11.20.08
Posted in Art, Random thoughts at 10:52 am by ducky
A while back, I wrote about LOLcats being a stand-in for ethnic groups, allowing us the humour of shared stereotypes but without having to saddle an ethnic group with those stereotypes.
Jay Dixit has a more expansive, romantic take on it: LOLcats are stand-ins for humans in all their glory and pathos. By being stand-ins, they are less emotionally dangerous:
By articulating profound feelings through cats and marine mammals speaking garbled English, we’re able to shroud genuine emotions in pseudo-irony — which means those animals can evoke deeper emotions without fear of mockery or cheapness.
I’ll put it more simply: humour is pain at a distance. Using cats (or dogs or walruses) lets us put even more distance between us and the pain. We can thus tolerate situations in LOLcats that would be too painful if it were about humans.
Hmm, I wonder if this is why animated cartoons so frequently starred animals (e.g. Mickey Mouse, Roadrunner, Foghorn Leghorn)…
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11.19.08
Posted in Email at 8:01 pm by ducky
I spoke a while back with Jason Gallic, the Product Marketing Manager for Email Center Pro. They have a product designed for improving email-based customer service, including automatic reply templates.
Fourteen years ago, I got to use a webmail system @ATS, developed for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications by the talented Ben Johnson. (Ben? Email me!) @ATS let you set up filters that would suggest a response if the condition you specified was met. When you read a message, after the message at the bottom, there would be a few checkboxes next to titles of suggested responses. I had the option of selecting any or none of the checkboxes, then pressing either a “Send as is” button or “Edit response” button. @ATS would include the responses that I checked, and send/let me edit it.
For example, I had one filter set up to suggest the “Undergraduate admissions” answer if the word “admissions” was in the body of the message. I had another filter which suggested the “Graduate admissions answer” if the word “admissions” was in the body of the message. By reading the message, I could sometimes tell if they were interested in graduate or undergraduate admissions, in which case I would click the appropriate box and send it on. Sometimes I couldn’t tell, so I would click both boxes and send it on. Sometimes I wanted to add a little extra information that I happened to know — if, for example, they asked about who would be a good advisor for research on hydrogen embrittlement in high-carbon steels — I would check the “graduate admissions” box and add the additional information before sending it on.
I ranted to Jason about how useful auto-suggest is; we’ll see if he manages to get it into his product.
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11.05.08
Posted in Politics at 5:03 pm by ducky
In his post today, Scott Rosenberg suggests that there are people who blame the blogosphere for how intensely nasty and partisan our political world is right now.
Excuse me????
Partisan nastiness has been going on far longer than people have been blogging. The Web was pretty well unknown during Clinton’s first term, and in its infancy during the second. I seem to recall a whole lot of partisan bickering back then.
I don’t think that divisiveness is due to the Web, I believe that it’s due to conservatives.
That’s a little hard for me to write because I want to be fair. But I really think it is true.
I recently read an article on research in morality that points up values differences between liberals and conservatives. One thing that researchers found was that liberals put a much higher value on fairness than on group loyalty, while conservatives value them about equally. This research suggests that a liberal is more likely to sacrifice group loyalty in the name of fairness than a conservative, e.g. to help a conservative do the work to send in an absentee ballot. This research suggests conservative is more likely to toe the party line, even if he/she doesn’t believe in it.
When Palin was insinuating that Barack Obama wasn’t a “real” American, she was exploiting her white audiences’ high value on group loyalty. By making it look like Obama had a different in-group, Palin made her audience worry that they might end up as the out-group.
(Being a member of an out-group might be particularly scary if you have yourself treated out-groups unfairly. I’m just sayin’.)
I was totally unconcerned about being in Obama’s out-group. You would think that I, a 45-year old, hot, white woman with an upper Midwest accent, who lives above the 48th parallel, might identify more strongly with Sarah Palin. However, I am a liberal, and I believe that Obama is a liberal. As such, I absolutely believe he will be fair. I absolutely do not believe that Palin will be fair. And I think that is part of her appeal to her base.
(P.S. I was kidding about being hot.)
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Posted in Canadian life, Family, Politics at 1:45 pm by ducky
Several people have asked me, “So are you and Jim moving back to California now?”
The answer is “No, not yet. Maybe never.”
I had six reasons to move to Canada:
- I was devastated that my fellow Americans could elect G.W. Bush for a second term. That said to me that my fellow Americans and I were not at all on the same page, and that maybe I didn’t belong in the US.
- I was upset at how my government shredded civil liberties for both citizens (e.g., illegal wiretapping) and non-citizens (e.g., torture and abuse).
- I was unnerved by an almost willful neglect/disinterest in some major, fundamental structural problems in the US and Californian economies. In particular, the US has been, as Lloyd Bentsen famously put it in a 1988 VP debate, been “writing hot checks” for a very long time: spending a lot but not paying enough in taxes to support those costs.
- UBC was more nurturing than Stanford, my other choice for grad school.
- We have lots of relatives close to Vancouver, just across the border in Bellingham.
- Canada’s health system is not tied to employment. It is highly likely that we will, at some point, earning money but not be employed. Living in Canada, that’s not a problem. (Like right now. I’m looking for work and Jim is consulting.) Living in the US, that might be a problem.
The fact that my compatriots turned out in such droves for Obama lessens the feeling that I am out of step with the rest of America. I was shocked and appalled by the divisive tactics used by the McCain/Palin campaign, but enormously heartened at the number of Republicans who have publicly voiced being likewise shocked and appalled. So Obama’s election knocks off #1 pretty well.
I have finished my graduate degree, so #4 is off the list.
Our families are still in Bellingham. We could move to Seattle and be slightly closer to our families, but California would be quite a bit farther away. So #5 favours Vancouver or Seattle, but still disfavours California.
I think Obama will probably make #2 better. Issuing an executive order banning torture at one minute past noon on Jan 20, 2009 would be a good start, but to see how he does on #2, I’ll have to see him govern.
Likewise, on #3, I won’t know if he will make things better until I see him govern. However, it’s not likely that he will be able to avoid “hot checks” in his term because of the horrible horrible financial problems. He also can’t do much about California’s problems due to Prop 13.
There are more factors to consider now.
Ducky Watching Election Returns
- I like many things about Canada and Vancouver.
- I have friends here. (It was really nice to watch the election last night surrounded by a bunch of friends!)
- It is really cool to live in the heart of downtown. We are able to walk to everything (so much so that we only use our car about twice per month).
- I like, in theory, that there is skiing so close. We have season passes this year to a mountain that we can see from our apartment. It takes about 30 minutes to drive there.
- By and large, Canadian government services have far better customer service than in California. It takes me about twenty minutes to renew my Social Insurance Number (like a Social Security Number in the US). It took me about fifteen minutes to move my driver’s license to BC.
- It is not a perfect fit.
- In particular, I still have ambitions to change the world, while I think Vancouver puts more value on having fun. I’m trying to get the “fun” attitude, but it’s swimming upstream for me. (Hopefully the ski passes this winter will help!) Silicon Valley is all about changing the world, and so that is a huge magnet attracting me south.
- I don’t like maple syrup, I have never played hockey, and I thought Anne of Green Gables was a boring book. I did not spend many years steeped in the Canadian cultural stew, absorbing the Canadian value system, shared experiences, and etiquette. I will never be fully Canadian. (At the same time, the longer I stay in Canada, the less time I spend in the American cultural stew; the less American I become.)
- Somewhat to my surprise, I discovered that I still love my country.
- I am growing to love Canada.
- I haven’t found a job yet.
So. Will I return to the ever return to the US? To California? I’m not sure.
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Posted in Canadian life, Gay rights, Politics at 11:39 am by ducky
To all my GLBT friends in California who want to live somewhere that respects them, there’s always Canada.
Canada wants immigrants. Here’s the funny version; here’s the serious version.
Do think carefully, however. Canada is not the US. There are some
subtle but important differences in the culture, outlook, and
priorities. They are not better or worse in one country or the other,
they are different. Exceptions: it is easier to shop in the US and the
Canadian governments have better customer service.
If you are thinking about emigrating to British Columbia, I’d be happy to talk to you about it.
Update: Here’s a blog post by an American lesbian talking about what it’s like to live in a country where she and her partner are fully completely legally married.
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Posted in Gay rights, Politics at 11:20 am by ducky
It’s looking like California’s Prop 8 is going to pass, and that’s a very sad thing.
However, I think it was far, FAR more important that Obama get elected than that Prop 8 fail. If McCain/Palin had won, we would have seen a significant shift in the Supreme Court to the right. We could have kissed goodbye to any hopes of getting marriage equality through the Supreme Court for twenty-five or thirty years.
With Obama in office, it will probably stay roughly the same in liberal/conservative makeup, but get younger. I expect that we will now see a federal Supreme Court case in five to ten years about marriage equality. And we will win that one — not just for California, but for everybody.
There is no good legal argument against marriage equality. Let me repeat that: there is no good legal argument against marriage equality. The arguments are emotional or religious, not rational. The rational arguments — the one on which our legal system is founded — say that citizens get equal protection under the law. It’s in the Constitution. It’s fundamental to the constitution. So unless the SCOTUS has people whose judgement is influenced by religion or emotion, we will win that fight. (This will be especially true after five or ten more years of seeing same-sex marriages function in Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut, Canada, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Israel, and South Africa without destroying the fabric of society.)
So yes, it is disappointing. It would have been nice to put this issue to rest in California forever. However, it is not dead. We will overcome.
(Update: Andrew Sullivan has a similar post, written with eloquence.)
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11.04.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:10 pm by ducky
I nominate fivethirtyeight.com for a Pulitzer Prize for their absolutely outstanding electoral poll coverage.
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Posted in Politics at 10:59 pm by ducky
President Barack Obama.
Yay! Thank you, America!
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11.03.08
Posted in Politics at 10:50 am by ducky
Andrew Sullivan wrote an endorsement of Barack Obama that made me cry. It wasn’t that his prose was so poetic that I got a form of Stendhal Syndrome. It wasn’t that he inspired me. It was that he reminded me, in clear and vivid detail, just how badly Bush messed up the country. He brought up all of my grief and dismay about — and all of my shame for — my government’s actions. He reminds me why I left my beautiful country.
One of my best friends is Lebanese. In about 1996, I asked him why he never talked about Lebanese politics. Had he just written it all off? No, he said that it was too painful to talk about. At the time, I didn’t understand. Now I do.
My productivity in the past few weeks has gone way down as I continually hunt for more stories about the election. It’s a destructive, addictive, action. It’s not like me reading the stories are going to change the outcome of the election. ( I voted several weeks ago, so it’s not like the stories are going to change my vote.) I know that it is pointless to read about the election, but I can’t help it, I must read — because every story that I read about Obama leading gives me a tiny flicker of hope.
I left. I turned my back and walked away. So why does it still matter? The best analogy I can think of is of being in love with an absolutely wonderful man who two or three times per year beats the crap out of me. I’ve metaphorically walked away and found another — one who is incredibly sweet and nice, but who isn’t as good a fit as my ex. There is nothing wrong with my new beau, and I admit to a little bit of excitement at something novel. But the fit isn’t quite right: he puts the toilet paper on backwards, he really likes foods I can’t stand, and he just doesn’t have the same shared context that I do with my ex. I have to keep explaining things to him that my ex understood right away. My new beau is certainly a fine and wonderful person, and I could be very content with him for the rest of my life, but there isn’t that same level of passion. Really I want a reformed version of my ex, one who fits but who doesn’t beat me.
I want Obama to win. Very much. I then want him to get my beautiful country out of this mess. (Er, these messes.) I want that very, very much. I’d like to think that someday I might have the option of coming home.
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Posted in programmer productivity at 10:17 am by ducky
Lutz Prechelt wrote a technical report way back in 1999 that did a more rigorous, mathematical analysis of the variance in the time it takes programmers to complete one task. He finds that the distribution is wickedly skewed to the left, and the difference between the top and kinda-normal programmers is about 2. It’s nice to find supporting evidence for what I’d reported earlier. Here’s the money graph:
Time to complete a task probability distribution
This graph shows the probability density — which is very much like a histogram — of the time it took people to do programming-related tasks. As this combines data from many many studies, he normalized all the studies so that the mean time-to-complete was 1.
Prechelt notes that the Sackman paper — which is the origin of the 28:1 figure that many people like to quote — has a number of issues. Mostly Prechelt covered Dickey’s objections, but he also notes that when the Sackman study was done in 1967, computer science education was much less homogenous than it is now, so you might expect a much wider variation anyway.
Evidence against my theses
As long as I’m mentioning something that came up that supports my stance, I should mention two things that counter arguments that I have made.
1. When I’m talking to people, I frequently say that it’s far more important to not hire the loser than to hire the star. My husband points out that the type of task that user studies have their users do are all easy tasks, and that some tasks are so difficult that only the star programmers can do them. This is true, and a valid point. Maybe you need one rock star on your team.
2. I corresponded briefly with my old buddy Ed Burns, the author of Secrets of the Rock Star Programmers. He is of the opinion that the rock star programmers are about 10x more productive than “normal” programmers. Interestingly, he thinks the difference is mastery of tools. I think this is good news for would-be programming stars: tools mastery is a thoroughly learnable skill.
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