I visited a doctor’s office and was surprised when his secretary pulled out a card – a ruled cardboard rectangle – to fill in my data. She had boxes of such patient cards in her office. A natural first reaction would be that this doctor must be pretty old and behind the times…
Then I saw the doctor, and he was neither old nor behind – in fact he not only had a computer on his desk, but after a few minutes he whipped out an iPad, which he seemed very happy with and used with speed and effectiveness to demonstrate some points to me. So I asked him, what’s with the old cards?
The reply is worth noting: scribbling on a card allows him to maintain a personal interaction with his patients. To type, you have to turn away from the patient and immerse yourself in the machine’s user interface; a card is unobtrusive and its usage is much faster and less exclusive of the patient; you can use it facing the patient. On top of which , it is not prone to crashes and outages!
This all made good sense – but unfortunately is not going to last: the doc told me he expects that the medical establishment (HMOs, hospitals, insurers, etc) will soon force all physicians to use their mandated computer tools, and that will be that. Come to think of it, if they took the extra step to port their software to the iPad, which is almost as flat as a card, we may have the best of both worlds!
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! 
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“.
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.
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…
My lectures on Information Overload invariably elicit an applause, which is gratifying but leaves open the question: what is the real impact on attendees in the long term? With long-term organizational interventions, we can collect data; but a lecture is a one-time encounter!
I was therefore pleased when I gave a lecture at a venue I revisit every few weeks, and a technician who was there to support the IT stuff came to me and said he’s heard me the previous month and had taken my advice to heart. He’d taken stock of his communication habits, gotten off lists, created rules, and so on – none of it rocket science, but the effect was (he said) a major time saving each day.
I must be doing something right, then!
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…
I was reading an article about hi-tech airships in IEEE Spectrum when my eye caught in the sidebar a link to another article titled The UAV Data Glut. What do you know – we thought Infoglut was a human problem, and now Unmanned Aerial Vehicles bitch about it too?
Naahh… of course, it isn’t the UAVs that complain; it is humans, the only species that can. The problem, according to the article, is that the super sophisticated drone planes generate more data than humans can look at: “In 2009 alone, the U.S. Air Force shot 24 years’ worth of video over Iraq and Afghanistan using spy drones. The trouble is, there aren’t enough human eyes to watch it all.” And it’s getting worse: the next model of Reaper drone will record 10 video feeds at once!
So it isn’t only email that’s spiraling beyond our ability to read it all; potentially important military information is also doing it. And the analogy doesn’t end there: the two widely different cases both involve nuggets of value – an important email, or the signs of a camouflaged enemy vehicle – buried in tons of irrelevant data. In both cases, technology is enabling the arrival of ever more data without a commensurate growth in human ability to absorb it all…
The solution, the Spectrum article shares, will have to be relegating the analysis to computers (who else?…) There are efforts underway to develop software that can watch the UAV’s boring data streams and identify those few needles in the haystack. Which makes you think – what about us knowledge workers and our flooded Inboxes? Sure, there are some tools that can help – Google Priority Inbox is one of the latest additions – but I suspect the military will get more powerful stuff going, and we’ll have to patiently wait for the civilian market spinoffs that always come later.
Who knows, maybe in a decade we’ll have software so smart that it will be able to write our outgoing mails, read the incoming mail, screen the junk and file the rest – while we take off to read a good book?
I mentioned in a recent post Lesa Becker’s study of the impact of computer adoption on hospital personnel. Well, I was visiting in a hospital the other day and noticed the wheeled computer the doctors were lugging around to patients’ beds, so I asked staff members whether the move to computerized patient records is a boon or a bane.
Opinions varied as to the time impact: all agreed it takes longer to use, with older folks feeling more affected than younger ones; but I was surprised with the reply of the head nurse. She replied with an emphatic condemnation of the technology, but for her it was not a matter of efficiency or more work. Her answer was short: “with a computer, you look at the screen instead of at the patient!”
This is indeed an interesting opinion, which was corroborated by the attending doctor. The computer provides a great deal of useful information about the patient, which can be shared and retrieved reliably, as another nurse had pointed out; yet at the same time it keeps the patient out of focus. In fact, given that time spent at each bed was dictated by the hospital’s workload, I couldn’t help noticing that the doctors were spending a significant fraction of that precious time pounding the keyboard. An unexpected side effect of the race to get more information; and another proof that more information is not always necessarily better.
This is indeed an interesting opinion, which was corroborated by the attending doctor. The computer provides a great deal of useful information about the patient, which can be shared and retrieved reliably, as another nurse had pointed out; yet at the same time it keeps the patient out of focus. In fact, given that time spent at each bed was dictated by the hospital’s workload, I couldn’t help noticing that the doctors were spending a significant fraction of that precious time pounding the keyboard. An unexpected side effect of the race to get more information; and another proof that more information is not always necessarily better.
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!
Am in the US, where I gave a lecture in an interesting conference called “Information Growth. Is it what you think it is? – How much information 2009 summit”, organized by the Global Information Industry Center at UCSD. The summit was held to present first results from the “How Much Information?” (HMI) research program, which is sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and seven hi-tech companies.
The research program works to quantify the amount of information that flows into the homes and workplaces of people in this day and age, and to understand how it is divided between different modalities (Cable, Live TV, Radio, Computer data, Books, Videogames, etc); and how all this changes over time. This was an interesting experience, because it addresses the flood of information from a rather different perspective than my usual one. Of course, that’s why I was invited to speak there: to give a different POV. My talk was called “All information is not created equal”, and it looked at different aspects of what makes the information – any information – more or less valuable, and in some cases outright harmful, to the end users that consume it.
Meanwhile I had fascinating discussions with other attendees, and took in much new knowledge. The actual amounts of information being delivered, stored and consumed are huge, thanks in large part to video and gaming content; the average American consumes 34 Gigabytes of information per day. The raw numbers are of interest to hardware and networking manufacturers; but the implications to individuals and to society are perhaps even more interesting. Understanding where the time “saved” from declining book reading goes, how different age groups differ in their information consumption patterns, and how the “digital divide” is penalizing people lacking ready access to this digital feast, are just some of the important questions involved. Expect some of the insights of the day, once I digest them more fully, to appear in future posts on this blog.
Oh, and I also went to see the Babbage Difference Engine in action at the Computer History Museum…
No, sorry, not of the coming of the Lord. Earlier today, while flying over the East Coast, mine eyes have seen the Glory, a lovely but elusive optical phenomenon.
I know what it is because of an old Scientific American article I’d read as a kid, which discussed meteorological optical phenomena, mainly rainbows of all kinds. The Glory was perhaps the strangest of the lot, and it stuck in my tender future-physicist mind.
As you can see in the rather poor photo I managed on my Nokia, a Glory is a circular rainbow that forms on a cloud of water droplets around the shadow of an object – such as an airplane – standign between it and the sun. The sun was shining from the other side of the plane (these days, when you can reserve your seats online, I make sure to have a window away from the sun, so I can see the planet’s surface without the dazzle of direct sunlight) and though our shadow was barely visible, the colorful halo of diffracted light around it was plainly there, delighting us as it flew alongside us for more than an hour.
Hallelujah!
