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Book Review: Business Secrets from the Bible

09 January 2015

Over the recent holidays, I read Rabbi Daniel Lapin’s Business Secrets from the Bible, a compendium of guidelines for conducting one’s work life distilled from the author’s knowledge of traditional Jewish wisdom.

The guidelines are somewhat abstract; the book does not recommend specific business ventures or investment products, but rather focuses on development of character traits and general ways of thinking. Divided into forty short chapters, several themes stood out to me included:

  • Perhaps counter-intuitively, the goal of business is not to make money. The goal is — or should be — to help other people. This doesn’t mean you must resolve to spend all of your time volunteering for non-profit organizations; you can help other people by mowing their lawn, helping them find and close on real estate, preparing their taxes, building computer software, catching and distributing fish, or any other honest business activity, and accepting payment for a job well done. The idea here is not to eschew making money, but to make serving your customer the goal rather than making money; excel at that, and the money will follow.
  • Being that business is about helping other people, it is helpful to build and maintain connections with other people. If I need someone to install a new roof on my house, I can look first to my circle of trusted friends and acquaintances to see if any of them are in the business of helping others with roof work. And likewise, if any of them need custom computer software developed, they can look to me.
  • Wouldn’t, though, my finances be better off if I repaired my own roof instead of hiring someone else to do it? Not necessarily. Another major theme of the book is that specialization is good, going so far as to deliberately seek ways to pay other people to do things for you that you could in theory do yourself, so that you have more time to focus on your own specialization. This is better for you, furthering your own business, and good for them, furthering theirs. Everyone wins.
  • You need not manage your own independent company to be “in business”. If you are an employee at a company, then your customers are the managers and owners of the company. Rather than viewing your 9-5 job as a drudgery endured only to take home a paycheck, look at your role there being to serve and help your customers.
  • Contrary to much popular advice, your business won’t necessarily be in line with “following your passion”. Not everything you enjoy doing is necessarily something that people will pay you for. If you have the talent and skill and opportunity to work at a job that you are thoroughly passionate about, then wonderful, but relegating your favorite activities to unpaid hobbies while you work professionally in another field need not be viewed with contempt. Become passionate about serving other people, in whatever capacity you are able to.
  • Never stop helping people! The author explains that there is no word in biblical Hebrew for “retirement”, which suggests it is something we ought not to do. Retiring from a particular job is one thing, but retiring from serving others altogether is something else completely. Plan to continue help other people, even for pay, for as long as you are able to.

Available in print and for Amazon Kindle, this is a great book to start the year thinking positively about your work and how it relates to making the world a better place. If you’ve already read Rabbi Lapin’s earlier book Thou Shall Prosper, much of the material will look familiar, but alternate presentations of the same ideas can help reinforce learning, and I find both books worth reading.

Designing Xerox Star Software in 400 Pages

28 September 2014

I’ve been reading Bringing Design to Software, an ancient tome (published in 1996) that collects interviews with a dozen software practitioners on the subject of software design. In modern parlance, what was called “software design” in 1996 might overlap with what today is called “user experience”, but in any event, it is an activity related to, but separate from, programming, that results in a well-planned specification for what is to be programmed.

The first interview is with David Liddle, who worked on the Xerox Star, an early desktop computer system aimed at business productivity use. How did Liddle and his colleagues go about designing the Star software?

We ended up writing a 400-page functional specification before we ever wrote one line of code. It was long, because it included a screen view of every possible screen that a user would see. But we did not just sit down and write it. We prototyped a little bit, did some testing with users to decide what made sense, and then wrote a spec for that aspect. Then we prototyped a bit more, tested it, and then spec’d it again, over and over until the process was done.

400 pages of software requirements may be commonplace in specialized applications like avionics systems, but it’s a lot more planning than most software gets today. Not even content with that, Liddle’s team hired Bill Verplank, a human-computer interface expert from MIT:

Verplank and his crew did 600 or 700 hours of video, looking at every single feature and function. From all these video recordings, we were able to identify and eliminate many problems. For example, we chose a two-button mouse because, in testing, we found that users demonstrated lower error rates, shorter learning times, and less confusing than when they used either one-button or three-button mice.

Being on the front line of developing early office applications, Liddle also addresses the misconception that the software models of files and folders and desktops was meant to copy a real-world office environment:

It is a mistake to think that either spreadsheets or desktops were intended to imitate accounting pads, office furniture, or other physical objects. The critically important role of these metaphors was as abstractions that users could then relate to their jobs. The purpose of computer metaphors, in general, and particularly of graphical or icon-oriented ones, is to let people use recognition rather than recall. People are good at recognition, but tent to be poor at recall. People can see objects and operations on the screen, and can manage them quite well. But when you ask people to remember what string to type to perform some task, you are counting on one of their weakest abilities.

Curiously, a lot of software written for programmers to use puts heavy demands on recalling arbitrary strings of text…

Would it still make sense to write a 400-page specification for office application software today? Would it still make sense to record hundreds of hours of video to research the optimal way to use the software? Maybe not. Thirty-three years have passed since the Xerox Star, and along the way, many good software design concepts have been identified and established as common practice. If you’re building software for an Apple desktop or mobile platform, for example, you can simply follow Apple’s design guidelines and save yourself a great deal of fundamental human-computer interaction research.

Nevertheless, spending time to plan your application up front may still be a good idea. Thinking through the interaction experience and the needed functionality with a pad of paper and a pen can make writing the code more straightforward, and software is easier to test if you have a precise definition of what it’s supposed to do.

Thanks to people like David Liddle, we can draw on years of experience in good software design to get a head start on our own projects!

Book Review: The Children’s Machine

21 September 2013

This past spring I read Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms as part of the MIT Media Lab Learning Creative Learning course. Having been delighted with that book, I just finished reading Papert’s follow-up book, The Children’s Machine (Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer).

Published in 1993, this book comes across as technologically more modern than 1980′s Mindstorms, though still obviously dated. For me, it is dated in an especially nostalgic way, as it was around the late 1980s / early 1990s that I was first learning about computer programming, and I can personally identify with some of the stories and concepts that Papert discusses here.

Broadly, this book might be viewed as a refinement of Mindstorms, whereby Papert had over a decade of additional experience and observations with which to form stronger, clearer opinions and gather more data and anecdotes. But while Mindstorms seemed to focus more on the specific idea of creating virtual educational worlds on the computer in which students could more easily learn abstract ideas, the present book steps back even further to look at understanding learning itself better.

Papert advances the term mathetics for describing the study of learning, as opposed to pedagogy, the study of teaching. Are there methods we can use ourselves, or encourage in students, to identify what needs to be done on the learner’s side in order to learn better? To rely on “being taught” without exerting enough effort on “learning” puts things out of balance.

This concept of mathetics is woven into accounts of using computers to improve how learning takes place, especially through creative learning techniques of building virtual things with computers, and through the notion of learning a concept better by teaching it to the computer via programming. For example, we read some stories about the development and usage of the Logo programming language and the Turtle programming system that was developed with it, and how this grew into a form of cybernetics controlling robotic Legos. Here’s a short example, in this instance about using Mitch Resnick’s multi-turtle Logo variant, *Logo:

Two high school students who had recently received their driver’s licenses decided to use *Logo to show cars moving on a highway. The students started by creating several dozen turtles, each representing a car. The program consisted of two simple rules. If a car sensed another car ahead of it, it slowed down. If it didn’t sense another car, it speeded up. With this simple program the students did not expect much to happen, but when they ran it, the cars bunched into a realistic-looking traffic jam. … It is worth noting that the students appreciated the self-organizing nature of the traffic jam only because they had written the programs themselves. Had they been using a packaged simulation, they would have had no way of knowing the elegant simplicity of the programs underlying the jam.

The front cover quotes School Library Journal as saying, “Educators with a vested interest in the status quo will hate this book. It is about their demise.” Indeed, there are numerous points brought up for consideration about how the educational system could be improved, including scathing criticism of attempts to nationally standardize education and judge student development based on standardized tests. Along these lines, Papert poses an interesting query for educational administrators:

[O]n my reckoning, the fraction of human knowledge that is in the [school] curriculum is well under a millionth and diminishing fast. I simply cannot escape from the question: Why that millionth in particular?

If you must limit yourself to reading only one Papert book, Mindstorms came across to me as more fresh and exciting, but the creative learning aficionado will get valuable insight from reading both. The paperback edition is available at Amazon. No electronic edition appears to be available.

Book Review: Privacy on the Line

11 September 2013

I just finished reading Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption. With all of the information being revealed and confirmed recently about United States government surveillance on personal communications, I wanted to be more educated on the issues.

Going about our day-to-day lives, how much privacy do we really have? The authors explain:

From video cameras that record our entries into shops and buildings to supermarket checkout tapes that list every container of milk and package of cigarettes we buy, privacy is elusive in modern society. There are records of what we do, with whom we associate, where we go. Insurance companies know who our spouses are, how many children we have, how often we have our teeth cleaned. The increasing amount of transactional information — the electronic record of when you left the parking lot, the supermarket’s record of your purchase — leaves a very large public footprint, and presents a far more detailed portrait of the individual than those recorded at any time in the past. Furthermore, information about individuals is no longer under control of the person to whom the information pertains; such loss of control is a loss of privacy.

What about U.S. government surveillance? The authors provide chapters of fascinating details, including:

Beginning in 1940 and continuing until 1973, FBI and CIA agents read the private mail of thousands of citizens. … Without warrants and without congressional or clear presidential authority, intelligence agents opened and perused the mail of private citizens, senators, congressmen, journalists, businessmen, and even a presidential candidate.

Numerous other examples include the FBI’s excessive surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr., authorized wiretaps being left activated beyond their official period of use, the FBI seeking information on who has borrowed unclassified scientific and technological books from public libraries for the purpose of identifying possible Russian spies, and more. In some cases, the FBI admitted that their surveillance tactics exceeded legal limits; in other cases, evidence against the FBI magically disappeared. Either way, it appears that if government agents wish to violate the law when it comes to surveillance, there is little (if any) actual oversight of their actions.

While government surveillance has been expanding by leaps and bounds, the authors make the case that not only is the huge amount of surveillance not commensurate with the relatively small amount of criminal or violent activity that it helps prevent, but even in situations where surveillance has been credited with helping to prevent undesirable outcomes, the surveillance tactics may not have been necessary.

It is important to apply common sense to the issue of terrorist investigations and to think clearly about which acts can be prevented and which cannot (Heynmann 1998, pp. xxi-xxiii). Timothy McVeigh’s attack on the federal office building in Oklahoma City was the work of a group of three people. … Unless the United States moves to a surveillance society on the scale of the former East Germany, the country will never be able to protect itself fully against attacks by “lone warriors” such as McVeigh.

To be clear, the authors do not claim that surveillance is useless against criminal or terrorist behavior; rather, it is of limited usefulness, and we need to appropriately balance legitimate surveillance needs with the privacy of the citizens.

On a more practical level, should we use encryption to protect the privacy of our emails and other communications? The authors seem generally in favor of it, but also warn us that:

One strategy followed by many pieces of intercept equipment should be a caution to anyone using cryptography: if an intercepted message is found to be encrypted, it is automatically recorded.

Since most emails are presently not encrypted, the very act of encrypting yours may draw attention to yourself. But at the same time,

as the use of cryptography increases, the privacy of everyone’s traffic benefits.

In light of the recent disclosures about the NSA’s methods of circumventing encryption, the book’s concluding chapter offers some especially interesting thoughts:

By building the machinery for surveillance into the US communication system, we overcome the largest barrier to becoming a surveillance society on a possibly unprecedented scale.

Once past that barrier (a place we may already have arrived at), it is much easier for laws and policies to fall into place in accordance with what is technologically possible.

This book is tightly packed with well-sourced information; I’ve only hit a few highlights here. It is available both in printed form and for Amazon Kindle, but if you don’t want the NSA to know that you bought this book, and if you don’t want Amazon to know how you read it, you might want to pay cash at the MIT Press Bookstore in Cambridge…

How Children Learn the Meanings of Words

27 July 2013

I just finished reading Paul Bloom’s How Children Learn the Meanings of Words. A reader of this book might expect to come away being able to answer the question, “how do children learn the meanings of words?” but in the final chapter, Dr. Bloom states that nobody knows how children learn the meanings of words! What, then, can we hope to gain by reading this book?

In claiming that nobody knows how children learn the meanings of words, the author is affirming what the previous ten chapters implied: this is complicated stuff, and state of the art research is just scratching the surface. The book covers a variety of subtopics related to word learning, including how children learn nouns, and pronouns, and numbers, and how they differentiate between naming things and naming representations of things, and how their words and their thoughts interrelate. But since what is known of these topics is still in its infancy, with much room for debate, rather than pontificating unsubstantiated opinions as facts, the author spends most of the book summarizing results from years of experimental linguistic research.

The first chapter kicks things off with some fun, considering how children learn what exactly the word “rabbit” refers to. If a child sees a grey rabbit running through the yard, and an adult points to it and says, “Rabbit!”, does the child understand that the word “rabbit” refers to a kind of animal? Or does the child believe that the word refers to that one particular animal (perhaps it is named “Rabbit”)? Or does the word refer only to grey rabbits, but not brown ones? Or to all mammals in general? Or to only the ears of the rabbit? Or to the tail? Or to “all and sundry undetached parts of rabbits”? Such questioning can carry us down the path of the ridiculous, but they are fair questions if we want to understand how words are learned.

My favorite excerpt from the book has nothing at all to do with linguistics, but was mentioned in passing as it pertains to cognition in general:

Adults are often oblivious to dramatic changes across a visual scene, even for objects that are the direct focus of attention, a phenomenon known as change blindness. In one striking demonstration of this, an experimenter started a conversation with a pedestrian and then, during a distraction, was surreptitiously replaced by a different experimenter. Only about half of the pedestrians noticed the change (Simons & Levin, 1998).

We also see a good rebuttal to the ever-popular Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, including a parody (originally published by Gregory Murphy) showcasing circular reasoning in the hypothesis:

Whorfian: Eskimos are greatly influenced by their language in their perception of snow. For example, they have N words for snow [N varies widely; see Pullum, 1991], whereas English only has one, snow. Having all these different words makes them think of snow very differently than, say, Americans do.

Skeptic: How do you know they think of snow differently?

Whorfian: Look at all the words they have for it! N of them!

Never content to assume a research experiment—even his own—has led to the one true answer, Dr. Bloom compares and contrasts the various experiments, pointing out both inadequacies and strengths, gently prodding the reader toward what he believes are the most plausible conclusions. As such, loaded with references to original research papers, the book serves beautifully as an introductory survey of word learning literature, and would be good for novice researchers in the field to jump-start their reading.

The book is relatively light on linguistic jargon, and should be accessible to readers without a background in linguistics, though some sections are more dense with terminology than others.

There are a number of pictures and graphs, but the book should be perfectly readable in electronic format. It is, however, presently only available in paperback.