March's Reading

Ooh aaaah eeee oooo ummm. Not much to report on the reading front. Still plugging away at the same non fiction. Started on Rawls' A Theory of Justice, which is a course text. I finished the Malazan Book of the Fallen, a journey (of 3.5 million words) that felt strangely less emotional than I was expecting. Definitely worth a read if you're feeling up to diving into a large and complex fantasy series.

Next up was David Weber's Out of the Dark, which was a bit.. meh. An interesting idea which didn't really develop until towards the end. This is fine itself, but I didn't find the rest of the book to be particularly noteworthy (unless if you like hearing about different models of guns that is). I picked up the book expecting the 'twist' from the start because it was given away by the description on Amazon. Bah humbug. If you want to try some Weber give his Starfire books a go.

Having a Fitt

Look at these poor tiny little buttons. What have Adobe's users done to deserve such tiny little things when there is no apparent need for them? According to Fitts's Law speed to get intercept an interaction area is a function of distance and target size. Or in other words, small buttons are difficult to get to and click, especially if they're far away. I'm not sure why, given the huge amount of available screen space here they have opted for small buttons.

February's reading...

Fiction
Dust of Dreams, book 9 of the Malazan Book of the Fallen. Yup, I'm slowly trawling through the series still and getting a big backlog of books waiting to be read.

Philosophy
I'm currently reading A Very Short Introduction: The Philosophy of Science. I 'do' science at work, and am generally interested in science. I like to think that I'm good at it and understand the principles, but somewhere along the way I don't think I've ever been explicitly taught the underlying philosophy and about what chaps like Popper and Kuhn have been talking about. Maybe I slipped through the cracks, maybe it just isn't generally taught any longer, maybe my university level education hasn't been sufficiently sciencey, or maybe they don't try to squeeze all that stuff into your brain until you get around to doing an MPhil.


HCI
More of a reference text this one, but I picked up a copy of Experimental Design and Analysis for Psychology that was on sale at Oxford University Press. 

Stay on target... (the task artefact cycle and remaining focussed on the task)

Two useful things to keep in mind when working in HCI (and more generally when considering systems); the task-artefact cycle, and remembering not to lose sight of the task by becoming overly focused on the current (or to be) tools.

The task-artefact cycle is one of those "obvious once it has been pointed out" things. Quite simply you have a given task, and a decision is made to change/support the task by introduce new or improved tools. Once the new tools are introduced they change the task. This is an obvious statement as it reflects the intended goal of introducing new tools. There are some subtleties involved however. The task may not have changed in the intended way, there may be secondary effects and repercussions elsewhere within a complex socio-technical system, and the task may have been radically altered. Once a new tool has been introduced a task should be re-evaluated (and it is generally useful to measure the effect of an intervention). Of course this isn't always practical and a pragmatic approach needs to be taken scaled to the importance of the task and the scale of the change. The key message here is that more than you anticipated may have changed. Some examples:

• (from Freakanomics) People give blood for free. Giving blood is a Good Thing (tm) to do, and saves lives. In a bid to encourage more giving of blood They decided to provide a modest incentive. Blood giving rates dropped, because an altruistic activity to help others had changed to an mildly unpleasant and inconvenient paid-for activity that wasn't (generally) worth the reimbursement. An interesting example of mentally framing an activity.
• (partly based on hazy memories of listening to Radio 4) In the UK in the last few years sperm donation underwent some procedural changes. Details of the donors became more available, and eventual offspring from the donation now had a 'right' to be able to find out how their paternal genetic donor was. This may have extended to being able to make contact with dear ol' gene-sire. Sperm donation rates crashed. Even before this change was implemented I was really surprised that They didn't seem to see this one coming. I can only guess that there was a bit of a user-centred design failure in that They a) failed to take donors as a human component of the system into account, b) they failed to carry out an adequate information gathering exercise, or c) one way or another they decided to just push on with it anyway (which frequently happens when there is already a Plan, and High Ups Want It To Happen (note I'm not suggested this was the case here)).
• A frequent ideal for providing user-aids is to automate part of a task to free the human up to focus on the 'high level' stuff, e.g. letting designers be creative. One potential side repercussion of this is that the more 'mundane' tasks may be an important component of assisting the person in thinking through a problem, or providing juniors with critical experience.
• Writing text with modern word processing tools can potentially be described as being radically different. It is now far easier to reuse material from drafts, to rearrange text, to collaborate on the same document, create and disseminate documents.
• Calculators and spell checkers: an exercise for the reader

A frequent problem I encounter in HCI is that people get overly focused on the tools rather than the task. The task of an employee becomes to operate software, and various stakeholders lose sight of what the employee actually needs to do. Another common problem is what I call "serving the machine" where work becomes more about process and meeting the requirements of a tool. This can become more and more bizarre as corporate identity fades or layers of other tools and procedures are put in place. Serving the machine can become more and more important, even if the original reasons why something needs to be done have been forgotten, or rendered irrelevant. In a similar vein an organisation can be ruled by unhelpful metrics, simply because that is the metric that their system gives them, and hey here are some numbers or a graph and they must be important, right? Another case is when a set of metrics are provided on a dashboard results in everything else being ignored or no longer part of the corporate ontology.

I need a "Serving/Worship the Machine" mug/tshirt/banner/whatever to wave at stakeholders when they lose sight of the underlying task (or *mumblemumble* timesheets *mumble* days in advance *mumble* all because the report is generated too early *mumble*). 

I'd like to think this topic could be extended to create a framework of tool use and task actions that will Help Save The World, but where would I find the time?

Moral Reasoning

At work I'm just finishing up a study about moral reasoning. What we've been doing is based on Kholberg's moral reasoning framework. I won't go into too much detail as better explanations of the moral reasoning framework can be found on the Internet. In short form the framework is a model of our our moral reasoning develops, moving through up to a potential of six stages split into three levels.

As wee monsters (aka the very young) we are operating at 'pre-conventional' morality, and have not yet obtained the standard level of moral reasoning. At this stage of moral reasoning we have an 'obedience and punishment' orientation, and move onto 'individualism and exchange'. An example of moral reasoning (as distinct from moral attitudes) at this stage is that of keeping promises on the basis that being known to keep promises allows future exchanges of promises. Someone reasoning at this stage would see nothing wrong with reneging on a promise if they believed that they would not be found out. Moral reasoning at the preconventional level is focused on Personal Interest.

Moving on from the pre-conventional stages most people develop to the, yes you guessed it, the 'conventional' stages. These stages appear to be tradition focused, norm-enforcing, and to a large part culturally-aspected. The value of the reasoning here then is based in part on our cultural laws, norms, and concept of being and the good. Most people end up at the conventional stage, and usually develop to stage 4 (warning hazy recollection of the numbers ahead) around age 14-21. Stage 3 reasoning is focused on positive personal relationships. Stage 4 reasoning is focused on maintaining social order. A worthwhile digression at this point; as development occurs through the stages the theory is that the previous stages are integrated into our reasoning, and are not simply rejected.

Postconventional reasoning focuses on broader and deeper issues. Stage 5 reasoning asks "What is this social order that we're maintaining? What do we want from it? What should it be? How can it serve the people?". Stage 5 reasoning could be argued to be the impetus for democracy (though again I would imagine this is culturally aspected; if citizens were universally content why question the social order?). Stage 6 reasoning focuses on universality and underlying principles. What is the good? How can we achieve it? How do we reason about these things? What principles should we adopt and why?

Postconventional reasoning is what philosophers should be aiming for, indeed what much of philosophy is about (ramble: this framework could plausibly be generalised to a reasoning framework). So far the evidence is on the side of the Philosophers; the DIT test (which is a measure of moral reasoning and Kholbergian-based) uses political scientists and philosophers as the upper anchor for the measure because of their performance on the DIT.

So... how is this topical?

The West, and to an extent the rest of the world through the UN Declaration of Human Rights, can be said to operate a theory of rights as the (or a) underlying principle of determining the good. Rights can be considered as the STOP signs for policy and justice. [Sweeping musing statement that will not be supported alert] Utilitarianism and the Kantian categorical imperative are compelling ways of viewing justice, but are incomplete of themselves and lead to undesirable outcomes if followed dogmatically. (Derek Parfit has a handy phrase, which sadly eludes me at this point, for one example of utilitarianism taken too far.) Rights help inform policy as to what should be supported, but also to prevent utilitarianist policy going to far. Rights of course can be ill-conceived just as they can be well founded.

A conflict of Rights is topical in the news at the moment. What is the most balanced view to take? What is the most right? Should we recognise all of the accorded Rights? Are some of them being 'merely' infringed as opposed to violated? A more worrying question arises; to what extent do the general public recognise that just because you don't like something doesn't mean it isn't right, that supporting the Rights of to ensure a just society involves some degree of 'pain' or 'cost'. What is right isn't the same as what is good for you. This is preconventional moral reasoning and is internally focused. What is right isn't the same as how we've always done it or things that don't offend me or things that don't inconvenience me. Hanging on to the social rules of the past for comfort or to preserve a personally beneficial status quo isn't moral (or at least isn't high up the scale of moral reasoning). Of course it should also be said that we shouldn't abandon the past simply because it is the past, or because something shiny and new has come along, or for some misplaced political correctness, or even to give in to the tyranny of the majority (hence the need for something like Rights). Ideas should be assessed neutrally. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

I'd like to write (ramble) more, but I've already thrown up enough views without enough support and I'm overdue a trip to the supermarket.

This blog post was composed to the sound of Metallica being played on banjos. True story.

Uncultured Swine

Elster's Marxism, Functionalism and Game Theory criticises functional explanations, and has an interesting summary of scientific explanations. Functional explanations are an 'objective teleology'; they postulate a purpose without a purposive actor. That is, functionalist explanations lack a causative mechanism. A tiger has stripes in order to hide better. We have eyes in order to see. The sun is in the sky so that we can see. In the case of the form of life Darwin provided us with the causal mechanism to explain how traits are gained; random mutation. Heritability and selection pressures then act somewhat like a feedback loop, at which point we can talk with our functionalist hats on.

Elster gives three main types of explanation: the causal, the functional, and the intentional. The sciences use causal explanations (which is part of what makes it science..), and the physical sciences use it exclusively. Biological sciences also use functional explanations, but this is done within the framework of the theory of evolution which provides the causal mechanism, the functional interpretation explains the why based on the utility of the attribute. Elster goes on to say that social sciences' use of intentional explanations, and the 'proper' approach should be causal-intentional, with nary a hint of functionalism.

Elster critiques Marxism for its extensive use of functionalist explanations of (capitalist) society. One part of the text that tickled me was a restatement of Bourdieu's assertion that when intellectuals play around with language and even deliberately violate the rules of grammar, that this is a 'strategy designed to exclude the petty-bourgeois would-be intellectuals'. This is a functionalist explanation that does indeed give a rationale for the observed behaviour (even if not a very good one). Elster suggests that this argument is a 'theoretical analgue of envy - arising when our "factual inability to acquire a good is wrongly interpreted as a positive action against a desire"'. Later Elster goes on to quote poetry from Goethe via Marx, so standing out like an inscrutable rhino grazing in the work canteen are four lines of German poetry in the middle of a Philosophy text. Is Elster trying to exclude me? Is my mild annoyance merely a sign of my envious regard of Elster? Or am I merely an uncultured swine?

January's reading..

Fiction
Toll The Hounds, book 8 of the Malazan Book of the Fallen. This is my current favourite fantasy series and I'm part way through reading the series again in anticipation of the release of book 10 in February. Large, weighty, rambling, complex, jarring, and endearing. The biggest let down is that I don't know anyone else reading the series, and the series is difficult to get into as the first book isn't as good and can be a bit of a confusing slog at times. It's definitely worth the effort of getting through.

HCI
I'm just finishing up Colin Ware's Visual Thinking for Design. This book provides some of the theory and science behind our our visual processing works, and then goes on to provide advice on how to support visual cognitive tasks, sketch prototyping, and various other bits and pieces including a dictionary of visual relationships.

Philosophy
Kymlica's Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction covers utilitarianism, liberal equality, libertarianism, Marxism, communitarianism, citizenship theory, multiculturalism, and feminism. If you're not sure what all of these things are, then this may be the book for you. By providing a grounding in these areas this book has helped to clarify my thinking, and helped me to spot the arguments and underpinnings behind many current political issues.


I'm also growing a little more aware of political issues, and slowly coming around to the notion that as much as I'm not particularly interested in taking part in political life (beyond voting etc) that perhaps I can't rely on others to be. Though the mainstream in the UK is (more or less) moderate and sensible, there are pressure groups and the like that wield disproportionate influence due to their use of the media, organised responses to consultations, etc.