| |
|
Thursday, September 01, 2005
|
|
I caved in on two things this past weekend, both at the Cingular Wireless store. First, I got my daughters cell phones. They both started high school today (yes, they're twins) and I want to be able to stay in contact with them now that they have a lot of independence.
And, I got a new phone for myself: the Audiovox SMT5600, aka the Scoble phone. Plus the unlimited data plan. Cingular made a bit of a mess of my calling plan and I had to go back the next day to get them to straighten it out (other complaints: their phone customer support has short hours and isn't open Sundays, and there are certain features, like international roaming, that they can't set up in the store and you have to call a special number to get activated. Also, an "unlimited data" plan doesn't include text messaging -- how dumb is that?) but it's all straightened out now. I really like the phone so far, though there's a lot to it and I'm not done getting it all customized yet. I particularly like being able to take people's pictures and save them as "caller id" pictures for when they call me. Overall, a cool phone.
9:52:25 PM 
|
|
And once again, it's become fashionable to beat up on PowerPoint as being the source of all evil. The San Jose Mercury News has a column that does exactly that. Oh, and Yale professor and information-design guru Edward Tufte (whom I have a lot of respect for) also pitches in.
C'mon folks, get serious. PowerPoint isn't evil. It lets people with good ideas do beautiful presentations, and it lets people with lousy ideas do beautiful presentations of their lousy ideas. It turns good communicators with poor graphic design skills into slightly better communicators, and it turns poor communicators with poor graphic design skills into slightly less bad communicators.
You could make the exact same argument about blogging software.
PowerPoint, and blogging software, are personal empowerment tools. They give people a voice and a platform to stand upon so their ideas can be heard. No piece of software can turn you into a good communicator, nor can it turn your bad ideas into good ones. But if you believe, as I do, that good ideas can come from anyone and deserve to be heard, then you WANT people to have access to PowerPoint, blogging tools, and all the other tools of personal expression.
And let's not forget: there were a lot of bad meetings and bad presentations on slides and overhead transparencies long before PowerPoint came along.
If you really want meetings to be better, teach your people to be better communicators. That's what I do. It isn't easy, but it pays great dividends.
9:46:04 PM
|
|
I've recently found two really cool screen savers, and I keep changing my mind about which one I want to use.
The first is MSN's. It does a FANTASTIC job of displaying photographs, plus aggregates RSS feeds and other news sources. My only critique: it isn't multi-moniton enabled.
The second: Star Alliance, the marketing consortium of airlines. their screen saver, which you can download here, shows you a real-time map of the current flights of member airlines. It's mesmerizing. (though also not multi-mon)
Enjoy.
9:31:43 PM
|
|
This is a really interesting article talking about a study by a Greek epidemiologist who surveyed the papers in his field and found that (according to his approach) more than half the papers published were later proven to be wrong.
One COULD take away fromt his that scientific researchers are unprofessional charlatans. But as someone who works in a research lab, I take away something entirely different:
Duh.
Doing good, publishable science that advances the field is very hard. Program committees and journal editorial boards that review papers can't reproduce the work when they review it; all they can do is see if it passes the sniff test, whether it (if true) sufficiently advances the state of the art, and whether it is presented in a clear and understandable manner.
But what they are doing is making sure that the work that gets published can be repeated and verified by others. Because that is at the heart of science: repeating and verifying, disproving, or improving its base of theory.
All scientific work is subject to context, constraints, biases (hidden or otherwise) and mistakes. Repitition is critical. You shouldn't believe anything subject solely to a single publication.
So of course a significnat percentage of papers turn out to be disproved, or faulty. That's part of the process.
Now with that said, there are certainly plenty of valid criticisms of mainstream scientific practice, and the author of the article points out many. One of the most common is to use sample sizes that are too small. My own adopted field, HCI (human-computer interaction) suffers mightily from this, and in fact there continues to be a raging debate within the community about how many people need to participate in a usability study before its results can be taken seriously as representative of a population of users. But of course the answer to that question, too, can be scientifically studied.
The moral: it isn't just the creationists who misunderstand science and the scientific process. It's broadly misunderstood, including by many scientists.
9:23:08 PM
|
|
|
© Copyright 2005 Kevin Schofield.
Last update: 10/4/2005; 3:19:18 PM.
|
|
|
