I have a Chapters gift card for $25. On the back is the presumably unique bar-code for the card, and the numeric equivalent for the bar-code written underneath. The number is 31 digits long. That makes possible roughly a nonillion (thanks wikipedia!) unique gift cards. If Chapters sells a million gift cards a year, they won’t run out of numbers until roughly septillion years from now. This puts my credit card, with its mere 16 digits, to shame.

So, what’s the big deal? Who cares? They will just scan the card through the cash register anyway. You don’t care about the numbers on the back. Well, it turns out that you do if you want to buy The Black Swan and Use of Weapons using the Chapters website. To use your gift card on the web you have to type in the 31 digit code by hand, and then when it turns out to be incorrect you have to type it in again, and then a 3rd time. And then eventually, after typing in 31*n (n depending on your tolerance for repetitive tasks) numbers, you give up and swear at Chapters.

So, what’s the lesson? First: 31 digits is a few too many. Second: there should be a mechanism for using gift cards on the web that doesn’t involve typing in numbers at all.

I’ve never been a big fan of the whole “crowdsourcing” theory as it relates to the wisdom of crowds. I am rather a believer in the power of the individual, a single person’s ability to achieve great things. This may reflect my own hope that some day I will emerge as being one of these great people (I’m still waiting), but I think there is also a fair amount of evidence pointing towards the over-hyping of crowdsourcing as an approach towards accomplishing great things that are not achievable by small talented groups.

My favourite example comes from a talk at a CHI conference (2007 or 2008), where some guy was giving a talk on the subject. His best example of successful crowdsourcing involved three composers who collaborated in writing an opera. First of all, three is not a crowd. Second, these three were not members of “the masses,” but were rather expert composers. This example is a big fail in my book.

This leads me on a bit of a tangent to thoughts on online communities, where discussion forums serve as collections of wisdom created in real time by crowds of collaborators. The two examples I will use are www.digg.com and www.fark.com. Both of these communities are centered around the discussion of news items, but I have observed that the “collected wisdom” produced by the two communities differ vastly in quality. In my opinion the discussion on digg tends to be simplistic, poorly thought out, and often of little value. In contrast, the discussion on fark is often sarcastic and silly, but it is at least clever, and this sarcastic content is intermixed with a good deal of intelligent commentary (at least in comparison to digg). Why are digg and fark so different?

I believe the quality of discussion on digg and fark differ so dramatically because of the reward structure in place on the two sites. digg has a complex system for allowing users to vote for comments and stories they like. Higher scored (more popular) comments receive more exposure, and lower scored comments are hidden. This is meant as a mechanism for encouraging quality content. On the other hand fark is egalitarian, in the sense that a comment written by any one user is given exactly the same weight as a comment written by any other user. I believe that the digg approach works exactly opposite to its intended purpose, and the fark approach that would seem to invite abuse instead encourages quality. The problem with the digg approach is that many users are driven primarily by the need for the approval implied by high scored comments. Instead of writing what they think to be interesting and of value, they write what they think will be voted up. These two things are not the same. On the other hand there is no reward structure on fark. There is only the discussion. There is no secondary market of “approval points” to worry about, and I believe this keeps the discussion honest and interesting.

Is there a take-home lesson to this somewhat meandering post? First, I don’t think a crowdsourcing approach will ever be effective at producing breakthroughs, but it can be effective at achieving less grand goals. Second, when constructing a crowdsource-based community one has to be very careful designing the reward structure, because the results you achieve will be optimized for that reward structure.

When the iPhone was being rolled out, what really made me perk up was the announcement that there would be an app store where developers from around the world could sell their apps. My reaction was excitement. My thought was that the app store could really differentiate the iPhone from other phones, and could foster the kind of creativity and community that elevates a technology from mere tool to life-changer.

It seems now that the app store is living up to my expectations, but there are clouds on the horizon. I just read today that the current best-selling app is “iFart Mobile.” If you are unfamiliar with this app, it allows you to reproduce a number of distinct fart noises (e.g. “Bubbler” and “Kazoo”) for the delight of friends and family. This has me worried.

My concern is that Apple will make the same mistakes as Facebook. We all know what happened with Facebook apps. The quality Facebook apps were overwhelmed by the crappy garbage that was designed specifically and exclusively to be viral. The Facebook app community is suffering as a result, and I am concerned that the iPhone app community will likewise suffer.

I don’t have a solution to this. All I know is that Apple has to somehow cultivate quality iPhone apps, while discouraging the crap. Allowing the community total power to do so is not effective, as the clever app creators will be able to manipulate the community. Apple must take an active role, while simultaneously respecting community input. Striking a balance between direct intervention and a hands-off laissez-fair approach is a tough thing to do, but is critical, as I think the vitality of the app store will largely determine the longterm fate of the iPhone.

I have been struggling the last few days over a paper. The problem is that the original (rejected) paper was 10 pages, describing 1 experiment. For this second submission attempt I had to both include a second experiment and squish the paper down to 8 pages. Not easy, it turns out, but possible. And the fact that it is possible disturbs me a little. Was half of that original paper really irrelevant? So many words, so much expended effort, which after further thought turned out to be totally unnecessary.

My life’s relevancy ratio in general isn’t all that good. If you add up all the time I spend watching TV, sleeping, and dreaming about becoming an astronaut, you are left with maybe 2% of my time being actually productive, in the sense that it will advance humanity in some form. But now, after discovering how much of that stuff is fluff, I feel I have to now downgrade that score to 1%. That is a full 50% drop in estimated total relevant output.

And if the paper gets rejected the score is zero.

There is one web browser issue that I consistently fall victim to. This is the problem that keyboard focus appears to jump, for no reason, from widget to widget, and sometimes from a widget to the address bar. I’m not sure, but I think it has something to do with starting to type before the page-load is complete. For example, I will be typing my user name into the user field, and halfway through typing the cursor jumps to the password field. Then, thinking I am still in the user name filed, I hit tab and type in my password, but it didn’t go into the password field, because I was already there. Instead the tab caused me to go to the address bar, and my password goes there.

Of course this wouldn’t happen except for the fact that I occasionally type while not paying attention to what is happening on screen. That shouldn’t be a problem, though. Once I have stuck the cursor into the user field things should happen predictably, and consistently. Keyboard focus should not jump randomly.

So, what are the possible negative outcomes of this? The most basic, and most harmless, is that I simply have to type in things again. There is a more dangerous security concern, however. When my password is entered in the address bar then anybody watching me as I type can see what it is, and possibly deduce that it is my password. Even worse, maybe, is that if I hit “enter” after typing the password then people peeking at traffic can spot this request. If they see a strange request for “mypassword” go by unencrypted they might be able to use that knowledge maliciously.

That’s it. This is a concern that is both a usability annoyance, and a security risk.

This Saturday a bunch of us from the lab went to Gifu prefecture. The occasion was the finals of IVRC 2008, a contest where different students come up with crazy ideas mixing the virtual and the real. A team from my lab had advanced to the finals, facing four other teams from various universities. The emphasis in this contest seems to be on creativity over practicality, which is fine by me.

Going back a few months, when I arrived in Japan, the team members described their idea to me. The idea is called “Funbrella” or asobrella in Japanese (I think. Maybe ansobrella). It is an umbrella that can record and play back the umbrella experience. There is a magnet and coil (basically a microphone/speaker) built into the structure of the umbrella, and if you go outside when it is raining it will record the vibrations of the rain hitting the umbrella. Then later on you can replay the tactile experience of holding an umbrella in the rain. Or, you can hook two umbrellas together over a network and “feel” the other person’s umbrella experience. Pretty crazy I think, and cool.

What I thought at the time, however, in addition to the idea being crazy and cool, was that there was no way it could work. The vibrations caused by the raindrops are far too small to be picked up by the microphone. You simply won’t be able to record anything meaningful. So, I wished the team members the best of luck, and hoped that if things didn’t work they would at least be able to learn from the experience.

Well, it turns out that I was totally wrong. I went to Gifu, tried out the funbrella, and the thing is freaking amazing. It works shockingly well. You hold onto the thing, they press a button on an iPod, and you feel the rain hitting the funbrella. Or they press another button and you feel marbles. They press a different one and you feel natto hitting it (natto doesn’t feel like much). The other demo is the networked funbrellas. You can hold one funbrella, hit the other one on the top, and it feels like you are hitting your own funbrella. Spooky, and excellent.

So, I was wrong. The team members were right, and I applaud them for having the vision and perserverence to carry the project through. Unfortunately they didn’t win the grand prize. That went to another excellent project, Yotaro, a virtual baby made out of rubber that has a genuine runny nose and wriggles around.

I needed some noise-isolating headphones, so I went down to Yodobashi and picked up a pair of Sennheiser CX400s. When I got them home I was faced with a daunting task: opening one of these horrid glued together plastic clamshell packages with nothing but my fingers and some nail-clippers. Any company who still uses packaging like this must hate itself. Why? Because every customer who is forced to struggle opening one of these things forms a negative opinion towards your product before even having a chance to try it.

Packaging is important, even though it’s something you only deal with once. Or, maybe it’s important because you only deal with it once. Apple figured this out. Opening an iPod or a Mac is a joy, and something you remember for a long time. I will remember the Sennheiser experience as well, mostly because of my sore fingers and a smallish cut.

And how are the headphones? A little bit muddy and bass-heavy compared to my Grados, but of course there isn’t really anything under $100 to compare with a nice set of Grados.

Update Dec. 5, 2008: These headphones are pretty terrible. It really hit home listening to Black Sabbath: Paranoid. It’s like I’m listening to my neighbours’ music through the wall. Boomy, indistinct, and altogether unpleasant.

I recently flew to California on Air Canada to attend CHI 2007, a conference dealing with computer-human interaction. I was overjoyed (or perhaps just joyed) upon entering the plane to see that they had the seatback touchscreen entertainment systems that allow each person to choose their own movie or TV show. The bodings were ominous however, when an announcement (paraphrased) came over the speaker that “once the entertainment system is activated, be careful to not touch the screen too many times in quick succession, or it will crash.” Over the course of the flight I would discover the many other ways in which the seatback entertainment system was deeply inadequate.

So let’s enter rant mode and simply list the many flaws in the system. First the system reacted very slowly to any input. Several seconds would pass after touching the screen and seeing any sort of feedback. Second, the movies and TV shows were categorized in non-intuitive and inappropriate categories. Finding something you wanted required navigating up and down the hierarchy to figure out where Air Canada hid whatever you wanted. This was made more maddening by the slow response. Third, many of the buttons were far too small and jammed together. My fingers are fairly slim, but I only had about a 50% success rate in pressing many of the buttons (particularly for changing volume). Fourth, much of the text was far too small, to a degree that the woman across the aisle from me couldn’t read it at all. She had to get somebody beside her to read it for her.

So is having the entertainment system better than having no entertainment system? Absolutely, however overall the system was about as bad as it could be while still functioning. It seems the people designing it had no sense for how it would be used, and what requirements there might be. If I were Air Canada I would have refused to pay for this. I suspect they are perfectly content though. The management responsible for installing these systems probably doesn’t spend too much time worrying about user/customer satisfaction with the system. They just want to be able to tick the box beside “seatback entertainment system” in their competitive advantage comparison chart.