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VC admits he hates boring PowerPoints

Robert Scoble — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 05:41:21 GMT

The coolest new product I saw at the Under the Radar conference was SlideRocket. It wasn’t just me, either. They won best of show overall as rated by both the judges as well as the audience. In this video you’ll hear me talking with Mitch Grasso, CEO of SlideRocket.

At one point in his presentation he really got my attention when he put a table on his presentation, just like Microsoft Powerpoint lets you do, but then hooked it up to live data from a Google Spreadsheet and the table filled in with live data. SlideRocket is a presentation system (works both in a browser as well as an Adobe AIR app) that looks a bit like PowerPoint, albeit with some cool new effects and collaboration built in, along with the ability to hook up to Web Services with a click of the mouse. He did the same thing with data from Salesforce. Oh, my. He had me eating out of his hand at that point.

Anyway, this isn’t really why I turned on my cell phone camera. Why did I do that? Well, the investor in SlideRocket was there. Who’s that? Mitchell Kurtzman, now a partner in Hummer Winblad (used to be CEO of Liberate and Powersoft) told me he hates boring PowerPoint slides.

Whoa.

At PodTech the CFO told me to be quiet when I told them that their Powerpoints should look like Steve Jobs did them. He wanted the boring “pack tons of points onto one slide with a boring, conservative background.” You know the type. Bill Gates used those in most of his talks.

I knew VCs wanted a great story and wanted the same thing we all want: to be a little entertained. It’s just that I didn’t have proof until today.

“There’s nothing deadlier than having a lot of text on a slide and then reading every word to us,” he says in the video before giving us more background about what VCs do want to see in their slide decks.

This is a short video, only 3:45 minutes, but here it is. “Tell a story.”

WordPress Hacks: Build a Photo or Movie Poster Gallery

Raj Dash — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 03:52:05 GMT

Use number #4 of my 48 Unique Ways to Use WordPress article was "image gallery/ photoblog". Item #29 was for a CSS or site awards gallery using a WordPress Gallery theme, such as the free one from OS Designer or the paid one from WP Designer. I know that OS Designer's theme can be used to build a photo or movie poster gallery, as I'll discuss shortly. I'm guessing that WP Designer's theme can be used as well.

The idea for this WordPress hack comes from Jason Schuller's visually impressive TrailerFlick site. Jason has hinted that he might someday release something similar. I couldn't wait, so I used OS Designer's gallery theme to build Posters@FilmScenic (which is still under development). That's a movie poster site, but I'm also planning to use the them to build up FotoFiler.com.

This hack is really quite easy, but there are a few things you should know.

OS Designer's gallery theme uses a thumbnail sizing plugin that allows you to change the maximum size of the thumbnail created when you upload an image (picture or movie poster). But the way the theme has been designed, you'll using more than a maximum of 225 pixels wide in the plugin's setting might cause you problems. (See below for clarification.)
This thumbnail setting refers to either dimension of a thumbnail, as displayed on the homepage of your photo or poster gallery.
For aesthetic reasons, you'll probably want to crop all your images to exactly the same dimensions before uploading them to the gallery them. For example, the movie posters at FilmScenic are 500 px w x 730 px h, which results in homepage thumbnails that are 225 w x 329 h.
Don't use overly long post titles, or the homepage items will not be aligned properly, vertically.
The theme also uses a voting plugin. You can skip it if you don't want visitors rating each image.
The permalink page for an item in the gallery is accessed by clicking on the entry title. Clicking on the image takes you to a page that you specify in a custom field for a given entry. (Keep in mind that you have to specify the thumbnail and full-sized images using custom fields. Please read the installation and usage instructions for the OS Designer theme.)

If you are setting up a photo blog and will have some images in landscape mode and others in portrait mode, I don't suggest you use this gallery. However, there is a way to get around the thumbnail sizing issue, as discussed in the section below.

Improvements

Here are some things you can do to customize your photo / movie poster gallery. (Warning: intended for advanced WordPress users not afraid of tweaking theme template files.)

Make the "Categories" mini-tab prominent. The "Tag Cloud" mini-tab is visible first by default, but if you only use galleries, you can tweak tabber.php. You'll need to move the code fragment for the category to the "top" of the code block.
Enable item text. Out of the box, the OS Designer gallery theme does not show any text that you might type in when creating a new entry. For a photo gallery, you might want to add some photo/ camera details. For a movie poster gallery, you might want to provide some movie details or even a short review. Please see my WordPress Hacks: Build a Web Directory article for details on enabling item text. (You'll need to add a WordPress function call to single.php.)
Lightbox your images. If you want a photo gallery in which some images might not conform to a uniform dimension, there's still hope for using the OS Designer gallery theme. I haven't set it up yet myself, but theoretically, you can do the following:
1. Install a "lightbox" plugin, such as Jason Schuller's Fancy Zoom, which I discussed in Jazzing Up Your Images. (You'll need to add a parameter to your "body" tag in the header.php file. The plugin has instructions.)
2. Upload two versions of each image. One will be normal, and will be linked to from the URL custom field, which is normally used to link to a page that you specify. (For example, my posters link to movie profile pages on Filmzee.) The second image should be cropped to a uniform dimension that you decide upon (500 px wide, max). When you upload this cropped image, the thumbnail will also be uniform. (The only drawback is that you'll need disk space and bandwidth for three different image files per gallery entry.)
3. Tweak index.php to change the use of the URL custom field, if necessary. Currently, you use the field to specify a page to link a thumbnail image to.
Lightbox a video trailer. For a movie poster gallery, you could go one step further to reproducing something like Jason's TrailerFlick by using a lightbox equivalent for videos such as Mediabox, Videobox or Videobox-lb. (Notes: The first Videobox is a WordPress plugins but the second one may not be. I have not tested any of the code.)

Also check out Lorelle's article on WordPress multimedia plugins for related information.

Pig bladder powder regrows human finger

Mark Frauenfelder — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:45:31 GMT

A man cut off his finger tip while working on a model plane. His brother, a medical research scientist, sent him a vial containing powdered pig bladder and told him to sprinkle on the severed finger tip. It grew back -- "flesh, blood, vessels and nail" -- in four weeks.

That powder is a substance made from pig bladders called extracellular matrix. It is a mix of protein and connective tissue surgeons often use to repair tendons and it holds some of the secrets behind the emerging new science of regenerative medicine.
"It tells the body, start that process of tissue regrowth," said Badylak.
Badlayk is one of the many scientists who now believe every tissue in the body has cells which are capable of regeneration. All scientists have to do is find enough of those cells and "direct" them to grow.
"Somehow the matrix summons the cells and tell them what to do," Badylak explained. "It helps instruct them in terms of where they need to go, how they need to differentiate - should I become a blood vessel, a nerve, a muscle cell or whatever."

Link (Thanks, Lex10!)

Marshmallow Peep wargame

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:14:47 GMT

Peep War is an edible tabletop military strategy game played with marshmellow peeps. The instructions are a free download -- I'm guessing that the game gets a lot less edible if you paint the peeps first, but you could probably do some nice terrain effects.

Each player needs the following supplies:
* Approximately 3-5 Marshmallow Peeps of a single color, or a sheet of our Peep Understudies.
* Approximately 30 jellybeans of a single color, or a sheet of our Jellybean Understudies, to represent Troops.
* Two halves of a plastic egg, or two tokens to represent Supply Centers
* 3 copies of the Invisible City Productions Peep War Hex Map.

Link (via Make)

Managing Mechanical Turk problems

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 07:20:05 GMT

Dolores Labs is a startup that helps companies solve their problems using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service (a piecework service that allows millions of casual laborers to contribute to "distributable judgment problems" -- like analyzing a large set of photos to find the faces in them, or classifying documents. The brief list of projects they've conducted to date is a fascinating glimpse into the kinds of problems that are tractable with "mechanical turks."

Document Classification: We helped Scribd, an online publisher, classify documents.
Sentiment: We labeled sentiment (buy/hold/sell) for stocks from posts on message boards.
Price Extraction: We extracted prices from popular shopping sites, as well as an open question to find the lowest price on a given product.
Search Relevance: We judged the relevance of a webpage for a search query.

Link (via Data Mining)

Aetheric Dynamo: Steampunk ghost-catching apparatus

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 11:02:50 GMT

The Aetheric Dynamo from steampunk sculptor Dan Cohen is a notional ghost-catching apparatus of great loveliness:

The primary purpose of this machine is the attraction and capture of a lower Aetheric Shell, otherwise known colloquially as a ‘ghost’ or ‘spirit. The secondary function is the transformation of the Shell into remote aetheric antennae, and the transduction of aetheromagnetic energy into electromagnetic current.

Link (Thanks, Dan!)

The Battle Over H-1B Visas Heats Up With Conflicting Reports

Michael Masnick — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 23:46:00 GMT

Last year, the supply of H-1B visas given to skilled foreign workers to work in the US, was exhausted after a single day, leading to many calls for the program to be expanded. As we get closer to this year's eligibility period, the expectation is for a similarly quick exhaustion of visas, so it's no surprise to see people rushing out studies that are both pro- and anti- H-1B extension plans. First, comes the controversy over newly released data pointing out that many of the companies who received the most H-1B visas happen to either be headquartered or have much of their operations based in India. Of course, the whole point of the H1-B is that these workers are in the US, so it's not entirely clear why it matters who the firm is. However, it does suggest that this may involve a situation where these firms are abusing the program and are not, as is required, first looking for qualified Americans to fill the jobs. Yet, just because some firms are abusing the program, it does not mean the program itself is a bad idea.

Meanwhile, Slashdot points us to an article claiming that there is no IT worker shortage, as some have claimed. The article is fairly balanced, looking at a few different recent studies that suggest there isn't a shortage -- though, there isn't much of a surplus either. It tries to reconcile the fact that companies are having difficulty hiring workers (which is undeniable) by suggesting that the problem is more with the hiring process than with the labor supply. Of course, that's just one interpretation. Another might be that many of these studies are counting all "IT workers" as equal, meaning that someone with obsolete skills or who is not particularly good, is considered the equivalent of a programming hotshot. The problem many firms are finding these days isn't that it can't find techies, but that the techies they're finding just aren't that good or qualified.

Finally, on the flip side of the coin, a study has come out dismantling the claims that H-1B visas tend to cost Americans jobs. Instead, it found the opposite was true: H-1B visas tend to create more American jobs. This is only counterintuitive if you believe that the labor market is a zero-sum game. However, as we recently noted, it is not. Bringing good workers into the US helps create more jobs here, because successful local companies help grow the economy and require even more workers. This is supported by the study, which found that for each H-1B visa issued by companies, five additional hires were made as well. With smaller companies, it was even more drastic, showing seven new hires. Furthermore, the study dispels the notion that H-1Bs are only used by companies looking to save money. It notes that when companies are facing hard times, they reduce the number of H-1B applications, suggesting that they're not being used to save money. If you've ever gone through all the paperwork (and lawyers fees) needed to hire an H-1B, you'd recognize that it's hardly a cheap or efficient process.

In the end, though, it's not hard to figure out the best path forward. The key is recognizing the simple fact that the labor market is not a zero-sum game. Bringing strong workers into the US, rather than having them compete from overseas, is much more likely to create more new jobs in the US. It shouldn't be difficult to understand this fact, though we always get angry comments from people who have trouble grasping it. It shouldn't be that complex however: if a company is doing well, it will need to hire more people. A company doesn't do well by letting the best available people (the ones who help them do well) work in other countries. This doesn't mean that it's okay for firms to abuse the H-1B process, but we need to separate the abuses (no matter how widespread) from the program itself. The goal should be to get as many smart, qualified workers working in the US, helping to expand our own economy, rather than working against it.

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Nerdfotainment

michael.lopp@gmail.com — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:16:02 GMT

I was introduced to Ask A Ninja via the following podcast. In the podcast, the Ninja complains extensively about the release of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. The gist: "Every single character has their own damned plot line and it's incredibly hard to figure out what the hell is going on”.

The third movie, At World’s End, only compounded the complexity problem. More characters, more plot lines, and more confusion. I just watched the third move for the third time and discovered another subtle moment of "Oh, that's why Calypso said that random thing in the second movie. I get it now."

Back to the Ninja. His final pitch was: "Movies shouldn't be this much work". He's wrong. Movies can be this hard, especially when they're designed for nerds.

Nerd Generation Theory

According to my math, there is a huge pile of nerds who are traipsing around their 30s. This is the Apple ][ generation and their making some bucks. Financial types call this decade of life "the accumulation years" because, traditionally, this is the time of life when you start gathering piles of cash for use during the rest of your life. You've found your ideal gig and you're hitting your stride.

Advertisers love these 30-somethings because they have large disposable incomes. Consequently, content creators love them as well, which means that for content creators to generate their own piles of cash, they need to develop entertainment targeted at the nerd demographic.

What do we know about nerds? Well, we know a lot. They need a project, are systematic thinkers, and they love puzzles and games. This brings me to a whole pile of entertainment that has shown up over the past ten years. All of which, I believe, is specifically designed for the nerd demographic, since all of the content shares a common characteristic: it's terribly complex and nerds enjoy making it more so.

J.J. Abrams is a Big Nerd.

One of the more prominent recent examples of nerd entertainment is J.J. Abrams’ Lost. If you don't follow the show, here's the pitch: "A plane leaving Sydney, Australia, headed for Los Angeles, crashes in the middle of the Pacific. The survivors end up on a mysterious island where an endless stream of bizarre, unexplained shit goes down."

I've just told you the basic premise of Lost, but I've actually told you absolutely nothing about the show. This is because Abrams has constructed an seemingly infinite set of intersecting plot lines involving all the major characters, both on the island and before they got to the island. Combine these elements with the usual science fictions elements such as immortality, time travel, and a creepy black smoke monster and you'll quickly realize that one of the biggest criticisms of the show is "I have no fucking clue what is going on".

That's right. That's the point. That's why nerds created the Lost Wiki. That's why we replay all the trailers in slow motion. We're looking for that tattoo on the shark in the third episode of the second season because AH HAH! That explains something. I'm just not sure what… yet.

Nerds are systematic thinkers, which means, for entertainment, we want to exercise our systemic comprehension muscles. We want to stare at a thing and figure out what rules define it. In the case of Lost, Abrams get this. He sprinkles hints of systems within the system of the show. He tinkers with time and with personalities to paint brief glimpses of clues. And then he changes everything because he knows that if we ever feel we've figured it out, we'll bail.

Captain Kirk Doesn’t Know He’s a Big Nerd.

Our search for entertaining complexity is not new; it’s just gone mainstream. In fact, if systemic complexity doesn't exist in a nerd-appropriate show, we'll go ahead and create it. Think about the original Star Trek series, which, in my opinion, was one of the first pieces of serious nerd entertainment.

Like Lost, the amount of content and discussion regarding the original series which hasn’t seen production in FORTY YEARS is mind-boggling. Yes, we’re still arguing about whether Captain Kirk could actually build a cannon to kill that lizard-guy . “In a battle between the Enterprise and a Star Destroyer, who would win?” (cough: Enterprise, duh, Star Destroyers can’t fucking steer.)

I've no idea how much backstory Gene Roddenberry constructed behind his characters and his stories. But I know that nerds, with their love of this show, have forced systemic complexity on it. Because if there is no project, no problem to solve, it's not engaging.

Feluf, also a Big Nerd.

Feluf is my Level 70 Night Elf in World of Warcraft. I was running Karazhan with my guild the other night and I landed two sweet Epics: Ferocious Swift Kicker boots and the Steelhawk Crossbow.

Many of you have no clue what I just said. Some nerd crap about World of Warcraft. If you have no clue whether World of Warcraft would float your boat or not, my question is: what'd you do when you read the previous paragraph? Did you Google Karazhan? How about Epics? If you did, you learned that Karazhan is a dungeon and Epics are apparently really good gear.

Unlike popular TV and movies, World of Warcraft is clearly targeted at the nerd mind set, which means it’s designed with brutal system complexity in mind. Sure, they've designed the beginning of the game to be simple and approachable, but that's how any good drug dealer builds his business: the first hit is free.

Significant engagement in World of Warcraft reveals a world chock full of complexity. You want to stop running all over the place? Well, you need a mount, and those guys show up at Level 40. To get there, you're going to have to figure out what gear is good for your class. You're going to have to learn how to make money to buy your mount, either via your profession or via building and selling goods at your local auction house. And once you get your mount at Level 40, you're already going to know there are faster Epic mounts out there. Shit.

There's a point where all this complex game drudgery sounds like life, and yeah, there is a lot of social interaction between players and guilds. But it's intersections within the system to support the system. Warcraft is built to be impossibly complex, but every player is always secretly thinking, "I can totally figure this out". Which is why Blizzard changes the system every few months.

Kaiser Soze. Unpronounceable Big Nerd

The Usual Suspects, Memento, and Donnie Darko. These movies represent some of the best of nerd entertainment, and two of these movies didn't do great at the box office. Yet all of them eventually made a pile of money because of the unique system puzzles they presented. Most folks walked out of those movies thinking, "I'm, uh, not sure quite sure what just happened to my brain". Whereas we nerds rushed home to the Internet to begin the quest of figuring out the system. IT'S A TIME TRAVEL MOVIE, RIGHT?

We followed that line of questioning up with the immediate purchase of the DVD. In the case of Donnie Darko, this not only made the movie profitable, but also resulted in eventual release of the Director’s Cut of the movie which only created more mysteries regarding that bunny who is still freaking me out.

Mr. Darcy is a Big Nerd. No, really.

Nerds have no monopoly over mind-bendingly complex plots. Anyone with a girlfriend has already endured multiple adaptations of the Jane Austen classic Pride and Prejudice. Yeah, I’ve been there. Yeah, I know the A&E version is the only adaption worth anything and I further know it’s because of that annoyingly charming Colin Firth portraying Mr. Darcy.

Yes, Mr. Darcy. Like the plots of J.J. Abrams, the arrogant intensity of Captain Kirk, and the devious hidden intentions of Kaiser Soze, Mr. Darcy is great nerd entertainment. I mean it.

Once you get past all the “doths” and “thous”, and realize there’s a lot more going on than social climbing and gold-digging, in Mr. Darcy you find a complex and nerd-worthy character. Why’s he being such an arrogant prick? SHE’S NEVER GOING TO LOVE THAT… WAIT… WHAT?

Argument about the natures and motivations of the characters in Pride and Prejudice might seem different than those in Lost or The Usual Suspects, but ultimately, we’re yelling about them because they are beautifully crafted unsolvable puzzles.

And that’s nerdfotainment.

A Mathematician’s Lament

Brian — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 02:32:31 GMT

I want to share this article with everyone. In addition to being exceedingly well written and cogent, it also says things I’ve been trying to say for years- and makes me want to say things I hadn’t thought of before. Go read it, trust me.

Unfortunately, this article made my mind want to metaphorically jump on the horse and gallop off in all directions, so the ensuing post may not be as coherent as it might be.

First, I want to point out that there is ample evidence that the majority of humans have an innate mathematical sense- one could almost make the case that having a mathematical sense is part and parcel to being human. Consider for a moment the wild popularity of music, architecture, even much of classical art, chess, go, and poker- all of which have deep mathematical underpinnings. Or consider the popularity of the game Soduko. I laugh when people tell me they like Soduko because it doesn’t involve any mathematics- the game is nothing but mathematics. When you’re playing Soduko, and you find yourself saying “Because of this two here, the two in this box can be in this column. Because of that 2, it can’t be in this other column, and because of this other 2, it can’t be in this row, therefor this last remaining square has to be a two”, what you’ve done is create a mathematical proof. It may not look like it, but it is. And, just to pound the last nail into this coffin, Soduko (generalized to larger rectangles) has been shown to be N-P Complete, meaning that it sits in nicely with number theory, abstract algebra, graph theory, and other “pure mathematics”.

The problem is that we’ve decided (or, more darkly, had it decided for us) as a society that we don’t want to teach our children math or science. Oh, we say we do. You ask people in the street should we teach our kids more math and science, and something like 93.8% of them will say “yes” (the other 6.2% will say “get away from me, you freak!”). The troubles generally start when we stop talking in safe abstractions and start actually thinking about doing something about it. At which point the conversation generally goes something like this:

Teacher: So we’ve decided to teach your kids more math and science.

Parent: Good. I want this to happen.

Teacher: OK. I’ve prepared a curriculum introducing evolution, the ancient earth theory, the big bang…

Parent: (interrupting) Wait one gosh durn minute here! What’s all this you’re teaching? Evolution? That the earth is more than 6,000 years old? What do you call THAT?

Teacher: Um, science?

Parent: That’s not what I beleive- I only want you to teach those things that I believe, or which don’t offend me. And call it Science.

This isn’t to disparage religion. Quite the contrary, in fact- despite it’s heavy use of religous terminology, it’s not about religion at all- it’s about politics. What Paul Lockhart (rightly) decries as the mind-numbing, soul-destroying aspects of “education” are, to many people, the most important part. See, mathematics- and art and literature and philosophy and history and all the other subjects if taught correctly- are about thinking for yourself, questioning, challenging, understanding instead of just reguritating. The problem with this is, once you start questioning, it’s hard to get you to only question “safe” topics. If you’re used to questioning and challenging the validity of a mathematical or scientific proof, you might start questioning or challenging the validity of an economic theory. What evidence does it have, what logic, which assumptions? If you’re used to analyzing and critiqueing art, you might start analyzing and critiqueing political platforms. What hidden meanings and analogies might this political slogan hold?

Adults (generally) do what they’re taught as children- and school teaches you to sit down, shut up, and do as you’re told. To be serfs, not citizens. It’s a citizen’s duty to question, challenge, and confront. It’s a serf’s duty to shut up and do as they’re told. As a side note, this is why I love the title of this blog (even though Robert came up with it)- Enfranchisement is not a legal state, it’s a mental state.

Note that there are attractions to being a serf, to just doing what you’re told. Firstly, it’s easy- you don’t have to think. Second, it’ s not your fault if things go wrong. And you don’t have to worry about the other serfs being different- everyone is just alike. And it’s probably easier to raise kids who sit down, shut up, and do as they’re told (three qualities not notably present for me or my siblings). And parents are an, arguably the, authority in a child’s life- and it’s uncomfortable to have a child questioning a religous, political, or social belief that the parent hasn’t questioned. So I don’t think this effect is the result of some evil genius intent on controlling the world (with his sidekick Pinky). Also, the effect is too wide spread- it’s not evil legislators in the capital enforcing this on schools- generally it’s the parents and school boards themselves. This is a grass roots sociological phenomenon. But, for whatever reason, the result is to push the teaching of math and science- and history and art and music and thinking and learning- out of schools. And to raise generation after generation of serfs, not citizens. To the detriment of our democracy and society.

Galloping off in a different direction for a moment, what he says about mathematics applies equally well to computer science- even if you don’t accept that computer science has anything to do with mathematics, or programming. Thinking of computer science as a bunch of algorithms, like quick sort or mark and sweep garbage collection, is just like thinking mathematics is arithmetic and a bunch of formulas to memorize. Mathematics, computer science, and programming are all about solving problems. What Mathematics and computer science have that programming doesn’t is generality. When you step back and ask yourself, now that you’ve solved this problem, now that you’ve made this program work, what does this imply about other problems and/or programs? You’re no longer programming, you’re no longer merely coding, you’re engaging in computer science.

If you’re programming and you’re not doing computer science, you’re screwing up.

Think about what I just said that. What I said was that if you’re programming and you’re not thinking, in a generalized and abstract way, about what you’re doing, you’re screwing up. Because if you are thinking about what you’re doing in a generalized and abstract way, you’re doing computer science. And if you’re not, you’re Cobol programming. Cobol programmers were, still are, notorious for not generalizing. If your metric of success was lines of code they were stellar- Cobol programs routinely hit multiple millions of lines of code. But even if your metric was just working programs, they were pretty good. But their code sucked. It was impossible to understand, and damned near impossible to change. Even something as simple as adding a few more digits to the date required heroic (and expensive) effort. Their code wasn’t elegant, it wasn’t art.

A common question, asked both by children of math and by programmers of computer science, is “what is this good for?” Paul Lockhart’s response is (paraphrased) “Nothing! It’s just art!”, which is where I disagree with him. It’s the wrong question, a question which makes a faulty assumption, not unlike asking someone if they’ve stopped beating their wife yet. The assumption is that the usefullness- of mathematics or of computer science- is in some sense implicit in, or part of, the subject itself. The expectation is that mathematics and computer science are a lot like auto mechanics. Once you learn automechanics, you can fix cars. If you plan on spending a lot of time fixing cars, say, by getting a job as a mechanic, it might be worthwhile learning. But if you’re not planning on working at a garage, learning more than the most basic stuff is really optional.

What is different about mathematics and computer science and physics from arithmetic and programming and auto mechanics is generality. Of course, the computer science/mere programming dichotomy is even worse, as we don’t have an excuse. Before the invention of computers, you needed humans to not just do mathematics, but arithmetic. And we still don’t have robots doing our car repair for us (it turns out there is a surprising amount of art involved in car repair- which is why it’s still a popular hobby). But we programmers don’t have any excuse- we have the perfect machine for taking over any part of our job which is tedious, boring, repetitive, and/or mechanical- the computer. A programmer should only be facing hard problems- if they’re not, they’re not taking sufficient advantage of the computer. Having the human do something the computer could do, like churn out reams of code, may make the programmer appear productive- but they’re not, not really.

But to only be solving hard problems, that requires generality. We need to not only understand what one program can teach us about another, but to express that understanding in a concrete fasion- in code. And Paul Lockhart’s point is that generality, with the attendent solving of deep problems, is something that we’ve been taught since childhood not to do. And that is the core problem.

HD TV Series Mass-Distributed for Price of an iPhone

Dean Jansen — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 23:32:01 GMT

Norwegian Public Broadcaster, NRK, recently made waves with the success of their pilot project where they put one of their full series online, in HD, without restrictive DRM, over bittorrent.

The initiative has been a huge success on every front — viewers love the super high-resolution picture and most people have reported incredibly short download times (given the file sizes). Furthermore, viewers have been downloading the episodes en-masse (around 80,000 times in the past 3 weeks). To top it all off, NRK hasn’t broken the bank to deliver the goods; in fact, they haven’t even broken a sweat.

To-date, NRK has paid a total of $350 for storage and delivery of the entire series. This information was disclosed to me by project manager Eirik Solheim; he also estimated that the bandwidth bill would have been roughly $8,000, had NRK chosen a more traditional delivery method.

Eirik shared the secret sauce behind the project:

All the HD video files were stored and delivered using Amazon’s S3 data service, which has optional bittorrent capabilities. NRK syndicated the .torrent episodes over an RSS feed, which allowed the program to work something like a podcast.

NRK recommends that people use Miro to subscribe: it’s the easiest way for folks to use BitTorrent and it fits their public-interest mission. The estimate that a high percentage of their downloaders (50% or more) are using Miro.

The ease of use is very important, because it encourages more people to participate in watching and sharing the shows. Technically, the cost to the producer for distributing to a handful of viewers, say 300, is basically the same as doing so for 1,000,000 people. This is because after a point, distribution is handled by the viewers themselves; as the number of viewers rises, the work that NRK does stays constant.

All in all, the pilot has been a major success, and is blazing a trail to wider adoption of bittorrent delivery for NRK programs. We’ll definitely post here when we get more details.

Copy Locked/In Use Files in Windows Vista [How To]

Kevin Purdy — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Windows Vista has a habit of making files unavailable for backup programs or just copying into new locations, claiming files you haven't touched are "In use," or sometimes just generically "Locked." The How-To Geek shows us a command-line utility, Hobocopy, that can find its way past the walls thrown up by the operating system's shadowy functions. You'll also learn how you can use Hobocopy as an incremental backup solution, like a less syntax-heavy version of cross-platform solution rsync. Hit the link to find Hobocopy and get step-by-step instructions.

Clive Thompson on the Benefits of Being a DIYer [DIY]

Kevin Purdy — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Wired writer Clive Thompson has a thought-provoking piece in this month's issue on the general decline in fixing and tinkering and how it affects our ingenuity, our thinking, and even our spending habits:

You see this on a personal level. If you can't get under the hood of the gadgets you buy, you're far more liable to believe the marketing hype of the corporations that sell them. When things break, you toss them and buy new ones; you accept your role as a mere consumer. "I think it makes you more passive as an individual," says Matthew Crawford, a former motorcycle repair-shop owner (and postdoctoral fellow in cultural studies) who's writing a book on the demise of mechanical aptitude in America.

Hit the link for a few upbeat signs about the growing resurgence in around-the-house aptitude, fostered by magazines like MAKE and *ahem* DIY-friendly websites. What are you comfortable trying yourself, what would you rather just buy/re-buy, and what do you wish you knew how to do? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Bookhabit’s biz model: Quick! Read ‘em while they’re cheap

David Rothman — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:55:49 GMT

Bookhabit, a spiffy new site connecting readers and new writers, will give you a break if you’re among the first to spot A Talent:

"The price of a book starts at USD2.50 and increases with its popularity, as indicated by the number of buyers. It is free for writers to post books on the site, and they receive 40% of the sale price – which compares well with the 5% to 12% writers receive on the shelf price of their books sold by retail book stores."

I myself would rather that the writer’s share be at lest 50 percent, but that’s still a good deal for authors and readers alike.

The top titles at 10:58 was Other People’s Children (10 downloads), and other featured titles were Susan in the Suburbs (1) and The Alchemist. Hey, check out the site. Keep in mind that it’s just getting started, the obvioius reason download numbers are so low. Your thoughts on the site, its biz model and the books there?

Format matters: Bookhabit offers audiobooks, too. As for e-book formats, I’ve made the heartfelt suggestion that PDF not be the sole option.

Technorati Tags: Bookhabit,Bookhabit.com

Assumption hunters, a new consulting business?

Grant McCracken — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:59:05 GMT

What is the most vexing problem in management today?

Next to setting our objectives, running a tight ship and meeting our numbers, I would argue that it's watching out for the blind side hit.

By blind side hit, I mean the kind of thing that Google did to Microsoft, that Barak did to Hillary, that hip hop did to Levi-Strauss, that Snapple did to Coca-Cola.

Watching for blind side hits is difficult because it means knowing our assumptions. And this is hard because assumptions are not for knowing, they are for making. For instance, in the late 1980s, I don't think anyone at Coke believed that a new brand could use the Mom and Pop corner store as a platform from which to stage an industry coup. I mean, get real. The Mom and Pop store was too small, too quirky, too amateur. Right? Wham! By the time, Coca-Cola understand what had happened to it, Snapple had stolen a march on the market.

The trouble with assumptions is that they are by definition invisible from view. (That's why we call them "unknown unknowns.") We hold ideas about the world without full awareness of what these ideas are or how they make us vulnerable.

Oh, I hear a voice of skepticism. Smart companies and gifted managers ferret these assumptions out. I mean, isn't that why we go to conferences? Well, sometimes. But did management find them soon enough? And did management discover all of them. Is there, somewhere out there on the far, invisible horizon, a tsunami headed our way? Sorry, but the bad news these days is always and unequivocally, "yes." Somewhere, way out there, there is an innovation that is eventually going to turn our business model upside down. It's not a question of whether, it's just a question of when.

So what to do. How about, for starters, this three step "assumption hunting" process?

1) ferret out the assumptions. Hire someone to go through the operation of daily business and capture every assumption. Philosophers are quite good at this. Anthropologists are very good at it. This is after all the way they study culture, which is, by and large, a set of assumptions that helps us think and act fluidly precisely because we don't know we are making them.

2) identify the parts of the world that could present challenges. Figure out just what the challenge is and when and how it will "come ashore."

3) Keep watch with a big board. In effect, what we are doing is "sunsetting" our assumptions with a view to discovery when they reach they end of their useful lives.

If I were Pine and/or Gilmore, I would write the book, get on the lecture tour, build the consulting company, and make a fortune. But hey, reader, feel free.

Explanations

I took this photo with my iPhone, now equipped with a special feature (OS 1.1.7) that allows the camera to capture never-before-seen assumptions "on film." This particular assumption is large and powerful, and we were lucky to bag it. The boys in the lap are giving it a once over now.

Follow up

Those of you are wondering what happened yesterday when I was waiting for royalty at PJ Clarke's in NYC. Nothing. But our guest didn't show. I guess if you're royalty, you're allowed. Andrew Creighton (McCann Canada) and I took the opportunity to reinvent the universe over a couple of beers.

Games People Play

Reginald Braithwaite — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 11:00:00 GMT

My thesis when I wrote The Naïve Approach to Hiring People was that we can learn thing about hiring people from the things we know about document classification. In that post, I talked a little about Naïve Bayesian Filters and what they teach us about selecting people to interview.

I wasn’t actually suggesting we stop using humans to select résumés or decide whom to interview based on their answers to phone screen questions, I was asking us to think about what we can transfer from our knowledge about document classification to the problem of—let’s be frank—people classification.

A few people wrote to say, “No, that won’t work, here’s why.” That’s really interesting! A completely naïve filter certainly wouldn’t work. But thinking about why it wouldn’t work teaches us more about how to do a great job of hiring the right people.

Games People Play

One of the reasons you can’t build a naïve document classifier to select candidates is that people game the system.

When people perceive that they have an enormous incentive to obtain jobs as programmers, they are motivated to subvert the process and get the job for themselves regardless of what the employer is attempting to accomplish with the interview process.¹

Candidates are trying to guess what you want to read or hear and will happily parrot it to you. You may think that this is a waste of their time, because lying to get the interview will only get them thrown out of interviews, but the incentives in looking for a job are to reward anything that gets them any reasonable job offer, no matter how many times they are thrown out of interviews.

For that reason, they are constantly monitoring the behaviour of employers and attempting to adjust their behaviour to manipulate employers into giving them interviews and ultimately, giving them a job. Roughly, there is the most difficult part of hiring people regardless of how you do it: Candidates are trying to guess what you want to read or hear and will happily parrot it to you.

You may think that this is a waste of their time, because lying to get the interview will only get them thrown out of interviews, but the incentives in looking for a job are to reward anything that gets them any reasonable job offer, no matter how many times they are thrown out of interviews.

Let’s state the problem with filtering a little more explicitly: filtering works by analyzing features (years of experience, technologies, education, past employers) and looking for the features that have the highest correlation with positive outcomes. For example, if our task is to select people to interview based on asking them no more than five questions over the telephone, we could use the following protocol:

Collect a list of questions to ask from sources like Steve Yegge’s The Five Essential Phone Screen Questions and Joel Spolsky’s [The Phone Screen].

When we call a candidate, select some questions to ask from our list.

Make a note of which questions the candidate answered satisfactorily and which unsatisfactorily.

If we call the candidate in for an interview, make a note of whether they were a decent interview. Not necessarily a “HIRE,” but whether we felt interviewing them was a waste of time or not.

After following this protocol for a while, we have collected an imperfect but still useful corpus: we can do some easy analysis to determine which questions have the highest correlation between satisfactory answers and worthwhile interviews. I can’t predict what your answers might be if you follow the protocol, but here’s something important to note: we are looking for the questions with the highest correlation.

Programming Collective Intelligence provides practical examples for building systems that reason based on learning from data and behaviour, such as Naïve Bayesian Filters, collaborative filters, and recommendation engines.

Armed with our “training,” we would know the five best questions to ask on the telephone. Great! We would start using them exclusively, and we would only interview people who get all five right. We wouldn’t grant that many interviews, but let’s assume that we would be happy with this trade-off. (We’ll address the nature of that trade-off in another post.)

At first, things would probably go really well. Every person we bring in for an interview would be worth the trouble, and we would making offers to many of them. We would boast that our five questions are amazing! But then things start would start to slip, we would start getting one or two duds a week, and then every other interviewee would be a dud, and before you know it almost everyone we call would give us great answers but would be a festering pile of mediocrity when they showed up for the interview.

What in Hades could have gone wrong? Of course, we know what went wrong: the job hunters would cotton onto our questions. The word would have gone around about the questions we asked. Maybe we would have been arrogant enough to discuss them on our blogs, maybe interviewees would network, maybe they would publish your questions on their own blogs. I can tell you that tech recruiters are constantly interrogating people for interview questions and then preparing their candidates by telling them what to study in advance. So if we ever hire through recruiters, we might just as well publish our interview questions on our web site.

So now anybody sending us their résumé would have memorized our five questions and would even know the right way to answer each question to get an interview. We would have been gamed.

So what can we do about it?

Game On

Before we try to work out a coping strategy from first principles, we can look around and see whether this problem has already been solved. Indeed it has; as mentioned, the cat-and-mouse game between spammers and spam filters is a very close analogue to the cat-and-mouse battle between employers and candidates.

The point of this post is to suggest that we can learn from a similar problem, not to pretend I know the exact answers. You have to do your own thinking!

The point of this post is to suggest that we can learn from a similar problem, not to pretend I know the exact answers. You have to do your own thinking! But here are a few ideas that have worked for me as an interviewer in the past. It is easy to see their analogue to battling spammers.

First, you need an iterative strategy. You cannot think of “The five best questions” as some sort of fixed list. The correlation between a question and the likelihood of a positive outcome for you changes over time as candidates discover what you are seeking and pretend to supply it. This is exactly like spammers writing emails: they are constantly trying to reverse-engineer filters and write letters that score well as non-spam, and the filters are constantly being updated in a Red Queen’s Race.

In 2004, I was granting interviews to anyone with Python, Ruby, Spring, or Hibernate experience. At the time, these were remarkably rare and had very strong positive correlation for the type of team I was building. Today, while I still respect those technologies, I doubt they have as strong a correlation. I would definitely need a strong phone screen before granting an interview.

This isn’t just about niche tools. I’m sure my more conservative colleagues will tell you that there was a time when a Microsoft programming certification meant far more than it does today. In general, as the word goes out that employers want something, the correlation between that thing and positive outcomes goes down, and employers have to search for other “features” providing higher correlation.

If you followed the link, you know what I valued in 2004. What about today? The second thing is that I’m not going to tell you (Although I still ask “What’s the best work you’ve ever done, and why are you proud of it?”). Spammers use computer programs called “bots” (you knew that, of course) to sign up for free email accounts and send spam. One of the ways email services try to foil them is with CAPTCHAs.

In my twenty years of business experience, Growing a Business is absolutely the best book on founding and running a business organically that I have ever read. And I read a lot of books! “Growing a Business” is not about scoring business coups or raising money. It is not about sales tactics or innovation. It is about growing a business step by step, customer by customer, employee by employee.

The economics of CAPTCHAs and other means of foiling bots are simple: there is an upfront cost to the spammer to reverse-engineer whatever obstacles you put into place and write a bot that can negotiate them. Thereafter, the bot earns money for the spammer every time it encounters your obstacle. Therefore, the spammers program their bots for the obstacles that offer them the largest opportunity to profit.

According to Windows apologists, this is why Windows machines are infested with virii and Macs are not: writing a virus for OS X is just as much trouble as for Windows, but the Windows virus can infect thirty times as many machines as the OS X virus, so nobody bothers with OS X virii. Maybe true, maybe not true.

So back to hiring and questions. Training your filters as described above and retraining them from time to time is fine if the marketplace takes a while to respond to your questions. It took four years before “Ruby” went from being a must-interview-no-questions-asked to a looks-good-but-better-have-something-else-as-well. But if things are moving very quickly, the useful time of a question may fall below the amount of time needed to train questions. In that case, you can’t gather reliable statistics.

What makes the “market” move quickly? Perceived desirability. If you’re Google and your stock is on fire, people devote themselves to deciphering and gaming your hiring strategy. Or if there are a very large number of people that hire the exact same way you hire, you get the same overall effect. Going back to CAPTCHAs, if you are running Google Mail, people will spend a lot of time breaking your CAPTCHA. Or if your CAPTCHA is part of a popular package that a lot of sites use, people will take the time to break it.

The easiest—and most effective—way to secure a web site is to use an obscure CAPTCHA. Sure, it ought to be as robust as possible. But if very few people use it, the incentive for breaking it will be low. In 2004, languages like Python and Ruby were obscure by job seeker standards. Sure, if someone wanted a job with me and only me she could claim to know them and get thrown out of the interview after the first question. But who would bother faking Ruby to get an interview with me when they could fake J2EE+Struts and get a few dozen interviews with BigCos?

Today, I have a different set of hot buttons. Sure, they are different in part because I have iterated over the years and there are new items that correlate strongly with positive outcomes. the new things are not necessarily hot things. I mentioned Python and Ruby in 2004, but I also mentioned J. J wasn’t hot then and it didn’t look like it was going to become hot, but I have had very good experiences working with APL and J people.

The main thing about my hot buttons is that I try to make sure they aren’t popular. Now you might snap your fingers and say, “Aha! The Python Paradox again!” But that isn’t it. The Python Paradox is that using certain unpopular languages that have Tweak “Cred” increases an employer’s attractiveness to strong candidates. That’s reversing things and figuring out how to game the good candidates! This is different: it’s choosing candidates based on things that are unpopular amongst other employers specifically to avoid having candidates fake them to get a job with you.

Winning

The battle to secure the best employees is a game, and while there are no sure things in life, there are strategies that maximize the possibility of a positive outcome for employers. Selecting candidates is certainly not a simple problem amenable to naïve filtering, but thinking about document classification helps us do a better job.

Likewise, responding to candidates attempting to subvert your interview process is not as simple as iteratively training your “filter questions” and choosing obscure questions, but thinking about the battle between spammers and web sites helps us do a better job when hiring programmers.

there are many reasons for this. i am going to skip right past all discussions of chicanery and posit something for consideration; if the industry does a terrible job of selecting good people, we should not be surprised that candidates do not trust us to take complete control of the interview process. if a candidate has heard that some of the people working at xyzcorp are complete bozos, what is wrong with stretching the truth in the interview to get the job? if the industry constantly trumpets how tools and architecture are more important than hiring good people, why shouldn't a less-than-stellar candidate lie their way into a job? won't eclipse and static typing and design patterns and bduf ensure that he can do a serviceable job?
[back]

post scripum: The fact is, almost every idea has holes in it. Finding them is important, but it’s just the first step. Bayesian filters are not going to be able to outperform a human for selecting candidates. True. But the next step is to figure out why they fall short and what we can do about it. There is a very lucrative business opportunity for someone to apply machine learning techniques to hiring people.

Where there’s muck there’s brass.

More death to job titles

Alexander — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:11:46 GMT

A while back I wrote a post about killing off job titles. I think they’re a waste of time and contribute nothing to our productivity, creativity or happiness at work. In fact, job titles can be the source of a lot of disputes and bickering in the workplace.

Matt Cardwell of Quicken Loans (a home loan lender based in the US) read this and liked it so much that he decided to issue a fatwa on job titles in his department. Here he explains why:

We never used to have titles on the Marketing Team at Quicken Loans because we always prided ourselves as having a marked anti-corporate and non-hierarchical culture. Actually, we did have titles, but everyone was called a “Marketing Manager.” So it was kind of a forced equality and no one EVER even talked about titles. But as the team grew from a few dozen people to over fifty, HR decided we needed some “consistency”, especially for purposes of external salary comping. So against our better judgment we relented and started creating a bunch of silly titles like: Marketing Coordinator, Marketing Program Manager, Project Manager, Jr. Project Manager, Sr. Project Manager, etc.

Well, it only took about 12 months for our brilliant decision to come back and bite us in the ass. Needless to say, it created all kinds of unnecessary noise within the team as people started to grumble about why a person who had only been here for 12 months just got promoted to Sr. Project Manager when another person who had been here for three years was still a Project Manager. I got so fed up with the divisiveness of it all that I just decided to banish titles altogether yesterday morning. So I went looking for some inspiration and Googled “job titles” or something to that effect and found your blog post from December. It was EXACTLY what I was looking for. So I dropped it into an email, added my two cents and started a revolt. Initially it was just within my 20 person eCommerce Marketing team, but it snowballed over the course of the afternoon to include most of the broader marketing team.

That is music to my ears and in response to Matt’s challenge, people got very creative. Here are some of the new titles:

Royal Storyteller & Propaganda Minister
Supreme Challenger of the Status Quo & Wicked Web Site Innovator
Mastermind of Possibilities, Visual Linguist, and Czar of the High Fiber Revolution
Flasher
Conceptologist
Pixelardo da Vinci

You can see more titles in my previous post on this.

How did Matt inspire people to do this? Here’s the email he sent out:

Okay, team, so I want each one of you to take 15 minutes today to really think hard about what YOU DO and what MAKES YOU HAPPY at work and create a title for yourself that expresses who you are and your impact on the business and your team mates. Forget about what Salary.com or some HR person said your title is or should be. Forget about what you get paid, how many years of experience you have, or what other people’s “titles” are in comparison to you. Tell us WHAT YOU DO and make that your new “title”.

As of this morning, traditional titles on the Website Marketing Team are DEAD. D-E-A-D. Somehow over the past year people have become WAY too caught up in who has what title. So we’re going to end the madness today.

If this scares you, makes you feel like we’ve taken something away or makes you wonder how your resume will look without that title-that-really- never-does-justice-to-you-and-your-talents-anyway, ask yourself when was the last time someone called you by your title? When was the last time Todd Lunsford or Bill Emerson or Dan Gilbert called you by your title? Worried about how this might impact future compensation? Don’t. Numbers and money follow, they do not lead. Kick ass at whatever you do, and the wealth will eventually flow to you. I’ve seen it happen again and again in my career … and especially here.

If you are concerned about someone not recognizing how important you are because you no longer have a standard title, then here’s your chance to create a title for yourself that will convey exactly how important you are. And because you are creating it, it will be all yours. No one else will have that title. Think of the conversations your new title will start with complete strangers. Think of the opportunities it can create for you in terms of expressing who you are, not what someone CALLS you.

“But what if I don’t like my description in three months …” you ask? What if what I do CHANGES? Well, then you can change your description. It’s that simple. No one ever stays the same … we are all growing … so let your “title” do the same when it’s time.

Here’s your chance. You have until the end of the day to let us all know who you are. Have fun, be creative, be humorous, but above all, be real and true. Remember, this will be on your e-mail signature, so please be aware of that.

I can’t wait to see what all of you come up with.

DEATH TO TITLES!

Matt

Matt Cardwell
Idea Salesman, Energy Focuser and People Unleasher
eCommerce Marketing Team
Quicken Loans
My title challenges your title to a duel. I predict a draw. - Me

I had to know more, so I emailed Matt with a few follow-up questions, and here’s an update from him on the fatwa on job titles:

You had a couple of questions around the titles Fatwa from your previous e-mail. One question was about whether we had abolished titles company-wide. So far only the Web Marketing Team and the Idea Lab (our creative team – basically an in-house agency for our advertising production) took up my challenge. Not surprisingly, the team that actually got the title “promotions” that started this whole thing opted not to join us in our little revolution. I threw the challenge out to them, but I haven’t really seen anyone take up the torch.

I do know that our CMO, Todd Lunsford was extremely supportive of the no-title revolution. As I mentioned, we really only started using titles recently for comping purposes. But even there, they are generally not very useful for the more specialized people on my team (usability pros, search engine optimizers, etc), because until very recently, Salary.com didn’t make distinctions between interactive marketers (which are in high demand) and traditional marketers. As an organization, we’ve been pretty ambivalent about titles. Most of our Sr. Leadership Team and many of our team members simply have no title on their email signature, or just identify themselves with their team. For example: Joe Smith, Web Marketing Team

So I think this will still spread … we won a couple battles, but we still have a war going on. It will come. And I’ll keep preaching.

This is fantastic! I’m adding Quicken Loans to my list of “Companies that get it.” And I’m not alone - they recently placed second in Fortune Magazine’s Best Company to Work list, one behind Google.

Your take

What’s your take? Is your workplace ready to issue its own fatwa on job titles? Or do you see some value in having a “real” title on your business card? Please write a comment, I’d really like to know.

Top 5 Factors Affecting Your Credit Score

JS — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 03:28:56 GMT

There are five primary factors that account for the magical credit score which determines you acceptance or rejection for most loans or credit cards, and strongly influences the interest rates or total cost for you to borrow the funds.

The following is a very basic overview of the five most important factors in determining your credit or loan score (aka FICO score). It is worth noting that the three major credit bureau all calculate their scoring models slightly differently, so what I have presented is a slightly blended overview, but it will give you the most important factors and an a rough relative weight in the credit scoring process.

How Payment History Affects Your Credit Score -35%

Payment history accounts for about 35 percent of your credit score (this will vary depending on the scoring agency). It makes sense that this would be a top factor, since someone with a long history is of never missing a payment is likely to continue to be a safe person to lend money to.

If you do have negative marks on your credit score, three factors will determine the size of the deduction to your credit score:

Time Since The Event - how long ago did you miss a payment? If it was a long time ago, and you have a good payment history since that time, it will not affect your score very much. Whereas a recent missed payment will cost more against your credit scoring.
Number of Missed Payments - obviously matters. One missed payment in ten years of good history won’t matter very much, but the more missed payments in your history, the more risky you are seen to be and this will be reflected in a lower debt score.
How Bad Was The Blunder? - being late or missing one credit card payment is a small deduction. All the way up to having a bill go to a collection agency to the biggest black mark of all: bankruptcy.

How Much You Currently Owe -30%

If you think of your credit score as a kind of “worry index” for lenders, you’ll understand why how much of your possible credit you are using would be a concern for lenders.

Think of this aspect of credit score as a percentage. The amount you owe on all possible credit sources (credit cards, auto loans, home loans, your current mortgage and so on) divided by the total of all credit available to you.

(more…)

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Kathy Sierra: Storyboarding for Non-Fiction

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 05:09:32 GMT

Kathy Sierra talks about storyboarding
(click to enlarge)

How do you create riveting technical presentations and user manuals? Tell a story. Kathy Sierra is teaching the tutorial and using her own experience creating the "Head First" books on Java and Design Patterns as examples.

Define your "post-click" behavior. After someone has gotten your message, what would happen in the reader? Does you message change the readers behavior? Do you know how you want it to change them? You can't create the right material without understanding what you want to achieve. In the case of

What creates a page turner? Suspense, for one. The feeling that you can't wait to see what comes next. Or even just the joy of understanding something complex.

What makes you stop turning the page? The audience responds with several examples including jargon, exclusion, competition with funner activities, and so on. Kathy talks about how jargon is an example of something that's good for people to know, but someone has to provide the bridge and too many books suffer from only being understandable after you know the area.

There's a hierarchy of requirements for a "bestseller."

The right topics
In the right order
Clear and accurate
Interesting
Enchanting

The competitive advantage is in the final two. Good writers don't usually have a huge challenge with the first three. But you have to nail those first.

One of the biggest problems that technical writers have is contentitis: the need to cover everything. Most books would do better with much less material in the same time. This is related to the happy user peak that Kathy has talked about related to product features.

Good books are brain friendly and seductive. When you can properly introduce people to topics, they get a richer experience. It's important to get people past the suck threshold and above the passion threshold as quickly as possible. That means you need to get information to them quickly. And that means that creating a page-turner is vital.

People don't want to be experts at a tool. They want to get something done, accomplish their goals. People do become passionate about tools, but largely because they allow them to get things done. Kathy uses the Nikon Learning Center as a positive example of focusing on the pictures people want to take and then walking through the ways to use the camera to get those results. Contrast that with user manual which is a dry exposition of features. She takes it one step further and contrasts sales literature with user manuals.

The brain has spam filters. No matter how hard you might want to get some information in your mind, the brain has natural processes that filter out some information as "not important." Authors have to fight to get past the spam filters. Legacy brains have to be fooled into thinking that the topic we want to learn is something they care about.

Brains care about chemistry (i.e. emotion). Brains pay attention to things that have an associated emotional cue. Brains like novelty, weird, different. You should be afraid every moment that you're losing you're reader. Brains pay attention to things that are scary. Brains care about changes in light and shadow. Brains pay attention to faces. Brains like joy. Brains like young cute things.

Brains don't care about cliche. Brains don't like things that aren't resolved. The brain gets pulled in trying to figure things out. Curiosity is irresistible.

Bottom line: emotions tell the brain "this matters." So talk to the brain, not the mind. In other words, trick the brain into thinking polymorphism is as important as a tiger.

Formality is a problem. People's ability to use and apply new information is positively affected by using a conversational tone. She cites research by Moreno and Mayer (here's a good summary) that " research seems to show a self referential effect where information is retained, memorized better when it is given a personal reference."

Biggest lesson: if you're in the business of communicating things, you're in the emotion-delivery business.

Kathy Sierra talks about the Hero's Journey
(click to enlarge)

Reader as hero. This doesn't mean that you write your book as a fictional story. But you want the reader to identify with the journey and the endpoint goal. The experience should be a hero's journey: life is normal, something happens to change that, (add a helpful sidekicks and mentor), things really suck, hero overcomes bad things, and then, finally, the hero returns to normal. The hero is changes after overcoming bad things. As an author, you should figure out what that change is. This is the outcome that you want for the reader.

The reader as hero can't be supported by "dumbing down" the material. The reader won't feel heroic if the material is too easy. Don't shy away from challenging. But use brain friendliness to create the emotional experience that gets them through the challenge

Here's the overall process we're going to consider.

Log line
High level 3-acts
Create 'story' template
Create topic list/cards
Rearrange in template
Fill in holes
Do detailed storyboards
Miracle occurs

The log line answers three questions:

Who is this about?
What is he up against?
What is at stake?

Act one is the call to action. Act one typically ends with the hero's refusal of the call and ultimate acquiescence. Act two is the challenge and ends with figuring out how to meet the challenge. Act three is the road home.

Story templates
(click to enlarge)

Here's the story template:

Set tone
Question posed
What's at stake
Catalyst or motivation
Skepticism or debate
Cross threshold (to Act 2)
back story and tools
Fun and games using tools
Stakes raised
Not out of woods
All is lost
Answer found! I rule!
Lessons learned

Keep in mind that learning experiences are fundamentally different from reference experiences. You can't create a great leaning tool and make it a great reference too at the same time.

Steps 1-5 in the preceding template are Act 1 and should be about 20-40 pages in a technical book. Steps 6-12 are Act 2 and are usually around 300 pages. Step 13 is the final Act and is again around 20-40 pages.

For every thing in your book from Acts to chapters to parts of chapters, use the spiral user experience model.

Motivational milestones
(click to enlarge)

Ask "why?", "who cares?", and "so what?" about very topic. Make sure this is front loaded so that the brain knows what it should pay attention. Make sure that when you say "This matters because..." that what follows in emotionally engaging. Show, don't tell. This might mean pictures but can also be an example. "Imagine you want to do..." is a way to set up a scenario.

Smoking out the topics with the "who cares?" question can ignite your natural passion about why it matters and affect writing in a positive way. Make this discussion real. Better to do it with a helpful critic, I think.

The other part of the spiral that readers care about is the payoff. Once users understand concept A, that leads right into the motivation for concept B: now that you understand this, you're ready to approach something even better. Game designers are good at this.

A technique for getting emotional benefit is "just in time" vs. "just in case." Just-in-time learning is highly motivated. Just-in-case is what books and lectures are all about. Setting up scenarios with "image you want to ..." is one way to making just-in-case feel like just-in-time. You'll end up with the topics in the right order.

The representation of getting to the next level. What are the rewards someone gets for completing an activity or learning something new? What are the new "superpowers" that they get? What can they do now that they could do before?

We need to get readers in the flow state--that state where they can't stop reading. To get there, knowledge and challenge have to be in balance.

What engages the brain?
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These things turn the brain on deeply: discovery, challenge, narrative, self-expression, social framework, cognitive arousal, thrill, sensation, triumph, flow, accomplishment fantasy, and growth. Complete the description: "Learning experience as..." Don't take people outside the experience with extraneous material and narrative. Don't make users think about the wrong things.

Variety is important. We get tired if we hop on one leg over and over. Make sure that you're exercising different parts of the brain. Insert cooler stuff with dry stuff. Pace the topics.

We ended with an exercise of writing out some storyboard ideas for something we care about. I did it for the first product Kynetx is building and it was fun and helpful.

Tags: etech etech08 product+management storytelling

UsWare vs. ThemWare

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 07:59:59 GMT

Ted Dennison left this astute comment in response to Do Not Listen to Your Users:

Generally when I go talk to users, it is to educate myself enough to become a user like them. Then I can see what needs doing, what needs streamlining, reorganizing, rearranging, etc.

This brought to mind Eric Sink's claim that there are three categories of software:

MeWare
The developer creates software. The developer uses it. Nobody else does.
ThemWare
The developer creates software. Other people use it. The developer does not.
UsWare
The developer creates software. Other people use it. The developer uses it too.

ThemWare is how most software gets developed, with predictably disastrous results:

If I am building software that I don't use and don't know how to use for people I don't understand or even like, how good is my software going to be?
I probably see every feature in terms of how difficult it will be to implement, rather than how valuable it will be for my users. I probably find myself wanting to label or document the features using my jargon instead of theirs. I probably create features that are tedious or unintuitive for my users. I can't imagine why the user interface I designed doesn't make sense to them.

I've found that much of the best software is the best because the programmers are the users, too. It is UsWare.

It behooves software developers to understand users, to walk a mile in their shoes. If we can bridge the gap between users and ourselves-- even if only a little-- we start slowly converting our mediocre ThemWare into vastly superior UsWare. To really care about the software you're writing, you have to become a user, at least in spirit.

Consuming the software you're creating is colloquially known as dogfooding in programming circles. Unless you're (un)lucky enough to be writing software intended for other software developers, dogfooding can be a challenge. But it's worth it. Dogfooding keeps software developers honest. Why work against your users by producing ThemWare when you could work alongside them to build UsWare?

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Who hates inequality?

Tyler Cowen — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 11:32:00 GMT

Chimpanzees are highly sensitive to inequity, and typically refuse to continue in interactions in which they get less than a social partner. However, chimpanzees from stable social groups do not respond negatively in situations in which their partners received better rewards, whereas chimpanzees from less-established groups show rejection rates as high as 60 percent.

Here is the full story, interesting throughout; the hat tip is to Mark Thoma.