Books - 5. page

Divorce Your Car, by Katie Alvord, is thought provoking. In the United States of America, an automobile is many things to many people: transportation, status symbol, hobby, money pit. Alvord takes apart the place of the car in modern society (the focus of the book is on North America, though she does refer to Europe and the Third World in places) and roundly condemns our dependence.

Her book is split into three parts–the first covers the history of the automobile and other forms of transport. She legitimizes what I’d often heard and dismissed as a myth–the car industry bought up the transit systems of cities in the US early in the 20th century and replaced them with buses. The second is a laundry list of the negative effects of the car (which, I must confess, I didn’t finish–too depressed after the first thirty pages). The final section covers alternatives, including walking, biking, mass transit, non-gasoline cars, and telecommuting.

I found the book to be quite good in outlining the problem and highlighting solutions. The dependence of modern life on the car is a dependence on convenience. But, to some extent, it’s a matter of inertia. Automobiles are so prevalent and easy that many of us never try the alternatives, let alone use them in preference to our car. A strong point is that she realizes that car-free living isn’t for anyone, and makes a point that going car-lite can have a positive effect as well. She also touches on the far reaching implications that technology decisions have had on our society, our cities and our lives–from subsidies to the development of advertising. It would have been interesting to read more about that, but what she did say was definitely thought provoking.

However, I do have three quibbles. Alvord cites sources extensively, but her arguments would be more compelling were the sources less biased (as you can tell by titles like Asphalt Nation) and more first hand. She ignores two factors that would affect my divorce. Giving up your car, or at the very least being aware of alternatives, makes driving after drinking less likely–a good thing! On the other hand, if you don’t have a car, you suddenly have a dearth of available camping and hiking activities. But these concerns aren’t everyone’s, to be sure.

Overall, a book well worth reading, especially if you commute a lot. Too bad they don’t sell it as a book on tape!

How to Lie with Statistics, by Darrel Huff, should be required reading for everyone. The cachet of numbers are used all the time in modern society. Usually to end arguments–after all, who can argue with “facts”? Huff shows how the same set of numbers can be tweaked to show three different outcomes, depending on where you start and what you use. The fundamental lesson I learned from this book is that mathematical calculation involves a whole set of conditions, and any number derived from such a calculation is meaningless without understanding those conditions.

He also mentions that colleagues have told him that the flurry of meaningless statistics is due to incompetence–he dispatches this argument with a simple query: “Why, then, do the numbers almost always favor the person quoting them?” Huff also provides five questions (not unlike the five d’s of dodgeball) for readers to ask, when confronted with a statistic:

1. Who says so?

2. How does he know?

3. What’s missing?

4. Did somebody change the subject?

5. Does it make sense?

All this is wrapped up in a book with simple examples (no math beyond arithmetic, really) and quaint 1950s prose. In addition humor runs from the beginning (the dedication is “To my wife with good reason”) to the end (on page 135, Huff says “Almost anybody can claim to be first in something if he is not too particular what it is”). This book is well worth a couple hours of your time.

“How To Lie With Statistics” at Amazon.

I just finished reading The Social Life of Information, by John Seeley Brown and Paul Duguid. This was not the quickest read; it’s a business book with the obtuseness of vocabulary that implies. However, if you’re a computer person with any desire to see your work in a larger context, this is a book you should read. In it, they examine eight separate areas in which computers, and the internet in particular, have supposedly changed our lives (this is typically called ‘hype’, though the authors don’t use the word) in the latter years of the 20th century. (This book is copyright 2000.) You probably remember some of these claims: the death of the corporation, of the university, of paper documents, of the corporate office. In each chapter, they review one claim, show how the claim’s proponents over-simplify the issue, and look at the (new and old) responses of people and institutions to the problem that the claim was trying to solve. They also examine, in detail, the ways in which humans process information, and how the software that is often touted as a replacement simply isn’t.

I really enjoy ‘ah-ha’ moments; these are times where I look back at my experiences in a new light, thanks to a theory that justifies or explains something that I didn’t understand. For example, I remember when I started my first professional job, right out of college, I thought the whole point of work was to, well, work. So I sat in my cube and worked 8 solid hours a day. After a few months, when I still didn’t know anyone at the office, but had to ask someone how to modify a script I was working on, I learned the value of social interaction at the office. (Actually, I was so clueless, I had to ask someone to find the appropriate someone to ask.) While examining the concept of the home office, the authors state “[t]he office social system plays a major part in keeping tools (and people) up and running.” It’s not just work that happens at the office–there’s collaboration and informal learning.

I’ve worked remotely in the past year for the first time, and anyone who’s worked remotely has experienced a moment of frustration when trying to explain something and wished they were just “there,” to show rather than tell–the authors refer to this process as ‘huddling.’ When someone is changing a software configuration that I’m not intimately familiar, it’s much easier to judge correct options and settings if I’m there. The authors explain that “[huddling] is often a way of getting things done through collaboration. At home with frail and fickle technologies and unlimited configurations, people paradoxically may need to huddle even more, but can’t.” This collaboration is even more important between peers.

Reading about the home office and its lack of informal networks (which do occur around the corporate office) really drove home the social nature of work. After a few years at my company, I had cross-departmental relationships (often struck up over beer Friday) that truly eased some of my pain. Often, knowing who to ask a question is more important than knowing the answer to the question. It’s not impossible to build those relationships when you’re working remotely, but it’s much more difficult.

Another enjoyable moment of clarity arose when the authors discussed the nature of documents. I think of a document as a Word file, or perhaps a set of printed out pages. The explicit information (words, diagrams, etc) that I can get from the document is the focus (and this is certainly the case in document management systems sales pitches). But there’s a lot more to a document. How do I know how much to trust the information? Well, if it’s on a website somewhere, that’s a fair bit sketchier than if it’s in the newspaper, which is in turn less trustworthy than if I’ve experienced the information myself. Documents validate information–we’ve all picked up a book, hefted it, examined it, and judged it based on its cover. The authors say “readers look beyond the information in documents. … The investment evident in a document’s material content is often a good indicator of the investment in its informational content.” Just as if someone says “trust me” you should probably run the other way, information alone can’t attest to its own veracity. The authors also look at aspects to documents (like history, like feel, like layout) that simply aren’t captured when you treat them as streams of bits.

And there are many other examples of ‘hype’ that are deflated in this book, and a few other ‘ah-ha’ moments as well. As I stated above, this is a great read for anyone who thinks there is a technical answer to any problem (or even most problems). By taking apart various claims, and examining the truth and untruth of those claims in a real world context, these two authors give technology credit where it’s due, while at the same time explaining why some of the older institutions and important factors in our lives will remain around. Reading this book was hard work, but understanding what the authors say gives me yet another way to relate to non-technical people, as well as fend off the zealots who claim, in a knee-jerk fashion, that more software solves problems. I majored in physics, in college, but minored in politics. It always seemed that the people problems, though more squishy, were more interesting. This book is confirmation of that fact.

I referred to Project Gutenberg obliquely here, but browsing their site I found that they’ve implemented distributed proofreading. This is a very good thing. I did one book, Hiram, the Young Farmer, for PG a few years ago, when I was in college and time wasn’t so precious. The OCR went quickly, but the proofreading was slow going and error prone; the story wasn’t exactly riveting, but it was in the public domain. (In fact, I just took a look at Hiram and found at least two mistakes. Doh!)

But Distributed Proofreaders solves the proofreading problem by making both the scanned image and the OCRed text available to me in a web browser. Now I can proofread one page at a time, easily take a break, and even switch between books if I’d like. Also, they’ve implemented a two phase review, much like Mozilla’s review and super review process. Hopefully this will prevent mistakes from being made, since these are going to be the authoritative electronic versions of these documents for some time. Linus’ law probably holds for text conversion even more than for software development.

Now, it wasn’t apparent to me from the website, but I certainly hope the creators of this project have licensed it out to businesses–I can see this application being a huge help for medical transcriptions (work from home!) and any other kind of paper to electronic form conversion.

Update:
It looks like there is a bit of a distributed.net type competition among the PGDP proofreaders.