his explanations for why they are true. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The book's title describes Doumont's basic approach to structuring information. <i>Trees</i> are another name for the balanced hierarchies discussed earlier. Reasoning that we handle recursion with even more difficulty than lists, Doumont prefers breadth of structure to depth. His ideal document might have five chapters, each with five sections, and each of those with five subsections. He recommends various combining strategies to limit depth and breadth. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The term <i>maps</i> refers to the forms of navigation you provide to your audience. Doumont believes that readers can navigate an effective structure effortlessly if you make it visible to them. For example, in a book structured as in the previous paragraph, you might provide a global map, and at each level tell readers what the divisions at that level contain. A running header or footer helps readers know where they are, and cross-references tell them where they can go. Oral presentations and websites need similar navigational aids, but each of these has its own problems. Without help, you can easily get lost on a website. During an oral presentation, you're stuck on a single track, but if your mind wanders, you need help to find your way back quickly. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The reference to <i>theorems</i> is a shorthand way to say that the busy professionals who might read your book or listen to your presentation want to know in advance what you intend to prove. Then they can decide whether they're interested in hearing the proof. This models the way mathematicians present theorems. It is, of course, not the way they discover them. Many presenters want to lead readers along the path they followed to reach their conclusions. They want to save the punch line for the end. For almost all papers or presentations, that is the wrong approach. It will frustrate your audience and potentially waste their time. They wish to be informed, not taught. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><b>Documents </b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Having laid out a set of principles, Doumont applies them to developing many forms of communication. The main ones, of course, are written documents and oral presentations. For each of these he defines a process for applying his principles systematically to create a communication in that medium. For written documents, his process is deceptively simple: plan, design, draft, format, revise. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Planning starts with asking why, who, what, when, and where. The last two are about logistics, and you can go badly wrong if you ignore them. The first three are a shorthand for determining the purpose of the document, the audience, and the necessary content. The purpose is what the audience should do (or be able to do) after reading the document. Doumont defines a two dimensional breakdown of the audience: specialist/non-specialist and primary/secondary. The primary audience consists of those in the To field of the email, those attending a talk, or those reading a research report when it first comes out. Members of the secondary audience are in the Cc field, hear a recording of the talk, or look up something in the report months later. Each quadrant has needs, and in some cases they conflict. The trick is to provide something for everyone without annoying anyone. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Designing the document addresses content and its order of presentation. Using the theorem model, Doumont shows how to give readers the information in a useful and effective manner. For documents of varying sizes, he shows how to reformat the author's chronology into a nested structure of situation, problem/solution, and work done. He then shows how to present this structure using the traditional components: abstract, foreword, summary, introduction, body, and conclusion. He uses the idea of fractals to convey the idea of a document whose structure at each level reproduces its global structure. This can be carried to extremes, but Doumont remains practical. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Doumont provides detailed advice about drafting and revising, but it is hard to summarize, so you'll have to read it for yourself. A main principle underlying these phases is to strive for clarity, accuracy, and conciseness. Don't simplify the ideas, but convey complexity simply.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Formatting is about structure, not aesthetics. Doumont's main example of formatting is his own book. Each two-page spread has four columns of equal width. Doumont tells readers:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The book was designed to propose a logical flow for the discussion while enabling selective reading of individual parts, chapters, or sections. Feel free therefore to read the complete discussion linearly or to jump ahead to the themes of interest to you. Topics are discussed in one double page each time (or in a small integer number of them), to facilitate their direct access or out-of-sequence processing.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">
The pages, too, are formatted for selective reading. The right page is reserved for the main discussion, with illustrations, limited examples, or comments placed left of the text. In relation to this discussion, the left page answers frequently asked questions collected at the occasion of lectures and workshops, set on a gray background. In the remaining space it lists typical shortcomings, offers practical advice on specific subtopics, or broadens the discussion.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The resulting book has a clean, regular design with a large amount of white space. You rarely have to turn the page while reading about a topic. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><b>Presentations </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Doumont's specialty is public speaking. Like his book, his public appearances provide excellent examples of his methods. If you have a chance to attend one of his talks, don't miss it. This book explains many of his methods, but seeing the methods in action is doubly powerful. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Doumont boils oral presentations down to this:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">[Engage] the audience with mind and body, conveying well-structured messages with sincerity, confidence, and, yes, passion. </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">As with documents, he has a procedure for achieving this end. The steps are plan, design, create slides, rehearse, present, answer questions. The planning phase is similar to that for a written document, but the design phase must confront the specific challenges of oral presentations. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Oral presentations are synchronous. The speaker defines the sequence and rhythm, and the audience can't skip around. They need visual cues and clear transitions. A strong opening grabs their attention and helps them see what's coming. A strong closing tells them that they can relax and clap, but also leaves them clearly aware of what you want them to do next.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Audiences cannot follow detailed evidence, so you should concentrate on a convincing delivery and leave the details to handouts or references. A convincing delivery relies on a good rapport between speaker and audience. Don't try to say too much. Stick to one main message. Decide on that message early in your planning phase, and state the message early in the talk. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Creating slides is a place where many presenters fall down. The slides provide visual cues to where you are, and they convey the same message that your spoken text conveys. In fact, Doumont says the spoken text and the slides should each stand alone. A person who cannot see should be able to follow the spoken presentation, and a person who has difficulty hearing or understanding your spoken words should be able to understand the presentation from the slides. Slides are potentially helpful extras, but bad slides can substantially detract from a presentation. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Speakers who create bad slides often do so because they are creating the slides for themselves, not for the audience. Dense, cryptic text can help speakers remember what to say, but it detracts from the talk as readers struggle to understand the slides. Some speakers think their slides should double as a written report. What they produce serves neither purpose. Other speakers, in a hurry, copy paragraphs from written documents onto slides. Such slides are worse than none at all. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Delivering a presentation is a performance in real time. You can practice parts of it in advance -- what to say, how to say it, how to stand or move, and when to change slides. It is important not to have to struggle with those aspects of the presentation, so you can focus on receiving and reacting to the cues your audience sends you. At the same time, you should reduce the noise caused by clothing, jewelry, name tags, or excessive movement. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Doumont has much more to say, and it's all worth studying, but you'll have to read the book. I hope you do.
</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-49127047505708210302011-04-01T15:59:00.000-07:002011-07-10T16:43:28.882-07:00Technology<span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: xx-small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the March/April 2011 issue of IEEE Micro © 2011 IEEE.</span></span><br />
<br />
<div>This time I look at two books that delve deeply into technology and our relationship to it. One, by Brian Arthur, is concerned with how technology works and how it interacts with economics. The other, by Kevin Kelly, tells a poetic, almost mythic story of where technology came from and where it's headed. Their stories overlap and reinforce one another. I highly recommend both of them.<br />
</div><div><i><b>The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves</b></i> by W. Brian Arthur (Free Press, New York, 2009, 256pp, ISBN 978-1-4165-4405-0, $27.00)<br />
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Brian Arthur is an influential theorist of economics and complexity theory. His work has influenced many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. He is a member of the research faculty of the Santa Fe Institute and a visiting researcher at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). This book grew out of lecture series Arthur gave in 1998 and 2000.<br />
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Arthur sets out to investigate, from an economist's point of view, what technology is and how it evolves. He observes that we use the word "technology" with three distinct meanings:<br />
<ul><li>A means to fulfill a human purpose (for example, an iPhone or a legal system).</li>
<li>An assemblage of practices and components (for example, the semiconductor industry).</li>
<li>The entire body of devices and practices (what Kevin Kelly calls the <i>technium</i>).</li>
</ul>For the first of these, Arthur uses the term purposed systems, reserving the term technology for systems (for example, the iPhone) that capture and exploit physical phenomena. A legal system shares many of the characteristics of a technology, but the phenomena it exploits are social and behavioral.<br />
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Arthur uses the term domain for an assemblage of practices and components. Domains are toolboxes. They form a language of rules and practices that define the possible technologies that can develop within that domain. Domain change is a major force in technological advance. For example, in the 1970s, aircraft designers moved from the mechanical and hydraulic domains to the electronics domain for controlling wing and stabilizer surfaces. Domains can have vast supporting structures, so a complete domain change can take decades and cause economic dislocation.<br />
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Arthur calls on the principles of combination, recursion, and phenomena to find a common structure for all technologies. A technology exploits one or more natural phenomena. The technology's internal structure is a main assembly that carries out its base function and a set of subassemblies that support the function. Each subassembly is a technology with the same overall structure. It isn't turtles all the way down -- the recursion is finite -- but most technologies have many levels.<br />
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This modularity makes it easy to see one of the main ways technologies advance and develop. Substituting a new subassembly for an old one can solve a problem or bring an improvement: lower cost, better performance, more functionality, suitability for more environments, and so on. For example, in the 1920s, aircraft designers wanted to achieve greater speed by flying higher, but they needed to invent the turbojet engine to make that possible. They were able to replace the engine subassembly while leaving many other subassemblies intact, at least at first.<br />
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This is a high level view, but Arthur gives a detailed picture of how standard engineering works to exploit and reinforce this model. In so doing he shows that the evolution of technologies does not follow a Darwinian model. Swapping one subassembly for another rarely happens in the biological domain. Darwin relies on long sequences of small steps and survival of the fittest. <br />
<br />
In engineering, many factors besides fitness determine choices. For example, early nuclear reactors used light water for both the coolant and the moderator. This was not necessarily the best approach. The US Atomic Energy Commission made the decision for reasons largely irrelevant to fitness, but once it had a foothold, this design became the standard.<br />
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Arthur examines the mechanisms of technological revolutions. A new domain arises from an existing one. Perhaps an investment mania and a crash follow, but the new domain grows well beyond pre-crash levels. The economy follows as existing structures adapt and re-architect themselves over the course of decades. Change is expensive, and often the necessary changes are not obvious. The switch from steam-powered factories to electric ones required a total redesign, but factory designers did not grasp the needs and possibilities of the new technology. <br />
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The leading edge tends to be concentrated in one region. Silicon Valley is a prime example, but there are many others. A virtuous cycle emphasizes the region's initial advantage. Practitioners are drawn there. Informal networking spreads undocumented knowledge and provides unofficial channels for solving problems. This mechanism explains why Akron, Ohio, was able to turn itself into Polymer Valley when the tire industry moved away.<br />
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Arthur has advice for politicians and entrepreneurs who are concerned about competitiveness: build basic science without a stated purpose of commercial use. Encourage and remove obstacles from the small startups that naturally develop. Creating a leading edge region requires gardening, not central planning. Water it, weed it, and let it grow.<br />
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Arthur's model of the ongoing evolution of technology is as follows. A long history of technology has left us with an active set of technological components. A new technology enters the active set and becomes available to replace subassemblies of existing technologies and may enable additional technologies. The economy adjusts. The new technology creates new problems and opportunities. A domain may grow up around it. The process repeats many times, often in parallel. Like a coral reef, technology is a living thing. It has needs and a kind of autonomy, but so far it still requires human intermediaries.<br />
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Like many other writers, Arthur sees our relationship with technology as ambivalent. Our deepest hope lies in technology, but our deepest trust is in nature. We need challenge, meaning, purpose, and alignment with nature. Technology can help us meet those needs or thwart us by subjugating us to its purposes. Like good and evil, these aspects of technology are part of our world, and we must constantly engage them. We should not accept technology that deadens us, and we should not confuse what's possible with what's desirable.<br />
<br />
Brian Arthur has produced a thoughtful and coherent account of how technology evolves. He has deliberately done so using plain language to make it available to a large audience. If technology plays a significant role in your livelihood, you should read this book.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly</b></i> (Viking, New York, 2010, 416pp, ISBN 978-0-670-02215-1, $27.95)<br />
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Kevin Kelly was editor-in-chief and publisher of <i>Whole Earth Review</i>. He had roles in launching The WELL and the Hacker's Conference. He later became <i>Wired</i> 's first executive editor. He is on the board of the Long Now Foundation. He co-hosts a monthly seminar series with Stewart Brand. <br />
<br />
Kelly spent his early years as a freelance photographer, wandering around Asia with very little technology: clothing, a sleeping bag, a pen knife, and his cameras. After a religious experience in 1979 (which he described on NPR's This American Life in 1997), he resolved to act as if he had only six months to live. He gave away his money anonymously and bicycled 5000 miles around the USA to visit his relatives. Along the way he encountered the Amish, and admired their contentment.<br />
<br />
When the six months passed and he found himself still alive, he began his new life with a unique perspective. He discovered online communities and came to see a benefit of technology that strongly influences a thesis he presents in this book, namely, that technology increases opportunities for people to realize their potential. What would Mozart, Van Gogh, or Hitchcock have been if they had lived before the piano, cheap oil paints, or film? <br />
<br />
Kelly admires the Amish relationship to technology. An Amish community is selective about what it embraces. They try new technologies, then use known criteria to arrive at a communal evaluation and decision. Kelly embraces a similar approach in his own life. He strives to increase his personal contentment by minimizing the technology in his life. At the same time he wishes to maximize the contentment of others. This requires embracing and helping technology's growth. <br />
<br />
To understand how he should relate to technology, Kelly looked at it from many angles, finally arriving at a grand view of an epic battle between entropy and exotropy (anti-entropy). From the undifferentiated starting point of the big bang, exotropy rapidly outpaced entropy in a continuing act of self-creation and self-organization that led to galaxies, planets, life, minds, language, and beyond. Exotropy pushes toward ever more abstract and immaterial expressions. Brains and language are important steps along the path. <br />
<br />
At our current stage, billions of years into the process, humans have significant influence on the direction of technology's evolution, but Kelly does not see that as as an eternal truth. He sees the body of technology, which he calls the technium, as exhibiting many characteristics of an autonomous living thing. The book's title reflects this point of view. But Kelly chooses a surprising spokesman to articulate it.<br />
<br />
Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, sees technology as increasingly restricting freedom because it strengthens society and imposes its own needs as well. Kaczynski supports an ideal of nearly complete freedom, only admitting a few rules necessary to make basic human interactions possible. Unfortunately, these rules allow mailing bombs to people you disapprove of.<br />
<br />
Kelly cites the <i>Unabomber Manifesto</i> because it is an extreme representative of the opposite of what Kelly believes. When it comes to the same conclusions Kelly does about aspects of the technium, it strengthens Kelly's confidence in those conclusions. Kelly and Kaczynski both believe that the technium pursues its own needs with a kind of autonomy. Both also believe that the technium creates serious problems. <br />
<br />
Kaczynski believes that the technium does more harm than good, and that compounding that differential over time will lead to its destruction. Because humans are increasingly dependent on complex technologies that they no longer understand, they will perish too.<br />
<br />
Kelly believes that the technium does more good than harm. Compounding that differential over time leads to greater happiness and opportunity for humanity and to ever better ways for things to improve. Each of these men is expressing a judgment about the balance between the good and the harm that the technium does. Kelly adduces many examples to support his conclusion. For example, the long term trends toward greater longevity, health, and wealth suggest that the compounding factors are positive. <br />
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If you accept that the technium has a sort of autonomy, then it makes sense to ask what it wants. Kelly believes that technology wants what life wants. The summary, which Kelly develops with many examples and much discussion, is that technology wants increasing efficiency, opportunity, emergence, complexity, diversity, specialization, ubiquity, freedom, mutualism, beauty, sentience, structure, and evolvability. These terms define the trajectory and mechanisms that the technium has followed from the big bang to today and seems likely to follow into the future. Kelly says, "a single thread of self-generation ties the cosmos, the bios, and the technos into one creation."<br />
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At this point you might feel that Kelly has devised a creation story for an age that feels uncomfortable with the traditional ones. Kelly is quick to say that the technium is too small to be God. But he speculates that we may see a new Axial Age spurred by technology. He says,<br />
<blockquote>I find it hard to believe that we could manufacture robots that actually worked and not have them disturb our ideas of religion and God. Someday we will make other minds, and they will surprise us. They will think of things we never could have imagined, and if we give these minds their full embodiment, they will call themselves children of God, and what will we say? When we alter the genetics in our veins, will this not reroute our sense of a soul? Can we cross over into the quantum realm, where one bit of matter can be in two places at once, and not believe in angels?</blockquote>In this new Axial Age, Kelly believes, we may seek spiritual refuge not just in ancient redwood groves, but also in ancient networks.<br />
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This review might not convey the excitement I felt while reading Kelly's book. The book is too dense to summarize easily here. The language is poetic, but hard to paraphrase, and many of the most interesting points are hard to lift from their complex contexts. I spent months digesting this book, and I enjoyed doing so. I hope you'll do the same.<br />
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</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-24487402733006993032010-11-01T21:53:00.000-07:002011-02-08T22:07:56.158-08:00Being Geek<div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the November/December 2010 issue of IEEE Micro © 2010 IEEE.</span></span></div></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"> </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This time I look at a book that is remarkable for its author's exceptional insights and uncommon points of view.</span></span><br />
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<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><b>Being Geek: The Software Developer's Career Handbook</b></i> by Michael Lopp (O'Reilly, Sebastopol CA, 2010, 334pp, ISBN 978-0-596-15540-7, <a href="http://www.oreilly.com/">www.oreilly.com</a>, $24.99)</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Michael Lopp has worked in Silicon Valley for more than 15 years. He is an engineering manager at Palantir and has worked for ground-breaking companies like Netscape, Apple, Borland, and Symantec. He was also part of a failed startup. He is the author of <i>Managing Humans</i> and the <i>Rands in Repose</i> blog. <i>Being Geek</i> draws heavily on postings from that blog.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Geeks</span></b></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Lopp's target audience consists of software developers and people like them. He calls them nerds or geeks interchangeably. He chose the word geek for this book because he liked the sound of the resulting title. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">If you're one of Lopp's geeks, you're socially handicapped in ways that he describes in a chapter called <i>The Nerd Handbook</i>, a guide to give to your friends and family. Your sense of humor grows out of your bitterness over your early life as an outcast. You have a project, and it's always on your mind. Your relevance detector tunes out small talk, making it difficult for you to relate to others. You are a systems thinker. Your model of the world is a computer. If you know the rules, you can figure out what to do next. Ambiguity makes you anxious.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Unlike many software developers, Lopp has no difficulty interpreting the non-verbal aspects of his surroundings. He observes the behavior of colleagues and generalizes the lessons he learns. He picks up on the unspoken cues in situations, so developments rarely take him by surprise. Following some of Lopp's advice, however, may require more facility at interpreting the non-verbal than many potential readers have.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>Rules of three</b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Lopp thinks strategically, so he can react to unpleasant surprises by remembering the big picture. He may have a manager in his job, but Lopp is the manager of his own career. His two-pronged approach to this book is as follows:</span></div><div><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Teach you a system of improvisation so that you can navigate the day-to-day unpredictability of the work world.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Help you develop a strategic career plan, so you know what to do if the sky falls in your current job.</span></li>
</ul></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">To teach you a system of improvisation, Lopp takes you through the kinds of situations that are likely to arise in software development firms and helps you understand the underlying system and rules. He shows you tools and techniques for managing your time and workload. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">To help you develop a strategic plan, Lopp provides a narrative<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 10pt;">—</span>a single job in all its aspects, from interviewing to leaving, seen largely from the perspective of a manager. He likes the number three, so he gives you three questions and asks you to keep them in mind as you follow the book's narrative: </span></div><div><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">What am I doing? </span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">What do I do? </span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">What do I care about? </span></li>
</ul></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">To Lopp, your day-to-day work, your management philosophy, and your career plan should be driven by another set of three questions:</span></div><div><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Am I setting the technical direction?</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Do I know what I have to do to grow?</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Am I keeping my commitments?</span></li>
</ul></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Lopp uses technical direction as a shorthand for all of the technical aspects of your career, from choosing an area to work in to writing a piece of code. You might not get to make all of the decisions, but if you write code, you should know what’s best for it at all stages of its life.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Failure to grow brings quick death in the technical world. Information has a short half life. If you haven’t failed recently, if nobody is challenging you, if you haven’t learned anything significant this week, you are in danger of falling behind. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Failing to keep a commitment, even a minor one, puts a scar on your reputation that is hard to erase. Your reputation is a huge asset that you should maintain at all costs. Sometimes this means telling your boss that you can’t handle that one extra task. Better to say no than to say yes and not do it.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There, in a nutshell, is Lopp's philosophy. But the best thing about the book is Lopp's insight into situations, management techniques, and tools. The bulk of the book explores all aspects of a hypothetical job. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>Job hunting</b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Lopp starts with the decision to leave your current job. After three years in a job—three releases for the product to become real—you might start to feel the itch to leave. Don’t mistake anger for the itch—cool off first before you act. When you do feel the itch, however, it’s time to go. You might have reservations about whether you’re really done or about the people you’re leaving behind, but Lopp has good answers to those reservations. You’re never really done, and your network transcends individual companies. Start looking for your next challenge. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Many books contain advice about resumes, portfolios, and interviews. This one is as good as any. Most of it is in line with other books, but Lopp addresses one area I haven't seen elsewhere. As an interviewee, you want to help the interviewers get what they need, but you need to elicit information too. Lopp talks about finding the "button" that will get each kind of interviewer talking. Some interviewers arrive angry, some love to talk, some try to maintain control, but for most of them, there is a strategy that will loosen their tongues.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
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<div class="PARAGRAPH"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Lopp also looks at some of the dangers that can catch a hiring manager napping. Requisitions look good on paper, but they can disappear in an instant. He recommends spending at least an hour a day on each open requisition. He also advises laying some groundwork before you have a requisition. Build a network of people you can call when the requisition appears. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Sometimes someone you thought you had hired decides to stay where they are. Lopp believes that this is often because you didn’t let them know how much you want them. He advises keeping in touch from the day they accept the offer until the day they show up for work.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>People on the job</b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Lopp emphasizes the kinds of informal interactions and relationships that don't show up on the organizational chart. When he was at Netscape, for example, four people who didn't look especially important on the organizational chart met each day to play bridge. He soon learned that they set much of the technical direction and corporate culture. When one of them left the company, long before the visible signs of trouble, Lopp knew that it was time to go.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Another interesting bit of analysis that Lopp performs concerns what happens when you make a big mistake. Your boss temporarily assumes a new persona: Interrogator, Illuminator, Randomizer, Prioritizer, or worst of all, Enemy. The temporary change may reveal attitudes and communication problems you didn't know existed. Lopp characterizes each of these reactions and shows how to restore your boss's usual calm, supportive personality.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Lopp brings his insights to other common situations. Your group gets sudden bad news and a number of personas appear, some requiring careful treatment. One displays explosive anger. Another refuses to accept the news. Yet another sees the sky falling. One blames himself while another says, "I quit." Lopp shows the course that each of these reactions is likely to take and explains how to get everyone into problem-solving mode.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Interpersonal relations take work, but some people are too much work. Every group has its values and beliefs. Those who are fundamentally incompatible with those values and beliefs must go, no matter how good they are. As Lopp puts it, the history of Silicon Valley is full of toxic people who were right. Their agenda and ideas were right for their company. Nonetheless, they had to go.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Lopp believes in the Pond. The workplace supports many information flows—official and unofficial. If you're there, you pick up on them. If you're not, you don't. When someone on his team wants to work remotely, Lopp may feel he has to say yes, but he worries. Stepping out of the Pond may be that person's first step toward leaving. On the other hand, the modern world makes it difficult to avoid remote workers altogether. Lopp identifies the factors in the employee and in the group that are essential to making it work. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>Games</b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Lopp has two important roles for games in his management approach: stimulating activity and developing relationships. In one example, he uses a list of bugs on a whiteboard and a system of scoring for analyzing and fixing them. Players use different colors to record what they do, and everyone can see who is accumulating points.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Back Alley Bridge</i>, known by its acronym, BAB, has been around for at least fifty years. It looks a bit like Bridge and a bit like Hearts. The bidding is a bit like Pinochle. An important aspect is the trash talk that accompanies play. Lopp uses it to build trust between two managers who aren't getting along.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The <i>Werewolf</i> game has made the rounds of the Internet in various forms. Each night in the village, the werewolves kill someone. Then the remaining players awake and try to identify a werewolf to kill. They have nothing to go on but what they observe, as one after another is accused and presents a defense. Lopp believes that playing this game will sharpen your interpersonal skills and prepare you for business meetings.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>Networking</b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When people talk about networking, they usually mean building a network of contacts throughout the industry. Lopp has a slightly different emphasis. He tells you to find "your people." Growing up, you may have been an isolated one in a thousand. But now you can improve your odds considerably. Go to conferences. Join affinity groups. Contribute to mailing lists. You will know your people when you see them. Writing about what you care about can be your initial connection, but extended face-to-face interactions show you what email hides: I talk with my hands. You can't stand the distraction of looking anyone in the eye when you're thinking hard. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>Managing time</b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Lopp has a lightweight system for tracking the tasks he should be working on. His artifacts are a to-do list, a parking lot list, and a trickle list. He reviews them briefly twice per day—the morning scrub and the evening scrub. His underlying principles: you won't complete everything you should; if you drop an important task, it will find its way back. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The morning scrub starts with yesterday's to-do list. If you intend to do an item today, leave it on. Don't assign it a priority or a completion date. If you intend to do it after today, use it to start today's parking lot. If you don't have a realistic plan for doing it soon, throw it away. The evening scrub is similar. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The trickle list tracks long-term goals. The column heads are types of activities, like read a book or have a hallway conversation. Each day gets a row of Xs and Os. Looking at the list can remind you of things you need to do or changes you need to make to your long term priorities.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Lopp has a framework for deciding which tasks to take on. Some things that come his way are crises. He has to take them on. In addition, he insists on devoting some time to creative activities—sitting in a room and thinking or doodling on the whiteboard. He hopes to delegate everything that falls between—routine matters—to someone else.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>Bits, features, truth</b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Everyone talks about the triangle of time, quality, and features. You can have any two of the three. If you think about this metaphor for any length of time, it falls apart. Lopp replaces it with the idea that on any project there should be three separate authorities, one each for bits, features, and truth. These are the traditional roles of the engineering manager, the product manager, and the program manager, but thinking in terms of the actual functions may be more realistic.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The people occupying the three roles should be equally strong. There should be both a healthy tension and mutual respect between any two roles.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>A complaint</b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My main complaint is about editing. The credits list an editor, a production editor, a copyeditor, and a proofreader. Nonetheless, the book has many typographical errors. The writing style is far from crisp. Furthermore, I feel that it suffers from a serious error of editorial judgment. The writing is full of unnecessary profanity. Even if the author speaks that way, there is no need to reproduce the vulgarities in print. They add nothing essential.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I recommend this book highly because of its content. This review covers many aspects of the book, but there are important topics I don't mention. If you have anything to do with software development, or if you just feel geeky, I hope you'll buy the book and study it.</span></div><div><br />
</div><div style="font-family: georgia;"></div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-63694484188843272902010-08-01T14:49:00.000-07:002011-03-15T10:21:51.393-07:00Miscellany<div style="font-family: georgia;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the July/August 2010</span></div></div><div style="font-family: georgia;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;">issue of IEEE Micro © 2010 IEEE.</span></div></div><div style="font-family: georgia;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; font-weight: normal;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"></span></span><br />
<div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"></span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">My backlog of books to review has grown out of hand. I don't have time or space to do justice to all of them. So here are some interesting books with brief explanations of why I hope you'll find reading them worthwhile. I recommend all of them.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Math and philosophy</span></b></span></span></span></div></div><div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></span></div></div><div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"></span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Recently I've read two books co-authored by Ellen Kaplan. She wrote one with her husband Robert and one with her son Michael. Both books are simultaneously erudite and readable, with delightful allusions to many aspects of culture. The books deal with some of the philosophical and technical underpinnings of the modern world. </span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Another math book, by a physicist, focuses on how to solve thorny problems using heuristic techniques, approximations, and lucky guesses.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><i><b>The Art of the Infinite</b></i> by Robert Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, 334pp, ISBN 978-0-19-517606-3, <a href="http://www.oup.com/">www.oup.com</a>, paper, $16.95)</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">In 1994 Robert and Ellen Kaplan founded The Math Circle (<a href="http://www.themathcircle.org/">www.themathcircle.org</a>), a school "designed for students who enjoy math and want the added challenge of exciting topics that are normally outside the school curriculum." In this book they introduce us to numbers, plane geometry, and some of the mathematicians who have furthered the study of these subjects. Because some of the deepest results of mathematics arise from considering the infinite, the authors try to ensure that we understand the definitions and philosophical underpinnings of that concept.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Georg Cantor's proof that the infinity of real numbers is greater than the infinity of whole numbers is well known and easy to understand. The authors show us the painful years-long path Cantor followed to arrive at that insight. This kind of humanization of mathematicians is one of the book's strengths. The intuitionists and the formalists, like Swift's big-endians and little-endians, both turn out to have the same sorts of foibles as the rest of us.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Chances Are: Adventures in Probability</i></b> by Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan (Viking, NY, 2007, 332pp, ISBN 978-0-1430-3834-4, www.penguin.com, $26.95)</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The dust jacket of this book bears a photograph, taken by Robert Kaplan in 1961, showing Ellen Kaplan pushing Michael Kaplan in a stroller. Subsequently, Michael studied European history at Harvard and Oxford. He is now a writer and film maker. Ellen is a classical archaeologist. She has taught math, biology, Greek, Latin, and history. Neither author is a professional mathematician. Perhaps their backgrounds explain their ability to see the big picture.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Probability and statistics have infiltrated practically every important aspect of our lives. It began simply enough when gamblers sought help from mathematicians like Fermat and Pascal. The resulting mathematics soon helped sea traders hedge against the unpredictable risks their ships faced with each voyage. The insurance industry expanded to cover other commercial and personal uncertainties.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Insurance and medicine have become entwined. While death panels may be a fantasy, medical practice and reasoning are firmly grounded in probability. In 1976 I wrote a review of Galen & Gambino's Beyond Normality: The Predictive Value and Efficiency of Medical Diagnoses (Wiley, 1975). Their work explained how to apply Bayes' theorem to evaluate the value of diagnostic testing. At the time most physicians were only beginning to understand this type of reasoning. Now it controls much of what they do.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Legal reasoning is another area where thinking about probability can be useful. It does, however, sometimes lead to highly unintuitive results. This has led appeals courts to reject expert testimony based on Bayes' theorem. According to the authors, "the technique has been forbidden, not because it doesn't work, but because the court may not understand it. We can continue to err, as long as we err in ways we find familiar."</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Game theory and military planning underlie decisions that affect our very existence. In fact, the Cold War came to a peaceful end largely because leaders cast aside the "best" strategies in favor of a more humane view of human behavior.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I don't think you can understand today's world without understanding the concepts in this book. The authors have put it all in one place for you. Get it and read it.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving</i></b> by Sanjoy Mahajan (MIT, Cambridge MA, 2010, 150pp, ISBN 978-0-262-51429-3, <a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/">mitpress.mit.edu</a>, 25.00)</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Sanjoy Mahajan, a physicist, is the associate director for teaching initiatives at the MIT Teaching and Learning Laboratory (TLL). The TLL works with faculty, teaching assistants, and students to promote excellence in teaching and learning. </span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Carver Mead, one of Mahajan's thesis advisors at Cal Tech, says in the foreword to this book </span></span></div><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Most of us took mathematics courses from mathematicians -- Bad Idea! Mathematicians see mathematics as an area of study in its own right. The rest of us use mathematics as a precise language for expressing relationships between quantities in the real world, and as a tool for deriving quantitative conclusions from those relationships.</span></span></blockquote><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">So if you want the answer, or something close to the answer, and you don't care about the proof, the techniques in this book might be just what you're looking for.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Mahajan considers his work to follow the path of the great mathematics teacher George Polya. Polya cited Euler and Laplace as mathematicians who perceived that "the role of inductive evidence in mathematical investigation is similar to its role in physical research." Some of the techniques that Mahajan describes are similar to the ones Euler used to find the sums of infinite series in the 1700s.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">While the ideas Mahajan puts forth are relatively simple, many of his examples would be difficult to follow for someone without at least the prerequisites for an MIT education. If you have those prerequisites, you might enjoy reading this book.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Grammar, usage, and editing</span></b></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right: The Celebrated Cynic's Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers</i></b> by Jan Freeman (Walker, NY, 2009, 236pp, ISBN 978-0-8027-1768-9, <a href="http://www.walkerbooks.com/">www.walkerbooks.com</a>, $24.00)</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Just over a hundred years ago, Ambrose Bierce, a journalist better known for his cynical Devil's Dictionary, wrote Write It Right, a quirky collection of prescriptions for writers. Recently, Jan Freeman, who writes a language column for the Boston Globe, decided to examine Bierce's maxims. She apparently decided to do so for an indirect reason. Bierce's fiercely expressed complaints are largely irrelevant today. They have been replaced by new pet peeves. By showing the irrelevance of most of Bierce's complaints, she helps us gain perspective on our own hobgoblins. They may be just as quaint a hundred years from now as Bierce's are today.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Bierce, like many language purists today, based many of his rules on a belief that English should be logical. But many of the illogical usages he complained about had been established hundreds of years before, and many persist today. Freeman makes this clear again and again as she carefully analyzes all 441 of Bierce's rules. If you're interested in usage issues, you'll enjoy this book.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Making Word Work for You: An Editor's Introduction to the Tool of the Trade</i></b> by Hilary Powers (Editorial Freelancers Association, NY, 2009, 80pp, ISBN 978-1-880407-22-6, <a href="http://www.the-efa.org/">www.the-efa.org</a>, spiral, $15.25)</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Now in her fourth career, Hilary Powers has been a freelance editor since 1994. She says she chose editing to enable her to emulate Nero Wolfe, that is, never to have to leave home on business. Before her first year as an editor was done, she had abandoned paper. She works only online, a fact that has necessitated her mastery of Microsoft Word.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The target audience of this small, spiral-bound book is anyone who edits for a living. Anyone who uses Word, however, will find useful information in it. For example, editors must master Word's change-tracking facilities, but many non-editors use that feature too. Macro programming is another powerful feature of Word that will quickly repay your learning how to use it well. Powers shows you where and how to use macros and provides free downloads of her own macros to help you learn the details.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Whether the task is mastering macros or simply selecting configuration options, this book removes your excuse for avoiding it. If you're like most Word users, you could do a lot of what this book recommends without reading it. Once you have this book, however, and read about the huge increases in efficiency that Powers achieves, you won't be able to resist the urge to tinker.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I have known Hilary Powers for many years, so I can testify that she writes the way she speaks. Her style is clear and colorful, never boring. The topics she covers are practical and directly useful. If you use Word, you should read this book.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Communicating</span></span></b></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Confessions of a Public Speaker</i></b> by Scott Berkun (O'Reilly, Sebastopol CA, 2010, 240pp, ISBN 978-0-596-80199-1, <a href="http://www.oreilly.com/">www.oreilly.com</a>, $24.99)</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Scott Berkun is a technical author who decided to try to make a living as a public speaker. He succeeded, and this book tells how he did it and what he learned along the way. None of it is glamorous -- even his being interviewed with prominent business leaders by Maria Bartiromo on CNBC. Berkun shows you the tricks of the trade -- the drab details and shameless gimmicks that help ensure that your audience goes away happy.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">One of the parts I like best is "The Clutch Is Your Friend." This chapter title comes from something Berkun's brother told him to help him learn to drive a car with a manual transmission. It introduces some excellent rules about how to teach -- whether you're facing one person or 5000.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Berkun says, "Everything in this book is true and written to be useful, but if you don't always want to hear the truth, this book might not be for you." By this he means that after seeing how sausage is made, you might never want to eat it again. That hasn't been my experience. I find the material fascinating. If you ever speak in public, you'll learn something useful from this book. </span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b><i>The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, expanded edition</i></b>, by Dan Roam (Penguin, NY, 2009, 300pp, ISBN 978-1-59184-306-1, <a href="http://www.penguin.com/">www.penguin.com</a>, $28.95)</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Dan Roam designs presentations and gives seminars about visual thinking. Here is his elevator pitch for this book: </span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"Visual thinking means taking advantage of our innate ability to see -- both with our eyes and with our mind's eye -- in order to discover ideas that are otherwise invisible, develop those ideas quickly and intuitively, and then share those ideas with other people in a way they simply 'get.'"</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Those of us who communicate for a living know that visual communication is an important tool, but few of us feel comfortable using that tool. The biggest obstacle that Roam must overcome is <i>I can't draw</i>. He allays that concern in this book by using simple drawings made from rough hand-sketched elements. Nobody draws worse than I do, but I can replicate any of the drawings in this book -- at least well enough to communicate effectively.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">In planning how to explore or express an idea visually, Roam asks five questions about what he wants his drawing to emphasize:</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> * Simple or elaborate?</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> * Qualitative or quantitative?</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> * Vision or execution?</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> * Individual or comparison?</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> * Change (delta) or status quo?</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This gives him the colorful mnemonic SQUID, for which he provides a minimal but recognizably squidlike sketch. </span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Roam applies the SQUID questions in each of his main areas: discovering, developing, and selling ideas. On this framework he hangs profusely illustrated examples. All you have to do is read along with pencil and paper at hand, and you'll learn that you really can use visual thinking effectively.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation</i></b> by Anne Gentle (XML Press, Fort Collins CO, 2009, 236pp, ISBN 978-0-9822191-1-9, <a href="http://xmlpress.net/">xmlpress.net</a>, paper, $29.95)</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Anne Gentle is a technical writer who ran a company blog in the prehistoric days of that technology (2005). She learned about using wikis for documentation by volunteering for the One Laptop per Child project. She also works with FLOSS Manuals, a community that supports tools for producing free documentation for free software.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Gentle sees a structural shift from one-way product documentation toward interactive, collaborative product support that includes plenty of user-generated content. Technical communicators steeped in the old model need help understanding and moving to the new one. This book provides such a guide. Gentle proceeds methodically through the new technologies and discusses the issues that arise for communicators.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">If you have a role in technical product documentation, you should read this book.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div></div><div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></span></div></div><div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></span></span></div></div><div></div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-71175959553416987372010-03-21T01:27:00.000-07:002010-09-12T15:19:21.300-07:00Search Patterns<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the March/April 2010 </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">issue of IEEE Micro © 2010 IEEE.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><b>Designing for Discovery</b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Asking questions and wanting to know the answers is basic to human nature. No one knows of a time when this was not so. Researchers have speculated that human culture took a great leap forward when life expectancies increased to the point that children could interact with their grandparents. Word of mouth sufficed for a long time, but writing and printing led to further leaps forward.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">It is a commonplace observation that sources of data are now increasing exponentially and that old methods of transmitting knowledge cannot keep up. Search technology has arisen to address this problem, but how best to use that technology remains an unsolved problem. Most computer users know how to go to Google or other search engines, enter search terms, and browse through results. Few user interface designers, however, know how to incorporate effective search technology into their designs. The book I look at this time addresses that problem.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><i><b>Search Patterns: Design for Discovery</b></i> by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender (O'Reilly, Sebastopol CA, 2010, 192pp, ISBN 978-0-596-80227-1 <a href="http://www.oreilly.com/">www.oreilly.com</a>, $39.99)</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Peter Morville is a founder of the field of information architecture. He is author of "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" and "Ambient Findability." His consulting clients include AT&T, Harvard, IBM, Microsoft, and the Library of Congress. Jeffrey Callender is the design director of Q LTD, a strategic design consultantly with clients worldwide. Peter bills himself as the word person. Jeff is the visual thinker. Their collaboration successfully integrates these ways of thinking.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Search, say the authors, is the worst usability problem on the web. We go to a website to find something -- a fact, a product, background information, an old acquaintance. Often, what we thought we came for is not actually what we need. Search is a conversation in which we discover new things and ask new questions. How quickly and accurately we find what we need defines the quality of our experience. If we give up and revert to more costly options like telephone or email, everyone loses. Yet that is what often happens when companies fail to use search technology effectively.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><b>Patterns and interconnections</b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><i>Apophenia</i>, an aspect of madness and creativity, is the ability to see connections that others don't see. The savant Daniel Tammet sees patterns of shape and color in the digits of π that allow him to recite tens of thousands of digits accurately. To those who do not perceive such patterns, the feat seems impossible. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The authors are writing for an audience of highly sophisticated user interface designers who can hold their own with engineers and marketers and make the business case with upper management for investment in search technology. The authors' goal is to discover and study the patterns of search so that these designers can make search better.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The study of software design patterns owes its basic idea to Christopher Alexander, who wanted a language to help him describe the architecture of living spaces. In <i>A Pattern Language</i>, he recognized that how you put the patterns together makes all the difference. He analogized this to poetry. In prose we strive for simple sentences in which each word has an unambiguous meaning. In poetry the words come from the same language, but they have multiple meanings and connotations. They are packed densely together to express what prose cannot express efficiently. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Morville and Callender see poetry as the model for using the search patterns they present as the heart of their book. But they take the poetry model further. This is a densely packed book of interconnected meanings. Its 192 pages contain more useful information than many books of three times its length, but you must read slowly and carefully to extract that information. For example, here is how the authors identify the problem that they are trying to solve:</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></div><blockquote><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">" . . . search is a wicked problem with no definitive formulation, considerable uncertainty, and complex interdependencies. Stakeholders have divergent goals and radically different world views. Requirements are incomplete, contradictory, and ever changing . . .</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">"Unlike Google, most firms aren't structured to manage the high-tech, step-changing, cross-functional, user-centered challenge. There are too many hyphens. As a hybrid of engineering, marketing, and design, search creates too many openings for missing links . . . Why risk your career (and your weekends) on a problem that's so intractable?</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">"We underfund and understaff search, and its poverty becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Users don't search now, because search failed then. Sometimes they browse. Often they bail."</span></div></blockquote><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">To help describe patterns, the authors first break down search into its static anatomy and its behavioral aspects. The major elements of search are users, creators, content, the engine, and the interface. The many relationships among these elements help explain the complexity of search and the ideas in this book. For example, a search engine may take account of users' preferences, but if users don't bother to use the available customizations, they all wind up with the same default behavior. An interface may present results effectively, but if the searched content is full of redundant, outdated, trivial (ROT) material, users will not be able to find useful results quickly. Sometimes users are creators, when they give feedback about the relevance of results or comment upon a discovered item. The well known site that puts all of the elements together most effectively is amazon.com. The authors use Amazon as a good example of many patterns, but they point out that every situation is different. The Amazon approach works well because Amazon tailored its approach to the specific characteristics of its unique business.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The static anatomy helps us understand the elements of search, but to make specific situations better, designers must also understand the kind of conversation that leads to discovery in their environments. To succeed, search must have aspects of jazz. The process must flow. The authors cite Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's contention that music, dancing, sailing, and chess are conducive to flow because they offer challenge, give control, support learning, reward skill, and provide feedback.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Just as designers repeat successful design patterns, users repeat the behavioral patterns that have worked for them. Search designers must support these behavior patterns. The main ways users interact iteratively with search facilities are narrowing/expanding searches and growing pearls. The main problems (antipatterns) they encounter are pogosticking and thrashing. To grow pearls, users find a good document and mine it for query terms and leads. Google supports this by offering links to similar items. Pogosticking is bouncing back and forth between a results page and the pages it points to. Thrashing occurs when users start from a flawed query (for example, using a misspelled term), then keep trying variations of it rather than switching to a better query. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><b>Principles and patterns</b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The authors are interaction designers, and because they see little evidence of interaction design principles at work in search interfaces, they feel compelled to explain those principles. You'll have to read the book for the complete story, but here is a brief summary of some interaction design principles:</span></div><div><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><i>Incremental construction</i> lets users start small and build. </span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><i>Progressive disclosure</i> hides complexity until it is needed.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><i>Direct manipulation</i> provides visible objects for users to interact with.</span></li>
</ul></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The heart of the book is a discussion of ten design patterns. The choice of these specific patterns is meant as a convenient and somewhat arbitrary starting point. The authors describe each pattern, identify its most suitable contexts, and show how it relates to the other patterns. They discuss why the problem that the pattern addresses is common and why the pattern provides a good solution. They provide examples that you can visit, interact with, and study. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The <i>Autocomplete</i> pattern is the first and the easiest to understand. Typing is slow, especially on mobile devices. Users cannot spell, and they cannot remember search terms. As users enter the first few characters, the system begins to offer suggested search terms. This depends, of course, on having a good source of suggestions. Google does this well. Most sites do not.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The <i>Best First</i> pattern is deceptively simple. The system sorts results in such away that the first few results that users see are the ones most likely to be what they are looking for. A huge portion of what Google does behind the scenes supports this pattern. When implemented properly, a best first approach quickly gives users what they need or helps them formulate effective follow-up queries.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The <i>Federated Search</i> pattern addresses the problem of finding content that is distributed among a variety of content sources (silos). Implementing it entails problems such as slow performance and different query languages in different silos. Combining the silos into a single source may be a better approach to the problem. A good example of where to use federated search is hunting for books by author, title, subject, and so forth, across a set of independent university libraries. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The <i>Pagination</i> pattern emerged by accident, not as a response to a specific problem. Designers found it convenient to return a linear list of search results and to enable users to navigate through the list in screen-sized pages. Users soon discovered that pages provide a way to bookmark specific sets of results. Interfaces that replace the simple results page may have to provide a different approach to that use case.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The <i>Faceted Navigation</i> pattern gets away from the simple results page. It arises from the work of Marti Hearst and her Flamenco project at UC Berkeley. Using content and metadata from returned results, it constructs a custom visual map that makes it easy for users to narrow their queries incrementally. A drawback of this pattern is that it requires a large amount of screen space, so it does not work well on small mobile devices. The authors regard this pattern as the most significant search innovation of the past decade.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The <i>Structured Results</i>, <i>Actionable Results</i>, and <i>Unified Discovery</i> patterns all contribute to speeding discovery and making the process more iterative and interactive. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><b>Moving search forward</b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Practitioners will especially appreciate the chapter called Engines of Discovery. Having laid out the principles of interaction design and created a language for discussing search patterns, the authors examine and discuss a number of sites that explore new ways to help their users discover what they may not have known they were looking for. Visiting these sites and understanding how they use search patterns is key to deriving maximum benefit from this book.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The authors hope that this book will influence the future of search technology. They see themselves not just as technologists and communicators, but as persuaders. In support of that function they have created some futuristic scenarios that they hope will serve as mythic guides for search technologists. These incorporate neural implants, direct communication of raw emotion, artificial intelligence, rogue agents, and software to recognize and track people.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">This book is a monumental achievement. The authors have provided a guidebook to a largely unexplored and immensely important territory. Reading it requires attention, effort, and exploration. Not reading it is likely to lead you out to pasture.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><br />
</div></span></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-52622294842970504992010-01-24T02:53:00.000-08:002010-09-12T22:59:30.354-07:00Technical Writing<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the January/February 2010 issue of IEEE Micro © 2010 IEEE.</span></span><br />
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"></span></div><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Before and during the dot-com boom, technical writing jobs in the US were plentiful and well paid. The ability to write coherent English sentences and use packaged software was sufficient qualification. Training in technical communication was not required, but certificate programs blossomed, and many new college graduates entered those programs. With the dot-com bust and the availability of high-speed communication between the US and India, many technical writing jobs became commodities and rapidly moved offshore. The number of people in the US identifying themselves as technical writers suddenly exceeded the available work. That number is now shrinking sharply to fit the demand. Many certificate programs have closed for lack of students.</span></div><div><br />
</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Long before the dot-com boom and bust, however, a small cadre of academics and reflective practitioners established the underpinnings of a profession of technical communication. They showed how to determine the needs of their audiences and studied the most effective ways to satisy those needs. Some learned how to quantify the value that their work added to the products they documented. A few even learned the language of the business executives who determine the value that their organizations place on documentation. These academics and practitioners mostly survived, and they form the core of the technical communication workforce that exists today. Many, including me, are members of the Society for Technical Communication (STC), the leading professional organization for technical writers, as well as the IEEE Professional Communication Society and ACM's SIGDOC. A variety of online communities and mailing lists also support the field.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">To be a successful technical writer today, you must understand the technical and business aspects of the work you do and how it affects the organizations who pay for that work. The book I look at this time covers all of the bases you need to touch.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Managing Writers: A Real World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation</span></b></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> by Richard Hamilton (XML Press, Fort collins CO, 2009, 276pp, ISBN 978-0-9822191-0-2, <a href="http://xmlpress.net/">xmlpress.net</a>, 24.95)</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Richard Hamilton began his career as a software developer in an organization that took software development seriously. His organization moved him directly from leading software teams to managing documentation, because they had begun to take documentation seriously as well. In the nearly 20 years since his first documentation management job, Hamilton has learned a lot about technical communication and how it fits into organizations like AT&T, Novell, and Hewlett-Packard. He has become an expert at applying XML technology to documentation projects and serves as a member of the OASIS DocBook Technical Committee. He is a member of STC.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Hamilton approaches the subject from the viewpoint of a manager, and he carefully covers everything that a technical writing manager should know. But writers who are not managers need this information as well. Technical writers in today's environment must understand the product, project, technology, and business issues. They must be comfortable communicating with the top leaders of their organizations, or those leaders are likely to regard them as commodities and their work as a cost that comes directly from the bottom line. On the first page of his book, describing the challenges facing technical writing managers, Hamilton says</span></div><div><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Most important, technical documentation is viewed with disdain by many engineers and lives at the bottom of the power hierarchy in most companies. A significant amount of your time as a documentation manager will be spent working to gain respect, power, and leverage so you can do your job.</span></blockquote></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">This sad fact applies to individual contributors as well. They must earn respect for themselves as members of the technical staff and of their project teams. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Hamilton gives an example of a situation in which he built power and influence. His firm issued annual updates of a complex product. The development groups were responsible for writing parts of a document describing their ongoing changes for the benefit of the support organization. When the writers needed clarification of the change document so that they could write clear release notes at the end of the year, the developers didn't want to provide information they thought they had already provided about features they had finished with months earlier. Hamilton's team took over preparing the ongoing change document, combined it with the release notes, and created an intranet site to simplify the developers' task of providing the new information and reviewing what the writers did with it. Hamilton's team thus gained control of the inputs they needed and won respect and gratitude for simplifying the developers' jobs and providing the support organization with clearer information. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Hiring and managing writers</span></b></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Hamilton begins his book with a short summary of what technical writers do and the challenges they face. In a few pages he lays out his list of the key elements of technical writing: product, developers, audience, tasks, deliverables, environment, and schedules. Many writers focus on a few of these elements but ignore or skimp on others. Hamilton explains why each element is important and touches on the key issues associated with each of them. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Hamilton focuses on the three main aspects of managing: people, projects, and technology. These discussions become successively more abstract, though none of them strays far from concrete real-world situations. The discussion of managing people, however, seems close to Hamilton's heart. The examples are gripping; they deal with situations that should resonate at an emotional level with most readers.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Hamilton's longest chapter by far is on hiring, which shows the importance he attaches to that key activity. I have reviewed a number of books that talk about résumés. They present different, often contradictory, points of view. The message seems to be that there is more than one way to skin a cat. Hamilton details his process for evaluating résumés, and you won't go far wrong if you use it. He focuses on general themes rather than little details, and he shows a laudable level of flexibility. For example, he says he would hire a writer with only Windows experience to work on a Linux project, but he'd be reluctant to hire a writer who specializes in software to write an airplane hardware maintenance manual. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Hamilton makes a good point: the qualities that make a great technical writer boil down to the ability to understand and the ability to communicate. This seems obvious, but if you look at job ads, they often focus on tools, technology, and prior experience. </span></div><div><br />
</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Hamilton is aware of the legal complications of hiring, managing, and occasionally firing employees. He contrasts the situation nostalgically with his father's situation as a personnel manager from the 1940s to the 1970s. He suggests making friends with people in the human relations department long before issues arise. This is the same advice Hamilton gives about building relationships with developers and with other managers. The pattern seems to be that good relationships lubricate formal processes. This is a tough lesson for introverts, a category that many technical writers inhabit. Many introverts would rather deal with processes than people.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Managing change</span></b></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">One of the most difficult problems of managing people concerns change. Most people adhere to the maxim, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." It usually takes real pain to make people want to change. For example, if your company must translate your documentation into other languages, the potential costs are painful to the company's finances. Hamilton uses former General Electric chairman Jack Welch's metaphor of a burning deep sea platform. The managers standing on the burning translation costs platform feel the pain and are ready to act, but the writers may see it as someone else's problem as they watch from shore. The people who must make the change work must first understand and feel the need to do so.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Another common problem with managing change is to confuse the means with the ends. Hamilton tells us to define the desired future state in terms that impose minimal constraints on the means you use to get there. In particular, that means keeping solution vendors -- and consultants who are tied to specific vendors -- out of the process until you have a clear idea of where you are going.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Managing technology</span></b></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">New technologies present technical as well as personnel problems. Hamilton provides good advice about managing technology. For example, not every problem can be solved by technology. If you have badly structured content, don't count on a content management system to fix it. Figure out what you are trying to do and what obstacles are causing your pain. Articulate the desired final state. Then look for a solution, which may or may not involve new technology.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Once you have a solution, Hamilton suggests easing the personnel problems associated with the pain of adopting the change by phasing it in, providing good training to everybody, and keeping management in the loop -- especially when problems arise. It is better for them to hear about problems from you before they hear from your critics. One aspect of phasing in change is to start with people who have a positive attitude toward the change. Get the bugs out before bringing the troglodytes along.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Hamilton is a specialist in using XML technology, but he is also aware of the hype associated with it. He quotes Richard Feynman: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations." The reality in this case is that it "will not organize your documentation, eliminate your production back-end, nor allow you to hire fewer, less skilled, or cheaper writers." XML is a system for producing markup languages (for example, DocBook or DITA). Such languages, when they integrate well with the structure of your documentation, help make your content easy to search, manipulate, reuse, and repurpose. Hamilton provides useful guidance in addressing these issues. There is no magic. You may have to make substantial investments before you begin to realize any of the benefits.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Many technical writing managers must deal with complex problems like single sourcing and localization. For such problems, the solution often includes some sort of content management system. Hamilton explores the issues involved in setting up processes to support single sourcing and localization. He also talks about how to decide what sort of technological help you need in managing content. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">While many vendors cite reuse as one of the main purposes of a content management system, Hamilton advises you to start by organizing your content in such a way as to minimize reuse. He considers it better to have just one logical place to look for a piece of content than it is to have it in different places, even if you have a system for synchronizing the content at those different places.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Resisting the dark side</span></b></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">One reason I am so enthusiastic about this book is that Hamilton is not in awe of sacred cows. Two of them are performance evaluation and performance metrics.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Business success depends on clear expectations between managers and their employees. They need a framework for ongoing discussion of goals, objectives, and other workplace issues. Weekly one-on-one meetings often provide this framework. On top of that, however, most companies use an annual performance evaluation process. This could be a beneficial way to focus on long term issues, but most companies use it for a different purpose: sorting employees into winners and losers. This robs the process of many good effects it might theoretically have had. Neither managers nor employees can engage openly and honestly in the process, because they are aware of its negative consequences. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Nonetheless, Hamilton recognizes that almost all companies have a performance evaluation process. Eisenhower said something to the effect that plans are useless but planning is indispensable. Hamilton applies that model to performance evaluation. He does what he can to make the process of performance evaluation helpful. He suggests ways to do as little harm as possible with the resulting documents and the ensuing discussions with employees. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Hamilton devotes approximately a quarter of his book to managing documentation projects. He makes points I haven't seen in substantially longer works on the subject, but I especially like his discussion of metrics. There is a cliché to the effect that if you don't measure something you can't manage it. Furthermore, keeping good records of predicted and actual values of some metrics helps to improve planning and estimating. Despite their benefits, however, metrics have downsides. Writers are aware that management may use these metrics to evaluate performance, so the measured aspects improve to the detriment of the unmeasured aspects. Unfortunately, the easiest aspects to measure are not likely to be the most important. For example, it is easy to count pages and hard to measure quality.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">As with performance evaluations, Hamilton shows how to make the best of a bad tool. He delegates measurement to individual writers to use as they see fit, and he solemnly promises not to use those measurements to reward or punish writers -- or report the measurements to anyone likely to use them in that way.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Hamilton has much more to say about managing people, projects and technology. This short book is full of useful information and hard-earned opinions. Whether you manage writers or would rather just sit in your cubicle and write, you need to read this book. It is the most practical and realistic book I have seen on the subject, and I recommend it highly. </span></div><div></div><div><br />
</div></div></span></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-10616930713486469512009-10-07T19:59:00.000-07:002010-09-12T23:00:29.131-07:00Life and Work<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the September/October 2009 issue of<br />
IEEE Micro © 2009 IEEE.</span></span><br />
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America declares that every person has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are precious rights, but exercising them takes work. Pursuing happiness entails overcoming many obstacles. The easiest and hardest of these are often in our own heads.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Recently I attended a workshop called <i>Strategic Planning for Your Life</i>, led by Judy Glick-Smith, a former president and Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). That workshop is not the subject of this review. You can find information about it at <a href="http://www.mentorfactorinc.com/">www.mentorfactorinc.com</a>. Glick-Smith's method asks you to begin by discovering what makes you happy and casting aside the internal obstacles to pursuing that happiness. She then lays out steps whereby you can arrive at a set of life goals and an ongoing process for pursuing and updating them.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">By whatever path you arrive at your life goals, they are likely to include some sort of productive work. If that work is a high-tech job, I can recommend a book to help you.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><i><b>Land the Tech Job You Love</b></i> by Andy Lester (Pragmatic Bookshelf, Raleigh NC, 2009, 272pp, ISBN 978-1-93435-626-5, <a href="http://www.pragprog.com/">www.pragprog.com</a>, $23.95)</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Andy Lester has been writing software since the mid-1980s. He is active in the Perl community, where he maintains more than 20 modules on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). In the course of his professional life he has seen countless résumés, interviewed many candidates, and done his share of job hunting as well. His frustration at what he has seen led him to write this book.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Many people give job-hunting advice. Most are dogmatic about their recommendations, even though one effective job hunter may give you rules that contradict those of another equally effective job hunter. Lester is no exception. He is sure of his rules, though he recognizes that they may not apply to your situation. Hardly anybody, however, is likely to disagree with the basic principles he starts with:</span></div><div><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Be honest with yourself.</span></li>
</ul><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Be honest with others.</span></li>
</ul><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Think like the boss. </span></li>
</ul><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Be a problem solver.</span></li>
</ul><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Sell yourself.</span></li>
</ul><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Tell stories.</span></li>
</ul><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Be positive.</span></li>
</ul></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Lester begins from the premise that life is too short for a job you don't love. Being honest with yourself is a key to ensuring that you don't wind up in a job that you don't love. Lester urges you to think about what you want in a job before you start looking at job ads or writing a résumé. Following one of his own principles, he tells a story of how he had taken a seemingly perfect job and found it to be unbearable. He hadn't aksed himself what he really wanted in the job. Had he done so and given himself honest answers, he would not have taken the job.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Once you decide what you want in a job, it's time to think about a résumé. Lester identifies what he considers to be the basic sections of a résumé and tells you how to gather and organize the contents of each. There are no surprises here, but his systematic coverage can help you ensure that you haven't overlooked anything. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Lester also identifies material that you should not include. Some of this is uncontroversial -- for example, don't include a photo or any information that you can't legally be asked about in an interview. Cautious hiring managers will discard such résumés without looking further. Some of his other rules, however, may cause raised eyebrows. Some experts suggest beginning a résumé with an objective, but Lester considers objectives to be useless fluff, often filled with meaningless phrases like "challenging position" and "contribute my skills." And if you ever apply for a job for which Andy Lester is the hiring manager, don't waste space on your résumé with the phrase "references available on request." </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Once you have the basic building blocks, Lester wants you to put them together in a variety of ways. Of course you need a generic résumé on paper and in electronic form, but that's just the beginning. Ideally, for example, you should create a separate résumé for each position, tailoring and arranging the parts to highlight the ways in which you meet that job's requirements. Furthermore, you need versions in various formats. Some hiring managers ask for résumés in Word format, while others want text, and you should also have a generic HTML version on a publicly accessible website. If someone asks for Word format and you send them PDF, they already know that you can't or won't follow directions. Lester has much more to say about résumés, and it's worth reading, even if you don't agree with all of it.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">After all of this groundwork, you have to find a job to apply for. Lester wisely steers you away from "job boards," websites that treat candidates and jobs as fungible commodities to be matched with one another. He also distrusts recruiters, because their clients are the hiring firms. You might think that recruiters find positions for candidates, but their actual job is to find candidates for positions. Instead of using job boards and recruiters, ask the people you know -- including your Aunt Edna, but excluding your current co-workers -- to help. Help can take many forms, but Lester advises keeping it lightweight. Ask for pointers and leads that you can follow up on. Don't ask anyone to do your job hunting for you.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Another piece of good advice that Lester offers is to use traditional sources like newspapers or the local Chamber of Commerce. Newspapers can give you a high level view of what's available in the area they serve. The staff of the Chamber of commerce can probably give you pointers to valuable contacts inside firms that need your services.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Once you find some interesting job possibilities, there is more to do before you send anybody your résumé. Lester tells you how to use publicly available sources like a company's website or its Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings to answer the key questions: how does this company make money, how could I help it make money, and would I enjoy doing so? Remember, life is too short for a job you don't love. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Lester suggests using online resources to help you find information about a company. You might discreetly approach a current or former employee who posts to a technical mailing list that you belong to. Or you might look on the Facebook or LinkedIn social networking sites for people whose profiles mention the company.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Once you've found out everything you can about the company, it's time to apply for the job. Many people will tell you to send your résumé with a cover letter, but Lester points out an aspect of cover letters that you may not have thought of. If you can't come up with two paragraphs that explain why you are a good match for the specific job and company, you probably shouldn't apply.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Jack Molisani, a recruiter who often makes presentations about job hunting, tells the story of a résumé he sent to a client who wanted someone with patent experience. The client called him back and asked why Molisani was wasting his time with a candidate who didn't have patent experience. The résumé mentioned the candidate's patent experience, but not near the top, and the client hadn't read far enough to find it. This illustrates several of Lester's points. One point is that if interviewers ask you questions that your résumé clearly answers, don't say "read the bleeping résumé." Molisani knew better than to call his client's attention to the material the client had overlooked.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">A second point that Molisani's story illustrates is that you should look at your résumé through the eyes of the hiring manager. Think about what is important to the hiring manager and make that part of your experience prominent on the résumé. I agree with that point, but I disagree with the method Lester suggests for making parts of your résumé prominent. Lester suggests highlighting words of the résumé that are important to the specific job by making them bold. This is a dangerous technique. A skillful communicator might get away with it, but most job candidates are likely to wind up with résumés that look like a ransom notes. Other techniques that Lester also advocates are more effective. Rearrange the sections of the résumé to highlight the most important information, and mention key points in the cover letter. By all means, tailor the résumé and cover letter to the job, but go easy on the bold.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">While Lester rightly encourages you to follow directions and give hiring managers what they ask for, he makes an exception for salary history. Never provide this information. It's nobody's business, and there is no benefit to providing it. Lester suggests finessing this request by politely but firmly noting that the information is confidential and that it's not a subject that you discuss with anyone.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">When the company invites you to a job interview, you're almost there. Unfortunately, many candidates perform badly in interviews. The hiring manager is likely to prepare carefully for the interview, and you should do the same. This includes preparing logistically. Arrive on time with whatever materials you need to bring with you. Clear your schedule, so you can stay as long as necessary.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">There are many ways to look at interviews. They are conversations in which you can lead as well as follow. They are sales pitches by which you show that you are the right person for the job and make the hiring manager eager for your services. They are a first day on the job in which you seek out the areas where the company needs you most. Unfortunately, they can also be an obstacle course in which the hiring manager seeks to trip you up with questions designed to eliminate candidates and simplify the hiring choice. Lester prepares you for all of these aspects of interviews.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">One piece of advice that Lester provides applies to many of life's situations -- not just to interview questions. Listen, and seek to understand not just the question, but the reason for the question. Remember that an interview is a chance for each party to decide whether they would like to work with the other. Sometimes understanding the reasons for questions can help you with your half of that decision. And being sure you understand a question before you answer it can keep you from saying something that makes you look uninformed or ill-prepared.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Lester also provides a lot of advice that you've probably heard before, but it can't hurt to keep it in mind. Arrive a little early. Treat everbody like the CEO -- especially the receptionist. Stand to shake hands. Make eye contact (but don't stare). Be positive. Ask for the job.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">I do not completely agree with Lester about how to handle a portfolio. I learned about how to use portfolios from Lance Gelein, another former president of STC. To Gelein a portfolio is a set of impressive props to use while telling stories. If the conversation comes around to a specific kind of job, you open your portfolio to a sample of that sort of work and tell the story of how you approached it, what obstacles you faced, and how you overcame them. The portfolio piece is not the entire job, but a snippet that you can point at while telling the story. Your portfolio does not stand alone without you. You never leave it with the hiring manager or let anyone look at it without your accompanying narration.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">To Lester, a portfolio is a collection of representative pieces of work that you are proud of. Each stands alone, and you happily leave a copy behind for the hiring manager to peruse after you've left. There is, of course, a place for this sort of work sample, but it doesn't fully exploit the story-telling potential of a portfolio. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Lester devotes an entire chapter to tough interview questions. Again, the key is to understand the reason behind the question, so you can directly, without equivocation, satisfy the interviewer's concern. Lester identifies a number of red flags that interviewers want to uncover. Some of these are two-edged swords. For example, do you refuse to ask for help? Are you unable to work without constant hand holding? Interviewers ask questions designed to detect where you stand with respect to these extremes. If you recognize what they are getting at, you can give a useful answer. Don't try to duck questions like "What is your greatest weakness?" or "Tell me about a project that didn't go well." Lester shows you how to approach such questions.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Lester's advice doesn't stop with the interview. He covers follow-up, dealing with an offer or with rejection, and even how to stay hirable after you start the new job. He has written a short but comprehensive book -- easy to read and full of good advice. Like every other book about job hunting, this one is not perfect, but if you absorb its advice and adapt it to your situation, it should pay for itself long before your first hour on your new tech job is complete.</span></div><div><br />
</div></span></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-90246882061366978812009-08-11T02:41:00.000-07:002010-09-12T23:04:57.615-07:00Twitter<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the July/August 2009 issue of<br />
IEEE Micro © 2009 IEEE.</span></span><br />
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Twitter social messaging service is simple, but hard to understand, at least at first. I poked around its edges for a while, until I found the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Twitter Book</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">.</span></span></div><div><br />
</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Twitter Boo</span></b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">k</span></b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Twitter Book</span></span></b></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> by Tim O'Reilly & Sarah Milstein (O'Reilly, Sebastopol CA, 2009, 240pp, ISBN 978-0-596-80281-3, <a href="http://www.oreily.com/">www.oreily.com</a>, $19.99)</span></span></div><div><br />
</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media. I have never before reviewed a book that he wrote, but I have been reviewing books that he published for about 20 years. Starting with a few how-to books for Unix users in the 1980s, O'Reilly Media has become the leading publisher of books about hot software topics. In recent years, Tim O'Reilly has become a leader in the open source and web 2.0 communities.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Sarah Milstein started out as a freelance writer and editor. She was a regular contributor to The New York Times. Later she joined O'Reilly media, where she led the development of the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Missing Manual</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> series. She now travels around the country, lecturing and teaching about Twitter. With fellow Times contributor Marci Alboher, Sarah is cofounder of 20slides.com, which will soon launch a series of career-related online workshops.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Twitter Book</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> has been my gateway to Twitter. It contains solid basic information about all aspects of Twitter and provides context for a large number of pointers. By following those pointers, I learned everything I know about Twitter. If you invest a few hours reading this clear and comprehensive book, you will be well on your way to understanding how Twitter fits into your life.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Basics of Twitter</span></b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">To begin using Twitter, go to twitter.com and sign up. Supply your full name, and pick a username that is short and to the point. My username is </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">xrmxrm</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, which includes my initials and echoes my email addresses and Facebook ID. No username that includes a significant indication of my full name would be short enough to be an effective Twitter username.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Next, set up your profile. Twitter allows you a picture, a 160-character biography and a location. My biography is:</span></span></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> </b></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Technical communicator specializing in documentation for programmers -- APIs, web services, programmer guides. Columnist for IEEE Micro.</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">My location is </span></span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Berkeley, CA</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Your name, your location, your biography, and your contributions are all that a person considering following your contributions has to go on.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Before using Twitter, you should understand updates, following, @references, retweeting, hashcodes, and searching. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Updates</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, also called </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">tweets</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, are your contributions. You can enter a message of up to 140 characters, and everyone who has signed up to follow you will see that message, with your picture, among the tweets that come to them. Anyone can follow your updates, unless you protect updates, which few people do, because there is little point to doing so. You can send updates from a browser or a third party Twitter client, on your computer or your cell phone.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Following</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> is an easily established asymmetric relationship between you and another twitter user. You simply go to that user's page (twitter.com/their_username) and click the Follow button. You can follow other users without their permission and without their following you. Twitter will, if you choose, notify you by email when other users choose to follow you. If you like, you can view their pages and decide whether to follow them. Many people automatically follow people who are following them, but there is no need to do so. Some people follow you as a form of spam. Obviously, you should not follow them. Twitter provides an easy way for users to report spam.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The most interesting uses of Twitter are conversational, so you need a way to refer to other people's tweets. Twitter interprets content of the form @username as a link, called an </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">@reference</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, to that user's page. By a quirk of Twitter, if you begin a tweet with an @reference, most Twitter users who follow you but do not follow the user referred to in the @reference will not see the tweet. As a result, if you want to pass a tweet to your followers, a process called </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">retweeting</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, you should place the @reference in the body of the tweet. The standard formats for retweets are to begin with </span></span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">RT @username</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> or to end with </span></span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">via @username</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Twitter has a powerful search mechanism. In addition, it automatically brings to your attention the topics that are most popular at the moment. Search results can contain the tweets of users you are not following, so searching enables you to follow interesting trends and find interesting users to follow. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Often, a group of users interested in a topic choose a search term to include in tweets about that topic. Such search terms usually begin with hash mark (#). These are called </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">hashcodes</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">. As I write this, #iranelection and #michaeljackson are widely used hashcodes. Nobody assigns hashcodes. Users simply start using them. Different versions soon converge, and conflicts work themselves out.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Twitter Helpers</span></span></b></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Twitter provides a certain amount of pushed summary information. In addition, a number of third parties follow Twitter, massage the flow of tweets, and make the information easily available. They can notify you about matters of interest to you, so you don't need to read millions of tweets each day. For example, TwitScoop shows hot topics as a tag cloud, in which terms appear in larger or smaller font sizes, depending on their recent frequency.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Another difficult problem for most new Twitter users is deciding which users to follow. Sites like MrTweet provide personalized lists of Twitter users for you to consider following.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">If you want others to find your tweets worth reading and retweeting, you should link to interesting material. URLs can be long, and Twitter's limit is 140 characters for your entire tweet, so you need to find a good URL shortener. Such services (for example, TinyURL, Bit.ly, is.gd, and Twi.bz) replace a long URL with a unique, permanent short one that points to the same place. Different shorteners provide different advantages. For example, some give you some control over the resulting URL, while others make it easy for you to track clicks.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Pictures are a compelling component of many tweets. You can post a picture to a site like flickr.com and use a shortened URL to point to it. Others can leave comments at the site or retweet the link with their comments. The twitpic.com site integrates especially well with Twitter.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">If you interact with Twitter solely through twitter.com, the primitive user interface soon becomes limiting. You must refresh the page to see new tweets. Simple tasks like replying and retweeting entail tedious manual steps that cry out for automation. Because Twitter provides an application programming interface (API), many third parties have created programs to put a different front end on Twitter. Most such programs run on computers, but others work on smart phones. I have tried Twhirl, SeesmicDesktop, TweetDeck, and DestroyTwitter on my laptop. Each provides improvements over the twitter.com interface, but I keep coming back to twitter.com because I feel more comfortable and less restricted there.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">One drawback of the clients I've tried is that they provide little in the way of accessibility. I like to change window sizes and enlarge the text and graphics on my screen. This is easy to do in most browsers. The clients I tried, however, all use Adobe Air. If Air provides that sort of control, these clients haven't figured out how to make use of it. Or if they have, they haven't made it clear to me how I can use it. For that matter, the same criticism pertains to Adobe FrameMaker, which uses Air as the delivery environment for its online help. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">What Twitter Is and Isn't</span></b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Twitter enables people to share facts, opinions, news, and commentary about everyday life or extraordinary events.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Recently Scott Williams posted an article at </span></span><a href="http://bigisthenewsmall.com/?p=2170"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">http://bigisthenewsmall.com/?p=2170</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> called Seven Things Twitter Is Not. He makes the point that Twitter is like a river. You can stand on the bank and watch the tweets go by. They are not piling up in your mailbox. Nobody expects you to answer them. If you do toss a tweet into the river, it flows away quickly. Someone may retweet it or reply to it, but the reply floats away too. It may include some context, but 140 characters soon become inadequate to contain an ongoing chat.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Another interesting metaphor is that of a great collective consciousness. As you watch the river, a subject may suddenly attract your attention. For example, on November 26, 2008, reports about the terrorist attacks in Mumbai spiked suddenly on Twitter, drawing worldwide attention before the news media could react.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">One frequently asked question about Twitter is, "How can I use it to make money?" Twitter does not seem to have answered that question for itself, but many businesses have found ways to integrate Twitter into their ongoing relationships with actual and prospective customers. </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The Twitter Book</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> devotes a substantial section to the do's and don'ts of using Twitter for business. No business should jump into Twitter until its management understands the principles that O'Reilly and Milstein lay out there.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">You may not understand Twitter at first, but if you try it patiently for a while and get a sense of how others are using it, it will grow on you. Go to twitter.com and give it a try.</span></span></div><div><br />
</div></span></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-51960193414954183382009-06-01T22:31:00.000-07:002010-09-12T23:06:40.490-07:00Software Architects<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This article appears in slightly different form in the May/June 2009 issue of<br />
IEEE Micro © 2009 IEEE.</span></span><br />
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This time I look at a collection that, according to its editor, is completely different from any other book you've read. That statement is true of any book, I suppose, but this book is unusual.</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts</span></b></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> edited by Richard Monson-Haefel (O'Reilly, Sebastopol CA, 2009, 218pp, <a href="http://www.oreilly.com/">www.oreilly.com</a>, ISBN 978-0-596-52269-8, $34.99) </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Richard Monson-Haefel is a co-author of the O'Reilly books </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Enterprise Javabeans</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> and </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Java Message Service</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. The project grew out of a presentation called </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">10 Things Every Software Architect Should Know</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, which he was planning for a No Fluff, Just Stuff symposium. He solicited inputs on a mailing list, and nearly 50 people contributed the "things" that became this book. Each fills a pair of facing pages and includes a contributor photo and brief biography. The regularity of the structure ends there. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The free format allows contributors to formulate their wisdom in whatever ways work best for them. They address a variety of subjects in a variety of ways, but looking at the book as a whole, I see themes emerge. They have very little to say about project retrospectives or managing risk, so I hope they will all read two excellent books from Dorset House. Norman Kerth's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Project Retrospectives</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> (Micro Review, May/June 2001) and DeMarco & Lister's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Waltzing With Bears</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> (Micro Review Jul/Aug 2003) are essential reading for any software architect. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Communication</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Communication receives a lot of attention in this book. Udi Dahan of Microsoft, for example, advises you to stand when you speak to a group. It makes people take you more seriously. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Other contributors stress the importance of knowing both the language of the business decision makers and the language of the software developers. Communication failures between the two groups cause many project problems, and these contributors assign to architects the responsibility for making that conversation work. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Norman Carnovale of Lockheed Martin Professional Services emphasizes the importance negotiating with the business decision makers to ensure that mid-project changes don't lead to unrealistic schedules and ultimately to failure. David Muirhead of the Blue River Systems Group recognizes that the business must drive a project, so he advocates developing the kinds of information that business leaders can use to make good decisions. Yi Zhou lays out the elements that make up a strong business case for a proposed expenditure. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Michael Nygard reminds us that we should remember the difference between a negotiation and an engineering discussion. When business decision makers ask "do you really need x," the answer should be "yes" if that's what the analysis led to. In an engineering discussion of the point, you might say "you could do without it if . . ." but business decision makers won't hear the "if" or anything that follows it. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Another communication theme is that architects must manage their own attitudes so that they can engage in open conversations with developers and customers. They must not let overconfidence or arrogance prevent them from hearing the good ideas of others or listening to the specific needs of customers. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Timothy High of Sakonnet Technologies gives advice that is easy to follow but often ignored. He advocates recording the rationale for decisions. He questions the value of most design documentation because it is hard to keep up to date. The rationale for decisions, on the other hand, doesn't require changes and is a valuable resource for the life of the project. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Requirements</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Another theme of the book is requirements. Understanding, examining, and negotiating requirements and turning them into specifications is one of an architect's key jobs. Everyone understands that this process is a negotiation that must balance the needs of customers, funders, and developers. Eben Hewitt puts forth the beautiful metaphor of a consommé -- an extremely clarified broth achieved by repeatedly straining out the solids that cloud it. You must test the language of the requirements again and again until it is clear. This reminds me of the Mary Had a Little Lamb heuristic in Gause & Weinberg's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Exploring Requirements</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> (Micro Review, Sept/Oct 2001), another book that all software architects should read. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Many of the contributions boil down to pushing back against stated requirements in various ways. Einar Landre of StatoilHydro advises seeking the value in the requirement. He tells the story of the F-16 Falcon aircraft for which an initial requirement was speeds of Mach 2 to 2.5. By asking why, the contractor was able to change the requirement to an agile aircraft that can accelerate quickly to escape from combat. Similarly, Eben Hewitt tells you not to rush to solve the problem. First interrogate it to see if you can change it into a more tractable one. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Keith Braithwaite of Zuhlke exhorts us to quantify requirements. Fast, responsive, and extensible, for example, are terms that mean different things to different people. Developments based on such terms can lead to serious disputes at acceptance time. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Assumptions, as we all know, can be dangerous. Timothy High advises us to challenge assumptions, especially our own. Urban myths -- or even facts that used to be true -- can lead us away from excellent solutions to design problems. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Not all requirements can or should be satisfied. Good design involves tradeoffs. Mark Richards of Collaborative Consulting recounts the story of the Vasa, an early 17th century Swedish ship that satisfied all of its requirements and sank the first time it fired its guns. Bill de hÓra of NewBay Software says that requirements often come in threes (like fast, cheap, and accurate) and that you should be prepared to pick two and jettison the third. When a requirement seems absolute, be skeptical and ask why. Dave Quick of Thoughtful Arts puts it another way: Scope is the enemy of success. The greater the scope, the worse the chances of success. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Another way to test requirements, according to Stephen Jones, is to stretch key dimensions to see what breaks. This kind of stress testing can identify future problems long before they occur. It enables the necessary changes before the design becomes set in stone. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A number of contributors show concern for end users. Your customer may not be the end user, as Eben Hewitt points out, but your customer won't succeed if the system serves end users poorly. Keith Braithwaite, following Heidegger, uses the german term zuhanden to suggest that systems should be invisible to users. However, Steve Talbott in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Devices of the Soul</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> (Micro Review, July/Aug 2007) takes the opposite point of view: Because it is so important to remain conscious of the assumptions and unseen factors that affect us, it's a good idea not to forget about our tools. An invisible tool still embodies the ideals and assumptions of its creator. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Pitfalls</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Many contributors offer advice about pitfalls and how to avoid them. Avoiding unnecessary complexity or generalization is a common theme. Neal Ford of ThoughtWorks defines accidental complexity as the complications that arise as byproducts of addressing the essential complexity of the problem. Often accidental complexity comes from adopting frameworks that are too general or fail to match the problem. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Kevlin Henney puts it another way: simplicity before generality, use before reuse. Eric Hawthorne says to choose frameworks that stick to their own domain and don't impose unnecessary requirements. Keith Braithwaite points out that the real world has multiple, inconsistent, overlapping frameworks. Sometimes it works to use each in its own domain. Or as Randy Stafford of Oracle puts it, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Exercise contextual sense to understand what works in a given domain. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The editor of the book, Richard Monson-Haefel, contributes his own pitfall. Avoid trying to future-proof the system, because you can't predict the future. Trying to guess the technologies of the future can lead to analysis paralysis. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Design and Development Approaches</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">As you would expect in a book about architecture, design and development approaches receive a lot of attention. Most contributors implicitly or explicitly advocate iterative and incremental processes. Bill de hÓra summarizes this view by saying that great software is grown, not built. Similarly, David Bartlett advocates Martin Fowler's continuous integration (CI) approach, which includes automated builds and testing at frequent intervals. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dan Chak of CourseAdvisor, however, focuses on designing the underlying database. He feels that the data structures and relationships that underlie applications do not evolve rapidly and require a complex, comprehensive technical design up front. The resulting solid and self-protective data fortress will save application data from the inevitable bugs in the application level. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">George Malamidis of TrafficBroker adopts the language of business. He says that every architectural decision is an investment. You should consider the return on investment (ROI). This is true whether you use an agile process or the waterfall model. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">George Holpe of Google says welcome to the real world. He implies that most software engineers are clinging to a bygone world of predictably ordered processes controlled by the program rather than by external events. In that world, systems are tightly, rather than loosely, coupled. He quickly tears down that straw man, using the word "scary" a couple of times to characterize the new environment. I get his point, and he's certainly right about the need for distributed, loosely coupled, event-driven systems, but I'd like to point out that we were building event-driven systems in the 1960s, so the idea isn't all that new. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Several other contributors also use uncertainty to their advantage. Kelvin Hanley suggests than when you come to a fork in the road, design so that choosing between the two branches has fewer consequences. Erik Doernenberg of ThoughtWorks suggests trying both branches and deferring the choice until it's obvious which is better. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Performance and Maintenance</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Most of the life of a successful software project happens after its initial installation. Many of the contributors address issues about performance and maintenance. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Randy Stafford points out that application architecture determines performance. Rebecca Parsons of ThoughtWorks advocates beginning performance testing early in the development process. This can help you identify problems early. It also gives you an ongoing record that shows which changes helped or hurt performance. Craig Russell of Sun Microsystems takes a broader view and advocates looking at the performance of the developers implementing the design. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Tools and Techniques</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I don't have room to go into all of the suggestions about tools and techniques. One that tickled me is Paul Homer's suggestion that you can get a good idea of how a system works by looking at its underlying data structures. In 1967 I attended Butler Lampson's course on operating systems at UC Berkeley. Lampson made exactly that point. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Architects</span></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Many contributions address the necessary qualities or skills of software architects. Many see themselves as leaders of the development project and focus their comments on how to interact with developers. Many say to lead by example or to keep a hand in the development work. The objectives are to maintain the respect of the developers and to experience the design from the point of view of a developer. It's easier to recognize design mistakes if you're the one who has to implement them. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Many stress the importance of maintaining respectful and open relationships with developers. Evan Cofsky of Virgin Charter invokes a taxonomy in Neal Stephenson's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Cryptonomicon</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. Architects are kings and must provide opportunities for elves, dwarves, and wizards. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Many also look at the social or ethical aspects of an architect's work. Barry Hawkins advises valuing stewardship over showmanship. As he points out, you are playing with other people's money. Michael Nygard points out that many decisions restrict or enable end user behavior. A few days of programming time may save end users a few seconds each time they use a feature. With many users and many repetitions, that could be a huge savings for them, but at a cost that you won't recoup. It certainly raises an ethical question. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Yi Zhou tells architects to take responsibility for their decisions. That means putting it in writing and communicating it to everybody it affects. You must also follow through to ensure that developers implement your decision, and you must review the decision periodically to see how it's working out. Taking responsibility also means not making decisions that you're not qualified to make. Delegate those decisions to experts. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I hope this review gives you an idea of the flavor of the book. If you design software, you're sure to find enough nuggets of information in it to justify its price many times over. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-61808559530068571222009-04-01T21:10:00.000-07:002009-07-09T22:23:39.605-07:00Software Testing, Freelancing<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the March/April 2009 issue of IEEE Micro © 2009 IEEE.</span><br /></span><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">This time I look at two subjects that confuse a lot of people and give rise to a great deal of wishful thinking. Misconceptions about software testing can cause great damage to large and small enterprises. Misconceptions about freelancing can be catastrophic for individual entrepreneurs.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Software testing</span></b></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Perfect Software and Other Illusions About Testing</span></b></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> by Gerald Weinberg (Dorset House, New York NY, 2008, 198pp, www.dorsethouse.com, ISBN 978-0-932633-69-9, $29.95)</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Testing is a sampling process designed to obtain information to use in decision making. Some testing activities entail banging on a keyboard, but many others do not. Suggesting a design review, for example, is a form of testing and a developer's reason for not wishing to submit to a review can be a useful test result. Many people see testing purely from the banging on keys point of view. That and other misconceptions lead to painful consequences for them. Gerald Weinberg, a self-described empathic person, has written this book to ease their pain. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Weinberg has been in this business a long time. He was an old timer in 1973, when I first read his enormously influential <i>Psychology of Computer Programming</i>, and he has been an effective and productive writer and consultant in the field of developing and testing software ever since. I have reviewed several of his books in my columns over the years. In addition, many books by other authors, especially those published by Dorset House, show the profound influence of Weinberg's style and approach.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The insights of the late Virginia Satir, a family therapist, inform this book, as they inform much of Weinberg's work about the social aspects of managing software development. Weinberg applies Satir's decomposition of communication into intake, meaning, significance, and response to structure his lessons about how to use testing. He also uses her insights about defensiveness and survival rules to understand the natural immunity to information that people often experience in threatening situations. Nonetheless, there is no new-age mumbo jumbo in this book. Weinberg translates all of his psychological insights into practical terms.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The book's title fallacy concerns the widely held belief among the general public that companies could produce bug-free software if only they tested everything before selling it. This belief falls apart upon cursory examination. Testing "everything" is not possible in a finite amount of time. Furthermore, while testing can identify problems, it cannot correct them. Testing can only provide information. Those in charge of a project can use that information to help them assess the risks associated with various options -- such as shipping the product or sending it back to the developers for more work. This decision is not always easy, because fixing one problem often leads to introducing or uncovering another, sometimes more serious problem.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Because testing can only provide information, you should test only if you need information to help you make a decision. Furthermore, written test reports rarely tell everything that the testers know, so if you want your money's worth from testing, you need to question and interpret the results. It also follows that testers do not produce decisions. Bad managers ask testers if the product is ready to ship. Good managers ask testers what they found, then use that and other information to help them make their own decisions. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Weinberg has seen the insides of far more projects than most of us have and has worked with some relatively dysfunctional organizations. His stories of scapegoating, intimidation, and other misuse of testers are hair raising. If you work under such conditions, you need to read this book right away.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Weinberg seems to have developed a special style just for this book. His chapters average about nine pages. Each ends with a short summary and a long list of common mistakes. The mistakes section reiterates the earlier chapter material in negative form. For example, his chapter on information intake explains why you should choose which information to look for among the large amount of raw data available to you. The first common mistake at the end of the chapter is "Not thinking about what information you're after. Don't just take what comes. You have choices."</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">As in many of his other books, Weinberg presents some lessons in the form of vignettes. For example, he builds his chapter about major testing fallacies around a few hours in the life of Rose, the new testing manager. The dialog is contrived, and the realistic touches (Rose spears a pickle with her fork and waits for Barry to finish his chili) are lame. Nonetheless, Weinberg uses this form effectively. He shows how the pressures on the different players combine with their partial understanding (or misunderstanding) of the situation to lead to scapegoating, turf battles, and finger pointing.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Weinberg presents a breakdown of bug fixing that accounts for a lot of inefficiency and delay in software development projects. Testing can uncover an anomaly, after which further testing merges into another phase called pinpointing, or isolating the conditions under which the anomaly occurs. Failure to agree on who is responsible for pinpointing leads to many conflicts between testers and developers.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Pinpointing leads to locating, which means determining the section of code in which the problem resides. Few organizations regard locating as part of testing, but a desperate developer might be tempted to return the bug to the tester for "more information."</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Between locating and fixing comes another important step: determining significance. This is a management function belonging to neither testers nor developers. Many stakeholders can contribute to this process. Ultimately, someone must weigh the costs of both alternatives. Fixing the bug takes time and effort and might break something else. Leaving it as is can result in other costs, such as service calls or lost sales. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">One of the biggest problems associated with testing is how it interacts with the schedule. In an ideal development process, testing begins before the project, because deciding whether on not to do a project depends upon information gleaned from some form of testing. Then testing continues through all phases of the project. Unfortunately, most project managers follow a different model.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Typical projects have schedules that include a block of time labeled testing at the end. This block does double duty as a buffer to accommodate slips in the development schedule. In a good project, testers participate in reviewing the usual project artifacts -- market requirement documents, functional specs, user interface specs, detailed design specs, and documentation plans. In a bad project they may be handed a functional spec and told to develop a test plan that tests everything. In either case, unless they work alongside the developers throughout the project, they do not usually find problems until long after those problems enter the product. What could have been fixed easily months earlier now becomes an obstacle to delivery. A project that was "on schedule" until the testers got hold of it is now in danger of slipping. At that point, it's easy to blame the problems on testing.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Another distinction that Weinberg makes is between testing and demonstrating. If you know the "test" result in advance and are only running it to give potential customers a good feeling, you are not testing. Testing always seeks to find new information. Somewhere near the level of Gianni Schicchi in Weinberg's Inferno are the sellers of expensive testing systems who use such fake tests to support unsupportable claims about their products. Vendors who claim that their products will do all the work without receiving extensive explanations about what the programs they are testing are supposed to achieve are simply charlatans in Weinberg's view. Weinberg is firm in his belief that machines will never replace brains when it comes to software testing. Testing is an interactive process of investigation in which each finding leads to new questions.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Like all of Weinberg's books, every page of this one has wonderful insights and advice. If you have anything to do with software development, you should get a copy and read it at least twice.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Freelancing</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><i><b>The Principles of Successful Freelancing</b></i> by Miles Burke (Sitepoint, Collingwood Australia, 2008, 206pp, www.sitepoint.com, ISBN 978-0-9804552-4-3, $39.95)</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">SitePoint is a small publisher targeting web professionals. Its books deal with SQL, CSS, HTML, ASP.NET, and similar staples of the browser-based world. Miles Burke is a freelance web developer, and he has written a book for others who wish to enter that arena. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">I confess that I was put off by the lax editing and the Australian jargon of this book, but if you can get past that, it has a lot of useful content for people who want to set out on their own. Other books for freelancers (for example, <i>Secrets of Consulting</i> by Gerald Weinberg) focus on advanced topics. This book lays out the basics. If you read this book carefully, you won't make any major omissions as you prepare for your freelance career. In fact, at every stage, Burke puts on the brakes and urges you to move slowly.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Many people jump into freelancing because they have just lost their jobs. Such an approach has little chance of success in most cases, because starting a business requires a financial cushion that few recently fired workers have. Also, those who have never worked for themselves may overlook expenses like self-employment taxes, insurance, sick days, vacations, and the like. Burke shows you how to make the necessary computations and set your rates accordingly. You may have to adjust a little if you don't live in Australia, but many of the points he makes apply in the USA as well.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Burke covers all the bases -- from not using stolen software to negotiating with your family for an efficient work area in your home. He also gives good advice about how to find work, how to relate to clients, and how to balance life and work when they all happen in the same place. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">If you are considering a career as a freelancer, especially in the web design area, you should find this book well worth its price.</span></div><div><br /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-28874426080390817342009-02-02T01:44:00.000-08:002009-01-27T21:48:53.325-08:00Hot, Flat, Crowded<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the January/February 2009 issue of IEEE Micro © 2009 IEEE.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The Italian political philosopher and pragmatist Niccolo Michiavelli once wrote about the difficulties of change. An English version of his much quoted aphorism is as follows:</span></div><div><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. The innovator has the enmity of all who profit by the preservation of the old system and only the lukewarm defense of those who would gain by the new system.</span></blockquote></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">This time I look at a prescription for a new system for dealing with the world's energy needs.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> by Thomas L Friedman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York NY, 2008, 448pp, ISBN 978-0-374-16685-4, $27.95)</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Tom Friedman has been with the New York Times since 1981, when he signed on as an energy reporter. He is now a foreign affairs columnist. His first two books deal with the Middle East. His third, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The World Is Flat</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> (see Micro Review, May/June 2005), deals with globalization. In this, his fourth book, he returns to energy, bringing to bear his broad understanding and experience of global issues and the Middle East. Though the book is about global systems, he has written it as an American and addressed it to Americans. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Friedman uses the phrase "hot, flat, and crowded" to refer to the three themes that are pushing the world into what he calls the Energy-Climate Era: </span></div><div><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Global climate change.</span></li></ul><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The emergence of new, globally connected middle classes in China, India, Russia, and elsewhere.</span></li></ul><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Worldwide population growth.</span></li></ul></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">He calls it the Energy-Climate Era, because energy and climate are the principal issues that the world will face for many years to come. These issues underlie and manifest themselves in the following big problems:</span></div><div><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Increasing population and the rise of middle classes have led to a sharp increase in demand for natural resources and energy.</span></li></ul></div><div><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The huge amounts we spend on crude oil and natural gas have strengthened dictatorships in Russia, Venezuela, and the Middle East and funded some of our worst enemies.</span></li></ul></div><div><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Vast emissions from energy production have overwhelmed the mechanisms that kept the level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere relatively constant for a long time. Increasing levels are causing worldwide climate change.</span></li></ul><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Access to energy has become increasingly important, but more than a billion people are not attached to a power grid. Many of these "energy poor" are using inefficient, dirty, ad hoc methods to obtain electricity.</span></li></ul></div><div><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Flattening and crowding have led to destruction and disappearance of critical ecosystems. Species are disappearing at an alarming rate. </span></li></ul></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Because many people contend that human activity is not a major factor in climate change, Friedman addresses that issue -- first with a lot of science and then with a Pascal bet. The mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that even though you might not be able to prove it, you should live as if God exists. Such a lifestyle, he contends, is intrinsically good, regardless of whether God exists or not. Applying this reasoning to climate change, Friedman says that changing our economy to use energy efficiently and to generate it from clean sources will benefit us greatly, even if "global warming" is a hoax. Of course, getting to that changed economy is not trivial, despite the proliferation of articles with titles like </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Seven Easy Ways to Save the Earth in Fifteen Minutes a Day</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">. Friedman impresses us with the magnitude of the task.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 270 parts per million (ppm). If human activity stops tomorrow, the level will continue to rise because of mechanisms already in motion. Friedman believes that a workable goal is to manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable. He translates this into slowing the growth of the carbon dioxide level, so it reaches a maximum of less than 550 ppm around 2050. Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala of Princeton University have computed the scale of the necessary programs, assuming that those programs start now and are completely in place by 2050. Some of their programs overlap or are alternate approaches. Here are some of the key programs:</span></div><div><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">For two billion automobiles, double the fuel efficiency to 60 miles per gallon, halve the number of miles per year to 5000, or change the fuel to ethanol or hydrogen.</span></li></ul></div><div><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">For 800 to 1600 large coal-fired plants, sequester all of the carbon emissions, increase efficiency from the current 40% to 60%, or fuel them instead with natural gas. </span></li></ul></div><div><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Replace all coal-fired plants by generating twice as much energy as currently from nuclear plants, 40 times as much from wind, or 700 times as much from solar.</span></li></ul></div><div><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Cut by 25% the electricity used by homes, offices, and stores.</span></li></ul></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">There are more, but these give an idea of the scale of the problem. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Friedman explains the current power distribution system. It is a loosely connected network (called a grid) of power companies (called utilities), all regulated by the states in which they operate. The utilities all participate in the following bargain: they can operate as monopolies as long as they provide a cheap, reliable, ubiquitous source of electrons. Unfortunately, the grid provides little support for the kind of innovations needed to reduce power use. The grid is huge, unintelligent, decentralized, unregulated, and poorly integrated. Its main defects are that it has no two-way communication, and there is no way to vary the price by load or time of day. Furthermore, the utilities operate under a business model that rewards them for generating and selling more power but not for promoting or facilitating efficiency. Friedman sees a smart grid and a new business model as essential to a sustainable energy system. The question is how to get there. Friedman's answer is to encourage innovation.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Near the bottom of page 243, Friedman buries the following:</span></div><div><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">If you take only one thing away from this book, take this: We are not going to regulate our way out of the problems of the Energy-Climate Era. We can only innovate our way out, and the only way to do that is to mobilize [the marketplace].</span></blockquote></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">This is the essence of Friedman's proposal for replacing our current unsustainable energy system with a sustainable one: shape the marketplace so that this is the inevitable outcome, then let the free market system work. For those who don't consider this an example of a free market, Friedman has an answer: our current free market isn't free either. He points out that what he calls the fraudulent hiding of the true costs of resource extraction and consumption shapes the current market. In addition he cites regulatory anomalies like the difference in import tarrifs between Brazilian ethanol (54 cents per gallon) and Saudi Arabian crude oil (3 cents per gallon).</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Friedman says that the market is like a garden to be shaped into an ecosystem for energy innovation. The shaping takes the form of an intelligently designed system of policies, tax incentives/disincentives, and regulations. He doesn't want to pick winners, but the entrenched interests are like kudzu. Uprooting them might be the hardest part of the job.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Friedman believes that the simplest way to shape the market is to provide a price signal, and he quotes from his interviews with the chief executive officers of General Electric and DuPont to support that view. A price signal can take many forms, but in essence it is a fixed target that developers of alternative energy sources can shoot at in their long term planning. To understand why this is important, consider the price of crude oil, which is largely controlled by a cartel, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The price tends to rise and fall by substantial amounts. Its rises stimulate development of alternative energy sources. Then it falls, and the companies developing the alternatives go out of business.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">One price signal would be a government guarantee of a minimum gasoline price. For example, when gasoline prices exceeded $4.00 per gallon in the summer of 2008, the government could have said that for each dollar the price dropped, the tax would increase 95 cents. This would have told alternative fuel developers what price to shoot at. Instead, as autumn gasoline prices dropped to below half of the summer levels, alternative fuel developers were forced to change or abandon their plans.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Another kind of price signal, applicable to all energy production, not just vehicle fuel, is a carbon cap-and-trade regime. In this approach a controlling authority sets a limit on the total emissions of carbon from all sources in an upcoming time period. It then distributes individual limits to all possible emitters in the form of credits. The credits add up to the total emissions limit. Emitters who do not have enough credits to cover their emissions must buy them from someone else or pay a severe penalty. At the end of the covered time period, the authority sets a new, presumably lower, emissions limit for the next period and issues new credits accordingly.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">An alternative to a cap-and-trade regime is a carbon tax. Emitters pay an amount that depends on the amount of carbon they emit. This is simpler than a cap-and-trade system. Each has advantages and disadvantages, which Friedman explores. Although the cap-and-trade system gives "environmental certainty" by limiting total emissions, Friedman prefers the carbon tax because it is more transparent.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">A price signal that some countries (and Texas) already use is a renewable energy mandate. The controlling authority specifies a percentage of total power generation that must come from sources (for example, windmills or solar cells) that do not emit carbon. The authority then increases the percentage over time. European countries have done this to varying degrees, which is why the US company First Solar finds more business in Germany, Spain, France, Greece, and Portugal than in the United States. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Regardless of the form it takes, a price signal requires our leaders to make a long term commitment to a complex plan. This is why Friedman asks whether democracy can survive complexity. He envies the Chinese government's ability to dictate policies and have a reasonable expectation that all levels of the society will implement those policies. "If only we could be China for a day," he says, "but not for two days." In earlier crises, leaders took control to enable them to act decisively. Lincoln asserted power over the states, and Franklin Roosevelt expanded and strengthened the Federal government. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">US energy policy, like our system of government, is designed to make inaction easy and transformational action hard. Among the cooks stirring this broth are state regulators, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Friedman characterizes the resulting policy as follows: maximize demand, minimize domestic sources, and make up the difference by borrowing huge sums of money to pay to those who hate us. To centralize energy policy, Friedman proposes a real Department of Energy. He points out that the current department with that name is concerned mainly with watching over our nuclear weapons.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Friedman provides many success stories of green projects. For example, US troops in Iraq used diesel-powered generators to provide electricity for a remote desert base. Transporting diesel fuel to the base exposed them to the danger of attacks that were hard to defend against. By insulating their tents, they were able to reduce their air conditioning power needs to a level they could provide from wind and solar sources. They even had power left over to give to a nearby village. This example shows the power of a price signal. Considering the costs of transporting and defending shipments of diesel fuel, the Army found it easy to justify the costs of becoming energy self-sufficient.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Another example is the conversion of 7.5% of New York City's taxicabs to hybrid vehicles. This example shows the effects of regulation. The city had to remove regulations that forced taxis to be large and heavy. Moving forward from this success, New York is trying to achieve similar increases in the efficiency of limousines.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">A main thesis of the book is that transforming our energy system is a key to remaining a world leader in the years to come. If we do not lead, other countries will, and we will fall behind. If other countries, particularly China, try to follow the same path we followed, we have little hope of averting catastrophic climate change. If we lead the way to a green revolution, other countries will follow, and we will remain a world leader. In other words, as Friedman puts it, green is the new red, white, and blue.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Friedman examines what is happening in China. As the world's most populous country and the one with the fastest growing economy, China is the key to successfully transforming our energy system. The Chinese government seems to have recognized the problem and committed themselves to producing cleaner energy, but they have competing priorities. The bargain between the Chinese government and the Chinese people is "we rule, and you rapidly become more prosperous." This means that they can't afford to stop the bus. They have to swap out the dirty engine and replace it with a clean one without slowing down. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">This review focuses on a few key points, scratches the surface of others, and completely ignores parts of the book. Friedman is a thorough and careful reporter. As he showed in earlier books, he is good at understanding how issues interact. He tells compelling stories to illustrate his points. If you want to understand the workings of the worldwide energy system and how it interacts with population growth and climate change, you should study this book.</span></div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-88499092977142625632008-10-26T20:03:00.000-07:002013-07-11T17:13:49.446-07:00Effective Java, Thoughtworks Anthology, Javascript: The Good Parts<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the September/October 2008 issue of IEEE Micro © 2008 IEEE.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Software Development Patterns</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">This time I look at three books about programming. None of them has the word "patterns" in its title, and none of them claims to deal with patterns or best practices, but that is what they are all about.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Effective Java, 2d ed</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> by Joshua Block (Addison-Wesley, Upper Saddle River NJ, 2008, 368pp, ISBN 978-0-321-35668-0, $49.99)</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">When I reviewed the first edition of this book (Micro Review, July/Aug 2002), I had never met Josh Bloch. Several years later, however, I was visiting the Google booth at JavaOne, when Josh came up to me and told me that my review had launched his book. He believed this because when my review appeared, his book had already been out for a year with modest sales, and his sales then increased substantially. I don't believe that my review had much to do with it. The book has a lot of substance, and it takes time for people to digest it and spread the word. Nonetheless, I recently took advantage of his gratitude to persude him to give me a copy of the new edition.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The first edition contains 57 short essays, called items. The new edition has 78 items. A few of the original items have disappeared, and Josh has added items to reflect the important changes to Java since 2001. He was a major player on the teams that developed generics, enum types, annotations, autoboxing, and the Java 5 for-each loop and concurrency library. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">In 2004, Josh moved from Sun to Google, where he continues to guide the evolution of the language but now also develops Java libraries that use the new features. Thus he knows Java both as a language designer and a language user. There is probably no other person who could have written this book with the same degree of insight and experience.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">If you ever have a chance to hear Josh talk, don't miss it. He is an excellent teacher, because he explains complex points clearly. That talent shines through the pages of this book as well. The items that Josh discusses are quite complex, even abstruse. Yet any experienced Java programmer can understand them.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">My review of the first edition highlights many good points that are still good in this one. What I concluded about the first edition remains true of this one. Every bit of this book is essential for Java designers. Reading this book before you start delivering products can easily repay its cost thousands of times.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The ThoughtWorks Anthology -- Essays on Software Technology and Innovation</span></span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">by members of the ThoughtWorks staff (Pragmatic Bookshelf, Raleigh NC, 2008, 234pp, ISBN 978-1-934356-14-2, $38.95)</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">ThoughtWorks is a software development firm that specializes in fighting software bloat. To this end they have developed techniques for programming, building, testing, and delivering applications efficiently. The essays in this book present several of these techniques.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">ThoughtWorks's founder, Roy Singham lays out his vision in the first essay. He talks about "the last mile" of putting a system into production. The expression "the last mile" comes from the telecommunications industry. The high speed backbone of the global internet slows down when it reaches the "last mile" of copper wire that brings bits to and from most individual customers. People have been talking about this problem for decades, but customers have seen few improvements.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">For Singham, the last mile starts when the software meets all of its functional requirements. It ends when it is in place, delivering value to the customer. Development teams can bring a project to a conclusion rapidly and efficiently because of their tools and methodologies. Customers then begin a long, slow, expensive process. They must ensure that the new software can handle the expected workload, work well with other systems, interact with existing data without corrupting it, and protect against all sorts of unauthorized use or attacks.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Currently, developers derive functional requirements from end users who, ideally, have continual contact with the developers throughout the project. Singham suggests adding the last mile tasks to the functional requirements and involving the last mile stakeholders in the project from its inception. This should lead developers to automate much of the last mile process, just as they routinely automate builds and testing. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">In telecommunications, the Holy Grail of the last mile problem is a means by which the internet can reach any customer at full speed (for example, fiber to the home). For software, Singham sees the Holy Grail as versionless software, a means by which developers can add features directly to production systems "on the fly," without fear of unintended consequences. Neither of these visions will come to pass any time soon.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Twelve more essays round out this book. They deal with programming, managing development, maintaining web applications and service oriented architectures, and building and testing systems. Having worked with large, convoluted Ant scripts, I especially appreciate Julian Simpson's essay on refactoring techniques for such files.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">In the 1970s I worked with the late Rudolph Langer, who built a number of special purpose languages, usually on top of macro assembly languages. One of these, for example, facilitated designing pinball machines. Another made it easy to design optical forms to enable users to enter data visually. Nowadays we might call these domain specific languages (DSLs). Martin Fowler's essay explains how to use Ruby to create a DSL.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">One of my favorite essays is Jeff Bay's "Object Calisthenics." He proposes an exercise in which you must write a 1000 line Java program using the following extremely strict coding standards:</span></div>
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<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Use only one level of indentation per method.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Don't use the else keyword.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Wrap all primitives and strings.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Use only one dot per statement.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Don't abbreviate.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Keep all entities small.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Limit classes to two instance variables.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Use first class collections.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Don't use getters, setters, or properties.</span></li>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Bay explains the points that he intends this exercise to make. He wants you to encapsulate data, use polymorphism properly, avoid duplication, and appropriately model the problem that you want the code to solve. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Like most books from the Pragmatic Bookshelf, this one is full of good practical advice. If you develop software, this one should be on your bookshelf.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">JavaScript: The Good Parts -- Unearthing the Excellence in JavaScript</span></span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">by Douglas Crockford (O'Reilly, Sebastopol CA, 2008, 170pp, ISBN 978-0-596-51774-8, www.oreilly.com, $29.99)</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Douglas Cockford is a JavaScript architect at Yahoo, where he introduced and maintains the JavaScript object notation (JSON) format. He is deeply steeped in the intricacies of the JavaScript language. The target audience for this book consists of highly experienced software designers and architects who are probably working on Ajax applications. If you do a little JavaScript programming to spruce up your website and are looking for a few tips and tricks, this is not the book for you.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Early browsers used Java applets, but this technology did not catch on. JavaScript went, in too short a time, from a rough draft of a language to the main language recognized by browsers. Subsequent revisions have added features, but the basic language design remains unpolished. Cockford refers to JavaScript as a "beautiful, elegant, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The part that Cockford considers beautiful is what he calls Lisp in C's clothing. By this he means that at heart JavaScript is a functional language like Lisp or Scheme, but its syntax resembles that of C. JavaScript has objects but not classes, which confuses many casual JavaScript programmers. You can create objects from prototypes, but you can also freely add attributes and methods. You can also define objects as literals, simply by listing their attributes and methods.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Cockford sets out to show you how to create JavaScript programs that use the parts of the language that he likes and avoid the parts he considers bad. Unfortunately, you can't avoid all of the bad parts (for example, global variables, the lack of block scoping, the poor way it handles Unicode). </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Cockford's explanations of how to avoid the bad parts entail sophisticated programming. His examples require careful reading, and real mastery probably takes a lot of practice. Cockford characterizes the book as follows:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">"This book is small, but it is dense. There is a lot of material packed into it. Don't be discouraged if it takes multiple readings to get it."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Excluding the appendixes and the index, the book is 100 pages long. You probably won't read it in one sitting, but it will repay your effort. It doesn't spend much time explaining the bad parts. If you want to use those, Cockford says, read any of the other JavaScript books.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">If you are an experienced programmer familiar with many programming languages but forced to do serious development in JavaScript, this book may save you an enormous amount of trouble.</span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-40914379022928349852008-04-25T20:22:00.000-07:002008-12-18T06:15:02.355-08:00Adobe for Technical Communicators, Switching to the Mac<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the March/April 2008 issue of IEEE Micro © 2008 IEEE.</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">This time I talk about two subjects that are not the way they once were and may change again tomorrow.</span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Adobe Technical Communication Suite</span></span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">(Adobe, San Jose CA, www.adobe.com, $1599.00)</span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Fifteen years ago, the tools of the technical communicator's trade came from many companies. The most important tool for creating technical manuals was FrameMaker from Frame Technology. For newsletters, marketing pieces, and other short documents, writers also used the more agile PageMaker, a tool for composing pages, from a company named Aldus. RoboHelp, from Blue Sky (later called eHelp) emerged as the tool of choice for creating online help systems. When web browsing became popular, Macromedia brought out DreamWeaver, the HTML editor of choice. Macromedia also developed Flash technology, one of the simplest ways to add animation to online content.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Starting in the early 1980s, a company called Adobe invented Postscript, the display language that now sits inside virtually every laser printer. They also developed the premier tools for manipulating vector and bitmapped graphics: Illustrator and Photoshop. Postscript is great for the insides of printers, but not so good for interchange and multimedia, so in the early 1990s, Adobe developed Portable Document Format (PDF). More than 90% of personal computers have software to read PDF files.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">When many companies serve the same customers with different products, there is usually one outcome -- one or more companies grow by absorbing the others, and soon the customers have a small number of full service suppliers. Adobe now owns all of the products mentioned earlier in this column. Only Microsoft has a plausible claim to being a competitor.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Having accumulated a set of products for the same audience, Adobe has taken the added step of making them work together smoothly. The Technical Communication Suite (TCS) consists of FrameMaker, RoboHelp, Captivate, and Acrobat 3D. If you buy them as the TCS, they work more efficiently together, and cost less, than if you buy them separately. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">For technical communicators, FrameMaker and RoboHelp are the heart of the TCS. Captivate, which simplifies creating Flash-based demonstrations and training, may become more popular as buyers of the TCS learn how to use it. Acrobat 3D, for most technical communicators, is essentially the same as Acrobat, but with a flashy new feature (embedded 3D graphics) that most of them will never use.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">FrameMaker is the tool most technical communicators choose to create books. It manages the chapters, appendixes, indexes, and so forth in a structure called a book file. It provides ways to maintain consistent styles and formats throughout the final document. It provides a facility for including some text conditionally, based on attribute values applied to the document at publication time. Up until the TCS, FrameMaker worked with a product called WebWorks Publisher to produce HTML output from the same source files. In the TCS, RoboHelp provides HTML publishing capabilities for FrameMaker.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I first reviewed FrameMaker in the May/June 1993 Micro Review. Unlike the current version, FrameMaker 3.0 worked essentially identically on both Macintosh and PC, as well as on the Unix systems for which Frame Technology had originally designed it. FrameMaker 8 and the TCS work only in a Microsoft Windows (XP or Vista) environment. Adobe has given no indication that they will ever support this product in the Macintosh environment. On the other hand, FrameMaker 8 has a variety of new or improved features, when compared with FrameMaker 7.2:</span></div><div><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Change tracking -- at last!<br /></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">A tabbed view to facilitate working with many source files simultaneously<br /></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Improved Unicode support<br /></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Spelling and hyphenation dictionaries for 30 languages<br /></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Better XML support (but still no DTDs or schemas)<br /></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Support for Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)<br /></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Integration of rich media (for example, Flash or 3D graphics)<br /></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">An updated Frame Developer's Kit (FDK)<br /></span></li></ul></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Like any new version, FrameMaker 8 has given me a few unpleasant surprises. I encountered, as others have reported, occasional crashes or failures to complete requested operations. However, I did two serious projects with FrameMaker 8 and was able to get past the occasional problems to produce correct PDF output.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Most technical communicators who produce online help use RoboHelp to do so. It facilitates building a body of information units called topics. It provides ways to maintain consistent styles and formats, and it manages all the ways end users can navigate to and among the topics. There are many standard formats for online help -- nowadays all based on HTML -- and RoboHelp supports all of them from a single source. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I first reviewed RoboHelp (version 2.6) in the Sept/Oct 1994 Micro Review. Over the succeeding years, new RoboHelp versions came out much too frequenty, leading to internal problems in the product. According to Mike Hamilton, a former key eHelp employee, Adobe inherited a code base in December 2005 that needed massive reorganizing and bug fixes. Another problem with RoboHelp was its output of a proprietary form of HTML, based on the notorious </span><kadov><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> tags. Adobe began to attack these problems with RoboHelp 6. They have now brought out RoboHelp 7 as part of the TCS.</span></kadov></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">In the TCS, RoboHelp works well with FrameMaker. Like FrameMaker, RoboHelp provides styles, variables and conditional text. You can define a mapping between FrameMaker's sytles, variables, and conditions and RoboHelp's. The mapping facilitates importing FrameMaker output into RoboHelp. You can import FrameMaker files into RoboHelp by reference, so that RoboHelp receives subsequent changes to the FrameMaker file, or you can import as a copy, so that subsequent changes to the FrameMaker file do not affect the RoboHelp version.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">RoboHelp can also import files of a variety of formats, including Microsoft Word 2007, as well as earlier Word formats. It converts all imported files into HTML and provides a built-in HTML editor for manipulating them.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">RoboHelp projects generally contain large numbers of files, sometimes worked on simultaneously by more than one person. RoboHelp comes with a source control facility that provides locking, history, and a means to compare versions. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Captivate is new to most technical communicators. It provides ways to create simulations (annotated animated screen captures) and training materials, including quizzes. Captivate produces Flash output, so that file sizes are relatively small. It can even import PowerPoint presentations and convert them to Flash.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Acrobat is an essential tool for technical communicators. It has many quirks, and there are gurus to help you deal with them (see Micro Review Sept/Oct 2004). It provides a way of publishing reasonably sized files representing printed manuals. It provides a variety of means for reviewing and annotating documentation. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">In the TCS, Acrobat enables you to embed three dimensional figures -- the output of common computer-aided design programs -- in PDF files. Readers can then manipulate the figures without special software. You can also embed Flash, sound, and other multi-media formats. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The way I use Acrobat, I've noticed little difference since moving to the TCS. My one complaint is that printing generally takes longer. There are some documents I print routinely that used to come out quickly with my old version of Acrobat but now take so long that the printer manager sends back an error message saying that the document failed to print. If I ignore the message, the document eventually prints. I've only tried this with one printer -- my ten-year-old HP LaserJet 4000 -- so perhaps it's not a general problem.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Adobe has made it easy for technical communicators to adopt the TCS. The bundle price essentially gives you some components at no cost. Adobe also offers generous discounts to owners of earlier versions of any of the components. It also offers student discounts. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">By bundling the products of the TCS, Adobe makes it less likely that a competitor to any of these products will become a new standard. An example of such a competing product is Flare, from MadCap Software. When Adobe acquired Macromedia, which had recently acquired eHelp, members of the RoboHelp team left Adobe to found MadCap. This gives MadCap Flare immediate credibility among technical communicators. Adobe's bundling of RoboHelp into the TCS, however, creates a large barrier to a successful challenge to RoboHelp by Flare. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">If you produce technical documentation, you probably already use FrameMaker or RoboHelp. You should take advantage of this package to obtain the benefits of the greater integration. It will also give you Captivate and the 3D features of Acrobat, essentially free.</span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Switching to the Mac, Leopard Edition: The Missing Manual</span></span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">by David Pogue (O'Reilly, Sebastopol CA, 2008, 604pp, ISBN 978-0-596-51412-9, www.oreilly.com, $29.99)</span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">In 1984 I got my first Apple Macintosh computer, and I used Macs almost exclusively until the early 1990s, when Windows 3.1 became a serious competitor. Gradually I switched almost entirely to PCs. I haven't done any serious work with a Mac in many years.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Recently I had occasion to borrow a Mac to review some Mac software. I found the experience extremely frustrating. I know that a Mac can do essentially everything a PC can do, but they do it differently enough that I felt like a beginner. It reminded me of times when I've tried to express myself in a language I don't know very well. I know what I want to say, but I don't know how to say it in that language. My mind races ahead, but my tongue cannot follow. This is the problem that David Pogue attacks first. The first four chapters tell you how to accomplish things on a Mac that you already know how to do on a PC.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">If you're not just visiting, but actually emigrating from the PC to the Mac, there is still a lot more to do. You need to move your files and get used to a whole new set of application programs. While some programs work exactly the same in both environments, you may find yourself using a different browser or mail program. Many programs work almost exactly the same. Pogue lists the tiny differences to be aware of in dozens of common programs.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The remainder of the book is not so much about switching as about understanding how the Mac OS X operating system works. For example, you probably have a limited view of how networking or system preferences work in the Windows environment. Pogue explains the somewhat more comprehensible Mac versions of these subjects.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">If you are a PC user, and you need to use a Mac or are considering moving permanently to a Mac, this is an essential book. Don't leave your PC without it.</span></div><div><br /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-56501899293980169492007-12-15T17:32:00.000-08:002008-11-25T14:55:47.071-08:00Young Investigator, Agile Restrospectives, Oracle Essentials<span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'Trebuchet MS';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the November/December 2007 issue of IEEE Micro © 2007 IEEE.</span></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'Trebuchet MS';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'Trebuchet MS';font-size:13px;"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Advice for a Young Investigator</span></span></span> by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, translated by Neely Swanson and Larry W. Swanson (MIT, Cambridge MA, 1999, 172pp, ISBN 0-262-68150-1, mitpress.mit.edu, $19.95)</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852 - 1934) shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906, just over a century ago. He established the structure of the brain and nervous system as networks of neurons connected by synapses.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">In 1897, on the occasion of his induction into a Spanish scientific academy, Ramón y Cajal gave a speech in which he advised young investigators to focus their work in ways that he felt would help them avoid many of the mistakes that he made as he began his own scientific career twenty-five years earlier. The speech eventually evolved into this book, with editions in 1898, 1912, 1916, and 1923.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Ramón y Cajal lived in a time when Spain was not in the mainstream of scientific work. Much of his advice concerns overcoming this obstacle -- learning languages, studying abroad, and so forth. His advice in this area is fascinating to look back on in the light of the shifts of power and influence that occurred in the twentieth century. He pronounced German the most important language for scientists, followed by English and French. He considered Italian to be important too, but so much like Spanish that any Spaniard can read it without difficulty.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The most thoroughly obsolete part of this book concerns how a young investigator should choose and relate to his wife. One of his milder precepts in this area is as follows:</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><blockquote>As a general rule, we advise the man inclined toward science to seek in the one whom his heart has chosen a compatible psychological profile rather than beauty and wealth. In other words, he should seek feelings, tastes, and tendencies that are to a certain extent complementary to his own. He will not simply choose a woman, but a woman who belongs to him, whose best dowry will be a sensitive compliance with his wishes and a warm and full-hearted acceptance of her husband's view of life.</blockquote></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Some of Ramón y Cajal's advice is as apt today as it was a century ago. Some of the examples he gives are tied to old technologies, but the principles are still correct. For example, he warns young investigators against undue admiration of authority. Ultimately, they must find their own way and dethrone established wisdom, just as Galileo refuted Aristotle's view of gravity and Copernicus displaced Ptolemy's view of the universe.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Ramón y Cajal also warns agains the fallacy that everything important has been discovered. The twentieth century is filled with counterexamples to that nonsense.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">In his recitation of desirable intellectual qualities, Ramón y Cajal concurs with the twenty-first century view in some areas, but perhaps not entirely in others. For example, he advocates independent judgment and concentration. Few today would argue with those qualities. On the other hand, he lists passion for reputation and patriotism among his desirable intellectual qualities. Here his arguments are not as persuasive.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Ramón y Cajal adheres to the "hard work" theory. He feels that most young investigators can do good work, but that lack of self-confidence leads many to fail. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">In <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Devices of the Soul</span> (Micro Review, Jul/Aug 2007) Steve Talbott says that self forgetfulness is the reigning temptation of the technological era. He complains that we do not observe aspects of the world around us that fail to fit into our preconceived models. Ramón y Cajal would agree. He advocates specialization in the sense of mastery. His ideal investigator has the same relationship to his craft as the Waorani hunter has to his prey.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">This a fascinating book. It gives valuable insights into the changes of the last hundred years, and it contains nuggets of advice that are as valuable today as when Ramón y Cajal wrote them. I commend MIT Press for making it available, and I recommend it to any student of science.</span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great</span></span></span> by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen (Pragmatic Bookshelf, Raleigh NC, 2006, 192pp, ISBN 0-9776166-4-9, www.pragprog.com/titles/dlret, $29.95)</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">In the May/June 2001 Micro Review, I reviewed <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Project Retrospectives</span> by Norm Kerth. That book proposes a dramatic improvement over the perfunctory "post-mortems" that software teams sometimes engage in when they have finished a project. Derby and Larsen have adapted Kerth's retrospectives to work with iterative and incremental development methods. Their retrospectives cover a short stretch of development -- perhaps a few weeks -- and drive changes to goals and processes for the next short stretch.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The project retrospectives that Kerth describes can entail a week spent at a resort. Derby and Larsen describe a process that proceeds on a much tighter schedule -- perhaps an hour or so. Short meetings, like short letters, are hard to achieve. They require focus and discipline. This book defines a structure and timeline for such meetings. By concrete examples, it shows why each element of the structure is important and how to meet the goals of that element within the allotted time.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">As regular readers of this column know, Esther Derby is one of the people who work with Gerald Weinberg to produce the annual Amplify Your Effectiveness conferences. These conferences emphasize the human side of software development, and this book does the same. It shows how to identify and solve many team interaction problems that occur again and again in development projects.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">If you engage in any sort of agile development, you should read this extremely concrete and practical handbook. </span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Oracle Essentials, Fourth Edition</span></span></span> by Rick Greenwald, Robert Stackowiak, and Jonathan Stern (O'Reilly, Sebastopol CA, 2008, 406pp, ISBN 0-596-51454-9, www.oreilly.com, $39.99)</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Jonathan Stern, the author most responsible for the original edition's structure and clarity, died in March, 2007. The remaining authors dedicate this edition to him.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">A few years ago I reviewed the second edition of this book (Micro Review, July/August 2001). As I noted then, I love books like this. I wish there were more of them. I spent over a year working with the Oracle server technology publications group and wrote some of the documentation that the earlier edition of this book is based on. The few hours that I spent reading this book gave me a much better sense of all the pieces and how they fit together than I ever achieved reading or writing Oracle documentation.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">This edition does not differ greatly from earlier editions. It covers the new features of Oracle 11g: caching of query results, automatic memory management, real application testing (analyzing data from production runs), total recall (a data archive that allows querying "as of" a specified time), active data guard (simultaneous query and update of a standby database), and many other changes and additions. The authors integrated the new features into the book at the appropriate places, making the book look as if it were written from scratch for this edition.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The economics of the computer book business seem to favor books that cover a wide variety of features in a cursory way. Many books provide excellent task-oriented instructions for end users or even administrators, but give them little insight into the underlying structure and concepts.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The authors of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Oracle Essentials</span> follow a different path. They present a concise, coherent picture of the entire Oracle system. This picture does not cover every feature of Oracle, nor does it cover any feature in complete depth. The picture is broad enough and deep enough to give you a good understanding of the main structures, processes, and issues involved in planning for and deploying Oracle, developing and optimizing schemas and applications for it, and administering its use.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">One of the hardest tasks in working with Oracle is understanding the kind of big picture that this book presents. Thousands of highly skilled software developers have worked on the system over a period of more than twenty years. Inevitably, layer upon layer of enhancements have distorted and obscured the clarity of the original design. Furthermore, the system is so large and complex that people who start to work with it usually join a group that specializes in one aspect of it. Even the oldtimers in the group may not know much about the rest of the system. And because they are comfortable in their corner of the product, they may not even consider it important to orient newcomers to the whole system.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The difficulty with this situation surfaces when different groups of specialists must work together to solve a common problem. Activities ranging from developing new versions of the product to designing new applications suffer from the inability of groups of specialists to understand one another's problems and issues. For that reason, I think this book will do as much good within the walls of Oracle Corporation as it will outside.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">If you work with any aspect of Oracle, or if you'd just like to understand the ins and outs of an important complex technology, this book is a must.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></div><div><br /></div></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2150563309822666240.post-80301436624355354932007-08-26T20:37:00.000-07:002008-10-27T13:05:18.725-07:00Devices of the Soul<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">This article appears in slightly different form in the July/August 2007 issue of IEEE Micro © 2007 IEEE.</span></span><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS';"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Thinking About Technology</span></span></span><br /></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Devices of the Soul</span></span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">by Steve Talbott (O'Reilly, Sebastopol CA, 2007, 298pp, ISBN 0-596-52680-6, www.oreilly.com, $22.99)</span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">In this book, Steve Talbott distills and sharpens a message he has been working on for a long time. Here is an excerpt from my review of Talbott's </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The Future Does Not Compute</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> (Micro Review, Nov/Dec 1995):</span></div><div></div><blockquote><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">While many pundits sing the praises of the coming global village, Talbott wants us to examine their unspoken assumptions. Many seem to be saying that simple technological tools can guarantee freedom and privacy, make learning and personal growth easy, and build strong democratic communities.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Talbott sees this as wishful thinking -- magical, automatic solutions to complex human problems. He sees the effects of the new technology as an extension of a trend that runs through most of the twentieth century. We spend more and more of our lives "running on automatic."</span></div></blockquote><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Since 1995, Talbott has edited an online newsletter at www.netfuture.org. Most of the material in his new book appeared first in that newsletter. Perhaps for that reason, this book has many interwoven themes that all reinforce the basic message: Self forgetfulness is the reigning temptation of the technological era. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I often watch the CNBC program Mad Money with former hedge fund manager Jim Cramer. The other day Cramer, who likes to make classical allusions, was talking about the many voices trying to frighten people into the anti-pattern: buy high, sell low. He stuck his fingers in his ears and said, "Don't listen to them, like Ulysses." My fourteen year old daughter and I have been reading the Odyssey, so I told her this. "But that's not what Odysseus did," she replied. "He made his men lash him to the mast so he could hear the Sirens' song." I'm not sure what implications this story has for investing, but it is a key element of a central metaphor of Talbott's book. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The Sirens sang that they knew all and would tell all to those who approached. Those who listened could not resist approaching, so they perished on the Sirens' rocks. Odysseus saw that the Sirens presented a grave danger. His self-awareness allowed him to perceive the risk and to conceive the clever device that saved him.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Talbott sees the Odyssey as a story of the dawn of technology. Odysseus's growing self-awareness, apparently not so common back then, allowed him to harbor secrets and concoct the many schemes for which he was famous. He conceived and executed the plan of the Trojan Horse, which brought victory to the Greeks in the Trojan War. He devised a complex scheme to free himself and his men from the cave of the cyclops Polyphemus. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Talbott equates the Sirens' false promise to tell all with today's promises of salvation through digital technology. "You are powerless to affect the technologically mediated future," sing today's Sirens. "Come dull the pain by partaking of its wonders." Talbott believes that we are not analyzing and mitigating against the risks of technology. We are letting the repeated assurances of progress through technology lull us into self-forgetfulness.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Odysseus's technology consisted mainly of mental devices. The golden age that followed Homer's time gave rise to great advances in art, drama, philosophy, mathematics, and science. But the Greeks, except for Archimedes, did little in the area of engineering. By contrast, we are surrounded by gadgets, but we forget that they are human inventions, carrying the aims and assumptions of their creators. This is self-forgetfulness, because we can forget our own aims, assumptions, and skills as we conform our behavior, and even our thinking, to the gadget's requirements.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Talbott contrasts Odysseus, the self-aware contriver, with the cyclops Polyphemus who lived in a simple natural state. While Odysseus moved away from this natural state slowly, today we are almost completely out of touch with nature. We have learned to ignore whatever our mechanisms fail to take account of, thus making us descend to the level of the machines. Holistic medicine, for example, seeks balance, not absence of pathogens. But we do not teach doctors to detect balance, because it is not part of the western model of disease and treatment. The doctors who follow this model cannot see what is evident to the practitioners of, say, traditional Chinese medicine.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes was famous for his qualitative knowledge. He could resolve questions in the field, simply by holding a blossom up to the light. Yet even Schultes was amazed at the ability of the forest residents to distinguish ten different kinds of yagé plants by sight at great distances, even though the distinguishing criteria made no sense in the standard botanical scheme.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Talbott views the history of technology as the history of walking away from ourselves. He describes the enormous skill of Tomo, a Waorani (Auca) hunter who could "knock a hummingbird out of the air and hit a monkey in the canopy 120 feet above the forest floor." In learning to use the blowpipe, Tomo had to develop stealth, physical skills, patience, focused attention, and, most important, a qualitative understanding of the animals he hunted and the forest they lived in. He knew, without thinking about it consciously, how it felt to be the animals he hunted.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Tomo, however, preferred a shotgun -- a vastly inferior weapon for his purposes -- because of the intrinsic attraction of the object itself. This is the same sort of intrinsic attraction I have always felt in hardware stores and, more recently, in electronics stores. In Tomo's case, the shotgun might lead him to specialize in shooting large animals at close range -- a task that requires some, but far from all of his skills. It is not hard to imagine his losing the unused skills over time.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Walking away from old skills and developing new ones is not the problem. This happens whenever people grow and progress. The problem Talbott sees is the direction and emphasis of the change. We often let labor-saving technology do the parts of the job that are easy to automate and simply drop the parts that depend on skills that our machines don't have.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Another central metaphor of Talbott's book is the conversation. Talbott calls for a respectful conversation between humans and nature, and a similar conversation between the technology around us and our aware selves. Talbott's model for conversation is human relations. We grant the autonomy and worth of others, and at the same time we act in ways that affect them. The approach we take in human relations models the approach Talbott suggests in the areas of ecology and technology.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">A conversation without preconceptions or artificial boundaries necessitates the risk of offense and misunderstanding. We have limited knowledge of the effects of, say, a new industrial process, an experimental gardening technique, or even a new type of bird feeder. This ignorance mandates that we proceed cautiously, but absolute caution makes progress impossible. The important thing is to listen carefully and openly to the answer. This is essentially the approach Bill Joy advocates in his April 2000 Wired Magazine article, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The Future Does Not Need Us</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">. There he warns about genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) and the potential catastrophes they might precipitate (see Micro Review, July/August 2000).</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Bill Joy often appears paired with Ray Kurzweil, author of </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> (see Micro Review January/February 2006). Kurzweil and Joy agree on the dangers, but they disagree on how to deal with them. Joy's proposal is to restrict GNR work until we have mechanisms in place to prevent bad consequences. Kurzweil's approach is to accelerate GNR work in order to avert catastrophes and solve humanity's problems. Talbott's approach is much closer to Joy's than to Kurzweil's.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">In the conversation between our aware selves and our technology, Talbott raises the question of how our tools should act. Should they act like friends, praising our efforts and offering us companionship? Should they be as unobtrusive as possible, so we can concentrate on the tasks they are helping us with? We can rule out the first one pretty quickly. Hardly anyone likes the Microsoft paper clip. But Talbott regards the second as unhealthy too. Because it is so important to remain conscious of the assumptions and unseen factors that affect us, it's a good idea not to forget about our tools. An invisible tool still embodies the ideals and assumptions of its creator.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Talbott devotes a portion of his book to addressing the views of researchers who, like Kurzweil, paint pictures of a future when computers will think and act like people. He ridicules Rodney Brooks for saying things like "We, all of us, over-anthropomorphize human beings, who are after all mere machines." He convincingly brands Brooks as a bully who argues from ignorance.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">He also heaps scorn on certain efforts coming from the prestigious and well funded MIT Media Lab. Computers, in Talbott's view, will think and act like people only if people abandon their humanity and reduce themselves to the level of automatons. The fact that people can imagine being replaced by computers shows how far along that path the Sirens of technology have led them. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">To emphasize the aspects of humanity that computers are unlikely to achieve, Talbott tells the stories of people whose handicaps did little to impair their humanity. I don't go into those astonishing stories in this review, but I hope you will read about them when you buy the book.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Education is another main theme of the book. The essence of education,according to Talbott, is helping children develop their own connections to the world. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The Tracker</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> by Tom Brown (Prentice Hall, 1978) tells the story of how an Apache elder, Stalking Wolf, taught Brown about the wilderness. When asked a question, Stalking Wolf would not reply with the requested information. Instead he would say "go ask the mice," "feed the birds," or something of the sort to send his student off on an adventure. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Our culture, however, works against understanding the world this way. Talbott gives the example of Monty Roberts, who learned to relate to horses in a way that allowed him to persuade untamed horses to do what he wanted, quickly and without force. Roberts, however, was rediscovering what John Solomon Rarey had already published in the mid 1850s. Rarey's work, though sensational at the time, was forgotten, because it did not fit the dominant paradigm.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">As Talbott points out, every educator publicly deplores the fact-shoveling model of education, but our educational system moves further and further in that direction. Jane Healy's </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds--for Better and Worse</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> (Simon and Schuster, 1998) analyzes the use of computers in elementary school classrooms. Healy sees few benefits, especially for younger children, and many bad consequences. Nonetheless, we continue to computerize classrooms at the expense of programs with greater educational benefit (for example, art, music, physical education, reduced class sizes).</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">In a chapter called Educational Provocations, Talbott makes blunt assertions about elementary education that he hopes will stimulate discussion. The gist of this eclectic recital is that the push for computers in elementary schools comes from giant computer companies and the parents that they have frightened or enthralled. The justifications are at best unproven and are probably untrue. The change in emphasis that computers produce goes against what educators know. Students need significance, not data. They need individual attention from caring adult mentors, not more sedentary time in front of screens. Finally, nobody has even considered the potential negative effects of the technology itself on developing children. Talbott even questions whether exposing children to the Internet at all is a good idea. Children need safe places in which to develop. The Internet is not a place, and there is no effective way to make it safe.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The fact-shoveling model of education has also brought great harm to higher education. If education is just data transfer, nobody needs to pay $40,000.00 per year to a university. The computer can transfer data much more efficiently than four years of college can. The aspects of education that residence at a four year college is designed to foster are no longer highly valued in the business world. In many jobs, an obedient worker who goes to the help system for just in time learning can be more cost-effective than a worker who has learned to think, introspect, challenge, and do research. In the credentialed society, the hiring manager is happy with fungible degrees based on measurable outcomes like numbers of hours of classes taken or specific scores on standardized tests.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Talbott also addresses the question of privacy. He points out that privacy is not the same as anonymity. It only matters where we know each other well enough to care. If our social functioning is reduced to data interactions, there is nothing for privacy to attach to.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Talbott is not a Luddite. He likes and values the technology he warns us about. He doesn't want us to discard it. He wants us to become fully aware of the tradeoffs between its positive and negative effects. Only with awareness can we make rational decisions.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">This book is a highly distilled presentation of more than ten years of Talbott's thinking about these issues. This review only scratches the surface. To do Talbott's ideas justice, you should read the book, look at the works he refers to, and think deeply about the issues. I hope that you will.</span></div><div><br /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04820315386755147752noreply@blogger.com0