Culture: January 2003 Archive Page

"It happens to everyone - you accidentally cut someone off or do something bone-headed unintentionally... wouldn't it be nice to have a conciliatory tone to indicate that you're aware that you screwed up, and are willing to admit it?" jzb --One Tone Isn't EnoughDissociated Presszilla)

"[T]he promise of a pill for every ill remains, as it always will, unfulfilled. Anyone who had read his Shakespeare would not have been surprised by this disappointment. When Macbeth asks a physician:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

"The physician replies laconically: 'Therein the patient / Must minister to himself.'

"Every day, several patients ask me Macbeth's question with regard to themselves-in less elevated language, to be sure-and they expect a positive answer: but four centuries before neurochemistry was even thought of, and before any of the touted advances in neurosciences that allegedly gave us a new and better understanding of ourselves, Shakespeare knew something that we are increasingly loath to acknowledge. There is no technical fix for the problems of humanity." Theodore Dalrymple --Why Shakespeare is for All TimeCity Journal)

Women in Bangladesh who fold their saris filter out more of the disease-carrying organisms that cause cholera than the women who filter through unfolded cloths, or who don't filter at all. While folding saris to make eight layers filters out almost all of the harmful organisms, this method means that women gathering water had to wait seven minutes for the water to seep through the cloth.

--Fight cholera with Sarees, Says StudyTimes of India)

That's a usability issue -- the material (saris) are cheap & plentiful, but getting them to work effectively takes time. People don't like changing their habits if they don't see any immediate benefit -- not even when their lives depend on it. As it happens, folding a sari so it has four layers is still effective enough to cut cholera cases in half, and it doesn't slow down the water nearly as much.

This is great news of a low-tech, low-cost strategy for fighting disease.

On a completely different note, here is the abstract of the article in which the researchers publish their findings. "Based on results of ecological studies demonstrating that Vibrio cholerae, the etiological agent of epidemic cholera, is commensal to zooplankton, notably copepods, a simple filtration procedure was developed whereby zooplankton, most phytoplankton, and particulates >20 µm were removed from water before use. Effective deployment of this filtration procedure, from September 1999 through July 2002 in 65 villages of rural Bangladesh, of which the total population for the entire study comprised 133,000 individuals, yielded a 48% reduction in cholera (P < 0.005) compared with the control." Is this good scientific writing? Can scientists do better, especially when people's lives are at stake?

"A serious literary magazine published by a hospital? Sounds unlikely. But the Bellevue Literary Review, published by the New York University department of medicine at Bellevue Hospital, is drawing on a long literary heritage. Bellevue has nursed William Burroughs, Eugene O'Neill and many other close-to-the-edge writers and artists. Danielle Ofri, the review's editor-in-chief and a doctor at Bellevue, believes scientists and doctors too often dismiss the power of language." --The Word DoctorNew Scientist)

Ofri asks her medical students to write up patient histories as a first-person narrative, I presume in order to encourage greater empathy with the human patient. Several years ago, I found NYU's excellent Medical Humanities website. Georgetown also has a site on Disability Studies in the Humanities, an interest that has arisen in part due to the near-obsession humanities scholarship developed in the study of "the body" in the 90s.

"Why is this a hobby horse of mine? Largely because I've been trying to promote the idea that games are an artform since I was a teenager, when I first started designing them professionally. Also because the rest of the world, both inside and outside the game industry, is starting to realize the validity of the idea--with increasing academic attention to games, increasing press coverage of them, and an increasing interest among game developers in thinking about design on a theoretical level. And finally, because so much nonsense is written about games that I think there needs to be a venue for a viewpoint that both values games and realizes their limitations--and the often stringent limitations of the sometimes soul-crushing engine we call the games industry." Greg Costikyan

--Games * Design * Art * Culture G*D*A*C)

Another comment from Costikyan: "Games are art. Most of them are bad art, to be sure." See also Costikyan's "I Have No Words and I Must Design. BTW, it was pretty easy figuring out which categories to use when I posted this entry.

"Some people prefer 'sneakers' to 'running shoes,' others 'soda' to 'pop.' But it's in Montreal - where many people use the French 'liquor douce' instead of 'soft drink' - that some Canadian language scholars are really bubbling with enthusiasm over the nature of English. 'It's so special because it's the only major city in North America where English is a minority language.'" Interview with Charles Boberg --Montreal English is a "Linguistic Laboratory"CBC)

Thanks for the link, Jim.

"Music, a social and artistic activity of the first importance, inevitably makes its way, often quite a substantial way, into literature of all kinds. Monographs have been, or could be, written on music in Jane Austen's novels, or Thomas Hardy's, or J. B. Priestley's, or on music in Galsworthy's FORSYTE CHRONICLES, to name a few instances at random. It may, then, be of some interest to recall (and I do not believe it has been done previously at length) some of the musical associations of the vast bulk of British crime fiction." Philip L. Sowcroft via Waterboro Public Library --Music in English Detective FictionMusicweb)

Naturally, the article starts with Arthur Conan Doyle, due to Sherlock Holmes's love of the violin and the opera.

"Although office clutter is usually almost entirely work-related, it tends nevertheless to be treated as though it consisted of the dirty socks and crisp packets of an adolescent. Workers are confused. They know that creating clutter is an essential part of the way they work, but they are made to feel guilty about it." --In Praise of ClutterThe Economist)

The paperless office isn't.

"2002 Year-End Zeitgeist offers a unique perspective on the year's major events and hottest trends based on more than 55 billion searches conducted over the past year by Google users from around the world."

Top 5 gaining Google queries from 2002:

1. spiderman
2. shakira
3. winter olympics
4. world cup
5. avril lavigne

Top 5 declining Google queries from 2002:

1. nostradamus
2. napster
3. world trade center
4. anthrax
5. osama bin laden

--2002 Year-End ZeitgeistGoogle)

This listing indicates that the world is moving beyond the events of 9.11.2001. I had toyed with the idea of making Morrowind my next comptuer game purchase... the fact that it's 9th on the "gaining" list makes me more confident it will be a good use of my limited free time. The singers on this list mean nothing to me, though I've used Eminem (7th gaining) in class when my students complained that the rhymed verse of Moliere's 1660's play Tartuffe was unrealistic. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

"The evidence that mother-only families contribute to crime is powerful. When two scholars studied data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, they found that, after holding income constant, young people in father-absent families were twice as likely to be in jail as were those in two-parent families. And their lives did not improve if their mother had acquired a stepfather. Fill-in dads don't improve matters any more than do fatter government checks." James Q. Wilson

--The Family Way: Treating Fathers as Optional has Brought Big Social CostsOpinion Journal)

Some bold statements that you don't hear people making every day; one hopes that this article won't simply be dismissed as being "reactionary", and that the important pro-fatherhood message won't be drowned out by voices accusing the author of wanting to bring the woman-oppressing 50s back. Of course there are families that are better off without a father, but most single mothers aren't Rosie O'Donnell or Jodie Foster. This article calls for active, involved fathers, not lord-of-the-manor breadwinners who demand the food on the table when they come home from the local bar so that they can spend the evening reading the paper and watching sports.

Google didn't find anything on the "National Longitudinal Study of Youth," but it did return a National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. It's annoying that I can't check Wilson's sources -- it wouldn't have taken up much space to give the names of the two scholars he mentions.

The article also paraphrases advice from William Galston, a former assistant to Clinton: "To avoid poverty, do three things: finish high school, marry before having a child, and produce the child after you are 20 years old. Only 8% of people who do all three will be poor; of those who fail to do them, 79% will be poor." Wilson's use of the statistics seems to confuse causality with correlation, which is something I'm sure Wilson wouldn't permit his philosophical opponents to do. Still, it sure looks like a strong correlation.

"The MetroCard Vending Machines in New York's subways are a classical case of programmer-directed hierarchical menu hell, forcing the user to make choices without knowing the consequences, and throwing the user off altogether at the smallest problem. With a little careful thought, we are able to improve the interaction considerably, while at the same time extracting some valuable heuristics for interaction design. " Lars Pind

Submitted by my former student Matt Hoy, who writes: "Excellent write up, well thought out points. The reader responses at the bottom are a little troubling. Do people reall view usability reviews as 'attacks' on the current design? Is it normal for usability testers to encounter this kind of opposistion?"

--MetroCard MessPinds)

Yes, Matt, there's often a huge gulf between the brilliant "ar-TEESTS" who dream up fancy designs, and the usability trolls who seem to scour the underworld seeking the densest, stupidest users to botch up even the simplest transactions. In retail, the cusomter is always right -- even when the customer is obviously wrong. Good design does not try to force the user to behave a certain way -- instead, it watches the way people behave, and then builds a system so that people can use it effectively by doing what comes naturally. Pind suggested that it wasn't necessary for the New York metro subway vending machines to present the user with a language-selection menu first, but a reader comment pointed out that people will walk past a machine displaying the "wrong" language. So, Pind's suggestions can't all be taken without scrutiny -- and they would, of course have to be subjected to usability testing by a wide range of users. One good way to do that is to put two machines with different interfaces side-by-side, and see which one gets more use. Let's just hope somebody from the New York transit authority read the article and the reader comments.

"This is the story of the revival of York Mystery Plays from the Festival of Britain in 1951 to the present day told by the many individuals who have been involved with the Plays - whether as actors, stage hands or front of house - through their personal memories, photographs and press cuttings."

--York Mystery Plays -- Illumination: From Shadow into LightNational Centre for Early Music)

A wonderful site that focuses on the music that accompanied these wonderful devotional and instructive plays from the Medieval town of York, England. (See my own York Corpus Christi Simulator.) Thanks for the suggestion, Heidi Johnson of the National Centre for Early Music, in York, England.

"Big media barons are routinely accused of dominating markets, dumbing down the news to plump up the bottom line, and forcing U.S. content on world audiences. But these companies are not as big, bad, dominant, or American as critics claim. And company size is largely irrelevant to many of the problems facing today's Fourth Estate." Benjamin Compaine

--Global MediaForeign Policy)

Since I've devoted class time and blog bits to lamenting the reach of multimedia corporations, it seems only fair to link to this opposing view. Interesting quotation from the article: "A merger of Time Inc. with Warner Communications and then with America Online dominates headlines, but the incremental growth of smaller companies from the bottom does not." Weblogs are apt vehicles for promulgating the "media convergence is bad" meme, but if Compaine is right, then the growth of weblogs themselves is an argument against the idea that convergence is the dominant model. Another quote from the article: "Make no mistake: an activist with a dial-up Internet connection and 10 megabytes of Web server space cannot easily challenge Disney for audiences. But an individual or a small group can reach the whole world and, with a little work and less money, can actually find an audience." That sounds more like the point of view expressed in the blogosphere.

"I heard of the play when it opened in Paris. But I am ashamed to say I did not see it. I had no idea that it would shortly dominate my life....My 16-year-old daughter was baffled by the programme material detailing the play's controversial history. 'What on earth is there to understand?' she said. 'It's perfectly clear what it is about. You only have to listen.' How stupid it seems now that, 50 years ago, people denied that this play was a play." --Godotmania [50-Year Appreciation of Waiting for Godot]Guardian)

"You find technology virgins everywhere: Teachers who insist on getting detailed training for every new piece of technology that shows up; librarians who refuse to figure out the Internet text searching tools; doctors who won't use computer technology because it is beneath them; managers who deny their employees access to the Internet. Common to them all is that they are severely middle-aged -- in soul, if not necessarily in body -- and still think of PCs and the Internet as something new and extraneous to their jobs and lives, something they can choose not to be involved with." Espen Andersen

--Stamp Out Technology VirginityUbiquity)

See also Henry Adams's "The Dynamo and the Virgin" (1900). An excerpt: "As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring,-scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power,-while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force."