September 2009 Archives
The Wall Street Journal reports a new wave of interest in the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, a Depression-era rearrangement of typewriter keys, developed by a psychology professor and typing expert in Washington State. Many users believe Dvorak offers speed and comfort superior to the conventional QWERTY arrangement. In the 1980s, computers brought a qualified victory, as software made it possible to remap keyboards without the massive costs of converting conventional typewriters or custom-building Dvorak models. The option was even built into both Windows and Macintosh operating systems.Now the age of the smartphone is setting back the movement, as Microsoft, Apple, and other manufacturers decline to offer a Dvorak option. Having tried to enter a simple URL with a new iPod touch (similar to the iPhone in its user interface), I'm puzzled that the issue came up at all. The small touch screen makes it a challenge to press the correct letter rather than an adjacent one. The problem for Dvorak users is cognitive, not physical; shifting from one layout to another is a mental pain. Considering the trivial cost of adding a Dvorak feature, Dvorak fans are probably right to believe that the industry is dissing them, hoping that they'll give up. It's a matter of respect.
Actually, respect for the user was August Dvorak's big problem. In the history of human factors, change often comes from below. I discovered this when writing Our Own Devices. For example, the first modern ergonomic chairs, introduced in the U.S. in the 1920s, were sold by leaving a sample chair for secretaries to try. Typewriter ribbon brands were also marketed with attractive boxes that typists could reuse for storage. Dvorak, evidently influenced by the ideas of the self-taught industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, took an opposite approach. He tried to sell government agencies and corporations on the idea that his keyboard would mean 1) more output per typist, and 2) fewer typists employed. But managers weren't buying the system, probably because it required a big investment in new equipment, retraining, and temporary decline of productivity. Those typists who were aware of it must have considered it just another speedup -- higher work quotas without an increase in wages -- that industrial unionists were protesting. Even government studies supporting the keyboard (to judge from descriptions I have read) focused on raw output rather than user comfort. The real advantage of the Dvorak layout is that while the brain can reprogram itself to use QWERTY nearly as fast as Dvorak, heavy typists and people subject to overuse injuries appreciate that their fingers don't need to move nearly as much.
Ironically, manufacturers themselves made reduced effort a selling point, for example in this postwar advertisement for IBM electric typewriters in the 1950s. So was there a chance for Dvorak's invention, at least as a niche product? It's impossible to say. But decades of papers on keyboard design and productivity are mostly moot because the great age of "production typing" in affluent countries is over, thanks to cut-and-paste clipboards in operating systems, cheaper and more accurate scanners, voice recognition software -- and outsourcing of much remaining keyboarding to developing nations. Meanwhile the interface of new touch-sensitive devices needs a new, end-user-friendlier twentieth century August Dvorak.
What is hard to explain is why Apple has kept third-party Dvorak software out of its official App Store, which means users have to hack their devices, possibly voiding their warranties. As Ed Hansberry explains on an InformationWeek blog:
The iPhone comes solely with a virtual keyboard. All Windows Mobile devices with touch screens have virtual keyboards. With that, you should be able to install whatever keyboard you want assuming someone has written it. You can run such a keyboard on the iPhone, but only if it is jailbroken.[One of many sites explaining this concept is here.] I don't know why Apple would block such an app from the App Store, but you won't find one there.The crisp elegance of the iPhone/iPod Touch interface carries a price: neo-Taylorist One Best Way design -- the very mentality that dogged Professor Dvorak. The Apple motto is evidently: "Think Different, but Not Too Different."
Photo Credit: Flickr User guspim
If John Beck Sr.'s happiness depended on his success, he'd probably be miserable. Sales at his Branchburg hair salon are down for the fifth straight year, a trend that began when budget chains such as Supercuts, Fantastic Sams and Great Clips moved into town. To make matters worse, when the recession hit, even his most loyal clients started stretching out their hair appointments.The report also suggests that farming, forestry, and fishing are satisfying occupations despite their risks and low compensation.
But Beck, who runs DJ's Hair Studio with his wife and daughter, is anything but miserable. After spending most of his life working for other people, he's just happy to be his own boss.
"We're in control. A lot of decisions that are made, are made by me," said Beck, 69, who opened the salon in the mid-90s after retiring from a 40-year career at Johnson & Johnson. "We have a lot of very happy clients."
Of course these statistics have their limits. You could say that the difficulties of running most small businesses (or farms) means that the people who have stayed with them, or entered them, are self-selected for intrinsic enjoyment of what they are doing. And what's the satisfaction level of employees of small businesses versus large corporations in the same line of work?
But the study still underscores an important finding of epidemiology. It's not stress itself but the sense of control that determines what work is beneficial or injurious to health. For helping reduce levels of obesity, smoking, excess drinking, and heart disease, perceived control is a dimension of life that deserves more attention.Writing in the Wall Street Journal of a wave of suicides at France Télécom, a business school professor in Paris, Isaac Getz, calls for new organizational styles:
Treat people as modern pilots, not as soldiers of the old wars. Give people real control over their work, stop giving them orders about how to do their jobs, and their stress will go down. With it, absenteeism will drop, and stress's hidden costs will shrink, while employee engagement goes up. All this, of course, is hard to accomplish in a traditional command-and-control company that often pays a lip service to autonomy but preserves the hierarchical chain of command--but it is possible.France has a highly regarded medical care system. But there, as here, the most important determinants of health and disease occur during the time people spend outside physicians' offices and hospitals.
"Annie Le Was on Fast Track, Suspect Ray Clark Cleaned Cages; Did Worlds Collide?" That's the headline of abcnews.com in the recent Yale tragedy. A prominent criminologist is quoted as saying that the accused:worked in an Ivy League school where most of his co-workers were potentially successful and had advanced degrees and were looking forward to a fulfilling and happy life, he was cleaning cages.Therefore, if the accused is guilty, "relative deprivation" might have been the motive. And of course that's literally true as a doubly conditional statement. But does even scrupulous speculation serve justice? There are three good reasons for professionals to think twice before pretrial comment in the media.
First, they haven't seen the evidence. In 1964, psychiatrists were all too willing to pronounce on Barry Goldwater's mental health and fitness for office for Fact magazine without ever having met him, leading to the historic libel trial, Goldwater v. Ginsburg.
Second, the state of expert testimony, even when presented in court, is in urgent need of reform, according to a recent report of the National Academy of Sciences. As its press release states:
Forensic evidence is often offered in criminal prosecutions and civil litigation to support conclusions about individualization -- in other words, to "match" a piece of evidence to a particular person, weapon, or other source. But with the exception of nuclear DNA analysis, the report says, no forensic method has been rigorously shown able to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source.This report does not cover psychological profiling, But a separate article in the New Yorker on the Cameron Todd Willingham case presents strong evidence that testimony by a prosecution psychiatrist as well as erroneous arson analysis helped condemn an innocent man.
Third, repeated psychological studies of both actual trials and moot courts suggest, as one paper from 2004 puts it: "Prejudicial pretrial publicity (PTP) constitutes a serious source of juror bias." It's time for journalists and scientists alike to reconsider how they present criminal cases. Framing even a hypothetical question may unintentionally help frame a real defendant.
Historical note: The biggest Ivy League medical school murder case of all involved an upper-class but financially troubled Harvard professor who was executed for killing a wealthy fellow Brahmin doctor (and slumlord). The historian Simon Schama, who wrote a novel about the events, observed of the school janitor who was the key prosecution witness that he was "condemned to be polite to those who were keeping him in his place." While some local historians still suspect the janitor, he collected a handsome reward for his role and retired.
The "relatively deprived," it seems, could be and can be almost any one of us.
(Photo: Flickr User [puamelia])
Friends of photography, and of French heritage, are mourning the death of Willy Ronis, most famous for his Nu Provençal, Gordes (1949). It's striking how many of the iconic images of France were created by immigrants or their children -- Ronis, Brassaï, André Kertesz -- just as the Hungarian-born cinematographers Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond created the look of all-American classics like Easy Rider, The Deer Hunter, and Deliverance. An aspiring composer as a young man, Ronis came to photography through a mixture of accident -- taking over his ailing father's commercial studio -- and inspiration from an exhibition of art photographers' work. The Depression and the mass demonstrations of Paris let Ronis become a participant observer of Popular Front militance -- to his dismay when American publications started using his images in what he considered a hostile, conservative sense after the War.
Ronis was one of the last stars of humanism, the search for universal experience in moments of happiness and tragedy transcending race, religion, nationality, and social class -- a movement epitomized by the blockbuster international traveling exhibition that William Steichen organized for the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, The Family of Man, to which Ronis contributed. (A kindred theatrical work, the Pulitzer prizewinning play, The Diary of Anne Frank, opened the same year on nearby Broadway.) Originally a Cold War bridge between East and West and a healing gesture following war and genocide, utopian humanism has survived the trends that scorned it, including the New Left and postmodernism. But we should temper our nostalgia; newer studies remind us that some Marxists and conservatives alike saw the exhibition as subtle propaganda for the other side. And Ronis himself was slow to see the evils of Stalinism, not resigning from the Communist Party of France until the 1960s.
The Times (London) obituary has a shocker of paragraph toward the end:
In 1999, in an important test case for the right of privacy in France, Ronis and [his agency] Rapho were heavily fined for his having taken 50 years earlier a photograph of a flower seller without her written consent. She had proudly displayed the image in her shop all that time until it was spotted by a zealous lawyer.
There's more about the case in a 2002 article in the Guardian; Ronis remained gentle, and a gentleman, about the case. But curiously -- considering the economic stakes in photography, and the implications of privacy legislation -- I found nothing about it in an electronic search of US law reviews. Some people would say that the French law, at least as I understand it from just two brief articles, is the true affirmation of humanism, the individual's freedom from unauthorized commercial exploitation of his or her image. But it's also an attack on a French national treasure, the heritage of candid street photography not only of Ronis but of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau. Consider another immortal Ronis image, a little boy bounding joyfully along the sidewalk, a baguette under his arm. What was the photographer supposed to do, get arrested following him home to get a parental signature? The law all but kills Ronis's definition of humanist photography as a difficult walk "toward a poetric representation of modest happiness." (See one of Ronis's last interviews, in French, here.) Probably for this reason, scores of his subjects ignored their "rights" and congratulated the photographer on the occasion of his valedictory retrospective show in Paris's Hôtel de Ville in 2005.
The Web era has dealt another blow to humanism, promoting a new aesthetic of vividly colored, electronically manipulated imagery and making 35mm black-and-white street photography look hopelessly grainy. Noting this trend on the photo-sharing site Flickr, the New York Times Magazine columnist Virginia Heffernan last year recounted a member's mischievous posting of a Cartier-Bresson classic of a bicyclist passing a spiral staircase, as his own, and the jeering response of members apparently ignorant of its provenance:
"When everything is blurred you cannot convey the motion of the bicyclist," one commenter carped. "Why is the staircase so 'soft'? Camera shake?" wrote another. "Gray, blurry, small, odd crop," someone concluded.
Nothing can bring back the humanist moment, but considering the alternatives, including some of the new online photography featured by Heffernan, it's looking better all the time.
(Photo: Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty Images)
Hats off to Daniel Brook for his series on Slate about the September 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta. It's a gem of reporting legwork and historical insight, based on a visit to Atta's thesis supervisor in Hamburg and sharp observations in the ancient city of Aleppo, where Atta was misled by his upbringing to misunderstand its heritage:
With the crumbling legacy of European imperialism and American-backed dictatorship written into its Paris-meets-Houston cityscape, Cairo is one of the world's worst advertisements for East-West relations. With that city as his tragic starting place, Atta refused to comprehend historic Aleppo, a cosmopolitan trading city where Europeans and Arabs, Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived side-by-side for centuries. He scorned diverse, mercantile Hamburg; he attacked polyglot New York. By allowing a discordant present to blot out a more hopeful past, Atta ensured further discord in the future.
Brook mentions but doesn't expand on the engineering background of the September 11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who selected the targets. As the official US report put it:
Highly educated and equally comfortable in a government office or a terrorist safehouse,KSM applied his imagination,technical aptitude,and managerial skills to hatching and planning an extraordinary array of terrorist schemes. These ideas included conventional car bombing,political assassination,aircraft bombing, hijacking, reservoir poisoning, and, ultimately, the use of aircraft as missiles guided by suicide operatives.
Generations of educators have assured us that that the study of science and engineering create international understanding across religious and ideological lines, promoting an international language that puts problem-solving ahead of dogma. And many scientists, engineers, and physicians around the world have indeed been outstanding ecumenical advocates.
But there's a dark side of technical knowledge. It's equally compatible with intolerance. Osama bin Laden, too, was educated not as a mullah but as a civil engineer. While many Iranian science professors are prominent in the resistance to the of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the brutal strongman appears to have an impressive technical background, even claiming on his blog that he had score 132 out of 400,000 engineering university applicants on a competitive examination. (Link via Wikipedia.) The world's second most wanted terrorist next to bin Laden is also no cleric but a physician, Ayman al Zawahiri. Well before September 11, 2001, the English historian Simon Sebag Montefiore noted the rise of medically trained tyrants, the Doctators, in the Spectator:
'Doctatorship' may be defined as the process by which a medical doctor, devoted to sacrificing himself to save lives, becomes a political dictator, devoted to sacrificing lives to save himself. 'Doctatorship' is a murky place where bedside manner meets state planner, where torture meets cure.
Whereas the Zawahiri and Atta families belong to the higher Egyptian intelligentsia, Ahmedinajad would be an obscure village artisan like his forebears if the passionately modernizing Shah had not promoted technical education for the masses, not only to promote growth but to weaken the hold of the religious conservatives.
The lesson is not that scientific and technical education are dangerous, but sadly that education alone has been overrated as a source of humane values.
For months, Germans have been stocking up on conventional incandescent light bulbs as the European Union (EU) phases in a ban on their manufacture and sale. There is open revolt even at the summit of nation's cultural establishment:
Many complain that the lights are just not bright enough and that they falsify colors. The Hamburger Kunsthalle, for example, recently made a bulk order for 600 incandescent light bulbs to make sure that it can keep illuminating the works it displays in the time-honored way.And it's become a mass movement, too:
The aesthetic issue is a powerful one. For Munich-based lighting designer Ingo Maurer, the CFL bulbs are ushering in a decrease in the quality of life. "We recommend protests against the ban, civil disobedience and the timely hoarding of lighting implements," Maurer told SPIEGEL. He also adds that he believes the ban might drive more people to use more candles, which are about as bad as you can get in terms of energy efficiency.
There are three problems with a legislative ban on anything in the absence of immediate harm. The first, as the German case shows, is that some people who might have increased their use of energy-saving bulbs, will protest limits on their choice by hoarding -- resulting in more energy spent producing bulbs that may outlive their purchasers. The second is that it removes an important incentive for the development of compact fluorescent lamps and light-emitting diodes that produce a more pleasing light, killing off the competition and reference standard. And the third is that it is an arbitrary and inconsistent way to promote energy saving; there's no limit to the wattage of new-style bulbs. The industry failed to learn from its founder, Thomas Edison, whose light bulb was designed to be not only more convenient than gas light, but more pleasant, according to Charles Bazerman's study.
Well-meaning Americans can be tone-deaf (or spectrum-blind) to culture, too. The U.S. counterpart to German incandescent aficionados are the people who have been stockpiling firearms and ammunition, like these preppies (Oregon-style), anticipating a crackdown by the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress. But there's a difference. The incandescent phaseout is law in Europe. It hardly matters that the Supreme Court clearly favors firearm rights and that between health care, Afghanistan, and the deficit, the Democrats won't be spending much political capital on gun control. Still, Barack Obama's remarks at a California fundraiser haven't helped: that economically discouraged Pennsylvanians "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations" -- an oil spill on troubled waters.
Obamaphobes' panic buying is having its own revenge. Democraticunderground.com reports that even one Wisconsin ammunition manufacturer is warning its own customers:
Due to hoarding of ammunition, you consumers have managed to raise theWelcome to the state of New Hamster.
prices of ammunition and components 50 to 500 percent.
You didn't even need the Government to impose any taxes or bans.
You did it all yourself.
Photo Credit: Flickr User Shika Kaoin
Call it a tempest in a VÄRME teapot. Critics are protesting the new catalogue typeface of the global furniture chain Ikea. As TIME Magazine reports:
Branding has been a large part of the Swedish chain's success -- what urban dweller today, whether in Atlanta or Kuala Lumpur, doesn't recognize that bright blue warehouse, glowing like a beacon of fine living, at the side of the highway? And its signature typeface, a customized version of Futura, has long been an integral part of that brand. But with its 2010 catalogue now arriving in mailboxes, the supplier of headboards and coffee tables to the world's thrifty and trendy has switched to what it sees as a more functional typeface: Verdana. In the process, it has provoked an instantaneous global backlash, the kind that can only happen on the Internet.
What bothers the protestors is that Futura was an influential 1920s font that had long entered the modernist canon, whereas Verdana, released by Microsoft in the 1990s, is designed for optimal monitor display. As the official Microsoft typography site puts it -- using Verdana:
This isn't merely a revival of classical elegance and savoir faire; this is type designed for the medium of screen.
But that doesn't matter to some critics, who are using the Internet to protest technological change intended to optimize design for the Internet.
Verdana is a landmark in its own right. Its chief designer, Matthew Carter, is one of the world's most honored typographers. He also designed Georgia, the typeface you are reading now.
I asked my friend Charles Bigelow about Verdana. He's a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a former MacArthur Fellow, who co-designed the font Lucida Sans in 1985 -- a breakthrough in type engineered to be legible on screen as well as in print. His verdict (from a longer e-mail):
. . . even at a large size, Verdana has a clear, crisp look.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the face when used
in print. It has a different graphical style than Futura,
or Helvetica, or Lucida, but that's a good thing. It shows
the originality and creativity of the artist who designed
it. It is a great accomplishment. We should admire originality
and creativity in fonts, just as we do in music, art, and
literature.
The problem that most screen-optimized fonts have in print
is that the big x-heights, the wide shapes, the open spacing,
the careful reduction of fine details, all combine to make
the text image look too big, too strong, too aggressive,
and too simple. One way around this is to compose the text
at a smaller size than would be used for print-optimized
typefaces. As the printed text point size gets smaller,
the screen-optimized faces begin to look more amenable
in form, finer in detail, more subtle in texture.
In the specific case of the Ikea catalog, another issue
is that the same font is used for both text (small sizes)
and display (big sizes). This one-font-for-all-sizes
approach to design reduces the graphical complexity of
the typographic image. Many graphic designers and
typographers prefer to use different faces for text
an display, to create more complex harmonies and contrasts
in the type image.
Certainly, there are many beautiful books printed in one
typeface, such as Garamond or Baskerville, at different
text and display sizes, but those faces were designed for
traditional printing, not optimized for screen display,
and they have many subtle and charming features that emerge
in different ways at different sizes.
If Ikea had used Verdana only for the text sizes, and a
different typeface for display, or vice-versa, the flap
might never have occurred, because the typographic image
would have been more complex, more nuanced, and less
likely to attract or arouse strong criticism.
And then there's the question of whether Futura was ever quite appropriate for Ikea in the first place. To some critics, Ikea's undeniably successful focus on cost-cutting and global sourcing compromises the ideals of interwar design. One of them, David Barringer, comments:
IKEA clearly tips the Bauhaus balance in favor of business. IKEA's success, however, might prove that consumers care less about the Bauhaus emphasis on lasting value and a humane society than they do about buying cheap stuff right now.
Ellen Ruppel Shell has made a similar point on this site. And as the critic Stephen Bayley recently wrote in the Guardian, flat-pack shipment of easily assembled furniture actually is 150 years old, the innovation of the (still existing) originally Vienna-based bentwood chair firm Thonet. Nineteenth-century globalization in this case was based not in Asia but in the forests of Central Europe, where skilled, strong men steamed and bent chair parts that were stacked and crated, to be reassembled (depending on the model) for elegant parlors or backwoods dives:
Source: Wikimedia Commons I wonder what images, and typefaces, will evoke early 21st-century Ikea 150 years from now.
Top Photo Credit: www.flickr.com/photos/colouredinks/440471470
(IInadvertently the original post omitted thanks to Steven Heller for the link to David Barringer's blog.)
Edward Tenner
