I started playing with lumosity today and was instantly hooked– it’s a website that has a series of cognitive exercises testing visual attention, working memory, and processing speed. Processing speed was my favorite– it’s a series of simple arithmetic problems that you have to solve as fast as possible. I can usually just glance at the equation and know the answer, and it’s strange when I see one like ‘22 - 8′ that misses my math cache and I have to actually think for a second to come up with the answer.
I’ve been rekindling my fascination with how people process information lately– really, ever since the Heather Gold Show at SXSW. I’m a pattern matcher, I can solve problems when I manage to see the underlying structure. The implication of this is that I’ll either figure something out incredibly fast or painfully slow– painful for me, since I usually solve things quickly and I can’t quite ever figure out why I see some things so quickly and not other things. It’s also what makes me such a bad math teacher– I can see the answer like I’m looking at a picture, and don’t understand why other people don’t.
(The other obvious question is what could I accomplish if I spent less time measuring my cognitive ability and more time using it to do something.)
Labels: cognition
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Google announced a new plugin called Google Gears that allows web applications to provide functionality even when users are offline. Right now, the only application that is using the new plugin is my beloved Google Reader, so I downloaded the plugin and decided to try it out.
Most of you who know me well are well-aware of what a Google whore I am, so this is hard for me to say– Google Gears sucks, and it sucks hard.
So there I am, flying through my feeds at my usual clip, when a pop-up informs me that I’m no longer connected to the Internet and asks if I would like to work in the offline mode. I switch over to a different tab, type in www.yahoo.com, and it comes up immediately, so I’m thinking that Google Gears is mistaken. I switch back to the Reader tab, close the pop-up, and I continue reading without a hitch.
And then the pop-up happens again. And again. And again. And so I disabled Google Gears, and I’m iffy on ever re-enabling it. I dig the idea of being able to read my feeds offline, but not at the expense of my user experience when I’m reading them online. Notifying the user that the app thinks your offline is the sort of thing that should be handled by a status icon in the upper right hand corner right up until the point that the app can no longer satisfy the user’s request– the way that true desktop apps like Outlook handle it.
Blergh. Very disappointing.
Labels: tech, web2.0
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Some folks are organizing a wii tennis tournament in Brooklyn.
Really great idea; decent chance they’ll get sued for trademark infringement.
Labels: uncategorizable
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I miss the AD wonderboy so– here he is a doing a parody thing of knocked up.
Labels: uncategorizable
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(subtitle for post: why some archangels get to be the voice of god and some don’t.)
I subscribe to Powell’s Books Daily Review email, which I usually ignore– I’ve been trying to have a more balanced information diet lately, which generally means that I take a small nibble of lots of pieces of news instead of diving in deeply to any single thing. Today’s review was on Phillip Zimbardo’s new book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.
This is one of those books that has a stupid name but describes something really cool (other relevant example: “goldendoodle” to describe the cross of a golden retriever and a poodle.) My high school psychology teacher had a thing for Zimbardo, he showed up all over the place in our curriculum, and since I had a little bit of a thing for her, Zimbardo has stuck around in my mind. He’s most famous for conducting the Stanford Prison Experiment, where ordinary people were divided up into the roles of guards and prisoners and who took to those roles in a way that became downright frightening. For more information on the Stanford Prison Experiment, you should employ one of the following information-gathering techniques:
- Google “Stanford Prison Experiment“. Look at that, I provided the link for you. All you have to do is click on it. This blog is all about making you feel like you’re saving time as it encourages you to waste even more.
- Read The Lucifer Effect. Probably a good idea to take the jacket cover off and replace it with a cover with a cooler title, like “The DaVinci Code”.
- Watch the My Big Fat Greek Rush Week episode of Veronica Mars.
There are two conflicting ideas of what makes people evil– situationalism (anyone can do anything given the right circumstance) and dispositionism (some people are just evil, dammit.) The Stanford Prison Experiment seems to indicate that situationalism is largely correct, but the book (review) indicates that it’s not that simple (it never is)– even amongst the guards, there were certain guards who were more sadistic than others. It seems like the real cause is a combination of some sort of internal threshold for sadism combined with the situation at hand– there are some heroic people out there who would never torture another human being, but they are few and far between.
The book seems relevant to me in a way that it doesn’t seem to touch on explicitly– the current debate over torturing detainees in guantanamo, particularly amongst the republican presidential candidates. It’s like we get to see the large-scale distribution of people’s internal thresholds for sadism in an intense and yet distant sort of situation. One of the key themes of the book is that people aren’t good at figuring out that an authority figure has made a mistake or lost the moral compass, and so tend to follow directions from them anyway, and I wonder if that’s what we’re seeing here. All it takes is one respected figure with a low sadism threshold, and he can get the vast majority of other people to fall in line behind him.
I think a large part of the problem is that we, as a people, don’t have enough skin in the game when it comes to questions about torture and the death penalty. It’s all too easy to dehumanize someone by labeling them as ‘evil’ and then doing whatever you want to them. So I think it’s time we changed the stakes. I think every citizen should be randomly assigned to a prisoner held in guantanamo or to a convict in the prison system, and in the event that the ‘enemy combatant’ or prisoner is proven to be innocent of whatever he was charged with, everything that happened to him during his confinement is revisited on his assigned citizen. I don’t think we really do justice to these people when we, as a society, say “hey, my bad” and just let them out the door, sometimes with a little bit of money as an apology. I’d like us to make the apology much more personal. And I’d like to believe that if we knew that we or someone we loved could be sent to prison at any time, we would do a much better job of treating prisoners fairly and humanely.
Of course that’s idealistic of me– the practical effect of such a system would be to ensure that no prisoner ever had a chance of being shown to be innocent after the fact, or of ever releasing anyone from guantanamo.
(p.s.- I hope you enjoy the use of capital letters in this post, part of my newfound effort to stop torturing your eyes.)
Labels: philosophy, book reviews
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ed felten is giving away 128-bit integers/circumvention devices. get yours before they’re all gone.
Labels: uncategorizable
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i met lane becker at sxsw– here’s a picture of us on stage at the heather gold show:
lane is in green, i (characteristically) am wearing the gray sandals. (note: this picture was taken by micki krimmel, who said i had the best quote of the show. i walked around on a cloud for the rest of the day after i read that.)
i met lane right before the show, i saw him in the audience and went up to him because he had asked an interesting question at one of the panels i was at that day and i wanted to discuss it further. i had no idea he was one of the guys behind adaptive path, which is probably a good thing, for if i had known it’s unlikely i would have had the courage to talk to him about my ideas. he could not have been nicer to me, and so i’ve been a big fan ever since.
his new company, satisfaction, had a great post today on the digg user revolt. i have been fascinated by this story (not quite as fascinated as techmeme has been, but still.) ever since i wrote my first constitution at the age of nine (it was for my third grade class, and was designed to put a check on the unbridled power of the girls), i’ve loved thinking about and designing systems that allow people to interact in order to achieve a common goal.
the general theme i’ve seen in the revolt posts is that this is the ‘end of digg’. i’ve been thinking just the opposite– i think digg will become stronger as a result of the revolt. the revolt was a clear illustration that there are checks and balances in the digg system: while digg-the-company has the ability to change particular policies or aspects of the voting algorithm, digg-the-community has a very clear veto-power that they can use to reject decisions that they don’t like. i think this is hugely significant– users in editorial-driven systems like slashdot or the daily kos can write journals or diaries and complain all they like about site policies they don’t like, they don’t have any actual power to effect change. the end result of this is that users eventually get frustrated and leave and the site stagnates. the digg community has a much more powerful outlet for venting their frustration, and the net result of this is that digg-the-company is forced to change to match the ideals of digg-the-community. regardless of what you think of the decision the community made, this is what democracy is all about.
Labels: uncategorizable
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when i came across this entry in my feed reader:
i immediately thought of mono and grails, and wondered what these competing application frameworks would be doing together at emo’s. fortunately, the google search for ‘mono’ provided a number of helpful links to treatment options, so i should be getting the help i need very soon.
Labels: uncategorizable
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