Archive for the 'Off-topic' Category

They’re taking over! (In a good way)

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 3, 2011
in Off-topic
. 3 Comments

So we’ve made the switch back from Daylight Saving Time yesterday at 2AM, and like every year I got up in the morning and made the round of the house to set all clocks, watches, computers and other devices one hour back. This is always a bore – there are so many time-aware contraptions in a typical home…

But this time I noticed one new thing – about half of these contraptions did not need resetting. The computers changed their time on their own (seems trivial to you folks elsewhere, but in Israel the changeover date follows the Jewish calendar and local politics, so it’s different every year; looks like Windows 7 knows how to pull the information in better than XP had). My smartphone got the correct time from the cellular provider over the airwaves. The PVR in the living room got the time from the cable company. Only watches and standalone clocks like the one in the car needed fixing manually!

This is one advantage of the fact that – let’s face it – computers have pretty much taken over everything in our modern environment. In the past decade or two microprocessors have infiltrated every machine, from your car to your dishwasher; but now they can also talk to each other over their global network and manage their own time zone affairs while we sleep!

Scary? perhaps… but very convenient! :-)

Tribute to a favorite bookseller

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on September 29, 2011
in Off-topic
. 0 Comments

My recent trip to the US was a pleasure, except for one shock: I went to the nearest Borders bookstore, and discovered the bookseller chain had closed forever the preceding week.

I do favor small independent bookstores, and have been worried about their tendency to disappear under pressure of the larger chains; still, I had to admit that Borders had a pleasant aspect that provided a bookworm with a delightful experience. Seeing it go under – one can surmise, due to the pressure of Internet-based alternatives and other shifts in information consumption habits of the 21st century – was profoundly saddening to me.

So, to pay my respects to this venerable bookseller, I dug up an old bookmark I have  (I collect bookmarks of stores I like)  from their Ann Arbor location – the town where Borders originated 40 years ago – and here it is. Somehow the serene reading lady in this vignette represents the pleasure that Borders had given us all.

It will be remembered fondly.

Borders Bookmark

Now, Facebook has its medals!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on August 15, 2011
in Analysis and Opinion and Off-topic
. 0 Comments

One common response to mention of Facebook among the Gen X and Baby Boomer (in other words, over 30) crowd is the disdainful “Why would I want people to know what I had for breakfast?!”  Use of Facebook, these people declare, is shallow and silly.

Now, it is true that many people – and not just youngsters – post to their Facebook stream rather unimportant  snippets from their daily routine; and their Friends on the service can ignore it or react to it with equally inane comments. But that’s hardly unique to Facebook; people getting together in a bar or a pub seldom pronounce earth-shaking insights either. So what’s the problem?

Which reminds me of that wonderful hobby of my youth, Amateur radio. Of course that was also about Geekdom, and homebrewing complex electronic gear; but it also involved sitting up late nights pounding at a Morse key to set up contact with like-minded “hams” from remote lands. And you know what? With few exceptions, what we discussed was our locations, antennas, weather conditions and quality of reception. Even more boring than what we had for breakfast. Yet no one criticized us as shallow or silly!

Why not? Perhaps because we had our medals, so to speak: everyone knew that radio hams were an indispensable asset to their community at times of crisis or natural disaster. Everyone knew of some ship or mountaineering expedition that was saved through a diligent amateur operator’s efforts. True, these cases were rare, but they earned our hobby respect.

And now, at last, Facebook is earning its own medals as a beneficial force in society. In the past year Facebook is increasingly seen to impact the affairs of nations; most visibly in the “Arab spring” revolutions in the Islamic world, but also in less violent situations. In Israel it is being used by the current grassroots protest movements seeking to restore sanity to food prices, increase housing availability, and revise the national priorities to focus on greater social equality and justice. Non-violent as they are, they already have a huge impact; and they all began as a call for protest in a Facebook page started by a young individual. A month later, the government is trembling in the face of the hugest demonstrations the nation has ever seen, and much hopeful change is in the air.

So… next time someone tells you that Facebook is about what one ate for breakfast, remind them that it has earned its medals, and the right to talk about breakfast if it wishes – in between overthrowing tyrants and channeling nationwide protests. Saving sinking ships is nothing in comparison!

The future is here!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 23, 2011
in Off-topic
. 0 Comments

I was entering a parking lot at Bar Ilan university near Tel Aviv and noticed a brand new sign near the pay booth (left photo). I couldn’t believe my eyes… the sign says, in case Hebrew is Greek to you: “Parking for electric cars. Better place“.
Better Place signs

Of course we’ve all read about Better Place, Shai Agassi’s start-up company that is planning to convert the entire state of Israel to electric cars, by providing a nationwide infrastructure of charging points and by adding to gas stations robotic systems that will replace spent batteries with fully charged ones in less time than it takes you to fuel your gas guzzler. This is all very exciting, but it was all on paper, and prone to skepticism. Shai Agassi, admittedly, had recruited the support of president Peres, obtained venture capital, and signed a contract with Nissan to make the electric cars… but it remained a case of “we’ll believe it when we see it”.

Well – now I’ve seen it, or at least the first signs of it, and not on paper. The sign on the right, inside the parking lot, directs you to “Charging stations” – and on following it I found myself looking at a bunch of parking spaces painted green, with white poles in front of them (see one under the tree in the photo below) that you’d connect an electric car to. There was also an RFID sensor to debit your account for the energy.

Better Place charging stations

Admittedly, the cars parked there were same old same old internal combustion models… the attendant told me the stations had been set up two weeks before and were not yet functional. But there can be no doubt: these guys mean business – green business! Well worth an off-topic post on my blog…

The iPad is mightier than the pen

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 7, 2011
in Off-topic
. 1 Comment

It has been remarked that younger people tend not to wear watches, because their ubiquitous cellphones and other computing devices make them superfluous (interestingly, this brings back the action of having to fish something out of your pocket to read the time -  a throwback to the Victorian pocket watch, without the chain!). But I’ve just been informed of another victim to portable computing, and it goes back much earlier than the watch.

I was talking to a friend who is also a consultant and he told me that in his workshops the attendees often sit with iPads and other devices that they use to capture notes – and, no doubt, to peek at their emails. He then added an interesting observation: when he asks them to fill some observations on a paper form he hands them, many people ask to borrow a pen.

Turns out that with the growing presence and usage of iPads and handhelds, people use those to take notes, write down phone numbers, or maintain shopping lists – so many of them just stopped carrying pens on their person! The essential geek icon of the eighties, the pocket protector bristling with pens, pencils and markers, is long gone; now even a simple pen is slowly becoming history.

Ubiquitous items of daily life do slide into oblivion at some point (I’ve posted a collection of older ones here), but it is always sad to see another one fall by the roadside of progress…

Ask your users!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 30, 2011
in Off-topic
. 0 Comments

Today I was writing my monthly Newsletter (this always seems to slide to the last day of the month ;-) ) and as I was re-reading it – I always do, aware of Murphy lurking in the shadows – I noted this passage, relating to choosing a video conferencing system:

Talk to your IT people about your options; but remember that the key thing is user perception and willingness. You may want to raise the subject in a group or staff meeting, and identify what the best usage model would be in the context of their collaboration needs. Then work with IT to implement a setup that would benefit these needs.

It occurred to me suddenly that this advice, which seemed to me so obvious when I penned it, was the exact opposite of what tends to happen in reality in organizations. The way things work with an introduction of innovative IT tools, it is IT that decides what to deploy, and asking the users in advance is seldom practiced. In fact, the innovators and change agents that pull companies forward in adopting new tools tend to decide what would be a cool capability, and they proceed to instigate pilots and demonstrations that will convince management (and IT) to deploy this capability. This is certainly what I saw in the matter of Videoconferencing tools.

In a sense, this is the way to go: often the end users can’t be bothered to realize the benefits of the new technology until they see it in action. Been there: I’ve followed this path many a time. But it’s a pity, because if you were to ask the users up front what technology they need and what its attributes should be to make them use it, you could avoid the many cases where a new technology fails to “catch”.  Been there too…

So: ask your users, and involve them as early as you can in your thinking process about the new IT tools you want to deploy. By Involve, I mean more than surveys: add user reps to any team or task force you have that will affect their computing environment. You will learn much, avoid mistakes, and as a bonus have champions eager to help introduce the new capabilities to their peers.

Climate control made easy

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on November 14, 2010
in Off-topic
. 0 Comments

I was at the World Usability Day 2010 conference, held in a beautiful auditorium in the Open University at Raanana (more on what I lectured about in coming posts), and I made a discovery that I just have to share with you: Hot air rises; cold air falls!

Of course I knew this; I’d graduated in Physics, after all. But I failed to make the connection at first. I  was sitting there near the front of the hall and slowly freezing from the air conditioning, until pubic protest made the powers that be turn off the A/C. Later they turned it back on. More freezing.

Then, during the break, I was talking to one of the organizers and mentioned this issue and she said “well, if we turn it off the people in the top rows get too hot“. And then it hit me: the auditorium had a slanting floor, with the back rows much closer to the vaulted ceiling than those near the stage; I could adjust my surrounding temperature by moving to a higher row where I’d be comfortable. Like the trees on a mountain range, that each live at the altitude that suits it…

Spelling for the new millennium

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 29, 2010
in Off-topic
. 0 Comments

Tolerance to spelling errors changes as history progresses. For instance, in the middle ages nobody worried about spelling at all; I’ve read many a manuscript from six centuries ago (my wife is a historian researching that period) and the spelling of everything, even names of people and locations, is all over the place. As long as you could guess what is being referred to, nobody cared. The more precise attitudes of the 20th century would not tolerate this, so our spelling has become standardized, enabling us to play Scrabble and hold spelling bees.

But the technology we use dictates our attitude to proper spelling. A single misspelled letter in a name on a flight ticket can doom one to being kicked off an airplane; and search, at least before Google, would be useless unless you spelled your terms right. What’s more, spell checkers depend on an intimate understanding of our tendency to misspell; which is why a spell correction algorithm for typed text – as incorporated in a word processor, for instance – is quite different from one used in handwriting recognition; the mistakes in the one follow completely different patterns from the other.

And now I was made aware of a completely new aspect of spelling intolerance. I was emailed driving directions to a meeting, and the sender made sure to point out how you spell the street name (it was a slightly unexpected version of the name). She also explained why it mattered: in case I wanted to type the street address into a GPS. Using a map, or asking for directions, this would not matter at all; but a GPS would require the accurate spelling.

Good thing they didn’t have GPS in the 15h century!

Knowledge Management Forum off to a good start

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 22, 2010
in Off-topic
. 1 Comment

Spent the day at the inaugural unconference of the  Israel Knowledge Management forum. This forum started  some years ago as a very informal gathering of interested professionals on the front porch of founder Yigal Chamish, and  is now making the tricky transition into a formal non-profit association.

I was pleased to observe a well-attended conference, with some 130 attendees and many interesting parallel sessions. There was much networking, including via twitter (#KMISR10); I saw many familiar faces and many new ones. Importantly, attendees included seasoned veterans and young new members, and representation from organizations of every size, flavor and sector.

So, I conclude, the new organization is off to a good start, and ready to tackle the challenges it is certain to face. If you are into KM and in Israel, check the forum out here and consider joining and influencing!

Oh, and what is an un-conference? That’s what it was called, to emphasize the focus on interaction and informal discussion as opposed to passive frontal lectures (of which there were none).

Tweeting the world

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 8, 2009
in Off-topic
. 1 Comment

One of the nice things about using Twitter is that you get to “meet” interesting people from all over the solar system (yes, yes, all from one planet, for the time being). I was amused, however, to get a message from a person that expressed delight at meeting on Twitter someone from Israel. The Internet is global and universal, after all, a prime expression of the supposedly flat world we live in, and we’re used by now to connect and interact with people from all countries without second thought; and this person told me she has Twitter friends from a list of countries – she was actually happy to “collect” acquaintances from distant lands!

This reminded me of the good ol’ days when I was a ham radio operator. One of the main things we radio amateurs did (when we weren’t building radio gear, anyway) was trying to collect confirmed contacts with as many different countries, regions, continents as we could… the farther the better. There were awards to be won for this, like the DX Century Club, or DXCC, given to anyone who had proof of talking to 100 different countries. And there was great satisfaction in discerning through one’s headphones the faint signal from some distant island or principality, calling the sender and getting a reply to add to one’s growing list. We also relished the conversation, the shared interests, the new friends; but the extra dimension of geographic distribution added to the excitement.

At least one person out there – on my network, too – still feels that excitement!

WorldMap.jpg

Image source: Steph & Adam, under Creative Commons license