Focusing and Foregrounding and Their Impediments

Some days I think a mouse would be a much better tool if only it had a button on it dedicated to obtaining focus.
On other days I realise what a colossal waste that would be.
Until that mouse button comes along I'll just have to continue clicking on a window like a monkey in order to obtain focus for scrolling.

What's that, you say?  Why don't I just use an app that lets me scroll whatever window is currently under the cursor?  Because sometimes I want to bring the window to the foreground so I can see the entire area.
And yet I don't want any window that happens to be under the cursor to always be brought to the fore as I wave the mouse around the desktop with abandon.

The problem with clicking to obtain focus, in case you were wondering, is that clicking initiates an action: namely, the click.  Upon, say, plain text in a webpage it's quite benign, which is what encourages the action to be initiated again in the future.  Unfortunately sometimes you end up clicking upon something that is actionable, such as a link on a webpage or a directory in a file explorer and it's these situations that irk me enough to bring to mind the fact that I want to click only to obtain focus and/or bring the window to the foreground and not to perform some action.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing it all wrong.

Slashing in the English language, and the parsing issue.

Sometimes the english language just makes me want to tear it apart and put it back together again.  And it's not even the irregular verbs and exceptions that irritate me the most.  More often than not it's the little things.  But little things lead to big things.

Take the slash.  Often defined as a forward slash used to separate alternatives or grouped items (!) it's generally considered good practice to not use spaces unless the items you're separating themselves contain spaces.  So "good/bad", but "good / rather bad".  How the hell is a reader supposed to identify the groups being slashed?  It's a parsing nightmare.

This is the part where I say I've avoided writing "(good) / (rather bad)" so far, but admit that I don't know how much longer I can hold out.
Of course, this just leads to further questions, such as

• Does 'good' really need to be parenthesised given that it's a single word?  I'd argue on the grounds of including the parentheses on the grounds of symmetry.
• Should there be spaces surrounding the slash, given that we've reduced the multi-word item 'rather bad' down to the single parenthesised item '(rather bad)'?  I have no strong feelings one way or the other here.
• What happens if I need to slash-separate a pair of parentheses and a group of words?  Or perhaps worse, a single opening/closing parenthesis and a group of words?  How does one read (() / (other mismatched punctuation)?

And before you know it we're onto grouping, sentence structure, syntax and whitespacing.

Yet I have no problem dropping caps on proper nouns...

Reputation

Identity and Reputation are two recent, loosely related issues that have been generating a fair bit of airtime recently on Google+.  Though it's Google's new social network that seems to be generating much of the noise at the moment, these concepts apply equally to other social networks and, indeed, to people in all manner of online and offline activities.

Anonymity, pseudonymity and a person's legal name: these aspects of Identity are being heatedly debated as the NymWars rage across the internet.  Here, however, we'll focus on the related issue of Reputation.

Reputation can be considered to have two main aspects: history, and notoriety.

- History: Is this some form of persistent identity (here or elsewhere).  Good for removing spammers / flyby posters.  Bad for young Johnny who finds the internet a wasteland for the first 12 months after logging on.
- Notoriety: Is this worth paying attention to.  Rather like pagerank on search.  Good for finding out who's worth listening to when looking for new contacts or sources of information.  Bad for finding new talent as top accumulators continue to accumulate yet more contacts and draw the eyeballs.

It's worth noting that whilst the first aspect ofeputation discussed above - History - looks to be about Identity, it is merely closely related.  A person who is anonymous has no history by definition, but those who use legal names and pseudonyms merely have the potential for history but may not in practice, young Johnny being the case in point.  With History you don't care who the person is (even in the disembodied sense): you are merely observing some enduring existence.

There is the side issue for point two that's sometimes raised, that perhaps a single Notoriety score is insufficient to capture the multiple aspects of one person.  For example, should Francis Crick receive a single rating, or separate ones for discussion of cellular development, abiogenesis and photography?  Having a single score would be relatively easy and automatable (lots of people follow and comment on Gandhi, Gandhi follows and frequently comments on Fred Blogs, so Fred Blogs rates very high) whereas separate scores would, I imagine, be difficult.  And perhaps not useful - Oprah may not have specific qualifications, but if she mentions books or movies there would be a lot of interested people because of her overall Notoriety.
Notoriety on topics could be tweaked once posts start incorporating tags.

Whilst the two aspects of Reputation above have no formal embodiment on G+, they do already have some primitive exposure on G+ and other networks.
For example, there are many high-profile G+ users that enable you to see their followers (or have them tracked elsewhere), thus enabling lists of Top G+ users to be created and browsed.  Many of these high profile users are high profile because they share lots of quality content, though there are also many that do not share any at all.  I've certainly used such lists in the past to find interesting people to follow.
As for history, that of the user on the specific network is viewable by clicking through to a user profile.  Of course, this is limited to the public post history, thus revealing at least a minimum existence.  However, when engaged in discussion on a forum / group it can be worth a moment to take a look at whether this user - with a potentially real looking name - has actually been active for more than the last 24 hours.  Pyro temporal identities are usually a sign that the argument is not worth pursuing.  A user that's been around for months is at least likely to still be there when you log in tomorrow.

As rudimentary as these facilities are, they at least give users today some ability to make decisions based on the Reputation of their network peers.  As for how G+ and other social networks can build on what's available and provide richer decision-making data?  Well, this post is already too long, so I'll leave that for another day.  Or an exercise for the reader ...

Google plus, filtering and moderation.

What G+ needs is the ability to filter comments by rating.

Not so much for the viewer, though admittedly it will get used in that way if available.  But for the poster.
I'm thinking particularly for the Scobles and Days who will often generate hundreds of comments for a single post, especially one that's asking for feedback.
What are they to do: wade through the entire set?  Read the first few, read the last few?  Ideally, they'd like to cut through the chaff and just peruse the most worthwhile comments.  And we have a system already in place for that - it's the plus one button.  Arguably underutilised on comments, but nevertheless it's a good first step to giving the poster a filter to place over a moderation system.
The problem with allowing it to be used by viewers is that they'd also want to filter out all the nonplussed posts.  But if they do that, then very few posts get plussed, certainly no new ones after the first few have been posted, and the ones that are plussed already will just quickly gain more (they're the most likely to be seen).
So in order for the system to work viewers of other people's posts probably shouldn't be allowed to filter.

What does this mean for people who follow high-profile posters such as Scoble and Day?
Reading a post 12 hours after submission means there are already several hundred comments.  Without a filter they're in the same position where they are now: reading the lot, the first/last few, or none at all.  Cue the comment: "I haven't bothered reading the other 300 responses, but here's what I think...".  In which case, why do they bother, and why would they expect anyone is reading what they've just written?
Harsh as it sounds, I think the only solution is for viewers to be given the unfiltered view so they can read through (some of) the comments if they please and moderate appropriately, or just post as if they're the only commenter there.

But note that in this situation the viewer is of secondary concern (they've read the post, they've possibly offered feedback).  It's the poster who's of primary concern, since they've posted and would like, in the case of excessive feedback, a summary of responses.

Searching For Manny Macx

Having recently read the Singularity-based novel Accelerando by Charles Stross, it got me thinking about a present-day Manny Macx.  Is there someone, or some people, who fit the bill?

I've since heard it said that he was loosely based on two people:
* Steve Mann, the life-recorder and wearable computer fanatic, and
* Max More, philosopher and futurist.

Makes sense, given the names.

I hadn't heard of More, and Mann didn't come to mind during the reading.  In Mann's place I saw Kevin Warwick, who's also into the whole cybernetics thing.  However, I was also thinking of Macx as someone who's highly connected and running on the front edge of research rather than someone specifically envisioning a posthuman future.  Scobleizer was the closest I came up with in that regard.

But these four are not really what I'm after.  One quality that's not captured in the above is youth.  Scoble is probably the youngest of the four and he's on the approach to 50.

So the perfect match would be someone in their twenties, highly connected, cyborged and riding the wave that is the impending Singularity.
And who preferably blogs, so I can follow them :)

Interfaces

Maybe it's just because I work in software, but I often get distracted during movies by things like GUIs and user interfaces, particularly in near future sci-fi.  Sometimes it's something obvious and radical, commented upon by many like the user interface from Minority Report.  Other times it's barely an aside, as in the GUIs used by the cops in Tokyo Gore Police.  In some ways this is annoying, since something like the Minority Report interface is intended to be flashy rather than utilitarian, and in the case of Tokyo Gore Police is merely a facade to show you that they're accessing "a computer".

However, at the same time, having multiple instances of computer interfaces - in a variety of environments - helps to focus the mind on the various aspects of interface outside of what is normally encountered in real life.
At the time of Minority Report, the gesture based interface wasn't something I had seen before, and hence introduced me to a new means of interacting with the computer.  With Tokyo Gore Police, the interface itself was quite basic (and I'm not even referring to the three lines of pseudocode/logging that repeated on a projector in the background) but it's the presentation of information in a japanese environment that was exceptional to me here in Australia.

Film, as a visual medium, is well suited to showing us how things can be portrayed.  With sci-fi, it really brings to the fore the interaction between humans and technology.  Although plot and pacing can mean that flashy wins over functional, it nevertheless allows us an opportunity to consider why an interface could be detrimental and what benefits it adds, if any, over our current interfaces by exposing us to a wider range of environments without the requirement that it be functional.

On the Wetness of Burgers and the No Free Lunch theorem

Every burger has an inherent wetness.  This varies not only from burger to burger, but also for a particular burger over axes of time and user interaction.  The wetness value is not represented by a single value, however, for the purposes of discussion we will assume such a simplification.

The problem is that, devoid of user interaction, the wetness value will increase along the time axis.  Some burgers are quite dry and will increase only moderately.  Others, however, will leak out the sides, leaving the bottom bun soaking, and actively discarding liquified filling at worst.

The user interacts with the burger in such a manner as to reduce its wetness rating.  This often involves at least rotation of the burger on one axis, and often is elevated to non-symmetric consumption and rotation about multiple axes.  Eating time (volume minimisation efforts) may be traded off against the benefits of filling-redistribution for extreme cases.

The exercise essentially boils down to finding a continuous minimum along the time axis, for a particular burger, whilst manipulating the user interaction variable.  Note that while the limited ability to look ahead means that what produces a minimum wetness in the short term is not guaranteed to enable minimum wetness in the moderate or long term, gains made in the short term often convey significant advantages later on.

One thing to keep in mind is that all burgers are different, and excellent strategies for one burger are not necessarily excellent strategies for the next - or even good strategies at all.  This was summed up by the No Free Lunch theorem of Wolpert and Macready in search and optimisation.  Indeed, the theorem states that the strategy you employ that actually minimizes the wetness of one burger will in fact be the very strategy that maximizes the wetness for some other burger.

Think about that the next time your absentmindedness leaves you with a burger that's composed of six breadcrumbs floating on a sea of mayonnaise that drowns two lettuce leaves.  There's no free lunch when dry-cleaning is involved.