Gladys and Otis

This morning I noticed a curious episode in the ongoing saga of “Man against Machine” or in this case woman against machine. It demonstrates how much people distrust even the most mundane everyday mechanical and electrical systems that we encounter.

This happened after I dropped my daughter off at work, and drove through the parking lot to get back on the main drag where naturally I just missed the light. So I’m sitting there and I notice a lady (I’ll call her Gladys) who was crossing the street directly towards me and only made it half way across before the light changed. So Gladys was stranded at the center divider standing next to one of those buttons that trigger the walk/don’t walk cycles. So I notice that Gladys starts pushing the button over and over as she keeps glancing up at the traffic light.

I can see her shoulder moving just a little so I start counting how many times she is pushing the button; I estimate that it must have been 25 times at least, and all this time she keeps glancing up at the Walk/Don’t Walk sign to see if it is changing. Then Gladys stopped for about ten seconds, and then decided that the stupid control may not have “heard” her and started pushing it again another ten or twelve times. Since this is normally a busy street, all this was happening long before one would expect the light to cycle to Walk again, so I found this all pretty amusing and tried to imagine what was going through her head.

Now everyone probably pushes the button more than once just to make sure that the light control picked up their button press, maybe two or three times just for good measure. This was different though. I was wondering if Gladys actually thought that if she pushed it a whole lot more times, then the control would get the idea that she was in a hurry, switch to a faster cycle and stop the cross traffic sooner. Or maybe she just didn’t trust the system to remember that she had pushed the button, that if there was a lot of traffic, then it would decide that the cars were more important than Gladys and make a conscious decision to make her wait longer.

Something interesting happened then. A man walked up to the crosswalk on my side of the street and noticing that there was a lull in the traffic, just started walking across against the red light. When she saw this guy boldly flaunting the rules, Gladys hesitated and then decided that she wasn’t going to let this guy make her look stupid and decided to take off, anxiously looking both ways to make sure she wasn’t going to get caught breaking the law. Of course, when she was most of the way across the remaining lanes, the light changed anyway at which point she relaxed, probably telling herself that the 35 button pushes did the trick.

I know this all sounds like the musings of someone (me) who should have better things to think about, but I was alone in the car and this is just the kind of thing that people think about when they have nothing better to do whether they admit it or not. So as I headed home, I started thinking what if there was a light on the button thingy that lights up to acknowledge that the unit picked up your command. Would that make Gladys stop after just a couple presses? Maybe not, since we have virtually all seen people press elevator buttons again and again that were already lit up, with the same thought that all this extra pushing would make an impression on the “brain” that runs the elevator.

Unfortunately the elevator brain is probably not that smart, or then again, maybe it is. If we actually programmed elevator and other controls to react to how many times you pushed the button, you would soon find people wearing out the buttons trying to impress Otis the elevator that they were in fact more important than all the other people who might be trying to use the elevator at the same time. Parents would train their kids to stand there and push the button continuously until the elevator got there. And they would do the same thing inside, trying to get the elevator to cruise past floors where people were waiting just because they were “in a hurry.” So maybe Otis knows that people are often self centered and could care less about being fair to the other patrons, and he consciously ignores those extra button presses in an effort to be impartial.

Of course, we all know in our hearts that Otis gets annoyed and actually takes his time when someone does that just to teach them a lesson. Obviously Gladys didn’t understand this fact.

Collective Intelligence

Ok, so I was reading the November issue of Fast Company magazine (the paper version -- that’s another subject in itself), and I was reading through their list of the 101 most provocative things that will change our lives in 2005. I come across number 64 which references James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, where he espouses the idea that groups of people can be smarter than the smartest individuals within them.

Certainly not a new idea, but think about his four criteria for crowd wisdom: 1) diversity of opinion to bring in a variety of info, 2) independence of members from one another to prevent the rise of a dominant leader, 3) decentralization to balance out mistakes, and 4) a good method of aggregating opinions.Assuming you accept his theory and the criteria above, which on the surface seems reasonable to me, why aren’t the most pressing problems of the world being solved by collaborations over the internet between large groups of smart, engaged people? What element of human nature would get in the way of the internet becoming an immensely powerful force that could generate solutions to our most pressing problems?

Maybe number 4, a good method of aggregating opinions, is the hard part. How do you get your ideas accepted, even heard in the cacophony of voices that the internet has now enabled, and how do these aggregate problem solvers achieve credibility? The obvious answer is through success. Like any business, you start small, tackling the moderate problems first, then work up to the big ones.

I have to believe that this is already happening, unless, and this is the big question, there is a basic flaw in Surowiecki’s concept. Does the old adage “two heads are better than one” break down when you get too many people involved? Does ego screw up the whole idea and cause the solutions to degrade into “designed by committee” type solutions? Do the smart ones in the crowd fade back when they don’t get recognition for their brilliance? Do the solutions dumb down to that which is easily achievable?

Interesting....

AARP convention observations

What an discouraging weekend! Just got back from the AARP convention in Las Vegas where I was handed free samples of Glucosamine tablets and Metamucil and offered numerous pamphlets describing how to deal with my declining mental capacity. Notwithstanding all the upbeat handouts, I went there to see if any high tech stuff was being designed specifically for seniors, which is something I’ve been interested in for some time now.

Well, either this is not a priority with designers, or this venue wasn’t the right place to show it off, because there were only a couple booths that had anything that fit my criteria for innovative design aimed at seniors, which was a little surprising given that there were over 300 exhibitors.

I even saw quite a few gadgets that were poorly designed for virtually anyone, not just the 50 to 70 year-olds that made up the majority of the crowd. I’m talking about devices that either had really tiny buttons with microscopic labels, or the buttons were placed so close together that you could easily push two at once, or the shape of the thing was such that it was hard to hold on to, or there was no tactile feedback; you get the picture.

Apparently it is going to take time for product designers to wake up to the fact that the median population of the US is getting older and that the 45 and older segment has more than half of the buying power of the economy. We also represent over 50% of discretionary spending and control 70% of net worth in the U.S. Wake up people!!!

Smart Homes or Useless Gadgets?

What with all this talk about home technology taking over our lives, maybe it’s time for a reality check. I just read an article written by John Dvorak, columnist for PC magazine who’s stock-in-trade is the presentation of contrarian viewpoints. His opinion in this 9/29/04 article is that the appeal of all this cool new technology is far overstated and that we really don’t need all these silly gadgets. I guess I would have to say that I don’t disagree when he questions why someone needs to stream mp3 files from their computer over their wireless net to their kitchen or bathroom (“What kind of nutjob needs that?”), but it won’t be long before people will pay real money to play their large mp3 collection on their family room AV system.

He also claims that only the very wealthy or bored compulsive engineers (like me who wire stuff constantly) really care about smart homes. On this point however, I strongly disagree knowing full well that John is baiting me with his typically hyperbolic writing style. Clearly the infiltration of technology in the home is an irreversible trend, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, and whether you really “need” the nice things that will become commonplace in middle-class homes before we know it.

Just look at the numbers for U.S. households with computers today versus 5 years ago. Then look at the same data on broadband. The number of houses that have their thermostats connected to their home network and programmable on dad’s PC is probably infinitesimal, sure, but it won’t be more than a few years before your next PC will have the capability to manage your sprinklers and your Christmas lights, and yes, your thermostat. You probably won’t use many of those features right away, but having them there will propel the technology just as sure as having cable available in a neighborhood makes people bypass their TV antennas.

The adoption of “smart home” technology is going to happen. Accept it. But know that only things that provide real benefit will ultimately succeed in the marketplace. Home builders keep very accurate records of what people ask for in their new homes, as well as what systems they pay to have installed later. Builders are just as important a factor in the marketplace as consumers. They will only install things that are cost effective for them, which means technology that helps them sell homes, which means technology that people like over the long run and doesn’t generate negative word-of-mouth.

Yes, we certainly don’t need a TV screen on our refrigerator door, but maybe it will morph into a touch screen that keeps track of food expiration dates, or programs the pork chops to be defrosted by 4 pm tomorrow afternoon, or notifies us of specials at our local market, or who knows? What we do know is that these things evolve according to what people want, and the “nutjob” ideas quietly fade away.

Digital Memory Update

Just bought a 512mb Compact Flash memory card at Costco for $35. Now, together with the 256mb card I had before (which cost about $55 by the way) and the 64mb one that came with the camera, I can take about 700 medium resolution pictures on a vacation. The only way I could take that many pictures is if I had the camera around my neck 15 hours / day for 3 weeks. Plus, only half of them would be worth keeping.

My prediction of $5 memory cards that are kept as backup memory is creeping closer...

Digital Photography Still in Infancy

Clearly the rapid rise of digital cameras has been restrained by the cost of memory. Once the cost of memory reached some magical level, sales of consumer grade digital cameras started to take off in the marketplace. It is now at a point where digital cameras are threatening to totally displace film. I think I read that sales of new cameras has now tipped the scales toward digital; it would be interesting to know how many digital pictures are now being taken versus film.

The problem is that this technology is still far from maturity mainly because the cost of memory is still a huge limiting factor. The other restraint is internet bandwidth. Not until we are all blessed with infinite bandwidth and dirt cheap digital memory, will digital photography approach the level that film photography has achieved.

Think about it. When you are taking your digital pictures, what resolution do you have your camera set to? Probably much less than the maximum your camera allows. If you have a 4 megapixel camera, you probably take most of your shots at around 1-2 megapixels. Why? because you can fit more shots on your expensive memory card and because it takes a long time to send a bunch of hi-res pictures over the internet to your friends, and because hi-res pictures take a long time to print on your inkjet printer. All these things effectively force the quality of your digital prints below the quality of film.

When we finally surmount this problem, you will no longer be kicking yourself that you didn’t take that perfect shot at the highest resolution because now all your shots will be good enough for an 11x14 or larger print. Plus, your PC software will pay attention to how you edit your pictures and automatically make corrections based on these accumulated preferences, thus improving on the current “average” quick editing that most software does. Also, you’ll be able to quickly send hi-res pictures over the internet and you’ll be able to store an entire vacation’s worth of pictures on one or two memory chips that cost $5 each.

The trick is going to be how we store all these pictures. I like Picasa, but it doesn't have a way to annotate each photo, only folders or albums. We are going to need a good system to annotate pictures or we will never be able to find them before long; many people already have this problem. We also need to get more conscientious about throwing away the bad ones. I should go through my photos before it becomes too big a chore.....