Smoky Shredded Pork Tacos recipe (Tacos de Picadillo Oaxaqueño)

Adapted from Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen

A perfect combination of flavours -- including pork, hot, smokey chipotle chillis (smoked, dried jalapeno chillis), sweet raisins and roasted almonds. Like with a curry, the flavours improve after a day or two.

If you're having trouble finding chipotle chillis, look in 'gourmet' delis or you can order them from various online retailers.


Makes enough for 16 to 18 tacos

• boneless pork shoulder, 675g, trimmed of fat and cut into 5cm cubes
• garlic cloves, unpleeled, 5
• white onion, 1 large, diced
• ground cinnamon, ½ tsp, preferably freshly ground Mexican canela
• black pepper, 1/4 tsp
• ground cloves, 1/8 tsp
• raisins, 85g
• slivered almonds, 55g
• for tomato-chipotle sauce (makes 350ml)
  • chipotle chillis, 2 to 3, stemmed (or canned chipotle chilis en adobo)
    OR chilies pasillas oaxaqueños, 1 to 2, stemmed
  • ripe tomatoes, 500g (2 large round, or 7 to 8 plum)
  • olive or vegetable oil, or rich-tasting lard, 2 ½ tbsp
  • salt, about a scant ½ tsp
• corn tortillas, 16 to 18 (plus a few extra, in case some break)
• hot sauce, optional, for serving

Simmer meat

• In a medium-size (2 to 3.5 litre) saucepan, cover meat with heavily salted water.
  Peel and roughly chop 2 cloves of the garlic and add along with half of the onion. 
• Bring to a gentle boil, skim off any greyish foam that rises during the first few minutes.
• Partially cover and simmer over medium-low heat until thoroughly tender, about 1 ½ hrs. 
• If time permits, cool the meat in the broth. (Reserve broth for soup or sauce.)

Shred meat.  Between your fingers or with some forks.

Make tomato-chipotle sauce.

• Prepare chillis
• For canned chillis - remove from their canning sauce.
• For dried chillis
  • toast them on an ungreased griddle or heavy frying pan over medium heat, turning regularly and pressing flat, until very aromatic, about 30 seconds.
  • In a small bowl, cover chillis with hot water and leave to re-hydrate for 30 minutes, stirring to ensure even soaking.
  • Drain and discard the water.
• Roast garlic
  • Roast the remaining 3 cloves of the unpeeled garlic on the griddle or frying pan, turning occasionally, until soft, about 15 minutes.
  • Cool and peel.
• Roast tomatoes
  • Roast the tomatoes on a baking sheet 10cm below a very hot grill until blackened on one side, about 6 minutes; flip and roast the other side.
  • Cool, then peel, collecting all the juices with the tomatoes.
• Blend chillis, garlic and tomatoes -- pulse them in a food processor or blender, to a medium-fine puree.
• Fry puree
• Heat 1 tbsp of the oil or lard in a heavy, medium-size (2 to 3.5 litre) saucepan over medium-high.
• Add the puree and stir for about 5 mins as it fries and thickens.
  
• Taste and season with salt.

Bring the filling together

• Roast almonds
• Turn on the oven to 180ºC.
• Toast the almonds in the oven in a small baking tin until fragrant and lightly browned, 6 to 8 minutes
• Heat oil 1 ½ tbsp of oil or lard, in a large (25 to 30cm) heavy, well-seasoned or nonstick frying pan, over medium-high heat.
• When hot, add the shredded meat and remaining half of the onion.
• Fry, regularly stirring and scraping up browned bits from the bottom, until the whole mixture is crispy and golden, 12 to 14 minutes.
• Sprinkle the cinnamon, pepper, cloves and raisins over the meat, then pour on the tomato-chipotle sauce.
• Reduce the heat to medium and simmer briskly, stirring occasionally, until nearly all the liquid has evaporated, 4 to 5 minutes.
• Add roasted almonds and stir them in.
• Taste and season with a little more salt if necessary.

Heat tortillas

• Set up a steamer (with this many tortillas, you’ll need 2 vegetable steamers set up in saucepans or a big Chinese steamer--either choice with 1cm of water under the steamer basket); heat to a boil.
• Wrap the tortillas in 2 stack in thick tea towels, lay in the steamer(s) and cover tightly.
• Boil 1 minute, turn off the heat and leave to stand without opening the steamer for 15 minutes.

Prepare tacos

• Either prepare the tacos in the kitchen by scooping a couple of heaped tablespoons of filling into each warm tortilla, rolling or folding them and nesting them into a cloth-lined basked
• Or, scoop the filling into a warm bowl and set out with a cloth-lined basket of steaming tortillas for your guests to construct their own tacos.
• Optionally, add a dash of hot sauce onto the filling in the taco.

---

Notes

• Shortcuts: two-thirds of an 800g can of tomatoes can replace the fresh roasted ones; leftover roast pork can replace the boiled pork
• The pork can be simmered several days in advance (refrigerate it in covered container with its broth, then strain and shred before continuing with the dish) or finish the picadillo a day or two ahead, cover it and refrigerate.

Variations

• Try mixing the leftover picadillo with grated chesese, baking it to heat through, then seving it as a communal appeitzer or a light main dish with tortillas--a variation on queso fundido.
• Shredded Pork Enchiladas. Prepare the recipe tripling the sauce; set the extra 2/3 of the sauce aside. Roll the filling in the tortiallas, fit them into a baking dish, pour the reseraved sauce over them and bake at 190ºC to warm through. Sprinkle with queso añejo or Parmesean and chopped coriander; seve immediately.
• Chiles Rellenos for a buffet. Roast and peel six poblanos, make a slit in their sides, remove the seeds, then fill each with about 5 tbsps of the filling (you’ll only need 1/2 the batch) and fit into a decorative backing dish. Slowly cook 2 large sliced onions in a little olive oil until nicely browned, soft and cramelized. Strew over the chillis and bake the whole assembly to heat through. Sprinkle liberally with queso añejo or Parmesan and set out on the buffet.
• Use filling to fill tamales, other chiilis (jaapeños, chiptles, chiles pasillas oaxaqueños), molotoes, qusadillas and so forth.

Updated 11 Dec 2017: reformatted recipe and modified some of the wording, to make it easier to read.  Fixed a few typos.

Haunting picture by Bansky

Someone at Channel 10 likes Amon Tobin

Amon Tobin's music isn't very immediate/accessible, so I was pleasantly surprised to hear several of his tracks used during the finale of the Australian version of Big Brother tonight tonight: The Killer's Vanilla and At the End of the Day from his latest album, The Foley Room, and Natureland off Supermodified. They used them as background music in several of the video clips they showed.

Nice line from Scott Adams - "The trick is to..."

A nice line from Scott Adams' blog:

The trick is to think of your ego as your goofy best friend who lends moral support but doesn’t know shit.

A missed chance

David Stenhouse looks back on a missed chance:

"When you’ve read as many books as I have, you know instinctively when something is going to be a hit. You mark my words. We won’t hear of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone ever again."

Video of impressive statistics visualisation - Hans Rosling using Trandalyzer

If you want to make sense of statistics for people, this is how you do it, as shown in this very interesting and impressive video.

In it, Hans Rosling uses UN statistics to demonstrate that many common beliefs about the modern-day world, such as on the nature of the divide between first and third-world countries, are wrong.

But more than the content (and whether you would agree with it or not), what it's about is how he presents it. The software he uses, Trendalyzer, seems pretty impressive. I don't mean from a technical standpoint -- though no doubt it is -- but from what it is able to do. This is futuristic software, like science-fiction films try to portray.

Graphs are animated to show how the data changes over the years, highlighting the trends. They're morphed to show a different, but related perspective. Details are drilled down into, for example to go from showing data for a particular country to data for its consitutent states. It's all interactive, and it leads to a very impressive flow: one perspective raises certain questions, so he modifies the view to try and get insight into them.

What I think is important about this kind of software is that it allows you to really demonstrate points, directly from the data -- very much showing rather than telling.

Effective analogy for showing what prosopagnosia is like

[Update: the linked page can now be accessed here]

Prosopagnosia is 'face-blindness' - the inability to recognize other humans by their faces. This page is a very effective description of what it's like, written by a sufferer.

They say good writing shows rather than tells, and that's what that pages does, using a very effective analogy -- to show you what it's like to have prosopagnosia.

If individuals were rocks, then it's like having to remember the characteristics of each rock, and try to realise when you come across this rock again, from your memories. The page uses photos of different rocks so you can see for yourself the sorts of difficulties involved.

There's a lot of complications you probably wouldn't think of, which the page demonstrates well. E.g. when someone gets a haircut - as demonstrated by the rock being obscured by a bit of foliage.

RunBot - robot that can walk with a natural, realistic-seeming gait

RunBot is a walking robot with a natural, flexible gait (BBC story; info). It can deal with uneven terrain, and changes changes like uphill or downhill slopes.

I think they've got the right approach. Like with Steve Grand's work, and Jeff Hawkin's HTMs, it uses a hierarchical means of control, where each level has a certain level of autonomy, and there's constant updating of the structures based on the environmental input.

RunBot has been co-operatively developed by european scientists

Some presentation-skills lessons from Job's iPhone talk

[Update: the article can now be found here]

Giving good presentations - five lessons drawn from Steve Job's iPhone presentation. The lessons the article goes into are: Build Tension, Stick to One Theme Per Slide, Add Pizzazz to Your Delivery, Practice, Be Honest and Show Enthusiasm.

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music. After a quick look, seems interesting. Maps out the myriads of genres and sub-genres of electronic music, giving a short desc of each -- and the author is not afraid to give their opinion of it -- along with some musical samples of it (usefully giving the artist and track name).

Short Shermer Article on Relativism

Decent, concise piece by Michael Shermer on relativism, and why it's a mistake to think that all false theories are equally false.

[Update: the article is now found here]

.

truth bootstrapped
because everybody knows
that everybody knows it

Police system to accept photographed evidence from cameraphones.

Not a huge deal, but could be helpful:

The LA police department plans to implemenent a system so that when someone gives an over-the-phone account of a crime or accident scene, they can augument that verbal account with photos taken on their camera phone, using the phone's photo sending feature.

Map of US states renamed for countries with similar GDPs

Interesting map. Apparently Australia's GDP is comparable to Ohio's.

[Update: the map can now be found here, or at various other places]

Article: How to explain RSS the Oprah way

Nice example of a non-technical explanation of a somewhat technical subjectmatter: How to explain RSS the Oprah way.

Article: Design That Solves Problems for the World’s Poor

Turning innovative design towards helping the world's poor -- a New York Times article on an exhibition, currently housed in New York, of designs that strive to do this.

one of the simplest and yet most elegant designs tackles a job that millions of women and girls spend many hours doing each year — fetching water. Balancing heavy jerry cans on the head may lead to elegant posture, but it is backbreaking work and sometimes causes crippling injuries. The Q-Drum, a circular jerry can, holds 20 gallons, and it rolls smoothly enough for a child to tow it on a rope.

Article on upcoming malaysian court case

I've got relatives in Malaysia and have been there a couple of times, and from that I knew that Malays are, from birth, automatically considered muslims, and that they aren't allowed to become non-muslims, but I didn't know that they aren't legally allowed to marry non-muslims, as this article on an upcoming court case in Malaysia says:

Ethnic Malays, who make up just over half of Malaysia's 26 million people, are deemed Muslims from birth.

Constitutionally, freedom of religion is guaranteed. But in reality, conversion out of Islam falls within the ambit of sharia or Islamic courts. And sharia law prescribes fines or jail for those who renounce Islam, effectively ruling out the option.

Muslims who leave Islam end up in legal limbo, unable to register their new religious affiliations or legally marry non-Muslims. Many keep quiet about their choice or emigrate.

Lina Joy, now in her early 40s, was born Azlina Jailani and brought up as a Muslim but at the age of 26 decided to become a Christian. [...]

Until the entry [on her identity card] is deleted, she cannot legally marry outside the Muslim faith. The legal wrangling began when she took the department to court over the anomaly.

Woman dies, ignored, in emergency room of US hospital

The LA Times reports (other) on the death of a lady at a public hosptial in the US:

She lay on the linoleum [in the emergengy room of King-Harbor hospital], writhing in pain, for 45 minutes, as staffers worked at their desks and numerous patients looked on.

Aside from one patient who briefly checked on her condition, no one helped her. A janitor cleaned the floor around her as if she were a piece of furniture. A closed-circuit camera captured everyone's apparent indifference.

Arriving to find Rodriguez on the floor, her boyfriend unsuccessfully tried to enlist help from the medical staff and county police — even a 911 dispatcher, who balked at sending rescuers to a hospital.

Alerted to the "disturbance" in the lobby, police stepped in — by running Rodriguez's record. They found an outstanding warrant and prepared to take her to jail. She died before she could be put into a squad car.

Shirky on why a lack of knowledge is useful for entreprenueurs (similar argument to 'knowledge as a creole')

Rough sketching out...

In Knowledge as a Creole, I talked about the largely unconscious process of 'building a worldview' (though i didn't use that terminology in that post). It's a constructive process, that tries to build a reasonably coherent worldview from -- roughly -- the current state of our shared knowledge. We have very limited control over this process, and it is difficult to change our worldview once it is constructed. On the flip side, this process leads to conceptual advances -- advances that were implicit in this shared knowledge.

Clay Shirky has recently written a post The (Bayesian) Advantage of Youth [Update: the post can now be accessed here] that makes a similar point, though from a different perspective. Rather than knowledge, he's talking about technological advances (made by entrepreneurs), and he's focuses primarily how already seeing things one way restricts your ability to see advances. Also, rather than just the 'worldview' he's talking about experience in general.

...The principal asset a young tech entrepreneur has is that they don’t know a lot of things.

In almost every circumstance, this would be a disadvantage, but not here, and not now. The reason this is so, and the reason smart old people can’t fake their way into this asset, has everything to do with our innate ability to cement past experience into knowledge.

...We are wired to learn from experience. This is, in almost all cases, absolutely the right strategy, because most things in life benefit from mental continuity. Again, today, gravity pulls things downwards. Again, today, my wife will be happier if I put my socks in the hamper than on the floor. And so on.

...In 999,999 cases, learning from experience is a good idea, but what entrepreneurs do is look for the one in a million shot. When the world really has changed overnight, when wild new things are possible if you don’t have any sense of how things used to be, then it is the people who got here five minutes ago who understand that new possibility, and they understand it precisely because, to them, it isn’t new.

---

Note, Acquiring knowledge is acquiring a skill is closely related to the 'Knowledge as a Creole' post.

Study: one in five couples get together through ‘mate poaching’

Interestly, one in five couples get together through 'mate poaching', according to the study reported
here in Psychology Today:

Wedding announcements in newspapers rarely tell the whole story. If they did, they would occasionally read something like this: "The happy couple met through her boyfriend at the time, who is the groom's former best friend. It took four months to lure her away."

According to one study, up to 20 percent of long-term relationships begin when one or both partners are involved with others. Evolutionary psychologists call this "mate poaching." This figure holds steady across age groups and among couples who are married, living together or dating, according to psychologists who polled some 16,000 individuals in 53 countries as part of the International Sexuality Description Project. Most surprising to researchers: Sweetheart-stealing is prevalent across continents and cultures, although it is notably less common in East Asia.

Favourite Recipes: Heston Blumenthal 's Roast Potatoes Recipe

Heston Blumenthal 's Roast Potatoes Recipe

This is from his excellent book "In Search of Perfection" (which I got thanks to Kerry).

They're just roast potatoes, but they're quite impressive. Much crispier and crunchier on the outside, and soft and fluffier on the inside, than you typical ones. It's boiling them for a while first that does the trick.

• large maris piper potatoes, 1kg
  (he says that the variety of potato is important for the right end results. However, you don't seem to be able to get maris piper potatoes in brisbane, so I just used the standard potatoes you get in supermarkets, and they seemed to work fine)
  
• olive oil, enough to fill the roasting tray to a depth of just under 1cm
  
• garlic, 4 cloves
  
• fresh rosemary, 1 generous bunch
  
• table salt
  

• Preheat the oven
  • to 190 celcius / 375 farenheight / Gas 5
• Wash, peel, cut and rinse potatoes
  
  • Wash the potatoes thoroughly and then peel them.
    
  • Reserve the peelings and tie them in a muslin bag.
    
  • Cut the potatoes into quarters
    (the quartering's important because it's the edges that get nice and crunchy: that's why reasonably large potatoes are needed for this recipe)
    
  • Leave the quaters in a bowl under running water for 2-3 minutes (or put in a bowl of water for 15 minutes, changing the water every 5 minutes).
• Boil the potatoes
  • Bring a pan of salted water (10g salt per litre of water) to the boil
    
  • Add the potatoes and toss in the bag of peelings (they
    contain lots of flavour).
    
  • Cook for 20 minutes, or until the potatoes are very soft: take them as far as you can without ending up without potato soup. (It's the fissures that form as the potato breaks up that trap the fat, creating a crunchy crust.)
• Preheat the oil
  • Meanwhile, pour the olive oil into a roasing tray (it needs to be large enough to hold all the potatoes in one layer) and place in the oven.
• Drain poatoes
  • Once the potatoes are soft, drain them in a colander and discard the bag of peelings.
    
  • Give them a gentle shake to roughen the edges and drive off any remaining drops of water.
• Roast the potatoes
  • Put the potatoes in the hot roasting tray and roll them around so that they are completely coated in oil.
    
  • Roast for an hour or so, until crisp and a lovely golden brown
    • Turning every 20 minutes.
      
    • Add the garlic and rosemary after 50 minutes.
      
• Season with salt and serve.

Teaching communication skills with interactive-fiction games

Sketching...

We can use simulations and games to give people the practice at tasks required to develop skills. Here's a way that 'interactive-fiction' games could be used to help people learn communication skills.

I'll illustrate by talking about a particular communication skill - the ability to negotiate effectively. There are principles behind effective negotiation, and to be good at this form of communication you need to have a mastery of them.

It's not that important what these specific principles are (see this article if you're interested in a discussion of some negotiation skills), just that there are different principles, and you can master each of them to various degrees.

Here's the sort of interactive-fiction game I'm thinking of. It probably wouldn't matter if it was textual or graphical, just that it involved a converstaion between your character and another (or others), where you are negotiating with them, and at each point in the conversation you have a selection of options for what to say next[1]. At each point there might be five different possibilities, and you have to choose one. Each choice is of the actual text that the character will say (as opposed to something more abstract such as "Ask about the red book").

The idea is that you are playing not simply yourself, but a character who had a certain level of skills. And you can run through the same scenario multiple times, but each time that character's skills improve -- either they have learnt new principles or have further developed the ones they have. And these improved skills are reflected in the conversation choices you are presented with.

Here are the ways I think would help people to learn those skills:

• It gives you practice. The conversation options at each point would cover a range of degrees of effectiveness. Would give you a chance to see how effective your choice was.
• You get to see the differences between different levels of skills. If you don't have the particular skill, it's hard to know what would have been the better way of handling the situation. But if you've already tried one way, and then you are shown what a better way is, then that might make it easier to appreciate the principle involved.

---

[1] The best examples of these sorts of conversations that I'm aware of are the first two of the 'Secret of Monkey Island' graphical adventure games (there is a third and a fourth game in the series, but they weren't done by the same person and aren't as good)

Dordoni Worktop table

The guys at Signal vs Noise recommended this desk - looks quite nice (US$1 998, though!).

From the website:

...it's all about elegant function and ease. The angled table legs afford ample leg room for when you and colleagues pull up chairs for an impromptu conference. To cope with uneven floors, its glides are adjustable. The Dordoni Worktop holds up to eight roomy desk drawers (sold separately) and openings on each end offer convenient storage space for rolled up blueprints and drawings.

Paper - Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface

This paper, "Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface" by Bret Victor, is a powerful argument for why, in designing software, greater emphasis should be given to graphic design and less to interaction. I think there's a good chance it'll go down as paradigm-shifting classic (and I don't mean that just as a buzzword, but as a genuine paradigm shift).

I've only read the first half of it so far -- it's quite long -- but I thought I'd post here to let others know about it.

Here's the abstract

The ubiquity of frustrating, unhelpful software interfaces has motivated decades of research into “Human-Computer Interaction.” In this paper, I suggest that the long-standing focus on “interaction” may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called “information software,” I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means.

Information software design can be seen as the design of context-sensitive information graphics. I demonstrate the crucial role of information graphic design, and present three approaches to context-sensitivity, of which interactivity is the last resort. After discussing the cultural changes necessary for these design ideas to take root, I address their implementation. I outline a tool which may allow designers to create data-dependent graphics with no engineering assistance, and also outline a platform which may allow an unprecedented level of implicit context-sharing between independent programs. I conclude by asserting that the principles of information software design will become critical as technology improves.

Although this paper presents a number of concrete design and engineering ideas, the larger intent is to introduce a “unified theory” of information software design, and provide inspiration and direction for progressive designers who suspect that the world of software isn’t as flat as they’ve been told.

Do the people living today /really/ outnumber all those who have ever lived?

I'd heard the claim that there are more people living in the world today than all those who had lived before. It seemed plausible, and I took it as true, but according to this Scientific American piece, it's quite wrong.

More on the importance of acknowledging bacterial evolution as just that

I recently linked to an article saying that researchers and the media tend to avoid calling bacterial evolution 'evolution', and commenting on why why this matters.

This blog post cites another reason it matters -- doctors who don't appreciate that antibiotic resistance is an evolved trait tend to prescribe antibiotics in a way that encourages such evolved resistance -- leading to so-called superbugs.

The author of that post has a personal stake in this antibiotic resistance issue and makes his point quite forcefully and eloquently.

[Update: the original blog link no longer works, but I managed to find a similar post by the same author that was written around the same time]

A step-by-step look at the design of a logo

Graphic designer Chuck Greens lays out all of the steps he went through to develop a logo for a helicopter transport company (he ends up with a logo based on a hummingbird hovering). Good insight into the design process. Shows how much of a trail-and-error search process it is.

Amon Tobin on why leaked copies of his latest album means you won't find many copies of it in the stores

Amon Tobin's latest album was leaked to the net a number of weeks before it was to go on sale. On his website he comments on the effects of this (www.amontobin.com - it's a flash-based site, so I can't link directly to the text, but it's in the 'Logbook' section)

[...] Today, the release date for my album, it's unlikely that you will see it in most high street shops and after the initial run it's unlikely that you will be able to order a copy even from online stores. this is because in-spite of more people having access to and apparently listening to my music than ever before, the predicted sales of the record were so low that it didn't justify the manufacture or distribution to any significant level. strange? not when you consider how hard it might be to convince any retail outlet, physical or digital, that they should try and sell something everybody could already get for free months beforehand.

so what does this mean in the wider context? who the fuck knows. like I say I won't speculate on the wider picture and you can draw your own conclusions as to what this means with regards to my own future output. again I stress that I'm not talking about what should happen here. I'm not saying I should be able to 'keep on doing what I'm doing' or even that my record deserves to be bought. all I'm saying, mainly for the benefit of those who might otherwise have been unaware, is that if you personally like what I do and wish to continue hearing more then the only way that will happen is if you support it.

Most descriptions of microbial evolution avoid using the term ‘evolution’ - and why this matters

[Update: the article is now found here.]

A quite readable article in PLoS Biology by Antonovics et al "Evolution by Any Other Name: Antibiotic Resistance and Avoidance of the E-Word".

"The increase in resistance of human pathogens to antimicrobial agents is one of the best-documented examples of evolution in action at the present time, and because it has direct life-and-death consequences, it provides the strongest rationale for teaching evolutionary biology as a rigorous science in high school biology curricula, universities, and medical schools. In spite of the importance of antimicrobial resistance, we show that the actual word "evolution" is rarely used in the papers describing this research. Instead, antimicrobial resistance is said to "emerge," "arise," or "spread" rather than "evolve." Moreover, we show that the failure to use the word "evolution" by the scientific community may have a direct impact on the public perception of the importance of evolutionary biology in our everyday lives."
[...]

"It has been repeatedly rumored (and reiterated by one of the reviewers of this article) that both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have in the past actively discouraged the use of the word "evolution" in titles or abstracts of proposals so as to avoid controversy."
[...]

"Nowadays, medical researchers are increasingly realizing that evolutionary processes are involved in immediate threats associated with not only antibiotic resistance but also emerging diseases [1,2]. The evolution of antimicrobial resistance has resulted in 2- to 3-fold increases in mortality of hospitalized patients, has increased the length of hospital stays, and has dramatically increased the costs of treatment [3,4]. It is doubtful that the theory of gravity (a force that can neither be seen nor touched, and for which physicists have no agreed upon explanation) would be so readily accepted by the public were it not for the fact that ignoring it can have lethal results. This brief survey shows that by explicitly using evolutionary terminology, biomedical researchers could greatly help convey to the layperson that evolution is not a topic to be innocuously relegated to the armchair confines of political or religious debate. Like gravity, evolution is an everyday process that directly impacts our health and well-being, and promoting rather than obscuring this fact should be an essential activity of all researchers."

Some beautiful pictures of Chinese landscapes

Some beautiful pictures Chinese landscapes. Apparently they're of the Guilin area.

Article: Illegal drugs can be harmless, report says

As reported in The Guardian:

The report, which is likely to spark fierce controversy, said: "The use of illegal drugs is by no means always harmful any more than alcohol use is always harmful. It called for the concept of drugs to be extended to take in alcohol and tobacco.
...
Current laws, the panel claimed, were been "driven by moral panic" with large amounts of money wasted on "futile" efforts to stop supply rather than going after the criminal networks behind the drugs on British streets.

At the heart of the report was a call for an end to what the panel called the "criminal justice bias" of current policy in favour of an approach that would treat addiction as a health and social problem rather than simply a cause of crime.
...
"Drugs policy should, like our policy on alcohol and tobacco, seek to regulate use and prevent harm rather than to prohibit use altogether," the report concludes.

Article: Taking our leaders at face value

The Star reports: "A new study suggests that how we respond to a candidate's face could determine who we vote for". The research was undertaken by the psychologist Anthony C. Little, and published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

Researchers started with pictures of political candidates such as John Kerry and George W. Bush, and used software to blend each picture with an image of an 'average face'. The resulting image wasn't recognisable as the candidate, but "nevertheless bore a sort of family resemblance to the originals".

"Then the researchers asked people to look at the faces and say who they would vote for.

In all eight races, the votes based on composite faces gave the same results as the actual elections."

The article also says

"The problem is, despite our specialized cognitive machinery for dealing with faces, it turns out that faces aren't a very good guide for judging other people.

Studies show that people think they can read all sorts of things about people based on their faces, including intelligence, basic character and personality traits. Unfortunately, the same studies show that we're not as accurate as we think we are.

Like everyone else, I know that I shouldn't judge a book by its cover. And like everyone else, I do it all the time – summing someone up in the street, or at a party, or on the subway, based largely on what I think I see in his face. I'm usually pretty confident I'm right, but I'm also probably wrong."

AV Club interview with Ricky Gervais, incl his thoughts on creative control

AV Club interview (single page version)with Ricky Gervais, co-creator of 'The Office' and 'Extras', from Jan 10 2007.

Two answers on 'creative control' I wanted to note:

AVC: How do you establish that kind of creative control?
RG: I just demand it. I just simply wouldn't do anything that I wasn't terribly in charge of. I don't let anything go. I worry about the font on the back of the DVD, and I'll do this as long as that continues. Even if it does continue, I could still get bored with that, but I certainly wouldn't compromise anything.
[...]

AVC: When you're working on something, do you ever have to struggle to tell the difference between comedy that can succeed commercially and what you think is good?
RG: Never. It doesn't come into it. We only do what we think is good and what we're happy with. I do that in stand-up, I even do it with my children's books. I don't do market research, I don't have focus groups, I don't care. I don't care if it fails, honestly. I'd rather have something that's completely mine fail than something succeed that I'm not proud of.

Debatepedia

Debatepedia (about, FAQ). Kinda like wikipedia, but rather than emphasising neutrality, it emphasises the differences in positions on contentious topics, providing a structured way for each side of the argument to be presented. Much like the (seemingly) unrelated OpenDebateEngine I mentioned last year.

Will be interesting to see how well it works.

Some recent Signal vs Noise posts on communication

Some recent Signal vs Noise posts on communication:

1) and 2)

Both of these concern Chip and Dan Heath's book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

1) is about the usefulness of counterintuitive-seeming statements, for getting people's attention.

2) looks the book's notion of "the Curse of Knowledge." They quote an interview with the authors that mentions it:

And that brings us to the villain of our book: The Curse of Knowledge. Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise.

The amazon description of that book says it's "an entertaining, practical guide to effective communication. Drawing extensively on psychosocial studies on memory, emotion and motivation, their study is couched in terms of "stickiness"—that is, the art of making ideas unforgettable."

3) '[On Writing] Describing a slice instead of the whole pie'

Here’s a look at how four great writers describe an amazing athlete. Note how all three spotlight a single play to explain a larger idea. By zeroing in on a specific moment, they are able to explain to readers what general, big picture platitudes can’t.

4) What being a speechwriter is like, and how it's similar to doing graphic design.

Favourite Recipes: Lamb Shanks with Dates and Pumpkin

Lamb Shanks with Dates and Pumpkin, served with Mashed Potatoes

It's a good one for entertaining.

Adapted from a recipe in Good Taste magaine, June 2002.

Serves 8, Prep 25 mins, Cooking: 1 hr 40 mins
(This is how long the shanks take to cook, but the mashed potato can be made while the shanks are simmering, so they don't have to end up adding mcuh to the time.
Note also that you need quite a large dish to fit 8 shanks - I often halve the quantities of the ingredients).

• For the lamb shanks
  • lamb shanks, 8, French trimmed
    
  • plain flour, to coat
    
  • jap pumpkin, 600g, peeled, deseeded
    
  • veg oil, 2 tbsp
    
  • sauce flavourings
    • brown onion, 1, finely chopped
      
    • stock
      • boiling water, 750 ml (3 cups)
        
      • chicken stock cubes, 2 large, crumbled
    • dry red wine, 250ml (1 cup)
      Wine suggestion: Lamb shanks need a full-bodied South Australian red.
      
    • whole peeled tomatoes, 400g, crushed
      
    • whole pitted dried dates, 150g (1 cup), halved
      
    • cinnamon stick, 1, 7cm
  • salt and ground black pepper
    
  • fresh continental parsley, 2 tbsp, chopped
    
  • mashed potato, to serve
  
  
• For the mashed-potatoes
  • evenly-sized medium unpeeled potatoes, 700g
    best potatoes to mash: kind edwards, pink eye, pontiac and sebago (brushed).
    Use evenly sized potatoes so they all cook in the same amount of time, resulting in a smoother mash.
    
  • salt, ½ tsp
    
  • butter, 100g, at room temperature, chopped
    
  • milk, 100ml
    
  • salt and ground black pepper

• Cooking lamb shanks
  • Preparation: cutting pumpkin and preparing stock
    • Cut pumpkin lengthways into four 2cm-thick wedges. Cut each wedge in half crossways.
      
    • Combine the boiling water and crumbled stock cubes in a heatproof jug. Stir to combine and set aside until required.
  • Brown the lamb shanks
    • Place the flour onto a large plate and coat the lamb shanks all over with the flour. Shake off any excess.
      
    • Heat the oil in a large heatproof casserole dish over medium-high heat.
      
    • Add the lamb and cook, turning occasionally, for 2-3 minutes or until well browned. Remove from pan and set aside.
  • Frying the onions
    
    • Add onion to pan and cook, stirring, for 2 mins or until onion is soft.
  • Slow-cooking the dish
    • Return lamb shanks to pan with reserved chicken stock, red wine, tomatoes, dates and cinnamon stick, and bring to the boil.
      
    • Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer, covereed, turning lamb shanks occasionally, for 45 mins.
      while this is cooking, you can make the mashed potato - see recipe below
      
    • Add the pumpkin and simmer, uncovered, for 35 mins or until the pumpkin is tender and sauce thickens slightly.
  • Serving
    • Divide the mashed potato among serving plates. Top with lamp shanks mixture and sprinkle with parsley.
  
  
• For cooking mashed potato
  • Wash the potatoes
    • to remove any excess dirt
      
    • and being careful not to break the skin
  • Cook the potatoes
    • Place the whole potatoes in a large saucepan
      (Cooking the potatoes in their skin, and not piecing them too often during cooking, stops them absorbing too much water, which can result in broken up and flavourless potatoes, and a watery mash.)
      
    • Cover them with cold water
      
    • Add the salt
      
    • Cover and bring to the boil over high heat.
      
    • Remove the lid and reduce heat to medium-high.
      
    • Boil, uncovered, for 30 mins or until the potatoes are soft when tested with a skewer.
  • Dry and peel potatoes
    
    • Transfer the potatoes to a colander with a slotted spoon.
      
    • Set them aside for 5 mins to cool sightly.
      
    • Drain the water from the pan.
      
    • Once the poatoes are cool enough to handle, use a small sharp knife to peel and discard the skins.
      
    • Return the potatoes to the dry saucepan.
      
    • Shake the saucepn over low heat for 1-2 mins to remove any remaining moisture from the potatoes.
  • Mash potatoes
    • Using a potato masher
      (avoid using a food processor to mash them as they will end up being gluggy).
    
    
  • Add seasinings and falvourings.
    • Add the butter and mix with a wooden spoon until smooth.
    • Meanwhile, heat the milk in a small saucepan over medium-low heat, stirring, for 4 mins or until milk is hot (being careful not to boil).
      
    • Gradually add the hot milk to the potatoes and continue to mash until smooth.
    • Taste and season with salt and pepper.
      Serve immediately.
    
    
  
  

Mashed potato variations

Garlic-infused mashed potato
Peel and thinly slice 4 garlic cloves and add with teh milk in step 5 before heating. Strain the hot milk and discard the garlic before using.

Creamy herbed mash
Stir 2 tbs finely chopped fresh continental parsley and 1 tbs chopped fresh chives into the mashed potato in step 6 before seasoning.

Patient managed e-health records

Michael Lawley has a sensible-sounding suggestion for electronic health records: rather than trying to implement some top-down, nation-wide system, let the patients take responsibility for their own data, just as they do with their financial records. Presumably, the patient could choose to pass this control to a third-party service.

Article: government funding overemphasises the utility of research collaboration

IT researcher Ricky Robinson writes:

Why, then, do so many Australian government funded research organisations emphasize the need for research collaboration, when all the evidence shows that few significant scientific breakthroughs have come through such collaboration? Granted, there needs to be some kind of collaboration between research institutions and industry when it comes to exploiting the results of research, but this is a completely different thing, and it comes at a later stage in the development of a research idea.

Acquiring knowledge is acquiring a skill

I recently described one way that acquiring knowledge is like learning a language. This post describes another.

That earlier post argued that like our language ability, knowledge (particularly that forming the core of our picture of the world) is mainly constructed out of innate types of structures, by unconscious processes that integrate the information received from our environment.

The similarity I want to draw here is that both acquiring knowledge and learning a language are matters of acquiring skills. While that last post concentrated mainly on unconsciously obtained knowledge, this post seems to apply more to consciously learnt knowledge.

Acquiring knowledge is, in particular, like an adult acquiring a second language.

Acquiring a language is developing a skill: a skill in using the language. This process has the following properties.

You can't just memorise the details. You have to actually practise hearing and speaking the language.

As you learn more, you're not just learning more details of the language, you're also refining your existing abilities.

And of course, it all takes substantial time and practise.

What you end up with is fluency. Whatever you want to say, in whatever context, you just know how to do it. You don't have to think it through, you can just do it, in real time. Not only can you speak the language, but you can think in it.

All skill acquisition goes through such drawn out processes of refinement, ending in fluency. What I want to suggest is that acquiring knowledge is like this too.

Like with language, acquiring knowledge is really a matter of being able to use the information.

Like with language, it is not something you can just memorise. It's not just a matter of fixing a bunch of facts in you head. You need to see the information being used in different contexts, and try using it yourself.

You need to see the information being related to different things, reasoned about in various ways, and so forth. You need to apply it yourself, in thinking and other problem solving tasks.

Similarly to language, as you learn more, you're not just learning more information, but you're refining your existing picture of things. You refine your appreciation of how the bits of information relate to each other, and you refine your ability to make use of the information in your thinking.

Also, you can come to see how the information conflicts with other beliefs you hold (and potentially try and resolve these conflicts).

And like with language, it all takes substantial time and practise.

What you end up with is a kind of fluency, too. In a given situation, you know if the knowledge is relevant or not, and in what ways it may be relevant. And you can just do this, without having to think it through (or without having to think it through as much). And not only can you recall the knowledge, you can think in terms of it.

This is pretty different to the usual view of knowledge. There's a common belief that knowing something is just knowing the fact(s) associated with it, and being able to express them. And that if you know this, then that's all there is to it -- it's just assumed that you understand how it relates to other things, that it is genuinely assimilated into your worldview, that you understand what other beliefs it conflicts with, that you are able to reason effectively with it, and that you in fact do apply the information, that knowledge, when it is appropriate to what you are thinking about.

But all of these things don't come for free, from just knowing the facts. They are developed over time. And its probably quite rare that anyone's knowledge of a particular area gets as fully developed as it can be.

If acquiring knowledge is acquiring a skill, then this explains, I think, why writing about or teaching a topic is a good way to learn it. In other words, if acquiring knowledge was not a skill, then going to such lengths in applying it wouldn't be of that much use.

Why does writing about it help acquire that skill? The drafting process helps you build an understanding of how the information fits together. It helps you to explore the relationships between things. It gives you the necessary practise to build the knowledge.

That process tends to drive you forwards, to fix lackings in your understanding of these things. Wherever your writing contains a lack of coherence or forcefulness, this tends to reflect an lacking in your understanding of it, and working on these problems means improving that understanding.

InnoCentive problems more likely to be solved by 'outsiders'

An article in the Wall Street Journal titled 'Prizes for Solutions to Problems Play Valuable Role in Innovation' says:

[...]

Now, a proliferation of prizes is attracting bright minds to stubborn problems.

InnoCentive, a company spun off six years ago by drug maker Eli Lilly, charges clients ("seekers") to broadcast scientific problems on a Web site where scientists ("solvers") are offered cash -- usually less than $100,000 -- for solutions; more than 50 challenges are now pending (see the site).

...

After examining 166 problems posted by 26 research labs on the InnoCentive site over four years, Karim Lakhani, a Harvard Business School professor, found 240 people, on average, examined each problem, 10 offered answers and 29.5% of the problems were solved. (Read Mr. Lakhani's blog.)

One surprise: The further the problem was from a solver's expertise, the more likely he or she was to solve it. It turns out that outsiders look through a completely different lens. Toxicologists were stumped by the significance of pathology observed in a study; within weeks after broadcasting it, a Ph.D. in crystallography offered a solution that hadn't occurred to them.

I mention this because of the common, though not always explicit, belief that you have to be formally trained in something to have any sort of 'expertise' concerning some aspect of it.

How do societes evolve?

How do societies evolve? I’m quite interested in this question, and I want to explain a little about what I mean by it and why I think it's an important topic.

How, is a society built, from its beginnings in ‘primitive bands’ to the complex forms we see today, with their many laws, insitutions, and so forth?

It seems to happen by piecemeal evolution -- you can't jump straight from a hunter-gatherer society to a modern democratic society -- but what are the actual details of this process? (i.e. like other complex systems, it's a matter of laddered skills).

For example, how does a policing system arise? What conditions are required for that to happen? And what developments does it enable?

What sorts of structures are found within our socieities, and what is the ‘division of labour’ between them?

What are the general themes at work societal evolution? One seems to be the ability to put increasing levels of trust in individuals and insitutions, which seems to enable more complex structures to be built within socieities.

What are the general driving forces behind the development? One seems to be improved communication mechanisms, that allow information to be transmitted more accurately, over greater distances in shorter amounts of time. That example is, in turn, an instance of technological evolution, which seems to be a significant driving force, though it is of course only one of the many facets of this issue.

I have limited knowledge of what we currently know about these issues. How much do we know? Under this general umbrella of ‘the evolution of society’, there is a lot of exiting work, but how much of this goes beyond just chronicling the changes, to an analysis specifically focused on the nature of the evolution itself?

What is the value of understanding how societies evolve? I can think of two main areas. I think it's important for understanding the nature of the institutions and other elements within our societies, and I think it's a large source of insight into human psychology.

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about the nature of the instituions and other elements of societies, and I think understanding them from an evolutionary standpoint would be a good way to understand their nature.

For example, the law seems to be commonly thought of as some sort of abstract force. John Searle's book The Construction of Social Reality is an attempt to clear up some of these misunderstandings and understand such institutions in concrete terms.

By understanding such things from an evolutionary standpoint, it's easier to appreciate their actual, concrete realisation, because you can see the processes by which it is built, and thus the way that it is realised. And it helps us hone our intuitions about how elements of socieites can change, and how the ways in which such change is constrained.

You need to understand these sorts of things if you want to think effectively about them -- which is important in many social/political/economic matters.

It's pretty obvious that human psychology plays an important part in the evolution of societies. If we can understand such changes (and similarly, when changes were not able to occur) then we can get some useful insight into our psychology. For example, by looking at the various conditions when people will or will not put trust in institutions.

37 signals say rewriting is key in software development and writing

A 37signals post with this message: whether we’re authoring software or prose, rewriting is key. Just get started, the say -- the bulk of the process is rewriting, anyway. They also talk a bit about what you’re goals should be when re-writing. The post also contains some nice quotes on its central theme.

On the issue of writing well, one of the comments under that post recommends the book On Writing Well by William Zinsser, which I hadn’t heard of. The reviews on amazon are pretty positive -- seems it's a bit of a classic. (seems this guy has also written a book called Writing To Learn, which also sounds interesting).

Labels added to blog, and updated blog template

Blogger recently added the capability to add labels to posts, so I've added labels to this blog's backlog of posts. I also updated the blog template, removing the old sidebar with links to external sites etc, and replacing them with a list of the labels and the updated blogger blog archive widget.

These are the labels I've added

• biographical
• effectivePerceptionAndReasoning
• humourFunInteresting
• ladderedSkills
• miscDevelopmentsAndAdvances
• natureOfPerceptionAndMental
• potentiallyUsefulInfo
• recipe
• simplicity
• thoughts

Knowledge as a Creole

Sketching out an idea, seeing where it goes... probably shouldn't be taken too literally.


Creoles

There's a type of human language known as a creole.

During the 1800s, there were situations where slaves from various different cultures were brought together to work on farms. They didn't speak speak common languages, so they developed pidgin languages to communicate: simplified languages without proper grammatical structures.

But something interesting happened when their children grew up in this pidgin environment. By themselves, the children turned the pidgin into a proper language with a proper grammatical structure. These sorts of languages are known as creoles.

Similar things have happened in the development of some sign languages.

In his description of creoles, the psychologist Steven Pinker says "...all it takes is for a group of children to be exposed to the pidgin at the age when they acquire their mother tongue" (The Language Instinct, pp 21 - 30)

Creoles provide significant insights into children's language development.

Creoles emerge naturally, without explicit decision or design by the children or their parents. There seems to be innate structures and processes in the children's brains that are looking to build a language from the pidgin.

It's like the structures and processes in the child's brain have a plan already sketched out for a language design, and facing an impoverished language like a pidgin, it modifies it and fleshes it out according to the plan.

And in fact, it seems that all language is a creole, in the sense that a child learning their mother tongue is going through the same sorts of processes as those children building a creole. That is, when a child is learning a language, they aren't just passively taking in the linguistic elements and deriving the language from that, but are actively constructing one according to an inbuilt plan, and only using the available linguistic elements as raw material.

But because in normal situations the child is growing up in environments containing fully-fledged language(s) rather than incomplete pidgins, the language they build is constrained to match the features of those existing languages.


Knowledge as a creole

I want to suggest that knowledge is also like a creole, in that the primary means by which we acquire it is like language acquisition: it is automatic, happens relatively young, and it is directed by innate processes and structures.

It is primarily responsible for building the knowledge that shapes how we see the world. And like with language-acquisition, and how we are limited in our ability to learn language once we have reached a certain age, our ability to change the way we see the world is limited after we have built our initial picture of the world.

If this was the case, it would help explain why people's worldviews tend to be fairly fixed, and it would also help to explain how worldviews and paradigms evolve over generations.

To see its role in the evolution of worldviews and paradigms, we need to see what happens as we build our knowledge.

Like with language, this knowledge-acquisition process is not a passive, simply absorbing the details out there, but is directed by innate processes and structures that look for certain types of details and build certain types of structures. So it's really less 'knowledge-acquisition' and more 'knowledge-building'.

To build our picture of the world, we have to integrate lots of different knowledge. This integrative process is not neutral.

Some of the knowledge may be overlapping, covering similar ground, but perhaps from different angles or at different levels of abstraction. Or it may be conflicting. To integrate these it needs to choose certain beliefs over others (not that it's necessarily going to build something that's fully consistent, though).

So in building a picture of the world, and integrating together knowledge, it has to streamline the input it receives. This can clean out dead-wood, like cleaning out beliefs that clearly don't make sense in terms of what we now know, or ad-hoc beliefs.

And this streamlining may actually make things explicit that were only implicit in the input knowledge. When certain facts are discovered about the world, the middle-aged person who has already built a picture of the world has great difficulty to deeply integrate these facts into their picture of the world.

But the person growing up, building their picture of the world can take these facts as just part of the existing knowledge and integrate them at a foundational level in their picture. So they may be able to, for example, make explicit consequences of those new facts that were there implicit in the data, but no one else could see before.

I suspect that this could play a role in why ideas often get invented by multiple people around the same time, and help to explain why brainwashing/propaganda efforts are so difficult to undertake in the longer-term.

And interestingly, this would mean that certain ideas can be there, latent in knowledge, for quite some time, until the next generation grows up and deeply incorporates them into their picture of the world.

Norman and Spolsky on ‘Simplicity’

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I think that the currently popular obsession with ‘simplicity’ is a bit misplaced. People's notion of simplicity is quite vague, and what they're talking is not really realy simplicity, anyway. Value attributed to 'simplicity' is often the result of other properties.

Recently there’s been a couple of articles on a similar theme in the blogosphere, one by Donald Norman and two by Joel Spolsky. I’ll take them in turn.

Norman’s article is called ‘Simplicity Is Highly Overrated’. I think highly of Donald Norman, from reading his “The Design of Everyday Things” book, but I think this article is a bit superficial. What he’s really arguing is about what people tend to want -- which he says is appliances with more features -- rather than being about the relative merits of simple or complex appliances.

Spolsky argues that what people label as ‘simplicity’ isn’t really simplicity at all, but something that is both different and more specific: specific sorts of functionality

Devotees of simplicity will bring up 37signals and the Apple iPod as anecdotal proof that Simple Sells. I would argue that in both these cases, success is a result of a combination of things: building an audience, evangelism, clean and spare design, emotional appeal, aesthetics, fast response time, direct and instant user feedback, program models which correspond to the user model resulting in high usability, and putting the user in control, all of which are features of one sort, in the sense that they are benefits that customers like and pay for, but none of which can really be described as “simplicity.”

A lot of people say that iPods are successful because they are simple, and he comments on this:

I think it is a misattribution to say, for example, that the iPod is successful because it lacks features. If you start to believe that, you'll believe, among other things, that you should take out features to increase your product’s success.

To summarise his argument, he thinks that people tend to talk of simplicity as ‘minimal and focused set of features’, yet the only potentially valuable sorts of simplicity -- which aren’t really simplicity per se -- are where there’s a close fit between user model and the program model, resulting in ease of use, or where there’s a ‘minimalistic aesthetic’.

If you're using the term "simplicity" to refer to a product in which the user model corresponds closely to the program model, so the product is easy to use, fine, more power to ya. If you're using the term "simplicity" to refer to a product with a spare, clean visual appearance, so the term is nothing more than an aesthetic description much in the same way you might describe Ralph Lauren clothes as "Southampton WASP," fine, more power to ya. Minimalist aesthetics are quite hip these days. But if you think simplicity means "not very many features" or "does one thing and does it well," then I applaud your integrity but you can't go that far with a product that deliberately leaves features out.

Slashdot has a discussion of these two articles.

In another article, Spolsky refines his point a bit. He talks about the notion of ‘elegance’ meaning 'grace and economy at achieving some task', which is related to simplicity (and, though he doesn’t make this point explicit, what people often really mean when they talk about ‘simplicity’). He says that while ‘elegance’ is valuable, ‘fewer features/capabilities' -- which is often what people talk about simplicity as -- is not so useful.

Sitting straight upright is not the best sitting posture, say researchers

The best sitting posture is not sitting bolt upright, but leaning back, with a 135 degree angle between your thighs and your torso. That’s the judgement of researchers who used a new form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that enabled them to determine the weight-bearing strain being placed upon the spine. The study was conducted at Woodend Hospital in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Up to 25% medication errors related to illegible dr handwriting

A CNN health article from a while back says:

Experts say up to 25 percent of medication errors may be related to illegible handwriting: A pharmacist misreads an illegible prescription, one drug is mixed up with another. [...]

Also last year the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, reported that medical mistakes overall -- including those stemming from unreadable notes from doctors -- may cause up to 98,000 deaths a year in the United States. Other researchers later termed those numbers exaggerated, but the authors stood by their report.

The article mentions handwriting seminars being given to doctors, and says the following

"It's good they're doing a seminar, but I'm surprised they're not going with automated bedside and hand-held computers, which cut the errors by up to 50 percent," Inlander said. Such devices require doctors and others to type orders into a computer system.

Paul Graham: Mind the Gap

Paul Graham writes, in an essay named Mind the Gap:

When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else. There's a huge gap between Leonardo and second-rate contemporaries like Borgognone. You see the same gap between Raymond Chandler and the average writer of detective novels. A top-ranked professional chess player could play ten thousand games against an ordinary club player without losing once.

Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill. But for some reason we treat this skill differently. No one complains when a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess or writing novels, but when a few people make more money than the rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong.

Why? The pattern of variation seems no different than for any other skill. What causes people to react so strongly when the skill is making money?

I think there are three reasons we treat making money as different: the misleading model of wealth we learn as children; the disreputable way in which, till recently, most fortunes were accumulated; and the worry that great variations in income are somehow bad for society. As far as I can tell, the first is mistaken, the second outdated, and the third empirically false. Could it be that, in a modern democracy, variation in income is actually a sign of health?

I think the argument he gives is pretty convincing.

There is one bit I’d make a -- relatively minor -- criticism of, though. He considers whether it’s unjust that certain kinds of work are underpaid. And though this question is phrased about work in general, his response is really only about work whose pay-level is determined by free-markets, and he doesn't make it very clear that he’s not really answering the general question. There's work like doing basic research, where the pay-level isn't, as far as I can see, determined by free-markets.

The bit in question is

When we say that one kind of work is overpaid and another underpaid, what are we really saying? In a free market, prices are determined by what buyers want. People like baseball more than poetry, so baseball players make more than poets. To say that a certain kind of work is underpaid is thus identical with saying that people want the wrong things.

Well, of course people want the wrong things. It seems odd to be surprised by that. And it seems even odder to say that it's unjust that certain kinds of work are underpaid. [7]

where that note 7 says:

One of the biggest divergences between the Daddy Model and reality is the valuation of hard work. In the Daddy Model, hard work is in itself deserving. In reality, wealth is measured by what one delivers, not how much effort it costs. If I paint someone's house, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush.

It will seem to someone still implicitly operating on the Daddy Model that it is unfair when someone works hard and doesn't get paid much. To help clarify the matter, get rid of everyone else and put our worker on a desert island, hunting and gathering fruit. If he's bad at it he'll work very hard and not end up with much food. Is this unfair? Who is being unfair to him?

I think it would have been more reasonable to say something like:

Well, of course people want the wrong things. It seems odd to be surprised by that. And it seems even odder to say that it's unjust that certain kinds of work, whose pay-level is determined by free-markets, are underpaid.

Richard Dawkins on “I’m an athiest, BUT...”

Richard Dawkins comments on people saying “I’m an athiest, BUT...”

Scott Adams on Atheists in America since 9/11

Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, writes: “Is it my imagination or have the atheists come out of the closet (in the United States) since 9/11?”.

Ads Exploiting Their Situation

Some pics of clever ads that exploit the situation they’re shown in. Like a manhole cover painted as a cup of coffee, where the steam rising from the cover makes it look like steam rising from the coffee.

Moderated Comments Stuffup

The comments for my blog used to be unmoderated - anyone could add a comment to a post and it would be added immediately. I'd get sent an email so I'd know this had happened.

At some point a few months ago I turned comment modertation on. I've still been expecting to receive emails whenever someone tried to add a comment, but I've recently realised that it hasn't been doing this.

So I've been thinking that no one has been adding any comments, even though they have - it's just that with the way I've had it set up, I have to go to the 'Moderate Comments' link on my blog's dashboard to see if any comments have been made, and vet them there before they'll appear on the blog (and before I'll be sent an email about them).

So apologies to Ricky and somebody called Dave, whose comments haven't appeared.

Scientist gets award for simulation of E.coli chemotaxis

BBC News reports that Dr Dennis Bray from the University of Cambridge was given the European Science Award for his innovative computer simulations of the bacterium [E.coli]. The simulations are of the chemotaxis systems that "allow bacteria to respond to environmental changes". It "enables bacteria to smell and swim towards sources of food"

There's a few comments in the article about the utility of computational models

"Today, computational sciences are of primary importance in all areas of science," said Professor Edouard Brezin, president of the Academie des Sciences.

"Together with experiment, computer models are now able to provide information which would not be accessible otherwise."

[...]
"It's got to the point where you can't progress without it," Dr Bray said. "We're just drowning in data."

[...]
"Any little corner of a living cell is just full of complicated machinery and molecules," said Dr Bray.

"There's just no way that one person thinking about it, can work it all out"

[...]
Bacterial chemotaxis provides an ideal platform to test computer models because it is one of the few systems where all of the individual components that influence cell behaviour are known.

Hence, discrepancies between what the scientists see in biological experiments and what they see in the simulations allows them to test the models. If there is a mismatch it suggests the model is incorrect and needs to be refined.

These anomalies can also lead to discoveries about the biological system itself.

[...]
When the computer simulations reach a point where they mimic an organism accurately, Dr Bray believes they could be used as experimental objects in their own right, rather than using a biological organism.

It's interesting to note, from the point of view of my PhD, the bit above saying that bacterial chemotaxis is "is one of the few systems where all of the individual components that influence cell behaviour are known." It may be a useful source of concrete data for some of the things I'm considering.

Why modern times are probably less materialistic

Sketching...

One of the most common complaints against the modern world is that we’re too materialistic. People look fondly at the past, when people’s lives were less materialistic, and more meaningful.

But I want to consider whether this is actually true. It may sound crazy, but could it be true that people in the past were more materialistic than we are today?

It certainly seems that we do have more ‘stuff’ these days, that we devote more of our time to obtaining it, and that we often seek to make our lives better and feel satisfied by obtaining things.

I want to start by considering that perhaps the reason that we, today, have more material trappings, and reach for them to satisfy ourselves, is simply because, in today's world, we can.

Times were hard in the past, and there simply wasn’t the access to material things like there is today. Surely if people had had the opportunity to have these things, they would have jumped at the chance to have them. To indulge their hunger, to make things more convenient, to have nicer clothes and nicer things. To get easy entertainment.

In a way, their lives had more meaningful elements because they were limited to those options. Given the opportunity, I bet they would have thrown them away, like we have. It's not that they were necessarily more enlightened.

In fact, I think we're probably more enlightened today, because we've had the opportunity to experience 'material fulfillment', and had the opportunity to see it's limitations. It's because we're enlightened about it that we complain so much about its limitations.

Think of a kid whose parents never let them eat ice-cream. When they move out of home and finally have that opportunity to eat as much ice-cream as they want, they gorge themselves on it. And it's nice. But it does have it's downsides, and it doesn't provide a particularly deep sense of satisfaction. Over time they'll probably learn this.

So what I'm saying is that it seems we've moved on, somewhat, from where we were before we had the opportunity to fulfill our material desires. And from this viewpoint we have the opporutnity to try and do something about it. So we can try and build social institutions/conventions/whatever that do provide 'deeper' things.

Laddered Skills - Democracy example

Just quick jotting...
The capabilities or properties of purposeful/designed systems are all laddered. Think of what is required for a country to be a successful democracy. You have to build up through a number of levels.. e.g. it's economics and other instituions have to be developed to a certain stage. It emerges through these things. You can't install democracy simply by things like changing laws. And it's not just a matter of tyring hard enough.

The design process used by Apple’s chief designer, Johnathan Ive

The 37signals blog Signal vs. Noise mentions a Business Week article [update: the article can now be accessed here] on Johnathan Ive “the man behind Apple’s design magic.” The article says:

His design process revolves around intense iteration — making and remaking models to visualize new concepts. “One of the hallmarks of the team I think is this sense of looking to be wrong,” said Ive at Radical Craft. “It’s the inquisitiveness, the sense of exploration. It’s about being excited to be wrong because then you’ve discovered something new.”

And the referring (Signal vs. Noise) post says:

Getting Real is all about iterations too. “Be excited to be wrong because then you’ve discovered something new” is a neat way to put it (btw, so is Fail early, fail often).

So lots of trying things out and revision, always trying to find where things could be improved.

Why programming gives you unique skills for understanding the world

Sketching....

Subjective elements in your understanding of something are just ways to gloss over the details how things actually happen. They’re a particular problem because we’re prone to unconsciously using them and they’re hard to spot.

Learning to program helps you develop important skills - in spotting and avoiding subjective elements. Subjective elements have no place in programming. You have to make things happen by writing a description that doesn't contain subjective elements.

You start with your picture of something, invariably containing subjective elements, and you have to make it into something fully concrete. The discipline of programming builds your ability to do this. You get better at spotting subjective elements in descriptions, and more agile at thinking of things and situations in terms of their concrete details.

When it comes to thinking about how things happen in the world, you may or may not be able to think about the concrete details of what is going on, and how they bring it about, but you can certainly be better at spotting subjective glossing in descriptions of it.

Visually referencing web-page elements

Think of instructions for setting up something on the computer, like an internet connection or an eBay account.

There are a number of different ways these instructions could be presented. You can have a fully textual description, giving the person instructions on where to go and what to do.

An improvement on this is to include pictures so people can more easily see what they should be looking at.

Even better is to explicitly, visually reference elements of the pictures from the description. So, for example, if there are a number of things a person needs to change on a dialog, visually highlighting each of these items on the picture and number them, so they can be referenced from the text. Or draw an arrow from the text to the item.

What would be even better is if the instructions could directly guide you through the process, and bring up the actual dialogs, rather than showing pictures of them, and highlight the actual items on that dialog. A sophisticated system could detect your state of progress and automatically open up the next dialog/page/etc - as a kind of worlflow.

Essentially, this is about being direct - showing rather than telling. You don’t have to see the instructions in one context and then switch to a different context to the actual web-page/program and then implement what they say. That context-switching requires you to reorient yourself and map what you saw in that description into what you’re seeing in the actual thing.

To do this on the web, you’d need the following sorts of things. A way of directly referencing elements within pages, such as input fields. Ways of visually highlighting these, such as putting a red drop-shadowed border around them. And a way to draw an arrow between a bit of text or an image and one of these items.

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I recently saw this post on the 37Signals blog Signal vs. Noise, on the idea of showing things as directly as possible - referencing a page element with a visual annotation. I can't say it was actually the inspiration for the ideas in this post, but it reminded me to write about it.

The post is about how they used direct visual reference on a particular page - or rather, the design process that led them to do this. Rather than describing how you could use the links in the link bar at the top of the page to populate a blank site, and saying what those links were, they just drew a bit arrow to those links saying "Use these links to fill your page".

Article on the myth of prodigy

[Update: the article can now be accessed here]

An article in the Association for Psychological Science's Observer

“I think we take it as an article of faith in our society that great ability in any given field is invariably manifested early on, that to be precocious at something is important because it’s a predictor of future success,” Gladwell said.
...
Precociousness is a slipperier subject than we ordinarily think, Gladwell said. And the benefits of earlier mastery are overstated. “There are surprising numbers of people who either start good and go bad or start bad and end up good.”
...
The other way to look at precocity is of course to work backward — to look at adult geniuses and see what they were like as kids. A number of studies have taken this approach, Gladwell said, and they find a similar pattern. A study of 200 highly accomplished adults found that just 34 percent had been considered in any way precocious as children. He also read a long list of historical geniuses who had been notably undistinguished as children — a list including Copernicus, Rembrandt, Bach, Newton, Beethoven, Kant, and Leonardo Da Vinci (“that famous code-maker”). “None of [them] would have made it into Hunter College,” Gladwell observed.
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And when it comes to musicians, the strongest predictor of ability is the same mundane thing that gets you to Carnegie Hall: “Really what we mean … when we say that someone is ‘naturally gifted’ is that they practice a lot, that they want to practice a lot, that they like to practice a lot.”

Automating Optimized Information Display

Ideally, we want to optimise the display of information. Or at least, most non-fiction information.

This is a matter of good communication, and that is largely a matter of efficiency. The information should be direct, concise and relevant. Unnecessary detail should be filtered out.

To do this effectively, you need to understand the target 'readership'. For example, knowing what they already know, so you can filter out details that are unnecessary to them.

Edward Tufte talks about this kind of stuff a bit.

Here's a simple example of optimizing information display - and automating that process: optimized cut-and-paste.

Much of the information you display is originally sourced from other places. I'd like to be able to automate the task of optimising the display of that information for the particular purposes it is being put to.

Say that I want to go to local hardware stores this weekend, so I search for them on the yellow pages website and add the details into my organiser software. The search results would look something like this:

store name
120 Sir Fred Schonell Drive
suburb, postcode
ph: (07) xxxx xxxx
fax: (07) 3371 xxxxx
website: xxxxxxxx.com.au


store name
street address
indooroopilly, postcode
ph: (07) 3371 xxxx
fax: (07) xxxx xxxxx
website: xxxxxxxx.com.au

But as far as my needs go, I can put an optimised version of this into my organiser program like:

store name, 3371 xxxx, street address
store name, 3371 xxxx, street address, indro

I don't need to know the fax or web details, so I filter them out. As for the phone number, in this context, I just need to put the number itself -- I don't need the 'ph:' bit or the area code.

And for the address, I just need to know the suburb, so I can filter out the postcode. And I can abbreviate 'Indooroopilly' as 'indro'. If the street is familiar and I know what suburb it is in -- as with 'Sir Fred Schonell Drive' -- I can omit the suburb name.

Since I can fit all the details of a store on a single line, I do so. And there's no need here for line spaces between the entries for the different stores, so I get rid of them.

It doesn't come out so much in this small example, but when you're dealing with lots of info, condensing it like this can make things much easier to deal with. The more you can see at once, the easier it is to see the whole and the properties it has, to manage it, and to see any patterns within it.

What I'd like is the computer to help automate this optimization task.

When I cut and then paste something, the program would provide options for optimizing the display of the information.

To do this, it would have to know a bit about how things could be optimized as well as knowing things about me. It could learn the kinds of optimizations I do - like replacing Indooroopilly with Indro. It could learn about what I know, in order to figure out what details I don't need to know - such as that I know all Queensland phone numbers have the '07' prefix, so it can omit them.

To do it well would be quite a difficult task. This post is not about the current feasibility of such automation, but just to communicate the idea of it.

I think such automated optimizing of information display is a major area in which software can become much smarter and useful, essentially by becoming better communicators.

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Here's some discussion / notes.

Ideally, when it filtered out information in a particular display, it wouldn't actually remove the information, but just not show it - so you could bring it up if you wanted to. Better, at any time you could tell it to adjust the type and amount of condensing you wanted.

Another sort of optimisation is dynamic optimisation to adjust to changes in the display area. If less space is available to display the information, the more condensed it makes it. For example, using 'heavier' abbreviations. Jorn Barger has talked a bit about doing this kind of thing (the above link is to his blog. After a bit of searching I haven't found the specific posts where he talks about this kind of thing).

For example, imagine a widget displaying the progress of a particular task you are undertaking, such as scanning your computer for viruses. You may want to keep track of this progress as you are doing other tasks. How much attention you want to give to it will depend upon what other things you are doing, and, for example, how much spare real-estate there is on your desktop. So you can resize the scanning-widget window to different sizes and it will adapt. Abbreviating things in various ways, and filtering out less relevant details.

Another optimization technique is clearly saying what you're saying, with techniques like [Update: this page can now be accessed here] 'heads', 'decks' and 'leads'. This makes it easier to find relevant information.

No one wants truly random play lists

Say we’re developing an MP3 player and want it to be able to mix up the order it plays songs. What comes to mind is a randomness -- having a random-play feature. But in fact, what we would really like is not literal randomness, but something more subtle.

A truly random playlist would do things like play the same song a twice in close proximity, or even twice in a row. What people really want is a subjective sense of variety. They want the songs jumbled up, but with repeats a bit more ‘evenly spaced’ so they don’t tend to come across the same song again until most of the other's have already been played.

When we first think of the feature we want, ‘random’ just seems to jumps into our head. Even if we wanted to deliberately think through exactly what we wanted in the feature, the notion of random would come to us well before we were finished.

The seems to happen through some sort of automatic assocition process. Our brains just seems to pick the closest general concept. It seems to be a kind of heuristic.

In such situations, I think you need to expect such things to just come to mind, and to be mindful that they’re often only approximations. And that means not just accepting it as true, and thinking about whether it really fits the situation.

If we do that for the MP3 player example, we can see that we’re after a feature that affects the listener’s listening experience. And if we have that in mind, and think about randomness, and how it will include sequences of same item more than once in a row, and reflect on this in terms of the listener’s experience, we can see that they are unlikely to want that.

This means not just considering what the player is doing, and that feature itself, but also the perception of it -- which is a key consideration here. That’s harder to do, as our thinking is usually directed at what’s there in the world, and it takes effort to also consider the perception of what’s out there.

What I’ve talked about here is an example of the ‘laddered skills’ I spoke a bit about a number of months back. It’s an example of how mental capabilities are laddered.

Skills are ‘laddered’ in the sense that in developing a particular skill, you have to pass through various ‘rungs’ that are pretty inherent to that skill. I had been intending to write about mental capabilities as laddered skills, but that turned out to be a far larger task that I’d expected, and I just haven’t had the time to work on it.

It's an example of it because, at one skill rung, there is just accepting whatever concept jumps to mind, and rung up there is recognising that this concept may be only an approximation and thus in need of evaluation. Also a rung up, is realising that the concepts that jump to mind tend to overlook roles that perception may play in the situation.

Better support for 'touch typing' on mobile phones

I often type SMSs or notes on my phone while I’m walking. Sometimes because it’s some spare time to do stuff, but also because walking frees up my mind and I often think of things when doing it. I’d like it if I could type them without having to continually look down to the phone to see what I’m doing.

Part of it is having to look down to see what keys I’m pressing. I can usually move my thumb to the right area without looking, but not quite accurately enough. It’d help there was tactile identification of the different keys. Perhaps they could have different texture patterns on each of them. Perhaps even the braille codes for the numbers on the keys.

The other part of it is in getting feedback on what you have typed. Rather than having to look down at the screen to see what character I’ve entered, it'd help if the phone could give me auditory feedback and read out that character. This would be particularly useful if I was using the handsfree headset.