In the Microsoft video you can see people collecting information and doing a lot of interesting (but not revolutionaries) things using devices very similar to a smartphone or a tablet and all interactions are done using one finger and the usual current gestures, as swiping.

Bret is instead proposing to have more ambitious visions, using the hands or the entire body for example (“With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?”).
Making devices where you can feel the material, consistency, instead of seeing “pictures under a glass”.

Hands feel things, and hands manipulate things.

Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.

And yet, it’s the star player in every Vision Of The Future.
To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It’s obviously a transitional technology.

What can you do with a Picture Under Glass? You can slide it.

That’s the fundamental gesture in this technology. Sliding a finger along a flat surface.

There is almost nothing in the natural world that we manipulate in this way.

The next time you make a sandwich, pay attention to your hands. Seriously! Notice the myriad little tricks your fingers have for manipulating the ingredients and the utensils and all the other objects involved in this enterprise. Then compare your experience to sliding around Pictures Under Glass.
Are we really going to accept an Interface Of The Future that is less expressive than a sandwich?

Francis Galton

the participants had to guess how much meat could you get from a beef that grazed in front of the crowd. 800 persons participated to the competition but no one guessed the right number (it was 1198 pounds), including several professional butchers.

Galton analyzed all the guesses and found out that their average was 1197 pounds, an error less than 0,1 %. Nobody was able to do better.
It was the year 1906. Galton’s finding remains true now: crowd wisdom beats the one from the experts.

Translating it into effort estimations: when they are coming from all the team members they are very often better than when they are coming from one “expert”.

It’s great that it survives the cuts in Google Labs. I talked about it here: ]]> http://mashimo.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/google-books-ngram-viewer-graduates-from-google-labs/feed/ 0 mashimo http://mashimo.wordpress.com/2011/08/02/which-macbook-air/ http://mashimo.wordpress.com/2011/08/02/which-macbook-air/#comments Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:44:21 +0000 mashimo http://mashimo.wordpress.com/?p=886 ]]> I was waiting since a lot of time for a new Macbook Air with Sandy Bridge architecture and finally it’s here. I have one since a couple of days.
It’s really the best notebook I have ever had and I’m also happy for the configuration I chose.
Here are a couple of considerations, just related to the configuration, maybe it can help other people to decide.

11-inch or 13-inch Model?

I got the 11-inch (28 cm) model, instead of the 13-inch (33 cm).
It has a screen resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels (instead of the 1440 x 900 of the 13-inch model).

My choice: 11-inch.
My thinking was: I want great portability, the 11-inch is so small, thin and light that I can bring it everywhere, plus it has a good resolution, the same keyboard and trackpad of the 13-inch. And it’s cheaper!

When I need more screen estate I can connect it to an external monitor.

If you really need as much screen as possible anytime, go for a MacBook Pro 17″ or another big laptop.

64GB, 128GB or 256GB SSD?

This was a tough decision. From one side you are used to large hard disks and media content. On the other side, you can keep most of your data collection in the cloud or on an external hard disk.

My choice: 128GB.

At the end, I went for a compromise: 64GB sounded too small and 256GB too expensive. My iTunes collection is stored on a NAS system that I can access via WiFi and I have many USB hard drive or sticks for quick external storage.
My old DVD external burner is also perfectly working with the MacBook Air.

Until now, I’m pretty happy with the choice, maybe 64GB would have even been enough!

2GB or 4GB of RAM?

Here’s the decision is very easy: you want to max out the RAM on your MacBook Air at purchase. In fact, you will not be able to easily upgrade the RAM later.

And more RAM is what can really boost the performance. The extra cost is totally worth it.

My choice: 4GB RAM

Which Processor?

The new processors are a huge improvement against the previous generation one (1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo) and – thanks to the SSD – the MacBook Air is noticeably fast in most of the tasks (beside such as video editing or intensive gaming).

The bottom line is that it’s not worth spending more to get a slightly faster processor than the one coming with the basic configuration.

My choice: stay with the 1,6 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5.

Conclusion: 128GB 11-inch MacBook Air With 4GB of RAM and 1,6 GHz Processor.

It is a paper full of interesting concept, made public around July 2010 and I had high expectations on the incoming social network of google.

In short the paper describes how the current social networks (à la Facebook) are not good models of the real life relationships.

Now Google+ is here.

Unfortunately the implementation is a bit disappointing: away from the original concept (at least, as described in the paper) and seems more yet another social network:  the anxiety for Facebook that pervades google (or their ad sellers) took over.

In fact the end result resembles very much Facebook, with its standard concept of main feed – my profile – my friends and I’m pretty sure soon will arrive the rest: games, polls, quizzes, ….

Until now, it looks more like the logic of “we need to have a social network too” won versus the “we should do something that does not exist” one.

It remains to see if they built something that was already existing, but better.

For example, Google knows a lot about me and my interests. They could show me or prioritize the feeds interesting for me among all the ones shared by my friends.  If Facebook is relations, Google+ could be interests.

It doesn’t look like this is achieved, for the moment.

Strong and weak ties

On slide 97 of the paper, you can see the following diagram:

It shows which kind of eco-system of relations a real person can have: different “circles” of friends (e.g. the college friends, the family) and among those other circles, with stronger or weaker ties (e.g. people we communicate with frequently vs. infrequently).

Typically you might have 10 strong ties and up to 150 weak ties (150 is not a random number).

You might even have only temporary ties (the person who answered your question on a surfing forum but who does not belong to the “surfing” circle of friends.

People with strong ties with us have also a bigger influence and deserve a different design and possibilities, i.e. they could help us deciding which new digital camera to buy or which university to choose because we trust them.

At the moment, G+ doesn’t really consider the strong ties.  Sure, I could double or triple all the circles and call them “strong surfing friends”, “weak surfing friends” and “temp surfing friends”.

But this is cumbersome; and G+ knows which people I most talk / chat / interact more. The strong/weak division could be done automatically.

Maybe one day it will come, I don’t know. It would have been great to have it from the very beginning though.

Personal information and privacy

The following diagram (taken from slide 193) shows that the privacy needs precise boundaries and the possibility to greatly customize them.

You want to give some personal information based on the recipients. Some of your “surfing friends” can get your phone number, some even your address, some none of them.

Sometimes people need to be anonymous

Period. It was even in the original paper (slide 186).

We will see. It’s a good first step (still, I’m surprised it took so long to come out with so basic functionalities) and many functionalities (APIs anyone?) are missing. Technically and functionally it’s also not bringing anything really new. But the interface is nice, the mobile application functional and it seems to scale very well.

It remains to see if they can build a good social product.

To quote Paul Adams, from his blog (after leaving Google for Facebook!):

Google is an engineering company, and as a researcher or designer, it’s very difficult to have your voice heard at a strategic level. Ultimately I felt that although my research formed a cornerstone of the Google social strategy, and I had correctly predicted how other products in the market would play out, I wasn’t being listened to when it came to executing that strategy. My peers listened intently, but persuading the leadership was a losing battle. Google values technology, not social science.

Here’s Way’s list:

1. The Name. JavaScript is NOT Java
2. Null is an Object?
3. NaN !== NaN
4. Global Variables
5. User-Agent Strings Report Mozilla. Ever Wonder Why?
6. Scope Inconsistencies
7. The Use of Bitwise Operators
8. Too Many Falsy/Bottom Values
9. It Can’t Do Arithmetic (he notes that he’s 99% teasing with this one)
10. Code Styling Isn’t your Choice!

The #4, Javascript (actually now called ECMAscript) almost requiring global variables, is the one that strikes with me most.
Followed by #10: JavaScript adding semicolon when it thinks it’s necessary!

When among the team members there are people with goodwill and resourcefulness, then leaders who are introverts and thoughtful are more suitable.
Exactly the ones who were considered inadequate because unable to motivate, give impetus and optimism. Nothing far away from truth. It’s the leaders who tend to attract others’ attention who are – at the end – not able to coordinate and get the best from the collaborators.

Effective leaders are quiet and reserved. This is what allows them to convince people and attain important results.

Specifically, the researchers meant to split the halo effect (what others perceive or believe to perceive) of a charismatic boss from the concrete impact on the people’s operation, measuring the teams performances.

The result: egocentric leaders reached the best profits when the employees were significantly more passive and submissive. On the other side, when the employees were proactive and enterprising they reached the worst results exactly when driven by egocentric leaders.

If you are extrovert, it’s very likely that you will become a leader. But this doesn’t mean that you will be able to positively contribute to your group performance. Those managers, according to the researchers, are missing the ability to absorb the useful suggestions from the subordinates, legitimate and implement the changes and take care of the improvements and / or the collaborators have the feeling that their hints are not listened to.
Moreover, they tend to look for domain conquering more than ideas harvesting.

He is going through several modern methods and tools.

In the world of web scraping, text mining and article reading utilities (readability bookmarklet) there is an ever growing demand for utilities that are capable of distinguishing parts of a HTML document which represent an article apart from other common website building blocks like menus, headers, footers, ads etc.
[...] In the following chapters I’ll try to review some article text extraction methods that are applicable to today’s websites. They mostly leverage on machine learning, statistics and a wide rage of heuristics.

in Ishinomaki, after the earthquake

Everything was ok for me (I was in Tokyo and then I moved to the South) but the devastation was so vast and complete that was difficult to comprehend initially. In some areas everything is gone. It was also unusually cold and snowing.

Seeing the people after the tragedy really made me respect Japanese people, even the day of the earthquake when the Tokyo public traffic system halted, they were so calm and so stoic.

At the end I’m really happy that I decided to stay and continue my trip; Everybody seemed really grateful that for us just being in Tokyo at a time when all of the foreign business people fled and France sent airplanes to fly their citizens home. Remaining there,  drinking the water and eating the fish along with all the citizens that had no choice but to endure was good-feeling. Even the staff at the hotel and restaurants in Kyoto kept asking us about what happened in Tokyo, they just wanted to talk.

And I’m definitely thankful we had an iPod and a netbook to keep in contact with Europe. Thanks Facebook!

I hope to go back to Japan soon.

The tool is very complete (maybe a bit over-engineered) and it includes powerful functionality for creating user interfaces (in a drag & drop editor) based on  Swing, SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) or GWT (Google Web Toolkit).
It’s also bi-directional: can read hand-written GUI Java code and reverse-engineered it into the GUI components.

I tried it with my test-application (a BMI calculator) and was able to create a GUI Java in one or two hours.

More information and the download are available on the Eclipse site and on Google Code.