Freakonomics

Freako­nom­ics: A Rogue Eco­nom­ist Explores the Hid­den Side of Everything was pub­lished a long time ago, way back in 2005, but it took my book­club until this year to decide to read it. Hey, no point in being too fast, if a book is worth­while it will still be worth­while a couple of years later, right? In this case, it is. There is an updated ver­sion, but even the older ver­sion has a way of look­ing at the world that’s worth pon­der­ing. Wiki­pe­dia and the offi­cial book site have sum­mar­ies, and there’s now a related blog.

The most fam­ous part of the book is the one that asks how far the decrease in crime in the 1990s was due to the poten­tial crim­in­als nev­er hav­ing been born; there has rightly been a lot of dis­cus­sion about that (Wiki­pe­dia has a decent sum­mary of some of the points). That dis­cus­sion has ten­ded to over­shad­ow the oth­er parts of the book, some of which bear more think­ing about. One good example is the way that gangs were organ­ised So how did the gang work? An awful lot like most Amer­ic­an busi­nesses, actu­ally, which, if taken ser­i­ously by people try­ing to get rid of gangs, might lead to dif­fer­ent ways of tack­ling them. The dis­cus­sion about how the Ku Klux Klan was made ridicu­lous by incor­por­at­ing it into the Super­man radio show was good, even if who did exactly what when is unclear. 

Above all, the book appeals if you’re someone who asks wheth­er there are oth­er explan­a­tions for things, past the seem­ingly obvi­ous. Like the book says, con­ven­tion­al wis­dom is often wrong, and it’s refresh­ing to read about some of the ways in which it is. Nor­mally we don’t dis­cuss non-fic­tion books for very long at book­club, but this book was an excep­tion. Most of our dis­cus­sion was along the lines of “does it make sense that” or com­ing up with altern­at­ive hypo­theses to explain some of their data. It would have helped if we’d seen some more of the actu­al math­em­at­ics so we could have been a little more sure of how they did the regres­sion test­ing, but that’s a minor quibble and I’m sure most of the book’s audi­ence did­n’t miss it.

Auto Industry Musings

In the on-again, off-again dis­cus­sions about bail­ing out three auto man­u­fac­tur­ers who are in large part respons­ible for their own prob­lems (which they admit), the major reas­on giv­en for not let­ting them go the way of any oth­er com­pany in fin­an­cial trouble is to cre­ate work and jobs for the people they employ. Surely bet­ter things can be found for these employ­ees to do than to cre­ate products that nobody wants to buy? Cre­at­ing man­u­fac­tured products con­sumes pre­cious resources ran­ging from metals and min­er­als dug out of the earth to power gen­er­ated to run the factor­ies. Then the res­ult­ing products will be stock­piled some­where, since nobody wants to buy them, left to rust and dis­in­teg­rate until they’re shred­ded to “recycle” the valu­ables left in them while the rest of the product is dumped in a land­fill. As make-work schemes go, this is, to my mind, not one of the bet­ter ones.

Bangkok 8

Bangkok 8: A Nov­el, by John Bur­dett (his site, Wiki­pe­dia) was the latest book­club read (yes, I know I’ve skipped a few in the middle, I got this one out of the lib­rary and it’s due back next week, which does con­cen­trate the mind won­der­fully). It’s prob­ably not a book many of us would have picked, but all of us enjoyed it, which is rare, and for many of the same reasons.

It’s a detect­ive story set in the pros­ti­tu­tion area of Bangkok, with a hero (Son­chai Jit­plee­cheep) who is the child of a pros­ti­tute, a half-caste who does­n’t fit into Bangkok soci­ety for a num­ber of reas­ons. The story itself was a little weird, with some weak spots, but Son­chai is inter­est­ing. I’ve only ever spent a few days in Bangkok, and that some time ago, but the author obvi­ously noticed some of the same things I did and incor­por­ated them very nat­ur­ally into the story. This includes such things as the Thai belief in anim­ism, as well as some cul­tur­al expect­a­tions that dif­fer between for­eign­ers (farang) and Thai. 

There are lots of amus­ing pas­sages, par­tic­u­larly when Son­chai is talk­ing to and about an Amer­ic­an woman who works for the FBI (so he calls her “the FBI”), and when he senses who or what vari­ous for­eign­ers were in pre­vi­ous lives, which he gen­er­ally does not both­er to tell them, fig­ur­ing that they would­n’t believe him any­way (this is an example of how nat­ur­ally those aspects are brought in, as in gen­er­al West­ern­ers don’t believe that you can look at a per­son and tell what they were in a pre­vi­ous life). 

Over­all it’s a good read and, if you have some famili­ar­ity with Thai anim­ism and have heard of yaa baa, it isn’t too hard to under­stand what’s going on. Hav­ing vis­ited Bangkok helps, but isn’t a pre­requis­ite (for­tu­nately).

Another WP Update

Hav­ing just updated my blog to the latest in the 2.6 series, it was time to go for the 2.7 series. Nor­mally I wait a couple of days for oth­er people to flush out the bugs, but I figured I’d be big and brave on this one, giv­en it’s Fri­day afternoon. 

As usu­al with Word­Press, the upgrade went flaw­lessly, even the few plu­gins I use installed without com­plain­ing. If you notice any­thing, let me know; it might take a while before I stumble on it. 

The new admin dash­board will take some get­ting used to. I don’t know yet wheth­er I prefer it to the old one or not, it looks more com­plic­ated but that could just be because it’s unfamiliar. 

And I’m try­ing out Mint for stat­ist­ics. I wrote a small plu­gin to add the code to the right place on the pages which seems to work. Now all I have to do is fig­ure out how to dis­reg­ard the spuri­ous vis­its.

Creating or Consuming

Fig­ur­ing out how best to spend “spare” time (that not alloc­ated to work­ing, sleep­ing, eat­ing, and the oth­er neces­sary daily activ­it­ies) is always a conun­drum. Do I read blogs, or write my own entries? Do I knit, or surf Ravelry? Do I watch TV, or read books? The pen­du­lum has recently been swinging too far in the wrong dir­ec­tion; I’ve been con­sum­ing more than cre­at­ing, tak­ing the easy, pass­ive way out to filling those spare minutes rather than think­ing about what I really want to achieve with them. It’s so easy to just “check what’s out there”, intend­ing it to be for a few minutes only, and find­ing the time stretches, like some ver­sion of Par­kin­son’s law, so that I’ve accom­plished noth­ing at the end of the even­ing. If I can­’t remem­ber what I’ve browsed, then was it worth read­ing? How much time should I spend on catch­ing up on what people I don’t know think? 

So, my plan is to think about my activ­it­ies more. If surf­ing, or read­ing feeds or tweets, then to do so delib­er­ately, rather than drift­ing along for lack of think­ing about what I’d really rather be doing. I’ll try to use my judge­ment more often, in oth­er words, to close the com­puter and spend more time with the world that’s phys­ic­ally present. Unless I decide that I feel like aim­lessly drift­ing through the Web, of course. 

I won­der how long I’ll keep this up?

CanUX Forum

I’m still recov­er­ing from three intense days at the Ban­ff Centre, tak­ing part in the CanUX For­um. The ori­gin­al motiv­a­tion was to learn more about user exper­i­ence, usab­il­ity, and design. I learned enough about that to fill my brain, and also learned ideas for brain­storm­ing, the rela­tion between cre­ativ­ity and muscle memory, and how some­times com­puters get in the way more than they help when you’re try­ing to fig­ure out the answers to issues.

I’m not going to try to recap the entire time although in future posts I’ll prob­ably come back to spe­cif­ic parts. Some write-ups I’ve seen are from Mack Male (who was on the same design slam team as me on the first day), and teehan+lax. I have lots of pages of scribbled notes that may or may not make sense when I come to tran­scribe them; much of the time was also spent in team work doing exer­cises to really bring those points home. Now I’m won­der­ing how much inter­activ­ity I can put into my own talks, of course, as well as won­der­ing how the “cre­at­ive play” aspects can work in find­ing solu­tions in more tech­nic­al discussions. 

Much to my sur­prise, the room was­n’t full of graph­ic design­ers, or even people with tons of usab­il­ity exper­i­ence. There were quite a few of those of course, people who could draw and sketch, but there were also people who come at things from a more text- or code-based per­spect­ive, like me. Com­ing from that per­spect­ive, I learned, simply means you take a dif­fer­ent path to design. You may not get to the same place as an artist­ic­ally gif­ted per­son, but where you land is not neces­sar­ily worse, either.

And I found lots of people there shar­ing my con­cerns, as well as my require­ments for solu­tions that work for remote design­ers and developers, solu­tions that bring out the cre­ativ­ity in developers and not just those who’ve been to art school. Most of the ideas for cre­at­ing viable designs involved reams of paper and sev­er­al hur­riedly sketched solu­tions that are taken as the basis for dis­cus­sion, with lots of iter­a­tion to get from those quick sketches to real­ist­ic solu­tions. I was aston­ished to learn how long it can take to solve issues, a week on one small menu on a web page is not uncom­mon. Although that thought is mildly fright­en­ing, it’s also reas­sur­ing to learn that even the experts take time to come up with good solu­tions. I’m inspired, as well as tired, and look­ing for­ward to put­ting some of these ideas into practise.