EclecticLip

Given the overriding importance of data presentation (read graphing skills) to the effectiveness of the modern “knowledge worker” it was decided that the book club would cover a book on that very subject.

Stephen Few’s Show Me The Numbers was chosen after a review of reviews (a meta-review?) on Amazon, which seemed to suggest that Edward Tufte (the giant of the field) might not be the best read for business-centric readers tied to Microsoft Excel.  Key points that stood out from the rest of the text included the “4 chunk rule” (describing the maximum limit of themes or aggregations of data people can process at a time) and the fact that when it comes to graphs, it’s the shape of the data that counts.  Not the particular values.  (If the values are critical… the data should be presented as a table!)

This review is the first (thus far at least) to be summarized in two files — a Word document and a PowerPoint slide deck — due to the benefit not just of explaining what the text was saying, but showing it visually as well.

As always, if you find the review to be useful, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

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Show Me The Numbers (summary)

Show Me The Numbers (PPT)

[originally written July 28.  Posted Nov 18.] 

While stuck, iPodless, in a near-interminable supermarket lineup the other week, I swallowed my dignity and perused the celebrity magazines near the cash register.  And you know what?  They’re actually pretty good!  While I’m veering into fiction, the fashionista in line behind me complimented me on my Vibram Five Finger shoes — the first footwear I ever bought to make a fashion misstatement.  I’m planning to take casual Fridays to the next level. 

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Much has been made of emergence recently — how complex systems develop / exhibit behaviours based on the interaction of simpler individual components.  An example might be how extraordinarily complex economies can develop, through the interaction of thousands or millions of individual “agents” in an economy, buying or selling as per their individual whims.

It occurred to me that the phases of nature (solid, liquid, gas, plasma — or “earth”, “water”, air”, “fire” for any Aristotelian holdouts) are themselves emergent phenomena. 

An individual molecule can’t be solid or liquid: these stuctures require the coming-together of a bunch of molecules, either into a lattice structure (solid) or a continuous-but-not-as-ordered one (liquid). 

Gases consist of molecules floating about freely (unbonded and unconstrained to each other) but if you only had a single molecule in a vacuum… there would be a distinct lack of other atoms by which to assess which phase it belongs to.

And since plasmas are gases where some fraction of molecules are ionically charged… i imagine you need a multiple number of molecules to assess whether they could be termed a plasma or not.  (If a lone molecule was present, and it was charged, one would presumably call it an ion, not a plasma.)

I’ll check in with a physics professor on this topic.  Hopefully I’m correct. 

Over the months, one of the themes for book club selections has been self-knowledge; a tradition that goes back to the “Know Thyself” carved into the side of the Temple of the Oracle of Delphi (and surely earlier still).  As a side note, “Nothing in Excess” (the old golden mean of Aristotle) and somewhat more verbose “Make a Pledge and Mischief is Nigh” were also apparently engraved into the structure.

Given the interest in self-knowledge, Gerd Gigerenzer’s book Gut Feelings — a primary source for Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink — was a natural fit.  Gigerenzer’s data supports the idea that less is more, an idea with enormous implications when it comes to data analysis for the modern researcher / knowledge worker.

As always, if you enjoy the book review, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

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Gut Feelings - summary 

I recently had a chance to catch up on some podcasts.  (Much like my “not-yet-read books” bookshelf, I’ve got many a megabite of unheard podcasts on my hard drive.)  This one was a CBC Ideas episode called The Moral of the Story Is; it’s dated March 22 2010.  It starts off with Bertrand Russell’s remark that:

“Most of the greatest evil that man has inflicted upon man comes throuhg people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.”

Partway through, the narrator interviews one Dr. Robert Burton, a neurologist at Mount Zion University of California Hospital.  At about the twenty-minute mark, he suggests that the brain’s reward system activates, when one has the sense of being right — in the same way it activates when people smoke, drink, use drugs, or engage in other addictive behaviours.  Basically, feeling indignant gives you an upswell of (bio)chemical pleasure.

At about 22 minutes, there’s a wonderful exchange:

Narrator: are you suggesting Bill O’Reilly is some sort of junkie, in a way?

Burton:  I’m not suggesting.

This rings true for me.  I’ve experienced the intoxicating sense of indignant righteousness when arguing with people who were “clearly wrong”.  Nowadays, I try to maintain an unrippled calm; and temper any anger with humour.  My media habits reflect this: I used to enjoy listening to American progressive talk radio, but now tend to find it agitating, again on account of the subsurface exasperation.  Of course, that’s nothing compared to what relatively little I’ve experienced of its conservative cousin.  I prefer The Daily Show, Colbert Report and Bill Maher, as their jeremiads are leavened with humour.  Our modern jesters, I suppose.

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While Dawkins maintains his composure here, he carries a lot of anger — indignation — towards the shallower strands of various religion traditions.  If memory serves, he gives Buddhism a pass in The God Delusion; his real problem is with literalism in the Abrahamic faiths, and Christian fundamentalism in particular.  Brutish and backwards as they may be, they’re not worth tripping into addictive indignation over.  Surely other approaches are better.

(Originally written June 5.  Posted July 9)

Kid-oriented movie “Marmaduke” opens this weekend, with Owen Wilson voicing the title canine and the surprisingly-not-a-one-hit-wonder Christopher Mintz-Plasse (of “McLovin” fame) also pitching in a voiceover.  I suppose Marmaduke is to Scooby Doo, what Heathcliff is to Garfield, and Bing is to Google — the overwhelmingly overshadowed runner-up in its category.

The movie also features, in the role of “Male Executive“, the Hollywood debut of Ashley Liu, a former work colleague.  Who did the modern equivalent of running away to join the circus, quitting his day job to pursue a full-time career in the fine arts.    He was doubly happy to have snagged the role, because the spec didn’t call for an Asian character.  (Lots of non-Caucasian actors have difficulty getting roles which aren’t ethnic-specific.)

Given that in the summer movie schedule, blockbusters drop every week, I didn’t think I’d have time to arrange a teambuilding movie night.  Nor did I think that many co-workers would want to pay $12 to sit through what appears to be a movie really, really aimed at kids: on Rotten Tomatoes, it gets an 11% rating, just squeaking above Ashton Kutcher / Katherine Heigl vehicle “Killers” with its 6%.  (And Killers was so bad, they didn’t even have previews, in an attempt to contain their losses!)

But there you go — to see a movie with a fuel cell tie-in which doesn’t involve disaster (Apollo 13), explosions (Terminator 3), George Lucas-penned dialogue (Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones), or corporate logo placement (”I, Robot”)…  you can go see Marmaduke. 

Oh - and to follow on the titular promise of this email, Ashley made his acting debut in a local theatre production of Sex in Vancouver, a transposition of a play called Sex in Seattle, itself a reimagining of what Sex and the City would be like if it was a bunch of (East) Asian women’s lives in the Starbucksian Pacific Northwest. 

Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm was chosen as the seventh book for the book club.  I’d come across it in an undergraduate course, and thought its treatment of the technology adoption lifecycle was relevant in light of the book club members being in the tech sector.

Moore’s insight was that, for disruptive innovations, there was a large gap — the titular “chasm” — between innovators and early adopters.  To mangle my metaphors in the manner of Thomas Friedman, many a would-be tech titan has shipwrecked itself trying to cross the chasm to the Shangri-La of profitability.

As usual, if you consider the review useful, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book — or by enlisting his consultancy’s services. 

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Crossing the chasm - summary

James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore’s public-relations handbook Do The Right Thing was the fifth volume covered in the book club.  The book’s selection was part of an effort to broaden the team’s exposure to ideas not generally covered in engineering education or their day-to-day work. 

The book was covered in late 2009.  Given that the Olympics would descend on Vancouver a few short months later, a book on public relations seemed topical.

In the interest of disclosure, I should note that I’ve had the pleasure of corresponding with both authors.  Given that I’m concerned about the framing of environmental issues, and not averse to sending emails to complete strangers, and given that Hoggan & Associates is a leading Vancouver PR firm with an interest in environmental issues, it was probably inevitable our paths would cross.

As usual, if you consider the review useful, please consider supporting the authors by purchasing the book.

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Do The Right Thing - summary

(Originally written April 19; posted May 12) 

The unpronounceable Icelandic volcano (”Eyjafjallajokull”) that recently disrupted air travellers — including my then-Dubai-bound brother — is small enough that it probably won’t have a cooling impact on the global climate, like other volcanoes.

As such, 2010 remains on-track to exceed 1998 as the hottest year on record based on satellite measurements, as per these charts.  1998 was particularly hot on account of that year having a strong El Nino (2010 in contrast has a moderate El Nino). 

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A colleague told me recently that FORTRAN still finds strong use in academia — outside of computer sciences, that is.  (I can only attest that FORTRAN was being used by chemical engineering professors in the late 1990’s at UBC.)

Evidently, FORTRAN was the language that computer-savvy professors in the 1960’s and 1970’s used for their work.  In the 1980’s and 1990’s, enough young professors building on their predecessors’ work, found it easiest to continue using FORTRAN.  With the result that FORTRAN still finds considerable use in academic circles.  Or, so says my anonymous source with the unverified information. 

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If true, there would be strong parallels with Latin and Sanskrit.  (Technically the closest parallel might be Proto-Indo-European, but franky, “FORTRAN - the Proto-Indo-European of computer languages” sounds ridiculous.)

Latin and Sanskrit were languages that survived in academic / “elite” circles, long after they had been supplanted by a myriad of vernacular languages in everyday use.  And outside academia, FORTRAN must have the programming-language-equivalent market share of, like, the Opera browser.  Or Netscape Navigator (I remember when you were cool!).  See Wiki here.