Some Difficulties with Historical Narratives...

I've finally managed to choke my way through David Sheff's Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World (1999; Random House Digital), which is a fairly dense history of Nintendo, focusing primarily on how they took over the North American market after the 'great videogame crash of 1983'. Unfortunately, I say 'choke through' because I didn't think that the book was particularly good, partially because it doesn't seem to be quite sure of what kind of story it wants to tell (it's got some long, rather uninteresting tangents and unreferenced, 'editorialized' claims). It also stumbles into a few other issues that I've regularly encountered in the odd historical narrative I've read. So, rather than discuss the book itself - which I'm sure won't interest most people - I'd rather use it as a springboard for a larger discussion.

I'm certain that writing a complex history, be it about a single individual, a company, or even a country, is a difficult and daunting task. Books (unless they're written by Terry Pratchett) are organized into sections, and each section is typically centered around a theme or idea. As most of us know, history isn't so neat. One problem is simply historical demarcation: You may date the beginning of the Renaissance to some specific period of the 14th century, but you'd be hard pressed to have noticed a big change if you were living in Florence at the time. Another issue is that multiple major events may be occurring concurrently. If you divide them into separate chapters, you often unintentionally give them the appearance of being much more unrelated than they actually were.

A good author may be able to overcome such issues, but the big killer for me is that of context. The actual state of what was going on around any narrative is absolutely necessary to any interpretation of the past. Without it decisions can seem inexplicable, and events can seem completely random, etc. If you're jumping back and forth in time so that you can parcel your story into neat little concepts, it's easy to lose sight of what the external circumstances were during any given period. This can be brutal, especially in a book about such a fast moving field as technology.

Another issue that specifically applies to narratives about the near-past is solipsism. It's quite common for individuals to narrate the broader themes of history from their own particular experiences. But such a perspective is a disservice to the reader, especially in an ostensibly 'researched' book. For instance, if I were to write a book about computers right now, based only on what I saw while working in the San Francisco Bay Area among academics, I'd probably argue the Apple was the world's dominant PC manufacturer and that 40% of America's population were hipsters. Global markets need to be put into a global context.

Finally, I'd like to bring up a pet peeve of mine that probably has a lot to do with my training as a scientist. It's not really part of the 'historical narrative' per se, but it does tend to show up in the conclusions of a lot of these books about companies or individuals. Let me set it up as a question: Has any piece of hype or prediction from a corporate exec in a tech company ever really come close to becoming reality? I mean like, become realized within say 10 years of when it was predicted to occur? Seriously, I've read countless stories in which executives talk about the 'world of the future', where your fridge communicates with your watch and 'multimedia' becomes the new reality, blah, blah, blah. While the wheels of progress grind ahead inexorably, in the short term, new technology is pretty much the same as old technology, only slightly prettier and a bit faster.

Here's the rub: I'm not criticizing execs for trying to peddle their wares, but rather I'm dumbfounded by how people fall for the hype every single time. I long ago decided that 90% of everything a corporate suit says is BS, and I've taken a wait-and-see approach to every new claim about how 'thing X will be nothing short of a revolution!' And yet, so many technology writers parrot the same junk to their followers. If you're going to end your book with a prediction, how about you stick to the old standbys that pretty much explain everything - price and market. It's tough to predict the future, of course, but I didn't need the title of 'market analyst' to tell you that no one wanted to pay huge sums of money so that their families could sit on the on the couch wearing stupid-looking glasses and watch 3D TVs, for example. I also don't need a book to tell me what the suits are screaming to the press.     

The Net is a Dangerous Place...

I've been a bit troubled by the recent trend among several world governments who've attempted to pass sweeping legislation with the intent of 'regulating' the internet. Some of these bills, such as this one in Canada, basically allow warrantless 'wiretapping' of internet traffic in the name of protecting 'children' from vague threats1. Others, such as the US SOPA or CISPA bills, are ostensibly about preventing online piracy or protecting national security, but the muddied wording and over-reaching nature of the legislation makes any specific intention debatable.

The specifics of the actual laws vary, of course. Some indemnify corporations against litigation should they provide personal information to the government that violates specific privacy laws, while others allow require internet service providers (ISPs) to keep copious records. Another popular form of bill allows companies to hold web hosting services liable for the content that their users upload. Cutting through the noise, all of these 'initiatives' pretty much have the same thing in common: They all try to argue that things done on the internet are somehow markedly different from things done in other 'mediums', and therefore require that someone be given more power in regulating it.

Not wanting to treat these sorts of issues with the same black-and-white mentality that I've seen used by many pundits, there are obviously aspects to the modern internet that allow rapid, mostly anonymous dissemination of copyrighted and/or even illegal material. In addition, I'm sure that modern criminals are able to use this anonymity to their advantage.

However, I'm sure that the advent of cellular phones was a boon to crime syndicates everywhere, and yet we didn't start widespread warrantless monitoring of the public's cell phone use (before the PATRIOT act anyways, to the best of my knowledge). I think it's pretty safe to say that a criminal element will spring up in any medium where an incentive exists for people to participate in such a thing. To paraphrase Balzac (or G. Gordon Liddy): If crime didn't pay, there would be far fewer criminals. I'm sure that governments would love to trample all over our constitutional rights to privacy, but I'm willing to bet that these 'protection' bills are heavily sponsored by the same folks who want all of the 'anti-piracy' bills to go through (see below).

The problem with 'piracy' is a bit more complicated - I don't think that it's the internet that's the problem, but rather that people place little-to-no value on 'digital' goods. I've had conversations with perfectly reasonable, intelligent people who proudly showed me their collection of ~$25,000 worth of pirated software without batting an eye; but would never think of shoplifting a chocolate bar. It's also clear that the cultures of some entire countries simply don't encourage paying for any media.

All this being said, I'm not exactly sure how fighting this theft is materially any different from fighting any other theft. I mean, every other business is plagued by opportunistic 'free rides'. When I was a kid, people routinely copied tapes and movies, shared books, etc. I never heard lamentations from studio execs and publishers that every time I loaned a CD to someone, it was a lost sale. But all of a sudden, Hollywood accountants come in to tell us that piracy is costing them more by the day than they make in a year and that everyone needs to be monitored to make sure that we're all playing by the 'rules'2.

Call me cynical, but I think that there's more than a little 'rent-seeking' going on here. Giant, powerful corporations are springing out of the technology revolution and seem to be doing just fine, whereas all of these archaic giants are clinging to outdated business models and crying foul. Perhaps a younger generation doesn't 'value' a film at $20, or a hardcover book at $30, or an album at $15, etc. What's the artist's cut on those figures anyways? Methinks that these young turks - the Netflixes, Amazons, Googles, and Facebooks - have found a much more efficient and cost effective content distribution model that leaves all of the good old boys in the dust.

As always some radicals are going to use the internet to organize and cause mischief. Some jerks are going to rip off the occasional Lady Gaga album (though it's questionable if they would have bought it were it not available through pirated means), and many, many fools are going to be too slow to figure out how to keep monetizing what people no longer value as highly as they once did. But in all of this I'm sitting in front of what is undoubtedly the greatest tool in human history in terms of disseminating and democratizing information, fostering cross-cultural interaction, and generally lifting the veil of opaqueness that's settled over that question of 'what's going on over there' for thousands and thousands of years. It's a marketplace of ideas that will compete for mental real estate with a much smaller barrier to entry than traditional mediums - that is, so long as it's kept free of what largely amounts to special-interest sponsored tampering.

The net is a dangerous place, at least in the traditional sense of the word, meaning 'threatening'. The question is 'threatening to whom'?   

1I have this constant, nagging problem with pretty much everything I hear about children (in the broad sense) these days. See, I did all kinds of stuff that I'm now being told is psychologically devastating to children, but I turned out just fine. I played insanely violent video games (there were no ratings back then), watched M-rated movies, read 'adult' fiction, and went to some of the most disturbing sites on the net regularly. In fact, we all did and most of us turned out ok. I'm hard pressed to think of anyone I know who didn't turn out so well that can't be explained by a terrible family situation or a series of 'real life' problems. I certainly can't think of any kid who say, glanced at pornography, only to have his or her life go spiraling out of control despite the best efforts of their family and friends. I think we're yet again completely misplacing our fears in the direction of things that old people can't understand, like rock-and-roll, or comics. Oh, and if you're concerned about the 'legions' of pedophiles lurking on the internet, then don't let your kid use it. Or maybe you could educated them or whatever before you buy them that iPhone.

2Have you ever tried to read one of these 'End-User License Agreements' that comes with software? They're ridiculous.

A Sober Reflection as I Pass a Milestone...

With the beginning of this month my NSERC PDF will expire, ending my ability to claim that I am bringing 'my own postdoctoral funding' to the table. I figured that this occasion was as good a time as any to reflect on the time that's passed since I completed my Ph.D. in 2009. Anyone who knows me will also know that I'd been generally disappointed with my postdoctoral progress. After what I felt was a very productive and enjoyable Ph.D., I ended up in a position that was completely unsuited to my working style (planned and goal-oriented), and not-conducive to accomplishing my (many) objectives.

It's really the latter that stings the most, because I've had so many people tell me that the ideas that I put together in order to obtain my external funding were great (not to mention that NSERC chose to fund it). However, I never really had the opportunity to work towards those objectives. I became involved in a large collaborative project, which, while interesting in its own right, was rather 'out of my hands' in terms of specific goals and interests. Despite spending a lot of time on the project, I was a 'cog' in a much larger wheel - a very bad position to be in if you're out there trying to make a name for yourself in a competitive field.

I'm not lying when I say that having to write progress reports to NSERC explaining that I hadn't met my goals was a huge hit to my personal pride. At about this time last year, I was in a position where I seriously thought that my best course of action was to abandon all thoughts of pursuing a career in academia. Despite my best efforts, I'd spent 18 months analyzing data for other people, there were no prospects for first author publications on the horizon, and my own project was completely stalled (though I had finished the process of 'protocol development' and could show that the idea would actually work). Unlike my work ethic during my Ph.D., I felt very little motivation to spend long hours in the lab. If this is what post-Ph.D. science was, I didn't want to have anything to do with it - a rather morose thought for someone who'd become as obsessed with science culture as I had.

After a period of serious deliberation involving soul-searching and much solicitation of advice from former colleagues and and advisors, I decided to give postdoc-ing one more try. And so I ended up moving across the country to new institution, bent on working on a new research organism (I've now moved from fish, to flies, to yeast - the next logical step would be dinoflagellates, I guess(?)).

While it was a bit difficult to find my stride again, my sophomore postdoctoral experiences so far have been quite positive. Stanford is an incredible institution, where the caliber of the work is often inspiring1. My work seems to be progressing quite well: I'm writing my first research manuscript in a long while, and I'm thinking of all kinds of interesting avenues to pursue both while here and in the future. Working long hours hasn't been a problem (or a burden, really), which goes to show how much being interested in one's work matters.

In addition to the work, the San Francisco Bay Area is probably the best place that I've lived so far, and even though I've only been here ~7 months, I've already done many great 'extra-curricular' things. The weather is much milder and more conducive to the ice-water flowing through my veins than was Washington, D.C. I'd take the 'not too hot, never too cold' humdrum of Northern California over the awful, hot, humid, Capitol summers any day.

It has been difficult to let go of my disappointment with the past few years, but the seemingly complete 180° turn that my life has taken since moving out West has helped a lot. Though it's often tough to do, if I force myself to look at the positive, I did learn many techniques and protocols during my previous position that I've been able to apply gainfully to my current work. I probably wouldn't be as productive as I am now without that experience under my belt.

While things are looking 'very up', I'm nevertheless not surprised to read about friends abandoning the topsy-turvy, stressful lifestyle of academia for the relative security of industry or elsewhere. I was able to pack my bags and move out west on whim because I didn't have anything 'tying me down', but many people my age don't have that sort of luxury2. The postdoc lifestyle is neither a great place to raise a family, nor to secure one's sanity. But, it does have it's big advantages as well, of course, such as the ability to pursue one's own interests, the freedom to set one's work pace (as long as it's 'frantic' or above), etc. 

With the benefit of a bit of hindsight, I'm glad that I chose to leave my previous position and keep at this science thing. I've got some ideas on the table, some plans for the future and a good thing going. It's a good feeling being able to say that.

1As well as a bit frightening, to be honest. There just aren't many (any, really) Canadian institutions with this kind of money or 'star power'. It's easy to forget that not every lab can produce the kind of work volume that you routinely see here.  

2Well, I had the 'luxury' of moving out here, but that's not to say that it was luxurious. My institutional change happened over a matter of months and was very, very expensive. Given that I didn't have much time to plan for such a large move, it has left me rather penniless. 

Audiobook Club: Steve Jobs - Part 2...

In my first post about Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, I said that I'd divide my thoughts about it into 3 parts, but I got so busy that I ended up listening to the entire book before I got to blog about it again. Thus, this shall be a 2 part-er.

The second section of Job's biography concerns his exploits after having been ousted from Apple in 1985 and illustrated for me the fundamental strengths and weaknesses of his (and ultimately Apple's) vision and philosophy of total integration of hardware and user experience. 

Shortly after leaving Apple, Jobs founded a company called NeXT, which sought, disastrously, to apply Macintosh-like principles to the academic and high-end server market. I say 'disastrously' because, as someone who has been involved in pricing, building, and purchasing high-end PCs for academic computational needs, I cannot think of anything more useless to me than an expensive, fancy-looking box, with proprietary, incompatible hardware and software, and little-to-no expandability1. It's actually kind-of crazy: Jobs wanted schools and companies to buy workstations at exorbitant costs, due almost entirely to weird custom-design decisions and proprietary uselessness. It was a colossal flop in terms of sales of computers, but the object-oriented language that they developed did become the foundation for the present Mac OS X.

Obviously a large part of the book goes on to discuss Jobs' building of Pixar Studios into the juggernaut that it is today (this is where he made most of his fortune, incidentally), but I'd like to focus more on the market decisions that eventually brought about Apple's present success.

When you look at products like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, it's pretty easy to see how a completely integrated hardware-software approach worked. A huge part of Apple's dominance in these three areas came from their entering into markets with good ideas, but making the experience much, much better for the user. They weren't the first to enter any of these areas, but they were arguably the first to make it sleek, fun, and user-friendly - at a premium, or course. It's easy for people to voice opinions about how product X or Y has more features, blah, blah, blah, but the fact of the matter - and what Apple had always advocated - is that the vast majority of people just want their products to 'work'.

The fundamental difference between these hardware markets and the original PC market is that unlike MP3 players, cell phones, and content-consuming tablets, PCs were so new in the 70s-80s that the only kinds of people that wanted to use them were also the kinds of people that were willing to sacrifice ease-of-use for options. The iPad costs more than many competing tablets, but what you're getting for the premium price is reasonably clear to the average consumer. In 1984, the massive premium price of the Macintosh wasn't at all such a clear justification, nor was the NeXT workstation (what workstation user wants anything less than a command-line interface anyways? Or furthermore, what academic lab wants to pay a premium for anything?).

With the gift of hindsight, it's easy to see how IBM's decision to license DOS from Microsoft, rather than buy it outright, was a horrible decision. But at the time, the market was in its infancy, and no one can be faulted for not knowing whether the money was in the hardware or software. In a similar vein, it's clear that electronics markets needed to mature before Jobs' vision made sense. Furthermore, it's amazing that only a single company has really pulled off what Apple has: No other hardware manufacturer has such an elegance and user-accessibility of both software and hardware (it really is amazing how utterly terrible the software that come with some devices can be). However, it's also the case that most companies arguably make way too many products - Apple focuses very conscientiously on a select number of markets that they feel that they can dominate.

Love them or hate them, it's pretty clear that Apple's products have developed enormous appeal, and it can mostly be traced back to one guy's absolute obsession that every single aspect of every device they produced was meticulously designed (sometimes leading to weird snafus like the iPhone 4 antenna issue).

I'd like to end with a comment about Jobs as a person. As I pointed out in my first post, it was actually quite difficult to get through the first sections of the audiobook because Jobs' personality is presented as completely intolerable. He's just not a relatable individual to me at all. Unfortunately, it appears that he didn't really mellow with age, and his temper tantrums and regular awful treatment of employees (and friends) continued to his death. Interestingly (to me anyways), Isaacson, in his wrap-up epilogue, addresses the idea of whether Jobs had to be such an asshole to achieve what he did and comes to the conclusion that he did not. His outbursts were not motivational, were frequently unwarranted, and his treatment of certain members of his family (such as his first daughter) are unforgivable.

I love my MacBook and my iPhone, but I can't understand the cult-like worship of Jobs the man. His story is fascinating (helped a lot by my living and working in the locations frequently discussed in the book), but he's not on my list of famous people that I would've liked to have met.  

1I need to be clear here: There are many high-end Mac computational workstations in labs nowadays, but this is because they're completely different from the original Macintosh - they use Intel processors and a Linux architecture. The old school Mac wasn't compatible with anything, had custom-designed parts, and case that you couldn't even open if you wanted to. 

'Gamifying' my Exercise...

Apologies for the lack of posts lately but work has become... stimulating. I'm currently in the process of drafting a manuscript about one project as well as developing a protocol for another, and therefore it feels as though my reading/writing time is best reserved for work-related purposes at the moment. That being said, I'm taking this Saturday morning to hammer out a quick blog post about a neat 'toy' that I've been trying out.

'Gamification' is a quite modern concept of adding reward systems, such as those implemented in table-top and video games, to non-game activities as an incentive to enhance interest in them. For example, when I was in elementary school, a local library posted a notice board indicating the number of books that each kid had read, turning reading into a competition for bragging rights. It's fairly easy to see how the advent of social media allows the potential to turn such 'leaderboards' into large-scale activities.

It is with this intent that I purchased an app on my iPhone called Zombies, Run!, which is quite clever and, I think, has the potential to kick off something quite huge:

The idea behind Zombies, Run! is quite simple: It's essentially a classic radio play centered around your role as a runner supporting a small town holding out in a zombie apocalypse. Each segment of the play is divided into jogging missions of about 1/2 hour during which you hear voice acted, narrative scenes interspersed among a playlist of the music you have on your device. The first scene sets up your mission and subsequent interstitials reveal more of an unfolding story (you may be asked to run through a 'forest' in order to lure zombies away from the town with home base relaying instructions and updates as to your progress over the course of the mission, for example).

The narrative is coupled to a game mechanic, the GPS on your phone measures your total distance and speed (direction and position aren't taken into account for obvious safety reasons). As you jog, you automatically 'find' and 'pick up' supplies for the town. The longer you jog, the more supplies you find. In between missions, you choose how to distribute these supplies to the various areas of the town (Armoury, Recreational Facilities, Housing, Medical Tents, etc.) in order to cause it to grow, unlocking more missions and extra bonuses. 

Here's a shot of the 'game' screen showing your town's status, population, and allowing you to divvy up supplies as well as read 'codex' entries about the various characters, locations, and events related to the narrative.

As we all know, if your goal is to stay fit, your perception of progress only comes in infrequent milestones. The idea here is that you get immediate feedback regarding your exercise progress, thus incentivizing you to keep it up. I'd run regardless, but it is a cool perk.

There's one other optional feature to the game that simulates something more akin to interval training. You can enable 'zombie chases', wherein you'll peridocically receive audio cues indicating that fast zombie are on your tail and that you need to pick up the pace. They're tough to avoid (getting caught makes you drop supplies) and are intended for people jogging in open, unobstructed environments such as a track. I turned them off when I was caught by a zombie horde because I refused to ignore a red light in Palo Alto...

I've only run three missions so far, but I can already say that I'm quite taken with the concept. The radio drama is of high quality and the interstitals add some unique flavor to each jog. My only concern is that I have no sense of the depth of the town-building segment and can't evaluate whether it's just a gimmick or something legitimately addictive. Regardless, the app lays the groundwork for an explosion in gamification of various activities. Some already gamified things, such as checking into burger joints in Foursquare are of dubious social utility; but as economists advocate, behavior is all about incentives, and positively reinforcing exercise seems like an awesome idea.