Reality check

What is real?

It's a deep philosophical question, and while for Plato or Descartes the question was whether they could trust their senses or not, for us the issue is further complicated by all things virtual.

If I'm having a conversation with someone about politics in an online forum, is s/he real? Are her opinions real, is the conversation real? How about the conclusions? Have we really agreed? Or has my nickname agreed with someone else's avatar? Have we communicated, if communication is psychologically defined as aligning each other's cognitive states?

It's well known that especially in anonymous forums (fora?) people take more extreme views and often play very exaggerated roles. Partly this is due to the low signal-to-noise -ratio in these boards, which means that everyone has to shout louder to be noticed, which in turn worsens the ratio etc. It's also common that people vent their frustrations and demonstrate their immaturity, or just deliberately sabotage conversations so that any conversation worth having falls apart relatively quickly. Bullying is very common, that of other board members, public figures, and more often whoever has online presence. Fat, thin, ugly, nerdy, odd, weird clothed, spotty, ethnic, poor, different... any of these apply to you, and you have posted your pic online to any social networking site, chances are someone has linked it somewhere with insulting comments, for other idiots to laugh at.

As if you're not a real person.

Would they do this to a person they know? Are they just cruel idiots or can they not tell the difference between reality and their virtual world? I'm not sure which answer is the more pessimistic, given the ubiquitousness of virtual presence and social interaction.

TV and papers are very good at blurring the borders of reality. The so-called reality shows are a big hit, but here reality means something different. Media tends to make virtual caricatures out of real people (sports personalities, politicians etc.) and real people out of fictional characters (soap stars: some papers write news stories about tragedies that happened in the show to the characters, as they would write about what happened to the actor) and the semi-fictional people in semi-reality shows are just a big mess anyway.

When people bring flowers to the cross-roads where a soap character had an accident with a tram and died in the show, why is that? Are we so fed up with reality that we need to pretend that the stories into which we like to escape for a while are actually true? Or, if our feelings for the character are real, why not express them as we would in real life? Nothing wrong with that?

Is that the reason why these reality shows are so popular? Because they claim they are true, their virtual world is closer to the real one and easier to sink into? Is that why the events and outcomes of these shows are so eagerly discussed in papers, speculation gets to epic proportions and everyone is supposed to have an opinion of these people?

Fundamentally, there's nothing new in any of this, of course. Storytelling, legends, songs, epics, and fantasies have always been an important part of being human. Our very ability for imagination is what sets us apart. We turn to fantasy for guidance, seek solace in stories, purpose in prose, emulate social interaction in songs, and all in all, need all this to keep our sanity. We can't turn the imagination-engine off, and so we need to constantly feed it.

Also, sports isn't real anymore, neither is music. Both arguably used to be, but we have chosen to pay for the pleasure of observing them and not do them ourselves. Sports heroes and pop stars (and the Royal families) live constantly in the Big Brother house, for us to criticise, vote, identify with and have feelings for. Newspapers write about them as if they were real, often forgetting that they are.

Our opinion of our colleague or neighbour is not necessarily any more real than our opinion of the runner-up in Amazing Race. Most people work with ideas and fantasies rather than bricks, mortar and other concrete things. And I don't necessarily have problems with more fantasy, it's the less reality -part of the equation that bugs me. If we only see each other as avatars or virtual characters, and if more and more people behave in public like they are in a first-person perspective video game, what will happen to the way we treat each other? If people talk about politics and look at politicians as if they are useless celebrities and tv-show characters from that soap opera they call the 20.30 news, what will happen to democracy?

And don't get me started on what's true and what isn't, or what's important and what isn't. :-)

East Germany

Unfortunately I left my camera cable at home, so I can't show you the Ossie-charm of my hotel room in Leipzig. The high point is the lonely cupboard with one (1) coffee cup and one (1) schnapps-glass. The view outside is also puzzling. Completely renovated jugend buildings alternate with derelict and abandoned ones. And then there are sprinklings of GDR-concrete here and there. And amidst the buildings, trees with budding leaves. The spring is about a month ahead of Finland.

So, Leipzig. Never been here before, didn't really know what to expect but it seems to be all here. And the hotel room is actually nice. The bathroom's been completely refurbed, along with most of the room and all the furniture, but there's some "gloom" under all this, sounds of past.

Our workshop and symposium starts tomorrow morning. The last two-three weeks have been riddled with technical difficulties and all sorts of obstacles, and so I needed to change my presentation plan. So, after promising so many times "never again", here I am again, still writing my presentation when the meeting is already about to start. Never again.

P.S. Oh, Deutsche Bahn is amazing. The new Berlin Hauptbahnhof is one of the most stunning buildings I've ever seen. No, absolutely the most stunning building I've seen. Inside, trains go criss cross in three levels, it's full of shops and restaurants and escalators and elevators and steel and glass... Stunning. I took the ICE, which was very comfortable. We briefly hit 200 km/h but most of the time we were rolling along at a leisurely 180 km/h across fields with forests of windmills. It takes an hour and 10 minutes to get from Berlin to Leipzig. I've also tried Berlin buses and Leipzig trams, along with Finnish trains and buses, so the day has been a public transport extravaganza. Oh, almost forgot, there was also the flight from Hki to Berlin. Rather not mention that, trains are much cooler.

Probably too difficult

If there is one theme which illustrates the need for formal research over "simple" common sense it is the theory of probability. It is ubiquitous, but difficult at best and counterintuitive at worst.

We like to see ourselves as basically rational beings, and the homo economicus that form the basis of most economical theories is supposed to be capable of making rational choices. Yet humans are mainly emotional, not rational beings. We use tools for our rational and logical needs, as we do most of our thinking and choosing with emotions.

The dichotomy between sense and sensibility, reason and emotion, is mostly a false one. It might work on paper and in folk psychology, but in order to understand the human mind it is a big mistake to pry the two apart. Emotions are quick and automatic reactions to changes in our environment and as such serve our survival. Sudden noises make us startle, infringements of our territory make us angry etc. Basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear) are physical states and tend to colour our perceptions. So-called secondary emotions (pride, jealousy...) are often called social emotions as they have to do with our relationships and attitudes towards others in our social environment. The ways in which we seek or avoid these emotions, the tendencies we have in feeling them form the basis for our personality. And cognition for that matter.

So, where is logic, where is reason, where is the "information processing" that the cognitive psychologists say we do all the time? Well, it's there of course, in that same mind-body. Again, even the most basic perceptional processes are about spotting patterns, regularities, similarities, structures - the building blocks of a "rational", logical and structured world view. Our perception is based on expectations that we can only cast in presence of regular, predictable structures. We get emotional satisfaction and pleasure out of symmetry, structure and regularity (and when these are violated within limits).

So if our emotions are logical and our reasoning emotional, where does it leave us? And what does probability have to do with it? Well, it means we are complicated and it is not easy to study us, especially if you start by leaving one half out of the equation, as psychologists often do. One example of this is the research on our rationality, which often entails making choices. The premise is that there is a "best choice" and we arrive at our choice after deliberation. The best choice is often defined as being the most likely to be beneficial, which means you need to understand probabilities to make that rational, correct choice.

I'm messing things a bit, I didn't mean to write about emotions but couldn't help it really. The original idea was to write about probabilities, as people generally fail in estimating the probabilities of different outcomes in even the simplest cases. Emotions crept in as I was trying to think what would explain these failures. And then I wanted to avoid the reason vs. emotion thing and it all got out of control.

Why do people take part in the lottery, even though the probability of winning is close to zero? The answer: they don't care about the probability as such. They know someone wins every week, and it could be them. And if they'd win, it would change their life completely and as the price of the ticket is low, why not take that chance. It's just a game...

OK. Although, when you start adding together the cost of lottery tickets over, say, 15 years, playing the game has actually prevented you from making some of the life improvements you've dreamed about. The casino always wins in the end, but the possibility for an individual player to win life-changing sums of money draws people in. Fairgrounds and markets have always been full of games where the odds are against the player, and internet has brought a new surge of these systems, some of them legal, some illegal.

They share two things: first, they appeal to you emotionally to get you involved; second, they rely on your poor sense of probabilities to damp the voice of reason telling you not to play.

Probabilities are hairy. Imagine you are flipping a coin. Nine times in a row you get heads. What's the probability that the tenth flip produces heads as well? Alarmingly many would answer something else than 50%. There are two factors at play here. First, people confuse the probablity of getting ten heads in a row (0.5^10 = 0.0009765625) with the probability of getting heads in any one flip (0.5). The second problem is the idea that in the long run, there should be an equal number of heads and tails. This is true, and if you can test this by flipping a coin a couple of million times (or get the computer do that for you) and the score should be relatively even. But this doesn't change the odds for any one throw, as the history of flips isn't stored in the coin. The coin itself doesn't know which way to land, and there's no natural law to force it to start producing tails after a long run of heads.

The other problem is that very few things in "real life" are actually random like a coin flip or a roll of dice. Also, we are rarely as attentive in keeping track of events as we are in the coin-flipping experiment. In fact, we tend to remember events that have emotional significance (ha! emotions!). So for instance, anyone making paranoid theories about the traffic lights being always changed red for them might suffer from both problems. First, as the lights are not random, it might be that they arrive at a certain crossroads always at the same time of its cycle, depending on some other set of lights somewhere else. Also, they might be more likely to remember the times they had to stop than those times they could just drive through the crossroads without thinking about it.

This is still easy, but now we get to the really weird stuff that throws even maths professors off. Have you heard about the Monty Hall problem? That wikipedia-link gives the problem and a number of solutions, as well as explains what the hassle was. In short, you have this game. You have to choose one of three doors, there is a car behind one of them, and a goat behind the other two. If you guess correctly, you get the car. The twist is here: after you make your choice, the game show host opens one of the two remaining doors and reveals a goat. He now asks if you want to stick with your original choice or if you want to switch. The question is, should you switch or keep your original choice.

And, counter-intuitively the answer is, and even with a very clear margin, you should switch. This problem featured in a recent NY Times article, and there's a game you can play to actually see that switching is the better strategy.

I'd think most people say they wouldn't want to switch. This is partly because they have miscalculated the odds (thinking it is a 50-50 chance) but also because they abhor the potential situation where they have undone a correct choice by changing later (and shown lack of belief in their initial choice etc.). As the NYT-article tells, this Monty Hall fallacy (when the problem was first presented, even maths professors wrote in to the paper claiming they'd made a mistake, and that switching makes no difference) has now been spotted in experimental paradigms used to study decision-making.

The research on cognitive dissonance is an attempt to look at all the factors that are involved in making simple choices, and one of the paradigms is to choose (or have monkeys choose, as in NYT's example) from three initially equally favoured items, first one of two, and then one of the remaining two. The researchers have shown that the item that loses in the first duel is likely to lose in the second as well. The explanation has been essentially the same as in the Monty Hall -case where people don't want to switch - there's a need to justify the first decision, or as some say, second-guessing isn't evolutionarily a good idea.

However, if you have even slight differences in the initial preference of the three items, then the odds in the second choice aren't 50-50, but 1/3 - 2/3, just like in the Monty Hall -problem. Let's take the example used in NYT: there are three Smarties, red, green and blue. Let's assume the first choice is between red and blue, and red wins. The second choice is now between blue and green, and green often wins. Now, if there is even the slightest order of preference, this is not just a case of wanting to justify the first choice, but also statistically the more likely outcome. Look at all possible orders of preference of these three, where red is higher than blue. There are three: R G B, R B G, and G R B. In two out of three of these, green is higher than blue, therefore making the odds of green being picked in the second choice 2/3 rather than 1/2.

This is all fascinating, and the fact that even trained scientists get these wrong is on one hand very relieving, and on the other hand very scary. It shows, however, that no matter what you think about sense or sensibility, in some issues there's no substitute for diligent research and learning.

Fifth freedom

According to the EUobserver, the EU leaders in their Spring Summit have suggested that a "fifth freedom" should be added to the four existing ones that form the basis of the Union. So far, persons, capital, services and goods have been given free movement (or rather, providing it is the work in progress) and now "knowledge" should follow suit.

This is to boost the competitiveness of Europe, an initiative launched with the Lisbon declaration. This has struggled from the beginning, and it has turned out to be very difficult to turn words into actions, not to mention results. This time, the plan is to increase the mobility of students, teachers and researchers, and further reforms of higher education system are promised.

This sounds good in principle, it remains to be seen what this will mean in practice. But on a more symbolic level, adding a fifth freedom is big.

And did we hear about it in the news? No. But that's not a surprise, we didn't hear much about the decision to take part in the NRF, or even the decision on next years budget (including controversial decisions on university funding. All we hear in the news these days is this or that about the minister for foreign affairs, this idiot "dancer" and the text messages. Again, and again, and again...

Vacuum cleaners are from hell and should be sent back there

Among all the household chores my least favourite is vacuuming. This is somewhat surprising, as I really like the somewhat related tasks of mopping floors, mowing lawns or clearing snow off the footpaths. They all require going through every square inch of the area to be cleaned, so there is an aspect of having to do it in a systematic way. Also, there's a real sense of achievement that comes with all of them. In sum, they are all excellent zen activities. Apart from vacuuming, which sucks (pun intended) because the tools are so badly designed.

I've recently obtained a secret memo, this is from a liaison group of vacuum cleaner manufacturers and it details the design principles of really annoying vacuum cleaners.


1) Make it loud.

To allow perfect concentration in the task at hand, the vacuum cleaners should make a deafening sound that can drown out all other sounds in the vicinity, e.g. the ringing of a telephone, crying children, fire alarms and pneumatic drills.

The effect of this can be further enhanced by placing the pitch of the sound to the same frequency range where the human hearing is at its most sensitive.

2) Make it top-heavy

By putting the centre of gravity of the machine high enough, you ensure that the machine falls over every time the vacuumer makes a turn exceeding 90 degrees. As such sudden changes of direction are indicators of erratic and non-systematic cleaning, the falling over of the cleaner is a gentle reminder to the vacuumer to make sure s/he vacuums every corner.

3a) Use self-tangling power cord

Nobody likes messy cords, not even while vacuuming. By using the extra static self-bundling cord (patent pending) you can assure that the vacuum cleaner power cord will stay in one, neat pile even when fully extracted. Following the current green trends, this pile of cord has a natural resemblance of a crow's nest.

3b) The length of the cord

In order to protect the walls, the length the power cord follows the formula below:

c = dr - ve - 30

where c is the length of the cord, dr is the distance from the socket to the furthest corner and ve is the length of the vacuum cleaner and tube itself, fully extended. 30 is the safety gap in centimeters that is left between the system fully extended and the furthest wall.

4) The nozzle

Again, for safety purposes, the nozzle is 3 millimetres thicker than the gap under the cupboard. Also, for historical continuity, the design of the nozzle has remained the same since Attila's wife started using his husband's elephants for cleaning the house, and attached a nozzle into their snouts. This nozzle has two options: uneven metallic base that scratches everything; or plastic brush that goes around the bottom of the nozzle that is handy in preventing dust from entering the suction hole.

5) Wheels

A standard vacuum cleaner has three wheels. One is made by FunnyWheels Inc., the same company that produces all the wobbly wheels in shopping carts (they put in one FunnyWheel in every 100th cart, the one you always get). The main purpose of this wheel is to catch the edges of carpets and pull the carpets along with the vacuum cleaner, as a gentle reminder that they probably need to be taken out. This wheel also sticks to and collects all extra vacuum cleaner cord and helps the self-tangling process.

The two other wheels are made as light as possible, and from cheap and hard plastic so that the friction between them and the floor is the same in every direction, i.e. the rotational feature usually associated with wheels is insignificant. This adds to the great experience of the vacuum cleaner actually being drawn on the floor rather than rolling on it.

6) The bag

A lot of effort has been put into designing the system to attach the replaceable bags into the vacuum cleaner. The main principles are: 1) the system should be loose enough to allow about 10% of the dust and dirt to bypass the bag and end up in the vacuum cleaner itself. This not only extends the capacity of the cleaner by 10%, the small grains of sand etc. end up in the motor and help add to the amazing noise the cleaner makes 2) the system should be tight enough to make sure about 30 % of the dust and dirt in the bag falls of while trying to yank the bag out of the vacuum. This serves as a quick random check to the contents of the bag, so that the vacuumer can make sure nothing of value gets thrown out with the used dust-bag.

7) Storage

The vacuum cleaner must be made out of at least 15 different pieces. The metallic tube should be made out of at least 3 different pieces to allow storage in a shoe box and extra entertainment during vacuuming when these pieces fall off intermittently. Many manufacturers nowadays have vacuum cleaners that stow without needing disassembly. This stowage usually means tilting the cleaner on a labile edge and then connecting a hook in the nozzle to the cleaner. This creates a highly unstable system where the plastic tubing makes a big loop that gets stuck on the doorknob or anything that moves in the vicinity. This serves as a gentle reminder for the user that it might be time to do some vacuuming.

(c) Liaison group of vacuum cleaner manufacturers: because we know best.

Rubbish

The restlessness in Belgrade is of course big news. And so it is the number 1 news story in the Finnish Channel 4 news, as well... and their angle is the Eurovision song contest. They've uncovered that the organisers (at EBU) are keeping their eye on the events but are at the moment convinced that the preparations for the contest are on time. They also interviewed some of the Finnish competitors, and even they didn't believe this was Ch4's take on the shocking events. They were trying to make comments about how the first consideration are the people in Belgrade and in Kosovo, wishing for a quick resolution to the tension etc., but the journalist pressed on and wanted to know if they were ready to travel to Belgrade if they were picked as the Finnish representative.

Same company, different medium... Afternoon newspaper, massive headline on Friday: Don't get sick in these countries!! And then they list the countries where hospital treatment costs the most, if you DON'T HAVE INSURANCE. For Pete's sake, who travels without insurance? That would have been a better take for this story: give an example of how expensive treatment and evacuation might be if you aren't covered. In pretty much any country.

Finding the solid core from all the mush is getting harder and harder, when even hard stories are being wrapped to layers upon layers of fluff. Yes, I'm a bore.

(Pic: icanhascheezburger.com)

Concepts

One of the blogs that I read, Yankodesign, often posts about designer concepts rather than actual products. Sometimes it makes you wonder what the concepts are for. Too often you see the un-innovative and plain lazy "fusion" concepts, where you take two seemingly unrelated things (like an MP3 player and a hairdryer) and combine them. Design/steal a shape for your "new concept", use a 3D-software to render pretty pictures of this thing and Bob's your uncle. You probably will get your study credits and 15 seconds of blog fame, but that's it. The problem is, although it is new, it is probably useless.

There are a number of reasons why some products don't yet exist. They might be unnecessary or plain stupid. Not everything needs an integrated MP3 player or videoscreen. Hairdryers, shoehorns and soup bowls do fine without them. Not everything needs to be called iThis or iThat. Not everything needs to be white and green or round and translucent. In short, these concepts are often trying to solve problems that don't exist; they are asking the wrong questions.

Then there are the tweaks: teeny-tiny alterations to everyday objects like plates or chairs, meant to add or enhance some part of their functionality. Unfortunately often sacrificing the original functionality.

Sometimes, however, a concept comes up that shows exactly the opposite: a new purpose, new functions. This mobile internet search device is one great example. Anthony James of Yankodesign calls it "the Looking Glass". It's a great name and I like it because it's a great concept of what could be. It's not about mimicking a trendy line of products, it's not spinning cliché design vocabulary. It's a great example of innovative design because the looks of the product are irrelevant. Actually, it's not so much a concept of a product, it's a concept of a platform, or an interface.

It is an internet tablet, combined with a camera, WiFi internet and a number of other components. The idea is that you look at the world through this and it displays you information about what you see, based on what it finds in the net about it. Point to a monument, the camera takes a snapshot of it, GPS locates it, the picture is analysed, compared to the info on the web and then relevant information from wikipedia and elsewhere is displayed. Point it to a restaurant, it could display the menu and let make a reservation. Point it to an office and it will find you contact details to the company. Point it to text and it tells you where the text is from, which typeface was used and what colour. Etc. The possibilities are absolutely endless. Try it yourself: how many uses can you come up with in a minute?

What would it take to build one of these? How far in the future is this concept? The designer Mac Funamizu sees this in the NEAR future, and hardware-wise it is not that far. I'm actually more interested in the software-side. According to many commentators in the designer's site, many big companies are working on similar concepts already. The information integration that would be needed for this thing to work is what the so-called semantic searches and ontology projects are trying to do. Or, what the web 3.0 will be about, to use web 2.0 terminology. While developing better search engines is of course a task noble enough to drive innovation, research and business ventures on the field, these kinds of products are needed to capture the imagination of people and to give these products clear and inspiring aims and applications.

That is what great concepts are about.

(Pic: petitinvention)

Celebrating the Semicolon

This is a wonderful story. I don't know which is cuter, that the NY Times would write an elated story about a punctuation mark, or that they had to append a correction after missing a comma in "Eats, Shoots & Leaves". But they are absolutely right. Semicolon is an indicator of certain "depth" in thinking about writing. One of the first comments I got for my writing from my PhD supervisor was that I should learn to use it. Not for the depth of it, or even style, but there were a number of points where I should have used it instead of the period or something else. Folded ends of toilet rolls in hotels, magnetic power chords in Macs, semicolons separating phrases. Signs of civilization.

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