Perhaps the most fun entries to write are about awful sites, and here's a real winner, courtesy of BoingBoing. The site is by the British government, and it's trying to discourage knife violence. But the site has two major failings: it's all in Flash, and it has enough stupid lawyerly language to discourage a Supreme Court justice from reading the site. The BoingBoing article is here. The awful site is here.
New Scientist is reporting a Microsoft patent application for monitoring a test subject with an EEG during usability testing, so that testers can see how people really react, instead of relying on second-hand information like behaviors or think-aloud protocols. Apparently Microsoft believes it has a way to separate out the dozens of noisy signals from the ones they believe relate to user responses. Are all the rest of us out of work now?
An article in Slate points out that Iraqi jihadists are every bit as clever about creating IEDs as the Viet Cong ever were, but with vastly updated technological help. To counter the problem, the military has come up with seemingly workable ideas, such as a drone lead vehicle in a convoy that could be driven from the back, but which makes the virtual drivers carsick, door armor so heavy it can't be moved, and images so detailed that the human eye despairs of picking out field from background. The article says quite plainly
The enemy's simple technology suits human limits; our complex technology defies them. Our crazy menu of jammers confused our troops, making them think they were jamming the right frequencies when they weren't. Our tutorials in wave propagation flummoxed them. When the $800,000 IED neutralizer flunked real-world tests, the company that built it blamed operator error, denying that the machine was "a failure in any way." But if humans can't operate your machine, your machine is a failure.
Researchers at the University of Washington have built a "joystick" that works entirely with basic vocal sounds. Vowel sounds move the cursor in various directions, while consonants like "k" and "ch" simulate clicks and releasing the mouse button. Saying the sounds louder moves the cursor faster.
Existing joysticks for the disabled require a stick in the mouth, which is tiring and interferes with speech, or head or eye tracking, which is hard to do properly. The inventors say that they elected not to use full voice recognition because it was far less efficient. That makes sense to me - syllables are much shorter and universal than whole words or phrases, and they can't be misinterpreted as easily.
I see double standards everywhere, I guess. It's not so much a moral failing as a human condition. Take file sharing and offshoring. Proponents of free file sharing like Slashdot and BoingBoing speak for a huge number of users and techies who dismiss the entertainment industry's hissy fits over the practice with replies like "Get used to it", "Globalization has made your old business model obsolete", and "File sharing opens up the market with more diversity".
My personal take on file sharing is that is indeed a new game that threatens the business model of the choke point that entertainment companies have profited from for more than a century. It's never safe to dismiss the creative energies of millions of users who want to circumvent the old restrictions on their pleasure. Getting around "The Man" is also more a human condition than a moral failing. The simple fact for the entertainment moguls is that file sharing exists and can't be effectively stopped, so they will indeed have to learn how to live with it. Further, file sharing has begun to live up to its potential as a redistributor of talent, a true exercise in globally democratic artistry.
But then there's B side of the technological album - offshoring. The same globalization and foreign talent development that opened up music and movies has also enabled engineers and developers in Eastern Europe, Asia, and other places to cater to the markets of America. I've heard the anecdotes about how foreign code is often bug-ridden and flaky, but so is much of American code. Further, the quality of the code continues to rise as foreign programmers become university-trained. Only a fraction of the toys from China are lead-coated, and only a fraction of the code from India is trash. We can't confuse media hype with reality.
I have to admit to being conflicted about offshoring. As jobs drift away from Americans, even in small percentages, the net effect is to make talented high schools pause at the door to computer science and engineering. Both the now-historical dot-bomb and current tales of offshoring have combined to devastate computer-related programs in higher education all over the country. We're losing a generation. Offshoring itself doesn't scare me, but its reputation does.
On the other hand, the egalitarian meritocrat within me can't help but marvel at what the other nations on Earth can accomplish with some money and markets. A recent review of a Korean Kia model, for example, compared it favorably with a Lexus, and for half the price. India's Bollywood is now producing movies that can compete in quality with many indies in America. "Dil Se", a Bollywood film that broke into the UK top ten, features an energetic crowd dance on the top of a moving train. Why not put more money and projects into these people's hands? If technology is an unstoppable force for globalization, so is commerce. If we can't stop offshoring because it works, we have to change our business model, don't we? We need to stop bemoaning it and get on with doing whatever we find we can do best.
This curtain control is said to be an example of truly bad design. As the cutline says:
There is no natural mapping between the buttons and their functions. I went through quite a bit of trial & error before figuring it out. And the problem is that even once you figure it out, it's not very logical.But one commentator responded that
From the printing around the buttons,. it looks pretty clear... The right column is for the solid curtains and the left column for the sheer curtains. The top button in either column opens the curtains, the middle button stops them while opening or closing, and the bottom button closes them.This seems reasonable only after you've studied the panel for a while. In low light, in poor position, or if an old person is looking at it, the design is still bad, in my opinion. Most Americans, at least, tend to think of controls being arranged in vertical clusters, not columns. Maybe they could use some icons to improve effectiveness, or have two controls. Even better is to just use the old-style rods that you pull to open or close drapes. One big plus to the rod approach is that the visually impaired can figure it out, while the electric control doesn't even have a braille equivalent for its labels. Why overcomplicate things?
