kip/bot/blog

One of the fun things to do with the Kindle is NowNow, a question answering service under the “Experimental” menu of Kindle. NowNow is based , I think, on the “mechanical turk“, a group of humans paid in a micro-fashion by Amazon to curate content and, under this program answer questions.

My first question to Nownow, sprang from a conversation with our CTO about gnostic and apocryphal scrolls (a very important part of our business of web marketing) and said that Mary Magdalene was the brother of Lazarus (the resurrectee). I didn’t know that, and while I didn’t doubt it either, I thought it was a good time to test Nownow:

Within 5 minutes, I had gotten three answers with varying shades of personal voice, exploration of nuance to the answer (”No … although it’s hotly debated”), and citations in the form of hyperlinks (you can use the Kindle’s wireless EVDO connection for web browsing).

This morning, while reading a trashy genre novel (I’ll do anything to get back in the fiction groove), the narrator described a character as “a real trouper.” Nice! Trouper! As in, the show must go on or do your part within a troupe/ensemble. I didn’t know that. I’ve usually encountered it as be a real trooper - soldier on, take your orders. Trouper felt right, but I ran it past the folks at Nownow.

My favorite answer comes from a person who I think I would like to have more chats with:

It’s definitely “trouper”, but “trooper” is taking over because so many people misuse/misunderstand the phrase. It seems likely the correct “trouper” will die off because it’s so neglected.

(In the same way “presently” is starting to mean “now” instead of “in the near future”, which is what it ACTUALLY means… just because people have been misusing it so much for so long.)

Anyway, a “trouper” means a member of a theatrical company (usually traveling, in a troupe) and has come to mean someone who keeps plugging away even when things go sour.

While both troupe and troop derive ultimately from the Latin troppus “flock”, one was adopted for military use while the other was applied to performers. However “a reliable, uncomplaining person; a staunch supporter or colleague” is, indeed, a trouper, likening someone to an actor or dancer who goes on despite hardship or impediments. It’s a compliment.

Troupe “group of performers” dates from the early 19th century in English, having come from French, and trouper “a performer belonging to a troupe” dates from the late 19th century. Trouper as in “she’s a real trouper” dates from the 20th century; it was already a cliche as evidenced by this quotation from 1959: “The phrase ‘she’s a trouper’ now has an old-fashioned and faintly derogatory air and is usually bandied about when someone continues to play with a high temperature or a shattering bereavement.”

Troop as in “a body of soldiers” is earlier, dating from at least the 16th century and deriving from Old French trope. A trooper is therefore a member of such a military group (1640), or, by extension, a certain type of law enforcement officer (especially in the U.S., where we have state troopers, who are state police. They’ve been called troopers since the early part of the 20th century). Calling someone a trooper in this way isn’t so much a compliment as a statement of fact: they’re a normal member of a group, nothing special.

This has been misused for a long time, though, and in the USA where the word “troop” is much much more common than “troupes”, it’s completely predictable that people would start using the “wrong” one. If you use the wrong one over and over again, over decades, it becomes acceptable, of course.

English is like that.

I hope this answer is good for you!

You can just tell this person enjoyed writing the answer, was glad for an excuse to dig into the mutual latin roots of both possibilities, and is sadly resigned to the way common usage overrides the richer, deeper original meaning.

I would, of course, be devastated to find out that this is a turing test and this was software generated:

if (question == usageOfWords) then

print “English is like that.”

endif

Techcrunch providing compelling reasons for the Kindle.  Or rather Citi investment analysts are.  They estimate that Amazon will generate between $400 million and $750 million in revenue from the Kindle by 2010, or 1% - 3% of Amazon’s total revenue.  There’s a nice side-by-side comparison that opened my eyes:

The most important, and most interesting, one is that book selection.  I was under the impression, from where I can’t remember, that both were at about 90,000.  My regular tests of Amazon and the Sony store didn’t seem to unearth any differences — attempts to find test books on either store yielded identical results.  Weird perceptual thing on my part?  Bogus data?

Most important, though, is Jennifer Aniston’s endorsement, also in Techcrunch:

So, after a decidedly mixed launch, the XO will finally be tested by the audience and in the kind of environment it was designed for. (As opposed to bloggers and podcasters who have iPods, iPhones, XBoxes, two laptops and power towers.)

MIT’s Technology Review magazine has a piece about the Peru launch. It might be a little gentler about the criticisms, since it’s an MIT publication, but they summed it up nicely:

The success of OLPC can no longer be judged against ­Negroponte’s early predictions and plans, nor by the technical merits of the laptop itself. Peru is what matters now. When I was in Lima, OLPC’s former chief technology officer, Mary Lou ­Jepsen (she has formed Pixel Qi, a startup dedicated to making even lower-cost displays for OLPC’s computers and others), visited the education ministry to offer help and show staffers how to repair the machines. But she acknowledged that OLPC’s future doesn’t revolve around the hardware she helped bring about. “Laptops are easy; education is hard to transform,” she said. “I don’t even speak Spanish. How can I even start to transform primary education in Peru?”

Negroponte gets a lot of heat for saying this isn’t a technology project, it’s an education one.  It’s a comment I haven’t really understood myself (despite being a huge fan of the project and the actual product). But this article helps bring that dynamic to life. Henry Dietz, a Peru expert and professor at UT, points out that the XO is being introduced into very unpromising situations: “You get out of those provincial capitals, a half-hour in any direction, and you are in rural Peru, and things are pretty primitive. Electricity is a sometimes thing, and the quality of education–the school is four walls and a roof and some benches, and that is about it. There is very little there to work with.”
The first, and oddly, most important, thing the XO brings to this environment is books and light. Peru has brought nearly a half million XOs and warehouse staff are using flash drives to load them (individually) with classics, Aesop, Peruvian poetry, Mario Vargos Llosa. This is powerful education: learning to read one’s language through its greatest artists.
Along with the books, they’re adding chess, literacy training, sudoko (plus the usual stuff). And the 15 hour battery is, of course, a source of light in the home even if the XO isn’t in use.

Another overlooked, or at least underdiscussed, part of the XO is that its mere presence connects kids to the world around them. Children in even the remotest towns are aware that there is a world out there that has computers and books and cameras and that they are at a far remove from that world. The XO puts them much closer to that world. As one father of an XO owner said:

“Our hope for him is that he will have hope,” he said. “So we are giving them the chance to look for a different future–or the same, but by choice, not by force. These children who didn’t have any expectation about life, other than to become farmers, now can think about being engineers, designing computers, being teachers–as any other child should, worldwide.”

Some other interesting notes on the design and deployment:

• Peru spent $80 million on the hardware, and another $2 million on teacher training
• The Peruvian government consciously made a choice to go with poorer villages and towns outside of its cities, rather than towns that are better connected to the infrastructure
• Most of the XOs will have limited, slow, or bad internet connections
• The and X and O on the case now come in 400 color combinations, to help kids keep track of which one is theirs

I’m thinking of switching to a Nokia — partly to connect to the ways the rest of the world is connecting, but partly cuz I’m no longer convinced of the awesomeness of the iPhone.

I bought the iPhone about three months after the release. I had resisted the urge until I unpacked my bag for work and saw an iPod, a phone, a camera. I went and bought the iPhone and dumped the other stuff from my bag, a savings of two devices, charging time and hassle, and some carried ounces off my back.

Today, however, I’m back to three devices. The iPhone camera sucks too much even for me; I tend to load it up with so many boingboing TV, TED, coolhunting videos, and the occasional West Wing for late or bleary subway rides, that I seem to never have the right music on hand for work; and the hassles of email with entourage/exchange/whatever plus my continued non-adjustment to the keyboard leave me calendarless and hesitant to answer work mails (since replies go to gmail). Yes, that last will be fixed in June (as apparently, will be the mideast problem and global warming, if you listen to the more energetic Mac rumors), but I think I’ve lost too much love for the iPhone to hold onto it.

And, oh yeah, EDGE sucks.

Is it possible that Apple, usually so well-known for providing more to customers by doing less stretched itself too thin? I don’t think I’ve ever had an Apple device that so infrequently delighted me (I mean delighted me, like making me say Nice!) and so frequently frustrated me.

The other half of the abandon iPhone equation is professional. As non-touch screen phones become more important in people’s lives (due to price point, durability, and, in developing countries, non-theft-worthiness), I feel out of touch with emerging design sensibilities and mobile behaviors. I’m not ready to go back to a crappy phone, but, seeing that the N-Series is the direction cheap phones will go rather than the iPhone, I may make yet another expensive shift.

While catching up on MAKE videos (where is Bre Pettis? nothing against Kip Kay, but I had grown quite fond of Bre), I saw a plug for RSINVENTIONLAB.com — the Radio Shack Invention Lab. It looks like a user-generated and curated set of projects using the stuff you find in the cabinets at the back of Radio Shacks.

Some design problems (though none of them caused by the pegboard and the tape and scrap paper look and feel) make it hard to find out what’s going on. But they seem have to some seeded projects (arduino, some MAKE b rolls) and then user-submitted stuff. The one above shows the charm and weirdness of this subcommunity: a box designed to capture EVP (electronic voice phenonomena). I would love to see this grow, as I am saddened every time I see a Radio Shack that doesn’t sell soldering irons.

Just started Adaptive Path’s Subject to Change, and it’s shaping up to be an important read. Only about 30 pages in, but already have had some great insights:

Brand strategy can ruin experience strategy — creating a brand is like projecting a personality. “These are the words we want you to use when you think of us” is not a response to customer needs. No matter how well-grounded the personality is in a cultural trend or audience insight, brand strategies don’t point to experience design.

Products should be like magic — with Arthur C Clarke’s passing, people have been quoting his line “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. It’s a phrase that tends to highlight the alienating effects of a feeling of magic. But Subject to Change argues that magic is our goal:

No one wants to deliver a product that mystifies its audience. In fact, the inception of most new products is spurred by a need to address an experiential concern. [But] Customers have little appreciation for the technical workings of a product. Beyond the interface, everything else might as well be magic. Think about a light switch. You flip a swtich; a light turns on. How many of us care how it works? Or you put things in the refrigerator, and a day later, when you take them out, they’re cold. Magic. You pick up a handset, press seven or ten digits, and are talking to someone far away. Magic.

A tempered definition of magic helps us understand the long-sigh (which may be close to the long wow) of a good product. I also like the “inception of most new products is spurred by a need to address an experiential concern”. That’s the most sober, non-fetishized way of describing Apple’s non-innovative, second/third/fourth to market design-focused approach to product design, going all the way back to the Mac (”computers for the rest of us”).

In this spirit of energetic non-fetishized discource, the book also debunks the hype around being new, being different, and being innovative as virtues unto themselves. By grounding the conversation in experience, it provides focus (while at the same time making our design jobs harder to do, and richer in reward).

Diggin’ it.

I blogged an HBR article a while back, questioning, among other things, how innovative Google really is.  Some news stories today, highlight some overlooked areas where Google is doing some interesting, potentially innovative things:

• App Engine — NYT article today talks about Google’s plans to move App Engine into the enterprise space by opening it up to 10,000 developers.  It’s a small launch, limited to apps written in python in the beginning, and it’s a late entrant to a field where SalesForce and Amazon have experience, if not dominance, but it’s a real move, based on another innovation:
• GFS — not news, not surprising, and I can’t tell if it’s good or not, but Google File System can fall under the umbrella of innovation, or innovation-friendly.  (Taking control of the infrastructure.)
• SalesForce alliance — NYT article briefly describes how Google is tying its Office apps into SalesForce’s suite of offerings to compete with MSFT.  Whether Google’s productivity apps on the web will win out over MSFT’s client or server based apps is the big question, but I have to acknowledge that the apps are lightweight, clean enough to hook into other software, and scalable.

I don’t think this makes the HBR article less silly, however.  The examples above are reminders that there are other things going on at Google beyond the usual gmail, Google Earth, ad serving, and blogger acquisition that most articles talk about.

Google’s ability to develop them and wait years to monetize them, however, still comes down to cash flow.  This still means we have little to learn from Google about innovation.

I’ve been seeing a lot of steampunk pics and references in my web trolling lately. Despite being a fan of the aesthetic, the not the fiction so much, I was stumped to see this one at Steampunk Workshop:

It’s a Mac Mini inside an old-fashioned (circa: steampunk) tin.  The picture below of modded headphones also comes from the Steampunk Workshop. But they strike me as pre-atomic-era SF, sitting more comfortably next to an oscilloscope than a brass input device.

Why are designers are getting such a kick out of steampunk mods of Apple stuff? The ultimate design objects being modded and retrofied to the place where there original design is not only lost, but are pushed in a distinctly mechanical direction?

The charm of steampunk for me is that it hearkens to the last great age of the renaissance person: late 19th century Europe, especially England. It’s a time when people could still dabble in many fields and make contributions in them: astronomy, electricity, biology, studies of the ether, psychology were all still open enough that, dare I say it, amateurs could still make discoveries or meaningful contributions in those fields while writing lame poems and playing the pianoforte after dinner for guests.

Or maybe it’s the time of the literary engineer — someone out of a Jules Verne novel who knew the classics, might quote Shakespeare, and still be able to improve on a thermal combustion engine and then house it in a mahogany case with brass fixtures. Sherlock Holmes is the quintessence of the literary scientist. Despite some embarassing gaps of ignorance, Holmes was a chemist, a historian, and a supremely gifted violinist who lived surrounded by those same brass-handled cabinets filled with news clippings, biological samples, ashes from cigars, shag tobacco, and sheet music.

This is the appeal of many adventure games, particularly Myst (all about the brass and amateur science), Jules Verne, the emerging adventure game sensibility in Dan Brown and other ‘manuscript’ genre novels. Even Bioshock with its emphasis on an aether-like technology and art deco setting, hearkens back to something more steampunk than cyberspace.

My enjoyment of steampunk is probably due to the demise of the literary engineer. There’s just too much to try and know and lifehackery has us focused on efficiency. I regularly see people on Facebook proclaiming that they don’t read, or don’t read fiction. I have friends who find literature inefficient and while they care about aesthetics, it feels like an efficient post-Swiss design nod to the finer things. The Mac Mini setup above has flourishes and embellishments — its charm is in its non-cleanness. Its celebration of artifice makes it tactile, places it in the realm of the craftsmen, implies the odors of wood and metal polishes, even celebrates its intricacy. By inviting us in to the mechanical intricacies of an object, steampunk acknowledges that we understand it and turns that understanding into something aesthetic.

Some time last year, I got sick of listening to people complain about the negative effects of technology.  It may have been when I got my Sony book reader, but I think it goes back earlier to when some ninny sent me a Thomas Friedman column, in which Friedman suggested that we had gone too far with technology.  The column was nauseating NY liberalism at its snooty self-important worst:

I arrived at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport the other night and was met by a driver sent by a French friend. The driver was carrying a sign with my name on it, but as I approached him I noticed that he was talking to himself, very animatedly. As I got closer, I realized he had one of those Bluetooth wireless phones clipped to his ear and was deep in conversation. I pointed at myself as the person he was supposed to meet. He nodded and went on talking to whomever was on the other end of his phone.

When my luggage arrived, I grabbed it off the belt; he pointed toward the exit and I followed, as he kept talking on his phone. When we got into the car, I said, “Do you know my hotel?” He said, “No.” I showed him the address, and he went back to talking on the phone.

After the car started to roll, I saw he had a movie playing on the screen in the dashboard — on the flat panel that usually displays the G.P.S. road map. I noticed this because between his talking on the phone and the movie, I could barely concentrate. I, alas, was in the back seat trying to finish a column on my laptop. When I wrote all that I could, I got out my iPod and listened to a Stevie Nicks album, while he went on talking, driving and watching the movie.

After I arrived at my hotel, I reflected on our trip: The driver and I had been together for an hour, and between the two of us we had been doing six different things. He was driving, talking on his phone and watching a video. I was riding, working on my laptop and listening to my iPod.

There was only one thing we never did: Talk to each other.

It’s a pity. He was a young, French-speaking African, who probably had a lot to tell me. When I related all this to my friend Alain Frachon, an editor at Le Monde, he quipped: “I guess the era of foreign correspondents quoting taxi drivers is over. The taxi driver is now too busy to give you a quote!”

I found this infuriating.  The assumption that a cab driver is just dying to be a reporter’s ‘vox populi’, or that he shouldn’t be allowed to entertain himself on the job (presumably Friedman doesn’t listen to music while he writes or watch TV while doing email at night), or cabbies choosing not to talk to a passenger who means nothing to him was somehow wrong, clearly, as indicated by the incoherence of the sentence, bugged me.

What bugged me most, though, was the way Friedman was judging another person’s use of technology through his own lens.  So the Jan Chipchase article in today’s NYT, has a great, liberating moment:

This is when I voiced a careless thought about whether there might be something negative about the lightning spread of technology, whether its convenience was somehow supplanting traditional values or practices. Chipchase raised his eyebrows and laid down his spoon. He sighed, making it clear that responding to me was going to require patience. “People can think, yeah, monks with cellphones, and tsk, tsk, and what is the world coming to?” he said. “But if you wanted to take phones away from anybody in this world who has them, they’d probably say: ‘You’re going to have to fight me for it. Are you going to take my sewer and water away too?’ And maybe you can’t put communication on the same level as running water, but some people would. And I think in some contexts, it’s quite viable as a fundamental right.” He paused a beat to let this sink in, then added, with just a touch of edge, “People once believed that people in other cultures might not benefit from having books either.”

Finally.

Nuts and Volts is one of the few magazines I subscribe to that I go through cover to cover each month. This is odd, cuz I don’t really understand it and read very little of it. It’s one of those magazines, like certain books I own, that I aspire to read and which I benefit from looking through.

For the uninitiated (or well-adjusted), Nuts and Volts is an electronics hobbyist magazine. It’s got product reviews, news (including the circuited contact lens), projects each month, loads of advertisements (which is a big part of the charm - electronics geeks writing copy and figuring out images that sell), tutorials, circuit walk-throughs.

My knowledge of electronics came from a month between jobs where I mucked around with the Arduino and some solderless breadboards. I’m better than a beginner, but the intermediate stuff in Nuts and Volts is beyond me right now. So, each month I browse it looking for content that helps me past my current plateau of understanding and, more importantly, I revel in the making culture that I admire.

The April 2008 issue (cover above) had particular charms for me. The cover story is “High Voltage Power Supply”(!) featuring a nixie display board and the line: “It’s fun to collect and experiment with forgotten technology! But, you will need a stable high voltage power supply to get started.” This might be the equivalent of the swimsuit issue for Nuts and Volts readers . . . I really can’t tell.

I loved this piece, a project for a timed/self-monitoring bird feeder, requested by a reader:

Retired, limited income, limited mobility guy . . . and they do a project for him to build a bird feeder. love Love LUV it.

And, lastly, you gotta love the advertisements: