Archive for category thoughts

The Apple iPad: Thoughts

Posted by jasonwong in bad design, good design, marketing, thoughts on January 28th, 2010

Disclaimer, in case you didn’t know for some reason: I have a MacBook and an iPhone and I enjoy them very much.

The iPad is intriguing. I have seen many people ask why they would want one. I think Apple essentially presented several use cases (eReading, couch surfing, airplane video watching), but it boils down to this: if you’re in the market for something that’s cheaper and less useful than a laptop but is more expensive and useful than an iPhone, the iPad is your device.

I am just curious as to how big that market is.

A friend of mine has an iPhone and Apple desktop. He doesn’t do work when he’s mobile, so he is interested in this device. For me, I can’t justify one right away. I would not get the more expensive 3G model, so I’d be stuck with just a WiFi connection, which means mostly home use. Since I already have a laptop as my main computer that I can bring with me, I don’t see the iPad use case working for me.

In terms of striking the balance between a cheaper laptop and a more useful iPhone, they leaned more towards the iPhone. However, they brought along many iPhone shortcomings – namely, multitasking and Flash in the browser. Therefore, you cannot have Pandora streaming, have your IM client going, and also work on something in Pages at the same time. With a $500 iPad (which Josh Gruber says is fast, fast, fast), you can only do one thing at a time. This just kills it for me.

I don’t think a big enough deal is being made about the fact that Apple is using its own Apple A4 chip in the device that makes it “fast, fast, fast.” Apple bought P.A. Semi and is now designing their own ARM-based chips in house. So, from this, the iPad is faster. I would like to think the processor can handle more than one application at a time, though. Yes, you could say that the iPad would bog down running too many apps, but so too can the MacBook. People expect multitasking and, if Apple could design an elegant system to do so, they should. Essentially, my argument boils down to this: Apple can’t possibly have unitasking as a written-in-stone design goal; at some point, they are going to have to introduce multitasking. It seemed like the introduction of the iPad, with its wickedly-fast processor, was as good of a time as any.

John Timmer, Science Editor of Ars Technica, nails it for me (scroll to the bottom of the page to read his thoughts directly):

Steve Jobs very explicitly placed the iPad in the category class between the phone and notebook, and it very nicely splits the difference between the two. And that’s precisely why I’m a bit disappointed by it—it doesn’t share enough of the features of either one of those two devices to actually make it useful to me.

When I leave the apartment for anything beyond local errands, I’m almost invariably carrying both a cell phone for communicating and a laptop for getting work done. A truly useful device would be one that could let me leave one of those devices and its added bulk, cables, and worries about charge status at home. The iPhone went a little way towards that dream—it was a phone, but its ability to handle a bit of web browsing and some light e-mail meant that leaving the laptop at home was possible in a few additional circumstances—but, for the most part, I’m still stuck lugging two devices.

The iPad doesn’t fix that. It’s clearly not a phone, so my phone would still have to come with me. It would do a better job of e-mail and web browsing than the iPhone but, if I’m carrying one of those anyway, that’s not a huge help. On the other side of its category divide, the iPad might add a few more cases where a laptop is unnecessary, but very few. I’m a touch typist; I take notes on presentations while watching the speaker, and I am often writing in one application while looking over a document in a second. With no physical keyboard and no multitasking, the iPad simply wouldn’t work for me. It’s just too limited to mean I could leave my laptop home any more often than I already do.

Apple looks like it nailed its target of creating a truly distinct device that’s somewhere in between the phone and the laptop. And, for precisely that reason, it doesn’t seem like it would be all that useful to me.

No Comments

HFES 2009 Trip Report

Posted by jasonwong in good design, thoughts, training on October 26th, 2009

I have just returned from the 2009 Human Factors and Ergonomics Conference in San Antonio, TX. The entire conference was fantastic, with some great talks and discussion panels. I met a lot of new people and reconnected with friends, and I even have a couple of new research ideas.

The hotel we stayed at was fantastic – a four-diamond hotel at the government rate, and it was right on the Riverwalk.

hotel

Speaking of the Riverwalk, this was a large walking area right on the river filled with shops, restaurants, and a big mall. It was a really convenient way to get around.

riverwalk

The conference was good, but we were overshadowed by a bigger, apparently more important conference called GeoInt. How could I tell we were less important? Well, look at the welcome that GeoInt received versus the welcome given to HFES.

geoint_welcomhfes_welcome

As mentioned before, I met lots of new people, specifically at the Navy, but I also reconnected with friends. There was a big George Mason University alumni dinner on Wednesday night, featuring at least 30 people. I was one of the first ones there!

masondinner

San Antonio itself is beautiful, with real Texas landscaping and a wonderful cave only 30 minutes away that was fun to explore.

landscapecaves

And, of course, you could not go to San Antonio without seeing the Alamo.

alamo

Alas, the conference came to an end, and I flew back to Rhode Island. The Providence airport has little booths for advertisements from local businesses, and NUWC had something up! A little reminder of work.

nuwcairport

All in all, it was a fantastic conference, and I hope to go again next year.

No Comments

Intelligent design comes to neuroscience

Posted by jasonwong in neuroscience, thoughts on November 5th, 2008

Ugh. Propopents of Intelligent Design and turning their anti-evolution focus to the brain, according to an article from New Scientist. They claim that the brain and the mind are separate entities, and the mind is essentially analogous to the soul.

Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing “non-material neuroscience” movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism – the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial – in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul.

As with the rest of ID, the claims of ID supporters are completely untestable:

In June, James Porter Moreland, a professor at the Talbot School of Theology near Los Angeles and a Discovery Institute fellow, fanned the flames with Consciousness and the Existence of God. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about consciousness,” he writes, “and how it might contribute to evidence for the existence of God in light of metaphysical naturalism’s failure to provide a helpful explanation.” Non-materialist neuroscience provided him with this helpful explanation: since God “is” consciousness, “the theist has no need to explain how consciousness can come from materials bereft of it. Consciousness is there from the beginning.”

Ugh. The scientists argue that neuroscientists have yet to explain how consciousness arises from the brain. It’s a tough problem – we have trillions of neurons to account for. But the preceding paragraph proposes that we don’t have to study the problem anymore because God is our consciousness. Oh, that was easy. Patricia Churchland, a philosopher of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, put it best: “it is an argument from ignorance. The fact something isn’t currently explained doesn’t mean it will never be explained or that we need to completely change not only our neuroscience but our physics.”

One more snippet:

To properly support dualism, however, non-materialist neuroscientists must show the mind is something other than just a material brain. To do so, they look to some of their favourite experiments, such as research by Schwartz in the 1990s on people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for OCD. Then he had patients use “mindful attention” to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.

From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material. In fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology – the material brain is changing the material brain.

But William Dembski, one of ID’s founding fathers and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, praised Schwartz’s work as providing “theoretical support for the irreducibility of mind to brain”.

Ugh. Seriously, read the article. Obviously the New Scientist reporter has a major bias, but it almost makes me want to leaf through the book at the store and see how disgusted I can get.

No Comments

Information “overload” and the 24-hour News Channels

Posted by jasonwong in attention, thoughts on September 25th, 2008

So it’s politics season. With less than 6 weeks left until the election, more people (hopefully) start paying attention to the news. Most likely, they get their news from CNN or Fox, the 24-hour cable channels. They seem like a good idea – constant information that can be accessed at any time. There is no more having to stay up until 10 PM to get the news.

Leave it to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (in an Entertainment Weekly interview) to discuss the human factors of this information overload (emphasis mine):

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You guys regularly make a mockery of the 24-hour news networks. Do you see anything good about the format?

[snip]


STEPHEN COLBERT: There’s not more news now than there was when we were kids. There’s the same amount from when it was just Cronkite. And the easiest way to fill it is to have someone’s opinion on it. Then you have an opposite opinion, and then you have a mishmash of fact and opinion, and you leave it the least informed you can possibly be.

STEWART: We’ve got three financial networks on all day. The bottom falls out of the credit market, and they were all running around. On CNBC I saw a guy talking to eight people in [eight different onscreen] boxes, and they were all like, ”I don’t know!” It’d be like if Hurricane Ike hit, and you put on the Weather Channel, and they were yelling, ”I don’t know what the f— is going on! I’m getting wet and it’s windy and I don’t know why and it’s making me sad! Maybe the president could come down and put up some sort of windscreen?” By being on 24 hours a day, you begin to not be able to tell what’s salient anymore.

Not being able to tell what’s salient anymore. Amongst all the e-mail and blogs and 24-hour cable news chatter, we can’t tell what’s salient anymore. Googling the term “information overload” gets around 2 million hits, and it’s the new buzzword used to describe the phenomenon of people who can’t manage their e-mail, websites, or other information sources. This is new – within the past decade for most people – and they just can’t cope with it.

The computer scientists’ answer is, of course, technology based. Build better software that can help you condense the information. Better spam filters, RSS feeds to bring information to you, and the list goes on. Yes, the problem of information overload was created by software, so software should adapt. But what about the human? Information isn’t going away; people need to adapt to and learn how to manage this information.

Clay Shirky, a web 2.0 guru, recently gave a wonderful talk on information filtering called “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.” Think about that: it’s not information overload, but a failure of information filtering. People need to learn to better filter the information coming into their brains and decide how best to act on the most relevant stuff.

This gets into the heart of psychology: how do brains pay attention? How can we teach adults to use that knowledge in the real world, and how do we give children the skills to cope with it later? In fact, are the youth of today better equipped to handle all this information? What makes them so? Coping mechanisms? A different brain organization? This all falls into a research area that needs more effort: the psychology of information management. It’ll be huge.

1 Comment

Exquisite New York Times piece on teaching evolution

Posted by jasonwong in academia, thoughts on August 29th, 2008

The New York Times ran an article (website link, PDF version) this past Sunday profiling a Florida teacher grappling with the new science curriculum standards he helped create. Florida now requires teaching evolution as part of the biology curriculum.

The article illustrates how tough it is to teach evolution. Even teachers who strongly believe in evolution can’t just teach their students that “Evolution is science and the Bible is not.” All teachers must do what they can to have their students understand the material. This is harder than it sounds, as those students who are very religious may not only choose not to believe in evolution but also choose not to learn anything about it.

The teacher who is profiled in the article (David Campbell of Orange Park, FL) believes in evolution and truly cares that his students at least bring an open mind to the subject. As someone who has taught several classes, his story is inspiring. The content of my classes (cognitive psychology and introductory psychology) is certainly not as controversial as biology class is, but both classes do touch on evolution. I always wonder if anyone is rolling their eyes at me when I talk about it.

But Mr. Campbell truly epitomizes what teaching should be all about: even if students don’t believe in something, the goal is to get them to open their minds and try to understand it. Students should critically think about the material and integrate it into how they see the world.

That kind of thinking about teaching is music to my ears.

“Faith is not based on science,” Mr. Campbell said. “And science is not based on faith. I don’t expect you to ‘believe’ the scientific explanation of evolution that we’re going to talk about over the next few weeks.”
“But I do,” he added, “expect you to understand it.”

No Comments