rodcorp

Rodcorp is moving home

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 10:41:17 GMT

Kraftwerk's Tour de France is aero dynamik

Thu, 14 Aug 2003 15:08:24 GMT

A new album from Kraftwerk, and music about Le Tour... you're thinking two boxes ticked. And so it proves: on a disc about the same length as a time trial, Kraftwerk keep their cadence up, relentlessly attack the peleton, and retain the yellow jersey. And as a bonus it has plenty of gravel-voiced speech in the Alphaville manner. It rocks. (Well, to be honest it actually clicks and beeps, but you know.)

Ross Mayfield: interruption 'taxes' in IM, email, phonecalls

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 10:59:28 GMT

includes good stats for Peopleware fans. As you'd expect, generally an inverse relationship between how personal and 'intense' the type of interruption is (phonecall, email etc) and time-to-recover-from-interruption, except that IM (which has more presence than email) may extract a lower interruption tax. Another reason to use it in the office?

Businesses: managing real-time communications critical

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 10:55:05 GMT

Businesses: managing real-time communications is as important as managing real-time processes. Put another way: PR is increasingly an internal exercise because external PR just happens, leaks out of the company via your employees. So, Ross says, trust your employees, teach them and empower them. Trust being the key verb here. (cf Cluetrain of course, and Semler/Semco.)

Designers: selling down not up

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 10:49:04 GMT

Politics considered helpful in the selling-your-design game.

The title itself -- Make It Bigger-- refers to Paula's endless battle to help clients be able to see the design clearly, and accept it without the layers of hierarchy pissing on it (my words, not hers). By end running the hierarchy and then selling down rather than up, she is able to avoid watered-down design arriving for final approval.

BBC: Phone tones to beat CD singles

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 10:42:18 GMT

The lines cross on the graph.

Marginalia around underground / tube maps

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 14:13:42 GMT

NYC: both Todd Glickman and Peter Lloyd maintain records of NYC subway maps, which include a series of six or so issued in the days/weeks after 911. By all accounts, that period was handled very well. These maps occasionally come up on eBay and tended to have: a box which stated when the map was reissued and referred travellers to mta.nyc.ny.us for more updates, and a speech-bubble enlargement showing the lower Manhattan area.

London: the best records of issued maps are probably Letch's London Transport Bus and Tube Maps 1920-2000 and Burwood and Brady's London Transport Maps 2nd edition, 1983.

An unofficial London tube map form 2003 when the Central line was closed after a crash.

Picking up on ET's comment that the London tube map is highly optinmised for its context, can we recognise cities from the thumbnail images on these Google Images searches? (and does that actually tell us anything useful about their design?): subway map, tube map, metro map.

Edward Tufte on London Underground Map

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 10:54:54 GMT

Someone asked ET about the London tube map which prompted a linkful and thoughtful discussion. The interchange symbols on the Madrid map apparently indicate how far you have to walk to change lines - something the London tube might usefully provide because whilst some interchanges are conveniently across the platform, but others are loooong, eg: Bank-Monument, or (various examples) on the Northern line due to semi-permanent repair works happening in the stations.

The Moscow metro map is a little forbidding. But this one for the city of ??? is interesting: some stations have rotational symbols to indicate that you can change there, and it looks as if there are two, differently named stations ('I' and 'II') at those interchanges. Relic of bureacracy or cutting edge solution to problems with people-flow?

Also found whilst we were on ET.com:

ET reviews Ken Garland's Mr Beck's Underground Map
Minard: the classic Napoleon's invasion of and retreat from Russia, 1812 map, and the less classic (but good) Hannibal into Italy map. See also Minard biblio.
Still on the subject of war, A Narrative Graphic of The U-Boat war in the Atlantic 1939-1945
ET explains the forum moderation policy: We particularly seek to avoid the chronic internet disease of "All Opinions, All the Time"
discussion on ISO paper sizes
Project management graphics

Agile development = being ready to ship at any time?

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 15:54:56 GMT

Darren Hobbs sez that agile means being ready to ship (literally, shrinkwrap and shelve up) whatever work you've done at any point throughout the project. Guards against the risk of the project being cancelled, though arguably if something is ready to go at all times and that thing meets some of the project goals, the project probably won't get whacked. Also: possible risk of not making sufficient progress in fear of breaking the product?

Looking at "agile" as it relates to the team rather than the project itself, the other "thing" that is ready to ship when a project is whacked is the team, what it has learned (individually and collectively), and its willingness/interest in going on to the next project and doing good. Not that these are necessarily all positive values: disillusionment and fear of failure are big risks in teams that have had projects cancelled.

See also the Agile Alliance, and its manifesto:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Worth reading.

National Gallery piracy risk for print-on-demand

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 15:54:06 GMT

NG considering extending its in-gallery digital print-on-demand service to accredited print shops around the world. Would the current lack of DRM prevent piracy, and/or allow an effective redress? [via ntk]

New desktop and mobile keyboards: ugly but ergonomic?

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 12:40:25 GMT

Softava's Q12 seems to be the first cousin of Unitap and Fastap before it. Looks like it has privileged button and keypress simplicity at the cost of requiring great digit precision [via MobileBurn]
Fingerworks seems to move mouse gesturing away form mouse-and-screen, and place it on the keyboard [via DarrenHobbs]

Salt Seller not sold and/or less sold of: Duchamp readymades fall short of estimates

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 12:38:48 GMT

Mark Kostabi once said there is no "Duchamp market", because he produced so little work:

Many pseudo-purists will advise you to keep production low and prices high. But Picasso and Warhol are the kings and barometers of the art market because they had huge quantity as well as quality. Duchamp is just as important historically but no one makes an art-market decision based on how the Duchamp market is going. Because there is no "Duchamp market." He produced too little.

Interesting idea, and last year, perhaps, we saw the proof when a Phillips sale of readymades in NY failed to make their estimates:

However, the sale of 14 "readymade" sculptures by the father of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp, was more problematic. The collection, which Phillips had guaranteed for an estimated $10 million, brought only $5.3 million. After the sale, dealers said there was nothing wrong with the prices realised - Phillips had simply put too high a price on the works.

To bring us up to date, here's Richard Polsky recommending good summer deals in the 2003 art market (no Duchamp).

AIGA: Understanding The Future Of Mobile Devices

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 18:34:39 GMT

Notes taken at this event, ably led by Nico MacDonald.

Mobile cameras. But not camphones.

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 14:15:39 GMT

Shaun Irving's Peanut is a mail-delivery truck converted to take 4x8 feet pinhole photos
Rodney Graham's Millennial Time Machine is is a 19th century horse-drawn landau, whose carriage has been converted into a camera obscura [via Wm. Gibson]

The Art of Chess

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 18:00:59 GMT

Nineteen chess sets designed by artists at Somerset House, London

On public view for the first time will be five recently commissioned chess sets designed by leading contemporary artists Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Paul McCarthy, Yayoi Kusama and Maurizio Cattelan. These new works will be set in context by chess sets designed during the 20th century by such major artists as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder and Yoko Ono.

Guardian: What time is it? Well, no one knows for sure

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 16:43:26 GMT

Four different time systems are used: Coordinated Universal, International Atomic, GPS and GMT. They're gradually getting out of sync because they either observe or ignore (for mostly systemic or historic reasons) leap-second adjustments made for the earth's rotation slowing. Some outcomes: navigational/astronomic/legal quagmire; atronomers expensively upgrade their systems; a return to the kind of timezoning done in the railroad era (albeit on a smaller scale); each group redefines the second to get the different systems back in sync, and keep them there (which the ITU would never allow, but would be funny).

Antimega: a Life in Paper, stalked

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 16:30:49 GMT

Antimega is receipt-mapping his life, which prompted the question 'What do the locations of his transactions tell us about him?'.

We put Holmes on the case, who observed the some of these receipts came from Northish London, and others from the Docklands, or thereabouts. Holmes then suggested that if we were to pick a tube station in Northish London (one in zones 1 or 2), we might be able to find him on the London Bloggers list, by taking advantage of the 'Weblogs Within 10 Minutes Of This Station' feature. We tried Baker Street, and then performed a 'Find in this page...' search. Elementary: Case closed.

Next week, Holmes says he may use inductive reasoning to delve further into Antimega's life, or to geographically stalk someone else.

SMS-mapped London will let you hail a cab by txt

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 16:02:10 GMT

5000 London Taxi Points and 4000 black cabs allow mobile users to text and book the nearest available cab, night or day.

28 July 2003: Anyone who has struggled to find a black cab in London will soon be able to locate the nearest available taxi and book it, all using SMS. With SMS connectivity supplied by Netsize, London's new Taxi Point service removes the need to wait on the street searching for a cab. Instead, customers can use one of the new 'Taxi Points' - actual signs that use a unique four-digit code to identify an exact location within central London. People wishing to use the service text the location code to the London Taxi Point short code (83220). Using GPS tracking, the service will identify and book the nearest black cab from the participating taxi fleets, delivering a confirmation SMS, and an alert when the taxi has arrived.

The service will cost the user £1 and Taxi Point signs will be positioned in locations such as public and private buildings, restaurants, theatres and bars. More than 5000 Taxi Point locations will be created in London over the next three years.

Just as the 5000 Taxi Point locations finished being rolled out, the mobileworld will finally tip over and most location mapping will be done by the network, not via an intermediary sign.

Or is this done for ease of cabs: so they need to know 'merely' 5000 locations, rather than attempting to find where you are from location data that isn't granular or accurate enough? We don't understand.
[via antimega]

Ducks, rabbits and Duchamp

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 12:26:19 GMT

In 'Of Two Minds and One Nature', Rhonda Roland Shearer and Stephen Jay Gould use the Jastrow duck-rabbit figure in discussing the idea that Leonardo, Duchamp and other artists successfully bridged art and science, and therefore show us the value of breaking down/through the unhelpful (false, even? - in the view of our authors, themselves a well-known partnership of art theorist and paleo-scientist) dichotomy between the two cultures.

In a key passage from one of the most influential books of our times (The Structure of Scientific Revolution), T.S. Kuhn bridged the disciplinary gap between visual representation and conceptual innovation when he used the famous gestalt illusion of the duck-rabbit [...] as a primary symbol for the meaning and nature of scientific revolution: 'It is as elementary prototypes for these transformations of the scientist's world that the familiar demonstrations of a switch in visual gestalt prove so suggestive. What were ducks in the scientist's world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards.'

An interesting article, but not sure it tells us anything new, unlike much of Shearer's research into MD.

Art students usually discover the duck-rabbit figure via Gombrich, who says:

we can switch from one reading to another with increasing rapidity; we will also 'remember' the the rabbit when while we see the duck, but the more closely we watch ourselves, the more certainly will we discover that we cannot experience alternative readings at the same time.'
[Art and Illusion, A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 1959, 5]

Yet this famous binary flip-flop between duck and rabbit always seemed insufficient: if you look at the picture long enough, the visual opposition starts to break down. The duck aspect becomes minimally contaminated by the (possibility of flipping over to the) rabbit aspect, and vice versa. This contamination is, we guess, what makes the flip-flop possible. You start with Jastrow's duck-rabbit = a rabbit OR a duck. You end up with Jastrow's duck-rabbit = a rabbit-duck OR a duck-rabbit. (Just found our embarrassingly confused explication of same, with images from 1997. Forgive our cod-Derridean enthusiasm.) Which is what we think Wittgenstein means when he writes about 'seeing-as' being a combination of seeing and thinking [Philosophical Investigations, 212e] and:

I am shewn the duck-rabbit and asked what it is; I may say 'It's a duck-rabbit'. But I may also react to the question quite differently. - The answer that it is a duck-rabbit is again the report of a perception; the answer 'Now it's a rabbit' is not. Had I replied 'It's a rabbit', the ambiguity would have escaped me, and I should be reporting my perception. The change of aspect. 'But surely you would say that the picture is altogether different now!' But what is different: my impression? my point of view? - Can I say? I describe the alteration like a perception; quite as if the object had altered before my eyes. [...] The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception's being changed.
[Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.E.M.Anscombe, 1953, 194-5]

People tracking in surveillance applications

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 12:23:48 GMT

PDF. Bizarrely, courtesy of a Google search for the centroid of London for the How many ways can the (exact) centre of London be defined? question.

Counter-factual history and fiction

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 16:01:59 GMT

Counterfactual History is sometimes controversial (see this discussion of E.H.Carr's 'Counterfactual History is Bunk', and this), but it can be very thought-provoking and tempting - many WW2 geeks will have considered an alternate outcome if Germany had taken Stalingrad, or if the US hadn't had logistical superiority in tank building (or any one of a dozen other scenarios).

ed Robert Cowley: What If? Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (1999) (am.co.uk | allconsuming), and More What If? (2002) (am.co.uk | allconsuming)
ed Niall Ferguson: Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (1997) (am.co.uk | allconsuming)
Counter-factual fiction: too many to mention (Churchill, Deighton, Harris, Carr and many others just in the military section, and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt recently), so: Uchronia has a gigantic list of counterfactual books
possibly some good stuff in this DMoz alternate history directory

Various things, in brief

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 11:21:16 GMT

Stereoscopic images via animation [via mefi]
Corporate logo fonts [via boingboing]
Nice list of SF authors (on the left)
Zipf, Power-laws, and Pareto - a tutorial on 'ranking' [via Swarz]
Qur'an as immutable latticework, and, in contrast, David Porush's Talmud as hypertext

WSJ on shortcuts for cutting through IVR to the human customer-support agent

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 11:19:38 GMT

The other thing to try on mixed IVR and human cust-service systems is press or say nothing. [via electrolite]

On choosing a speech recognition vendor for call centres

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 22:10:39 GMT

In Testing Speech Recognition-based Applications, Part 1, Chris Bajorek tells us that sppech rec has matured enough to be genuinely useful to call centres, and advises customers to research the vendors core capabilities:

First, experience matters. The more successful deployments a vendor has under its belt, the better chance you will get an accurate estimate of time and costs. So, you need to get permission to talk directly with several customers who have gone through that process. I would ask for a few references whose projects have been completed in the last 30 days, and a few that were completed more than 6 months ago to see how well they have been supporting, updating, and tuning the system.

In part 2, he gets on to application and infrastructure performance. In addition to the basics (does it answer first time every time, play prompts without breaking up, respond to commands quickly, have a high "recognised"l percentage, and smoothly scale performance up to maximum call loads) he reminds us that

Caller attributes and call conditions that conspire to unravel your SR-IVR system's performance include diverse caller demographics and accents, caller devices that don't always produce clean speech (i.e. cell phones in marginal reception areas, cheap speaker phones, or VoIP calls with low-bandwidth vocoders or high levels of data channel impairment). Not bad enough yet, you say? How about calling in from a cell phone in a marginal reception area WITH a high level of automotive wind noise mixed in? (Speech recognizers really like that one.) Add multi-line call loads and spoken commands that "barge-in" during prompt-playback, and you're starting to understand what a real-world SR-IVR system has to deal with.

And concludes:

The point of knowing all the factors that can affect performance of your SR-IVR system is this: we should now be able to develop tests that will VERIFY such systems under real-world conditions

which we suspect most vendors are somewhat far behind with. Meanwhile the speech rec industry seems more concerned with speed and cost of development this month: TuVox to partake in the Speech Solutions Challenge at SpeechTEK 2003, where it will have six hours to devise and deploy a voice self-service solution for a pre-selected application.

WIP: Lament: music for printer and five voices

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 20:50:37 GMT

I walked into the open-plan office upstairs and heard the girls mournfully talking about how the new printer was no good. I asked whether it was slow, or had poor print quality. No: they didn’t like the newly upgraded printer’s song, which was mechanical and annoying. The old printer’s noise had been repetitive but musical, so they used to sing along with it when it did a large run of flow charts. I asked them what the old printer song had been like, and one of them started humming it to me. Gradually the others joined in until there were about five of them humming it, in remembrance.