thanks steve!

This is mind-blowing. 60 Minutes shows a few different research activities mapping electrical impulses in the brain to intentional actions (like selecting a letter to type, moving a robotic arm, controlling a mouse cursor).

The segment intimates endlessly optimistic future possibilities for the disabled (folks with ALS, paralysis, amputations). I wonder also what this might mean for the completely able-bodied - things like being able to control remote machinery ‘directly’, impacting the environment without cumbersome, intrusive instrument panels, controlling a mobile interface with limited hardware controls more immediately.

On Slate V today: a modern married couple makes it through the day without straying more than 15 feet apart. Slate Deputy Editor David Plotz and his wife Hanna Rosin, also a writer, are attached by a 15-feet string, inspired by an Arizona Buddhist couple that recently made the headlines for having spent every minute together for the past 10 years.

http://www.slatev.com/player.html?id=1581571593

I like these two! The window into their lives, and their observations about the experience, are what makes the video.

Robbie Bach demo’d our multimodal product at CES this year. I designed this demo flow - it shows looking for a movie, buying a ticket, and sending the info to a friend.

Here’s the video.

Feedback is welcome.

A little while ago I posted about Wells Fargo’s abdication of its responsibility to deliver critical and legally-obligated customer documents in a reasonable fashion via their website. Today, in the midst of tax season, I realize Vanguard has similar problems. Here’s the letter I sent to Vanguard. (And yes, this is becoming something of a consumer-rights mission for me.)

To whom it may concern -

My husband and I requested online document delivery from Vanguard this year in an effort to save paper.

Now as we approach tax time, we realize that your website does not appear to support Apple Macintosh Firefox or Safari browsers or Linux Firefox browsers for viewing the ‘Tax Forms Servelet’ document delivery application. These are standard browsers and this is a standard task.

My husband is a software engineer at Google and I am an engineer at Microsoft. We are currently trying to reverse engineer your download application to gain access to our tax forms. This should not be necessary - in fact, it is probably a violation of your electronic document delivery promise and your legal requirement to make tax forms accessible to your customers.

You may want to ask your web engineers and quality assurance engineers to make sure they design and test for operating systems other than Microsoft Windows - which may be about 10% of your customer base.

Best regards,
[our names]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080303120346.htm

The first half of the article was, imo, really neat. The second half was conjecture on top of hoo-hah. (Don’t ask me what that means, I’m seriously po’d right now.) This article in Science Daily was taken almost verbatim from a press release, so I’m inclined to blame the study’s author or Northwestern’s PR dept for the absurd social policy & gender stereotyped implications made herein.

The first half of the article says that the researchers used fMRI to image the brains of 31 boys and in 31 girls aged 9 to 15 as they performed spelling and writing language tasks. And - to paraphrase - they found that for girls, the language center of the brain was all lit up, while boys tended to have activation more in their visual or auditory cortices (depending on if it was a reading or listening task). Girls (and this is old news) tend to outperform boys on the language-based tasks, but now we can speculate that it might be because different portions of the brain are coming into play for each.

Ok. Good. Fine. We should stop there. But the authors (or their pr dept) now begin to speculate:

“…those kinds of sensory associations [i.e., activation in the auditory/visual cortex rather than the language center] may have provided an evolutionary advantage for primitive men whose survival required them to quickly recognize danger-associated sights and sounds.”

Primitive woman was not in danger? She was living in a gated-community apparently. And, sensory associations of written or oral language has anything to do with sensory associations of danger signs? Do tell.

“…it could explain why women often provide more context and abstract representation than men. ‘Ask a woman for directions and you may hear something like: ‘Turn left on Main Street, go one block past the drug store, and then turn right, where there’s a flower shop on one corner and a cafe across the street.’”

Is there a study that shows that a woman is more likely to give directions like this? I’ve seen research that indicates that women are more likely to use landmarks, but more useless verbosity? That’s just poor directions.

“Such information-laden directions may be helpful for women because all information is relevant to the abstract concept of where to turn; however, men may require only one cue and be distracted by additional information.”

So might women. In fact anyone reading that directions example above would be lost. Less information to process makes processing easier for everyone.

The study author goes so far as to suggest that his study might be a basis for the single-sex teaching movement. Again, how so? To quote one blogger’s response: “There is no reason though to extend this series of discrete observations into a general rule, in the first place. Applying this fictitious rule to any more complex process is even less justifiable.” That is to say, if sensory activation happened for reading and hearing, what type of teaching method would bypass both listening and reading to get straight to boys’ abstract language core? How does this recommendation jive with actual teaching experiments that show that boys do worse in single-sex classrooms?

The most plausible explanation of these results is that boys develop on a slower timeline than girls. This explanation is mentioned and than abandoned in favor of more interesting hoo-hah, when a similar test of adults (or even an adjustment for gender development within in the framework of this study) would put the question to rest.

Anyone else notice that in the rush to embrace digital opportunities for cost-savings, financial institutions are doing a fairly miserable job executing?

I received a notice today via email that new legal terms were going in to effect on my Wells Fargo checking account. Neither the email nor the slightly different message in my Wells Fargo message center provided current, accurate steps (or a link!) to get to these legal documents on the Wells Fargo website.

When I requested online statements and messages, I did so assuming it would be simple to jump from an email to the relevant information on the Wells Fargo website - as easy as opening a snail mail envelope. In my naivete, I thought I’d be able to communicate with my bank efficiently, effectively, get up-to-date information and do my part to save the environment simultaneously.

For this to work, though, I must rely on my financial institution’s communications to a) either keep pace with changes to their own website or b) (far more ideal) simply offer a direct link from message to the referenced doc they’d like to call our attention to.

Wells Fargo’s email to me (with my interjections in brackets):

We have new information to share with you about changes to the terms, conditions, or disclosures that apply to your account, House. [my read: new & higher hidden fees!] That information is now available to view online. We are providing the information online because you agreed and instructed us to send you your account statements, as well as our account-related notices, through online delivery.

Here’s how to access the new information:

1. Sign on to Wells Fargo Online at wellsfargo.com [no problem!]
2. Select “View Online Statements” on the Account Summary or Account Activity screen [ok, look for a link!]
3. Go to “Important Documents” section and make your selection [make my “selection”???? look for something that says “changes to the terms, conditions, or disclosures” maybe? do i need to be in my ‘house’ account first? hopefully it’ll be something flagged with “new!” or “important!”]

For your convenience, you’ll be able to view this information online (and print it for future reference) for 90 days from the date of this email.

Sincerely,
Wells Fargo Online

Both steps 2 and 3 were challenging. The link in step 2 appears not to be available on the Account Summary screen and is quite difficult to find on the Account Activity screen. The section referenced in step 3 is difficult to find because it’s off to the far right, in a very different part of the screen than the link in step 1, and has no highlighted link text to scan for. Nor is there any indication which documents I should be clicking on for the new information I’ve been sent to find. Need I click on them all? Have they all changed? I’m still not sure if I got all the important information they think they’ve communicated.

—

I believe Wells Fargo’s handling of this communication about changing the terms of my contract is poorly executed at best and dishonest or negligent at worst.

Putting a 90 day limit on the availability of this material seems similarly nefarious. I could keep their paper mailings for years (which in fact I used to do). The parallel should be required in the digital domain - either include the information in the email so that I can archive it for years on my own, or let me access Wells Fargo’s online archives at my convenience. Requiring me to print out the terms of our agreement every time they change undermines the entire (paper-free!) rationale for online notices.

I’m not sure how to hold financial institution’s to the same usability bar as online retail sites (other than by suing) but I’d sure like to find a way. I sent them an email. I’ll let you know if they act!

Thank you NSF for this beacon of light. Actual research on the differences between crawling and not in developed vs indigenous cultures.

Will Baby Crawl?

Izod is 8 months old today. It’s a fabulous age, he’s talking (nyah, nyah, nyah) nonstop, reaching for our hands to standup and then bobbing, wobbling and giggling once he does, sitting & reaching & grabbing & mouthing & banging & re-mouthing & passing it from hand to hand & re-mouthing… you get the idea. He almost seems to be understanding us sometimes (bye bye, milk, outside) and communicating back (is he signing that he wants milk?)

On the other hand, he continues to like standing so much and to so dislike lying down on his front that I wondered today if he would ever crawl. I’d heard some babies never do. But just now I had the thought -

will our baby be at some disadvantage if he never crawls? Correlation-wise or causation-wise, perhaps babies who never crawl are a bit less coordinated generally or have trouble distinguishing left from right (which supposedly may impact reading)?

So I googled “babies who never learn to crawl” and got some interesting results. Two questions were posted to Yahoo! Answers:

1. Will he not learn to crawl if he never goes on the floor? and
2. If a baby does not learn to crawl will it affect them in later life?

Virtually the same right?

The answers though are a perfect example of both what it’s like to be a parent in America today and what it means to rely on the collective wisdom of internet answer sites.

In the first post, the “best answer” says:

Babies who walk before they crawl can have serious hand/eye coordination problems when they get older. I’ve heard of children having to be taught to crawl when they were 7 because they had never learned. There is something in the rhythmic motion that the brain and body need to connect with.

Almost all the other answers on the page continue in this vein. Except one slightly apologetic, tentatively defensive one at the very bottom that says, in effect, I tried but my daughter never crawled and she’s just as smart today as any other 4 year old.

In the second post, the “best answer” says:

There is an old wives tale that says it will [affect baby later in life]. But that is all there is to it. Crawling is not really even a developmental milestone that doctors check for. As long as baby is showing interest in it’s world, and finding some way to be mobile, there is no cause for alarm. Some even skip the crawl/roll/scoot phase and go straight to cruising and walking. Each baby is different, and there are sooo many ways for them to explore. So, in answer to your question, no not crawling will not effect a baby later in life.

and all the other posts on the page continue in this soothing vein.

One site, one redundant question, two sets of diametrically opposing answers. The Wikipedia system is better, where there’s a higher likelihood that these folks would have to duke it out together to come to agreement on a single entry. Further, both sides would have to cite evidence that supports their authoritative “Answer”.

Instead, here, we poor gullible novice parents are subject to the same kind of parenting schizophrenia that greets every conceivable parenting question. Both sides are dogmatically sure they are right and simultaneously diametrically opposed. If only the babies could speak for themselves.

I think it’s funny how one woman defying cultural norms to pee can inadvertently prompt a column by a well-known, well-read/heard cultural commentator in favor of toilet equality.

when I headed for the men’s room, passing a long line of women waiting to get into the women’s, and when I got inside the men’s, a tall woman in a long black coat emerged from a stall and walked out. She didn’t run or skulk or sneak, she simply walked purposefully out of the men’s toilet, having done what she needed to do, and didn’t linger to hold a press conference or wash her hands. A couple of men glanced back from the urinals and noticed her and were very cool about it. “Was that a woman?” one of them asked. “Yes, she was,” I said.

Talk about empowering women to inappropriately appropriately act! Making random, strangers (men) mildly uncomfortable is effective.

Anyway, I came down the hallway crowded with about 57 openly disgruntled New York women, seething, muttering, glaring at the men sweeping past them, and I strolled into our clubroom as the interloper loped past me on her way out, and the coolness of the male patrons was interesting.

At Benson School in 1952, a girl in the boys’ toilet would’ve been an international incident, but in New York, men smiled, went about their business, zipped up, washed their hands, and went off to dinner as if nothing had happened.

The country wants change. Here’s how it happens. People talk it to death for decades and then somebody crosses the line and suddenly the line doesn’t exist anymore.