Everything's Dynamic

Increasing patient empathy: what manufacturers can do

2010-07-30T03:36:00.000-07:00

As discussed in a previous post, the key to getting manufacturers to have a vested interest in building empathy with them is to insert patients into the customer experience supply chain. Here is one thing hatmanufacturers can do to support this.

Manufacturers can open up their data to third parties: For devices that record and track data, the status quo works great for manufacturers and doctors. Doctors have access to the data and use it, and in so doing have feedback for the manufacturer. The manufacturer considers that feedback and may even ensure that the data provided to the doctor is usable and useful. It's a very closed loop system where there's a solid link between the inputs and the outputs. For many devices, this is the customer experience supply chain.

The problem, however, is that the patient is left out of the loop. Doctors may want to keep data from patients for a variety of reasons (e.g. they assume patients won't understand it, they assume patients don't want it, etc.) and manufacturers may have their own reasons. In the end, neither the doctor nor the manufacturer feels that much pushback from patients because--as non-decision makers--patients have little leverage. So patients stay on the fringes of the customer experience supply chain.

The problem with this arrangement is that for a lot of devices there is information that patients would find useful, if for no other reason than (as elicited in a previous post) than to gain a better appreciation for the capabilities of the device. Moreover, the very fact that patients want data but can't get access to it is itself emblematic of a lack of empathy for patients. But given the entrenched nature of the customer experience supply chain discussed above and the manufacturer's desire to preserve the status quo ("if it ain't broke, don't fix it"), how can patients get access to the data?

One way would be for the manufacturer to let other systems access the data in its devices, essentially paving the way for some other company to establish an entirely different system with its own customer experience supply chain. Except for in this new customer experience supply chain, the patient would be the focus. While this solution is far from ideal, it gives both the patient and the doctor a prominent role in each of their respective customer experience supply chains. Once this is the case, the incentives are aligned to foster an increase in patient empathy.

Image from here.

Increasing patient empathy: what patients can do

2010-07-30T00:24:00.000-07:00

In a previous post, I explained how the unique economic structure of the healthcare market presents an inherent challenge for the cultivation of empathy between medical device manufacturers and patients. The gist of the problem is that manufacturers often sell their devices to doctors or hospital administrators, who then [usually] decide for patients which brand of device the patient is going to get. Since patients are not the decision-making consumer, there is little financial incentive for manufacturers to concern themselves with the patient experience and understand (at an empathic level) what it's like to be a patient. Contrast this with an industry like consumer electronics, in which end users are decision-making consumers, and you can see why the consumer electronics world ends up with products like the iPhone and the medical device world ends up with products like the Monicard Home System pictured above.

Right now patients are sort of an ancillary component to what Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery refer to as the "customer experience supply chain" in their book Do You Matter?. In other words, patients do not have a significant impact on what manufacturers perceive to be the important parts of the customer experience. The key to building empathy with patients, then, is to get patients to become a legitimate component of the customer experience supply chain.

It will likely be a long time before the healthcare system is truly consumer-driven and patients are eagerly pre-ordering the latest stent from Amazon.com. So in the meantime, here are some practical ideas for how medical device patients can become part of the customer experience supply chain right away.

Patients can become effective communicators with their doctor(s): Effective communication means asking good questions (do research online before going to the doctor!) and being honest about any feedback or concerns one might have with their device, as well as being assertive and demanding that the doctor not shrug off what she considers to be a trivial issue. Doctors don't remember everything a patient tells them (they're human, after all), but the more feedback they hear from patients the more likely they are to pass that feedback onto the manufacturers.

Patients can communicate with each other: In a lot of industries, word-of-mouth is considered the best form of advertising. Indeed, there's likely a lot of word-of-mouth "advertising" that goes on between doctors. Encouragingly, patients have begun using the Internet to swap stories and share their device experiences with each other. As long as patients maintain effective communication with their doctor (see above), information shared between patients will eventually make its way to doctors.

Again, the key is for patients to influence the decision-makers, and by talking with doctors about what they've read on the Internet (even if patients bring up a bunch of rumors), doctors are more likely to pass that feedback on to a manufacturer. In the case of errant rumors, for example, a manufacturer might use such feedback to improve whatever aspect of their system was causing the rumors to be propagated in the first place. And voila, empathy for the patient.

Patients can demand their device's data: Just as one might expect a diagnostics report or explanation from a mechanic prior to having work done on a car, patients should expect the same level of transparency (at least!) from their doctor. I suppose the mantra would be, "Trust, but verify." If a patient has a device that spits out data, then that patient should feel entitled to not only getting a copy of the data but also to getting an explanation of the data that they can understand. By familiarizing herself with the data, a patient is more likely to learn about how their respective device works. Patients can be lectured all day about how device X measures parameter Y and delivers therapy Z, but until they can actually connect the dots between their health and the data tracked by the device, they're less likely to fully appreciate the capabilities of the device.

When patients appreciate the capabilities of the device, they can become more involved patients. Not only does this translate to more effective communication with their doctor (see above), it also positions the patient to take on a more consumer-type role when they need their device replaced or need to add an accessory to the device. As such, the next time their doctor prescribes a device, the patient will be able to offer an informed opinion to their doctor, something which would have a significant influence on the doctor as purchasing decisions are being made.

Next up: what manufacturers can do to increase patient empathy.

Image from here.

Why patient empathy is challenging for manufacturers of medical devices

2010-06-22T03:11:00.000-07:00

A hot topic in the design world recently has been the importance of building empathy between businesses and their customers, a concept well documented in the book Wired to Care, by Dev Patnaik and Peter Mortensen. The basic case for empathy is actually pretty intuitive-by spending time with customers a business can better understand their needs and therefore deliver better products and services that more effectively meet the needs of customers. Formal efforts to build empathy with customers have been underway for quite some time with consumer electronics products (a classic example might be Jan Chipchase's globetrotting research conducted for Nokia), but one area where there remain structural challenges to building and capitalizing on empathy is between medical device manufacturers and the patients who use their products.

A fundamental dynamic of the medical device industry is the disjointed relationship between the patient, doctor, healthcare administrator, and the medical device manufacturer. This relationship is especially complex in the case of sophisticated devices that are not sold directly to patients and which are instead sold first to doctors or hospital administrators and then resold (via a prescription) to patients. The following diagrams illustrate (in a simplified manner) how the sales channels are structured for a typical sophisticated medical device versus a typical consumer electronic product.

While there are some similarities between the two models (for example both have "middlemen," the Doctor and the Retailer), there are two important differences between the two models: (1) the medical device model contains an "Administrator" component, and (2) the sales flow to the patient in the medical device model is a PUSH flow, whereas in the consumer electronics model it is a PULL flow. While the presence of the Administrator component is indeed an important part of the medical device sales model, this analysis is concerned with the effect that PUSH vs. PULL relationships have on how much weight is given to empathy for the end user at the manufacturer during product development.

In the above models, a PUSH flow represents a decision made by the giver/seller, whereas a PULL flow represents a decision made by the receiver/buyer. For consumer electronics, the sales flow model is straightforward. Consumers own the purchasing decision, and—simplifying greatly—if they value a product, they buy it. if they don't value a product, they don't buy it. Whether from a Retailer or directly from the Manufacturer, the flow is always PULL in nature. As such, the Manufacturer has a natural incentive to build empathy with Consumers. After all, by better understanding their Consumers, Manufacturers can better meet their needs and ultimately sell more products.

For sophisticated medical devices, however, there is a structural challenge that puts Patients one step removed from Manufacturers. For medical devices, the flow starts with Doctors and/or Administrators choosing (via a PULL flow) which devices to stock, a decision which Patients-who can only get a device through a Doctor's prescription-are essentially stuck with regardless of their individual preferences. In other words, Doctors/Administrators (I'll refer to them simply as "Doctors" for the remainder of this post) PULL devices from the Manufacturer and then PUSH those devices onto patients.

As a result, for medical devices Doctors emerge as the primary customers and Patients become secondary customers. As decision holders, Doctors hold a tremendous amount of very concentrated power. Naturally, this results in Doctors having a rather strong voice with the Manufacturer, who from a first-order economic incentive standpoint has every reason to bend over backwards to please the Doctors. So employees at the Manufacturer spend time with Doctors at conferences, training sessions, or advisory boards collecting quantitative and qualitative information and all-the-while forming empathic bonds with Doctors. Patients, however, end up getting short shrift, something that's easy to justify when Patients account for approximately zero direct revenues. As marketing personnel tally their annual market research budgets, it's easy to conclude that the benefits associated with building empathy with Patients do not outweigh the costs, which makes the decision easy. After all, why spend time learning about and building empathy with Patients when they never buy anything?

So does this mean that Patients are forever destined to miss out on the benefits that arise from building empathy? In my next post, I will discuss some possible solutions for helping empathy become a vital part of the medical device development process.

Image from here.

Disclaimer: I work for a large medical device manufacturer (not the one that made the device pictured above.)

Android vs. iPhone: Which is more open?

2010-06-19T17:14:00.001-07:00

Guest-writing at Megan McArdle's blog, Timothy B. Lee riffs on the growing frustration that developers have with the closed nature of the iPhone platform versus the relative freedom offered by the open Android platform. I agree with Tim that this is a big weakness of the iPhone and that--if Android ever gets its act together--this could be the Achilles' heel of the iPhone. In thinking-out-loud about how Android could get its act together, I realized that there is one area in which the iPhone is more open than Android: the user interaction paradigm.

One of the main differences between the iPhone and Android respective user interaction paradigms is that Android has two off-screen buttons--one for moving Back within or between applications and one for accessing a Menu of actions available within each application. The iPhone puts this functionality in the screen, which whether by design or by chance ultimately leaves the decision of how to implement this functionality to the designer of each application. The net result is more user interface (UI) freedom on the iPhone. This may seem trivial at first glance, but upon further inspection I think that there's actually something significant there.

Granted, app developers still have to concern themselves with Apple's Human Interface Guidelines (and straying too far from these could--based on Apple's ambiguous approval rules--result in an app getting rejected), but in practice there is actually considerable diversity between iPhone apps. The downside to such freedom is a lack of consistency, but the upside is that market forces within the iPhone App Store can function to separate the apps with bad UIs from the apps with good UIs.

In contrast, Android's interaction paradigm (with the two off-screen buttons) is somewhat constraining from a UI perspective. Granted, there is probably a lot of diversity between Android apps, but they all suffer from the usability handicap created by being forced to use off-screen buttons. This handicap makes it all the more difficult for Android apps to truly break away from the pack in terms of user experience. A mobile platform is only as good as its apps, and one of the main things that makes an app good is a good user experience.

So I would argue that neither the iPhone platform nor the Android platform is as free and open as a mobile platform could be. The best solution would be a platform that has no constraints on how applications are coded (like Android) and gives UI designers maximum latitude for creating compelling interactions (like the iPhone).

Image from here.

Android Gingerbread should get rid of the dedicated "back" and "menu" buttons

2010-06-19T16:08:00.000-07:00

According to this TechCrunch post, Google is going to be improving the user experience of its Android mobile operating system. This is great news, and I'm sure their improvements will go further than simply making the graphics "prettier." In my experience using Android on the HTC Hero and the Google Nexus One, the thing that hurt the user experience more than anything else was Android's poor usability, particularly with respect to navigation. The two big usability flaws were: (1) the use of a dedicated hardware Back button for navigating within and/or between applications and (2) the chameleon-like Menu button that, when pressed, opens a popup menu of actions the user can take within the specific application being used.

First, the Back button, which is the leftmost bottom below the screen on the Nexus One, pictured to the right. My main beef with the way it's used is that it's really easy to get cognitively lost, especially when you start shuffling between applications. My recommendation for the Android user experience (aside from hiring me!) would be to scrap the whole idea of stacking. For in-application navigation, put the "Back" button on the screen, since that's where the user's attention is, anyway. It's how the iPhone does it and it works great. And for between-application navigation (i.e. multitasking), adopt the "deck of cards" metaphor employed by Palm's WebOS. TweetDeck's iPhone client also uses the deck of cards metaphor and it's not only easy-to-grasp, but also sort of fun to use.

Now, the Menu button, which is the second-to-left button below the screen on the Nexus One. From my experience this was even worst than the Back button. The reason the dedicated Menu button is so frustrating is that it's highly unpredictable. I'm actually pretty surprised that Android ever even went with such a confusing feature, as it violates one of Jakob Nielsen's heuristics--Consistency. (Nielsen's heuristics are fundamental to the field of usability.) Since each application will almost certainly have its own set of commonly used actions, access to those actions should not be forced into one single button. The iPhone handles this quite well by letting each application define for itself how to give users access to common actions; usually applications put four or five buttons along the bottom of the screen, each representing common actions. And then maybe the last of those buttons is a "More" option, which brings up a little popup menu.

For both the Back and Menu buttons, from my perspective the key to improving usability is to move functionality away from dedicated off-screen buttons and onto the screen (where the user's attention is). These changes would put Android approximately on par with the iPhone for usability.

iPad Use Case Idea - Car Sales

2010-04-05T23:21:00.001-07:00

Here's another idea for how an iPad could be used: selling cars. Imagine a salesperson approaching a prospective customer on the lot and showing them a short and interesting video (probably not a commercial) and allowing the customer to explore some of the car's specs on the iPad. Each manufacturer could have their own app designed to answer (in an honest way) the most common customer questions. Maybe each app could have a custom racing game that would allow customers to drive through famed stretches of roadway (the Autobahn, Tokyo, Los Angeles freeways, etc.) in the car they're interested in.

I think one big appeal of this idea is that iPad could ease the awkwardness between the salesperson and the customer. Instead of interacting with each other directly, the salesperson and the customer can now use the iPad as a means of interaction, or if nothing else as a conversation starter. Instead of the salesperson being the sole conduit for information (which the customer understandably views as a biased source), now the iPad can serve as a neutral source of information. Perhaps more importantly, whereas in a conventional exchange the customer may feel like they're being given a hard sell from an aggressive salesperson, when interacting with an iPad the customer might feel that they're in control of the experience. The net result is that the iPad puts the customer at ease.

Additionally, at least in the short term, the iPad is a novelty that signals to customers that a given car company is design-minded and "gets it." I'm thinking of companies like Volkswagen or BMW. An iPad-based sales interaction could be a real experience differentiator. Why buy a car the old fashioned way from Toyota when you can buy a car the smart way from Volkswagen?

Images for above mockup from here, here, here, and here.

iPad Use Case Idea - Healthcare

2010-04-04T00:52:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: iMedicalApps demonstrates that an iPad can be used in a sterile field here.

Easy-to-use tablet devices (such as the iPad, which I'll use here to generally refer to any easy-to-use tablet device) give us (humanity) the chance to fundamentally improve everyday experiences. One area where a lot of experience improvement is needed is healthcare. Human errors (many due to poor usability) are a major problem, not to mention the fact that many medical devices deliver pretty poor user experiences. This is not all that surprising, given the heavy burden of clinical, regulatory, and compliance hurdles that medical devices must pass. As a result, products take longer to get to market and once on the market are more costly to change than the typical consumer product, so anything that's viewed as "non-essential" is often the first to go. And rightly or wrongly, user experience is often deemed as non-essential or dismissed as something that can be addressed in training. Combine this with the complexity of the healthcare market, in which it's common for one person to make the purchasing decision, a different person to prescribe the use of the device, and yet another person to actually use the device, and it's not hard to see why poor user experiences prevail.

Enter the iPad, a relatively cheap piece of powerful hardware that is portable, can be mounted anywhere, and requires no accessories to interact with. As the FDA has indicated with healthcare apps running on the iPhone, while medical software may be considered a medical device, the iPad itself (i.e. the hardware operating system) may not end up being considered a medical device. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean that the iPad could effectively become THE display and control panel for pretty much any medical device.

The image at the top of the screen shows just one possible use case for the iPad in healthcare. In this case, a clinician in a cath lab (in real life they'd probably be in scrubs but the illustration is just a quick mockup) can use the iPad to review, manipulate, and add annotations to the same images projected on the lab's monitors. And at the end of the procedure, all the results could easily be exported into the clinic's EMR. Such functionality surely exists in today's cath labs, but the iPad allows all the interaction to happen in a context that is more immediate and direct than with today's systems. Perhaps more importantly, cath lab team members will be able to communicate amongst each other more effectively, as the iPad's portability allows for team members to communicate visually ("here doctor, look at this") instead of relying solely on the verbal channel ("note the bifurcation in the right pulmonary artery at approximately 1-inch distal to termination of the pulmonary trunk").

Needless to say, it will be interesting and exciting to see how the healthcare industry responds to the iPad.

Image on monitors and iPad from here.

Freedom of business model

2009-11-14T22:57:00.000-08:00

Critics of libertarians often conflate capitalism with a handful of specific business models (like fee-for-service or ad-supported). This leads many of those critics to falsely conclude that anytime a libertarian supports an enterprise that strays from the bounds of these business models, that libertarian is engaging in behavior that is incompatible with "capitalism" and is therefore being hypocritical.

In reality, such a charge reflects the ignorance of the accuser. Libertarians support capitalism not because of how awesome money is, but rather because it is consistent with the general notion that individuals ought to be free to engage in consensual transactions with other individuals, regardless of whether such transactions are profitable or even involve money at all.

Link via Hit & Run.

Norman Borlaug

2009-09-13T23:14:00.000-07:00

This weekend was a proud, yet humbling time to be a graduate of the University of Minnesota. Not because of the new on-campus Gophers football stadium, but because the world is remembering the life of Norman Borlaug (left, above), an alumnus of the University of Minnesota and a hero to mankind who passed away on September 12, 2009:

Dr. Borlaug’s advances in plant breeding led to spectacular success in increasing food production in Latin America and Asia and brought him international acclaim. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

...

Yet his work had a far-reaching impact on the lives of millions of people in developing countries. His breeding of high-yielding crop varieties helped to avert mass famines that were widely predicted in the 1960s, altering the course of history.

David Boaz suggests he be called "Borlaug the Great," a label that from what I've read the humble Dr. Borlaug would most likely be uncomfortable with. Boaz goes on to make an excellent point about how human society remembers its past:

Just think of the people who have gone down in history as “the Great“: Alexander the Great, Catherine the Great, Charles the Great (Charlemagne), Frederick the Great, Peter the Great — despots and warmongers. Just once it would be nice to see the actual benefactors of humanity designated as “the Great”: Galileo the Great, Gutenberg the Great, Samuel Morse the Great, Alan Turing the Great.

Saving the lives of hundreds of millions of people...I think that qualifies one to be "great."

Image from here.

For a large country, the US does alright

2009-06-17T23:17:00.000-07:00

Via Infosthetics, the above graph (culled from the Flash visualization here):

...maps the base pay of the world's parliamentarians, ranked by country and expressed as a multiple of per capita GDP, versus a "Good Governance Index", which itself is a combination of the Democracy Index, the UN's Human Development Index and the Perception of Corruption Index.

In short, the further away the country dot is removed from the yellow cross, the more their MPs are being paid. The larger the (counter-clockwise) angle from the yellow line, the worse their corresponding governance.

Some commenters on the Infosthetics post have decried the visualization as unnecessarily flashy, but I think it's actually pretty useful, at least for relative comparisons. The best cluster of countries in this analysis are all countries with small, fairly homogenous populations such as Switzerland, Iceland, Luxembourg, etc. Not all such countries are in the same cluster (notably Austria and Belgium), but the biggest country (population wise) in the best cluster is Canada, with about 33 million people.

The second-best cluster of countries includes much larger countries, including the US, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Japan (Japan is the line that extends to the right out of the image). In general, these countries are more also more diverse (namely the US, the UK, and France).

So, in general, the trend seems to be that smaller, more ethnically homogenous countries get more for their money than large, ethnically diverse countries. This isn't all that surprising. But what was a little surprising for me was how relatively well the US does, considering that it is both the largest country in the upper-right quadrant and also the most diverse. Of course, it should be reiterated that the US' position on the graph is likely heavily influenced by the fact that the base pay is normalized per GDP, and the US' GDP is quite a bit higher than some of the countries in its cluster.

So that's what an A/B test is...

2009-06-17T23:03:00.001-07:00

The other day I was reviewing this great Alertbox article on user experience methods, and I came across a method with which I was unfamiliar--A/B testing. Well, sure enough, just like when you learn a new word and then it suddenly seems that you hear it used a couple times within the same day, this 37 Signals post points to a real world example of A/B testing. In this case, Less Everything simply measured the number of "conversions" (I guess the number of people who tried the application for free?) when a button was placed on the left side of the screen versus when it was placed on the right side and found that putting the button on the right led to a conversion rate of 13.8% versus a conversion rate of 12.3% for when the button was on the left.

The study seems to follow the guidelines for A/B testing in that the sample size is large ("thousands of users") and it was performed on an essentially finished design where it was easy to change only one part of the design and observe the effect of that change in isolation.

Target Price Tags Lead to Shopper Confusion

2009-05-31T21:40:00.000-07:00

While browsing through the food aisles at the SuperTarget in St. Louis Park, I observed two separate incidents of shoppers not understanding Target's price tags. Since I didn't observe that many total incidents of shoppers interacting with the price tags, this seems like an abnormally high error rate.

In the first instance, two women were chit-chatting while casually picking up food. As they passed by the barbecue sauce section, one of them remarked to the other that Sweet Baby Ray's (a brand of barbecue sauce that's fairly popular in Minnesota and Wisconsin) was on sale. As a fan of Sweet Baby Ray's myself, the comment piqued my interest (I'm always looking to stock up on something I like when it's on sale) so I looked over to the rack to inspect the price. To my dismay, Sweet Baby Ray's was in fact not on sale. But, the item directly above it (some sort of marinade) was on sale, and the large 'on-sale' ticket was hung directly above the various bottles of Sweet Baby Ray's. As far as I can tell, the shoppers mistakenly associated the 'on-sale' ticket with the Sweet Baby Ray's and used it to justify its purchase, which one admitted to the other was an "impulse purchase."

In the second instance, two teenage boys were shopping with a limited budget (this sounds like some made-up persona, but it's true!) and I passed them in the snacks aisle. One of them saw a bag of Munchies and mentioned to his friend that he loved Munchies and that they sooo good. But he ended up not buying the product because, as he explained to his friend, "Seven dollars is too much for Munchies." Not a fan of Munchies myself but nonetheless an occasional purchase of bagged chips, I thought to myself that seven dollars IS too much for Munchies...something must be wrong. So, I checked the price (since the item was not on sale, the price tag was a standard tag like the one pictured above) and found that the price for the object adjacent to the Munchies (some sort of package of several "lunch size" packs of chips) was $6.99 (i.e. "seven dollars"). However, the Munchies, whose price tag was a bit to the left of the bag and therefore easy-to-miss, were $3.99, a far more reasonable price (I think it was a super-size bag). So in this case, the shoppers' confusion led to a lost sale for Target.

In both cases, the shoppers were confused about which price tag applied to which item, which to me calls into question the effectiveness of the price tags' designs. I'm guessing they were not designed for maximum usability, as they are similar to the tags one would find at any big-box store and are probably merely the default style that the tag manufacturer provides. But, this being Target, I'm surprised that the company hasn't unleashed its army of designers on this problem, something that could be costing the company lost sales and, if solved, could possibly result in greater revenue and most-likely in greater brand equity.

One idea I had was to, at least on the larger 'on-sale' tickets, put a picture of the sale item on the tag. Manufacturers already spend a lot of effort on distinguishing their packaging from their competitors, so why not leverage that effort and simply show a picture of the item next to the price? If this isn't possible, then perhaps the price tag could at least feature an easy-to-read, non-technical, non-abbreviated description of the product. "Munchies, $3.99" would probably be sufficient.

Images from here and here.

An Idea for Reducing Energy Usage and Subsidies

2009-05-26T22:34:00.000-07:00

I had a thought while driving home after softball today and listening to an NPR report about the complex issues involved in developing a multilateral coordinated response to the problem of climate change, something that will be addressed head-on at climate change talks in December of 2009 in Copenhagen.

Here's my idea. Once Google PowerMeter and/or similar services becomes ubiquitous, each homeowner's energy use could be compared to all the other homeowners in the same city or county. Utilities would include a homeowner's energy usage percentile rank (lower is better) on each month's bill (or paperless statement, if the homeowner so chooses) so they could see how/whether their changes in behavior are affecting their rating and private companies (such as DIY KYOTO) could provide devices that deliver feedback on energy usage in real time.

So, nothing too revolutionary with the above paragraph (see pages 195-196 of Nudge). But to really incentivize people to strive for the best ranking possible, what if receipt of the home ownership subsidy (more commonly known as the mortgage interest tax deduction) were subject to a homeowner attaining a ranking below the median homeowner. That is, as long as a homeowner's energy usage is in the lower 50th percentile of their peers (across a given municipality), they receive the full subsidy (just like they already do today). But homeowners with energy usage in the upper 50th percentile receive no subsidy.

The program could be phased in over time, so that in Year 1 no subsidies are withheld from homeowners but those who are in the upper 50% would be notified that next year, they will not receive the full subsidy. In each subsequent year, the subsidy offered to energy-intensive households would decrease (e.g. 75% in Year 2, 50% in Year 3, etc.) such that eventually only homeowners with energy usage in the lower 50th percentile would receive the full home ownership subsidy. And maybe over time the 50th percentile threshold could change or become multiple thresholds, so that homeowners not near the 50th percentile mark will still have an incentive to save energy (after all, if you're already in the 90th percentile, it may be unrealistic to think that you'll ever be below the 50th percentile, so you might just give up). The gist of the idea is to tie receipt of the home ownership subsidy to some level of energy conservation.

Not only does this chip away at the market-distorting home ownership subsidy, it also offers a progressive (as opposed to regressive) nudge to homeowners, since wealthier homeowners are more likely to use more energy. As discussed in the book Nudge, often people (Humans, not Econs, in the terminology of authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein) will respond more readily to incentives with high salience than those with low salience, even if the value of the behavior changed by the incentive isn't directly proportional to the value of the incentive. The threat of losing a generous subsidy for not reducing energy usage may in fact be a more salient incentive than a utility bill that is $10 higher in a given month.

One final point: it's important to reframe the concept of the home mortgage interest deduction as a home ownership subsidy, since (1) that's what it is and (2) a tax "deduction" sounds like something to which you're entitled but a "subsidy" sounds like something that has been granted onto you and is subject to removal.

Einstein Expanded on Newton, but Newton is Still Relevant

2009-05-22T07:48:00.000-07:00

A great exchange from the two bloggers at Defective Equilibrium, the New Zealand version of Marginal Revolution:

Udayan Mukherjee:

This doesn't mean we have to argue that markets are always and everywhere a non-starter. It is merely an acknowledgment that the model proferred by neo-classical economics is not the final draft of economic explanation, but that it is akin to the Newtonian Physics awaiting its Einsteinian upheaval. For me this is tremendously exciting, as it opens up the study of economics and allows its foundations to be put under the experimental zoom lens. If people are predictably irrational, then it is something we need to be aware of as empirical scientists and integrate into our models of market behaviour.

Tom Mathews:

Uday used a useful analogy of Newtonian vs. Eisteinian physics. Newtonian physics gave us a good approximation of how the world worked for hundreds of years - but as Einstein showed, it turned out to be fundamentally misconceived. Einstein's insights gave us a deeper, more accurate understanding of how things actually work.

But have we since abandoned Newtonian physics? Of course not. In the vast majority of observable situations (that is, except for research physicists) Newton's laws still appear to hold. Engineers need not worry that people moving around in their buildings will increase in mass as they move and thus crash through the floor, for example.

While earning a master's degree in mechanical engineering, I don't think I ever learned about Einstein's theories beyond the cursory mention that Newton's stuff is really just an approximation for how things really work, but it's so accurate for most real world applications that it's all we're going to teach you. Ten years from now, perhaps this is how neoclassical economics will be thought of.

Image from here.

Inspiration

2009-05-03T22:57:00.000-07:00

There's something incredibly inspirational about seeing Danny MacAskill attempt something extremely difficult and then finally master it. That's what happens in the first 1:30 of this video. The rest is just awesome.

Via Kottke, who aptly describes the above feat as "parkour on a bicycle." Although I think the actual term is "bike trials."

Are stoplights really necessary?

2009-05-02T19:45:00.000-07:00

Via Tom Vanderbilt, the London borough of Ealing is about to conduct an experiment in which they observe whether traffic flows better at some intersections without stoplights:

Ealing found evidence to support its theory when the lights failed one day at a busy junction and traffic flowed better than before. Councillors have approved a report which recommended that they “experimentally remove signals since experience of signal failure showed that junction worked well.”

I observed a similar phenomenon sometime around March of 2009 at an intersection near where I work. For about a week, the intersection shown below, which is usually regulated by stoplights (including a left turn arrow), was regulated solely with stop signs as a 4-way stop. My personal observation was that traffic flowed no worse than usual, and if anything may have been better. Ultimately, I think the best solution for the intersection shown below is multi-lane roundabout.

View Intersection where stoplight was out of service in a larger map

Fostering Increased User Participation in Healthcare

2009-05-02T19:17:00.000-07:00

IDEO's Tim Brown thinks that "participation is key to the next big wave of innovation in business and society." In a post specifically about healthcare, he envisions EMRs (Electronic Medical Records) and HSAs (Health Savings Accounts) as two ways to enable greater participation in healthcare.

Fundamental to this collaboration is the creation of platforms that encourage participation. By this I don’t mean goading people into eating healthier food or taking more exercise. These may be beneficial outcomes of other more systemic innovations, but they are not, on their own, going to create the major shifts that we need.

Two platforms that are already under discussion and, in my opinion, offer huge potential for improved collaboration and participation, are e-medical records and health savings accounts (HSAs). With the risk of sounding like a health-care reform lobbyist, here is why I think they are important, but also why I think current ideas about these platforms run the risk of limiting their impact.

The Obama administration has already embraced EMRs, but HSAs have typically been championed by libertarians and conservatives. I agree with Tim Brown that HSAs help people become more engaged with their healthcare decisions, but I'm skeptical that HSAs will gain much traction in the foreseeable future.

Image from here.

Dynamic Haptic Displays: The Next Big Thing?

2009-05-01T22:16:00.000-07:00

Dynamic haptic displays like the one shown above (from Chris Harrison) seem to really be gathering momentum and I wouldn't be surprised if they become the next big thing in interaction design. The feedback channels of sight and sounds are already maxed out, but the sense of touch is currently underutilized (we can do better than just a vibrating phone). Another cool dynamic haptic display technology comes from Artificial Muscle:

Corporate Nationality As a Branding Tool

2009-05-01T22:02:00.001-07:00

Matt Yglesias on corporate nationality:

Beyond CEOs, Nestle has 15 directors. Of them one is Indian, one is Swiss/American, seven are Swiss, and the rest are from other European countries. But there’s nothing especially “European”—and certainly nothing Swiss—about the company’s actual operations. They earn a lot of money in Europe, but the majority of their revenue is from outside of Europe, and there’s production all over the world. It’s also totally normal for large multinational firms to be disproportionately owned by shareholders located in their “home country” and home continent.

Corporate nationality, in other words, doesn’t matter. But it seems as if it actually does. And for somewhat mysterious reasons.

One reason I can think of is that corporate nationality can and is used as a branding tool. There's probably some serious brand equity in Nestle being thought of as a Swiss company because Switzerland is know for its luxury brands and chocolate. And American companies practically flaunt their American-ness (at least here in America).

Image from here.

Customer Experience In Healthcare

2009-05-01T21:51:00.000-07:00

Jay Parkinson:

I’ve started collecting photos I take of medical clinics vs. veterinary clinics in the same neighborhoods. If anyone has some good examples, send them my way…but here’s the first. Just goes to show that when people pay their own hard earned money for healthcare, providers start competing on price and quality and appearance…essentially, the consumer experience.

Interaction Design Ethics

2009-04-26T19:20:00.001-07:00

This post at the IxDA Discussion forum got me thinking about a thought I had a while ago about the ethics involved with applying the results of user research/usability testing to product design. I was thinking about users' misperceptions regarding what a product does or how it works and then how to deal with those misperceptions in successive product iterations. Specifically, when is it alright to allow, or even exploit, users' misperceptions and when is it inappropriate? Where is the line separating ethical decisions from unethical ones, and what defines that line?

The way I thought through this problem was by considering two extreme examples. One example where it seems acceptable, maybe even preferable, to just let users continue to misperceive how something works is whether a hypertext link needs to be single-clicked or double-clicked. One needs only to click a link once to follow the link, but a lot of [less-experienced] users often double-click links, probably confusing this action with the action required to open a file or a shortcut on a Windows desktop. Designers of web browsing software allow single-clicks or double-clicks for links, but technically allowing double-clicks allows users to continue to not correctly understand how the browser actually works. Of course, it's really no more work for the user to double-click instead of single-click, and their lack of understanding of how links really work is likely never to matter. In other words, the cost of misperceiving the functionality is essentially zero.

However, what about a product with an interaction that has a higher cost of misperception, say a medical device? Imagine a product with an interface that has, among other things, a green circular button and a switch labeled "Auto-protect." The way the system actually works is that once the various parameters have been programmed elsewhere on the interface, the operator presses the green button to deliver a drug intravenously. The "Auto-protect" switch is not related to the drug delivering functionality. However, since the "Auto-protect" switch is positioned a little too close to the green button, some users misperceive the "Auto-protect" switch to have the functionality of protecting against an inadvertent overdose and, as a result, are observed to always flip the "Auto-protect" switch on before pressing the green button.

In this example, it would be obviously unethical to conclude that since users want the device to include a mechanism that protects against overdoses, we can just fool them into believing that the device offers that functionality by moving the "Auto-protect" switch even closer to the green button, to better afford a relationship betwen the two. Of course, allowing device operators to mistakenly believe that they are protected from delivering an overdose, when in reality they are not, has a very high cost (i.e. patient death), so there seems to be no room here for allowing users to think whatever they want as long as they're able to use the device.

So is the cost of the misperception the thing that determines where the line separating ethical from unethical decisions lies? Or is there something more to it?

Image from here.

Protectionist Law Impeding Competition, Consumer Choice

2009-04-19T10:17:00.001-07:00

This issue should be a non-issue.

The developer aiming to bring the popular Trader Joe’s grocery chain to Minneapolis got a wary reaction from residents and others at a Whittier neighborhood meeting Monday night. Some residents spoke in favor of the plan, but others—including the Wedge Natural Foods Co-op less than a half block away—say the corporate retailer shouldn’t get any special favors that might give it an unfair marketing advantage.

Mark Dziuk is hoping Trader Joe’s will be the anchor tenant in a large commercial and residential project on a busy block of Lyndale Avenue South. The problem is Trader Joe’s won’t sign on unless the store is allowed an adjacent wine and beer store, but state law prohibits liquor stores within 2,000 feet of one another in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Hum’s Liquors, a neighborhood icon for the past four decades, is practically right across the street. If Dziuk wins the exemption to the state law, it would be the first in Minneapolis.

I agree with the Wedge in this case in that Trader Joe's shouldn't be given special treatment. But the special treatment Trader Joe's seeks shouldn't even be an issue in the first place. This is all the fault of some arbitrary protectionist law from 70 years ago (that would be 1939) that isolates liquor stores from competition by prohibiting competing stores from being within 2,000 feet of each other. A defensible (but not necessarily correct) argument for this law is that it might prevent any single area from becoming "liquor store alley." Even if that line of thinking is valid and even if that's a value which the community consents to, then surely the law could be written better. For example, instead of always using one distance (2,000 feet) to regulate liquor store density, why not allow more liquor stores for denser-populated areas or areas with greater pedestrian/vehicle/transit access? There's no reason a small rural town of 500 people should be bound by the same law as a densely-populated corridor in a large cosmopolitan city.

Sarcasm Is Good

2009-04-10T09:28:00.000-07:00

With talk of a CPSIA for food getting me all worried, I appreciated this bit of sarcasm from Reason's Jesse Walker regarding an odious Pennsylvania food safety law:

Unfortunately, the inspectors' fight doesn't go far enough: What about the home meal loophole? Every night across America, parents cook unlicensed dinners for their naively trusting kids, and perhaps even a guest or two. Are the kitchens dirty, the ingredients expired, the pots unwashed? We don't know! How many lives will be lost before the government steps in and says, ¡No más!?

Have Novel Touchscreen Interfaces Fulfilled Jef Raskin's Vision?

2009-04-09T21:56:00.000-07:00

For a class called "The Psychology of Human-Machine Interaction," I was assigned to read Jef Raskin's book The Humane Interface (cover pictured to the right). At the time (2004, probably), I was really intrigued by Raskin's idea of zoomable interfaces and the notion that discrete applications are an inefficient way to facilitate users' desired actions, but it all seemed sort of far out and futuristic.

However, with innovative touchscreen interfaces such as the Palm Pre's "deck of cards" metaphor or Bumptop's 3D desktop (demo shown below), it seems that Raskin's visionary ideas are finally being realized. I love the idea of enabling users to use their spatial faculties, a cognitive ability that is severely under-utilized in traditional hierarchical 2D desktop interfaces.

How People Spend Their Time During Work

2009-04-09T12:11:00.000-07:00

This map showing Zappos purchases in real-time across the US is very interesting. What I found particularly intriguing is that as lunchtime occurs in a given timezone, purchases seem to slow to a trickle. Meanwhile, there seems to be a post-lunchtime flurry of activity. All anecdotal observations, of course.

Via Marginal Revolution.

CPSIA For Food

2009-04-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

You know that new law that was passed that requires excessive testing of products to prove they don't contain lead (CPSIA)? Well, now there's a proposal to do the same thing for food! Thanks, government, for trying to make farmers markets illegal!

Image (with some editing) from here.

Design Thinking and Government

2009-04-09T07:16:00.000-07:00

I'm very intrigued by the potential that design thinking has to offer government. Of course, nothing has more inertia than government and it is inherently ultra political, so altering the way government works is extremely challenging. Nevertheless, I remain hopeful, and stuff like this from IDEO's Tim Brown is encouraging:

What if design was used to test some of the rules our government leaders are proposing? Could we go through some experimental cycles using design and prototyping as a tool before final decisions are made about what rules to adopt? Might this help us avoid our tendency to create new rules and then walk away, under the assumption that our finance, health and global energy systems will now behave in the way we want them to?

This is of course an excellent idea. In the private sector, when systems are created they are rigorously tested. Good system designers/engineers understand that a critical part of any system are the humans it affects and relies on, so good system design incorporates a lot of use testing and design iteration to ensure that the system will behave in real life and its designers intend. Almost every government action is a case study in the law of unintended consequences, so it stands to reason that government-designed systems more often than not do not behave in real life the way their designers intended. Ergo, government needs to start using design thinking!

Image from here.

The growing importance of experience design

2009-04-07T22:21:00.000-07:00

This is a very interesting post by David Armano which does a good job of putting into words what has been in the back of my mind for the last couple of months. Basically, he's seconding the proposition of this Economist article, which is that the economic crisis has hastened the phenomenon of people second-guessing whether the constant struggle to keep up with the Joneses by acquiring as many gadgets/knick-knacks/kitchen applicances (i.e. "junk") is really the best way to spend their disposable income. As Armano puts it, we're entering the "post-consumer era." I think this passage is rather salient:

...Credit lines have ensured that we can purchase beyond our means and advertising has had years to perfect it's craft making us believe that we don't want the latest and greatest product—but that we actually NEED it. In fact, if we can't have it our lives will be empty—we will be missing out we won't be living life as it was meant to be lived.

This of course is a lie.

But it's worked for years. Bigger, better, faster, newer. Get it and get it now before your neighbor does. It's a myth that's stood the test of time and fueled a global economy because it could. When it's old, throw it out or give it away. Then one day, the housing market collapsed, the stock market collapsed and we woke up scratching our heads as to why. And some of us are re-thinking the economics of mass consumption.

I think a lot of people are finally realizing that they reached the point of junk saturation a few years ago and there is just no longer a need to rabidly acquire stuff like there's no tomorrow. As such, I think the term "post-junk" may be more appropriate than "post-consumer," for as long as we live in a capitalist society there will always be "consumers" and "producers," per se.

One consequence of such junk fatigue will be an increased desire for fewer high-quality products rather than more low-quality products. Jason Kottke highlighted this a while back in this post, in which he talked about "upgrading oneself" by, for example, replacing off-the-rack dress shirts with tailored shirts.

As Armano goes on to point out, the ever increasing interconnectedness of humanity that has been enabled by the internet is going to push people into becoming smarter, more demanding consumers. This may not necessarily be the result of conscious decisions by each consumer, but rather as a simple consequence of our digital surroundings (e.g. Facebook, Google, Twitter, whatever's next, etc.). Without even realizing it, the inputs into our decision making processes will in effect be pre-screened by the recommendations, purchases, and comments of our trusted peers.

From my perspective, these two phenomena (junk reduction and increasing consumer awareness) pretty clearly point to a greater role for good experience design amongst both products and services. People are going to want better stuff that simplifies/de-clutters their life, and whether they know it or not they're going to be nudged away from objects/services that they perceive as junk and toward objects/services of trusted value.

Imeem...please let me scroll with ease!

2009-03-26T19:46:00.000-07:00

I love imeem, but I think their user interface has plenty of room for improvement. One small thing that's really been annoying me recently is how scrolling through a playlist works. To see what I mean, try clicking on the "up" or "down" arrows in the following embedded playlist:

Smart

The scrolling increment (how much up or down the list moves when you click on an arrow) is way to small. Right now, one click scrolls the list about 1/5 of a song, so to scroll to the next song you have to click the down arrow five times. At a minimum, a single click should scroll the list by one whole song, but I think a more optimum increment would be 4-5 songs.

Chevy: Ergonomics is for Girly Men! Yeah!

2009-03-21T16:29:00.000-07:00

I'm really getting sick of this commercial, which has been in heavy rotation during the NCAA Tournament:

So making something easier (and most likely safer) to use is emasculating? Because real men work harder, not smarter?!?

Talk About a Nudge!

2009-03-17T06:28:00.000-07:00

This bus stop ad for a fitness company in Amsterdam features a bench that shows the weight of the person sitting on it.

Via Kottke.

The Santelli Rant and Who's to Blame

2009-02-24T09:38:00.000-08:00

I admit, when I first saw the rant above by Rick Santelli opposing the Obama mortgage plan, my emotions were stirred and I had to agree with the spirit of his frustration. People like Brian Beutler, Ryan Avent, and Matt Yglesias dismissed the rant in part because Santelli (and the traders who empathize with him) didn't publicly oppose the various bank bailouts. In the eyes of Beutler and Yglesias, Santelli and the traders were hypocrites and narrow-minded members of the wealthy class...always willing to blame the little guy (individual homeowners) but never refusing to accept a free money or political favors (i.e. the various bailouts). I think Yglesias' thoughts are neatly captured in this excerpt:

When someone applies for a mortgage, there are two parties to the transaction. On one side of it is a teacher or a blogger or an electrician or a lawyer or a nurse or a guy who manages a Home Depot. On the side is a guy who, for a living, as a professional, works in the “deciding on what terms to offer people mortgages” business who works, for a living, at a financial services business...That, to repeat, wasn’t the judgment of electricians and store managers; it was the judgment of people who were professional mortgage-offerers.

While Yglesias is happy to excoriate the big financial firms for being over-leveraged (borrowing more than they could pay back if housing values started to drop) because they should have known better, what Yglesias fails to address is the culpability of individual borrowers in their very own version of over-leveraging: applying for a mortgage that was beyond the amount they could reasonably afford. I think this is the crux of the Santelli/Yglesias divide.

Which is why, emotionally at least, I have to side with Santelli. Yes, it was tempting for individual homeowners to keep up with the Joneses, but individual adults cannot be expected to have no self-control over their temptations. Individual adults (wealthy, poor, or middle class) fell victim to their temptations and made stupid decisions. Yes, they were tempted (and it seems that the people doing the tempting sometimes broke the law), but they still made a bad decision. So why should the people who made good decisions have to pay for the people who made bad decisions?!?! That's how I feel from an emotional standpoint, at least.

Now, all that being said, I'm not an economist, so I can't really weigh in on whether Obama's mortgage plan makes sense for the overall US economy. But as an individual adult, it is extremely frustrating to think that there may be two sets of rules: one for the reckless and irresponsible and one for the calm and prudent.

Meta Analysis: The Constitution During the Civil War

2009-02-19T11:31:00.000-08:00

Via Information Aesthetics comes this Wordle-like data visualization tool that shows the frequency with which certain words are used in a big word cloud. One thing that jumped out at me was the difference between Abraham Lincoln's first and second inaugural addresses. Here's the word cloud from his first address:

And here's the word cloud from his second address:

The thing I thought interesting was that the most prominent word in Lincoln's first address is "constitution." However, in his second address (when victory over the South was imminent but while his suspension habeas corpus was still in effect), one of the most conspicuously absent words is "constitution." I don't really know what to make of this, but I thought it was interesting for there to be such a huge change. I guess Lincoln didn't think anybody wanted to hear about the Constitution in the second address? Maybe he didn't have time? Maybe he knew in the back of his mind that suspension of habeas corpus was unconstitutional? Who knows...

Designing Product Experiences vs. Designing Product Messaging

2009-02-19T10:42:00.000-08:00

I love this quote from Brian Thomas Collins:

Brilliant design cuts out the marketing middleman – the traditional art directors and copywriters – and creates its own media. Like Occam’s Razor, it whittles the marketing equation down to simplest principles: the best experience wins.

Not the best promise. Not the cleverest copy. Not the Big Idea or the biggest budget. The best experience wins.

Via Good Experience.

How Context Changes the Perception of What's Good

2009-02-16T08:18:00.000-08:00

This is a very interesting clip showing some capuchin (monkey) behavior. The first part shows capuchins working together to accomplish a task, which is itself quite interesting. But the second part is also very interesting. It shows two capuchins, one which receives a dry biscuit for completing a task and one which receives a succulent grape (apparently more desirable for capuchins) for completing the same task. The first capuchin is alright with receiving the biscuit until he sees the other capuchin recieve a grape. Once he sees that, he refuses to accept the biscuit and holds out for a grape.

What would be interesting would be to see how the capuchins behave when a biscuit is the reward for a simple task and a grape is the reward for a complex task. Would the capuchins grasp that harder work is deserving of a more desirable reward?

Via the Nudge blog.

Do it by design

2009-02-06T12:56:00.000-08:00

This encouraging story of the redesign of a plaza in Montgomery, Alabama is a great example of how roadway safety can be built-in to a design instead of relying (in vain) on ineffective techniques such as signs and pavement markings.

Hall, for its part, describes the lack of markings as a kind of symbiotic relationship. As they note on their website: “HPE designers assured the city that a design speed of 25 mph would make explicit pavement markings, or guide lines, unnecessary. The lack of extensive markings would, in fact, help manage the vehicle speeds to the pedestrian friendly 20 to 25 mph range. Rough pavement texture and traffic enforcement will also help manage vehicle speeds.”

And the safety? “Drivers for the most part act as Rick predicted they would. The occasional driver goes the wrong way, but since the plaza is wide open and the speeds are so low, no accidents have resulted. There has actually not been a single accident involving vehicles or pedestrians due to the plaza concept.

Not only is the plaza, safer, but it looks like an actual [European] plaza! Every city in the United States should be doing this.

Via Twin Cities Streets for People.

Annoying Portmanteau Watch

2009-01-25T10:28:00.000-08:00

"Cheftestant"

Used on a commercial for Top Chef.

(Bonus annoying portmanteau: "bromance," as seen on the Top Chef website when getting the link for this post.)

Technology's Influence on Gestures

2009-01-19T20:20:00.000-08:00

This post at Small Surfaces reminded me of a thought I had when I first saw the iPhone. Five years from now, when the method of zooming in on an image by moving ones thumb and index finger apart along a diagonal on a multi-touch screen becomes ubiquitous, will this gesture become commonplace as a part of normal conversation? Imagine talking to a friend while they're viewing an image (on a big wall-sized screen or a handheld device) and, as you ask them to zoom in on the image, subconsciously pantomiming the gesture pictured above. Or maybe a politician will be referring to "the big picture" and, without realizing how silly it looks, start repeatedly pinching his fingers as if zooming out on an iPhone.

Image from here.

Thirty most-used words in Congress

2009-01-19T20:13:00.000-08:00

This page lists the thirty most-used words in Congress over the past month. Not surprisingly, there's no mention of "liberty" or anything remotely related to the idea. "Security" is #18.

Via Jay Parkinson.

The High Cost of Subsidies

2009-01-16T21:04:00.000-08:00

This interesting article by Stacy Mitchell discusses the rise and fall of suburban big box retail stores. Her prescription for preventing this problem in the future implicitly identifies the cause on a lack of strict local government land-use regulations.

The only way to ensure that the coming wave of deserted stores and shopping centers does not become a persistent blight on the landscape and a drag on local economies for decades to come is for cities, working together across metro regions, to sharply limit what can be built on undeveloped land.

Mitchell makes it seem like the problem this whole time has been lazy local governments who, if they were only more vigilant, could craft perfect little cities. What Mitchell ignores, however (but which a commenter to the article points out), is the very active role that local governments played in subsidizing just the type of development she decries. Walmart alone has received over $1 billion in subsidies, and it's not uncommon for a big box development to benefit from some sort of tax break or even some unethical use of eminent domain. Talk about distorting the market...

The problem isn't lazy local governments, but rather overly-active local governments.

Cult of the Presidency Watch

2009-01-16T08:31:00.000-08:00

Why would anyone want to wear a shirt with the first names of Obama's immediate family on it? I can see wanting to wear an Obama shirt because you think he's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but a shirt with his daughters' names on it?!? Seems a little stalker-ish to me.

Via Trendcentral. Title of post from Gene Healy's book.

Human Factors of TASERS

2009-01-16T07:18:00.000-08:00

(NOTE: These images are random images from the internet...I have no idea what the TASER and gun mentioned below actually look like.)

At 2:00 a.m. on New Year's Day, Oscar Grant was shot by a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) police officer. The incident has sparked protests and riots in Oakland, and for many this seems like an open-and-shut case of yet another incident of police brutality. However, the officer who fired the shot is claiming that he mistakenly drew his gun after intending to draw his TASER, presumably to subdue Grant. Leaving aside the issue of whether the use of a TASER is justified in this situation (or any situation), as soon as I read this I immediately wondered about the human factors involved in this situation.

Dave Schmidt, a former police officer, offers an interesting discussion on how motor learning and and the phyhsical position of the TASER on the officer's belt may have lead the officer to confuse his gun for his taser. Moreover, as Schmidt points out, "The TASER feels and draws like a handgun, but it is completely different." If a TASER feels the same as a gun, then it seems like a blatant violation of Human Factors 101 to store the two in such close proximity on the officer's belt.

It seems like there are two things that could be done to mitigate the risk inherent in officers carrying both a lethal and nonlethal (at least usually) weapon:

Ensure that the "design" of an officer's belt is not such that two different pieces of equipment with two very different functionalities are stored closely to each other. If officers's are used to drawing their gun from the right side of their body and drawing the TASER from their left side or from a leg holster, they're less likely to make the motor skill confusion of grabbing one when intending to grab the other.
Require that all TASERS manufactured and/or sold in the United States do not have the same appearance, texture, or even weight (if possible) as a gun.

Implementing these two mitigations would greatly reduce the probability of TASER/gun confusion, just as human factors engineering has greatly reduced so-called "human errors" in aviation, medical devices, and even consumer products.

Cass Sunstein as Regulatory Czar

2009-01-08T11:48:00.000-08:00

Apparently Cass Sunstein is going to be the new regulatory czar. I don't know if Sunstein is the ideal pick, but Obama could have done a lot worse. Libertarians seem to fear Sustein's "libertarian paternalism" because (1) it's more concerned about paternalism than libertarianism, and (2) Sunstein doesn't seem to operate with the same definition of liberty as libertarians do. As Will Wilkinson has pointed out, Sunstein seems to think of liberty as the preservation/defense of choice, while libertarians tend to think of liberty as the absence of coercion.

In reality, I think those two things are less different than they may seem in the abstract. After all, isn't the practical liberty that a person experiences both a function of the lack of coercion AND the choices that their stations in life afford? In other words, people who live in a prosperous society with some coercive regulations (say Denmark) probably experience greater practical liberty than people who live in an anarchic society with no coercive regulations (say Somalia).

In any case, I think Sunstein has the potential to be a very positive force (pun not initially intended, but now that I recognize it it seems pretty clever so I'm going to leave it in there) in the Obama administration, especially if he's able to focus not only on the formation of new regulation, but also on the reformation of existing regulation. After all, the classic "libertarian paternalism" example associated with Sunstein is the idea that by making enrollment in 401ks the default option but allowing employees to opt out (thus preserving choice), participation in 401ks will be greater and people will be better off. Wouldn't it be nice (and intellectually consisten, by the way) if Sunstein/Obama applied this same logic to Social Security and allowed people to opt out of it?

Image from here.

I guess it's a common problem

2008-12-28T17:12:00.000-08:00

My last name (Monnier) is rarely pronounced correctly (it's French, so it's pronounced "Moan-e-yay"). So I wasn't too surprised to see the name butchered by Brent Weisberg (the journalist covering the case) from KPTV in Oregon when discussing how a local man (Charles Monnier) saved someone who had been attacked by pitbulls by beating them off with a shovel. Instead of the elegant French pronunciation, Weisberg identified the hero as "Mont-e-air". Last time I checked there was no "t" in "Monnier."

Oh well.

Taste...influenced by more than just smell

2008-12-23T19:47:00.000-08:00

This is relatively old news (August of 2008), but is nevertheless interesting. A study in the Journal of Consumer Research found that:

Participants who ate the vegetarian alternative did not rate the taste and aroma less favorably than those who ate the beef product. Instead, what influenced taste evaluation was what they thought they had eaten and whether that food symbolized values that they personally supported ... strategies that might persuade heavy meat eaters to change their diet include changing the cultural associations of fruits and vegetables to encompass values that meat eaters endorse (e.g., power and strength), or challenging heavy meat eaters' assumptions about what tastes good by using in-store (blind) taste tests or showing them results of studies such as this one."

This reinforces the idea that the product is not just the physical product (or its taste), but the entire experience of purchasing and consuming the product (the price, the product's story, its ingredients, its smell, etc.). And I think the authors of this study are on to something by suggesting a change in the marketing strategy of vegan alternatives to meat. While I think that rebranding tofu and seitan as manly products (buy a new Ford F150, bet a freezer full of Hungry-Man Tofu dinners!) is an uphill battle, I could imagine a line of frozen vegan dinners targeted toward health/fitness-conscious individuals that uses a brand strategy similar to those whey/protein supplement powders...maybe something like Kung pao tofu fortified with Omega-3 fatty acids and 1000mg of the latest nutrient du jour.

John has sent you an invitation to join his risk pool...

2008-12-23T19:27:00.000-08:00

As Jay Parkinson mentions here, the social network E-Factor (for entrepreneurs and investors) is now offering health insurance to its premium members:

Fascinating concept…social networks becoming pools for health insurance. It sure is a whole new world of stickin’ it to the man...What if Facebook offered a whole slew of low cost insurance premiums to their members? Of course, premiums would be much lower because the average Facebook user is young and fairly healthy.

We (in the US) have employer-provided health insurance for a number of reasons, one being the fact that income from corporations in the form of subsidized health insurance isn't taxed (so it's cheaper for a corporation to buy health insurance for an individual than an individual for herself), and another being that a company's set of employees provides a rather convenient group of people from which to create a risk pool.

A change in the tax code to allow all expenditures on health insurance (whether by a corporation or an individual) to be tax-free would take care of the advantage of employer-provided insurance described in the first reason, and allowing risk pools to be created from online social networks would take care of the advantage described in the second reason.

Granted, a group of Facebook friends (or an extended network of friends' friends) may not provide a sufficient diversity of healthiness to allow for a practicable risk pool, but perhaps a network of LinkedIn connections would work. In any case, I'm sure there's some way that social networks (or meta networks) could be harnessed to generate risk pools. It's an intriguing idea, to be sure.

Image from here.

Unintended Consequences?

2008-12-23T19:18:00.001-08:00

I think that the "iBreath" iPod breathalyzer attachment is a good idea...anything that gives people more information (which can in turn lead to more informed decisions) seems like a good thing, especially when it gives people more control over their own bodies.

I wonder, though, if having such information may lead to a perverse competition among revelers to see who can achieve the greatest Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) the fastest. The selling point of the product seems to be that it can help you know when it's safe (from a legal standpoint, at least) to drive. But I wonder if it also contains warnings for when ones BAC is nearing that of alcohol poisoning. And then I also wonder whether such warnings would be effective or might they merely be a sign of accomplishment ("Last night I was so wasted I got the alcohol poisoning warning!").

In any case, the potential for intentional misuse is probably pretty small, and is most likely outweighed by the benefits of the product, so it's obviously a net good thing.

I've lived a sheltered life...

2008-12-19T10:03:00.000-08:00

I knew Wisconsin was a nice place to live, but I hadn't realized that I'd grown up in a metropolitan area with one of the lowest crime rates in the nation (Wausau, WI). In fact, six of the top ten metropolitan areas with the lowest crime rates in the nations are mid-size Wisconsin cities very similar to Wausau. Wow.

Fon du Lac, WI
State College, PA
Bangor, ME
Eau Claire, WI
Appleton, WI
Sheboygan, WI
Bismarck, ND
La Crosse, WI
Logan, UT-ID
Wausau, WI

Via Marginal Revolution.

2009 looks bleak, 2010 a bit better

2008-11-26T19:44:00.000-08:00

As the following embedded map of the OECD Economic Outlook shows, 2009 looks like a pretty stagnant year for the western world. Flipping the year to 2010 shows a happier scenario, with a lot less blue and a lot more orange.

One comment about the map's usability: it would be nice to be able to toggle the year without having to move the mouse all the way down to the dropdown box for the year. One potential solution would be to add all the years (2008, 2009, and 2010) to the little bubble that pops up when you hover over a country so that you could click a different year without losing focus ona country. As the map is currently designed, the user has to break their focus on a country (and any other countries their comparing the country of focus to) to change the year, which seems a bit clunky.

Via OECD Factblog.

Meta-analysis of Free Market Critiques

2008-11-20T22:42:00.000-08:00

After reading this post by Tim Lee:

It sounds to me like what Ezra is saying here, in an extremely back-handed fashion, is that libertarians aren’t corporate stooges at all. When the interests of corporations happen to align with what we regard as good public policy, then corporate interests tend to be our allies. Otherwise, they tend not to be. Which, as far as I can tell, is exactly how it should be.

...

But it is a little bit frustrating that when libertarians take a firm stance against the interests of large corporations, we don’t get praised for our independence so much as getting attacked for our ideological rigidity. These charges can’t both be right: we can’t both be solicitous corporate shills and inflexible ideologues. If people are going to question our motives, I wish they’d at least get their story straight on exactly which kind of intellectual dishonesty they think we’re engaging in.

I was reminded of this video (via Will Wilkinson) on how ones morals can affect what should be an objective, rational judgment.

What Ezra seems to be guilty of is allowing his moral values (opposition to oil drilling, support for a progressive tax system, support for government-managed Social Security) to cloud his characterization of the motives of libertarians.

True For Many Things

2008-11-20T22:08:00.001-08:00

Via Andrew Sullivan, this ridiculously simple chart shows how gay marriage would affect society:

A similar chart could be made for many libertarian positions, the most obvious of which (to me, at least) is drug legalization.

Wikipedia Curiosity of the Day

2008-11-14T18:32:00.000-08:00

Can you believe that the guillotine was used by the French government as recently as 1977?!? From Wikipedia:

The last public guillotining [in France] was of Eugène Weidmann, who was convicted of six murders. He was beheaded on June 17, 1939, outside the prison Saint-Pierre rue Georges Clémenceau 5 at Versailles, which is now the Palais de Justice...The guillotine remained the official method of execution in France until France abolished the death penalty in 1981. The last guillotining in France was that of torture-murderer Hamida Djandoubi on September 10, 1977.

Via curiosity about the guillotine courtesy of this Boing Boing post.

Pro-Choice

2008-11-10T12:08:00.000-08:00

This Daily Show clip reminds the viewer of the benefits of choice:

Why doesn't the same liberal appreciation of reproductive choice also apply to parents being able to choose where their kids go to school? As Nick Gillespie and Neal McCluskey have pointed out, when it comes to school choice, rich people (like Barack Obama) effectively have a choice; poor people effectively don't.

I've never understood how some people can so passionately defend a woman's right to choose her reproductive outcomes but then not defend that same woman's right to choose where her child (once born) will go to school.

Mixed Feelings on the Election

2008-11-05T04:35:00.001-08:00

First, the good news. Barack Obama will be the next president. Aside from his victory's historic importance and its potential implications for race relations in America, Obama was just clearly the superior candidate, especially on foreign policy. So good news there.

But as encouraging as Obama's victory is, the passage of Proposition 8 in California is almost equally discouraging. Voters in California voted to amend that state's constitution to take away a previously constitutionally-protected right from a minority of its citizens. This is classic tyranny of the majority, and it's a reminder that liberty is never 100% guaranteed and requires eternal vigilance to maintain.

The one ideal that Obama has associated himself with more than any other ideal is "hope." It is with hope that supporters of liberty and equality can move forward from the disappointment of Proposition 8's passage, encouraged at the prospect that a message of hope can indeed succeed, even in the face of ignorance and intolerance.

Image from here.

Who I'm Voting For

2008-11-03T20:54:00.000-08:00

Finally, the election is upon us. After looking up the relevant sample ballot here, I compiled the following summary of who I'll be voting for. If you're looking for a good summary of the candidates local races in your area, the Star Tribune has a nice "MyVote" tool here.

Office	Candidate (party)
President	Bob Barr (L)
Senator	Dean Barkley (I)
U.S. Representative	Christopher Monnier (write-in, i)
State Representative	Jerry Pitzrick (D)
County Commissioner	Randy Johnson (NP)
Soil Commissioner, District 1	Eric Hupperts (write-in, NP)
Soil Commissioner, District 3	James Wisker (NP)
Soil Commissioner, District 5	Karl Hanson (NP)
Eden Prairie City Council (choose two)	Brad Aho, Jeffery Meyerhofer (NP)
Minnesota Constitutional Amendment	No
Minnesota Supreme Court, Justice 3	Paul Anderson (NP)
Minnesota Supreme Court, Justice 4	Deborah Hedlund (NP)
Minnesota Court of Appeals, Judge 16	Terri J. Stoneburner (NP)
4th District, Judge 9	Philip D. Bush (NP)
4th District, Judge 53	Jane Ranum (NP)
4th District, Judge 58	James T. Swenson (NP)

Legend

(L) = Libertarian Party
(D) = Democratic Party (technically Democrat Farmer-Laborer in Minnesota)
(I) = Independence Party
(i) = indpendent
(NP) = non-partisan position

If you think the stock market is bad...

2008-10-31T19:39:00.000-07:00

With the stock market losing over a third of its value in the last year, it's sort of becoming generally accepted popular opinion that, "Wow, we sure are lucky that whole 'privatize social security' thing didn't pan out." Al Franken is even running a commercial in which he proudly proclaims that he will "fight any attempt to privatize Social Security."

Gee, thanks, Al, for promising to guarantee a rate of return of, at best, 2%! Good thing social security wasn't privatized in 1965:

If you invested $100 in 1965 at Social Security’s rate of return, today you would have $254.91. But if you invested that $100 in the market, today, even with the current down market, you would have $4,135.92.

Source: Cato@Liberty

Freedom Is Unrestrained

2008-10-31T19:25:00.000-07:00

Wisdom from a Japanese T-shirt via Engrish.com:

See, Sarah Palin. Freedom is unrestrained, even if it results in the "MSM" portraying you in a bad light.

The Wisdom of Crowds

2008-10-30T20:26:00.000-07:00

One of the big reasons I favor markets over central planning is that humans are prone to error. In an abstract sense, if you put all your eggs in one basket (i.e. central planning), errors (which are inevitable) have the potential to be magnified such that they affect many more people than just the decision makers themselves. However, when power is devolved towards the individual (i.e. markets), errors are more localized around the person making the error.

The former system makes change slow (everyone has to agree to try something, then everyone has to deal with a failure), while the latter system makes rapid iterations possible: person A tries something and it doesn't work, but person B, not burdened by the error created by person A, tries something else that does work and is able to spread his/her good idea. Hence the wisdom of crowds: many people trying many different things leads to the emergence of a couple of really good ideas, while the bad ideas are allowed to fail gracefully.

Anyway, blah blah blah with all the philosophical stuff. These words by Arnold Kling sum everything up:

However, we see a shift in power from markets to government as adverse nonetheless. Individual political leaders have less knowledge than is aggregated by markets. They face perverse incentives. And they pervert the incentives of others. Witness today's economy, in which everyone is asking not how they can create wealth but how they can get their share of a bailout.

Image from here.

Abuse of Power

2008-10-23T07:55:00.000-07:00

This video makes me both sad and outraged at the same time. As hard as it may be to see, every dog owner should know about this tragedy in order to (1) be aware of what cops on power trips will do to dogs (and humans, by the way), and (2) take any necessary precautions in order to protect your dog.

Via The Agitator.

Marketizing Health Care

2008-10-20T20:14:00.000-07:00

More of this, please:

Radiology has long been at the forefront of telemedicine, and now it is paving the way into another area of medicine...auctions! Enter Telerays radiology auction service, where batches of studies are auctioned off to the radiologist with the lowest bid. That doesn't sound very reassuring until you read through the company's reassuring credentialing process.

The radiologists are recruited from across the US in what appears to be a win-win proposition. For physicians, the Telerays system allows for as much or as little work, when and where they want, while simplifying billing arrangements. For hospitals, it adds access to radiologists, including sub-specialists (that may not be available in a smaller center) while potentially allowing for cost savings as well.

Dr. Jay Parkinson approves.

Image from here.

Jacob Weisberg Incurs the Wrath

2008-10-20T19:31:00.000-07:00

Jacob Weisberg wrote an article called "The End of Libertarianism" and set forth a wrath of libertarian rejoinders. I think Weisberg's final passage summarizes how he really feels:

The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading Ayn Rand novels in high school. Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world's failing to conform to their model by asking where the world went wrong. Their heroic view of capitalism makes it difficult for them to accept that markets can be irrational, misunderstand risk, and misallocate resources or that financial systems without vigorous government oversight and the capacity for pragmatic intervention constitute a recipe for disaster. They are bankrupt, and this time, there will be no bailout.

It was nice to see that I wasn't the only one whose blood boiled upon reading this egregious straw man of an argument. This being the internet, however, Weisberg's flimsy contentions were soon shredded by an all-star cast of libertarians.

Radley Balko: As I mentioned this morning, what gets me is this notion that libertarian ideas have been tried, and failed. That’s not the case at all. This administration has denounced libertarians at every turn. Its ideas come largely from the moral right and from the neconservatives, two groups wholly at odds with libertarianism.

Brink Lindsey: In firing this broadside, Weisberg poses as the pragmatic, empirically minded anti-ideologue. In fact, he is engaging in the lowest and most intellectually trivial form of ideological hack work.

Will Wilkinson: I think Weisberg rightly sees that control over the popular narrative about the causes of the financial collapse could have a big effect on public opinion. And Democrats are about to win the White House together with a robust Congressional majority. So here’s the main chance! The long-awaited dream! The desperate desire! The rightful claim of establishment liberals to the commanding heights is imminent! Now is the time! The sense of entitlement is about to meet title! And the GOP is in utter disarray, having long ago lost any semblance of a coherent philosophy of government. The field is almost clear. Only the utopian punter, holding a tattered copy of Atlas Shrugged, guards the goal line. The embittered professors and graying editors-in-chief cannot bear to wait another season. They will wake to their triumphant dawn. The cry goes up: “Smear the libertarian queer!” And never mind the rules. Bring it, Weisberg.

Jesse Walker: When you don't believe in the heroic corporate chieftain, it should be equally hard to put your faith in that alternative fantasy, the heroic regulator: neutral and public-spirited, always attuned to market failure, constantly prepared to right the ship of commerce. Instead we favor a decentralized system of checks and balances, of which the most important are the checks imposed by an open, competitive marketplace. Not because it's heroic, but because it can ruthlessly cut a would-be hero down to size.

Matt Welch: There is no space in Weisberg's conception of "libertarians" for people like, for instance, me: Not remotely a utopian, not "of the right," never read an Ayn Rand novel, spent high school playing sports instead of reading political philosophy, don't want to do history over (except for Game 5 of the 1986 ALCS), and don't pine for some presumably awful world where everyone shares my political views. (And, I might add, unlike Weisberg, I don't want to convert my political views into increased state power over fellow citizens who don't happen to agree with me.) No, I just think that, all things being equal, capitalism is vastly superior to socialism, government is by definition inefficient, and would be much better off focused on essential tasks, rather than, say, nationalizing hundred-billion-dollar chunks of the mortgage industry, or trying to guarantee that asset prices never depreciate. In my world, at least, not all regulation is automatically evil, just ripe for being gamed by the very interests being regulated, and so better when pruned back.

I think Matt Welch just about perfectly captures my thoughts.

Some Sensible Comments from the Washington Post

2008-10-20T06:54:00.001-07:00

From today's Washington Post:

We'll never know how this newly liberated financial sector might have performed on a playing field designed by Adam Smith. That's because government interventions of all kinds, from the defense budget to farm supports, shaped the business environment. No subsidy would prove more fateful than the massive federal commitment to residential real estate -- from the mortgage interest tax deduction to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the Federal Reserve's low interest rates under Mr. Greenspan. Unregulated derivatives known as credit-default swaps did accentuate the boom in mortgage-based investments, by allowing investors to transfer risk rather than setting aside cash reserves. But government helped make mortgages a purportedly sure thing in the first place. Home prices seemed to stand on a solid floor built by Washington.

That sounds about right.

Via Econlog.

One More Thought About Economics

2008-10-19T23:40:00.000-07:00

Don Boudreaux:

The chief question [regarding the current economic situation] is to what extent are today's problems caused by market forces, and to what extent by government interference with these forces.

In other words, the system we have now (and what we've had for the entire history of the United States) is anything but a free market. That system is a combination of market forces and government interference with those forces; as such, when the system fails, to truly solve the problem, we must look at all components of the system, not just one or the other.

Why I'm Worried

2008-10-19T23:15:00.000-07:00

Arnold Kling:

What we are seeing now is the Freddie/Fannie model applied to the entire financial sector. You need a government guarantee in order to be a player. Once government-guaranteed firms are on a firm footing, the equivalent of "affordable housing goals" is sure to follow. That is, government will be bossing capital around to an even larger extent than before.

I have a sinking feeling that misplaced hostility towards free markets (how exactly are our current markets "free?") will lead to policies and regulations that are increasingly hostile to liberty and capitalism. Maybe not...maybe everyone will just agree to make markets more transparent, thereby allowing for a better understanding of risk. But I'm skeptical that things will work out that nicely.

So economic liberty is in for a rough ride in the coming years (decades?). But I'm confident that, in time, the failures due to whatever increases in government intervention the reaction to the current crisis brings will become evident, trickling down from brilliant academics all the way down to the masses. Eventually pop-economics books will be written that use clever metaphors and narratives to convey the flaws of government intervention to society. So there's hope. As Russ Roberts has said:

So if you love liberty and fear those who would engineer our well-being rather than let it emerge from our free choices, if you love liberty and fear those who would use good intentions as an excuse for plunder, don't worry. We'll have our day down the road. Keep reading and writing and thinking. And don't yell. Above all, smile and hold firm to your principles. They will be remembered and valued when the pendulum swings the other way. It's just a matter of time.

Hopefully sooner rather than later.

More Input!

2008-10-18T23:46:00.000-07:00

This post on speedometers by Tom Vanderbilt got me thinking:

Even more troubling is the speedometer’s dumbness. The device gives a simple reading that lacks context. It tells speed, but it doesn’t convey other useful information. How does the car’s speed compare to the posted limit? How much time is saved by driving faster, and how does it compare to the added fatality risk of a crash (which rises exponentially at higher speeds)?

As Tom hints, absolute speed is just one input that goes into a driver's calculus of how to drive, and it's often less important than other inputs (such as the current speed limit, current and upcoming traffic conditions, current road conditions, or the total trip time based on the current speed). In other words, drivers need more information besides just raw speed to perform the task of driving. And since today's technology allows for the collection of such information, it seems like a good idea for cars to start providing that information. Of course, it's important to avoid information overload, but clearly drivers aren't currently overloaded with information if they can find the time (and cognitive capacity) to talk/text on their phones, put on makeup, eat, read, etc. while driving.

As Johnny 5 would say, more input!

Image from here.

Best Restaurant Name Ever?

2008-10-18T23:34:00.001-07:00

If I ever go to Toronto, I want to eat at C'est What. That's where the User Experience Network just had their last meetup.

Image from here.

The Ultimate in Slothfulness

2008-10-18T23:22:00.000-07:00

I randomly stumbled across this workstation setup while searching for some image at work the other day and thought, "this is exactly what I've been looking for."

Imagine being able to waste time on the internet without even getting out of bed!

Canada Gets All the Good Stuff

2008-10-17T07:38:00.000-07:00

Man, Canada's on a roll. First there was the suggestion that Canada bail Iceland out of its current troubles by basically adopting it and making it a new province. Then this article about how Canada's banks have largely avoided the current crisis in America and Europe. And now this:

Following a meeting in Quebec City, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who is the president of the European Union as well, are expected to sign an agreement for preliminary negotiations meant to create a trade pact between Canada and Europe that would be even more sweeping than the North American Free Trade Agreement.

And the killer part of the deal:

If adopted it would minimize barriers in services, include sales to government, open up the air travel market and allow skilled Canadians and Europeans to work across borders without visas.

How cool would it be to be able to just be like, "Yeah, I think I'm going to move to Paris for a while, then maybe Amsterdam, then maybe I'll come back and work in Toronto or Vancouver. Oh, what's that American friend? You need a Visa to work in Europe? Huh...seems archaic."

Image from here.

I Hope Obama Knows Better

2008-10-15T21:45:00.000-07:00

I saw this ad on TV tonight and found it quite disheartening:

As Matt Welch put it in the Hit & Run liveblog of the debate:

Obama's sinophobia could qualify him for a contributing editor slot at The Weekly Standard...

Does Obama really have to resort to such jingoism? More frighteningly, does Obama actually believe in the validity of the protectionism the ad implies?

Really? WTF?

2008-10-14T01:45:00.000-07:00

I thought of this idea after seeing some McCain-Palin signs around my neighborhood and thinking: "Seriously?" So I mocked up a quick version of it. I'm thinking of having some lawn signs printed...I wonder how many people would put one of these in their yard? Here's the real one, by the way. And in case you need reminding, here are Sarah Palin's greatest hits:

Facebook Tips

2008-10-12T09:58:00.000-07:00

I recently saw someone use the "♥" symbol on Facebook and was wondering how they did it. Windows character map says the shortcut key is "U+2665," but this isn't very helpful. Where's the "U" key? Typing a capital-U and then 2665 doesn't work. So how do people do it?

Turns out (as I found here) there are some really easy ways to get some basic symbols. These shortcuts might not work in all applications and/or fonts (they won't show up in Verdana), but they work in Facebook.

Alt+1: Non-filled smiley face (☺)
Alt+2: Filled smiley face (☻)
Alt+3: Heart (♥)
Alt+4: Diamond (♦)
Alt+5: Club (♣)
Alt+6: Spade (♠)
Alt+7: Dot (•)
Alt+8: Square with hold (◘)
Alt+9: Non-filled ellipse: (○)

Too Many Houses, or Not Enough Residents?

2008-10-10T19:45:00.000-07:00

One of the many causes of the current financial situation is an excess of housing supply. During the real estate boom, developers speculatively built houses in anticipation of eager home buyers buying their dream home now that they could finally (or so they thought) afford it. As we now know, that plan didn't really pan out.

One perspective is that there are too many houses. Another perspective is that there aren't enough residents. Solution? Get more residents (i.e. increase immigration limits). The genius economists at Marginal Revolution seem to think this a good idea, as does Lee Ohanian, an economist at UCLA:

We should encourage the immigration of prime-age individuals. Beginning in 2007, net immigration fell to half of its level over the previous five years. Increasing immigration would increase the demand for housing and raise home prices. And note that the benefit would be immediate. Home prices -- and the value of subprime obligations -- would rise in anticipation of a higher population base. The U.S. particularly needs highly skilled workers. These workers not only would purchase homes, but would generate higher living standards for all Americans.

I actually favor lifting all caps on immigration and letting as many people come to America as want to, but letting more skilled workers in (you know there's a shortage when the annual application quota for high-skilled workers is filled on the first day applications are accepted) seems like a very politically-palatable way of increasing immigration and helping the economy.

Image from here.

No on Prop. 8!

2008-10-10T19:17:00.000-07:00

I don't live in California, but I think the defeat of Proposition 8 (which would ban gay marriage in California after it was legalized in a Supreme Court decision) is super important for equality and, more generally, liberty in the United States. If the government is going to be in the business of sanctioning relationships between adults, it shouldn't discriminate between which relationships are valid and which aren't.

You might think that a defeat of Proposition 8 is a shoe-in...after all people in California are pretty liberal and open-minded, right? According to Andrew Sullivan and Mike Riggs, however, that doesn't seem to be the case, as support for Proposition 8 is growing.

That's why I donated to "No on Prop 8" here. I happened to have been in San Francisco for work when the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage was announced, and the local news stories of couples that had been together for 30 years finally having the chance to make their relationship official were truly inspiring. To paraphrase Michelle Obama, I was finally proud of my country.

Image from here.

Business Arrogance

2008-10-08T23:18:00.000-07:00

I have a mixed opinion of "business thinking" and its many adherents (presumably anyone with an MBA). On one hand, I have a lot of respect for people that can get products into the marketplace in a timely manner despite any lingering imperfections in the products that the designers and engineers might otherwise deem unacceptable. On the other hand, the arrogance of executives and other like-minded business-thinking people can often be very annoying. Take this example of a JetBlue executive taking his company's brand reputation for granted, vi Mark Hurst at Good Experience:

Some analysts have voiced concerns that this might not be the best strategic move; here's the reply, an instant classic:

Edward Barnes, JetBlue's chief financial officer, says the airline isn't worried. "You can't underestimate the brand," he said.

You can't underestimate the brand. It raises an obvious question: What brand?

Mark goes on to clearly illustrate how JetBlue's service has deterioriated, and I agree with him that, with the attitude of its CFO, it's only a matter of time before the brand's image begins suffering serious damage. Maintaining a positive brand image (by creating a positive user experience) seems to require constant vigilance lest suffer a regression to the mean at the hands of business arrogance.

Image from here.

Sad Guys on Trading Floors

2008-10-08T13:02:00.000-07:00

Sad Guys on Trading Floors is a brilliant site that just combines stock images used to accompany a story about the current financial crisis with clever captions. Here are two of my favorites:

Seriously guys! Five dollar footlongs at Subway! It’s a fantasic deal! BUY BUY!

It suddenly occurs to Roger that he should’ve ignored his dad and gone to Parsons after all.

Via Free Exchange.

Easy-to-understand Explanation of Current Financial Situation

2008-10-08T10:02:00.000-07:00

From Reason's Hit & Run:

George Mason University economist and author Russell Roberts, who blogs at the always interesting Cafe Hayek, sat down with reason.tv to talk about the nation's shakey economy and the government's bailout plan.

Design for Engagement

2008-10-07T23:51:00.000-07:00

Via Boing Boing and the Putting People First comes the story of some interesting research by Dutch psychologist Christof van Nimwegen.

In "The Paradox of the guided user: assistance can be counter- effective," van Nimwegen asked two groups to perform the same tasks. The first was allowed use a computer; the second group only got a pen and pencil. The second group executed all tasks faster and performed substantially better. In addition, their solutions to complicated problems were more creative.

...

Van Nimwegen says much software turns us into passive beings, subjected to the whims of computers, randomly clicking on icons and menu options. In the long run, this hinders our creativity and memory, he says.

I don't think there's anything wrong with allowing people to format a document without exerting too much cognitive load, and I don't think that using wizards to guide users through otherwise-complicated software tasks will turn humans into a bunch of Wall-E-style consumers. They may learn less about the software and have less situational awareness about the task (writing documentation?) they're completing, but doesn't that at least create the potential for users to spend more time doing value-added work instead of writing administrative documentation? I don't want to waste cognitive capital on writing a report; I want to spend that cognitive capital on thinking of new solutions or connecting disparate pieces of information, things I wouldn't use Word for anyway.

I think the lesson here is that interfaces should not be designed to take the user out of the equation entirely, but rather to keep the user engaged in order to optimize the human value the user brings to the equation. So keep the boring, administrative, and easily-automatible stuff out of the hands of users and use the interface to facilitate rich, value-added interaction.

Image from here.

The experience is the product

2008-10-07T23:17:00.000-07:00

"The experience is the product." I read this sentence (or something like it) in a book at Barnes and Noble one time (I can't remember the name of the book) and it has stuck with me ever since. I certainly agree with the sentiment; the "product" isn't just the gadget; it's the packaging, the price, the place where it's purchased, and of course the user's interaction with it.

So when I came across this post at Medgadget listing the winners of the 2008 Ig Nobel prizes, the one for Nutrition caught my eye:

NUTRITION PRIZE. Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.

Don't just design the flavor, also design the "crunch!"

Likewise, this post on NOTCOT gets at the same idea:

The internet is a buzz with rumors on the latest “viral” video of Dan Aykroyd showing us his new Crystal Head Vodka in a gorgeous glass skull...Apparently it is made by Diamond Estates Wines & Spirits Ltd, out of Newfoundland water triple crystal filtered through herkimer diamonds (aka double-terminated quartz crystals)! Really the story is just great though, and the video and bottle make the experience priceless...

Of course, using specially-designed bottles to differentiate a commodity product are commonplace (why do you think the Coke bottle looks so unique?), but adding a whole myth (replete with a video) takes things up a notch.

Whether it's research into how humans judge the quality of a product or marketing designed to sell a product, it's important to consider the holistic experience of the user.

Images from here and here.

Homemade Alka-Seltzer

2008-10-07T22:40:00.000-07:00

A couple months ago, I made one of the smartest purchases of my life and got a SodaClub FountainJet carbonation machine (the thing on the left in the above picture). I'm pretty sure it's already paid for itself with the money I've saved from not buy bottled carbonated water, plus it allows me to make homemade Alka-Seltzer. I love Alka-Seltzer, but it's expensive and I always seem to run out of it.

So finally I decided to try to make it "from scratch" and the results were great. Add 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda to 1 cup of carbonated water plus a couple drops of lemon juice and you end up with something decently resembling Alka-Seltzer. Anectdotally, I think this actually cured my stomach ache (probably what others would call heartburn or gut rot...basically a really acidic feeling) faster than the real thing. Plus, it's way cheaper. A win-win-win!

Images from here, here, here, and here.

Too Funny (and Accurate) to Not Post

2008-10-03T07:48:00.000-07:00

I love this flowchart of Sarah Palin's debate strategy:

From Adennak via Andrew Sullivan.

You are more qualified to be vice president than Sarah Palin

2008-10-02T07:29:00.000-07:00

Watch this series of clips of Sarah Palin trying to answer basic questions that most Americans could provide better answers to and ask yourself, how can *anyone* seriously be considering voting for McCain/Palin?

Private Airports...Finally!

2008-10-01T22:18:00.000-07:00

Privately operated (not to mention privately owned) airports have been commonplace in Europe for years, but not so in the US. Until now (finally!). According to the New York Times:

Midway Airport is poised to become the first large privately run hub airport in the country, officials said Tuesday, after an investment group bid $2.52 billion to win rights to a long-term lease, The New York Times’s Susan Saulny writes.

The deal with Midway Investment and Development Company, requires final approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and the Chicago City Council, which is set to vote Oct. 8.

Almost all commercial airports in the United States are owned and operated by local or state governments, and Midway is no exception. But Midway is eligible for leasing because the city applied to the F.A.A. to take part in an experimental program begun about 12 years ago to explore privatization as a means to generate capital for improvements.

Congress has allowed the agency to permit up to five airports to take part in the program, and if the Midway deal is approved, it will be the first.

It's about time America caught up to Europe in this regard. In case you're wondering, here's the list of top 10 airports worldwide. They're all in Asia, Europe, and Africa, and some of the airports are operated by governments while others are operated by private companies. There are currently no US airports (all of which are run by some governmental entity) in the top 10. Maybe Midway's new privatization can change that?

Image from here.

Imeem

2008-10-01T20:34:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: Imeem seems to have changed their interface since this posting (see the comment), and the new version is indeed superior. Way to respond quickly, Imeem!

Ever since I discovered it from reading some article online, I've been a big fan of Imeem. Now MySpace Music basically offers the same functionality, but since I'm used to imeem I plan on sticking with it for the time being. Imeem has been criticized for its clunky user interface, but the one redeeming thing about the site's problems is that they seemed to get resolved (or at least improved) pretty quickly. With their newly-redesigned front page, however, I think Imeem made a minor, yet still annoying, design flaw.

Here's what the page looks like before you've logged in:

After you click the 'login' link (with the yellow box around it in the above picture), the page looks like this:

My qualm is that the button to submit your username and password is labeled "Login," and yet the original 'login' link is still visible (see the yellow box above). When logging in for the first time, I briefly looked away from the screen and when I looked back, I was confused. Which "login" (the button or the link) am I supposed to click on? Was the button there the whole time? Why is the link still there?

I think there's a pretty quick fix for this: just repalce the 'login' link with the 'Login' button after the link is clicked on. Something like this:

With so many seemingly trivial usability issues (like this one) continuing to show up in Imeem releases, I have to wonder if they do any sort of usability testing before launching a new release. As Jakob Nielsen says, you really only need to test 5 users to find a lot of the little things that trip up users.

Why I Don't Like Driving In Traffic

2008-10-01T06:19:00.000-07:00

I like driving when there's no traffic, or maybe even light traffic (slow cars are like obstacles). But when there's heavy traffic, especially when there's no way around it, I hate driving. I think the reason goes beyond just being annoyed at how slow everything is moving. I think the thing that really gets me is being forced to drive in a dumbed-down manner. Like it or not, if you're driving in heavy traffic you have to actively participate in the mind-numbing task of driving without any real challenge. Stop and go. Stop and go. Stop and go. I don't mind passively participating in a mindless activity (like watching TV and zoning out) when it's on my terms, but I hate actively participating in a mindless activity when it's not on my terms. It's like brain slavery.

Sometimes all I want in life is to just be able to take a subway (itself a mindless task, albeit a passive one) from home to work.

Wake up when it's optimal

2008-09-30T22:00:00.000-07:00

HappyWakeUp is a program that runs on Nokia phones that uses breathing patterns (as measured by the phone's microphone) to analyze sleep patterns and wake the user up at an optimal point. Per the press release:

The new alarm clock is built in to a mobile phone. The subject sets the desired alarm time as normal and places the phone nearby (usually beneath the pillow). The phone analyses the subject's 'sleep movement sounds'. Twenty minutes before the alarm is set to go off, the phone determines when the subject is making 'almost awake' sounds, and gives off a soft alarm signal.

If I had something to tell me that, despite my desire to get more sleep, it really would be better to just get up early than go back to sleep and force myself to wake up when my alarm goes off, I think I might be more prone to do so. As it is, without such reassurance, I sometimes will wake up like 20-30 minutes before my alarm clock is set to go off but then go back to sleep, only to regret that decision when I try to break out of the deep sleep I'm in when my alarm goes off. I hope software/alarms like HappyWakeUp become ubiquitous.

Via Medgadget.

Citi's Demise

2008-09-29T11:39:00.000-07:00

According to Wikipedia:

Citigroup Inc., operating as Citi (pronounced Siti), was a major American financial services company based in New York City before its demise on September 30, 2008.

Problem is, September 30, 2008 has not yet occurred. Here's a screenshot:

Is this a random act of vandalism or is some insider at Citi trying to tell the world something? Time will tell...

Interesting User Research Idea

2008-09-28T22:18:00.000-07:00

As I was unwrapping a red Starburst (unfortunately Super Target was all out of the California flavors so I had to settle for the original bag), I thought to myself, "Wait, you have two yellows, a pink, and a red. Don't eat the red one first; eat the yellow ones first and save the red for last."

This reminded me of the strategy I typically employ when eating snacks of a mixed variety. I tend to ration the best parts (the almonds in a can of mixed nuts, the red Starburst in an "original flavors" bag, or the shrimp in a bowl of jambalaya) so that I have a disproportionate amount of them towards the end of the eating experience. This got me thinking that it would be interesting to observe how other people approach this "problem." Is my experience typical, or is it peculiar? Even more interesting, are there other areas of life besides snack consumption where one might find similar behavior patterns?

Some quick virtual ethnography reveals what one dissatisfied Starburst consumer chose to do with their yellow and orange Starbursts:

I wonder if the geniuses at Starburst have already figured all this out and have determined the optimum balance of flavors to put in each bag to ensure that consumers get just enough red to keep them wanting more, but just enough yellow to make the red all the more desirable?

Images from here and here.

Remember This Song?

2008-09-28T22:08:00.000-07:00

Movies - Alien Ant Farm

Best Franchise Ever

2008-09-28T21:38:00.000-07:00

Churro Station.

WTF, USA?

2008-09-18T07:56:00.001-07:00

With stuff like this, a move to Switzerland (the 4th economically freest nation in the world) is looking more and more tempting by the minute.

The chief executives of the three big American automakers — General Motors, Ford and Chrysler — met on Wednesday afternoon with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
When they emerged, they expressed optimism that the loan guarantees would be included as part of a budget resolution that is needed to finance government operations through the end of the year.

Let them fail! We'll still have all the cars we need, and none of the inefficient corporations we don't need.

Cool Website: Schematic

2008-09-16T22:32:00.000-07:00

Vân told me about Schematic. I'm quite impressed by the novel mode of interacting with the site they employ: in addition to the conventional way of navigating between pages using links, you can "zoom out" and view the entire website as a collection of individual pages, similar to how you might view all 20 pages of a Word document at once by setting the zoom to something like 10%. I found it very intuitive to zoom in on a particular page; just click (or double-click, as I initially did) on the page you want. All in all, I think this is a good example of how a site can show off its creative bona fides without sacrificing usability altogether.

Bush Is Not Laissez-Faire!

2008-09-16T21:39:00.000-07:00

I don't know if it's Obama or the media (or both) that is guilty of conflating George Bush and his fellow Republicans' economic philosophies as "free market" and "laissez-faire," but whoever (ahem, Rupert Cornwall) is doing so is being intellectually lazy.

Barack Obama has expanded his call for stricter control of the US financial sector into an across-the-board attack on the laissez-faire economics championed by Ronald Reagan, pursued by President George Bush for the past eight years, and embraced by the Republican candidate for the White House, John McCain.

Cutting taxes while raising spending at a record rate and increasing burdensome regulations is not laissez-faire. As Tyler Cowen says in the New York Times:

THERE is a misconception that President Bush’s years in office have been characterized by a hands-off approach to regulation. In large part, this myth stems from the rhetoric of the president and his appointees, who have emphasized the costly burdens that regulation places on business.

But the reality has been very different: continuing heavy regulation, with a growing loss of accountability and effectiveness. That’s dysfunctional governance, not laissez-faire.

...

Still, the Bush administration’s many critiques of regulation are belied by the numbers, which demonstrate a strong interest in continued and, indeed, expanded regulation. This is the lesson of a recent study, “Regulatory Agency Spending Reaches New Height,” by Veronique de Rugy, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and Melinda Warren, director of the Weidenbaum Center Forum at Washington University. (Disclosure: Ms. de Rugy’s participation in this study was under my supervision.) For the proposed 2009 fiscal budget, spending by regulatory agencies is to grow by 6.4 percent, similar to the growth rate for last year, and continuing a long-term expansionary trend.

The Republicans and their flagrant misuse/abuse of free market-friendly language (they sometimes talk the talk but never walk the walk) has poisoned the "laissez-faire brand." While it's generally contemptible for any politician to bash self-interest and risk taking (i.e. the things that make our society prosperous), I think it's actually a good thing for McCain, as he carries the banner or Republicanism, to do just that, as hopefully his doing so will work to diminish the false association that many people have between Republicans and free-market economics, and in turn reduce the damage to the laissez-faire brand that such a false association has caused.

Bottom line: blame the current financial situation on Republicans all you want...I'm sure they're plenty guilty. But don't make the intellectually lazy mistake of blaming laissez-faire policies by association. Republicans aren't laissez-faire, and laissez-faire is not what caused this mess.

Design for Disguise

2008-09-16T21:21:00.000-07:00

I think the "Anti-Theft Lunch Bag" is pretty clever:

It reminds me of the fake Saturday Night Live commercial for the Chameleon XLE, the "luxury car that doesn't look like a luxury car":

Inside, the Chameloen XLE has everything you would expect in a luxury sedan of its class. Soft leather seating, a contoured instrument panel, and fine wood. But there's more - much more.

Authentically distressed fenders give way to a partially padded roof of blistered vinyl. While under the hood, a simulated transmission-fluid drip whispers, "Hey, not worth the trouble." This is craftsmanship no one will steal. GThis is engineering for the inner-city driving experience.

Via Boing Boing.

Solving Climate Change with Cute Icons

2008-09-14T09:18:00.001-07:00

Here are the icons used in BP's latest TV campaign ("Energy security 1"):

And here are the icons from Chevrolet's "Gas-friendly to Gas-free" campaign:

The two sets of icons are pretty different from each other, yet each seems to represent their respective brand's image well. BP's icons fit their "we're-cute-even-though-we're-an-oil-company" image, and Chevy's icons fulfill the role that Chevy plays in the automobile marketplace as the "trying-to-be-cute-but-still-not-European" automaker. Hopefully there's also some substance behind these two companies' campaigns, and they're not just counting on consumers to assume the problem is solved because the icons for yet-to-be-viable solutions already exist.

Images from here and here.

Txtpert: The New Crossword Puzzle

2008-09-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

Via Small Surfaces.

Park(ing) Day 2008

2008-09-13T09:36:00.000-07:00

Par(king) Day 2008 is September 19th:

PARK(ing) Day is a one-day, global event centered in San Francisco where artists, activists, and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform metered parking spots into “PARK(ing)” spaces: temporary public parks.

The image above is from Phillips Garden, a Minneapolis participant in Park(ing) Day 2007. Park(ing) Day was founded by REBAR, a San Francisco group, and has since taken off to cities around the world. Here's the first Park(ing) Day installation from November 2005.

Via Greater Greater Washington.

I Should Try Tivo

2008-09-13T08:46:00.000-07:00

According to Garrick Van Buren:

TV without TiVo is like email without a spam filter.

I don't like spam, so maybe I should get with the '90s and finally get Tivo. Then again, maybe I'll just wait 'til everything's online.

Bob Barr

2008-09-13T08:42:00.000-07:00

Here's my position on the upcoming presidential election. If polls indicate that Minnesota is not safely "in the bag" for Barack Obama, I'll vote for Obama, if for no other reason than it's a vote against John McCain. But if it's obvious that Obama will win Minnesota, then I'll vote for Bob Barr. He's not the perfect candidate (or even the perfect libertarian), but his position on the War on Drugs (end it now) is way way way better than either Obama's or McCain's.

But treating what is, at base, a moral, spiritual, and health problem as a matter of federal criminal law has solved nothing. The next president must put politics aside and take a long, hard look at the failure of the federal war on drugs. We must reestablish the primacy of individual choice and state's rights in deciding these issues. This always has been the greatest strength of America, and should be again.

Courage

2008-09-13T08:38:00.000-07:00

This guy is my new idol for standing up against the US Border Patrol's unconstitutional checkpoint 40 miles from the US-Mexico border:

Via Cato@Liberty.

Wilkinsonian Insight

2008-09-13T08:32:00.000-07:00

David Brooks (of The New York Times) wrote an op-ed proclaiming that individualism is dead because humans are naturally social creatures. Will Wilkinson smashes that non-sequitur with one sentence:

Individualism is indeed unnatural — much like other noted mockeries of the natural order, such as equality under the law, vaccination, and the wheel.

He actually wrote many more sentences, all of which destroy David Brooks' ridiculous proposition.