Edward Tenner

Patent Arrogance

2009-11-17T15:10:00Z

"Don't Be Evil"? Silicon Valley seems to be thinking a lot more about the unthinkable, or at least the distasteful.

The New York Times Digital Domain feature notes with tongue only partly in cheek that Apple has just applied for a patent on a system that would let consumers use electronic devices free in return for exposure to a stream of advertisements that would compel responses before the machines would resume functioning.

Would anyone have guessed that Apple, so widely revered, would seek patent protection of a gimmick not unlike one used to sell vacation timeshares? (Agree to attend the sales seminar and get a free weekend getaway!) Or could anyone have predicted that the Apple of 2009, a company with premium products, would file a patent application that could make it a latter-day descendant of Free PC and ZapMe, companies that in 1999 gave away PCs engineered to always display on-screen ads?

And there's a parallel move, disclosed in 2008 by The Times (London):

The Times has seen a patent application filed by [Microsoft] for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees' performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer's assessment of their physiological state.

The obstacle to both applications is clearly not the "understaffed and underfunded" Patent Office.

Both ideas may be non-starters, at least as presented by the respective newspapers. The kinds of businesses that would be interested in buying the Microsoft system are already causing considerable physiological and mental distress to their employees. As long as the profits are rolling in, they don't need to pay Microsoft to tell them so. And Apple's mooted satanic pop-ups have their own structural flaw. Consumers seeking free equipment for agreeing to watch advertising have all shown that they hate paying money for anything. Not the best prospects for marketers except con artists, and why should they pay when broadcasting spam is virtually free?

Of course, the applications could be staking out less offensive innovations in deliberately grandiose general language for maximum legal protection. Or they could be intended to thwart expected moves by competitors.

In fact, maybe both documents are really disinformation, designed to lure journalists (and bloggers) into speculation that obscures the companies' real intentions, like those World War II "invasion plans" designed to be discovered by the Wehrmacht.

But who knows whether Microsoft against Apple might some day turn into Big Brother versus Big Bother.

(Photo: Lars Plougmann/Flickr)

Nomen Est Omen

2009-11-16T02:50:00Z

Names can be prophetic. Consider this account of a German privacy case by my friend John Schwartz, about a lawyer suing Wikipedia to enforce globally a German law limiting the naming even of convicted criminals after their release:

Mr. Stopp has already successfully pressured German publications to remove the killers' names from their online coverage. German editors of Wikipedia have scrubbed the names from the German-language version of the article about the victim, Walter Sedlmayr.
Now Mr. Stopp, in suits in German courts, is demanding that the Wikimedia Foundation, the American organization that runs Wikipedia, do the same with the English-language version of the article.

An injunction-seeking attorney named Mr. Stopp? Of the firm of Stopp & Stopp? Psychological researchers have found a statistically significant influence of names in choices of career. The phenomenon is called "implicit narcissism" or "implicit egotism." (Not that the firm concerned, or any other individuals with fitting names, are personally narcissistic or egotistic.) It worked for the poker champion Chris Moneymaker -- his real name, incidentally. A distinguished astrologer in India has made name change a formidable science, and the British have web sites to expedite the process.

But it's still worth remembering a point made by the Wall Street Journal's "Numbers Guy," Carl Bialik, quoting one statistician on the alleged predictive power of names:

"In very large samples like the ones here, even small differences will be judged statistically significant," Prof. [Hal] Stern [of the University of California, Irvine] says. "This means that we're confident the difference is not zero. It does not mean the difference we see is important."

Firing Educators with Enthusiasm

2009-11-09T19:50:00Z

President Obama wants to make it easier to dismiss teachers whose students aren't performing well on tests. But what about the parents? By the president's own account, his daughter's performance jumped when he and his wife made clear their expectations, evidently without a change of instructor:

The president . . . went off script for a few moments, telling of a C grade that his 11-year-old daughter, Malia, brought home from school recently. It didn't meet the standards at the Obama home, he said, and Malia knew it.

More recently, he said, she came home with a score of 95.

"What was happening was, she had started wanting it more than us," he said.

And I wonder about negative incentives when positive ones have such questionable results; merit pay for test scores has been a disappointment, at least in Texas:

For the $300 million spent on merit pay for teachers over the last three years, Texas was hoping for a big boost in student achievement.

But it didn't happen with the now-defunct program, according to experts hired by the state.

The Texas Educator Excellence Grant, or TEEG, plan did not produce the academic improvements that proponents - including Gov. Rick Perry - hoped for when the program was launched with much fanfare in 2006, a new report from the National Center on Performance Incentives said.

"There is no systematic evidence that TEEG had an impact on student achievement gains," said researchers for Texas A&M University, Vanderbilt University and the University of Missouri.

Maybe attrition plus the dread jobless recovery will come to the schools' rescue. From the Depression into the 1960s, the teaching corps, not only in major cities, were an elite, many of whom had aced competitive examinations (the best known, Lyndon Johnson, was an outstanding classroom teacher). Not all new recruits of the postwar boom could be expected to measure up, just as the nation was spoiled by the efficiency of the mid-century Post Office, but there was more to it than the drought of investment banking jobs. Discrimination in other professions made instruction one of the few alternatives for talented women. There was also more religious and racial bias in what remained of the private sector. Fortunately, Depression-era unemployment levels, racism, and sexism are unlikely to return. So how do we recruit and train teachers?

Since teacher education and certification programs don't seem to relate to progress in actual instruction (not unusual; bar exam results aren't correlated with future legal competence) Malcolm Gladwell has proposed the sink-or-swim system used in football and financial advising. You can't evaluate aptitude in advance, so let lots of people try and keep those who work out because of a mysterious interpersonal aptitude one researcher has named "withitness." (Who, I wonder, will re-teach the kids who experience withoutitness?)

But teaching isn't like pro sports, finance or the arts. The average struggling musician can take hope, like the aspiring athlete, from a few colleagues' superstar incomes. Not teachers. Even Frank McCourt never planned to be a best-selling author -- it was his method of teaching by storytelling that helped him become one.

And we need many more teachers than quarterbacks, investment advisors, or special forces commandos. According to the Census Bureau, in 2004 there were 3.1 million primary and middle school teachers and 772,000 secondary school teachers. In 2005 we had only 800,000 physicians, and 20 years before that only 500,000, according to one unofficial report. Education's problem isn't that people don't realize it's important. Most do. The problem is that it is so important, just as health care became a greater issue with the expansion of medicine.

So if the educational establishment is still not delivering, conventional incentives are disappointing, major salary increases unrealistic because of scale and state and local fiscal crises, and sifting battalions of aspirants for Gladwellian "withitness" is a non-starter, what's left?

Musical ability was once considered the domain of "withitness" too. Shinichi Suzuki showed it was possible to train teachers to bring out latent talent in large numbers of students. We should focus not on threatening teachers but on creating better ways to help them.

The greatest of the twentieth-century gurus, Peter Drucker, was also the one who best recognized the educational side of all enterprises. Zachary First, managing director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University replied to my query about one of his most brilliant insights, which I haven't yet found in print:

"Peter Drucker long consulted for ServiceMaster. He was both an advisor and friend to the company's Chairman and CEO, C. William Pollard. Drucker once suggested to Pollard that ServiceMaster's real business was not janitorial services or lawn care or pest control, but rather 'developing people.'"

Maybe academia can in turn learn something from the crabgrass removal business. How to develop the people who are developing people -- that's the question.

(Photo: Gamma-Ray Productions/Flickr)

Two Snaps: The Alchemy of Hits

2009-11-03T15:00:00Z

Why do some technological and cultural products spread like kudzu while others wither on the vine? Journalists and academics have written volumes about "stickiness," but even the sharpest manufacturers, publishers, and producers have been rejecting future hits for decades -- often ideas and styles the break normally reasonable rules. Parker Brothers actually declined Monopoly twice: as the Landlord's Game (a simulation promoting Henry George's socialist tax reform principles, with a cult following in academic economics) in the 1920s, and its ultimate pro-capitalist version, authorized for a pittance by the unworldly original patent holder, in the 1930s. (The developer of that successful revision, or rather inversion, had to market a home-made prototype to convince them.) But if the game had flopped, there would have been many plausible reasons -- too complicated, consumers were sick of monopolies, etc.

Recent tributes to the late composer Vic Mizzy show the power and unpredictability of hits. The LA Times explains how it worked:

. . . [B]ecause the production company, Filmways, refused to pay for singers, Mizzy sang it himself and overdubbed it three times. The song, memorably punctuated by finger-snapping, begins with: "They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky, they're altogether ooky: the Addams family."

In the 1996 book "TV's Biggest Hits: The Story of Television Themes From 'Dragnet' to 'Friends,' " author Jon Burlingame writes that Mizzy's "musical conception was so specific that he became deeply involved with the filming of the main-title sequence, which involved all seven actors snapping their fingers in carefully timed rhythm to Mizzy's music."

For Mizzy, who owned the publishing rights to "The Addams Family" theme, it was an easy payday.

"I sat down; I went 'buh-buh-buh-bump [snap-snap], buh-buh-buh-bump," he recalled in a 2008 interview on CBS' "Sunday Morning" show. "That's why I'm living in Bel-Air: Two finger snaps and you live in Bel-Air."

It's encouraging to note that budget limits helped make the song such a success.Mizzy was challenged to become a one-man band and chorus, rose to the task, and managed to include copyright ownership in his contract. Mizzy not only had the right idea, he was willing to put hours of work into the right execution.

For whatever obscure neurological or aesthetic reason, the theme song has joined the ranks of the earworms. It's infectious even across species. Parrots learn not only speech but melodies and rhythm from their human companions, and the Addams Family theme song is an avian hit on Youtube, with dozens of versions by cockatiels alone. Here's the best finger snap I found:

Creative success is usually a lot of work -- except when it isn't. And in the end, like the Mizzy's Adamses, it can also be a bit "mysterious and spooky."

Help Yourself: New Age vs. Old School

2009-10-27T20:55:00Z

Whatever investigators and courts ultimately decide about three deaths and a number of alleged injuries in a "sweat lodge" program at his Arizona New Age retreat, the guru James Arthur Ray has no plans to abandon his mission. And to judge from the positive reaction of many prospects, the risk might even make the program look more attractive -- no pain, no gain and all that. (There's a theory that as technology makes motoring and other activities safer, some people compensate by craving new risks.) According to the Los Angeles Times,

Though shaken by the deaths, Ray has quickly returned to the road, teaching his secrets of success even as he uses them to cling to his own.

"I've taught that we're all going to have adversity and we can't run from it," a somber, teary-eyed Ray said Tuesday night at the beginning of his free recruitment session in Denver. "I've certainly learned a lot in the past 10 days."

Some weren't aware of the Sedona deaths until Ray addressed it. But Lyle Guthmiller, 44, a heating and air conditioning technician, said it didn't dissuade him from considering signing up for one of the retreats. "When you're pushing the limits, unfortunately, things can happen," he said. "I'd rather live that life than be a couch potato."

Self-help gurus--and their disciples--have exasperated skeptics for over a century, at least since the debunkers of the Russian-born spiritualist Helena Blavatsky, whose Theosophy movement has survived its early detractors to become a presence on the Web. Even negative publicity keeps leaders in the news, and weren't many of the founders of today's great religions denounced in their own time as charlatans?

Video in particular favors today's prophets, with their often spellbinding performances, over less charismatic naysayers. Ray was featured on the Larry King show, as the self-help critic Steve Salerno notes with dismay in the Wall Street Journal. Even accomplished investigators of alleged occult phenomena like the magician James Randi, who offers $1,000,000 prize for proof of the paranormal, can't expose the advice of motivational speakers in the same way. One of Randi's blog contributors does have an illuminating account of a post-tragedy appearance by Ray. It should not be so surprising that Ray and his followers have taken the offensive; over 50 years ago, a Chicago end-of-the-world movement was not dissolved but galvanized into action after its Armageddon deadline passed, helping inspire the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance.

There are many sins in the self-help industry. One is the dogma that anybody can be a great success at any time simply by drawing on inner resources. It's one thing -- and a good thing -- to show how many people have overcome poverty, illness, disabilities, and discrimination. It's another to deny the role of factors beyond our control, especially chance (despite some evidence that our attitudes can affect our luck) and circumstances. For example, in 1996 magazine interview, the great computer scientist Donald Knuth observed that people with exceptional programming aptitude existed and exist where there was no opportunity to display their gifts: "I imagine there are computer scientists in the pygmy forest." Some people's gifts may no longer be profitable; others' not yet. And then there's the insidious Just World Hypothesis, recently exposed here by Jonah Lehrer. Louise Hay, the publisher-doyenne of New Age healing, told the New York Times Magazine writer Mark Oppenheimer that while she would not confront victims with guilt, she could see justice even in genocide:

"Yes, I think there's a lot of karmic stuff that goes on, past lives." So, I [Mark Oppenheimer] asked, with a situation like the Holocaust, the victims might have been an unfortunate group of souls who deserved what they got because of their behavior in past lives? "Yes, it can work that way," Hay said. "But that's just my opinion."

Should we condemn all self-help books? Some are recommended by mental health professionals, as Daniel Goleman observed years ago, before going on to write a best-seller of his own. The monarch of the genre may still be Samuel Smiles, author of the original Self-Help, a Victorian sensation still in print after 150 years.Smiles was a disillusioned political reformer who argued for individual effort. Reactionary propaganda or progressive politics by other means? Make up your own mind here. Smiles glorified the work ethic, not wealth or social status, and admired his protagonists for the sacrifices they made, for example the French Protestant ceramicist Bernard Palissy supposedly fueling his furnace with his household furniture as a last-ditch measure. This and many other anecdotes in Smiles have been questioned by more recent scholarship. But his message was the opposite of most of today's movement. He taught at workers' schools and declined lucrative offers to memorialize self-made industrialists.He preached no Secret but perseverance and dedication to the work for its own sake rather than for external rewards.Smiles the Scots Calvinist may have been the last great apostle of the Protestant Ethic, but he was also a forerunner of twenty-first-century ideas like self-efficacy.

Photo Credit: Flicker User Casey Serin

Getting a Grippe

2009-10-21T16:15:00Z

In flu season, what price prevention? That's a question the Philadelphia Inquirer is asking as religious and medical leaders discuss the ethics of the handshake. While there is medical debate about avoiding the gesture -- some doctors say a ban is only minimally effective, others carry hand sanitizer in bottles with them -- some people fear a moral contagion. One mother whose family had swine flu last summer called avoidance

"extreme. . . . That's who we are as human beings. We do shake hands. We do hug each other. We do kiss our friends on the cheek. If we let go of all that, then what do we have left? We're just walking by each other as strangers."

She still shakes hands, kisses cheeks, and refuses to use hand sanitizer, even though Har Zion Temple in Penn Valley, where her husband is the rabbi, recently installed dispensers after a member made the request.

Philadelphians' concerns on such questions have deep historic roots. Handshaking was once a common form of greeting in Europe, then displaced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by hat doffing and bowing, only to re-emerge as an allegedly English innovation. But it was the Quakers, first settlers of Philadelphia, whose founder George Fox promoted the gesture as a symbol of the equality of believers -- at a time when authorities considered refusing to doff a hat to magistrates something between heresy and treason. Philadelphia even has a handshake historian with a classics Ph.D.

There's a sinister side of anti-handshake campaigns. Mussolini cited hygiene in officially banning the handshake in favor of the "Roman Salute," a gesture that has its own scholars. (Some historians think the Duce just wanted "excuse to avoid one form of human contact.") And Youtube hosts a virtual festival of conspiracy-theory handshake videos like this.

Despite hygienic reservations, the handshake, like the chair, is a Western custom that has made its way around the world. Influenza did not reverse the trend even after the 1918 pandemic, so it's not going to do so now. Some alternative gestures like elbow bumps make as much sense (outside their original cultural contexts) as rituals of safe blood brotherhood. In fact the small risk makes the clasp even more meaningful. So handshakes, perhaps followed by discreet private disinfection, are here for the duration.

(Photo: Flickr/star5112)

The Physics Nobel and the Fate of Bell Labs

2009-10-16T20:55:00Z

A Newark Star-Ledger report on this year's Nobel Prize for Physics shows how the twentieth century's greatest innovation in imaging was the indirect result of two research "failures." Wired has more details of the internal politics.

The breakthrough of Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, the charge-coupled device (CCD), had a curious motivation. What catalyzed it was the peculiar agenda of AT&T in the late 1960s. Managers of Bell Labs thought that a new technology called bubble memory was about to replace semiconductors and let researchers on the latter side know they they needed a great new idea fast to prove semiconductors were worth continued funding. Bubble memory turned out to be a bubble and is now only a memory, but pressure, based on an erroneous projection of the future, helped create another future. It also made it possible to capture the images of Apollo 13. Yet the videotube that used the first CCDs became a dead end itself. AT&T's Picturephone service was based on a very rational early fear of cable and television as rivals of the telephone in building new, high-speed networks, as the historian Kenneth Lipartito has confirmed in his standard account of the program.

Veterans of Bell Labs are rightly proud of the organization's record. To quote the Star-Ledger:

Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies, has now produced 13 Nobel laureates and more than 31,000 patents since 1925. During the 1960s and 1970s, the lab in Murray Hill was regarded as a crucible of some of the most innovative research in the world.

"Everything we take for granted today -- digital music, digital art, lasers -- came from Bell Labs," said A. Michael Noll, emeritus professor of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California and a former Bell Labs research scientist.

But it also noted the changes and research group closings under Lucent:

Many Bell Labs scientists, past and present, say their research community has never recovered.

"The environment that was there back then, the excitement about being around creative people who were open to talking about their work, was not duplicated during its time," said Dan Stanzione, a former director of Bell Labs.

Ironically some non-profit research laboratories like Battelle and Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft have been able to support themselves at least in part through income from the innovations they helped sponsor -- like dry photocopying and the MP3 format, respectively. I have found no information on royalties received by AT&T or Lucent for the invention of Willard Boyle and George Smith at Bell Labs -- possibly because original patents had expired before the digital imaging boom. (I'd welcome information from readers in telecommunication and imaging.)

This prize for 40-year-old work raises an intriguing question. Has something been lost from American and world science by the dispersion of so many great researchers? Some of them have profited personally; at conferences I've met former technical staff members who have made fortunes in finance and entrepreneurship. Others, like the late electrical engineer and perceptual psychologist Bela Julesz, a future MacArthur Fellow whom I met while I was a science editor, flourished in academia and became mentors to a generation of students. Still others have had the best of both worlds, with high-salaried tenured teaching jobs plus lucrative industrial ties.

But is society better off with so much talent redeployed? Are great innovations more likely to arise in the newer, decentralized, and more responsive global environment? Does everything important get discovered independently anyway, regardless of what happens to one organization? I'm not so sure. In Jeremy Bernstein's Three Degrees above Zero, Bela Julesz said Bell Labs had no counterpart in Europe or elsewhere and was "an absolutely unique treasure . . . for the whole world," a "baroque organ" for the maestro who needs "to pull out every register." Maybe the old Bell Labs resembled the Hollywood studio system, where massive resources and depth of skills could be deployed to produce qualitative leaps. The Labs set a high standard for the reconfigured world of global science.

(Photo: Wiki Commons)

Prof to Harvard: Drop the Balm!

2009-10-09T14:40:00Z

Consider this idea of the Harvard philosopher and television ambassador Michael Sandel as summarized in the (London) Times Higher Education. (I have not been able to get Sandel's new book itself yet and will correct this post if it turns out I am misinterpreting the original.)

Adopting the philosopher John Rawls' argument that a person does not merit success merely because he or she was lucky enough to be born with gifts that are in demand, Professor Sandel says a "philosophically frank" university should tell those it rejects that "we don't regard you as less deserving than those who were admitted" and that "it is not your fault that when you came along society happened not to need the qualities you had to offer."

This is supposed to "lessen the sting" (as the article quotes Sandel's book) of rejection--telling unsuccessful candidates that "society," with the Harvard admissions staff as omniscient arbiters, doesn't need "the qualities" you are offering. But look at the qualities that the Harvard Admissions office lists in its FAQ:

There is no formula for gaining admission to Harvard. Academic accomplishment in high school is important, but the Admissions Committee also considers many other criteria, such as community involvement, leadership and distinction in extracurricular activities, and work experience. We rely on teachers, counselors, headmasters and alumni/ae to share information with us about an applicant's strength of character, his or her ability to overcome adversity and other personal qualities - all of which play a part in the Admissions Committee's decisions.

In other words, Professor Sandel's allegedly consoling message would imply, academic brilliance, work ethic, athletic prowess, musical talent, community spirit, leadership, and resilience aren't everything! It isn't your fault that you are relatively lacking in one or more of them. We're sure you're good at something.

Sandel's proposed words to the winners, as quoted by the Times Higher, are as transparently flattering as the ding letter is implicitly devastating.

"You are to be congratulated, not in the sense that you deserve credit for having the qualities that led to your admission--you do not--but only in the sense that the winner of a lottery is to be congratulated. You are lucky to have come along with the right traits at the right moment."

In other words, don't be proud just because you are a naturally superior person, but you are also exactly what society needs at the moment--you lucky dog.

Seriously, don't use a great philosopher's concepts to sugar-coat a bitter pill. I propose a different message that could be adapted by other leading colleges and that could go to admits and rejects alike.

We have done our best. But remember, we not only admitted but honored, during the Third Reich, Hitler's piano man Putzi Hanfstaengl We rejected Warren Buffett and accepted the future Unabomber. Our short-lived independent alumni magazine 02138 delighted the national press a few years ago with highlights of our mistakes, and archive.org has saved a copy of the original, or at least its first page. Even if the seven percent of candidates we accepted are on average five times as likely to be as outstanding as the 93 percent we rejected--not likely because most applicants are self-selected as qualified for Harvard academic work--the latter as a group will have twice as many notable people as the former by their sheer numbers. So whether we accepted or rejected you, let our decision motivate you to work harder at learning and prove us right in the first case or wrong in the second.

Rejection, like other arts, is best learned young. To overcome it, begin by calling it by its rightful name.

Full Cotton Jacket

2009-10-06T18:38:00Z

Who thought up the white-coat policy for doctors meeting with President Obama in the Rose Garden to advocate health care reform? Since when do physicians attend political gatherings in semi-ritual clinical garb? I haven't seen many caps, gowns, or hoods at higher education conferences. More importantly, why choose a custom that has itself been targeted for reform? Authorities in Scotland recently banned white coats from hospitals on the grounds that long sleeves can transmit MRSA and other infections. They substituted a new set of unforms, barred, incidentally, from street use Meanwhile, the AMA is still studying the question. This article in Slate notes other disadvantages of the symbolic attire, including inspiring enough fear to raise hypertension in some patients. Seven out of eight doctors don't wear them at work. Business suits are the dress code of Mayo Clinic doctors. (On the other hand, older patients seem to like the coats.)

White coats may turn out on balance to be a bacteriological menace, a potent placebo, or both. But for an Administration that wants to break from conventional thinking, why go out of the way to proclaim tradition? The AMA declares judiciously:

Although your Reference Committee appreciates the intent of the [dress-code] resolution, the action requested ... may have unintended consequences, a concern raised by some speakers who testified.

Whatever the AMA decides, the President seems to find symbolic theater irresistible, not necessarily to the advantage of his own causes. But at least he didn't follow suit, as George W. Bush did during a (non-medical) laboratory visit in 2007.

Photo Credit: Flickr User Waldo Jaquith

A Much-Needed Gap

2009-10-02T13:51:00Z

Was there ever really a generation gap? Recent obituaries of the retailing billionaire Donald Fisher make me wonder. Fisher apparently called his clothing and music store The Gap with reference to that unstoppable 1960s concept -- the name actually was suggested by his wife as an alternative to his original "Pants and Disks." Significantly, he was an outsider to the garment industry and retail; his real estate background prepared him for all-important skills of store location.

As for that lower-case gap that inspired the stores, Fisher's career are reasons to reconsider the pop social science fixation on generational differences. First, in some ways contrasts within an age cohort may be greater than those between different age cohorts -- for example, in religious and political issues -- though the balance does change. Germans recognize a flakhelfer generation pressed into anti-aircraft and other combat service as teenagers in the later years of the Second World War, but apart from this military experience and ensuing controversies, what do Pope Benedict XVI and the novelist Günter Grass really have in common?

Second, age boundaries are fluid except when laws (like those conscripting the flakhelfer born in 1926 and 1927) create sharper breaks. Usually the balance of attitudes and values is a continuum over time, but is treated in discrete units. Compare the color spectrum. Culture and language lead children of each society to recognize a different set of colors according to psychological studies, even though humanity perceives the same wavelengths through essentially the same eyes and brains. Generational differences also can be arbitrary ways to slice what's really smooth.

Third, and the most relevant here, the culture of each "generation" is shaped by men and women somewhat older -- in the case of The Gap by a 41-year-old businessman whose 20 or so years' seniority over his customers did not impede his success. His own disappointment with the cut and fit of jeans in other stores was evidently shared by many younger people. Even the defining musical superstars of the 1960s and beyond weren't Baby Boomers themselves; John Lennon and Ringo Starr were born in 1940, Paul McCartney in 1942, George Harrison in 1943, and their legendary producer George Martin in 1926. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were both born in 1941. The leading orator of the Berkeley student revolt, Mario Savio, was vintage 1942, his German counterpart Rudi Dutschke, 1940. Even France's Daniel Cohn-Bendit (1945) doesn't strictly qualify; most definitions of the Boomer generation cited on the Web give 1946 as its beginning, reflecting the demographic bulge that is the name's original basis.

Speaking of California protest, whatever your opinion of Ronald Reagan's policies, his recalled comeback to a student spokesman while governor of the state is still the best commentary I know on generation gaps, even though I haven't been able to confirm it so far in another source; it might be applied to the "Millennials" and the Internet, too. When the student expressed doubt that his generation could be understood by people who had not grown up with space satellites, rockets, and computers, he says he retorted: "You're absolutely right. We didn't have those things when we were your age. We invented them."

Photo Credit: Flickr User Eleanore H. and LittleMissCupcakeParis

The Perils of Thinking Differently

2009-09-29T19:35:00Z

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

Control: The Neglected Dimension

2009-09-24T22:23:00Z

It's good to be the king, or queen, be your realm ever so small, according to the findings of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a survey of over 100,000 working adults. The Newark Star-Ledger elaborates with a local case study:

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.

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."

The report also suggests that farming, forestry, and fishing are satisfying occupations despite their risks and low compensation.

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.

Trial By Profile

2009-09-22T14:40:00Z

"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])

Willy Ronis: Requiem for a Humanist

2009-09-17T20:40:00Z

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)

September 11 Reflections: Terror and Technology

2009-09-11T21:45:00Z

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.