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Human fit

02/09/2016

The Training of a Pickup Owner

Some time ago, I wrote a post complaining about my then reasonably new Toyota 8ft. bed pickup. My complaints had to do with its size (except for the 8 foot long bed). It was simply too big.  But since I still have it, it must have some good points, so in all fairness.I figure that I should mention a few redeeming virtues to it.

I first experienced pickups when I rode around with my dad in his 1939 Chevrolet. Eight foot bed, but smaller machine. Eight feet is a magic number, since building materials, single mattresses, and all sorts of other things can be put into an eight foot long space, and if there is a closable end (the tailgate) they will stay there. He drove the truck for over 25 years, before losing it in an accident, and then acquired a 1966 Chevrolet pickup, which he drove until he died, at which point it went to my oldest son, and now I am restoring it. All eight foot long beds. But pickups have grown.

At one point, I needed my own pickup, and bought a new small Toyota truck (six foot bed). It was a wonderful machine, and passed through the hands of two of my children before it was finally sold. My older son is into his second small Toyota (Tacoma), and has had terrific luck with them, but they all had shorter beds. I meanwhile went through an 8 foot bed blue Ford F150 (wrong color for California’s central valley), and a white one (more acceptable to the culture). Both of them served me well, except as the bells and whistles increased in number and complexity, although the drive trains in both of them gave me no problems, I had increasing problems with failures of remote control features, electronic ignition systems, etc. So I decided to buy another no frills Toyota, and go back to the smaller model because of its convenience in parking and driving around cities. But as I tested the new Tacomas, I realized I had somehow gone from a large person to an extra large person, and I couldn’t easily get my knees under the steering wheel, my head under the top of the door opening, etc. Perhaps less flexible?

Also, I have always been  an ad-hoc camper, and had shells on my Fords, enabling me to sleep in the 8 foot bed in the rain, and my wife to ride in back on a mattress and read books and listen to music when we took long trips (probably illegal, since there was no seat or seat belt back there). So I bought a white Tundra, even though it had the shortcomings I mentioned in the earlier post.

  1. Too high off the ground, demanding a running board for my wife to get into it, and making it impossible to reach objects in the middle of the bed.
  2. Door too wide to be fully opened in tight parking situations.
  3. Turning radius too large due to wheelbase of the truck, in turn partly due to an overly long cab. I wanted a single seat, but the “conventional cab” has room behind it, presumably to put things. But the space is such that things put there will disappear forever, because it is a high and narrow space, and how many of us are going to remember what we stuff into a space such as that?
  4. Too “car like” instead of “truck like”. Large body panels with little structure behind them which dent easily, lavish and expensive rear light enclosures that are difficult to change when the break (it is a truck), etc.
  5. The step on the back bumper enabling you to easily get into the back is covered by the tailgate when it is open.
  6. And more

My previous experience had taught me much about ordering a pickup. I knew it was important for me to:

  1. Order the minimum of bells and whistles (remote control devices, TV cameras, luxury upholstery, etc.), since over long usage, they would be likely to fail. If you lose your manual key to open the cab and start the engine, you probably have another one, and if not, the nice people from AAA can solve your problem. But if your digital “safety system” fails, you probably better hang on to your wallet and take it to a mechanic.
  2. Go for the smallest engine available. It will have plenty of torque and speed for me and I don’t plan to race my pickup.
  3. Go for two wheel drive. Four wheel drive obviously has more traction, but tempts one to try to attempt overly heroic feats. There is nothing more pathetic than a stuck four-wheel drive vehicle.
  4. Get an eight foot bed. The two extra feet are worth the extra move needed to get into a parking space in most lots, and the worry about whether you are going to make the U- turn at the intersection. Besides, your friends and family always want to move eight foot long items. Security is a load of plywood sheets and other building material with the tail gate closed. And you can sleep in it.
  5. Get one that is easy to get in and out of, because that seems to be a primary activity with a pick up.
  6. Unless you have a dog or very small kids, forget anything behind the main seat, but make sure it can seat three people. I seem to do quite a bit of moving for young perhaps newly married couples, and they both want to go along, so stay away from fixed central consoles.

So what have I done to now be much more fond of my truck, than when I initially bought it?  I have not done the major modifications I had planned, like lowering the body and beefing up the springs.  But other things have happened.

  1. First of all, I have accumulated the various dings and scrapes having to do with normal usage of such a truck, so I don’t have to worry about it. The truck and I can curse together when we find a new scrape in a parking lot, which makes us closer. (Incidentally, when people ding your pickup in a parking lot, they tend not to leave you a note—I guess that’s reserved for cars). I once had the unsettling experience of observing a farmer friend of mine drive a new pickup home, only to attack the inside of the bed with a crowbar, since he did not want a bed liner, and did not want to have to worry about the shiny new paint and bumpless interior. He wanted to put it to work immediately. I understand that, but can’t bring myself to do it.
  2. I put running boards on it, just like in the 1930’s
  3. I built several fine sturdy yet light weight boxes that I could stand on to reach material in the center of the box, and use to easily get in the back when the tail gate was open. But after the boxes were repeatedly stolen by people for storage containers (especially my wife}, I shortened an old rake which I keep in back to help me reach things. And I learned to climb in the back, using the bumper step, before I open the tail gate.
  4. I have learned a set of skills associated with the truck. I have a plastic removable bed liner in the back, because I frequently load and unload heavy objects and it is somewhat slippery so that objects slide more easily on it. I have become quite good at moving things where I want them while en route. I can move them forward by an usually abrupt stop. I can move them backward by accelerating up the hill to my house. Just a few hours ago I had three toolboxes, some old tractor parts, and a bunch of just-bought loose groceries in the back, and I was able to use the uphill road to my house, my brakes, and my steering wheel to arrange everything in the order I wanted them—sophisticated swerving adjusts things sideways.

So I now love my Tundra. It has just taken fifty thousand miles for us to get used to each other. | It is still too big, too far off of the ground, and too fancy. But now it is looking older and more used like I do, and I am looking forward to the next fifty thousand miles.

Do you suppose people become more fond of products that they use a long time, both because they become more skillful at using them, and because they become “old friends”? I sure do. What does that say about constant new digital equipment and continual new “upgrades”?

Posted at 05:49 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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01/07/2016

Are Computers Turning Us Into Slaves?

Are Computers Turning Us Into Slaves?

In 1996, Clifford Stoll, already a long-time computer user, wrote a book entitled Silicon Snake Oil, which was critical of the internet. I loved it and recommended it to all of my friends. It was a breath of fresh air in an atmosphere which was polluted with the breathing of people sure that computers and the internet would solve all problems and generally lead to nirvana. Many of the latter are still around.

One observation I remember from the book, was that in the early days of the computer, he claimed he spent half of his computer time simply trying to get his equipment to do what he wanted it to do, which was reasonable, but in 1996 it seemed like he was still doing this, and it hardly seemed reasonable at all.

Now it is ten years later. It has been raining for the last two days in California, and although I probably should have gone outside and played in the rain, it being miraculous in our drought ridden state, I decided to stay inside and work on my computer, happily typing on books, getting my photographs out of Apple’s new and disastrous Photos software, doing small things such as this post, and so on. I did none of that. Instead I worked on our relatively simple home computer system, which consists merely of two computers, two printers, and related equipment.

At the beginning, my wife was having problems with scanning material to Word, and downloading Christmas photos from her camera, and my printer was doing an awful job printing pictures – streaky and too dark. The streaky was clearly from a printer needing cleaning. But the too-dark seemed like maybe something more profound. The result was a struggle with color balance, where was it being controlled, etc, and the usual downloading of new software. Still too dark. So I ran it through the cleaning sequence three times. No difference. At that point I had already spent far more time than the printer was worth, so I went and bought a new printer, and you know how much time that takes, especially since it is sales season, people are still returning Christmas gifts, and the traffic is a nightmare in this area anyway. And of course, there was then the time spent learning to use all of its features, most of which I didn't need.

After selfishly solving my own problems first, I attacked those of my wife, and made a slight bit of progress. Like most people we work with lots of peripherals and are hampered by finite desk space and large screened maschines with not enough USB ports (which are in the back of the machine, and therefore sweep everything on the desk to the floor when the computer is rotated to reach the damn things). She was powering one USB hub off of another one, and since the light on her card reader was not going on, maybe not enough power to download the photos? So I did the usual shuffling of USB cords, including trying to trace them through the snarl that accompanies most computers, hoping that some combination would let everything work, but no luck. I then re-entered the post holiday traffic and got a new and better brand of hub, but still no luck. I finally tried her card on my computer and it also didn’t load – woops, something wrong with the card. It turns out she bought it overseas, so I set that one aside for later.

On to the scanning. Somewhere in the recent “upgrading” we have been doing due to changes in operating systems (required on mine by the encryption now demanded by Stanford servers and hers demanded by peripherals and consistency with mine), and resulting obsolescence of applications, she couldn’t find her favorite method of simply scanning to RTF and then saving the document as a Word document. We worked on that for a while before succeeding, also trying to translate the marketing language concerning available new optical character recognition software that maybe we should download (impossible to learn such things over the phone, all advertised as the best on the internet, and I wasn’t about to go driving again). But by then, my two days were over.

So, Mr. Stoll, in those two days days, I  far exceeded spending half of my time trying to get my “system” to do what I want it to. I  spent ALL OF IT. And was not done! And to make matters worse, quite a bit of my time was spent accommodating to having to “upgrade” software which, I didn’t want to do, because it will require me to modify useful habits I have acquired over time, and the changes will not improve my life—so far, quite the contrary. In my present mood, typewriters were pretty cool.

Following day note: My wife’s computer had lost its connection to the internet the day before in all the excitement. We initially thought it was because we had pulled something loose in the afore mentioned swarm of wiring which not only interconnects our computers, printers, and so on, but also allows us to participate in a beta test of Google Fiber and TV, all controllable from a pad and working through many black boxes. My credentials would seem to indicate that I should be better than average at screwing around with this kind of stuff, since I have been an engineer for 60 years, have used computers since they became available, and I guess was once a “rocket scientist”, since I worked on spacecraft at J.P.L.  If true, I have great sympathy for those who are only average and are in the same boat as I seem to be in.

Turned out it was a faulty power strip, now replaced and all systems are go, except that one of the external back-up drives seems to be balking.  I will now post this thing, call for help from a friend, Tim Keely, the world’s best IT person, who will know what is up with the external drive (no clue from its manual on the web), get back to the imported photo card, and then begin my periodic unsnarling of wires that seem to love to intertwine beneath desks and tables and behind sofas, bookcases, heavy chests of drawers, and other heavy objects. My world is not yet wireless.

And aren't computers supposed to serve us, rather than the opposite?

Posted at 09:48 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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11/28/2015

Virtual Reallity —Media Flavor of the Month

I trust you had a happy Thanksgiving.  The University (and I) take a thorough vacation being thankful, so I am being a bit sloppy on posts.  But I am back, for better or worse.

Judging from the media, the world is agog with the thought of virtual reality devices and programs being available at a reasonable cost.  VR, as it is sometimes called, is being heralded as the next best thing, the replacement for television, and so on.  Apparently billions of dollars are being spent on developing the hardware by major players in the digital world and which is imminent on the market.  I am definitely not involved, and my only experience with VR is because a few  weekends ago the Sunday New York Times put together a down-loadable sample of how their material could be presented in VR, and included one of Google’s cardboard box viewers with their paper. 

 At this stage of the game, one cannot expect to receive a technologically mature product for free, but we had had a lot of fun playing with it. and it is indeed mind-boggling to be able to turn your head and watch the world swim by.  The image in the sample was not comparable in quality to that presently available on a TV or computer screen, but probably superior to the first TV image I ever saw, and if the decreasing cost and increasing ability to handle data continue, it will continue to improve.

 But I have had the privilege of observing movies  go to color and sophisticated sound and projection equipment and now three-d, TV going to color and larger screens with ever-increasing resolution and accompanying surround sound, opera doing a wonderful job with "hi-def", and everything from theater through vocal performance to classic orchestras taking advantage of technology.  These improvements have definitely made for a more complete experience, but I am not sure how much they have revolutionized the experience, because people seem to adapt to technological innovation, and take it for granted. 

In my opinion, the main factor in entertainment, is the quality of the message being presented.  Three dimensional films have not obsoleted the “old fashioned” film approach, which does not totally surprise me, because I happen to know a few people who have lost sight in one eye, and do not claim a great loss in their enjoyment of life.  My wife and I seem not to desire a TV screen that covers most of a wall.  Neither do we need woofers that cause discernable changes  in the size of our chest cavities.  In fact, we are often drawn to presentation of first class material presented in a more primitive way (old movies?)

 So my question about VR, which obviously requires more complex and therefore expensive camera and viewing equipment, is what is it best to be used for?  Obviously it will be used for games —it will add to the realism of war games if one has to worry about being shot in the back or bombed from straight over head.  But I recently looked again at the New York Times sample news presentation and found the VR to be somewhat distracting to its purpose.   The New York Times story in the sample concerned  children who had been displaced by war, something with which we should be very concerned,  but the wheat fields behind my head, seemed to fill no great need, especially because I kept checking what was there rather than focusing on the children and their problems.

  Theater often has great power because it focuses on a few characters and a set which adds to the story.  I am not aware of a travelogue movie that has used three d.  In fact, travelogues are usually made more interesting by including interesting characters and some sort of plot, on which the viewer can focus.  Even then, I am not sure that they are superior to high quality still  photos. Advertisements in Grocery stores tend to try to focus our attention, not allow us to see the merchandise behind us.

 So I think the future of virtual reality, other than in games and as a novel way to present information (for a while), depends on the ability to generate programs that can accomplish things that can not be done more cheaply, with simpler equipment, and perhaps more effectively due to less distraction by material not germane to the intention of those producing the material.  Good luck to it, but I plan to focus on real reality for a while.  

Posted at 10:51 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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11/05/2015

Bye Bye Tank

DSCN0187I recently sold a small British army tank I have had for some time.  To be formal, it was a British armored reconnaissance vehicle—CVR(T)— Scorpion.  It was classified as a light tank, built in the 1970’s, and at that time it held the speed record for the fastest production tank in the world (51.10 mph).  Photograph at left.

 I acquired this tank perhaps because I had never  owned one, and always thought it would be fun to drive one around, and because this one is light (9 tons – made of aluminum to be air-freighted), small (17 ft.long. 7 ft. wide, 7 ft. high) easy to work on, and equipped with all the bells and whistles available at the time  periscopes, lights, tools, antennas, lots of electronics, equipment boxes all over the place, and even a boiling vessel for making tea (British).  It is also fun to drive, being equipped with a Jaguar engine (I do know Jaguar engines), a centrifugal clutch, and a motorcycle-like foot gear shift.  And lest you worry, it was part of a collection and legally de- militarized (the cannon is not operable, the machine gun had obviously been removed – this is California).

 I also was probably influenced  to buy it because at the time I was on the board of the foundation that owned this collection, the largest private collection in the world of beautifully restored military tracked vehicles, which belonged to a man named Jacques Littlefield, one of my all-time favorite students.  The collection was a magnet for tours, kids, my students  (I taught a course on the historical relationship between technology and war), ex-tank crew people, and generally people who were interested in machinery and military history , and I finally could no longer fight the urge to own one. The collection, incidentally has joined the Collings Foundation headquartered in Stow, Massachussetts, which has an outstanding collection of vintage automobiles and aircraft.

 Other favorable factors were that Jacques  sold it to me for an excellent price, his people were a source of knowledge and extra parts, and my kids and grand kids thought that it was wondrous..  The only slight downside was that my good wife considered that it was symbolic of violence, and should not be in our yard, and might not even be welcome on the Stanford Campus.  So I located it  at my friend's farm up in the Sacramento valley, comfortably covered by a barn and surrounded by lots of dirt roads and open fields.

 But many years passed, my kids were no longer fascinated by it, I was not going to my friend’s farm as often and beginning to worry about it not being looked after, and then the major factor— I could barely get into it and move around any more.  So one of my friends (who took on the responsibility for finding a home for the big collection after Jacques died a few years ago), found a person who was looking for a tank like mine, and who would obviously give it an excellent  new home, so I sold it to him.

  IMG_0772The photo on the right shows it being packed ready to  go.  In a sense, I am glad I sold it, because I wasn’t really using it and don’t have to worry about it any more.  But it is the only one of my hobby machines I have sold—and it was the only tank I owned.  Maybe a little seller’s remorse.

 My wife is not unhappy at all.

 

 

Posted at 07:27 PM in Design, Engineering, Human fit, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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10/12/2015

Intelligence and the Computer

Intelligence is a broad word.  If you want to check it out in Wikipedia, it is here.  Of note is that although usually applied to humans, it is also used in conjunction with animals, plants, and increasingly to machines (artificial Intelligence.)  If we consider the word “smart”(perhaps a subset of intelligent), we seem to include everything with a chip in it (smart cars, smart houses, smart thermostats, smart toys, etc.)

 Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, there seems to be increasing confidence that the computer and related information systems will continue to become more intelligent as time passes.  In fact, a few hard-core folk believe that computers will surpass humans in intelligence. There is an educational venture in the Silicon Valley area that calls itself Singularity University and which studies innovation and so-called exponentially accelerating technologies. Singularity in this case refers to digital technology, and is defined in Wikipedia here.   One of the co-founders, and now Chancellor of the  University, is Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and technology visionary..  He has written a book entitled Singularity is Near, and believes this singularity will occur in 2045, and that we should prepare for this time when computers become more intelligent than humans and continue to advance more rapidly than we can.

 Admittedly, I do not have the technical reputation that Kurzweil does, but I do not believe this at all. Computers have steadily taken over activities that humans used to do—calculation, recording and organizing information, controlling machinery, making decisions based on input, and so on.  But I see no way they can take over the ship.   For one reason, we humans, not computers, define intelligence, and we do so selfishly.  Think of how much faith we place in the I.Q. test, which˙ after all merely measures how well one does on a traditional “test”(according to traditional questions) rather than overall intelligence.  Nevertheless we believe in it, But should should computers out perform us at taking the test, we will change the test. As computers do better than humans at various tasks (Big Blue beating Kasparov at Chess, once thought to be a game requiring great intelligence, and speed at calculation, which got me good grades at Caltech), we seem to change our minds as to how much intelligence is necessary to accomplish these tasks. And there is always Dave’s approach to HAL, his misbehaving AI computer, in the 1968 movie A Space Odyssey—shut it down.  

 I first encountered the then large mainframe computer in the 1950’s when I worked first in the Air Force, and then at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  I was fond of these machines because they could do complicated and involved calculations that I really did not like to do, and practically never could have, by hand.  I have worked with computers ever since, and like most people, I consider them not only immensely useful, and wondrously capable of speeds and data handling with which humans cannot compete.  But I don’t think of them as particularly intelligent, any more than I thought of the Library of Congress, adding machines or telephones as Intelligent.   I know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches are being applied in an increasing number of ways. And the role of computers will change a great deal by 2045, which after all is 30 years from now. The digital age is still quite young. The invention of the internet was approximately 30 years ago and of the World Wide Web only 24 years ago. Computers will continue to amaze us , until we take the new miracle for granted, but we humans will continue to lead the movement.

 I am a believer in artificial intelligence when humans are in the loop.  When I joined the Stanford faculty, I worked a bit with the then Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, headed by John McCarthy, one of the early pioneers in AI.  One of the graduate students was working on computer vehicle control ,  and was using a remotely controlled cart I had built for my Ph.D. thesis (remote control by a human with time delays in the loop) a few years before.  It was clear to me then that computers would take over an increasing number of information processing tasks that people had traditionally done, but even then I was skeptical about how far they would go at being truly intelligent.  At some level, we humans have always had to tell digital devices what to do and how to do it.

 In the early days, AI was very interested in the workings of the human mind.  But the human mind is beyond complex.  Yesterday there was an article in the New York Times entitled “Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain, by Kenneth Miller, Co-Director of the Center for Theoretical Neurosciences at Columbia University”. It is here. He wrote it because of the attention being paid to an increasing number of people who seems to want their brain frozen and stored until science has progressed to the time when someone can thaw it out and start it up again. His answer is “maybe centuries from now”.  I have another reaction, and that is “who would want to”?  But the article does give an insight into how far away we are from truly understanding the human mind, despite a great amount of brain and behavior research.

 AI researchers no longer think of duplicating the human mind on silicon, but the search for computer based intelligence that mimics human intelligence is alive and well. In fact, as computers become better and better at crunching numbers and handling “higher” mathematics, and as they are equipped with better sensors and actuators and integrated into more and more nets, they become more and more useful to us (with a few exceptions, such as handling “big data” for marketing purposes and being involved in pranks and crimes). But the more time I spend screwing around with such things as new operating systems and applications, handling the increasing number of people who want to send me e-mails or texts, find things on the ever-increasing internet, or become my friend or contact on social networking sites, the dumber my computer seems at handling information for me,  and I have never considered allowing it to make decisions for me.

 The good news is that I don’t have to worry about Mr. Kurzweil’s singularity, because I will be dead by then.  The bad news is that computers may hasten my death, but only through frustration, and not because they are more intelligent than I.

Posted at 03:42 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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09/17/2015

Creativity and Control, Innovation and Tradition

 I recently read a book entitled The Innovators, by Walter Isaacson, (see recommended books) who attracted a lot of notice writing a book about Steve Jobs after his death, and is an excellent writer with a good ability to deal with technology, science, and the people involved (although from my viewpoint as an engineer who has put in my time in industry and in academia I think he is a bit biased toward the sciences, although he recognizes the need for the “faceless” engineers, as he calls us, and often confuses engineers with technicians, machinists, and other worthy people). Since I have spent much of my life living and working in Silicon valley and teaching at Stanford, I have had a chance to get to know and work with a few of the heroes and many of the “faceless”, and am very familiar with the truths and myths.  I feel that Isaacson does a reasonably balanced and interesting job of telling his stories and drawing conclusions on the necessary qualities needed to innovate in what is called “high” technology (I am never quite sure what differentiates “high” technology from “low” technology).

 I apologize for not sending this post out at my usual Sunday or Monday time, but like many people, my wife and I took an end-of-the-summer vacation trip around Northern California, and a vacation to me includes severing as many links as possible with the internet.  During our trip, I couldn’t help but consider how much the many miraculous innovations described in Isaacson’s book (the internet, the smart phone smart phone,  computers, and all the features the digital age has brought to me through appliances, entertainment, etc.) have  improved my life.  The conclusion I kept coming to, is that there is good news and bad.  Certainly technical work has been greatly aided by the computer’s ability to calculate and simulate and provide information, although I suspect that one’s understanding of the assumptions and uncertainty in such things may be impaired.  I have much easier access to information, communication, and entertainment although it is all becoming seriously less fun through ever increasing use as a marketing tool.  I also have to put up with expectations of instant response (texting) and endless messages from people I don’t know who want things I cannot or don’t want to provide.

 But to me, the computer and the internet have always been tools to accomplish things I want to do, and like most tools, when I acquire a facility at using them, I resent them being changed, unless there is a major benefit to me.  And here we get into the conflict between the new and the known, because a great amount of the profit in and excitement about digital hardware and software is about creativity, innovation and change.  But as the title of the post implies, these can clash with control and tradition, and effort is needed to accommodate to the new—and time, which is becoming more important to me as I get older,  I am no longer amused by changes in software and hardware because some designer or manager, or entrepreneur has a “better” idea which I am forced to incorporate into my life even though I don’t need or want it.

 In a previous post I think I mentioned my ongoing problems involved in changing from Apple’s operating system 10-6-8 and associated applications, which I had used for years and was very familiar with, to 10-10-5, needed because a major hack had convinced the Stanford University computer people to encrypt all of us.  This, of course, resulted in my need to upgrade many  applications and deal with information such as  a great many photographs that had been re-arranged because Apple (not me) thought they should be.  The more time passes, the more annoyed I become at the time I am still putting into this change.  It is as though one manages to learn to juggle five balls, and then someone changes one of the balls.

 I understand the cost of backward compatibility in software, but when one already has as much capability as one needs/wants, can’t someone figure out how to preserve that?  In the case of Apple going from iPhoto to Photos, since I had not been upgrading my iPhoto (I preferred the older format), the “upgrade” (means change even if it a negative one) included in the new operating system happily re-arranged my images and put them in Photos (the new version that I don’t like as well) and informed me that I could no longer use  iPhoto because my iPhoto software was not the latest issue.  When I tried to download this latest version of iPhoto, I found it was no longer available at the Apple store, and I could not find it anywhere else on the Web.  With the help of a friend, I managed to find the iPhoto upgrade, so I can now access my old iPhoto files, but iPhoto and Photos are not easily compatible.  So I am still up to my neck with re-arranging images, getting information where I want it, and fears of future moves from Apple that will attempt to force me to use Photos, or worse.  The result is that I am going to go through the pain of getting the photos off of my Mac, and am even considering leaving Apple products because it seems to me that they are sacrificing a lot to make operating systems of desktops more compatible with smart phones and their other "portables", and I don’t want to go through endless iterations in which they strip things down so the desktop operating system is compatible with an Apple shirt button, or whatever else will follow their watch.

 I built much of my professional reputation promoting, teaching, practicing,  and consulting in things having to do with creativity and innovation.  I am a believer.  But unless they are properly balanced with control and tradition, over time the loss may be bigger than the gain.  Over time, new goodies tend to become boring, and one should not overlook the costs of change to users. 

 

 

Posted at 01:17 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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08/25/2015

The Enigma of Success

I was recently talking with a few other faculty elders at Stanford, and we were reminiscing about the changes that had occurred in the University since we had arrived (1958 for me as a graduate student, 1966 as a member of the faculty).  They have been many.  Stanford in 1958 had begun its climb to its present size, wealth, and justified fame, and was a wonderful place to be because of its smaller physical size, its relative lack of red tape and rules, the excitement of rising in prestige, and its more informal physical plant and personal interactions.  During my time as a graduate student I not only carried a large teaching load and was responsible for a research contract, but was given the job of re-building (with student help) the upper floor of a large building, where we were building a new academic unit. In fact, I repeated this— studs, drywall, and paint— in the 1980’s when I was tasked with chairing a struggling program and allocated unusable space. I came to love the place through building my offices to suit my desires, and being able to move walls around at will.  No longer.  My present office has concrete walls and a building manager, and I must be very clever even to be able to drill holes in the wall.

 In 1958 there was no faculty club, so many of the professors would bring their lunches, eat them together, and socialize.  In fact the faculty members of one very academically successful group in my department was famous for playing loud and boisterous games of hearts during the lunch break.  Since there were many fewer Ph.D. students, there was less overhead in the funding and maintaining of laboratories.  Now successful faculty members in the Engineering School often have a much larger number of Ph.D. students, visiting faculty members, fellows, lab space to accommodate them all, perhaps an executive director with industrial experience to keep the whole thing running, several administrative assistants,  etc. etc. etc.  Faculty members are more likely to be entertaining visitors at lunch than playing hearts, and tending their mini empires rather than interacting with each other.

 An even larger change has been in the overall feeling of the place.  The 8000 acres  owned by the University was originally Governor Leland Stanford’s horse farm, and was in fact called the Farm, as it still is by many alumni. The academic center was developed but most of the land was not, and even the academic area was equipped with somewhat wild growth and nicely worn buildings.  Lake Lagunita on campus was generally full during warm weather (no perception of water shortage then), and just before filling, was sometimes used by the students to stage the Lagunita Seca road race, run by vehicles built by the students with no rules and driven by students with no training!  When I was a student there was one policeman on campus.  I don’t know how many we have now. It was possible to park one’s car next to one’s office.  It is a challenge to park on campus at all now, and probably will cost money.  We have tour busses, traffic circles, and stop signs for bicycles, and the construction going on seems to be never ceasing.  The university seems more like an airport every year.

 But as you know, Stanford has become an educational power house.  The university sits high on all ranking lists, attracts an increasing number of outstanding applicants, does research that affects us all, and becomes ever more successful at hiring world famous scholars for the faculty and raising money for everything from funding research and endowing professors to expanding the facilities.   There are certainly more conveniences, money, and prestige attached to being to being part of the university now than there were when I first arrived, and Stanford is even becoming a force in athletics But as one alumnus said on a recent visit.  “What happened to the Farm?  This is a research city—an extension of Silicon Valley”.

 And is the plant going in the same direction as the people?  Stanford is becoming larger than human scale and  a show house of cleanliness and landscaping. But people who work in universities are supposed to be creative.  My background includes a great deal of study of creativity.  Creativity requires room to think and experiment and an environment that is consistent. Faculty members and students in universities often have neither the time nor inclination to follow the dreams of architects and administrators.  Life in the university  consists of overlapping and seldom finished work, which can seldom be tucked away, leaving clean desks and shelves.

Below are two photos taken in the new Engineering Quadrangle at Stanford.  IMG_0683The next three show the  IMG_0677work space of an outstanding professor, an IT expert, and a  program manager.  These are a far cry from the interiors shown in the architecture renderings and blessed by the Trustees.  

IMG_0672 IMG_0686 IMG_0669

IMG_0700The next photo shows the exterior of the Clark center for bio-engineering. It is a striking piece of architecture, with its glass walls opening onto a central atrium.  But if you look closely, most of glass walls have been obscured from inside, because the people working inside neither want to be watched by passers by (oh look honey, there is a professor), nor have the sun shine on their computer screens.  The next photo shows some actual student work space.  Happily, the students have overcome the architecture! IMG_0697

 The final photo shows office space for Ph.D students in yet another building.  But Ph.D. students are not willing to sit in rows with tidy desk tops, no space to store their work, food, and projects, and with people staring at them through glass windows. Therefore, few of them are in these rooms. 

IMG_0690In my opinion, many of our new buildings smack a bit too much of control and fantasies of how professionals should conduct themselves, rather than showing an understanding of the actual lives of students and others employed in the rather messy educational process . Alumni from many years ago speak fondly of the feel of the more poorly maintained, but informal physical campus.  The new buildings are impressive, but where’s the fun?  What’s to love?  Institutions have to learn better to grow and maintain the feeling of informality and smaller size.

 Of course, this progression in size, wealth, and fame is typical of fortunate organizations, and is in a sense a reflection of the American way.  And I am proud to have played a small part in it in the case of Stanford.  But there is much to be said for smaller organizations that can exist with less control, and therefore less overhead and reporting.  I am hoping that Stanford will continue to improve and enjoy the long success of universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, and even Harvard.  But individuals, organizations, and even nations seem to go through a cycle of climbing to “greatness”, and then going through the process of slowly declining and being forced to watch others take over leadership.  I sometimes think it would be nice if so much, including most economic theories, did not depend on growth.  But it seems that most of us are not strong enough to put limits on ourselves in favor of an environment that we can easily control—the human condition.  So I will continue to enjoy the ride.

 

 

 

 

Posted at 08:25 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Education, Human fit, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality | | Comments (0)

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08/10/2015

Good Product: The Portable Pressure Washer

I have had a small portable pressure washer for many years, and finally completely wore it out.  I decided to try living without one, and soon realized it had become part of me. If you do not have one, these machines use a small gasoline engine (or electric if you prefer) and a pressure pump to propel  a relatively small stream of water at very  high speed, as opposed to that available from a garden hose nozzle.  The result is tremendously increased cleaning ability – a stream of water that can quickly cut through not only dirt and dust, but baked mud, flaking paint, hardened grease, and many other stubborn types of filth, using nothing but water (and a bit of detergent in case of stubborn resistance).  And not only that, as a good Californian I appreciate the fact that it does so with less water than I would waste with a hose, scrub brush, etc.

 I probably especially appreciate it because of my hobby of rescuing old machinery, because alternate approaches to cleaning keep me drenched in toxic liquids, depressed from endless scraping, and disappointed with the end result.  The photo below shows my new washer —nothing special— a sale at Lowes. 
  IMG_0620But it is even better than my old one and comes complete with four nozzles ranging from gentle to “don’t get your hand in the stream.  These are tools, not toys, and not to be used for water fights or cleaning the mud off of one’s bare feet.  The next photo shows most of the mechanical portion of my McCormick Daisy reaper restoration project, which I have mentioned in past posts.  IMG_0628Through its stay on a friend’s farm, it became covered with mud, clots of grease, dust, and leaves.  I timed how long it took to clean it until it sparkled again—under a minute— and it required less water than flushing a toilet or the amount of cold water that has to be run before the hot water appears in the upstairs shower of our 110 year old house (being also a Californian, my wife collects it, hauls it down stairs, and puts it on her garden.)

Posted at 11:07 AM in Design, Engineering, Human fit, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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07/20/2015

The Vanishing Machine Aesthetic

I really miss being able to see the details of machines.  Not only are they exciting, but often beautiful.  I am suspect, of course, being an engineer, but so be it.  When I was a kid, I used to love standing too close to steam powered railroad locomotives, not only for the emotional thrill of their size and sounds, but also to try to figure out how they worked (possible for a kid in those days).  I don’t stand too close to modern train locomotives, or in fact, even notice them.

 Something happened many years ago (1920’s and 30’s) to start us hiding the workings of machinery. 
6yr_old_boy_cat_30The photo at the left shows a caterpillar 30, probably built in the 1920’s, with the usual kid playing on it.  The next photo shows a restored caterpillar 10 manufactured a few years later, but with a more “modern” approach to design.  Note that the workings are shrouded in sheet metal.  Cat ten The third photo shows a beat up caterpillar 10 without the sheet metal (I am restoring it and straightening out the sheet metal).  To me, it is more interesting without the sheet metal, but I will put it back on so it doesn’t bother people.

IMG_0527The final tractor photo shows a caterpillar tractor manufactured in 1995.  Certainly looks faster (it is) and more powerful (it is) and more technically sophisticated (it is), but what is inside of its sports-car body panels?  Give or take a bunch of electronics and a steering wheel rather than clutch/brake levers, it is similar.  But I’ll bet the reaction of most people (not farmers) is not to care—they just like the exterior. (I do admit it is a great tractor and I like the exterior also).  But this tractor is perhaps more difficult to understand and to maintain than the Caterpillar 30, as well as not as much fun for kids to play on.

 

ImageA44I think it is worrisome that we are no longer paying as much attention to how things work.  Personal computers are a good example —no clue as to what is in the package.  In fact, most of us are perhaps happier that way.  But the role technology is playing is increasing so that hiding it may delude us, especially if covered with modern marketing. The “Cloud”, being touted by companies with enormous server capability (Google, Apple, IBM, Amazon, etc.) is causing massive ignorance.  Traditional clouds are beautiful, especially close to sunset, the weightlessly drift through the sky, ever changing, and hopefully in California promise eventual much needed rain, and in summer cooler weather.  They are almost magic.

 The “Cloud” being sold by computer companies is another example of intentionally hiding technology that our society should better understand.  It consists of access to the company servers (not all servers), and is an attempt by the company to function as our digital memory and provide our operating systems, applications, and other software (conveniently allowing them to charge us a monthly fee).  This cloud consists of glass fibers and other conductors under ground, on the ocean floor, and occasionally in sewers, feeding massive number of digital devices in anonymous , windowless, extremely hot  buildings that suck  huge amounts of electrical energy not only to accomplish their function, but also to prevent themselves from overheating.  Some time ago I mentioned a book entitled Tubes, by Andrew Blum.  An excellent read if you think the “Cloud” is either beautiful or magic, or if you don't understand the physical components of the internet.

 What’s happened to us?  Many things, but the directions of technology and the strengthening of the design profession have certainly had large inputs.  The realization of the advantages of low-drag aircraft, beginning with the evolution of fighter planes and the design of airplanes such as the DC-3 in 1934 was certainly instrumental.  The photo at the right  Loewy Pencil Sharpener shows a famous pencil sharpener prototype designed by one of the leading designers of the 1930’s, Raymond Loewy in 1933.  It never hit the market.  But granted that it would only sharpen one size of pencil, it does look like it could move through one’s office rapidly, and would have probably sold because of the then love of “streamlining”.  I have opened the hood of a few “luxury” cars only to find that the engine is almost entirely shrouded, although it represents a high level of craftsmanship.  And I can tell long and now amusing stories of putting a new battery into my admittedly sleek Apple iPhone.

 I am for unwrapping and better understanding how things work.  Not only is it interesting, but we can better evaluate what we are doing to ourselves.

 

Posted at 03:22 PM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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06/22/2015

Shadow Work, by Craig Lambert

  This is a short, easy to read, and provocative book by Craig Lambert (more info. at recommended books column at the left), that claims that our leisure time is being eaten up by doing work that used to be done for us.  The reason for this is partly technology (the computer), partly because business has discovered that by off-loading work to customers it can cut its payroll (pumping our own gas), and partly because we honor work in our culture.

 This book got my attention because everyone I know seems to be bemoaning the loss of leisure time, even though supposedly the information revolution is helping us by taking over increasing amounts of work, and because I have just blown away a ridiculous amount of time in first of all, going to an outrageously complex multi level password system needed to use the Stanford server (the university was badly hacked a while ago), and having my computers be encrypted (which of course required "upgrading" the operating systems, which required "upgrading" apps, etc. etc. etc. ) 

 Lambert defines shadow work as work we do without labeling it as work, and for which we are not paid.  One example is the constant mucking around we do with our computer(s), as manufacturers keep “upgrading” them to sell us even more features we don’t want (and remove some we do).  I hate Apple’s new “Photos” program, a supposed improvement over IPhoto.  To me it is a step  backwards enshrouded in meaningless changes and crowned with the loss of useful features.  Even worse, once one allows one’s computer to make the change (mandatory with OS 10-10-3 on), one can’t go back unless one has the latest version of iPhoto on the machine—apparently not known by my favorite IT person who knows everything.  Dumb move by Apple.  And lots of Shadow Work upcoming for me, as I am going to bail out of their photo organization software so I can organize my photos the way I want them, not how Apple thinks I should. In fact, maybe I'll bail out of Apple.

 The book has many examples of this phenomenon.  The replacement of travel agents by web sites, for instance.  Granted one has the ability to compare endless flights, hotels, rental car deals, etc., but the time and effort spent as contrasted with letting a travel agent do this (at one time paid by airlines, hotels, etc) can be huge.  Another is shopping, especially in big box stores, or even large grocery stores, in which it sometimes seems impossible to either find what one wants (especially if everything has re-arranged to be compatible with the now popular marketing technique of forcing the shopper to pass by everything in the store) or find a person to give one a helpful clue.  Another is the time spent figuring out all of the non-standardized kiosks, credit card readers, and other digital “aides”, all slightly different.  I just had a brand new-looking gas pump consistently refuse my credit card, and upon complaining to the one attendant, was told that I had to withdraw the card slowly.  Interesting after years of being told to withdraw it rapidly.

 Lambert also goes into topics such as doing one’s own taxes, legal work, and other activities formerly done by others.  And the time we spend filling out medical forms, and providing information on ourselves to internet vendors so that it can be sold in the Big Data world.  He agrees that many of these activities are cheaper and maybe faster than hiring professionals, and perhaps our time is less valuable than that of the doctor who wants the information, but his main point is that we do an increasing amount of “work” that used to be done for us, without realizing it, and the result is perhaps more frantic lives and less human interaction.  Definitely describes me.

 He also talks about the incredible time and effort spent by parents outside of the home that did not used to occur.  When I went to school in the dark ages of education there were no organized kid athletics, no summer camps, no parents driving  us to school or helping us with our homework (not much homework), no PTA or other volunteer groups, or parents organizing campaigns against teachers and administrators (too much homework—not enough homework).  I look at my children and the time they spend chauffeuring their kids around and attending events, and I think Wow.  I learned to play sports and did well in school without parent involvement, and it worked.  In fact, we would have been uncomfortable if parents were hanging around our ball games and attending out school productions.

 And finally, his argument again reminds the reader of the loss of paying jobs awaiting us in the future.  I went through a divorce many years ago.  It did not include large estates, criminal behavior, or anything that would result in a novel.  In fact it was even called a routine divorce by the judge, who chided the two attorneys for making it into a war and not coming to an agreement.  But they did earn money for a whole year.  An example where computers could have done better, but we do have a lot of attorneys to support.

 I recommend the book.  It is an  easy read and will make you wonder how much “Shadow Work” you are doing.

Posted at 11:27 AM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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05/18/2015

No Wonderful One Hoss Shays

Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote a poem entitled “The wonderful One Hoss Shay”, about a shay (buggy) belonging to a minister, that when it finally failed, completely fell apart — all parts broke at once.  It is here. It was given quite a bit of notice when I was in engineering school, because one goal of designing a good product is to ensure that it does not contain weak components that cause early failures.  The last stanza of the poem is the punch line.

 The challenge to minimize weak components in a product is a worthy one, and my experience is that it is not receiving enough attention these days.  As an example, I have had problems the past few years with actuators (the components that convert electrical signals to mechanical outputs) in my cars.  Due to emphasis on reliability in the 1980’s and 1990’s, manufacturers have done a good job on the drive train (engines, transmissions, etc.) and body.  But cars have acquired more and more remote and automatic features.  The integrated circuits and wiring harnesses are quite reliable (until rats, mice, or squirrels chew on the wiring insulation— a common occurrence).  But many of the features (electrically operated door locks, windows, trunk lids, climate control systems, etc.) must at some point turn the electrical signals into a movement, and here the problem seems to lie. 

 A common way to perform this function is through a solenoid, a device that uses an electro-magnet to do the needed work.  But the last Ford pickup I owned had so many solenoid failures, typically in actuators that were difficult to replace, that I bought a Toyota because I could get one with old fashioned mechanical window cranks, door handles, and other features.  So far, so good, but as I write this I am feeling pressure because the front door lock actuator on my wife’s beloved Acura TSX has failed.  Viewing the internet and talking to a mechanic friend, I find that is not unique. Looking at a photo of one, I am not surprised, because the exterior is a very complex plastic injection molding, and I would bet that inside there is a plastic gear or two that has simply worn out.  But to replace this, I will either have to order a replacement from the internet and spend several hours cursing and dropping fasteners inside the door where they are difficult to retrieve, or take the car to a mechanic and give them several hundred dollars for doing so. 

 I was perhaps overly trained when I worked at JPL, since there are no mechanics in interplanetary space, so failures of components before the mission is complete are very bad news to everyone except the media. So attention is paid to all components to ensure that they will not fail and compromise the mission.

 I know from briefly working in the automobile business that the major components of automobiles are thoroughly life-tested for reliability, and much attention is paid to the design and manufacturing quality of them.  But how about things like door lock actuators?  Or if for some reason (cost or whatever) they are of shorter average life, how about making them easier to replace?  Instructions on how to do almost anything are on the internet, but how about ensuring their quality in the case of diagnosing and replacing components of complicated products that are likely to fail?  And how about having nuts and screw heads visible like in the old days with some attention to allowing the use of traditional tools,  rather than special plastic body panel removers, Torx-head drivers, and custom clips?  Arms with extra joints and tiny hands would help also, if maintenance is not better considered in design. 

Posted at 12:22 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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05/04/2015

Sherry Turkle and Alone Together

Sherry Turkle, an excellent writer, is a clinical psychologist and a professor at M.I.T. and has spent her career examining the effects of technology on society.  She has written three books focusing on computers, the first, The Second Self, written in 1984, was dedicated to the interaction of computers and people.  The second, Life on the Screen, was written ten years later and devoted to the use of the computer to form online identities. Both were quite positive about the potential of the computer to help us develop.  Her last one, Alone Together, subtitled Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. was published in 2011, when her daughter was in college, and shows much more worry about the effects of computers on us, particularly on the young.

 Her research subjects for this book ranged from young children through college students, and being a social scientist, she interviewed and interacted with a large number of them. Her findings and associated information about trends in computer application are covered in the very readable book.  I read it when it was first published, but I just re-read it, and found it even more thought provoking, perhaps because my grandchildren now range from 3 years to 17 in age, and I have been able to compare the effects of computers on them with that of my own children, and on my brother and me — three generations of drastically different usage.

 The first section of Turkle’s book talks of robots – computers and computer controlled devices intended not only to serve us, but to evoke emotions in us.  A sizeable business exists in computer controlled toys for both children and adults that do so, ranging from simple toys such as Tamagotchis, Furbies, My Real Babies, AIBO’s,  and Paro’s through the much more “human” appearing and acting products being experimented with at places such as M.I.T.  Turkle discusses the ethical and practical issues associated with machines designed and built to stimulate love and other emotions in humans through such mechanisms as neediness, communication, and aesthetic appeal.  She delves into such issues as their use in caring for and interacting with the aged in nursing homes and with children.  In the case of providing companionship for lonely elders, she points out the value in providing them with something to love and care for, but also questions as to why real humans are not doing this instead. She also responds to an apparent increase in desire for robotic mates on the part of extreme computer believers, by pointing out that robots themselves have no emotions and even though they may seem to love you, they do not care for you at all.

 The second section is about communication and interaction over the internet, and nicely overlaps the first, since although they do not have three dimensional bodies, there is certainly an essence of robot in the avatars we design for ourselves in many games and in the role that social networking can play in our lives.

 Turkle goes into great detail on the positives and negatives of internet communications, and in her usual style tells many stories, good and bad, as examples of what is happening.  Since I still mix with college students, it has been interesting to me to see the progression from telephoning to e-mail to instant messaging to texting.  What next?  More and more messaging of shorter and shallower character?  She tells stories of students texting each of their “friends” 20 times a day and staying away from telephone conversations for fear that they will let their friends know more about them than they would like;  of  hurt feelings and misinterpretations; of overly controlling parents; of treating people more like things and things more like people;  and finally of the tremendous amount of time and energy devoted to social networking.

 When our children were young, my wife liked  the analogy of tree people and phone people.  When tree people had problems, they would climb a tree and try to figure out what to do to solve them.  When phone people had problems, they would instantly get on a phone and call their friends to discuss them.  Now it seem we have progressed past phone people to tweet/text people, and trying to communicate with more and more people by saying as little as possible. Why do we seem drifting toward huge quantities of shallow statements? Is a sound bite mentality the natural defense to a surplus of information?

 In the March issue of The Atlantic magazine, there was an excellent article by Graeme Wood entitled What ISIS Really wants.  We subscribe to The Atlantic, and I had read the article, which was very thoughtful.  But in the May issue, they printed several reader responses, and then, to my amusement they put in a “Tweet of the Month”, which was “Disagree w.parts, but @gcaw’s new Atlantic essay on ISIS is the rare, genuine must-read. I felt challenged, even provoked, through it all”.   The tweet was from @shadihamid, who is a Brookings Institute Fellow, and undoubtedly an expert in this area.  But was I not a subscriber to The Atlantic, and even if I was and had not read the article, Mr. Hamid’s tweet (if I read it, which would have been unlikely) would probably not have convinced me to.  Granted that he is good at restricting himself to 140 characters, I would bet he deserves a few more, and if he had them could convince more people to read the article.

If  you have not read Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together, I recommend it highly.  It is even more pertinent than it was when she wrote it.  If you did read it when it was published, you might find it interesting to read it again.

 

 

Posted at 12:41 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Symbolism and Cultural Values, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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04/06/2015

Nostalgia

My oldest son has some farm-land in the Sacramento valley in California.  He works at U.C. Davis and is very involved in sustainable agriculture.  He also grows vegetables a well as usual crops such as wheat, tomatoes, etc.  A year or so ago he acquired four work horses (Belgians – about a ton each) and set about integrating them into his farm.  It is close to the farm where I fiddle with old machinery, and yesterday I took a visiting friend up to check out the area.  Bob was spreading manure with his horses (who had produced it) and we stopped by to say hi and maybe give him a hand.  We could not stay long, but it was long enough to help him load a few loads into the manure spreader and ride around with him.

 My grandfather worked 20 acres of oranges with horses in Southern California jointly owned by my parents and grandparent  when I was a little boy,  but  I was so young I don’t really remember much about the horses. But visiting Bob with his horses made me remember much about farming when I was a kid.

 Work horses have some similarity to huge dogs.  They like to be scratched and petted and talked to, eat, and be around people.  But they have differences.  They have been bred to be unflappable, love to pull heavy loads, and are extremely well trained (they have to be, or the owner not only would have trouble doing his/her work, but would probably spend quite a bit of time recovering from bruises, broken bones, and other such inconveniences). 

 Of course the pace of horses is far slower than that of modern tractors. As a result, the pace of farming when I grew up was much slower and simpler than modern farming.  Not only do horses move more slowly, but horse drawn equipment is straight forward to understand and repair should it need it—no panic calls for the repair van.  And riding on the spreader behind the horses on a beautiful day was in many ways the opposite of working inside in a university.  Plenty of time to look at the scenery, think, listen to the birds, soak up the sunshine, and feel like something worthwhile was being accomplished. Although I was too young to become involved with my grandparent’s horses, I did get lots of chances to help spread  sweepings from Santa Anita racetrack stables onto the grove from the bed of the  family Ford Model B 1-1/2 ton truck.  Same thing – no critical deadline, no interruptions from one’s cell phone, no need to be highly visible in the world or have a great deal of money.

IMG_0299I certainly do not want to be a farmer, horses or not.  I fled the bucolic life as soon as I was able.  But I very much like farmland, farmers, and now work horses (although  I have no use at all for riding horses).  And it is interesting to me to recall how two families could at one time live off of 20 acres of citrus (a beautiful, fragrant, easy-to-raise crop that tasted good) when now 1000 acres is considered a small farm.  True, my parents and grandparents had little cash, shared one very used car, and were without such things as TV, computers, micro-wave ovens, air conditioning, and central heating. And since I did not live in town, I was not surrounded by people my age.  And I was definitely expected to do my chores.  But there were advantages to traditional country life, and I am glad my son can experience some of them. And I have to say, horse-drawn equipment was so simple and so well tested, that to me much of it is downright elegant. I finished restoring my McCormick mower (red machine in photo), and it is an example.

 

 

 

Posted at 08:29 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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03/29/2015

The Forklift—A Good Product

 When I began my hobby of restoring old equipment, I realized I needed to lift heavy parts and sub assemblies.  So  40 years ago or so I restored a 1950’s Clark Yardlift 40 forklift, which was free to me, since it belonged to a farmer friend, was not in running condition, and no longer had the performance he wanted.  It is a relatively small machine (capable of lifting a load of 2000 pounds ten feet in the air, tilting its forks over a range of 15 degrees, traveling 9 miles per hour forward or backwards, and weighing about 6000 pounds plus load.  Although it has inflatable tires up front, it is unhappy on rough or soft ground, and the forks have no sideways motion)

 But of course, like most fork lifts, it is extremely maneuverable, and since it is only 42 inches wide and 11 feet long with forks attached, it is consistent with my yard and other spaces where I work. It also has the advantage of being fueled by Propane, so it does not mind being unused for long periods of time.  When I want to use it, it reliably starts and does its thing.

 What do I use it for?  More and more as my wife and I age.  The photograph (taken by a fascinated Photoneighbor) shows my wife at low elevation and I attacking our front hedge.  We hide behind ten foot tall hedges, which are a pain to trim from ladders.  However, with my wife on the pallet, along with a small generator and an electric clipper (in her capable hands), no mere hedge can slow us down.  Similarly I can carry anything weighing up to two tons wherever the forklift can go, and I can’t remember ever being able to lift two tons myself.  In fact, I can probably do more aided by my forklift now than when I could leap tall buildings with a single bound, but was trying to live without a forklift.  And, of course, it has unlimited kid-entertaining potential (see next two photos.

 Unfortunately, forklifts are considered an industrial product and not designed for people DSC_0020messing around in their yard.  And perhaps there are not that many people doing so any more.  But I would think there would be a market for a cheaper, lighter, yard model, at least for those of us who are aging but still like to move heavy loads around, trim smaller trees, and work on second stories of houses.  Of course, there are many boom lifts (cherry pickers etc.) used by painters, tree trimmers, utility people, and other “professionals”.  But they are expensive, limited in load lifting ability, and one can get into trouble lifting large loads too far from the base.  And worse yet, for people like me, it is very difficult to find one that is free because it is broken. (I am under pressure go find one again, since my foot slipped on the clutch in our last hedge trimming session, almost dumping my wife in the hedge – cherry pickers are controlled by the person in the air)

  DSC_0016So I consider my forklift, even thought it is now 60 years old,  an outstanding product, which has become a friend that helps me live the life I choose.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted at 09:44 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Human fit, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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02/02/2015

Horn of Too Much Plenty?

Today I went shopping.  One of my land line phones had had a sick battery for some time and finally gave up, so I decided to go to a large local electronic supply outlet and get one rather than buy one over the web and wait for it to be shipped.   I had gone there often, and was pretty  sure they would stock the battery, and while I was there I realized I could pick up  a couple or USB hubs, since both my wife and I were out of slots, and another external drive.

 BUT, the resulting trip took much, much longer than I had planned , because (1) as many stores tend to do, they had re-arranged their stock, and (2) I was simply overwhelmed by choices, and had the common store experience of not being able to find anyone who knew much, if anything, about the options I had.

 As to batteries, there were yards of them displayed in a section labeled something like “Battery World”, and many, many customers standing in front of it agreeing that there should not be so many of them.  While old-line battery equipment makers seem to do fine with the traditional letter sizes (AAA, D, etc) and numbers (6 volt, 9 volt), makers of digital equipment have gone wild in configurations, sizes, voltages, and connectors.  Standardization time? 

 After looking through the whole mess, and squinting at the fine print, I could not find a match, so I ran down an actual employee, and taking my dead one he disappeared, (telling me the usual “give me a second”).  After 5 minutes he came back with a big smile, and told me that since it was a telephone battery, it was undoubtedly in the telephone section.

 So I set forth for the telephone section, and initially discovered that the batteries were not in the aisle entitled “Batteries”. I found them after looking through the section, but couldn’t find any numbers  that matched the old battery.  The first employee I hunted down could not solve my problem.  The second one did. 

 Then off to find the hubs and the drive.  After I found the locations in the store (they had moved), I encountered an overwhelming number of each, at a variety of prices, each boasting of their superiority on the box.  I once again found the rare employees, and asked them  questions such as “what is the difference between them”?  and “why shouldn’t I just buy the cheapest one"?  Once again, no satisfactory response, and in defense of the employees, probably because there was no way that the relatively few of them could understand the details of the overwhelming number of products in the store.

 Incidentally, on the same trip, I found the same result in the drugstore in which I was looking for more products.  It was a big store, but not a “big box” store.  The staff seemed to consist of a woman at the cash register and a pharmacist in the back, with long lines at each location. I was looking for eye-drops, and the choice was over whelming,  Looking at the ingredients, there seemed to be much more similarity between them than the packages suggested, but once again, no help available. Remember “floor walkers”?  No more.

 I enjoy owning high quality products, and some are better than others, but it is  becoming increasingly difficult to discriminate between products in these days of  overwhelming marketing, packaging that does not let you get your hands on things,  and decreasing numbers of informed store employees and trustable web sites that could help. I sometimes think that many times there is less easily available usable information in the "information age", than there was before.

Posted at 08:54 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Education, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality | | Comments (0)

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01/19/2015

Go Economist

The cover of the Jan 17th-23rd 2015 issue of The Economist magazine blares “Seize the Day: How Falling Oil Prices and New Technology Offer a Chance to Transform Energy Policy”.  The Leader (here) speaks to the energy issue, as do several articles and a Special Report on energy technology.  For a consistently capitalist magazine, their treatment of energy is surprisingly green.  Their suggestions for improvement, of course include more freeing all energy markets and making them internationally seamless  removing all subsidies for producing and consuming fossil fuels world-wide, and ensuring seamless global energy markets}.  But it also backs up such things as carbon taxes and decreasing waste, smarter grids, and research on better storage for solar/electrical energy.

The Special Report points out advances in technology that are making alternate energy sources more economic (as one article points out, fossil fuels have historically gone up and down down in price, but solar keeps getting cheaper).  It also underlines the need for new business models and the need for cutting energy waste. Nothing  radical if  you follow the energy situation, but the Economist may receive more attention from deniers in business and government than pioneers such as the Rocky Mountain Institute.

 The Economist has consistently promoted cleaning up and modernizing energy production and usages, since such activities obviously open up great economic opportunities.  It is a stand that may seem to run counter to the vested interests of traditional energy producers and consumers – big oil, coal, etc.  But it is the future.  After all, our steady state energy source is the sun.  A couple of  billion years ago or so there was a extinction event, sometimes called the Great Oxygenation Event (here). Cyanobacteria, the dominant life form upon this time, began producing oxygen by photosynthesis, and in the process killed themselves off, leaving an atmosphere containing free oxygen.  And here, a long time later, we are.  Are we going to kill ourselves off and yield the scene to life forms that live on carbon dioxide and methane?

 The battle will be long and nasty, and will be fought in time periods consistent with our life spans rather than in billions of  years.   It will be a difficult one since oil, gas, and coal are such efficient sources of energy, so affordable, so integral to our society and so dominant a part of our economies, but we will be forced to clean up our act and our economy and we will adapt.  As a tiny personal example, I used to swear that I would leave the location in which I live (which I love) if burning wood in fireplaces was ever outlawed.  We’re close.  Our area has outlawed the inclusion of wood burning fireplaces in new houses, and we now have “no burn” days so often that my wife and I switched to gas logs a year ago.  We are not leaving.

 The age of fire must assume a much less destructive character.  Late developments (fracking, tar sands), might cause us to think we  have a long supply of fossil fuel (several  generations) which we can simply burn, but producing, refining, and moving it will continue to be more costly, we will continue to fight over it and play economic games with it,  damage to the ecosphere will continue, and we will have to continue to admit that we are dependent on long dead plants and animals.   Being humans, things will probably get worse before they get better.  It will take us some bitter arguments, more costly incidents (BP and OPEC) and require thinking and learning a lot, but we will change.  We will learn to use our fossil fuels more thoughtfully and we will end up with unused fossil fuels in the ground, just as we ended up with unused oil in the whales. 

 Now is a good time to get much more serious on this transition.  The warning signals have been increasing over many years, and we have heeded them to some extent, but  we “developed” countries have been building our dependence on simply burning fossil fuels sharply over the past 150 years, and now we are facing large populations doing the same.  It will take at least that long to become more sophisticated in generating and using energy.  I remember the years it took in denial and then in technical development to cut the emissions from automobiles.  This is a much larger challenge. And we in the U.S. seem to consider ourselves leaders of the world — why aren’t we leading it?

 I admire the role the Economist is playing in the change, especially since they may be losing a bit of support from the petroleum and coal industries,  so-called energy policy experts,  and all those who are dominated by them.  I notice in the letters and internet responses, some Economist readers are accusing them of “liberal” thinking, obviously an obscene activity to said readers.  But hey, by now oil and coal companies should be acting like energy industries, in deed as well as in their advertising.  And if oil prices stay down, we can raise taxes enough to fund our breaking-down infrastructure and accomplish the  technology development necessarily to help them use our fossil fuels in a more intelligent way.  They are too valuable to simply burn, and we need to quit using our fragile ecosphere as a free dump .  We definitely should  seize the day.

Posted at 03:03 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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01/04/2015

The Ecosphere and Products

I am happily reading away at my Christmas books, and two of them are very readable and are concerned with the environment, and the technology and products that harm it. More details are in the recommended books section of this blog.

 One is Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, and focuses on the species extinctions now underway due to human activities.  As you perhaps know, there is presently a movement to declare the end of the Holocene (wholly recent) epoch, which began some 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age, and declare that we are in a new epoch (the leading proposed name seems to be the Anthropocene), due to the fact that we humans are causing changes that will clearly show up in the fossil records of the future. One of most disturbing signs that will be visible is the damage we are causing to other living species.  Five major extinctions of species have occurred in the past due to catastrophic events in the Earth’s environment.  Now we seem to be entering a sixth, but guess what, this one seems to be caused by one of the species — us.  And the extinction not only is decreasing the wonderful variety of life, but is bound to cause us problems, since we have evolved in the context of it.

 The author of the other one, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, is Naomi Klein.  She is a Canadian woman who describes herself as an activist, a socialist, and a feminist.  Her first book, No Logo, was a blast at large, international, companies that acquire such a strong brand through marketing that they can sell people products they don’t really need.  The second, The Shock Doctrine, attacked unregulated capitalism, the Chicago School of Economics, and the tendency of the U.S. to support people attempting to enforce pure capitalism through political power or force (Pinochet).  Her latest argues for fighting climate change as an activity to not only preserve our cultures, but to help us create more humane and supportive societies. 

 Kolbert is a staff writer at New Yorker magazine, and Klein is an award winning journalist, and a syndicated columnist, and I can’t help  but think that such backgrounds are good training for the production of readable prose.  Neither of these books is a shallow rant. Kolbert’s book has over 30 pages of notes at the end, and Klein’s almost 60, (in small print, yet).  I have two more reasons for liking Klein.  The first is that a few years ago she was rated 11th in a major poll run to choose the world’s top 100 intellectuals—and she never finished college.  The second is that her books are a breath of fresh air to me, since I have spent most of my life living in Silicon Valley, and teaching at Stanford —both becoming more and more fond of unbridled capitalism, which certainly has resulted in wealth, but to me a certain loss in the quality of life in the area.

 Kolbert’s book is a story of what is occurring.  Klein’s is a call to arms.  She obviously has little faith in either business or government willingness or ability to do anything about climate change  in the rapidly shrinking time between now and when we fail to meet the present goals  She believes that the force to do something about it must come through active protests of large numbers of people who oppose the lack of action on this issue in order to achieve the widespread awareness of the problems that will be caused by atmospheric change, and to accomplish the radical changes necessary to re-balance our lives with the resources we have.  And I think she makes good arguments for some of the benefits of such changes.

 Climate change can be ameliorated by a life style that minimizes the pollutants that drive it. My worry is that among the many things that we have not evolved to do well, is solving problems with long time scales (hundreds of years) and great complexity.  We have a tendency to ignore slowly developing bad news, especially if the bad effects will occur after our deaths, and to try for simple answers in situations where there are none that will please every one (health care).  So we try to ignore, deny, or side step the problems.  As an example, we now we hear more and more about geo-engineering.  Dumping more pollutants into the atmosphere to decrease solar radiation to the planetary surface?  Give me a break!

 I recommend the books.  They probably won’t change your basic beliefs concerning things such as the amount of effort we should put into trying to minimize climate change, but they are full of interesting information and should cause more thinking on the topic.  And if you think we should focus more clearly on the problem, you will like them a lot.

 

 

 

    

Posted at 07:35 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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12/15/2014

Good Product —Metropolitan Opera Hi-Def Simulcasts.

Marian and I discovered these productions a couple of  years ago, and I, to my amazement, have become a serious opera fan.  I have always liked certain music from operas, but live opera included such things as long drives to San Francisco, difficulty in finding a parking place, expensive tickets, cramped seats, and inability to see very well (the closer seats were more than expensive).  A theater in Palo Alto a few blocks from my house presents the simulcasts, and throws in free parking 100 feet or so from the door, extraordinarily comfortable seats with lots of leg room and usually empty seats on each side of you, $25 tickets, excellent coffee and ice cream as well as popcorn, and a very large screen and outstanding sound.

 And a presentation that puts you in the action both on and off stage.  I am still trying to understand how they do it.  Although the performances are broadcast live, the camera work is of movie quality, and the views of everything from singers to orchestra members, to scenery, to back-stage activities are seamless, shot from all angles and distances, seemingly perfectly integrated, and needless to say, up close.

 Before these simulcasts, I had not appreciated such things  as the acting skills of the performers (relatively cheap seats), or the effort spent to stage an opera.  The last one Marian and I saw was Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, which entranced us for 6 hours (it is not easy to entrance the two of us for that long),  plus two long breaks in which we could watch the 100 person stage crews do such things as erect a full-sized section of old-time Nurnberg and scenery for the final act, which begins as a discussion in the interior of a house and ends with a huge pageant in the town park.  And sandwiched in between were the usual interviews with performers, which shows them to be regular people with excellent senses of  humor.

 One of the all-time great interviews in the Simulcasts we have seen was of a formerly little known tenor named Jay Hunter Morris, who grew up in Paris, Texas, and worked  his way from church choir to back-up roles in less known opera houses.  The performance was Siegfried of Wagner’s Ring cycle,  one of the most difficult roles in the opera.  Siegfried sings almost constantly through the several hour-long opera. Only a few tenors in the world are thought capable of performing this role at the top level, and eight days before the first performance the tenor scheduled for this production realized he could not do the performance.  In came Jay Morris, who not only performed it brilliantly, and loved the part, but when interviewed proved to be a more than lovable small-town boy-makes-good. I shall never forget him lying on a couch trying to recover for the next act, and excitedly saying things such as  “I am so tired, but this is so fun”, and “who’d believe someone from Paris, Texas could wind up singing at the Met?”. He had definitely been discovered.  Needless to say, he is now world famous and the receipient of many honors.

 I am usually a believer that live performances are superior to media ones (obvious exception of movies). But I am well aware that attendees at Stanford’s new football stadium are often watching the big TV screens hanging in the middle of the field rather than the live players, and such heresy even occurs at Giants baseball games.  And I certainly realize that the Met Simulcasts have made me lose my interest in attending the live opera in San Francisco, or in New York for that matter. And I am very happy to see technology remain quietly in the backround, which I think should be the case, and yet deliver a product with the value of these Simulcasts.

Posted at 03:34 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Education, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality | | Comments (0)

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12/08/2014

Flying Leafblowers—The Drone and Life

Leaf blower drone croppedThe media, perhaps looking for a cause, seems to be becoming increasingly interested in drones.  An example is an article entitled Free the Drones (here) and one entitled The Robot Overhead (here) in the December 6fh-12th edition of The Economist..  The gist of the first article is that Congress should loosen the grip of the Federal Aviation Authority on commercial drone flights, since they are so useful to business.  Congress has ordered the FAA to come up with new rules for commercial drone flights by September 30th, but the Economist is clearly worried that the rules will remain overly restrictive.  I certainly hope they aren’t wide open. The second goes into present and potential commercial uses of drones.  But are we setting about to produce the equivalent of automobile traffic in the air?

 The photo reflects one of my fears—noise.  My wife and I hate gas powered leaf blowers, even though she has a large garden.  In our area we can hear one or more of them being used much of the time. The ones powered by two-cycle gas engines are the worst, followed by those powered by four cycle gas engines.  Relative to the gas powered ones, electrical ones are okay, but not as good as rakes. Finally, manufacturers, goaded by local laws, are quieting the things down, but it has been a good while.  How  about drones?  What kind of restrictions will there be on noise.

 I am all in favor of airplanes,  the commercial and military ones of which are tightly regulated during their design and operation .  And as for noise, the military ones are usually based away from population centers, and attention is being paid to commercial engine noise levels (there are, of course, people who buy houses next to airports and developers who build them, so the problem will continue to exist).  Private planes seem to be only marginally muffled. And there are necessary exceptions, such as the helicopter that lives on the top of the Stanford University hospital and flies directly over my house on its errands of mercy—we have not figured out how to build a quiet helicopter yet.  Who is going to control the drone noise?  Hopefully, not the Economist.

 Since we live close to a football stadium, we are in the pattern taken by small planes noisily pulling large advertising banners.  They seem to fly around from tail-gating time until the game begins.  We are capable of reading the banners the first time around, and like many people,  the more times we see an ad the less we like the business sponsoring it.  Marketing seems to be uncontrollable in the U.S. at present.  Are drones going to be enlisted to further bother us with ads?  How about loud speakers?

 There is awareness and resistance to increasing drone traffic.  Despite Congress there will be regulations as to when and where various types can be flown and by who, and controlling such things as reliability  and even noise.  And the second Economist article mentions hunters shooting one down.  In fact I heard of a ballot measure in one state in the U.S. seeking to make it legal to shoot down drones.

I am not against drones in general,  But I see another example of technology coming faster than we can think through the consequences.  In a supplement to the 2013 Worldwide UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) Roundup, published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, there was a list of 57 nations and 270 manufacturers developing and producing some 960 unique type of UAV’s, 144 of them in the U.S.  I am personally glad the FAA is slowing things down.

 

Posted at 11:00 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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11/16/2014

Technology and Dying

I recently read Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health.  Also a terrific writer, who has received widespread recognition for his skill with words.  He is one of my favorite writers, and early in the history of this blog, I wrote very positive posts about three of his early books, Complications, Better, and The Check List Manifesto, which were about quality in medical care and how to achieve it.  I recommend them as well as this one.

 Being Mortal discusses the quandary of dying in developing countries.  Most of us in the U.S. say we would like to die at home, And in fact in the 1940’s, most of us did.  But by the 1980’s over 80 % of us died in hospitals, and the odds are that that is where we will draw our last breath, surrounded by sterility and technology.

 Although we realize that we should spend the end of our lives enjoying our lives as much as possible, and looking back with pleasure at our lifetime experiences, we cling to extending them as much as possible.  Hospitals are full of medical talent focused in exactly that direction—to cure, and extend lives.  So we enter a hospital, subject to our hopes, which coincide with those of our doctors.  The result may be that we die in a way that we would not have chosen —drugged and separated from friends and family.

 Gawande argues for more sensitivity to the quality of our lives at the end, but realizes the possible conflicts between this and modern medical care, furnished by organizations of people trained to extend lives and proud of their skills to do so.  This is being widely recognized these days, an appreciation that I am sure will increase as the Boomers reach the ends of their lives.  This can be seen in the increasing visibility of hospice care, POLST (Physician Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment) forms, and other means of dying without being connected to a host of tubes and wires, or because they have finally been disconnected.

 Medical care is another situation in which technology has reached a sophistication level that may not always be the answer.  Traditional Navajo indian attitudes toward death were interesting.  When a person died, their negative aspects (lack of harmony with the universe) went into a chindi, or ghost, which would hang around the site of their death and burial and infect those who became close to it with sicknesses perhaps leading to death.  As a result, there was an advantage for a person dying outside of their living quarters,  which otherwise would have to be destroyed to protect others from the chindi, but in an uplifting environment.   Interesting that this approach would help slow down the spread of infections, such as the dreaded antibiotic resistant MRSA bacteria that hang around hospitals. Only a limited number of people (4) were involved with preparing the body for burial and disposing of it, and they were careful to purify themselves afterward.  The chindi was to be avoided at all costs.

 The author Tony Hillerman wrote a wonderful series of mysteries taking place on the Navajo reservation, and in them would occasionally have the hero breaking a dying relative or friend out of a hospital so that they could die at home, hopefully out of doors surrounded by beautiful scenery, not only consistent with their lives, but sparing the hogan from destruction.  The hospital typically would furiously resist this action.  I would think that the hospital would be all in favor of this, because it would soon have been populated by large numbers of chindi, to the detriment of all who entered it, sick or healthy.  But medical people are trained to cure, and technology continues to make them more capable of doing so. And they generally do not believe in chindi.

Posted at 08:09 PM in Books, Current Affairs, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, Symbolism and Cultural Values, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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10/27/2014

Different and More are Not Necessarily Better

I have had an excellent and long relationship with Apple’s operating system 10.6.8.  I had vowed to stay with it as long as possible.  But it is difficult to stay with something you like when dealing with the digital world, because digital hardware and software are changeable with little relatively little expense, designers of it are often motivated by the glory of “new” features, businesses like to boast about new products in their marketing, and any fool can add stuff to the internet.  I unfortunately had a camera failure and had to get a new back (the digital information could no longer be read).  My new one is capable of wi-fi, which I thought would be useful, but it didn’t seem to like 10.6.8, so I finally bit the bullet and upgraded all the way to 10.10, which is of course being trumpeted by Apple as the epitome of all operating systems.

 I used to play the piano a lot, and clearly remember the agony of learning to do so.  But one day, after many hours of learning and practice and years of playing, I realized that I could just play it. It would do what I wanted it to do without conscious attention to the mechanics involved.  Driving cars, shooting basketballs, typing, riding bicycles, most human activities requiring some amount of skill follow the same trajectory.  In a minor way, so did operating system 10.6.8 for me.  I could just use my computer!

 Since I was able to delay changing so long, I have a good view of what has happened to Apple’s desktop operating system over time.  The answer is both a great deal, and not very much— new and useful features, but lots of trivial change in fonts and format, features that I do not want that would distract me from my work, inability to deal with several of my old applications (Photoshop), and a propensity to organize data for me in ways that have no meaning for me. I am presently trying to get rid of several of these new “features”. Fortunately I discovered the “notifications” box in system preferences, so I could disable several distracting notices at once.  And I am sure I can figure out how to get iPhoto to open by just showing me my photos and albums rather than classifying them into “events”, that not only have no meaning to me, but are not events at all.  But I will have to go back to a bit of learning to “play the piano again”, and I don’t want to just because someone decided the keys could be better arranged,  And unfortunately, I don’t expect the music to be any better.

 Granted that the digital world is improving over time, but such things as computers and the internet are tools to help people, and tools should honor the learned skills of the users.  The digital world is filled with people who cluster around places such as the offices of Wired Magazine, Singularity University, and computer companies such as Apple and Google, and believe in constant change, constant growth, and the increasing dominance of digital technology.  Technological determinism in its pure form!  Digital technology is marvelous and bringing us valuable capabilities, but it works for us, not the opposite.  I have pushed creativity and innovation for most of my life as a teacher, author, and engineer, am constantly amazed at our capability to do new and wonderful things, am a fan of the results of it, and have been involved in many very rewarding creative and innovative activities.  But guess what —creativity and innovation need to be controlled.  I will talk about that in a future post.

Posted at 07:21 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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10/12/2014

The Oxy-Acetylene Tank Set

Welding with oxygen and acetylene gas (the fuel) has been around for many years—at least since 1903, when two French engineers, Edmond Fouche and Charles Picard, put their name on it. By using pure oxygen rather than air the flame burns at a high temperature (about 3,500 F) and easily melts common metals such as steel and aluminum. Welding is typically done by causing the two pieces of metal to melt and feeding the resulting “puddle” with a “filler rod”. 

 Before oxy-acetylene welding, metal was welded by heating in a forge and then pounding the two pieces together. But oxy-acetylene provided a much more convenient and controllable way to weld metal.  Of course, any temperature hot enough to melt steel can be used to braze and solder, and by increasing the oxygen pressure (it is usually about twice the acetylene pressure) steel can be easily cut.

 I like to weld, and was taught to weld both with oxy-acetylene, and with an arc, or stick welder.  In this form of welding, a consumable electrode of metal is used to strike an arc with the metal to be welded.  The material from the melting electrode combines with the molten area on the material to form the weld.  Stick welding is used in situations where larger amounts of material are to be involved and electricity of the proper voltage is available.

 Now there are more sophisticated approaches to welding.   Tungsten intert gas, or TIG, uses a non-consumable tungsten electrode to draw an arc and melt the metal and a filler rod, and an inert gas atmosphere is used locally to prevent oxidation of the metal.  TIG units have a foot pedal to vary the voltage of the current, making for much closer control.  And there is MIG (metal inert gas) in which the consumable electrode in wire form is automatically fed into the weld at a chosen speed and voltage.  This can be done in an inert gas or with a flux included in the wire.

 And there are many more. I must admit I usually use TIG and MIG equipment rather than oxy-acetlyene, but my trusty oxy-acetylene tank set, consisting of the two tanks of gas with pressure regulators, a double hose to conduct them to the torch, and miscellaneous tips, lighters, goggles, etc. (see photo)  Tank set still gets a great deal of use.  For one thing, I love it, because it is the first kind of welding I ever did, and is extremely flexible.  But also it can be used for endless purposes other than welding, brazing, and soldering— from heating rusty nuts and bolts so that they will unscrew, to re-warming coffee, to removing stubborn paint, to partially burning new wood to make it match older wood, to melting a large number of materials other than metal, to showing off for my grandchildren and repairing things for my wife. 

I also like it because to me, fire is endlessly fascinating.  Why should combining two gases, one of which we need for life (oxygen), and one which comes from dropping calcium oxide into water (acetylene) and lighting the mixture cause such a hot flame? And unlike electric welding (and  heating), such things as extension cords and generators are not required.  It is just you and the fire performing miracles. The oxy-acetyline welding set is an old, but still high quality product.

Posted at 06:34 AM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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09/08/2014

Smart Technology, Social Inertia

The Sept 6th, 2014 Technology Quarterly report in the Sept. 6th-12th issue of The Economist was unusually optimistic.  It spoke of many future accomplishments in a very positive way—the possible successes from the biohackers movement, wondrous devices for improving medicine due to the dropping cost of and access to digital technology, decreasing energy usage by heating individuals, rather than spaces, suspended animation allowing more time for surgical miracles, increasing integration of digital technology into automobiles shortening the time to driverless cars, new air traffic control systems allowing pilots to choose their own direct routes, safer and cheaper methods of demolishing old buildings, improvements in anti-missile systems (and nuclear warheads}, and the rapidly nearing option of genetic improvement of humans. 

 Clever, yes, but are societies smart enough to use these things well?  If we are going to Improve humans, who makes the decisions as to what “improvement” means — The free market system? Government? And who gets it—Wealthy individuals? Everybody?  The race for systems to defend against long range missiles has been going on since Reagan’s ill-fated “star wars” system, (expenses since 2010 are nearing 100 billion dollars) even though there seems to be a consensus that it is easier to build missiles  and decoys than shoot them down. Are we going to forever keep up this arms race, even though it becomes increasingly expensive and creates increasingly unusable products? And when will the makers of these life changing developments  realize that creativity needs to be balanced with control, and innovation with tradition and existing skills and knowledge in the public?.

 One short article in this report is entitled "The Language of the Internet of Things".  It is here. It speaks of a future in which devices increasingly communicate between each other, allowing helpful services like smoke alarms that would notify fire departments of the location and nature of the fire and automatically unlock doors, and appliances that would coordinate the various components of meals and deliver them at a pre- programmed time.

 The article speaks to the necessity of these Things speaking a common language.  Seems obvious.  But unfortunately, history and the present “information revolution” show a long period of competition before this happens.  Even now there are several separate groups of companies seeking to develop this language, but although they is cross talk among them, they are going their own way.  In fact, the final sentence of the article is “Given the huge variety of connected devices, and no doubt the desire of some firms to keep thing proprietary, it is possible that no single standard ever emerges”.

 Earlier in the article, the author speaks of the difficulty of deciding upon this language, partly due to the unknowable nature of future products.  A sentence that caught my attention in this discussion was “People have to get used to smart devices and installing regular software updates even, perhaps, for ovens”.

 It will be a cold day in hell before I install software updates for an oven.  In fact, I am not even sure I want my stove oven communicating with my microwave oven. Brilliant innovators in the digital world should worry a bit about how long the majority of people are going to put up with this continual “upgrading” that often obsoletes perfectly adequate software and hardware, and with the relatively trivial but annoying differences in hardware and software products from different venders that seek advantages in marketing and protection from patent-law suits.  As to yet another sentence in the article, “The real problem may turn out to be not a lack of standards, but too many—and disagreement over which initiative to pursue”. “Too many standards” is a complicated oxymoron and a situation that is presently wasting countless hours of people’s time in now relatively simple cases such as use of the computer.

 Clever individuals are bringing these technological options to us.  Are societies smart enough to demand that they improve the quality of life and free up time, rather than further complicating our existence?  

 

Posted at 09:56 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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09/01/2014

Doing vs. Watching

The Sunday edition of the New York Times usually has rather ho-hum articles on the front page, because they are probably prepared ahead of time so that the staff gets some break in their lives.  Predictably yesterday’s edition had an article about Congress, one about ISIS, one about gambling, and one about medicine.  But the main article definitely got me thinking.  The title was “Virtual Games Draw Real Crowds and Big Money”, by Nick Winfield.  I must admit I was oblivious to this major movement.  Turns out huge crowds are turning out to watch champion gamers compete on big screens—11,000 people filling Seattle’s basketball arena, 40,000 expected at a championship to be held in Korea.  And there is the TV audience—apparently more than 70 million people in the world watch “e-sports”, as gaming competitions are called.  A championship tournament last year attracted 8.5 million simultaneous viewers. As the article pointed out, this was the same number of viewers that watched the deciding game of the Stanley cup finals in hockey.  Prizes are large and celebrity awaits the champions.  Businesses are climbing on these events for advertising and sniffing profits.  If you haven’t been following this development, the article is here.

 I am familiar with the draw of computer games, since I have a step son who has spent years at Electronic Arts and grand kids who indeed love them. But strangely enough, I don’t seem to be attracted to them.  I like reality rather than virtuality.  I guess I am an extreme do-it-yourselfer.  I would rather do things poorly than watch others do them extremely well.  I  liked to play sports, even though I was never that good, more than watching the “pros”. I would rather make and repair things adequately rather than hire people who would do such things more rapidly, and perhaps better. And as a further complication, I prefer the outdoors to the indoors—odd for a professor.

 The N.Y.Times article discusses a champion gamer named Peter Dager and his environment as follows: “When not competing in front of thousands of people, Mr. Drager works from his childhood bedroom in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  At the small desk in the corner sit the tools of his trade, a computer with two displays, a webcam, a keyboard, and a mouse”  That is definitely not me.  My hobby of rescuing unloved heavy machinery requires much of my yard at home, a bit of a friend’s farm (barn and open space), piles of swell tools and materials,  loud cursing, forklifts, and such things as sunburn lotion, mosquito repellant, and occasional bandages.  I am starting to realize that my friends and I who do similar things are perhaps a vanishing species, but I like us. 

 I have always wanted a full life of various experiences, good friends, and accomplishments I could look back on with pride.  Oddly enough, although competitive, I have never wanted to be the best in the world at anything.  I look back happily at the way I have spent my time.  Dilletante?  Perhaps.  But the Times article has a short quote from Mr. Drager on how he reached the pinnacle of gaming: “What most people lack, he said, is a singular focus on games, a willingness to clear away all other distractions”.  Later—“I, and many players like me, sacrificed everything. We gave up on sports and friends and school just so that we can play more”.  Mr. Drager is apparently headed toward an income of $200,000 a year, but like most parents, his father wishes he would finish college.

 But selfishly, I have never wanted to sacrifice everything—especially sports, friends, and school— in order to play games.  And I sometimes worry about we homo sapiens spending more and more of our time “watching” instead of “doing”, I believe that as media becomes more powerful, and people in various parts of the world grow more affluent, there will be more and more powerful opportunities to experience life vicariously—television, travel tours, the internet, following the lives of celebrities. But is this consistent with the way we evolved?  We continue to do damage to ourselves (wars, violence) and nature still speaks out (earthquakes, tornados). Are we going to lose our ability to recover from such things?  Are we going to follow Rome and add lions and tridents to professional football?  If we are going to have gladiators, it is probably better to have them computer generated and presented over big screens.  But are we going to up the ante on  professional performers as a result?

 Enough of this.  The day is dawning and I will get busy on my mundane tasks.  In order to prevent nagging, when my wife wants me to do something, she puts my assignment on a post-it note and sticks it on the mirror I use while shaving.  When I can no longer see my reflection, the rules require I complete the task.  Today they read “put Formica on kitchen shelves over stove, fix fire-escape ladder, paint front and back porches, repair drain pipes in front, find a better home for TV and computer wires, fix screen door so it doesn’t bang, water orchids”  Straight forward common acts, but promising  a feeling of accomplishment when achieved.  Perhaps not as seductive as League of Legends, but the weather is nice, and I am capable of doing a high quality job on such things, and I should shave.  And since my wife is walking around the lake country in England with  a few of her friends, I can sneak away, work on my vintage orchard sprayer restoration, and cover myself with sweat, grease, and perhaps glory in the eyes of some beholders.

 

 

 

Posted at 06:48 AM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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08/24/2014

Bad Guys (?) and Good Guys (?) on the Internet

I have just finished an amusing and to me enlightening book entitled Internet (how crime went online and the cops followed) Police, by Nate Anderson, deputy editor at Ars Technica—see recommended books list on the left.  It is a series of cases of abuse of the internet and the attempt by various people to stop it.  Among other things, it highlights the disagreement between those who think the internet should be free and uncontrolled, and those who think it should at least follow the laws that pertain to written material and intellectual property.  Unfortunately, it is a very different media than paper, and easier to abuse than control, even if you believe it needs more control.  I have no doubt that it will be controlled more tightly as it grows, because that seems to be what happens when populations increase, and when anonymity is easy, money is to be made, and billions of people are involved, many of whom do not particularly revere the internet and view it as a source of quick money rather than something to cherish.

 Since I do not follow this topic in detail I found the cases quite extraordinary.  One of them, for instance, concerns a man named Nikolaenko, a Russian citizen, who quietly over time built a spambot network based on a virus he designed that infected more than 500,000 computers that would send out spam at his command.  It is estimated that at one time his network was producing over 30% of the spam in the world, and Nikolaenko was making millions from his clients.  He was finally identified, and apprehended during a visit to the U.S. (Russia does not punish its own citizens for such antics).  But U.S. courts could not do much with him, because spam, although very annoying, is difficult to prosecute, because those who do it claim freedom of speech, and old laws don’t seem to have much effect. 

 Notice that despite the “no call” attempt on the part of the government, telephone marketing is back in full force and even more annoying because it does not now involve real people.  We are thinking of dropping our land line, but marketing ads are now showing up on cell phones.  The trash quotient for our phone is on a par with the trash quotient in our surface mail (lots).  But the trash quotient in my e-mail is worse, and still growing rapidly.  And to make it even more insulting,  phishers are not even bothering to correct their spelling any more.

 A similar case involved a man named Steven Warshak, who founded a company that eventually was selling thirteen different medicines over the internet that supposedly increased penis size. He too was making millions, although the medicines not only didn’t work, they really didn’t exist.  He too was identified, but also escaped the punishment he would have received for fraud in the days of written documents.

 I knew there were problems in the internet, but not the extent of them, and how difficult it is to prosecute what many of us call “computer crime”, or “internet crime”.

 The book is well written, easy to read, and gives a good picture of the problems people have who are trying to police the internet. You will be biased as to how bad the problem is, but having recently gone through the exercise of sending an invoice overseas for some consulting I did, it seems to me that things are getting worse.  Sniffers love to find the word invoice, especially on overseas messages, because there is usually lots of valuable information on such things.  And I am also enduring Stanford University’s frantic attempts to escape hacking through two layers of passwords, one designed to foil sniffers,and therefore un-memorizable by humans,  and the other a constantly changing set of random numbers (encryption is coming), It seems to me that the usefulness of the internet is radically decreasing as a result of lack of control, and lack of laws that fit the media and its international nature.

Posted at 08:55 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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08/10/2014

Tools That Change Too Fast

A couple of days ago, I spent a couple of hours in the morning helping my wife get her computer to do her bidding, and a couple in the afternoon building a new top for the wooden tank on the antique orchard sprayer I am restoring.  The computer problem was somewhat typical.  In the past, she was able to scan text to her computer from her printer, save it as a word document, and then edit it — the miracle of OCR.  Then the system quit working.  The scanner denied that it was connected to the computer (after insultingly telling us that we should check to make sure the USB connector was plugged in —we know that much—and to load an up-to-date driver for the printer).  But if it was working in the past, why not now?  Obviously  because someone was screwing with the software to “improve” it.  Before I did that, I tried a few other things.  Her system scanned  jpeg documents okay and transferred them to the computer.  Why not text in an editable form?

 I could not make sense out of it, so I downloaded the latest driver for the printer, but that still did not solve the problem.  So I phoned an IT friend, and he couldn’t make sense out of the problem on the phone, so he dropped by for a personal inspection.  After what I considered a number of wizardly moves, he found some code in the machine that allowed my wife to scan the text and transfer it to the computer in the form of rich text, which could then be converted to Word and edited.  Two hours of frustration, and my wife was back where she had been in the past. But that did not include hours of frustration for her before she asked me for help.

New sprayer topSwitch to making a top for my wooden tank.  The photo shows the result.  About the same amount of time was required to build it as I blew away on the computer problem, with pleasure from the process and pride when I was done.  The difference?  I used a table saw, a radial arm saw, and an electric drill to drill holes and sink screws.  My grandfather taught me to use a table saw when I was eight or nine years old, and they have changed little since then.  I encountered my first radial arm saw in a junior high school wood shop course, and had used an electric drill for many years before then.  True, use of electricity to sink screws was rare then, but the principle can be easily extrapolated from using a screwdriver.  My point is, that the tools did not constantly need upgrading.  It was possible to learn to use them, and then set about accomplishing things with them—not spending time becoming comfortable with the latest release.  And certainly not having the tools lose ability they once had.  Such things as computers and printers are tools.

I quit using Firefox a couple of years ago when it seemed that a new version was coming out every couple of weeks.  The Firefox people seem to have calmed down now, so I am back using it because it is a good browser (assuming they quit telling me that cat videos are a new form of communication —not among my friends!).  I am feeling the same about many aspects of computers.  I  have a computer-sophisticated friend who is still using Windows XP.  He knows the system cold, and it does everything he wants it to.  I am still using Apple OSX version 10.6.8  for the same reason, as I am holding onto applications I have used for years, and will until I am forced to move, at which time I will resent the time and effort I will need to acquire equal facility with the new and “improved”.  Tools that do the work should hold still and let us develop and use our expertise with them.  Think of the hammer!

Posted at 07:47 PM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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07/13/2014

Drought, Leaves, Noise, and Energy

In California’s present drought, trees are dropping leaves in record quanities.  We have always hated leaf blowers, because of the noise they make, because trees are supposed to have leaves around them, and because of the fuel they burn to perform work that is kind of fun to do by hand.

I must admit that there are places we care for where the leaf buildup can become not only inconvenient, but an invitation for fire. An example is my escape barn in the Sacramento Valley, which is crammed with machinery and is surrounded by oak trees providing leaves to be blown into the barn in great heaps. In order to clean the leaves out it is necessary to remove all of the contents of the barn, which is a major job.  Another is our driveway and yard walks, which are covered with gravel, and challenge one to rake up the leaves without the gravel accompanying them.  So  we finally invested in a small, hand-held four-cycle blower (quiet) to loosen up the worst and most difficult to reach areas of dead-leaf accumulation.

 But the device turned out to be both tempermental and difficult to maintain.  And even it made too much noise, so I decided to permanently take it up to my barn.  A couple of days ago I decided to take it apart and find out what its troubles were, and found that it was clearly designed to make it so impossible to repair that the owner would buy a new one.  One obvious problem had to do with the pull-rope starting mechanism. To begin with, the first step required removing a large number of Torx screws (fortunately I had the proper tools) and unsnapping a couple of stubborn plastic latches in order to remove a cover which seemed like it was covering the starting mechanism.  Upon doing so I found I still had not reached the starting mechanism (and also that the blower fan was loose, but tightening it was rather easy).  I then set about to remove the next layer, and naturally a different size of Torx wrench was needed.  I then decided to get onto the internet and find a shop manual for the thing, since there must have been an easier way to reach the starting mechanism, but of course I failed.  But while looking through the internet I came across a page advertising a leaf blower I had not heard of. It is here.  

The Ego Leaf Blower! It sounded interesting. It cost quite a bit, but I am a believer that within a couple  of hundred years we will be looking back in disbelief at how dependent on fire we were for energy.  And I think the change will be traumatic for some of us. so we had better be starting now.  Electricity seems to be the best way we  have of distributing energy, so we had better learn how to generate enough of it cleanly and develop the storage necessary to take better advantage of the sun.    And after all, one of my sons who is devoting his life to Tesla Motors and the environment had successfully brain washed me, and here was a blower with a decent sized Lithium ion battery.  It would not make nearly as much noise as a two cycle (or even four cycle) gasoline engine, and it seemed like it would move some serious leaf piles.

 So we went off to Home Depot to look at one, and everything seemed as described on the internet. Unfortunately the store policy prohibited fully charged batteries in the store, so we could not test it. But the  Home Depot folk told me to take it home and try it, and I could bring it back if not satisfied—clearly they were sure I would be.  So I took it home, charged it up, and asked my wife to give it a short late evening trial.  Wow!  There are three speeds, low, high, and more than needed, an easy trigger system, and no on-off switch.  Just pick it up and squeeze the trigger.  And of course no gas and oil to mix and check, no chøke, no warming up, etc.  Allegedly a full charge will last an hour, which is more than we need. And it certainly does blow.  Tomorrow my wife will check it out at greater length.

I very seldom vouch for a product without using it a year or so, but this one just seems to be nicely timed, since most people I know are fed up with the sound of two cycle gas engines, and present battery-operated blowers are fairly weak.  As soon as we use it long enough to discover its shortcomings (there will undoubtedly be some) I will apologize for this post, and give you a more measured impression of the Ego Blower (I do like the name). But I doubt that we will take it back tomorrow.

Posted at 10:30 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality | | Comments (0)

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06/22/2014

Good Products Last—Oldies but Goodies

DSC_0091The  photo at the left shows two tools that not only do their job beautifully, but are inexpensive and have been around as least as long as I can remember.  The red jack on the wheel of the tractor is a Hi-Lift jack.  It has a tested load of 7,000 pounds, and can lift a load to a height of over three feet.  It can also pull and clamp.  It is extremely simple to operate—kick a lever up and it raises the load, kick it down and it allows you to lower it. 

It is sometimes called a farmer’s jack, since it rapidly does its job , absorbs tremendous punishment without breaking, and has enough capacity and stroke to handle most farm jobs.  I am not a farmer, but I use mine constantly to do household maintenance, work on cars, and pursue my old machinery hobby.  Incidentally, these jacks are manufactured by a number of different companies, but I have had the best luck with those made by Hi-Lift, a company that was started in 1905 and seems to be as dependable as its jacks.

 The silver colored object on the ground is a come-along, called by many other names, since it is widely manufactured. It is a compact cable hoist that is capable of exerting large force for its size and weight.  The one shown is rated at 2 tons and inexpensive.  Of course, it would be easy to get one with more capacity (maybe a four ton one would outpull a Hi-Lift), but although I often need to lift heavy weights, I seldom need to pull that hard.  My 2 ton one will pull any vehicle I own and lift any thing I need to.

  DSC_0095But the real miracle can be seen from the more close up shot on the right of the come-along hanging on the Hi-Lift.  No electric wires, batteries, leaking hydraulic fluid, failing seals, or hidden complicated mechanisms.  I love them for that alone.  They are all hanging out there allowing one to see how they work, and fix if they misbehave.  In particular the Hi-Lift seems to be almost fail-proof, and should something break, replacement parts are easy to get and simple to install. And I must admit, I do like kicking a lever better than pushing a button—especially if I am the middle of a frustrating job.

Posted at 08:29 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, Performance, Cost, and Price, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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06/16/2014

Product Quality and Capitalism

 In the New York Times Digest last Monday, there were three articles together on the business page that caught my attention.  The first was entitled "G.M. Disconnect between Managers and Engineering". The original article as it appeared in the newspaper is here.  It is concerned with defects that are detected in products at the engineering level and either do not get to the level of the organization that can solve the problem, or do so and are not dealt with, usually either for reasons of time or money.  This is neither new nor newsworthy, but probably we need to be reminded of it once in a while.  Engineers want products to be as perfect as possible.  At “higher” levels of the organization, schedules and profit loom large.  If people are killed (the ignition switch mess at GM, the Challenger explosion), or if the product is highly visible and potentially dangerous (the Three Mile Island shutdown), the media grabs hold of it and the impact is large.  This is especially true if it is found that management knew of the problem before.  It is not likely that product defects can ever be completely banished.  But managers should perhaps be more aware that eventually,  the cause of such things will be discovered, and the cost to the company will be far larger than if they were solved when discovered.   Unfortunately, the punishments at higher levels often seem to be proportionally less than those at the working level.

 The second article, entitled "Japan Seeks to Squelch its Popular Tiny Cars", available here,  concerns effort in the Japanese government to inhibit the production and ownership of keis, small cars that are particularly appropriate to the crowded road conditions,  high fuel prices, and relatively small trip lengths of Japan.  The government is apparently concerned that these very popular vehicles (40% of new cars sold in Japan last year were keis) are distracting the Japanese automobile industry from  more profitable larger cars.  The Japanese people, who have become used to the convenience and low cost of these small cars are rightfully annoyed.

 The third article is "Music for Nothing, at Least While it Lasts" (here).  It focuses upon the increasing amout of services and entertainment available over the internet and television either free or for very low cost (not counting the monthly payment to internet service and TV providers and the time spent blotting out advertisements and junk).  The concern is that this “boon” will be at the cost of the quality of the material.  It has an interesting and revealing comment from the musician Van Dykes Parks that appeared in The Daily Beast concerning a song he recently wrote with Ringo Starr.  He stated that in the good old days, the song would have provided him “with a house and a pool”, but at current royalty rates he and the former Beatle would make less than $80.  I must admit that I would like to finish a couple of books that I think could make a lot of people think about such things as creativity vs. control, innovation vs. tradition, and quality vs. profit, but probably won’t in the present scene of information overload and the need to market one’s own work.  Writing books is hard work and requires a lot of time.  I am not looking to spend even more time publicizing them through endless hours on the internet and doing book tours, especially since the book-reading population is decreasing.

 These three articles caused me to continue to wonder about the effects of unbridled capitalism on the quality of products.  Obviously high quality products should not injure or kill people.  G.M.’s safety problems are being blamed on its “cost culture”, a corporate attempt to minimize costs and therefore maximize profit and competitiveness—clearly good things in a capitalistic system.  Similarly, high quality products should fill people’s needs.  Perhaps cutting down on small cars in the country might protect export profits by further encouraging work on larger ones, which seems like a good capitalistic thing to do.  But, shouldn’t the Japanese people have the types of cars that fit their culture?  The area in which I live, would certainly benefit from much smaller cars.  It presently contains so many “normal” size cars (often containing one person) that they neither seem to move around so well any more, nor find places to park.

 And if people depend on high quality music, information, and entertainment from the internet, TV, and other media, and the media depend on that to attract us to their advertisements as well as on the money we pay them directly, where does the money come from to allow the people who produce such material to develop? Will the quality hold up?  Where will the future outstanding musicians come from?  Listening to the music floating up from the dormitories below us, drum machines seem to be increasing their presence.  Groups using them are more affordable, because drum machines do not require any practice or particular talent to deliver their rhythms and may be adequate for college dances.  But hopefully they are not a portent of future music, because listening to a simple and unvarying repetitive rhythm too long is a good way to be driven mad.

Posted at 10:17 AM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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06/09/2014

Standardization vs. innovation

In the recent past, I have had a couple more experiences with one downside of innovation—the decrease of standardization among products.  The first was yet another talk that I gave despite failures in my slides, due to first a recalcitrant projector, secondly an uncooperative sound system, and finally, a stuck computer (although I realize this was not due  to lack of standardization).  Both were cured, and I was stimulated to throw in a few words about reliability, predictability, and standardization.  For much of my career, graphics were delivered in talks by means of overhead and Carousel projectors. This equipment was bulky, and also had its own faults (the more mature of you will remember the thrills of a stack of slippery transparencies escaping their bounds, or of slides spewing out of a carousel tray when the retainer ring came loose.)  But such accidents were much rarer than computer—projector screw ups.  Part of the problem is that often one does not bring their own and familiar computer (one does not always want to haul a computer, even a super portable one, on a long and complicated trip in India).  Certainly the hardware and software will improve, but  it will also change, thus preventing the broad knowledge base that accompanied the long use of overhead and Carousel projectors. 

 The second just occurred because we switched our home TV service to Google, which we are able to do because the Stanford Campus has been a beta site, first for Google fiber and now the TV.  We are delighted with the service, both in terms of programming, and the outstanding people that seem to install to it and take care of us.  I was also delighted with the set top boxes, because they offered an HDMI connection, a component TV, connection, a standard and optical audio connection, and a USB connection. 

 My problem, like that of many people, is that although I realize the superiority of HDMI connections, I have a large supply of old, and high quality components that do not have consistent connections.  In fact it seems that  my house, basement, and shop are overflowing with old but operable equipment of mine as well as cast-offs from four kids who have gone on to better (?) things.  I would love to have HDML connections on everything I own, so I could just plug them together, but guess what—the AV in the Adams house is terrific, I am not going  Imagesto replace all of my old equipment, and I don’t want to spend money on a bucket of converters.  So I have just spent more time than I wanted to juggling HDMI, component, optical, composite, and coaxial wires, occasionally realizing I have run a signal through a TV and lost surround sound, etc.  Actually, I don’t completely mind not having everything on HDMI plugs, because if I did, something better would come along, and I would be worse off.

 Of course, if change doesn’t happen, a price is paid.  A good example is the refusal of the U.S. to switch to the metric system.  The only other two countries in the world not on the metric system are Myanmar and Liberia.  The cost to us is huge.  Products built for export must be built to the metric system, and products imported usually are.  Since I work on cars for fun and saving money, I have to have a complete set of metric and U.S. wrenches, drills, taps, and measuring tools and have access to machine tools that can cut the proper threads, etc. And I have to keep two types of fasteners in stock. And, of course, there is the inconvenience of travelling outside the U.S. and having to constantly convert to the metric system. There was a series of books produced by the U.S. Department of Commerce in 1968 based on a large study of the cost of not committing to the metric system entitled A Metric America, Its Time Has Come.  It was compelling reading, and the government tried to get us to do so, but we ignored them.  Actually, the metric system has been increasingly used in the U.S. for many years.  In particular science is base on it.  But despite several attempts, we do not seem to be willing to accept what is now the world standard, and by our actions we end up needing to follow both it and our rather hilarious system, built on things such as the length of some dead European king’s end thumb joint and foot length. And even if we were officially on the metric system, I would be annoyed by the number of different “standardized” types of screws, nuts and bolts  (see Wikipedia).

 But too much change also incurs a price.  Going back to digital slide projectors.  The standard plug to connect to a computer is the VGA plug.  It ia a rather large plug, but easy to use.  But there are no standard plugs on the computer side.  I use Apple products, and they have changed the projector outlet at least three times, going to ever smaller and more difficult to use plugs.  Undoubtedly there will be a continuing flurry of this as digital devices continue to shrink, become wearable, and attempt to retain product individuality.  I notice that occasionally, when I do take it traveling overseas, my portable computer requires an equivalent weight of adapters (to electric outlets as well as projectors), chargers, extension, USB, and Ethernet cords, mice (when I become annoyed at the track pad), and other doo-dads to ensure it will function when and where needed.  I am sure that I would do better if I were more sophisticated with digital hardware and software, but I DON’T WANT TO BECAME MORE SOPHISTICATED!  I am already ahead of the average bear.  How about more standardization, innovators?

 

 

 

 

 

Posted at 08:55 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Education, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality | | Comments (0)

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05/04/2014

Michael Lewis, Flash Boys, Stocks, and Technology

  I am a fan of Michael Lewis books.  They are fun to read, filled with heroes and villains, and even better give insights into what is to me an exotic and foreign land — that of Wall Street and high (matter of perspective) finance.  I have just finished his latest book, Flash Boys (information in recommended reading column on the left of the blog).  As you can see from the internet, it is already highly controversial, but also presently number one on the New York Times non-fiction best sellers list.

  Michael is a very bright and likable person, who has a knack for causing people to tell him things they probably shouldn’t, which is of course a valuable attribute in the vocation he has chosen.  I met him years ago when his wife, Tabitha Soren, came to Stanford as a holder of a  Knight Journalism Fellowship, awarded to outstanding professional journalists.  He was interested in doing a piece on Silicon Valley venture capitalists, we talked a bit, and he asked me to introduce him to some.  Easily done, with the result that an excellent article appeared, describing the Silicon Valley venture capital industry very well, but also outing a bit of dirty linen that several members of the VC community did not want to become public.  I liked the article, but a couple of the people I told him to look up didn’t return my phone calls for a while.

 One thing that impresses me is that he has an incredible knack to convey the nature of the seemingly strange (to me) behavior of people investing large amounts of money in hopes of making huge profits.  Among other things, Flash Boys is about the impact that computers have had and are having on the stock market.  In brief, computers now handle large movements of money rather than people, and the speed at which they can make decisions and the speed at which buy/sell messages move has become a critical factor in trading, resulting in great emphasis on such things as the length of fiber cables and the speed of digital components. Large buys and sells affect the value of stocks.  When stock transactions were completed in seconds, traders were able to follow them.  But now first milliseconds and then microseconds are important for a number of reasons.  As an example, Computers are fast enough to sense a buy or sale well before it is complete, and use this knowledge to profit by such things as transactions through other exchanges.  The age of high frequency trading was  the result of this.

 Flash Boys is an excellent story about the effects of technology on a traditional business and the interaction between computer specialists and traditional traders and managers.  Books like this open my eyes a lot, because my attitude toward money was probably formed by growing up in a small town after the depression.  I tend to relax into thinking that it represents something fixed.  I certainly do not consider myself an investor, but Michael Lewis books do make me think about the trustworthiness of the money on which I depend on as a retired person.  High frequency trading does not affect my meager stock transactions, but it affects the economy, and the economy affects me.

 I recommend the book for a number of reasons, not the least being that it will give you another look at the influence of technology when it strikes a traditional business.  And if you are not on Wall Street working in finance, it will give you some things to think and worry about.

 

Posted at 07:57 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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04/22/2014

Non-Digital Writing Tools

 I have just returned from spending a week at my Sacramento Valley hide-away working on my old machinery, and on a couple of books.  The weather was beautiful (spring time in California), and I am now feeling terrific—partly because I got a lot done, partly because I love to work on old machinery, and partly because I was outside.

  I came to realize some time ago, that screens (as in movie, computer, projection, pad, phone, etc) do not like the outdoors.  The picture is degraded by sunlight and the device forming the picture would rather be dropped onto a carpet rather than onto rocks or into water.   Unfortunately, I like being outdoors, and I do not like trailing long extension cords to power such devices, whether directly or through batteries.  Computers are indoor things, especially if one needs a screen large enough to be able to work on two full-sized pages simultaneously. Therefore I often tend to resort to more vintage equipment, i.e. pencils or pens and paper, because they work very well outside.

 But I use such tools inside as well.  My wife and I have learned to re-cycle our unwanted mail (almost all of it) by keeping  unopened letters in piles in various locations around the house to use for making notes, lists, or whatever. Eventually we re-cycle them like good campus residents. This proves faster and more convenient than constantly trying to remember where our pads or phones are, turning on our lap-tops, or running upstairs to our desk tops.  And pencils and pens are required for certain family traditions.  I lie in bed on Sunday mornings and struggle with the New York Times crossword puzzle.  It is in the rather limp magazine section, the paper is rather slick, and computers are not allowed in the room since due to the time difference, red-hot puzzle people on the east coast have finished the puzzle and put the answer on the web.  Since few people are strong enough not to take advantage of this, computers must be barred.  Due to the nature of the limp magazine and the texture of the paper, high quality pencils are needed, not only to form easily readable words, but because it is often necessary to erase one’s brilliant, but ill fitting entry.

 Unfortunately, it seems as though as we move to computers, the quality of non-digital writing tools is not only not improving, but decreasing.  I have long loved the common wooden pencil with eraser.  But pencil lines seem to be becoming less consistent, and erasers seem to wear out more rapidly and do a poorer job of erasing.  The sample below shows the work of four pencils Pencil specimentsI picked up from a coffee cup on my desk where I store them.  The ends had has five hard swipes  with the eraser of the pencil that made them. They represented four different brands,.  As can be seen, the lines they made were similar, except for the fourth one, which was fainter, and the success of the eraser went from acceptable to awful.  This is the first time I have ever tried to compare pencils.  The first two were old established brands (Dixon and Faber Castell).  The last two I will not mention, because this is not a scientific comparison.

 The message is that it seems that one cannot simply grab a wooden pencil any more and have it perform as expected.  And in fact, the web is reflecting this by producing much information on them.  See the list of pencil-related web sites here, or just put “pencil blogs” into your browser and ignore such things as eyebrow pencils.

 The situation with so-called mechanical pencils is even more complex because of the many approaches they take to hold the lead (which of course contains no lead – it is a mixture of graphite and clay), feed it, keep it from breaking, etc.  And such pencils tend not to include reasonable erasers. Furthermore good ones cost too much if you tend to lose them and loan them to friends (which I do).  And they are less rewarding to chew and to drum on one’s desktop.

 And then there are pens.  Sharpies make great indelible lines on almost anything, until you neglect to put on the cap, in which case they will rapidly die.  Such is true for most “give away” ball point pens, some of which will come with a retractable feature to protect pockets, and some with a fragile plastic cap that soon disappears.  I am having great luck with a pen entitled Uniball Vision Elite, but it is a bit pricey and tends to run out of ink rather rapidly.  And of course none of the lines from such pens can be erased, and therefore are of limited value for amateur cross word puzzle solvers like me.

 Is the quality of  pencils and pens being neglected as we move toward computers? Is it even going down hill?  A worry to us who like to doodle, make sketches, and work on books in the sunshine.   

 

Posted at 01:26 PM in Craftsmanship, Current Affairs, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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04/07/2014

Product quality, ignition switches, and humans.

 I worked a short time for General Motors some 50 years ago, did not love them then, and do not particularly love them now.  But since we are again going through a familiar dance about the evils of General Motors which includes the media, Congress, attorneys, and various people grieving over the loss of loved ones, we should keep a few things in mind.

 Such dances have benefits, because companies do tend to become complacent about various aspects of product quality in the heat of seeking to increase their profits, stay at least even with their competition, and focus on marketing and growth,  Occasionally they do need to be reminded by the press and public anger that they should tighten up their ship.

 But General Motors sells some 2,750,000 automobiles a year, does business in 140 countries, and has a quarter of a million employees. In an activity such as this, many decisions are made, some of which in retrospect seem wrong.  Also, in a sample of 250,000 people, a few may not have safety uppermost in mind.  Humans are human.

 Each year there are approximately 1.3 million automobile related deaths in the world.  This amounts to 3500 per day, or one every six seconds.  In the U.S. the death toll is about 35,000 per year.  I drove through San Francisco yesterday when a long-distance foot race had the city traffic diverted into strange areas and made most drivers very angry. I then then came home down a jammed freeway with various impatient people trying to beat the crowd.  I think it is miraculous that only 35,000 people in the  U.S. are killed in automobile accidents each year. The equipment is pretty good.  The drivers are the problem.

 It is tragic if 13 people have been killed by faulty ignition swtches, and criminal if information that this was likely to happen was knowingly with-held.  But whether we like it or not, approximately 55 million people die in the world each year ( we will all eventually be one of them), and 2.5 million in the U.S., so 13 deaths, although tragic to family and friends, would have gotten only local media attention, had not the faulty ignition switch been discovered.  So maybe there is a bit of jump-on-evil-G.M. going on because it attracts media attention, offers politicians a platform for righteousness,  and gives frustrated people on the internet a chance to vent on big business, Bush, Obama, Democrats, Republicans, terrorists, or whatever.

 But it is important to remember that people screw up (especially in hind sight and if many of them are involved) and things break—always have, always will (especially if complicated).  Yesterday my relatively new HP scanner/Apple computer combination quit scanning.  I checked the connections, the system settings, rebooted everything, still no luck.  After I finish this post I will uninstall the driver and install a new one.  But it may still not work.  It's failure will not kill me, but this is a relatively simple and mass produced digital system.  I often have trouble with my digital electronics.  Still anxious for automatic cars?

 It is always possible to make more reliable products.  But it costs.  As an extreme example, the Mars Curiosity Rover and the spacecraft that landed it successfully in August 2012, were necessarily built to be highly reliable, and JPL had many years of experience in building reliable planetary robotic spacecraft.  And this was a particularly challenging project.  But the cost for the rover and and associated spacecraft was 1.8 billion dollars and over a decade was necessary to design, develop, and adequately test it.  It survived launching, 9 months in space, landing, and is happily doing its mission.  But 1.8 billion dollars would buy 60,000 General Motors cars at $30,000 each. 

 True, the cost would come down somewhat if a large number of Curiosity rovers and associated spacecraft were built, but extraordinary effort in design, manufacturing and testing each one would still be necessary to ensure that nothing would fail.  The space shuttle received such attention, but remember the o-rings?  Tesla automobiles are receiving unusual care, although a couple of battery incidents have received media coverage, but their relative production is low and their prices are high. if their output and prices approach those of Toyota’s, will they be able to avoid occasionally getting into trouble?

Again, things break and users and producers screw up. Trying to prevent this, or at least minimizing its impact, is a difficult part of the challenge in securing high quality products. 

 

Posted at 08:06 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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03/02/2014

Fastenerphobia (Job's disease) and Disapointment with Japan

 My wife Marian drives a 2004 Acura TSX, a sporty little car destined to become a classic.  She takes very good care of it.  But recently, she broke a tail light while backing into a tight spot.  Clearly it needed to be replaced— a small problem, thought I.

 

  DSC_0019Although only a small piece was missing, (see the photo) these days one must buy a “tail light assembly” rather than a lens, but I found one on the internet for “only” eighty dollars (It would have cost twice as much at a dealer) I ordered it, waited two weeks for my notice that it was not in stock, and ordered one from another company, which arrived in a couple of days.

 

 Upon examining the wounded tail light, I found no screw heads that would allow me to simply remove the old one and install the new.  When I opened the trunk, I found a cover behind the tail light, and upon removing it found three nuts.  I removed them, which was not easy because the opening was neither large enough or aligned enough to go straight in with a socket wrench,  the projecting screws required an extra long socket, and of course they had been tightened to heroic car-assembly-plant torque.  But to my surprise, after much tugging and swearing, the assembly would not come loose from the car.

 

 Internet time.  I found a large number of unhappy posts by people that shared my problem, and unbelievably, it was necessary to remove the  back bumper cover, which covers not only the bumper, but a large part of the back of the automobile, and among other things covers two more bolts that needed removing to get the tail light loose. This took  much wallowing in the dirt and number of different tools, but I finally loosened it enough DSC_0018to change the assembly, (see photo here) cut my hand  replacing the bulbs I had removed to get the old assembly free, and put the car back together.  The happy result is at the left.  DSC_0023  But unfortunately, the process of replacing the tail light slightly lowered my very high opinion of Japanese automobiles.  Tail light lenses break.  Why should one have to re-move large body panels to replace them—or even taillight “assemblies”

What has happened to the once happy sport of maintaining an automobile?  I changed this light because I do love to maintain cars, and I don’t want to think of what a dealer would have charged for the part plus shop time at $125 an hour. But  observe the two photos below, one of the tail light from a 1966 Chevrolet pickup, and one of a tail light and a back up light from a 1975 Jaguar XKE (pardon the dirt, they both belong to me and are working classics.)  Note the screws that can be easily removed to replace the lenses (originally available for a few dollars at most).  Isn’t there a certain functional elegance there?  What’s going on? incidentallly, notice that the Jag rear fender does not need a plastic cover over it.

65 chev tail light croppedOne of the many apocryphal stories one hears about Steve Jobs is that he once summarily fired an   Jag tail light employee who showed him a prototype in which a screw was visible.  Apple products such as the  iPhone are clearly designed to be taken apart (at some expense) in an Apple store when, for instance, a new battery is needed.  In fact the internal screws are specially designed so that ordinary screw drivers do not work (a screwdriver that does plus new battery are available on the net, as well as instructions for separating the pieces of the shell.)  Hiding fasteners seems to be part of the new sleek visual look.  I agree it can be beautiful, but the beauty pales if something quits working and one wants to take it apart.

The final photograph shows the back of my old favorite Samsung phone.  A quarter turn of the screw (done with almost Cell phone any thing including a coin), reveals the battery and the SIM card, just lying there waiting to be removed and replaced if desired.  It also doesn’t mind being dropped once in a while and being stuffed into my pocket.

 

 

 

PRODUCTS SHOULD BE DESIGNED TO BE DISASSEMBLED, AS WELL AS ASSEMBLED.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted at 07:34 AM in Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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02/23/2014

Stanford Good Products, Bad Products course, ME314, 2014

Winter quarter is almost done, but it does not seem like winter here in California, because the sun continues to shine, and the farmers (including my older son) continue to become depressed.  Perhaps it will never rain again and we will return to desert, where we began before building our immense snow-dependent water system.

 The course good Products Bad Products is also almost done.  The Course outline for this year is here.  But since I discussed the course in previous posts, I won’t go into detail again. If you go to the Categories section on the left of the blog below the Recommended books section, and click on "ME 314 Stanford course 2013, you will get some of it. But the web-site for the students “choose a good product and a bad one” assignments is no longer accessible from outside Stanford. Ashish Goel, who was one of the highly competent Teaching Assistants last year, and was in charge of all things having to do with the internet, was kind enough to put it back on an publicly accessible web site.  The URL is here. If you would like to look at some of the student choices and short discussions, open the URL and have a good time.  If you click on the title of the entries, photographs will appear as well as the complete short description by the student choosing the the products as an example of good or bad.                                      

 The course ends with amazingly well designed media-rich presentations of good products and bad ones based on each of the chapter areas of my books. Stanford students are good at media, and Dave Beach pushes it in the course, as you can see from the outline.

I wrote the book because the issue of product quality is extremely complex, subject to personal tastes and judgements, and in general difficult to define in a sound byte.  But by spending effort judging products and arguing about them, it is possible to become much more sophisticated when dealing with the topic. Try it.

 

Posted at 08:44 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Books, Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Education, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Global Constraints, Good Products, Bad Products book, Human fit, Internet, Management, ME314 Stanford Course 2014, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Stanford Good Products Bad Products Course, Symbolism and Cultural Values, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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02/16/2014

The Quality of Work, Computers, and the Mystery of Employment

For some time now, we have been hearing about unemployment, outsourcing, computer-based automation, and such things.  I recently read a book entitled The Second Machine Age, — Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.  The Authors are Erik Brynjolfsson, the director of the MIT Center for Computer Business, and Andrew McAfee, a research scientist at the Center. It is listed in the recommended books list on the left.  They also were the coauthors of Race Against the Machine.  Both books have gained considerable notice.

 It is packed with interesting information, but I also found it interesting because it contained several different messages.  The first part of the book consisted of raves for the amazing accomplishments of digitization, and all of the things that computers can now do that only humans used to be able to do.  It admits there will be problems as computers become more and more powerful, but miracles will be accomplished and individuals have no choice in going along with this.  The authors also deny becoming technological determinists (if we can think it up, it will happen). But for a while I thought “oh no, not another born again computer book”.

 But societies have choices—there are such things as, regulations, labor movements, legal challenges, revolutions etc., and they are beginning to happen over issues such as privacy and the quality of life—or in other countries censoring the internet. And we hear of autonomous automobiles, but much attention to the  possibility of autonomous trucks and we would hear from the teamsters union again.

Happily, in the second portion of the book, the authors bring up the downsides of digitization, and one of course, is the effect on work (labor and jobs).  And I think we have only seen the tip of this iceberg.

 Most people in business and economics focus upon jobs as a way to move money around, and believe that as computers take over more and more jobs, others will appear.  But will they?  An article entitled “Closing the Gap”, in the Feb 15-21, 2014 issue of The Economist, suggests that the present decrease of unemployment may be due to the fact that the U.S. labor force is permanently stunted by people leaving it for reasons ranging from early retirement to giving up on finding jobs.  I think there is another reason to worry, and that is the quality of jobs.  People who have worked in a highly skilled job they love, are hardly satisfied with any old job.  I have a highly educated friend who is a farmer.  He requires being out of doors and hates computers—period.  He would be a pretty  unhappy tax accountant (a job, incidentally, which computers are taking over).

 Brynjolfsson and McAfee obviously like to think about difficult problems, read scholarly articles, follow the news in the media, and write books.  I do too, but I too am an academic. I don’t think we are typical. I clearly remember being in high school and none of my friends liked to do such things.  Many of my present smart but non-academic friends do much of such things..  Can it be possible that most people are in that category? Do people like a bit of manual labor to use the hands and muscles that have so carefully evolved over time in some context other than a health club?  I grew up on a farm.  The work was hard and the sun was hot, but at the end of the day one could collapse and see what had been accomplished, My father was smart, found farming highly satisfying, and would not have liked an inside job without heavy lifting.  In fact he once wrote me a letter, and it was the only example of his handwriting I ever saw—and he wrote beautifully.  Later I worked in a large machine shop, and it was more fun than farming, and to me even more satisfying.  The people were bright, amusing, and took rightful pride in what they were accomplishing. They were highly skilled, and not only could they see progress during the day, but the output was not something just anyone could do. And they could compete to see who did better work.

 I also worked on a work-over rig in an oil field for a spell.  The crew was high in spirits (emotional and after work alcoholic), full of jokes and pranks, once again skilled (mistakes could kill people), and at the end of the day could see what they had accomplished.  Even farming gave one pride and a sense of contributing when a bit more mechanized, and like farming, oil field work was outside—an important element to a lot of people.  I don’t know to what extent computers are now ”helping” the crews, but it’s coming.  And it is interesting to consider a classic roughneck working in an office, especially wearing a suit.

 Later still, when I worked at GM and JPL, I also worked closely with even more highly skilled shop people, because I was designing prototypes which needed custom parts made extremely precisely often from exotic materials.  I was by then an engineer, but when agonizing over a difficult problem I would sometimes wish I still worked in the shop, because the feedback was faster and the people seemed happier, healthier, and more entertaining. 

 Such jobs have been disappearing in the U.S..  As an example, computer aided design and manufacturing, coupled with very precise machining centers, do not require high salaries and do a totally predictable job. Do you suppose that people who liked doing that kind of work by hand would be fulfilled sitting and watching a number of such machines doing the work while they were being paid very low wages to be bored?

 So it isn’t just the number of jobs.  It is the fit of the job to the person and the sense of contribution and accomplishment that accompanies it.  One problem is that despite the efforts of many people, males are still with an inheritance of competing, showing off, and talking trash (as are women, but they play different games).  Watching a computer, or even running one, doesn’t do it for many.  I had a lovely phone conversation yesterday with a woman who works for A.T.&T.  My land line phone was doing things that weren’t covered in the web site, so I called the number with my cell, and after waiting several minutes while the phone told me the call would be recorded for quality purposes (do you suppose anyone ever listens to the recordings?), that they were receiving an unexpected number of calls, and that I shouldn’t hang up because they valued my calls, all the time playing me crummy music, an actual nice person came on the line, and solved my problem.  After I told her how wonderful she was compared to a web page, we had a long conversation on A.T.&T’s dime and I forgave them.  Had it not been for the human contact, I would have put another notch on my frustration with the company.  The power of real humans! 

 I’ll bet the elders who told you where to find things at Walmart would like their jobs back, and I wish they could get them, but I am afraid we are in a system too much captivated by cutting expenses and increasing profit.  But the backlash will come. I think I’ll go join a union.  And quit buying things over the internet.  And plant some corn in my back yard.

 But maybe nobody knows what’s going on with employment.  In the February 16, 2004 New York Times there is an article by Fred Andrews entitled “The Case for Swapping Roles with China”.  Steven Roach hass just written a book entitled Unbalanced— The Codependency of America and China. I haven’t read it, but he apparently claims both of us are getting in economic trouble, and the only solution is for us to swap roles.  We should go from consuming to producing, and China should do the opposite.  Maybe I can get a job in a shop, while people in China all go to work buying and selling things over the internet and speculating on investments.

 

Posted at 09:27 PM in Books, Craftsmanship, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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01/19/2014

Concept 2 (all kinds of quality), and the Good Products Bad Products Course

The Good Product Bad Products course continues on its way.  I will continue to report on it.  If you want a preview, if you go to the left sidebar, slide down to “archives” and you will find a series of dates. Click on the word “archives” and you will see more, and if you look at posts I wrote during Stanford’s winter quarter (early January to March) for the years 2012 and 2013, you will find information on the course for those years.  This year will be similar. In fact, if you are new to this blog, and have not looked through the archive, you might enjoy some of the other posts that are there.

 The first lecture last week was devoted to the process of doing field research by use of video and the case of a very successful company,.  One guest speaker was Scott Doorley,  who has a large amount of media experience, showed examples, and talked about story telling and use of video.  The second speaker, Peter Dreissigacker, was a student during my early days on the Stanford faculty, and received a master’s degree in the Product Design program , which was at the time my academic home at Stanford.  I remember him well, as a large, happy, talented,  idealistic person, an Olympic class rower, and an obsessive drawer of nice pictures.  Upon graduation Peter, his wife-to-be Bari, and his brother Dick (also  Olympic rower) went to Vermont, and bought an old run-down farm.  These were the hippie days, and moving to Vermont not only placed one in beautiful and not overly-populated country, it was considered a cool thing to do.

 Their dream of working a couple of days a week as bartenders or in equivalent jobs, upgrading the farm, skiing and rowing, was interrupted by the need to make money.  They decided to make oars and sell them.  For  various reasons, they decided to experiment with fiberglass, and after the usual experimentation and contemplation, worked their way up to oars reinforced with carbon filaments, at the time new on the market, but seemingly made to order for strengthening oars.  Their present oars are far beyond wood.

 The result was not only a very successful company, but one that receives an outstanding grade as to be a place to work—as Peter said, if you want to live in a small town and if you like rowing.  Their web page is here.

 The company began as a family company, and still is, although it has 60 employees (a large family).  It provides oars to a very large fraction of the teams competing at international competitions and to top school rowing teams, It also makes perhaps the world’s highest quality ergonometer for rowers and others looking for exercise devices.  The ergonometer has become a feature of well equipped gymnasiums,  It not only provides excellent exercise, but it has spawned a large following who compete remotely and in winter gatherings in areas where it is not much fun to row on top of the ice, using their scores on the sophisticated electronics in the machine.  Finally, they produce exercise machines for competitive skiers, or if you are a skier, for the gym or home.

 Why are they so wonderful?  It is a company built on life-style, not profit or growth.  It is after perfection in its products.  It has kept a focus on its markets and listens closely to its customers.  It benefits from extremely long employment and devoted employees, and Peter and Dick and Bari are wonderful people and take very good care of them.  It is also very proud that although it has only 60 employees (a size where it is possible to operate informally and in which everyone knows everyone else), it provides two or three hundred other jobs in the area by outsourcing to individuals and small companies to produce components for its product.  No China—just Vermont.

  It is always a real upper to me to visit the company, or to have the pleasure of Peter and Bari’s company.  Happily we will get to see more of them, since one of their daughters, Marlo Kohn, runs a lab for “makers” (open to any student and providing tools ranging from 3d printers to sewing machines) at Stanford,  and she is on the verge of  having a grandchild for Peter and Bari.  In the midst of the Silicon Valley with its manic desire for growth and money, Concept 2 looks like a very good business model indeed.  If you are ever in their area in Vermont visit them, especially if you are interested in starting a company.  You might consider basing it on what you love, being patient in becoming wealthy, staying away from venture capitalists, and hiring people who love what you do.

  Peter Dreissigacker is still a large, happy, talented, idealistic person who rows disturbingly well for someone his age, and not only still draws nice pictures, but includes his sketches in his PowerPoint presentations along with text and photographs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted at 09:40 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Management, ME314 Stanford Course 2014, People, Product Quality, Stanford Good Products Bad Products Course, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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01/12/2014

Marketing, Design, and Product Quality

 The Stanford Good Products Bad Products course is now underway, and the first session was spent with Dave Beach getting the course organized, me talking about my Good Products Bad Products book (the text), and then Dave doing an exercise comparing a common $20.00 orange juice maker with the Juicy Salif juicer designed by Phllipe Starck and selling for more like Juicer1$100.00 (shown in the photograph). He began by holding up a Juicy Salif and asking the class what it was, (few people knew) and then put it on the table with the disassembled conventional oneand had a student volunteer use each juicer and comment while another made a video of them.  He then let the exercise develop into a guided class discussion of the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two as far as overall quality was concerned, and the power of video as a basis for product analysis.

 The second session featured Pam Scott, whose field is qualitative marketing.  She began in design, but has had a very successful career with several large companies in marketing and has now started her own entitled The Curious Company.  She was accompanied by two members of IDEO.org, a non-profit design and innovation company whose mission is to help the poor through “human-centered” design.

 The goal of qualitative marketing is to develop as much empathy with potential customers as is feasible, by not only interviewing them and watching them, but sharing their lives to the point where one can develop unique insights into their needs and goals. The three speakers obviously love this work, and used cases to illustrate how the method works. 

  Pam used a case of helping a cosmetics company re-design their shower products for women by finding through long conversations and interviews that women take three types of showers—a wake-up-get-it-together and-get-going one (morning?), a feel-good, feminine, and irresistible one  (when they need it), and a wash-away-the-day’s-cares one (perhaps in the evening). The company had been assuming that women would use the same products for all showers. She proved they would be far more successful by diversifying them, in particular aiming toward these three types.  It worked.

  The two IDEO people also gave examples of their work, one relating how he came to understand indian small-plot farmers without speaking a common language by simply spending time helping them in their work and participating in their yoga exercises. The other talked about defining products for very young, and perhaps single, village mothers, by essentially helping them and becoming their buddy. 

 Over my lifetime, marketing has become much more sophisticated, wide-spread, and considered an input to design. As you know, there are powerful quantitative approaches to marketing research as well as qualitative ones.  The jargon “human-centered design” implies that the designer can obtain insight into the “human”, and therefore can deliver the customer more exactly what they need/want.  Qualitative marketing people and designers both seek this insight.

 But how well do people know what they need/want?  I first became interested in design by meeting Henry Dreyfuss while I was in college.  He was one of the big three industrial designers in U.S. (the others were Raymond Loewy and Walter Teague) and I met him because I was dating his daughter. His office specialized in the physical and sensory fit between user and product, and sought for “classic” designs, that would serve the customer over many years.  He succeeded on both of these aims (see Wikipedia article here), and in fact a telephone he designed for Western Electric dominated the U.S. from 1937 until 1950.  In these days of constant turnover, can you imagine essentially everyone in the country having the same, simple, black telephone for 13 years?  No internet access, but certainly an easy way to talk to people.

  His designs were not gaudy nor did they follow fashion and fads.  John DeereThe photograph at the right shows a late 1930’s tractor that I own that Dreyfuss designed for John Deere.  It is their model A, and the first “styled” one, although it is not styled that much.    It is extremely functional – easy to take apart and put back together and all parts are very accessible.  But it is less likely to attract broken branches, mud, and clots of grease than its predecessor, and has a comfortable seat and great vision.  This was not to say he was completely driven by function.  He found at one point that farmers, who then maintained their own tractors, liked large nuts and bolts, so he convinced the company to increase the size of the fasteners in the face of major complaining from the engineers, who had worked hard to choose them by the load they would carry. 

 Dreyfuss certainly believed in involving  himself and his designers in the use of products.  When I first met him, I noticed he was wearing a hearing aid, and spoke more loudly to him, as I tend to do in such cases. But at one point he gently told me that I did not need to speak so loud because he could hear fine, but was developing the hearing aid for one of his clients, and wearing it long periods of time to see if it hurt his ears.  He also had a great deal of influence in the UCLA Departments of Human Engineering and Art (which is maybe why the art department admitted me without a portfolio), and attracted a large amount of attention by driving a John Deere road grader from his office in Pasadena to the UCLA campus (probably 20 miles through the center of Los Angeles) wearing his trade-mark brown suit.

  But he believed that after thoroughly understanding the problem and the prospective customers,  the designer, being an experienced professional, should extrapolate the customer’s needs and wants  at the time into the future.  He believed that if a product were to be used over a long period of time, it should be designed so that the customer would grow to value it more and more, even if it was not appreciated as much when acquired.  In other words, he believed that good designers should go beyond what the customer had experienced and could imagine— in other words help the customer grow.  This would require designers and qualitative marketing people to help the customer see a bit into the future.  

 

Posted at 09:30 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Good Products, Bad Products book, Human fit, Management, ME314 Stanford Course 2014, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Stanford Good Products Bad Products Course | | Comments (0)

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12/30/2013

Big System Failures

I was writing a post yesterday about effects of the internet on Christmas, when the electrical power went off in my home. It came back in a couple of hours, which is better than usual. But my portable was uncharged, and I couldn’t get back to my post until today.  Our electrical service seems to drop out several times in a year, usually in the rainy season (tree limbs fall on the wires, equipment that doesn’t like water gets wet, construction in area, etc.).  But we are going through a long dry spell, and have not had rain or strong winds in weeks—business as usual.

 I have now rebooted computers, changed all (most) of our clocks, charged batteries and am back in business.  But I spent yesterday with an old friend who is a user of large computer systems, and we got into a discussion of system reliability, so lets think about that, rather than the internet and Christmas, since you all have just experienced that interaction.

 Things tend to fail when unprecedented and complicated, just after being manufactured (sometimes called “infant mortality”), and after long usage (sometimes called “wearing out”,)  The system supplying our house with electricity is certainly complicated.  But I would not call its components unprecedented or even that exotic, and I trust that they are manufactured with care, and perhaps if highly critical even “run in” a bit before installation, because repairing failures results in real costs to the utility and annoys its customers.  But yet it fails.

 Big systems have failures. There are many reasons for this, not all predictable. There are seeming exceptions to this, such as the two Voyager Spacecraft launched in the 1970’s and still operating now over 15 billion kilometers from the sun. But the amount of care in design, manufacturing, and repetitive testing involved in the Voyager project, combined with a design that focused on simplicity and ruggedness, plus the predictability and benign nature of space (once you get past earth orbit) are not typical in the production of terrestrial devices or the environment in which they operate. And the voyagers too will eventually fail.

 Computers fail. Yours probably have. The internet is full of stories of large and costly failures.  Put “Large Computer Failures” into your browser, and you will get a large number of examples.  Approximately a month ago, the Bay Area Rapid Transit sytem (BART) suffered a major problem with its computer system (here) which caused a large number of people to miss appointments, work schedules, and so on.

 Why is it that visionary individuals and companies never seem to consider system failures in their ambitious plans.  I cannot help but wonder how much thought about system reliability is going into planning such complex systems as highways containing computer controlled automobiles, a sky full of UMV’s (drones), and an ever increasing number of robotic machines in our lives.  The government is not likely to release the reliability statistics of military drones.  I have not heard statistics on the reliability of industrial robots, or the few exquisitely cared-for automatic automobiles running around at present.  But I am happy to see that concern about such things is increasing and think there should be more.

 When our power goes off, we suffer some annoyance, and some worry about such things as long outages which can cause inconveniences such as thawing food, non-working cordless phones,computers, TV’s, etc. But failures in complex automatic control systems can cause deaths. Consider automobiles.

 Automobiles are typically driven by someone until failures become annoyingly frequent before they are scrapped.  What does that say about Highway 5 or Los Angeles being full of computer driven cars?  We hear of airplane accidents due to pilot error when taking over when the autopilot fails.  A common explanation is that pilots  spend so much time manually controlling the plane that they lose their instincts on what to do in an emergency.  Shouldn’t we worry more about computer driven airplanes with out-of-practice “standby” human pilots —or no pilots at all?.  Many leaders of the digital world believe that computers are more reliable at controlling complex equipment in a complicated environment than humans.  I have  not seen any data that convinces me that this is true over the total lifetime of such equipment.

  I have a reputation as a booster of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and in fact I am a believer.  But just because something is technically feasible on a small scale does not mean that it should too rapidly be introduced on a large one with attendant social complexity.  If your computer driven car hits another computer driven car, who is liable for the damages?  The car manufacturer?  The digital equipment manufacturer?  Are cars insured rather than drivers?  Are periodic maintenance checks mandatory?  How often does your car operating system require updating?  There are many factors involved other than the capability of hardware and software.

 

Posted at 11:38 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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12/15/2013

Two Views of the Internet

 As I told you in my post of November 3rd, I was planning to order a number of the books reviewed that day in the New York Times that were concerned with the internet.  I have been reading through them, and the first two (listed under recommended books) held remarkably different views.  The first, Smarter Than You Think, was by Clive Thompson, a writer who has appeared in such publications as the New York Times, Wired, Fast Company, and Mother Jones.  He is a proponent of the internet, and I share many of his views.  As I have said before, I consider the internet a work in progress, with already great value, but great potential to improve —for instance in quality control (bad words for many internet folk) and increasingly smart, and perhaps specialized search engines. In particular, social networking, I believe, is in its infancy and it is difficult to guess what directions it will ultimately take.  I worry most about the effect of continually monetizing the internet.  I can’t help but think of the direction television, in particularly network television, has taken in order to squeeze more money from advertising.

 The New York Times Review of Thompson’s book is here, and portrays it well.   It is an honest report on the web and its potential starting with its service as improved memory for the individual, and ending with its function in connecting society.  It was easy to read and left me feeling good about the internet and the future. 

 The second book, Entitled Status Update – Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age, is by Alice Marwick, who after a research job at Microsoft, joined Fordham University as an assistant professor in communication and media studies.  The book reflects her experience working in and her research on the San Francisco computer scene during the post-bubble times of Web 2.0.  I loved the book for many reasons, even though as the review (here) said, she definitely verges into social-science-speak from time to time.  But as a professor, I have learned to enjoy academic dialects.  In particular the author loves to use the term neoliberal to describe the young entrepreneurs in her book, which she describes as “persons having a philosophy advocating deregulated free-market economic policies as a means to freedom and prosperity”.  I won’t quibble, except many of the people she interviewed seemed totally self-centered, which I didn’t think liberals were supposed to be.  And neo-cons believe in the free market. But not as much, I guess, in free expression, and more in spending time and effort converting others to their beliefs.

 I loved the book because I am a technical person living in Silicon Valley, working in a University whose new buildings seem to be named for entrepreneurs who have made a pile of money (Hewlett, Packard, Gates, Allen, Yang, etc.} and are filled with eager potential entrepreneurs.  I have a 50 yard line seat to watch the unfolding of the digital world.  Also because I have long been fascinated by social movements in San Francisco that promise a new, revolutionary, and more enlightened life (beatnik, hippie, now this).  Even though they do not result in radical change in everyone’s life style, they provoke thought and action, and always result in beneficial changes in viewpoint.

 In my view,  many of the younger digital advocates described by Ms. Marwick are a bit too much in their pursuit of becoming a brand and changing the world, especially those who she calls micro-celebrities. But they will help move our increasingly huge population to better itself whether they succeed or not, and the more of that we have, the better.

  Finally I enjoyed Ms. Marwick’s heroic effort to separate her scholarship from her personal feelings.  To the extent she failed, the book became more fun to read. I think I will send her a fan e-mail.

 

Posted at 07:32 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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11/24/2013

Mechanical Failure of Electrical Things

 When working in aerospace, I at one time was the supervisor of an electronics packaging group.  Packaging in this case meant the mechanical design of electronic equipment —structurally, thermally, chemically, whatever— and the group was tasked with figuring out how to cut the weight from electronics subsystems and improve integration of the system.   When first asked to do this, I was reluctant, because electronics never were my main love.  But what I realized more and more clearly as I worked on the job, is that although solid state electronics components themselves are surprisingly reliable, (once they have gone through a bit of usage) in use they fail mechanically, often because of mechanical inputs, either from the environment or from people assembling, testing, and maintaining them.  Even if this is not the case, if electronic devices are expected to do physical work, they need not only an input (which can be from an electrical device), but an actuator which allows them to effect the physical world.  Such actuators are often a combination of electrical and mechanical (solenoids, electric motors, etc.) and exhibit traditional wear and anger at contaminating particles, and require such things as lubrication and controlled loads and temperatures. So it was an excellent assignment, because we could work on challenging mechanical problems that neither the electronic nor the traditional mechanical engineers were spending much time on.

 I also became much more aware of the fact that given enough complexity and usage, electro-mechanical systems will fail.  And there is a good possibility that they will fail at some point if they are not designed with the humans who produce and use them in mind, because not only do things break, but people (and even robots) screw up. I have many memories of examples of this—a flight spacecraft, built and assembled in clean rooms, showing clear signs of one of the technicians having eaten a sandwich containing tomatoes over one of the electronic packages—a contract technician at the Cape actually putting two male connectors together enough to blow up a science instrument on another flight vehicle (thought to be an impossibility).

 I mention this, because I suspect that the seemingly miraculous success of digital devices, both in performance and profit, has caused us to give less attention to this.  Perhaps it is not only because electrical engineers would just as soon not work on mechanical problems and vice versa, but also because technology has been changing so fast that many devices are essentially thrown away in a relatively short time (Apple hopes it is a year).

  We hear more and more about autonomous cars.  But they certainly have not been in use long enough to have good data on their behavior when operated and maintained over long period of time by typical people. I tend to keep my automobiles for 10 to 15 years and 150,000 to 200,000 miles.  I expect to have minor problems with them in that time period and buy them replacement parts, but not to have a failure capable of killing me. And so far they have done that, partially due to the many years of experience and testing we have invested in them.

 How many autonomous cars have been run in traffic for even 200,000 miles?  One of the last two “incidences” my wife and I have had with cars was due to a neighbor backing rapidly out of a tree-and-fence lined driveway into my innocent wife, who was driving down the adjoining street. If the cars were autonomous, would its sensors have been able to detect the other car? Which one would have stopped?  Both of them?   The other was due to an almost new front tire delaminating while in heavy traffic moving rapidly on a very high bridge.  This required a bit of quick decision making with little data.  Neither of us had experienced such a thing.  We had to decide when and where to get off the road, which was difficult because there was no turn off lane, and neither of us was sure what was happening to the car and whether it would continue in its present bumpy and veering mode, or go into a more catastrophic one.  I am told that autonomous cars will be better than we are, but would they know what to do in uncommon failure modes such as this?

 As another example of electrical failure over time, my previous pick-up was mechanically both reliable and fairly rugged, but as it acquired miles, it began to have failures in electrical components such as coil packs and solenoids.  By the time I gave it to my brother’s farm after 125,000 miles, I had given up on many of its push-button operated features.  The buttons would push, but the features wouldn’t operate.  To make matters worse, accessing the faulty actuators was sometimes a nightmare (the rear-most coil pack and spark plug, the window and door-lock actuators), with the result that I looked hard to find a replacement vehicle with a minimum of such things.  I succeeded and love my new one (even though it is too big) because it has very clever long-used devices such as cranks on the windows and keys to lock and unlock doors.

 And then, of course, there are the interactions with electrical systems that grossly overestimate the capability of humans.  An example was the almost catastrophic Three Mile Island nuclear plant shut-down many years ago—the report of the study committee (the Kemeney Report) portrays a very believable situation in which operators trained only in normal conditions (the way we learn to drive) made all the wrong responses when behavior became abnormal.  Would computers have done better?  Only if all failure modes could have been quantified and predicted.

 Such mechanical weaknesses in electrical systems can be found at all levels.  Stanford University has many buildings and large conference and class rooms, in which people who not only work at Stanford, but come from all over the world, give talks.  I am one of them, and the room scheduling is done by a combination of a large computer and people who represent individual fiefdoms (and no, they do not always coordinate or agree), so I am often finding myself in rooms I am not familiar with.  These days, of course, people tend to use large numbers (often too many) graphic images, usually in some format such as Power Point, and usually stored in their powerful portable computer, because these rooms tend to be equipped with built-in projectors, but not computers.  The rooms do tend to be equipped with what are called smart panels, which typically contain  the necessary electronics, buttons, switches, and lights to integrate one’s portable computer, microphones, lights,or whatever with the room. they are certainly simple compared to one's computer and the equipment in the room.

 But my impression from using them, is that these panels are all different, usually without good instructions on how to use them (instructions are usually written by IT people who assume they shouldn’t be necessary and the rooms do not come equipped with these IT people) and unlabeled wires, (often coming from under the rug or other mysterious sources). Some screens are controlled by a switch, and others automatically when the projector is switched on, window covers may or may not be synchronized with the projector, and if one’s computer is on the odium, it often blocks the buttons, switches, and lights.

  If I have never used it, I routinely visit the room I will use the day before my talk, and typically spend 15 minutes to a half hour figuring it out, sometimes failing and looking for someone who uses it often.  Even if I have used it, I arrive at my talk ridiculously early because undoubtedly some one else will have used the room and left it in a different state than it was in the day before, especially if they have been able to physically access the projector.  People still don’t seem to realize how the computer and the projector interact, so they fiddle with the manual projector controls, which of course are also not standardized.  I often end up with several VIP types trying to help me figure out the AV system (often to their consternation with little success), but I guess it introduces an interactive and informal atmosphere to the session.

 I used to complain mightily when the standard slide projector (the Kodak Carousel) was almost universal.  The remote was often missing, slides could drop out if the retaining ring was not securely fastened to the drum, etc. etc. etc.  But at least the projectors varied little from year to year and did not attempt to interact with all other equipment in the room, and after one learned their foibles, one could show slides almost anywhere. I almost want them back, because I have a sneaky feeling that such things as “smart panels” will not be standardized in my lifetime, and of course, they are not smart at all.

 

 

 

  

 

Posted at 07:27 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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11/17/2013

The internet, Distraction, Addiction, and Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

 As I mentioned in a couple of my previous posts, there appears to be a tsunami of books critical of the internet under way.  I am setting about reading some of them, since being at Stanford and in Silicon Valley, I live among the priests and generally hear only praise for it and its potential.  To suggest that the internet is becoming less useful because of the overwhelming and often low quality if not useless) information it contains is somewhat like wandering through the Vatican wearing a sign proclaiming that there is no God.  But I am not an internet atheist.  In fact I use it a lot for reasons ranging from doing research for writing (even though everyone is aware that using URL’s as a source is rather ridiculous, because the content in them changes and they go away), through watching videos my friends tell me to watch on YouTube (and I do), to finding tomorrow’s weather prediction,   And oh yes, I have this blog , and am on Twitter, Facebook, and Linked in, although I at this point I am not exactly sure why—so maybe I am an agnostic.  More about that in a later post.

  I recently finished The Distraction Addiction, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.  More details can be found under recommended books at the left side of this blog.  The author is a scholar-writer-researcher-futurist, who as the title of the book indicates, is extremely interested in the importance of attention and the cost of distraction on getting things done and enjoying life.  He draws from sources ranging from cognitive psychology to Buddhism.  I very much enjoyed the breadth of the book, which can be inferred from the subtitle “Getting the Information You Need and Want Without  Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Losing your Soul”.

 The author has a good sense of humor and a good writing style, but this is not a comic book.  And it is far from an anti-internet rant. The author and his family are obviously eager and informed users, even bonding by playing computer games together after dinner.  But instead it is a book of reasons why it is necessary to consciously control ones attention and limit distraction in this day of ever increasing opportunities to escape into endless communication, videos, surfing, and other such activities.  The book is both fun to read and thought provoking.  It reminds us that there are tremendous resources and very bright people tempting us toward seemingly being busily, if not frantically,  involved with each other and the world, but maybe neither accomplishing as much as we might that will affect ourselves or others in the longer term, nor taking proper advantages of other ways to enjoy life   The author calls his approach contemplative computing.  He not only reminds us of the traps of existing with the internet, but suggests ways to better avoid them, including such things as digital sabbaticals and taking advantage of software such as Freedom,  He clearly feels that we should be more mindful of the mind, as do I.  The internet is a formidable attack on our very valuable, but already limited attention.

 

 

 

Posted at 06:47 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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10/27/2013

The Circle, the Internet, and People

 I have just finished a novel entitled The Circle, by Dave Eggers (see book list on leftt of page for more information).  I have been waiting for someone to write a book like this for some time. It is a sort of Brave New World/1984 that is based on digital technology.  The Circle is a mythical future company that is a combination of Google, Facebook, Apple, and such other companies.  It has bought the competition and is a near monopoly.  The troika that built it and control it consist of the idea person who was responsible for the advances in technology that made it possible, a person who believes fervently that the human race is best served by total transparency and interaction among all of its members, and finally a person who believes in large companies with large profits—all of them sure they are performing a great service for humanity.

 The story hinges around a young woman named Mae, who accomplishes her dream of being hired by The Circle.  She is a combination of naivete, talent, and ambition, and the book covers the changes in her life and values that result from the progress in the company in accomplishing its goals.  As the company grows, it  attracts more and more people into its beliefs and services, which include great break throughs in such things as miniature video cameras and data handling, with the result that personal privacy is drastically reduced, and  people spend the majority of their time  interacting and communicating over the radically improved equipment and network that is available. Finally, everyone has the ability to watch, listen to, and communicate with everyone else —pretty much total transparency and no privacy.  There are hold-outs, including Mae’s parents, her ex- boy friend, and finally, one of the three founders, but they will obviously not succeed in remaining free of this brave new world. I would have been with them.  I found the book chilling.

 When our children were young, people would talk about tree people and phone people.  When tree people had a problem, they would climb a tree and think about it.  When phone people had a problem they would proceed to call all of their friends and talk about it.  My wife and I and two of our sons were tree people, our daughter was a phone person, and as my wife would say, our other son would climb a tree with his phone.  Now we  have social networking people and non-social networking people. 

 Two or three years ago I began dabbling in social networking, partly because my publisher convinced me  that I had to or people would not know my Good Products, Bad Products book existed, and partly because social networking is somewhat a function of age, and since I have a relatively large amount of that, I wanted to make sure that my resistance was due to me, not my age.  I am now sure.  And I feel in good company.  A few  years ago Don Knuth, a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford , and a person I like and respect told me that he was going to cease communicating on e-mail to make more time for thinking about important problems and create a bit more spare time in his life.  He is a hero in the field (He is the author of  “The Art of Computer Programming”, a classic set of monographs beginning in the 1960’s and still continuing, and a god in the area of fonts) and I would be surprised if he has taken up social networking.

 There is a discernible increase in criticism of the internet.  I mentioned the books of Evgeny Morosov in a previous post, and he recently wrote an article published in the October 28 edition of the New Yorker Magazine entitled Only Disconnect, with the subtitle Two Cheers for Boredom.  It is here.  In the article he decries the disappearance of free time to think and ponder important problems among internet addicts.  He mentions three books I have not read; The Present Shock—When Everything Happens Now, by Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist and consultant, The Distraction Addiction, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a futurist trained as a historian of science, and Ambient Commons—Attention in the Age of Embodied Information, by Malcolm McCullough, a professor of design and architecture at the University of Michigan.  I have ordered all three and will let you know what I think of them when I read them. Incidentally, Morosov also admits that he is now the  owner of a safe with a built in timer in which he can lock his smart phone and internet cable.  Such is the power of the habit.

 I am perhaps hypersensitive, watching Stanford students live a life of constant interruption and escape via their smart phones and the internet.  They think they are multi-tasking.  But I read the literature, and know that they are just kidding themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted at 10:25 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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09/29/2013

Creativity, Space, and Neatness, Part 2 - The Open Office Fad—Enlightenment or Delusion?

Stanford University has fallen prey to the “open office” philosophy recently, with sometimes questionable results.  In many of the new buildings, including the one in which my office is located, professors are allowed separate offices.   That is reasonable, since part of professing requires thinking about difficult things and talking privately with students about not only academic, but personal matters.  Also, at least I work better in a space that seems my own.  As I mentioned in my last post, I need space and limited interruptions. 

 But non-professors do not get separate offices.  The two photos below show a portion of a long hall in the building.  On one side are the professor’s offices.  The first one shows a section of DSC_0114the long other side, which was initially not broken by a barrier.  The architect’s drawings showed this  side with tables which included electric outlets for computers and Ph.D. students sitting in the chairs facing the wall across from the professor supervising their work.  The architects perhaps did not realize that Ph.D. students need their own turf and quiet to do their work, that professors are seldom in their offices, and that sitting in rows facing the wall is associated with such things as military basic training and wearing dunce caps.

 

The second photo shows the end of this wall where one of our administrators has frantically attempted to get some quiet and privacy to do her work by erecting various temporary screens.

 The third photo was taken in a new building that functions as the headquarters of the Engineering School.  It also shows a workspace  for Ph.D. students.  This time they do not have to sit in rows facing the wall, but they have little room to store material, are on display behind glass to people passing down the hall, have limited space to lock up such things as computers and peripheral equipment,  and would have to be disciplined DSC_0119enough to do their difficult work in the midst of a large group of people.  But being bright (they are after all Ph.D. students), they solve these problems by doing their work in their dorm rooms or homes.

 The last of the photos is the domain of Tim Keely, a good friend of mine , who is an outstanding IT manager in the school.  As part of this he typically has a large amount of computer equipment on which he is working —but no office space, because he is not a professor.  He works crammed in a niche in the corner of the Ph.D. space, and worries about who  will steal what equipment.  But he at least has a niche.  Unfortunately, he is about to be moved into an “open office” with the other administrators in the department.  He is not happy.  DSC_0115

 I believe in cross disciplinary workand lots of interaction, but not at the expense of a closable space of one’s own in which to work and keep all of the material necessary to do that work.  Open space to meet is fine when it helps accomplish the goal, but not for all people and not for all of the time.  And woe be unto you, should you be good at computers and in an open office, since you will spend all of  your time with the line of your office partners at your desk seeking your help.

 Even though they are cheaper, and these days there is much attraction to the “interaction” component, the open-office fad will pass.  There is ever-increasing negative feelings about such space at Stanford and elsewhere.  There was an amusing tirade in the Jobs section of the September 20th New York times written by Phyllis Korkky, entitled "Modern Offices, Chock-Full of Offenses".  It is here.  It draws from personal opinion, and also Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners, who has written a book with her son that apparently contains observations bemoaning the loss of traditional offices— “Walls and doors can no longer protect workers from unwanted visits, along with various odors, shouts, coughs, sneezes, popping of gum, belching and spitting” (Stanford people, of course, do not belch and spit — but I admit I do pay a lot of unasked for visits to people).  As another quote, “Forget all this business about making everybody love everybody else, It is taking up time that could be spent getting work done, and it’s a drain on people’s finances and personal lives”.

 Happily over time all of this carefully architected glass, steel. And concrete space at Stanford will be humanized by its occupants, despite the efforts of the building managers and  walls that resist hanging up exciting, entertaining, and even useful material.   

 


Posted at 08:35 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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09/22/2013

Creativity, Space, and "Neatness", Part 1

Creativity must be balanced with control in order to make exciting things happen.  If one is starting a company, one must be able to balance the two.  In a larger organization, it is possible to have people who lean toward creativity, and others who lean toward control.  This often correlates with their work.  We therefore find the “creatives” and the “suits” in ad agencies, the designers and the executives at Ford, and the faculty and students and the administrators in universities. 

 Although everyone mixes creativity and control in their life, in more extreme cases values and lifestyles diverge, as do preferred working environments.  In my experience, it is not unusual that people preferring and working on problems requiring a high degree of creativity, especially if these problems include tangible products, have and perhaps need work spaces that are less structured, formal, and “neat”, than those whose job is concerned with control.  In the last two weeks, two articles have appeared in the New York Times, discussing studies that have borne this out.  The first by Kathleen Voss in the September 15, 2013 edition, is  "It’s Not ‘Mess’. It’s Creativity"and is here.  The second, by Gretchen Reynolds, appears in the magazine section on September 22, 2013, and is entitled "Clean Up You Desk! (But Not if You’re Looking to be Creative)" and is here.

 Both of these refer to controlled experiments in which people were asked to do tasks, one group in extremely neat office space, and one in messy office space.  Those working in the messy offices were judged as considerably more creative.  The numbers are in the articles.

 To me, the interesting thing about these conclusions are that they are surprising to people, because I have spent most of my life experiencing this phenomena. CEO’s of established companies (a control job) often not only have extremely neat offices but live in houses that do not appear to be very lived in —I call this the Architectural Digest phenomenon (a magazine that is  about interior design more than architecture, and is full of beautiful photos of house interiors in which there is no sign of human habitation—no magazines, no dirty dishes in the kitchen, not even any indentations on the couches— a fantasy of control}.  Chief Financial Officers, Financial Consultants, and School Principles often have extraordinarily clean and orderly offices.  On the other hand, the game designers at Electronic Arts, the designers at IDEO, and the design engineers at JPL have offices that are loaded with prototypes, irreverent wall hangings, and piles of  incomplete work and reference material.  And studios of artists are often full of works in all stages of completion and stimulating objects and graphics.

 I must admit a bias.  The photo is a corner of my home office, which is full not only of material I need on the projects upon  Home office shotwhich I am working, but also of material that keeps me happy and stimulated.  I happen to know that many people consider it messy, but I have found out over many years that it is consistent with doing my best work.  In particular I have found that I am a member of a large slice of humanity that keeps track of things by where they are.  From the photo you can see that I like lots of icons on my computer more than lists. And their location is important.  And I like stacks of paper, because I can find things in them faster than in my computer memory. 

 As far as organization,  of course there are other slices of humanity,  two of which are common.  People in one of these  keep track of things according to when they occurred—they like chronological lists rather than alphabetical ones, diaries, and past schedules. 

Perhaps the most righteous slice of people keep track of things by title, author, or other words— they like filing cabinets, alphabetizing, and hierarchies.  And they have presumptuously decided that they are more organized than people like me.  But I have had many years experience with administrators who decide to take good care of me and in the process “organize” my material in ways such that I can not find it when I want it.  So I quietly accept their negative judgment, secure in the knowledge that I am not an anal-compulsive.

 This difference in styles of organizing and working leads to some problems with the present “open office” phenomenon, about which I will have several things to say in my next post.

Posted at 09:07 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality | | Comments (0)

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09/15/2013

Noise, People, and Good Products

I have recently noticed an uptick in media concern with noise.  An article enabled “The sound of Silence” in the last issue of the Economist is an indication. It is here.

 It is about time.  I read a prediction recently that due to expanding population and economic trends by 2050 6.5 billion people will be living in cities.  That was approximately the entire world’s population in 2005.  People make noise, and if you pack them together (New York City) you have a lot of it, especially with the injection of police, fire, rescue, and commercial and amateur observation drones that are being projected—undoubtedly they will be propelled by two cycle engines and try to fly low so that the advertising banners they are towing are more easily readable.  I realize I should have emphasized noise more in my Good Products, Bad Products book. 

 The Stanford campus where I live is a good example, as well as the campus itself.  It used to be called "the farm".  It should now be called "the city".  It is in an extended growth and building period, and in addition the local area is doing a large amount of road work, including installing a  large new gas main to replace the one which caused an explosion and a fire in a town north of us.  One of the wonderful features of my home at one time was the quiet. No more. 

 We seem to be in the traffic patterns for both San Francisco and San Jose’s airports, We seem to be the only homeowners that do our own gardening (a hobby of my wife), so we are surrounded by professional mow and blow teams that often use multiple two-cycle engines at the same time.  In At 100 yards on one side of us is an increasingly busy campus road lined with fraternities that are the scene of parties featuring bands with ever more powerful amplifiers, and 100 yards on the other side is an increasingly busy road that has been the sight of gas main work for at least a year.  Even as I write this an even larger and louder garbage truck has stopped outside our house and our neighbor’s mow and blow team and contractor are at work.

 Will there be an end to what is sometimes called the noise pollution?  There will certainly be more regulations.  Past ones have caused vehicles to be quieter and rock bands to have decibel limits (difficult to police).  The university gardeners now use quieter equipment, such as four cycle generators to power electrical yard machines.  A few companies are now advertising the relative lack of noise from their products.

 And maybe the construction in the Stanford area will slow down some time—or maybe we are like an airport and are doomed to constant “improvements” accomplished by heavy equipment.

 My experience is that producers and consumers of products worry more about appearance and function than sound.  Maybe the time has come when populations have increased to the point where more attention needs to be placed on sound. Actually, this has been slowly happening for years.  When I was in high school we could drive our cars around with hardly any muffler (if you are old enough, you remember” straight pipes”.)  No longer.  When I was in high school the population of my home town (not my high school town) was 1200.  Now it is over 100,000.  That would be a lot of barely muffled cars. 

But as population grows, so does noise,  Cars seem to have dealt with being quieter.  In fact in The Economist article the author admits that maybe electric cars need to make a bit more noise.  Motorcycles lived through the requirement of being muffled.  At least heavy equipment is used to raze buildings and dig up pavement rather than explosives. But how about private planes and small internal combustion engines.  And how about more extreme punishment for people who use their automobile horns to express anger, rather than give warnings. 

 And I think that one contributor to the increasing noise problem is the present fad of “open office” architecture.  More about that in my next post.  But to get you thinking, Facebook is about to build a ten-acre open office for 2800 engineers (see Forbes article here)  Not for engineers like me!   

Posted at 07:15 AM in Design, Engineering, Good Products, Bad Products book, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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08/11/2013

Good Products —The Sippy Cup

If you read the August 11 Sunday New York Times, you probably noticed that the “Who Made That” article in the magazine featured the Sippy Cup.  If you are not aware of these wonderful devices, the photo on the left shows one of my grand Sippycup 1daughters happily guzzling away, and the photo below and to the right shows a closer view of two different models of Sippy cup.   The New York Times Article is here.  Credit for the invention is given to a (brilliant) mechanical engineer named Richard Belanger in 1988, who was inspired by his dislike of constantly cleaning up spills from cups, glasses, and the like resulting from his toddlers in their transition from bottle to dexterity.  He later negotiated a licensing deal with Playtex in the early 90’s, and the rest is history.

 The good news is that small kids like them, and they do not spill.  People quibble with that, saying that some of them do leak a bit if held upside down, but they perhaps did not have the good fortune of experiencing the constant dropping and knocking over of whole cups and glasses of liquid, and sometimes conscious glee at simply rapidly pouring liquid from the highchair onto the floor, that used to be a continual part of pre- Sippy Cup parenting.

 But to me, since these devices do not require the highest of technology, it is  Sippycupsamazing that they weren’t available, for instance, when my own kids were spilling their drinks on the floor.  Often people approach me with ideas for inventions for products and ask me what I think of them.  If they seem so obvious that I am sure they exist, but they don’t, I usually tell the inventor they are brilliant.  Such is my reaction to the Sippy Cup.  For centuries, people had probably snarled at their two year old children when they spilled their drinks on the floor.  And then Richard Belanger came along and solved the problem. 

 

Brilliant, Richard!

Posted at 09:00 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality | | Comments (0)

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07/31/2013

Product Quality: Is small always beautiful?

The U.S. has been in love with miniaturization for a long time.  I clearly remember that in the 1960’s “space race” we were forced to miniaturize spacecraft and components as much as possible because our launch capability was extremely limited compared to that of our competition, the Soviet Union.  But we of course easily convinced ourselves that our equipment was more sophisticated, because it was more miniaturized.

 Small has always been attractive—the works of mechanical watches, dollhouse furniture, model trains, etching details on a dollar bill.  We have been thrilled as computers and smart phones have shrunk.  But is there a limit?  Yes, unless we shrink.

 I am getting more and more requests for information on so-called thumb (flash) drives—  The little gizmos that stick into your USB slot and provide external (and portable) memory.  On the large size, these devices are approaching one terabyte, but still have significant size.  The Kingston HyperX Predator 3.0, when available, will apparently have a capacity of one terabyte, but be approximately 2.8 inches long, 1 inch wide, and 0.8 inches thick.  With an attached chain, it should be both easy to hand around, and easy to keep track of.

 But how about those of us with smaller data needs.  I am increasingly asked for 100 megabytes of information or so on a thumb drive, and often do not receive the drive back.  I therefore went off to Fry’s electronics to buy a few cheap ones, and found that four gigabyte drives (a lot of information not too long ago) were selling for under five dollars.  So I bought four of them.  They came in the usual nearly unopenable package, but once adequate shearing and prying took place, I could see what I had bought. 

 Without their tiny chain (included, but one of which broke easily), they measured under an inch long, less than ½ inch wide, and less than ¼ inch thick.  Impressive amount of data in such a small package.  But I got ahead of the point I wanted to make in this post, because I had unwrapped one in my office, and it Thumb drive on hand smtook me several minutes to find it so I could measure it.  The photos  show one of  them in  my hand, one of them taken from waist height (no zoom) Thumb dirve on ground which I had intentionally dropped on the ground, and one disappearing under papers on my desk.  My life is not consistent with keeping track of these tiny things. Cute and powerful, but not designed to the same scale I am. I predict that in a relatively short time I will have lost all three of them, and be worrying Thumb drive on desk sm about whether there is anything on them I would not like other people to see.

 Controls too small for fingers, letters too small to read, fasteners too small for common tools, and objects too small to keep track of simply do not fit humans.  High quality products should be consistent with full-sized people.  

Posted at 09:00 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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07/11/2013

Product Quality, Computers, and the Internet


I am still working on the Trillions book by Lucas, Ballay, and McManus that I mentioned in my last blog.  The major message in the book is that as computer capability and information on the internet continue to increase (which they will) we will hit a wall with our present approach to information and the internet; that our use of server-client channels, company owned seperate “clouds”, differentiated hardware and software, and retention of old and once adequate formats will result in death through complexity and frustration on the part of users. Not being a computer person, I am going to discuss this book with a couple of friends who are, before I comment on such larger issues.

 However, I must admit I resonate with many smaller examples of increasing problems in the book.  I am finding it takes more time to find what I want on the internet because of the increasing number of locations my search engine finds for me, and more and more redundancy and unsubstantiated opinion on the internet in general. I just looked up bed bugs on Google, and of course received 3,400,000 pertinent pages in 0.25 seconds.  But most of the pages I looked at (many fewer than 3,400,000) said the same thing (they don’t carry germs, they feed at night, they are flat, etc.) and suggested the same cure (tear up your bedroom, look for black bug poop, vacuum, etc.).  A few were more valuable than the others.  I would have liked to just be guided to the few.  Same results if you look up anything having to do with medicine.  Ten pages would be enough and easier to deal with in most of these searches. But more and more appear, since there is no barrier to putting them up.

 One of my favorite escape-book authors is a very prolific Pulitzer Prize winning journalist named John Camp, who writes under the pen-name John Sandford.  In  one of his latest books, Silken Prey, he features a couple of satisfyingly edgy computer experts.  The hero, a detective named Lucas Davenport, also has a computer background.  At one point Davenport, while trying to research some suspects, states “I really need to get background on them.  But all I get from Google is a lot of shit”.  One of his experts, a woman who goes by the name of ICE, replies “You know that old thing about “Garbage in, garbage out?”  “Yeah” says Lucas. " "Google is now the biggest pile of garbage ever assembled on earth”, ICE says.  “Give it a couple of more years, and you won’t be able to find anything in it”.

 When feelings are common enough to make it into a John Sandford book, they are common indeed.

 As to software,  some time ago I replaced a dead Mac, and the new one came with a OS 7 level operating system, which did not like my Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft office suite, resisted showing me the scan bar, and refused to offer up the two little arrows on the right of the page which let one move incrementally through a document or photograph.  It also offered me new “features” which I found unnecessary and complicated.  I went back to OS 6.8, which although perhaps not as “advanced”, was one with which I was totally familiar, more than adequate, liked the applications I was used to, and did not require that I acquire new habits and skills. I was reminded of the days in which Dell would for an extra $150 sell a PC with Windows XP, which Microsoft had announced they would no longer service, rather than one containing the newer Windows Vista.  They had lots of buyers.  I am still using my Mac OS 6.8 and happy with it, but soon something will make it inconvenient for me to do so, and I will be spending time learning how to do things I once knew how to do in a different way and cursing because I can't disable features I don't want.

Posted at 08:05 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Good Products, Bad Products book, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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07/07/2013

An example of progress in product quality

A few years ago I bought the remote battery operated irrigation timer shown in the first photo. Old sprinkler controlThe control screen was visible through the plastic shield for a few months, but then the shield clouded over and it became necessary to remove it to change the control settings.  It worked well, but as can be seen from the second photo below (minus the shield), the numbers were miniscule and usually difficult to see because of faucet location, and in order to set it, it was necessary to go through the modes shown in the even smaller text at the top of the screen and press the necessary buttons.  Old sprinkler control bareThis was not straight forward unless one had the small manual at hand, and not only does one lose manuals and not want to spend the time to try to find them on the internet, but really, a single-channel irrigation timer should not require a manual.

 The other day I bought another one made by the same manufacturer (Orbit) and found an amazing improvement, as can be seen in the third photo.  All of a sudden the settings New sp rinkler controlare visible to the normal human, and the functions are obvious, as are the settings.  I am presently reading a book entitled Trillions; thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology, by Peter Lucas, Joe Ballay, and Mickey McManus, respectively  professor of Human Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon, former head of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon, and president and CEO of MAYA Design, a consulting firm specializing in digital networks and communication. They believe that we are in an early phase of digital communication and heading in the wrong direction—one that will drown us in complexity.  Among other strong feelings is that computers and associated networks must speak our language—we have already gone too far in accommodating to them.

 The timer in the third photo speaks our language.  That in the first does not.  Good for Orbit. 

 I will talk a bit about design of the cyber world in future posts.  I will begin by talking a bit about the Trillions book.  I tend to resonate with its arguments, having been influenced by people who have also influenced the authors (Henry Dreyfuss, an early mentor).  In the last few weeks I have gone through the usual projector and sound system problems in various new and technically sophisticated buildings on campus, spent a ridiculous amount of time integrating a new blu-ray player into my excellent (but pre-hdmi) home system, unjamming my fairly new printer, attempting to re-do my unworkable user name and password collection, and trying to figure out how to live with the increasing quantity and decreasing quality of the knowledge on the internet. I have a life to live and I don’t need this kind of stuff.  It’s time for the digital world to get over itself and start growing up.

Posted at 07:47 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Good Products, Bad Products book, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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