I realize it’s fashionable among conservative bloggers to bash Harry Reid (D-NV, the Senate Majority Leader) for whatever reason, but the recent attacks on him for refusing to seat Roland Burris (D-IL) are inane.

The Constitution gives each House of Congress the authority to judge its own members. From Article I, Section V, of the US Constitution:

Section 5: Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members, and a majority of each shall constitute a quorum to do business; but a smaller number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the attendance of absent members, in such manner, and under such penalties as each House may provide.
Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two thirds, expel a member.
Each House shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy; and the yeas and nays of the members of either House on any question shall, at the desire of one fifth of those present, be entered on the journal.
Neither House, during the session of Congress, shall, without the consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.

That some “conservatives” are now criticizing Reid by relying on an activist decision by the Warren Court should be a warming that many so-called “conservatives” are just Republican Party hacks who jump at any opportunity to embarrass the Democrats.

Hopefully after Governor Blagoevich (D-IL) is impeached, the next Governor can appoint someone appropriate to the seat. I have previously suggested that Tammy Duckworth is sufficiently Obamariffic for our age, and his scathing review of her by Firedoglake emphasizes my view. Anyone Firedoglake despises can’t be all bad!

Pulse UX has a pretty good post up about the Value-at Risk statistic that has recently taken a drubbing.

How new theories in human information processing explain the meltdown on Wall Street
At the heart of the answer to this vexing question on the melt down of Wall Street is a major shift in the underlying psychological theories of human decision-making. In fact contemporary theory on human error research has shifted entirely from the idea of “decision-making” to the concept of “sense-making”. The underlying cognitive science behind this new way of visualizing how individuals and more important entire institutions assess risk is known generally as “Naturalistic Decision Making” or NDM. What this new view teaches is that there are no “points-in-time” that constitute rational decision triggers, but that problems like RISK management on Wall Street are actually an accumulated series of EXPERIENCES that flow together to create situations that are filled with distortions such “positive outcome bias”. We now know from significant research that these distortions make it nearly impossible for those directly involved in such situations to make intelligent (reasoned) decisions about actual RISK.

What I get from this Pulse UX piece, as well as the conclusion from a recent piece at Mini-Microsoft…

As a result, you get something like Office 2003 where the end-user feature set was so hard to describe that marketing had to resort to odd ads of people creating dog-piles of ecstasy over the release and ads warning customers that they are dinosaurs if they don’t upgrade. We can’t really describe what features you’ll get, but at least you won’t be a dinosaur… heh?

Like that point from The Field above, we need to focus on the customer experience vs. barely wired together technology which typically is redundant and confusing. At home I like watching videos stored on my Ultimate machine, and I’ve got about six different services running to do it multiplied by three different networked video boxes hooked to my TV. For a given video, I have to know the right hardware plus software combination. We want to own the living room, but our customer experience is mentally and physically scattered between Media Center, Xbox, WMP, Zune, and partner media boxes. I love Media Center and I think it should be present in all SKUs of the OS (excluding good ole N) but with something like the Fuji release I get pretty concerned about where it’s going. Around the consumer experience we need coherent focus, not a scattered competitive model.

.. is that, too often someone comes up with something, and says it represents reality, without offering any validation for that. What I mean is, we hear that such-and-such is a measure of 4GW, or of User Experience, or of risk, or something, and we take it on faith.

From the User Experience of financial markets (currently at fatally low levels) to the Microsoft Zune (not much better), we run into trouble when we take claims of this-indicating-that at face value.

Courtesy of Sinosplice, I need give props to MS Paint Adventures, which is best described as Choose Your Own Adventure crossed with Toothpaste for Dinner. MS Paint Adventures follows (more or less) Problem Sleuth, a wannabe hard-boiled private detective, annoyed by his neighbors and seemingly trapped in his own office.

MS Paint Adventures is inspired by Infocom games, and the faux-interface reminds me especially of Return to Zork. But the “game” is strictly linear, with only one option per frame. Check it out!

I have been pushing it for years, and I am glad a bipartisan consensus is now emerging around it: we need a net-zero gas tax.

Charles Krauthammer writes:

What to do? Something radically new. A net-zero gas tax. Not a freestanding gas tax but a swap that couples the tax with an equal payroll tax reduction. A two-part solution that yields the government no net increase in revenue and, more importantly–that is
why this proposal is different from others–immediately renders the average gasoline consumer financially whole.

Here is how it works. The simultaneous enactment of two measures: A $1 increase in the federal gasoline tax–together with an immediate $14 a week reduction of the FICA tax. Indeed, that reduction in payroll tax should go into effect the preceding week, so that the upside of the swap (the cash from the payroll tax rebate) is in hand even before the downside (the tax) kicks in.

The math is simple. The average American buys roughly 14 gallons of gasoline a week. The $1 gas tax takes $14 out of his pocket. The reduction in payroll tax puts it right back. The average driver comes out even, and the government makes nothing on the transaction. (There are, of course, more drivers than workers–203 million vs. 163 million. The 10 million unemployed would receive the extra $14 in their unemployment insurance checks. And the elderly who drive–there are 30 million licensed drivers over 65–would receive it with their Social Security payments.)

My proposal, by contrast, was a $3.00/gal gas tax, equiavelnt to a rebate of $42 every period. The specific mechanics of the net-zero gas, whether rebated through the payroll tax or as monthly checks, do not matter much. What matters is that it helps our friends and hurts our enemies:

We underestimate our power. Of course, the slump in China and other rapidly growing economies has contributed to the current extreme price collapse. But China consumes only 9 percent of the world’s oil. The United States consumes 24 percent. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia produces 13 percent of the world’s oil. We don’t generally see ourselves as the Saudi Arabia of oil consumers, but we are. The Saudis have the most effect on the world price because they are the swing producer. We are, in effect, the swing consumer. And since oil peaked earlier this year, we are consuming less. October was yet another month of record year-on-year decline of gasoline consumption in the United States. And that’s just the immediate effect, before the long-term impact of changes in our automobile fleet can take hold. And that long-term change will only occur if we keep the domestic price high.

Let’s hope Barack Obama introduces this geogreen net-zero gas tax, along with a geogreen economic stimulus!

Since I mvoed this blog to Wordpress, I have used the Redirection plugin by John Godley of Urban Gieraffe to patch over some inconsistencies between Wordpress and my old host, blogspirit. For instance, blogspirit and wordpress have different locations for the RSS feed, the atom feed, some special pages, etc.

Redirection has always had a very convenient settings page, that allows me to make blog readers and other software think pages are still in their old locations. So far things had gone smoothly.

Unfortunately, the latest version of Wordpress appears to break Redirection! The settings page is gone, and the forwarding now works inconsistently. So, for example, this link to a blog series I wrote years ago still works, but this link to my atom feed no longer works.

Wordpress 2.7 has broken other sites as well — “probably not a good idea” as Lynne Pope says. The creator of Redirect knows at least some of the problems Wordpress 2.7 has caused him, but not all. Some intrepid bloggers are trying to figure out the problem on their own,

Wordpress is annoying enough people wiht 2.7 that some are advocating to stop using criticla plug-ins, which would remove one of the big benefits of Wordpress for many people.

Eventually, I fixed the problem (I think) by going into the redirection database through phpMyAdmin, and changing both the action_type and match_type fields to ‘url.’ I am not sure if this is a valid approach, but it seems to work for now!

Catholicgauze has an interview with the author of The Atlas of True Names, which is a series of maps in which proper place-names are replaced by what those names (may) actually mean.

In the U.S., The Atlas of True Names is available from Kalimedia, though an Amazon UK page exists as well. More on the Atlas is available from Language Hat, Language Log, and Strange Maps.

For quite a while, I was involved in discussions relating to 5GW (which sometimes stands for the fifth generation of modern war, other times stands for the fifth gradient of warfare, but always implies a technique of armed conflict that can defeat a large-sized 4GW force).

The term is becoming fashionable again, with appearances in the Marine Corps Gazette and now Wired.

How to Win a ‘Fifth-Generation’ War | Danger Room from Wired.com
5GW is anchored in the global Islamic jihad espoused by Al Qaeda, Coer writes. But that doesn’t mean that fifth-gen warriors necessarily are clearly ideological, with aspirations of setting up alternative political systems. They’re opportunists, intent only on destruction. But even seemingly pointless violence can have a perverse logic, for the sudden, irrational destruction undermines the idea that nations — and especially the most powerful nation, the U.S. — are viable in the modern world.

So how do you beat a fifth-gen enemy? By not fighting, first of all. Beebe says ending the vortex of violence in Africa means alleviating “the conditions of human beings that create these insecurities across state borders.” In other words, focus on economic development, humanitarian assistance and communication, with nary an M-16 or Abrams tank in sight.

The article reads like a re-terming (or rediscovery) of John Robb’s ideas, but without any reference to John. Both Robb and Coerr base their work off line, seem to accept the chronological emergence of the first four generations of war, and then predict that the next force will be either a “bazaar of violence” (Robb) or “clearinghouse for
violence” (Coerr) without any coherent ideology, desire for control
over population, desire for a state, etc. Robb, like Coerr, even for
a time branded his idea 5GW, but I think he determined that it was
best to stick to terminology he owned.

My monograph, Revolutionary Strategies in Early Christianity, briefly discusses 5GW. I have written about 5GW on this blog, and I participate in Dreaming 5GW, a website dedicated to the phenomenon.

Pulse UX had a piece on Google Chrome (the browser I’m currently using to browse the web) in late 2008 that becomes more interesting every time I read it. After thinking about the piece for some times, it comes to two general conclusions: Google Chrome is not a well designed browser, but then Google Chrome is not primarily a browser at all.

The point about the danger of starting-from-scratch is obvious enough:

What does Google Chrome mean for the future of user experience design?
In an article by Steven Levy, from the October 2008 issue of WIRED magazine title: “Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web” the developers of Chrome described how they approached the UX design problem for their new “world-beating” browser. In part they described the UX design methodology as follows.

“When deciding what buttons and features to include, the team began with the mental exercise of eliminating everything, then figuring out what to restore.”

Whoa!…that IS an interesting UX design methodology. The problem is that the Google UX process ignored almost entirely the past 25 years of cognitive science and related skill acquisition theory. The Google Chrome UX design methodology created, to a significant extent, the perplexing complexity of Chrome by ignoring several billion “person-hours” of prior experience that users accrued with established browser interaction models. Arbitrarily deciding what to leave out or include in terms of features and functions is…how shall we say…1950’s UX design.

… and dovetails nicely to my thoughts on the science and art of user experience research. However, the Pulse UX piece then convincingly argues that the primary purpose of Google Chrome is to be a rendering engine for Google Docs and other software in the cloud. Thus, Google Chrome is not a competitor to Microsoft Internet Explorer so much as a competitor to Microsoft Live Mesh.

The post is fascinating. The “art” of Chrome’s long-term strategy, and the science of measuring user experience, tie together nicely. Read the whole thing.

An excellent short post referencing a story on gang violence in U.S. News and World Report. While there are deep problems with criminality in th United States, in general things have been getting better. The sorts of crimes that are increasing, however, seem to be fueld by the Drug War.

So end the Drug War.

Gangs rule over the most crime-free America in decades Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog
What drives all this competitive destruction? Our failed war on drugs.

By not medicalizing the problem and decriminalizing use, we provide black market opportunities for criminals.

Frankly, Id rather see Big Pharma clean up

The modern approach to complex problems is not to wish them away, or to create a libertarian paradise: it is to regulate them. We have regimes for regulating alcohol and marijuana. Why not regulations for fat… and for drugs?

Slashdot links to an an interesting article at Technologizer about Clippy, the automated assistant that former was activated by default in Microsoft Office. Clippy was perhaps the Bill Callahan of technologies: everyone who knows anything about him has a strong opinion, and those opinions tend to be negative, but true strong points keep shining through.

I found the graphics and mock-ups (way back to the Windows 3.11 days) interesting, but what inspires this post is a throw-away line from the Slashdot summary:

Most folks think that Microsoft Office’s Clippy, Microsoft Bob, and Windows XP’s Search Assistant dog were perverse jokes — but a dozen years’ worth of patent filings shows that Microsoft took the concept of animated software ‘helpers’ really, really seriously, even long after everyone else realized it was a bad idea. And the drawings those patents contain are weirdly fascinating.”

The slashdot writer is guilty of the same dogmatism that he accuses Microsoft of.

Research into user experience (UX) is both a science and an art. It is a science to the extent it uses quantitative methods to estimate the behavior of a population. So, for instance, when Microsoft applies multivariate regression functions to anonymous user-experience data to determine the relative learning curves of potential changes among different personas of users, it is engaged into scientific UX research. Likewise, when Microsoft conducts ethnographies, case studies, and interviews to understand the phenomana embedded into its software (such as affective UX), it is engaged in an artform.

Both science and art go far beyond what “everyone else” realizes. Indeed, the explanation of variation (the science of UX research) and the understanding of experience (the art of UX research) exist to help make software better than if the designers were stuck with what “everyone else” knew.

Like anyone in the computer science community, I have strong opinions of Microsoft. Windows Vista is awful. Windows 7 is pretty good. I have a feeling that the quality difference between these products relies more than a little on one decision to shortchange UX research, and another to look at it seriously.

Extra credit: What aspect of UX research is ignored in this presentation? Which is focused on?