purple motes

My Blog, I fear that thou wilt find but few
Who fitly shalt conceive thy reasoning,
Of such hard matter dost thou entertain;
Whence, if by misadventure, chance should bring
Thee to base company (as chance may do),
Quite unaware of what thou dost contain,
I prithee, comfort thy sweet self again,
My last delight! tell them they need not fear,
And bid them own that thou art beautiful.

8 Comments

In a sample of 275 U.S. public library systems in 2005, the circulation of audio books recorded on cassette tape was 1.3 times the circulation of audio books recorded on CDs.[1] As late as 2005, many audio book borrowers apparently owned audio cassette players. For music albums, the last year that cassette tape sales exceeded CD sales was 1991.[2]

In 2006, the ratio of DVD rentals to video cassette rentals was 115. In 2006, 86% of TV households had a DVD player, and 84% had a VCR.[3]

Many persons apparently keep media technology long after new technology has superseded it. That's not a good omen for the U.S. digital television (DTV) transition.

Notes:

[1] Calculated from data in Molyneux, Robert E. (2007) "Transitions: Library Circulation and Digital Formats," in The Bowker Annual 2007: Library and Book Trade Almanac, pp.402-6.

[2] See data in 2000 10-year Music Consumer Trends Chart, RIAA 2000 Consumer Profile.

[3] See U.S. Entertainment Industry: 2006 Market Statistics, pp. 27-28.

4 Comments

Yesterday I bought an external 250 GB hard drive for $150 from a mass-market retail store. The device is only slightly larger than a pack of cards. Astonishing.

Offer Comments

According to Communications Daily (June 21), Motorola CEO Ed Zander stated in his keynote address at NXTcomm that Motorola next summer will have a mobile device that allows persons to talk and share photos at the same time. Much evidence suggests that such capability has significant value in communication.

While delivering video to mobiles is attracting more industry attention, I think that the possible upside for show-and-tell devices is bigger than for mobile video. Design and marketing will be significant challenges. On the other hand, in-stream photo sharing is closely related to highly successful mobile voice and SMS charging models. In-stream photo-sharing can easily draw upon well-established user understandings of payment for communications services. That's not the case for watching video on mobiles.

1 Comment

Typing text on a keyboard and manipulating a mouse are recent, conventional muscular routines for communication. Those routines have little relation to the muscular practices of communication that humans have used throughout their evolutionary history. Moreover, those routines are much different from muscular activities many people do for enjoyment, such as walking, playing catch, running, playing tag, swimming, and curling. Making communication services more muscularly natural and muscularly enjoyable could create additional value.

In conjunction with the use of sight and clever extra-body technology, a person can write with any muscle at speeds comparable with those of current keyboard routines. The Dasher Project allows a person to write text by directing a point across dynamic, letter-coded regions. With the appropriate linking technology, any muscle, including eye gaze movements, can direct the point to write. Such technology obviously has great value to disabled persons. For persons with a wide range of muscular possibilities, such technology allows communication service providers to offer muscular routines that are natural, enjoyable, and propitious for the specific circumstances of use.

You can use your hands in ways that are much more natural and satisfying than typing on a keyboard. Jeff Han has developed a multi-point graphical interaction surface that is pleasurable even to watch. The forthcoming Apple iPhone, 8 million of which are expected to be sold in its first year on the market, incorporates some touch-screen gestures for controlling the phone.

Highly successful products suggest the value of innovation in the space of muscular movement. Dance Dance Revolution (Dancing Stage) has brought large-muscle leg movement to video games. The Wii video console controller includes motion sensors that enable, for example, sports games to incorporate sports-typical gestures. The Apple iPhone also incorporates motion sensors, as does the recently announced DoCoMo D904i.

I'm still hoping for a mobile camera-phone that better communicates "Look at this!"

Offer Comments

A great way to study the ancient Greek trireme is to build one. Frank Welsh, a trireme enthusiast and funder, John Morrison, an ancient historian, and John Coates, a former British naval architect, established in 1982 the Trireme Trust with the following objectives:

1. To resolve a long-standing controversy about the design of this historically important type of ship
2. To discover its true performance at sea
3. To enable the realities of sea power at that time to be understood
4. To draw attention to the maritime and technical skills which were the keys to the cultural achievements and lasting influence of ancient Athens.

The Trireme Trust and Greek shipbuilders worked together to build an ancient Greek trireme. In 1987, the full-scale, fully functionally trireme Olympias was ready to be commissioned into the Greek navy and taken out for its first sea trials around the island of Poros.

I was part of the crew that rowed the Olympias in its first sea trial in the summer of 1987. The crew was collected mainly from British universities. We stayed for a couple of weeks in the Greek naval officers school on Poros. Being on the crew of an ancient Greek warship undoubtedly included great hardships and suffering. But by 1987, that job made for a very good time.

The trireme has 170 rowers arranged in three tiers: thranites (top tier), zygians (middle), and thalamians (bottom). I was a thalamian. Because the seats were fixed wooden benches, the effort of rowing was shifted towards the arms and back compared to boats with slides (rolling seats). From where I sat I couldn't see the water nor feel any breezes coming across the boat. The rowing section leaders and master would shout out instructions, and I could see and feel the rhythm of rowers both in front of me and above me.

Being down in the boat has advantages and disadvantages. It was hot. I drank a lot of water and sweated it out. Arranging fresh water supplies must have been a major challenge. Being a thalamian wouldn't be a good position for being rammed by another trireme. But it would be a great position in winter, or in battle with projectiles flying.

The boat itself is an engineering marvel. John Coates, the architect, would climb around the boat, fixing various broken parts, and talking with rowers. You can find more pictures of the boat here. That the Greeks could build hundreds of these boats 2500 years ago is amazing. That the Greeks and the Brits could together rebuild one based on scraps of archaeological and textual evidence is astonishing. I remember Mr. Coates saying that the design constraints implied much of the design.

We rowed the boat through a variety of test maneuvers. One was was to accelerate to full speed and hold that speed for a short period. Another was to reverse direction quickly and turn sharply. Given that no one had any experience, and given the difficulties of coordinating 170 rowers, the boat performed amazingly well.

A recent study has analyzed the power output of trireme crews. The study found:

rowers of ancient Athens – around 500BC – would had to have been highly elite athletes, even by modern day standards.

Says Dr Rossiter: “Ancient Athens had up to 200 triremes at any one time, and with 170 rowers in each ship, the rowers were clearly not a small elite. Yet this large group, it seems, would match up well with the best of modern athletes. Either ancient Athenians had a more efficient way of rowing the trireme or they would have to be an extremely fit group. Our data raise the interesting notion that these ancient athletes were genetically better adapted to endurance exercise than we are today.”[1]

This is an interesting finding. The historical record seems diverse enough and clear enough to rule out performance exaggeration or misreporting, an issue that always should be considered carefully. Perhaps some subtle difference in ship design made a huge difference in performance. That seems highly unlikely.

Were the ancient Greeks genetically better adapted to endurance exercise than persons around the world today? Note that "persons around the world" is the relevant comparator, because the market for athletic performance today is globalized. No negative selection for endurance seems plausible for all human beings around the globe over the past 2500 years. Genetic differences, it seems to me, isn't a plausible explanation.

Trireme crew performance is puzzling. I personally believe in the potential of modern athletes.

[1] Quote from Leeds University Press Release. These findings are also reported in Stephanie Pain, "When men were gods," New Scientist, Feb. 10, 2007, pp. 46-7. That article provides a few additional details. It notes that ancient writers consistently indicate that triremes crews could row at 13-15 kilometers per hour for 16 hours or long. Modern measurements indicate that 30% of the crew's power output is lost. But even with 100% power efficiency, the crew could not achieve ancient performance. The New Scientist article is not scholarly documentation of the study. Such documentation apparently is not yet available.

12 Comments

Imagine sitting inside a car on a blistering hot day, with the windows rolled up, without air conditioning, waiting 20 minutes for the car’s security system to reboot after you placed a call to roadside assistance. That’s a bad distribution of control logic.

A human confronting exceptional circumstances is likely to be better able to evaluate relevant information than a computer can.

Offer Comments

Developing good social networking technology requires thinking about distributing computing between humans and computers. Way back in 2002, a human-computer interface designer discussed some problems with the then-trendy idea of context-aware computing:

I suggest rather than trying to take humans out of the control loop, we keep them in the loop. Computational systems are good at gathering and aggregating data; humans are good at recognizing contexts and determining what is appropriate. Let each do what each is good at.
[Erickson (2002) p. 103]

Recognizing and respecting comparative advantage between humans and computers is also a good design principle for social networking technology.

Social networking technology that depends on a computer having better (human) social intelligence than a human challenges the designs of both. Consider a social networking application for a mobile phone called a Jerk-O-Meter. It measures the user’s voice activity and voice stress. Using these data, the application evaluates the user’s communicative performance and delivers these messages:

“Stop being a Jerk!”
“You could do better”
“Now we’re getting somewhere”
“Wow you’re a smooth talker”
[Madan & Pentland (2006), p. 6]

Another application, called Wingman3G, measures speaking time, voice rate, and vocal stress. It evaluates this data using a model of successful dating communication and produces real-time messages such as:

“Maybe you could speak a little slower?”
“You’re getting there, maybe you could relax a little?”
[Madan & Pentland (2006), p. 7]

Human brains evolved under selection for social intelligence. Digital computers did not. Human social intelligence can easily encompass that of computers and reduce their social value to the social value of recognized manners and conventions.

Compared to humans, digital systems are relatively good at routine collecting, processing, and distributing information. Information such as on-line/off-line status, communication initiation, communication addressing, communication duration, as well as word rate and stress indicators, might be valuable to humans using social networking technologies. An interesting recent paper discusses the design of shared visualizations of such information ("social proxies"). It offers six claims for good design of social proxies:

1) "Everyone sees the same thing; no user customization"
2) "Portray actions, not interpretation"
3) "Social proxies should allow deception"
4) "Support micro/macro readings"
5) "Ambiguity is useful: suggest rather than inform"
6) "Use a third-person point of view"
[see Erickson (2006), pp. 13-4, which describes these claims in more detail]

Claims 1) and 6) suggest designing social proxies to be like objects in our one, real world. Claims 2)-5) point to the comparative advantage of human social intelligence in human social interactions.

References

Erickson, Thomas (2002), "Some Problems with the Notion of Context-Aware Computing," Communications of the ACM, v. 45 no. 2 (Feb.) pp 102-4.

Erickson, Thomas (2006), "‘Social’ Systems: Designing Digital Systems that Support Social Intelligence" (pdf file).

Madan, Anmol and Alex "Sandy" Pentland (2006), VibeFones: Socially Aware Mobile Phones (pdf file).

Offer Comments

Device design is a significant problem for a show-and-tell communicator. Designing a “phone” that integrates talking and showing would be a useful project for a design school class.

Re-describing features is less costly than redesigning devices. Speaker phones are used for long, boring meetings. But a social mode is just what teenagers need. That’s right kids, just press that button and you and the friend that’s permanently attached to your hip can both talk at the same time with another friend and see and share pictures on your phone at the same time, too.

Put your phone on social mode and you all can talk and see! Who cares if you talk a little louder and adults around you can hear you? That’s their problem. Plus, they’re stupid so they won’t understand what you’re talking about anyway. Privacy? That’s for uptight geezers!

A show-and-tell social mode probably would be a lot more valuable to most mobile phone users than being able to use your Nokia N73 to take and upload photos to Flickr. Martin and his daughter could use it when communicating with Nana. The 78% of Swedish broadband customers who want to use a webcam on Christmas Eve probably would like to be able to do a “group call.” And they would probably rather not have to do it crowding around their desktop computer, wherever that’s located.

Communication devices need to move on from the design of phones. Recognizing that not all interpersonal communication is one-to-one would be a propitious place to start.

2 Comments

Attaching a camera to a mobile phone doesn’t seem to create much value. In rank order of occurrence of key Telco 2.0 events, 200 early respondents to the Telco 2.0 survey placed “voice revenue less than 20% of mobile operator total revenue” at “13/never.”

Can you use your mobile to take a photo while talking to a friend and send it to her instantly in the stream of your conversation? In other words, can you do real-time show and tell?

Recently in a bustling T-Mobile retail store, I told an energetic young service representative that I wanted a phone that would let me send a photo to the person I’m talking to. He said that all the phones could do that. I asked him to show me how it’s done. He said the he had never tried it, and asked another representative how to do it. That representative said that the phones can’t do it.

The representative in the Verizon retail store told me that he didn’t know if the phones could do it. He then whipped out his RAZR, dialed a number, and then tried to take a photo. The device produced a message saying that the camera was shut off.

In the Sprint retail store, the first representative said she didn’t know. The second said she wasn’t sure if it was possible. The third said he did it once but he didn’t remember how he did it. A customer overhearing our conversation then told us that yesterday she was making a call about a pie that had arrived damaged and she tried to take a picture of it while on the phone and it didn’t work. Oh, that’s a shame, I said.

To assuage my disappointment, the second representative in the Sprint store then told me that she had sent a text while talking on her mobile phone. I asked her if she sent the text message to the person she was talking to. She told me that, no, she had sent it to someone else.

What’s the problem with showing and telling with a phone? Technically, the problem is that normal voice calls are tightly integrated with the transport infrastructure (“circuit switched” not “VoIP” etc.) Even with mobile phones with messaging capability, Internet access, etc., the communications channel established when a person talks on the phone is a traditional voice channel. Hence placing a photo in the stream of communication isn’t possible.

Applications and networks that can support a show-and-tell mobile communicator are right around the corner. Internet telephony software from everyone can already do this. According to the Telco 2.0 preliminary survey results, in order of occurrence “a leading internet player launches a mobile telephone service” is ranked #1 (it’s already happened: AOL in Germany) and “WiFi capability available in mass-market mobile devices” is ranked #2. So show-and-tell mobile communicators will soon be available.

But will anyone show these devices to you and tell you about them?

2 Comments