Ben Kraal's New Now Know How - Techno-social

Brisbane Public Transport Smart Card Ticketing

nospam@example.com (Ben Kraal) — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 02:26:26 +0200

T’other day, Ricky and I were discussing the soon-to-be-implemented smart card ticketing for Brisbane public transport.

In the conditions of use for the current trial it says that you have to “touch on” at the beginning of a journey and “touch off” at the end. To ensure that you touch off, when you touch on a large amount is deducted from your card and when you touch off the system adjusts itself to deduct the correct fare from your card. What happens if you have just enough credit for a trip? How can/does the system deduct a maximal amount from your card? It seems that this sort of system requires that cards are registered to “owners” so that the system can bill you if you default on a fare.

Another strange thing about the system that Translink seem to be building in Brisbane is that lack of control gates, which seesm to be the norm in other smart ticketing situations (in my limited understanding). Hong Kong’s Octopus card (which I have found is the most written about system) certainly has gates and this article on the relative merits of smart cards vs smart tokens also presumes that some form of gate or turnstile will be part of the wider system. Obviously, gates are a primary way to enforce one or both of touching on and off and thus lessen the incidence of fare evasion. It will be interesting to see how Translink implement their gateless system (I assume it will be a gateless system. The current trail is certainly gateless).

In related news under one of my favourite heading of unintended consequences you can buy special smart-card protectors to prevent “skimming attacks”. Obviously as soon as these type of thing were developed a Hello Kitty version was on the market within nanoseconds.

Space and sociality

nospam@example.com (Ben Kraal) — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 02:09:08 +0200

Recently I’ve been reading a lot about space. Not the Final Frontier kind but the just-outside-the-door kind. Urban space.

It may have started with Stewart Brand‘s How Buildings Learn, which is just wonderful. Brand shows how buildings aren’t usually designed with a view to their use but instead are often designed to look good in architecture magazines. He argues for space that can be adapted by it’s inhabitants, space that can be changed to reflect the changing needs of it’s users. This is usabilty writ large and with a time-scale of years and decades not hours.

I think I then read William H Whyte‘s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces which is about parks and plazas in New york city and also about people and what they do in public and how they do it and how to watch them. Whyte shows that people do the darndest things like having conversations in the middle of busy throughfares. The thing is that people do this, not because they’re stupid or inconsiderate, but because they like being part of the bustle of the people around them. Like the best research, the things presented in Social Life are so amazingly obvious that you are shocked when you see how often they’re done wrong. Whyte’s main contribution is the wonderfully, head-slappingly, obvious insight that the best way to make a space inviting to people is to give them somewhere to sit. If that place to sit is out of the cold breeze and in the sun with a view of the passing crowd, so much the better. For example, Canberra’s dismal mall in Civic is so cold and lifeless on most days because it’s just a wind tunnel, especially towards the Garema place end.

From there I read Edward T Hall‘s The Hidden Dimension. It’s an exploration and explanation of how different cultures percieve space, particularly personal space. Hall is credited with coining the term proxemics. There’s a lot to ponder in The Hidden Dimension, particularly with regard to how people experience and manage cross-cultural interactions.

And I’ve just finished Paco Underhill’s two books on shopping, Why We Buy and The Call of the Mall which are about retail geography. Why We Buy is better.

And now, having read Adam Greenfield’s latest entry, I’m hanging out to find out more on the “New Ludic Urbanism”.

Understanding Computers and Cognition

nospam@example.com (Ben Kraal) — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 02:53:08 +0200

Is this the best computer-science (perhaps HCI) text ever?

Winograd and Flores show that hard AI isn’t possible (ever!) and that the concept of being-in-the-world should be the basis of computer system design. Most of the argument is based on Heidigger’s philosophy of being.

Though Understanding Computers and Cognition was published in 1986, it resonates today with the increasing push to get computers off the desktop and into the world. This is despite it being out several years before Mark Weiser’s work on ubiquitous computing. The argument they make is, to me, the basis for much of the work in CSCW and in particular the resurgence of ethnomethodological investigations into people using tools and technology as a way to inform design, though Winograd and Flores never explicitly endore such a method.

Winograd and Flores make the argument for ontological designing, design(ing) that is concerned with transformation of what is possible, with opening up new spaces for interaction that is “both reflective and political, looking backwards towards the tradition that has formed us and forwards to as-yet-uncreated transformations of our lives together”.

Through the emergence of new tools, we come to a changing awareness of human nature and human action, which in turn leads to new technological development. The designing process is part of this ‘dance’ in which our strucutre of possibilities is generated.

The book closes with this statement:

In ontological designing we are doing more than asking what can be built. We are engaging in a philosophical discourse about the self — about what we can do and what we can be. Tools are fundamental to action, and through our actions we generate the world. The transformation we are concerned with is not a technical one, but a continuing evolution of how we understand our surroundings and ourselves — of how we continue becoming the beings that we are.

That last part “of how we continue becoming the beings that we are”, indeed the whole quote, reminded be of Deleuze (who I am only beginning to explore, let alone understand) though there’s no reference to Deleuze in the book. I could, of course, be on entirely the wrong track with this Deleuze thing. Hmm…

Onwards! To continuing becoming!

Chew quietly, big brother is listening

nospam@example.com (Ben Kraal) — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 06:13:51 +0200

Nicholas Nova blogged on this paper recently and it was too good not to share: Analysis of Chewing Sounds for Dietary Monitoring.

Yes, it’s food recognition through chewing sound analysis for the eventual purpose of dietary monitoring.

More on speech recognition interfaces

nospam@example.com (Ben Kraal) — Tue, 30 May 2006 06:53:40 +0200

(Via OrangeCone) Gartner have a new report out on The Evolving User Interface (link goes to summary, real report is $$$) that mentions speech recognition.

Despite delivery of continuous speech recognition in 1997 and subsequent advances that now
deliver accuracy superior to the average person’s typing, speech recognition has not been widely
adopted. Broad adoption is hindered by personal or emotional factors, social barriers and low
value combined with high complexity for most users. Most people are accustomed to a writing
style in which one watches what is written and corrects errors on the fly. In addition, talking to the
computer is often seen as a social faux pas or raises concerns about personal privacy.

Acutally it takes about 6 months to get proficient enough at using speech recognition to approach a sensible level of throughput, taking into account correction time. And broad adoption is not so much hindered by “personal or emotional factors” or by “social barriers” but by the fact that using speech recognition productively, as a replacement for typing and mousing is really, really hard. This is mostly because most, if not all, desktop computer applications are designed to work with a mouse and keyboard and using them through speech recognition is like typing in mittens. I’d love to see a proper word processing package based on speech, rather than a GUI word processor with speech layed over the top.

At the same time, Gartner’s point of view reproduces the classic technological determinist view that if a technology fails, it’s because people made it fail, or weren’t ready for it, not that the technology is bad or wrong or inappropriate or some middle ground. Small vocabularly speech recogntition works and works well in a small number of quite specific situations. Open ended speech recognition on the desktop or on the mobile is just a bad idea. Computers do not understand speech in the same way that people do and they never¹ will.

For most users, there is no pressing need or compelling advantage over existing interfaces. Only
when users learn to speak as part of the creative process, unlearn the correct-as-you-go habit
and become familiar with the conventions of a speech-centric interaction model (navigating,
formatting and so on) will speech recognition become widely adopted. Speech recognition will not
become the dominant mode of text entry for at least a decade.

“At least a decade”? Yep. But people have been saying that for at least three decades now.

Many people speak as part of the creative process and have done for years. Lawyers and many other people have dictated to secretaries and tape recorders successfully for decades. Dictating to a person, even one who is at a remove from the dictator is different to dictating to a computer (because (sing it if you know it!) Computers do not understand speech in the same way that people do).

Finally, the correct-as-you-go habit is a pretty good one. Why would we want to unlearn it? We even do it as we speak — why would we want to unlearn years of verbal habits to fit with an interface?

Mobile and workflow applications are more-promising candidates for gaining value from speech
recognition, however. These applications use speech recognition for application control and will
feed speech recognition to the desktop over time as users become comfortable with the voice
interface paradigm.

Mobile apps will use speech for application control? Maybe. But why, when simple app controls map so sweetly to a single-handed control like a scroll-wheel and when anything more complicated will be faster to accomplish with manual interaction. Besides which, if you’re going to be carrying around something with enough processing power to do good speech recognition, is there any reason to think that you need to be using it on the move when your hands and eyes will be busy?

Also, speech on the desktop for application control will be a “surprise and delight” feature but not something that I think people will use. Why? Intuition that changing modes from manual to speech is hard.

¹ Ok, for a given value of “never”. In this case “never” is sometime after the first consumer-grade quantum computer is on sale. And maybe not even then if no-one figures out how to build semantics into a computer.

Bugs on the Windshield

nospam@example.com (Ben Kraal) — Thu, 18 May 2006 04:10:01 +0200

AutoIT quotes a recent Top Gear magazine review of the new Volvo S80:

Theres [an] optional driver-prompt: little cameras scan the mirror blind spot and flash an amber light when someones abreast of you. Trouble is, at certain speeds in the rain, they gather drops of water which fool the camera and trigger the light. Doubtless a little lip below the lens would cure it. So why not?

AutoIT then says that the fault was probably never encountered in the design stage of the car.

The fact is, modern cars are increasingly encrusted with new high-tech systems, and its doubtful that the development cycle of the car, long as it is, provides enough time to detect these kinds of wrinkles. When you have to test not only that the car does what its supposed to do, but also that it doesnt do what its not supposed to do, testing can take a lifetime.

And then, AutoIT says:

Given that more and more cars have touch screens and, in the future, will be internet connected, it wont be long before drivers will have the option to send bug reports direct to the makers. Itll be just like using a beta of Internet Explorer 7 only at high speed, down the motorway. Now wont that be great!

As Fro would say, “oh, the huge manatee!"

I can think of absolutely nothing worse than car makers taking the view that their cars are always undergoing development and that consumers/drivers are going to report bugs. Do consumers even know if something is a bug or a feature? IE7, like many products, prompts you to send a bug report on a crash. I can see it now — airbags go off and the touch-screen prompts, “Would you like to send a report to head office?”