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posted at
11:52 PM
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 I don’t know how international it is, but the protocol for Americans—or let’s say Seattleites, anyway—is essentially to ignore strangers, and to stand facing the doors. Phones help ease the awkwardness of this situation (strangers are so near, yet so ... non-existent), because people can look down and fiddle busily with their phones instead of desperately trying not to make eye contact with other passengers.
But our elevators (and, I assume, those in many other buildings) have a feature that changes the dynamic in interesting ways. Above the bank of floor buttons is a 12-inch screen that displays a rotating selection of news bites, weather, traffic, reviews, deals, and so on. (According to the provider, this “reaches smart, busy, upscale professionals on the move and struggling to ‘do it all.’” Sure, whatever.)
People now have something to look at in the elevator besides the closed doors, or their phones, or the back of the person in front of them. This subtly changes the feel of the constantly changing group going up and down together. They’re watching TV together!
The headlines that are displayed will occasionally move someone to make a remark, or at least to grunt in acknowledgment. This can be an ice-breaker for others … it’s a conversation starter!
Sherry TurkelTurkle, who teaches "the Social Studies of Science and Technology" at M.I.T., has recently started to worry that we’re using devices to mediate human relationships for us in ways that actually increase our isolation. Maybe that’s true. But I like to think that our elevators, thanks to technology, might actually now be breaking down the barriers between people in our building.
[categories]
general
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Saturday, 5 January 2013
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Office space
posted at
12:34 PM
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The company's focus on office space presumably was based on an implicit acceptance of the idea that people engaged in concerted intellectual work need to be able to work in peace. In the widely read Peopleware, a book from the mid-1980s about managing software projects, authors Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister addressed the need for this type of space: Before drawing the plans for its new Santa Teresa facility, IBM violated all industry standards by carefully studying the work habits of those who would occupy the space. [...] Researchers observed the work processes in action in current workspaces and in mock-ups of proposed workspaces. They watched programmers, engineers, quality control workers, and managers go about their normal activities. From their studies, they concluded that a minimum accommodation for the mix of people slated to occupy the new space would be the following:- 100 square feet of dedicated space per worker
- 30 square feet of work surface per person
- Noise protection in the form of enclosed offices or six-foot high partitions (they ended up with about half of all professional personnel in enclosed one- and two-person offices)
 For a few decades, it seemed that Microsoft was taking this advice to heart. About 5 or so years ago, however, it became evident that the company had changed its mind about space requirements. As buildings were added or remodeled, new layouts were introduced that emphasized open spaces and that featured areas (nicknamed "fishbowls" and the like) that seemed intended to foster interaction: a physical manifestation of the "collaborative workspace." Some years ago, all the technical writers and editors for a major division were moved to a new building and were presented with their new space, which was a cubicle farm (with 4-foot walls) inside an enormous, high-ceilinged open space. Old-timers were horrified.
I moved to Amazon in 2012. The space I'm in is a somewhat curious hybrid of semi-private offices (2 people per) and clusters of cubicles. Aside from obvious seniority/hierarchy, I can't tell exactly how the space is doled out; even as a new employee, I have half of an office. Developers who've been there longer than I have sit across the aisle from me in cubicles. There are open spaces that contain tables and chairs, and I very frequently see one developer or other sitting on a beanbag chair among the cubicles, tapping away on a laptop.
Certainly the space arrangements do encourage the kind of collaborative work that open-space proponents believe in. There's a constant hum of conversation, stand-up meetings, people popping into one another's offices, and so on. Every single person has a laptop, and people carry them everywhere. No one on my team is more than a short walk from my desk, so it's almost as easy to just buttonhole them as it might be to compose an email with a query. And there's absolutely no doubt that the mingling that occurs in offices and hallways and common areas fosters communication; hardly a day passes when I don't have a useful conversation with someone who I just happened to have run into in passing.
This has made me ponder the question of private space versus collaborative space. Were the studies that IBM did incorrect about the need for private space? That doesn't seem likely. Yet all around me I saw people working all day, and clearly getting things done, in an environment that would have made the space designers for the the Santa Teresa facility throw up their hands.
What's different now? Well, here's some speculation.
One obvious difference is that many of the people occupying the cubicles are young, by which I mean considerably younger than I am. (It is one of those milestones of a long career that I now routinely work with people who are about the same age as my children.) To be clear, the average age of software developers has probably not changed significantly in the last 30 years, and I would absolutely not claim that there's something evolutionarily different about youngsters today that somehow makes their brains different or anything like that. I would suggest only that many folks who are developers today did not come up in a corporate environment of private offices, hence are used to working in an open-space plan; it might be the only type of office space they've ever been in.
 Another difference is that people today might be more used to creating what we might term "psychic privacy" (as opposed to physical privacy). One thing you do see a lot as you pass cubicles is people wearing headphones, often noise-cancelling models. I can see this as a privacy measure in two ways. One is that it creates an exclusionary environment for the person wearing the headphones, who can tune out the otherwise very close ambient noise. Two is that I for one am less inclined to lean over a cubicle wall and make an inane remark to someone wearing headphones, which is to say, headphones become a signal that someone is in fact trying to work — a kind of metaphorical closed door.[2]
And finally, I think that in some ways things haven't really changed. I was chatting to one of the beanbag-chair-sitting developers not long ago (a serendipitous meeting in the kitchen) and asked him about his ability to sit in the midst of bustling activity and get things done. His answer was instructive: when he has to get real work done, he said — by which he meant serious, heads-down coding — he stays late and works after other folks have gone.
This last, I think, is probably an answer for how to reconcile the IBM findings with the current fashion in open-space design. People do get benefits from open space in terms of collaboration, and then can carve out small niches of privacy in order to encourage flow-type experiences. But they also still hide themselves away when they need physical privacy in order to perform concentrated work. This is made easier also by the portability of laptops, which let people find an environment they prefer and to work there. Many people do work at home, where they presumably have spaces that they've structured for personal productivity, and of course let them work during the hours when they're most productive.
I suppose the conclusion is that if you're IBM in 1982 and you're going to chain developers to a desk so they can work at their non-portable terminals, you'd better give them some private space in which to do that. If they need to collaborate, give them a meeting room. The current environment seems to have essentially turned this on its head: put people together so they can work together, and if they need to, they can slink off and find some private space in which to work on their own.
Even tho I'm old-school, generationally speaking, I don't mind this new environment. Since the beginning of my career I've split my work between collaborative and secluded, with the secluded portion usually done at home late at night. It's certainly become a lot easier to make work portable in the last 30 years. That other people might not find the new space arrangements as conducive as they'd like, however, I can easily see.
More reading:
[categories]
work, general
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Wednesday, 2 January 2013
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Sleight of hand
posted at
07:55 PM
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Deborah Baron, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, where Jay lives, once invited him to a New Year’s Eve dinner party at her home. About a dozen other people attended. Well past midnight, everyone gathered around a coffee table as Jay, at Baron’s request, did closeup card magic. When he had performed several dazzling illusions and seemed ready to retire, a guest named Mort said, “Come on, Ricky. Why don’t you do something truly amazing?”
Baron recalls that at that moment “the look in Ricky’s eyes was, like, ‘Mort—you have just fucked with the wrong person.’ ”
Jay told Mort to name a card, any card. Mort said, “The three of hearts.” After shuffling, Jay gripped the deck in the palm of his right hand and sprung it, cascading all fifty-two cards so that they travelled the length of the table and pelted an open wine bottle.
“O.K., Mort, what was your card again?”
“The three of hearts.”
“Look inside the bottle.”
Mort discovered, curled inside the neck, the three of hearts. The party broke up immediately. Then this appeared in the current issue in an article about Apollo Robbins, a different kind of magician, titled A Pickpocket’s Tale:
A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole,” was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn’t have much to work with.
“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.”
Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale.
“Fuck. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair.
Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette’s pen.
[categories]
general
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posted at
08:33 AM
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 To keep things simple, I’ll round numbers grossly. I’ll assume 18,000 miles, 50 mpg for the motorcycle, and 25 for my car (which I actually know, because the car’s computer tracks this). So:
18,000 miles at 50 mpg = 360 gallons
Since the bike gets essentially twice the mileage of the car, it’s all very easy. If I'd used the car for the same miles, I would have used 720 gallons. At (assumed) $4/gallon, I’ve "saved" $1440 by riding my motorcvcle (360 x $4 = $1440).
Of course, this is all laughable. Many of the miles I’ve put on the motorcycle are miles I would never have put on the car—i.e., miles driven just for fun. Not to mention that this supposed savings in fuel expenditures doesn't come anywhere near what it cost to buy the bike in the first place, and what it costs to insure and maintain it.
Even so, every time I pass a Prius, I think "neener-neener, I get better mileage than you." And maybe by the time I’ve put 600,000 miles on the bike, it will actually represent a real savings.
[categories]
motorcycles, general
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posted at
10:30 PM
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The bar is low, obviously, but my favorites are always the ads in which the merchant tries to establish a connection between their blatantly off-season or aseasonal offering and the holidays. My favorite so far this year is a company that offers zipline tours up on one of the San Juan islands. The premise of their ad — and this is a typical strategy — is that so-and-so is just so hard to get a gift for, so the answer is a gift certificate for a zipline tour! The ad writer in this case felt obliged to provide some backstory on the putative recipient and why swinging through the trees was just the thing for him. Presumably the simple offer of the tour was by itself insufficiently, um, compelling.
My radio listening is way down in latter years, so I'm not really sampling broadly. This is a good thing in general, of course, since it spares me exposure to foolishness like this. On the other hand, it reduces my enjoyment of this little exercise.
Got any candidates?
PS Apologies to John McIntyre for the title.
[categories]
general
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Sunday, 11 September 2011
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Labor-saving
posted at
01:11 PM
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- Clear path to table saw: 3 minutes
- Wheel table saw out to driveway, unfold: 1 minute
- Find extension cord, plug in: 45 seconds
- Set blade height: 10 seconds
- Measure width, set fence, square fence: 1 minute
- Cut wood: 11 seconds
- Unplug saw, wind and stow cord: 30 seconds
- Fold table saw, wheel back into garage: 1 minute
- Find broom, sweep up sawdust: 2 minutes
- Put crap back in garage in front of table saw: 2 minutes
[categories]
general
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Monday, 29 August 2011
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Yeah, I'm fluent in that
posted at
03:12 PM
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On the other hand, it turns out you probably know more languages than immediately come to mind. In fact, you're probably fluent in quite a few of them. Like which? Well, Colleague David discovered some of these recently when he was updating his profile:
[categories]
language, general
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posted at
08:51 AM
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 Turns out that cracking a safe has some things in common with hacking someone's bank account in our present day: while the problem is theoretically hard, it helps tremendously to have some insight into human nature. Safes have some additional weaknesses by virtue of being mechanical devices. OTOH, they don't offer the problem we have today of trying to remember dozens of passwords.
In any event, the passage below (sorry about the length) is from James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Times of Richard Feynman and says something about the nature of security when you've got those darn humans involved. (This is edited slightly for length.)
Locks mixed human logic and mechanical logic. The designer's strategy was constrained by the manufacturer's convenience or the limits of metal, as it was in so many of the bomb project's puzzles. The official logic of a Los Alamos safe, as displayed in the dial's numbers and hatch marks, indicated a million different combinations — three numbers from 0 to 99. Some experimentation, though, showed Feynman that the markings disguised a considerable margin of error, plus or minus two, attributable to plain mechanical slackness; if the correct number was 23, anything from 21 to 25 would work as well. When he was searching combinations systematically, therefore, he needed only to try one number in every five — 0, 5, 10, 15 ... — to be sure of hitting the target. By thinking in terms of error ranges, instead of accepting the authority of the numerals on the dial, he brought a pragmatic physicist's intuition to bear. That one insight effectively reduced the total combinations from one million to a mere eight thousand, almost few enough to try, given a few hours.
An American folklore had developed about safes and the yeggs who cracked them. [...] The consummate safeman was thought to need sandpapered fingers and hypersensitive ears. This was pure myth.
To learn to crack safes, [Feynman] had to find his way past the same myth. Only gradually, as he looked for nuggets of useful information, did he realize how mundane the business really was. Because his repertoire would have to omit drills and nitroglycerin, it would have to make the most of such practical rules as he could find. Some he read; others he learned as he went along. Most were variations on a theme: People are predictable.
They tend to leave safes unlocked.
They tend to leave their combinations at factory settings such as 25-0-25.
They tend to write down the combinations, often on the edge of their desk drawers.
They tend to choose birthdays and other easily remembered numbers.
This last insight alone made an enormous difference. Of the 8,000 effective possible combinations, Feynman figured that only 162 worked as dates. The first number was a month from 1 to 12 — given the margin of error, that meant he need try just three possibilities, 0, 5, and 10. For a day from 1 to 31 he needed six; for a year from 1900 to the present, just nine. He could try 3 x 6 x 9 combinations in minutes. He also discovered that it took just a few inexplicable successes to make a safecracker's reputation.
By fiddling with his own safe he learned that when a door was open he could find the last number of a combination by turning the dial and feeling when the bolt came down. Given some time, he could find the second number that way, too. He made a habit of absently leaning against his colleagues' safes when he visited their offices, twirling the dials like the perpetual fidgeter he was, and thus built up a master list of partial combinations. This is actually my favorite part:
The remaining trial and error was so trivial that he found himself — for the sake of cultivating his legend — carrying tools as a red herring and pretending that safe jobs took longer than they really did.
[categories]
general, technology
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posted at
01:42 AM
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To the latest design:
As an aside, just for fun I want to note that this latter design is very cleverly used to decorate Starbucks HQ in Seattle (the erstwhile Sears store-cum-warehouse), with the sea-lady peeking out from the top of the building's "tower":
Ok, so, the question du jour is where this logo came from. Corporate mythology has it that the design was "originally derived from a twin-tailed siren in an old sixteenth-century Norse woodcut." Sounds plausible, right?
Not to everyone. As recounted in the Wall Street Journal blog, of all places, a graduate student at Yale who writes a blog named Got Medieval thought this sounded fishy (haha), because, for one, "there’s no such thing as a 16th-century Norse woodcut."
Long story short (i.e., edited), ...The twin-tailed siren isn’t from a “marine book” at all. She’s from an early German printed book, Das Buch von einer Frawen genant Melusina, a translation of Jean d’Arras’s Roman de Melusine. Melusine tells the story of how the first male of the Lusignan line, Raimondin, met a beautiful woman at an enchanted fountain in the forest. After extracting a promise that he never try to find her on a Saturday, this woman, Melusine, gave him all her love and great wealth as well, promptly married him, and later bore him eleven sons. Naturally, Raimondin couldn’t leave well enough alone, tracked her down on Saturday and found her back at the magic fountain where she had reverted to her true form, a twin-tailed siren or serpent-lady.
So the Starbucks mermaid isn't a mermaid, she's a twin-tailed siren. And she most definitely did not come from a "16th-century Norse woodcut."
The Got Medieval blog calls this The Other Starbucks Mermaid Cover-Up. (If you compare the old and new logos, you'll deduce what the first cover-up was.) The entry expends a fair bit of scholarship on this issue and makes a case that the official story is, um, misremembered at best:If medieval studies teach us anything, it’s to be extra cautious with origin stories. Just as there was almost certainly no conveniently named Trojan refugee Brutus who founded Britain (nor Turkus Turkey, nor Francus France), no sword in the stone that elected a Welshman the king of all England, no Donation given by Emperor Constantine of all his earthly power to the Catholic Pope, and no shape-changing serpent lady Melusine to sleep with the Count of Anjou, there was almost certainly no “sixteenth-century Norse woodcut” floating around Seattle in 1971. It’s far more likely that three businessmen and coffee afficianados searching for a symbol for their new coffee shop in Pike Place Market turned to the American edition of The Dictionary of Symbols — which, incidentally, was first published in that same year, 1971. But the urge to clean things up and make them more inspiring than they were is simply irresistible where one’s origins are concerned. The number of people who feel a certain sense of vindication at having this cover-up exposed is, I imagine, fairly modest. Still, I do have sympathy for Carl S. Pyrdum, III, the stated author of the Got Medieval blog, who says he started the blog "as a place to gripe about how the mainstream media does not understand the Middle Ages." A significant number of posts on the Language Log, for example, are gripes about how the mainstream media (and people at large) don't understand language.
And really, anyone who's an expert at something can find it exasperating to encounter the largely uninformed ramblings of the rest of humanity about the expert's beloved field. Of course, that rarely results in a chance to rant about a major corporation and then have the WSJ pick up the story. So kudos to Got Medieval for this one.
[categories]
seattle, general, history
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posted at
05:46 PM
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 As we've all experienced, retailers these days like to offer discounts -- sale prices -- in the form of rebates. There are two kinds: instant rebates (IRs), which are taken off the price when the cashier rings it up, and "customer-initiated rebates" (CIRs), which is the kind where you have to fill in a form and send it in.
From the seller's perspective, CIRs are a great approach. First, the retailer can post a discounted price, which looks like a sale. Second, rebates are often offered through the manufacturer, so the retailer doesn't have to eat the discount at all. Third, the rebates have very specific steps and requirements (the more cynical will maintain that these are crafted to maximize consumer error in rebate-request submission), and many folks either won't bother at all or will not complete all steps correctly. Estimates for rebate redemption vary. Some think around 50%; others say "The industry average is less than ten percent. And it can be as low as one percent."
(Of those who do go through all the steps, some number of people never cash the rebate check, which is apparently known as slippage.)
In effect, CIRs provide a decently fine-grained way to capture the consumer surplus. Or stated another way (using the example of tax-prep software):In offering a CIR, those consumers who are very price sensitive will take the necessary actions to receive the $5 to $10 rebate on the product. People who are not sensitive to price (price insensitive) will not take the time. They accept the price.
The challenge with an IR in this case is leaving too much or too little money on the table. Price too high, and price sensitive shoppers will elect to manually prepare their taxes and forego purchasing the software. Price too low, money that price insensitive shoppers would have gladly paid is left behind. Finally, retailers can rule that they won't take any products back in return or exchange if the product has no UPC on it. And hey, guess what, you needed that UPC in order to claim your rebate. So sending in your rebate means you're also waiving your right to normal returns, even if the product is defective.
Now, I am a price-sensitive shopper, to the extent that if there are two similar options and one is cheaper, I'll probably go with that. And although I find CIRs annoying, if that's how I can get my sale price, I'll likely fall for that. I'm good about it -- I get and keep the receipt; I carefully cut out the UPC; I make copies of everything; and I mail everything in on time.
Recently, tho, I was outmaneuvered by Fry's. They give you a rebate receipt, good. But the form you have to fill out and send in is now all online. And as I discovered, the form you need is taken down immediately when the rebate purchase date expires.
In the traditional rebate protocol, the rebate is valid if you buy the discounted product for a specific price and within a set period. Fair enough. But you generally have some time (weeks or even months) to get around to sending in your rebate request. Fry's has gamed this system -- now you have to make sure you get not just the item, but also the rebate form before the rebate period expires. One day after the rebate expires, the forms are gone, and you, my friend, are SOL.
I learned this the hard way after I'd gotten two items over the course of a week that both qualified for rebates. When I sat me down the next week with rebate receipts and UPCs in hand, I discovered that the PDF files for the rebate forms were not available. An inquiry to Fry's "customer service" (I use their term, not mine) got me no reply.
This strikes me personally as a new and particularly weasel-y way to handle CIRs. Sure, Fry's can justify this by noting that the rebate period had expired, but that's not the same as the rebate submission deadline. What it feels like is another way, beyond the normal friction of CIRs, of making it difficult for consumers to get a rebate. (And since these are manufacturers' rebates, does Fry's even care?) And it sure as heck gives me a bad feeling about Fry's, and is that really worth it to the retailer? Some retailers think not:Even when the failure to redeem is the customer's own fault, it can breed negative feelings toward the company offering the rebate. Growing complaints inspired Best Buy and Office Max to almost completely eliminate their use of mail-in rebates. Customers "said they hated them, [and] we listened," says Best Buy spokeswoman Dawn Bryant. Mail-in rebates were phased out between 2005 and 2007. I might have reached the end of my patience with CIRs, and Fry's has come very near to exhausting the little good will I ever had toward them. It's sort of unfortunate that they're so very conveniently located for me. But if I'm going to get weaseled by going bricks-and-mortar, maybe I should just go ahead and get real discounts by shopping online.
[categories]
general, personal
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