Gauges and Lies

One of the most memorable discussions from Terry Winnograd’s CS 147 Intro to HCI courses involved gauges on automobiles.

Professor Winnograd was discussing when the difference between gauges and dummy lights on automobile dashboards and claimed that there were times when you wanted accuracy (gauges), and other times when you didn’t care (dummy lights).

A student raised his hand and made a striking comment.

He claimed that his father worked at GM and that you don’t want the gauges on your car to be accurate. The fuel gauge in your car was designed purposefully to be inaccurate. In fact, it is only accurate when it indicates half a tank!

This contradicted what Prof. Winnograd had just said and became a discussion. It turns out that there are very good reasons for wanting an inaccurate fuel gauge.

Let’s start with when the gauge indicates the tank is full. It does this prior to the tank being full. Why? Because fuel pumps automatically shut off before the tank is completely full. But you want drivers to feel like they have a full tank when they fill up. Otherwise they end up trying to top off. Topping of causes spills, which is bad for the environment and the finish your car. It can also damage equipment inside your fuel tank. Proper procedure is to stop filling when the pump automatically shuts off even though you might be able to squeeze as much as another gallon into the tank.

So the gauge indicates full before the tank is full. This benefits everybody.

Now let’s examine the other extreme. When the tank is near empty. Running out of gas is a bad thing. Not only does it make you walk around with a heavy red can, it is terrible for your engine. There is sediment at the bottom of the tank and you’d rather not run it through your engine. In order to encourage you to fill up before running out of gas the gauges indicates that you’re empty before you actually are. Again, this is in the best interests of everyone involved in nearly every case.

So gauges that take a paternalistic approach to displaying information can be a good thing.

GM doesn’t want you to freak out if your tank is only 95% full. It doesn’t matter, and acting as if it does can be avoided by simply lying to you.

GM doesn’t want you to run out of gas. It is bad for your car and leaves you stranded. So your car lies to you to get you to fill it up at a reasonable time.

Apple’s iPad trickle charges very slowly when your battery is nearly full. In practice this extra charging isn’t going to affect how long your device will run. But they don’t want you to freak out that the last 5% of charging takes a lot longer than the first 5% so the gauge lies to you.

I hope it comes as a shock to no one that the iPad also lies to you on the other end of the battery scale. It doesn’t simply run until there isn’t a drop of juice left. It watches how much power remains and shuts down before the power is completely drained. Otherwise it wouldn’t be able to shut down cleanly, which is bad.

So yes, your gauges are lying to you. As they should.

Truthiness and Impact

This American Life is perhaps my favorite radio program. The mix of storytelling, humor, and (more and more recently) news appeals to me.

I listened to the Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory episode while waiting for what was to be an overnight flight home from a business trip. I had just taken two benadryl tablets to make sure I slept on the flight and played the podcast back at double speed on my iPhone to make sure I’d hear the whole thing before they closed the door of the airplane and asked me to shut off all my dangerous electronic devices. I planned to be asleep moments after that.

I came away with three impressions. First and foremost, Mike Daisey speaks slowly. Even playing the audio at double speed he seemed to be speaking slowly. I suppose this is for dramatic effect, but wow.

Secondly I thought it was impressive that this guy had hopped on a plane and uncovered as much as he did in such a short time. Perhaps he had been speaking quickly while in China, because he got a lot done. Visited a bunch of factories, spent two days talking to workers outside a Foxconn plant, toured a dormitory, and had secret meetings with an illegal union. The idea of unions being illegal in China struck me as an interesting tidbit. Who needs a union if you’re already a communist, the worker’s party?

In my nearly drugged state it did not occur to me that Mr. Daisey was taking some dramatic license with his story. Perhaps it should have. Which leads me to my third impression: if slow talking storyteller Daisey could show up in China, hire a translator, and witness all these problems, then they must be widespread. You don’t just show up in a country and happen to find that much misery, even if you are looking for it. The idea that he witnessed this personally amplified the impact of the story. It made you wonder what else was there that he hadn’t seen, if abuses are so rampant that he could wander in and witness so many.

But it turns out that he didn’t see what he said he saw. This American Life has retracted the entire episode and done a new episode to dissect what went wrong and how. I listened to this on normal speed and Daisey speaks even more slowly. In addition to the slow talking there are the pauses, as Daisey’s is either searching for words or trying frantically to will himself invisible. Pauses that go on so long you wonder if the battery has run out on your iPhone.

Here’s the complicated part. Aside from some details about the location of security cameras and private guards having guns much of what Daisey speaks of happened, but he didn’t witness it. There have been cases of underage workers, there have been n-hexane exposure incidents, and there are injured workers. Daisey insists that the rules of journalism and the rules of the theater are different and that it was wrong of him to present the material on This American Life because there it is presented in the context of journalism.

There are all sorts of questions that could be raised around the distinctions that he’s trying to make. The one I think is most interesting is, why take dramatic license at all? I’d suggest looking at two other This American Life guests.

Malcolm Gladwell is a well known author and journalist. In 2008 This American Life featured a piece by him in the episode Tough Room. It is hilarious. If you are unfamiliar with it you should go listen to it now before reading further.

Gladwell recounts his entry into the profession of journalism, and how he and a colleague had a contest to insert certain phrases into articles in the Washington Post. The problem is that it didn’t happen. So here is a journalist, talking about journalism, and so you think that he would be using the standards of journalism in reporting on his reporting. Which is what gives the story its impact. If you thought he was just making this up as a funny story it wouldn’t be very funny at all. It is funny because of it’s “you couldn’t make this up” quality. But he did make it up. Ira Glass adds a disclaimer at the end, which is ambiguous at best.

David Sedaris is a frequent guest on This American Life. A search for his name on their website results in six long pages of results. He is an author and humorist, who tells tales from his impossibly amusing life. I once was so engrossed in one of his books that I spent an afternoon reading it poolside and ended up blistered all over my body from sunburn. I had thought I was in the shade. In any case, I would do it again as the book was that good.

He’s also making stuff up. As with Gladwell this is in the realm of comedy, but it isn’t just a funny story he’s telling. He’s telling stories from his own life, so the listener tends to assume that he’s telling them as they happened.

So when Mike Daisey, storyteller, presents his story to This American Life, what is he to think? They tell him it has to meet the standards of journalism, yet journalist Malcolm Gladwell has flouted these by telling an untrue story about flouting the rules of journalism.

They tell him they want to verify that what he claims happened to him happened to him, yet David Sedaris, who is perhaps the most frequent guest in the history of the show, has been shown to embellish his stories.

Part of the problem is that the show has evolved over the years. It has gone from more story focused to more long form journalism. And Daisey embellished his story for the same reason that Gladwell and Sedaris did. To make it have more impact.

Most of the things he reported have happened, at some point, in some Apple supplier. But he didn’t witness him, and they aren’t rampant. But if he said that, what impact would his story have? A mere fraction of the impact of the story he actually told.

Finally, labor conditions in the developing world are very much a worthy topic of conversation and action. That said, This American Life dropped the ball in their final segment of program in describing one way in which listeners could think about the issues involved. There are multiple ways to think about the issues involved, and the most reasonable one was left unmentioned. Paul Krugman’s article In Praise of Cheap Labor expressed this viewpoint well. Jobs at Foxconn and the like are more desirable than working in rural agriculture for less money. This is how economies develop.

In addition, holding Apple’s feet to the fire simply because they’re the most recognizable company here is not the most productive way to address the problem. Countless other companies have suppliers with worse practices. Does going after Apple have a positive impact on those in the worst conditions? Why wouldn’t This American Life, in the interest of journalism, have presented this other framework for thinking about labor conditions in the developing world?

I’ll continue to listen to This American Life, perhaps with a more critical ear in the future. I’ll continue to buy Apple products, as long as I judge them to be the best tools for the jobs I want to do. And I assume that Malcolm Gladwell, David Sedaris, and Mike Daisey will continue telling stories. But only one of them will do so slowly.

iPhone 4s/5 Speculation

As is usual, there’s a lot of speculation regarding the details of the new iPhone. What is interesting this time around is that there seems to be evidence for two different models. One an iPhone 4s, that would resemble the current iPhone 4 in terms of design. The other is a device with a larger screen, but has a design that echos the iPad 2 but with a taper and an oblong home button. The 4s rumors are supported by photos of components that would fit in it. The 5 rumors arise due to photos of protective cases that are popping up all over.

While some think there might be two iPhone models I wonder if something else isn’t at play. The putative iPhone 5 design actually resembles the iPod Touch in some ways more than an iPhone. It is thin. It doesn’t seem to have an obvious place for an antenna. Its larger screen would be attractive to iPod Touch users who tend to use it for games.

In any case the new iPhone is highly anticipated. By waiting to introduce it until fall rather than its usual early summer debut Apple has probably raised expectations. The problem is that the iPhone 4 is still an excellent phone. It has an incredibly solid design (glass back notwithstanding), a fast processor, a lot of memory, and a beautiful screen. The jump from the 3gs to the 4 was huge. Even with the extra time it isn’t likely that Apple is going to pull off that size of jump again. I think that the desire for the 5 is due to people wanting to see that same sort of leap forward. A larger screen and thinner device would be improvements, but I’m guessing that if they materialize it will be in the form of an iPod.

Asteroids & Arithmetic and Atari

Yesterday Apple forwarded me correspondence from Atari. They have claimed that my game Asteroids & Arithmetic infringes on their trademark and have requested that it be immediately removed from the App Store.

The email from Apple suggested that I could justify my use of the term and attempt to fight this or remove my app from the store.

Given that I’ve given the app away for free from the start I have no financial means to get into a tussle with Atari. The name was chosen simply because it is descriptive. There are asteroids to shoot and there is arithmetic to do.

There are several other games in the App Store that contain the word Asteroids. I wonder if they got similar letters yesterday.

I am considering what to do with my game. Should I leave it dead? Rename it? For now I’ve got other stuff to do, so it will be unavailable for a while. Sorry about that.

IOError: [Errno 32] Broken pipe

Once I spent 8 hours looking for what turned out to be a missing asterisk.

This is the story of how I spent much longer looking for a print statement.

Long story short I had a cron job that would run just fine when I ran it manually but would not complete when cron ran it.

I thought it might be an issue with the fact that cron runs under a different environment than a program invoked from the command line. I verified my python virtual environment again and again. I could find no difference.

Finally I did what I should have done from the start: store the output from stderr in a file. This is done thusly:
/home/user/path/to/script.sh >/tmp/output 2>&1

Looking at the end of the output of the script that invoke my python program I found:
IOError: [Errno 32] Broken pipe

At the end of a stack trace. The last line in the stack trace was the normally innocuous:
print "primaryupc does not match any upc: ",primary

Which was a warning that serves a purpose but not an important one.

Removed the line, program ran as it should as a cron job.

With some googling I’ve come across the following unsatisfactory explanations:
Jay Taylor’s blog
2004 post in comp.lang.python

So it seems that you should put print statements in scripts that will run from cron jobs. Who knew?

iPad Simulator Screenshot

When running iOS apps in the simulator you can take a screenshot with control-command-c.

This is easier than using Grab and then trying to crop accurately. Also if the iPad simulator is downscaling your copied image still comes out at full resolution.

So now you’ve got an image in the clipboard, what do you do with it? Open Preview and hit command-n. That will create a new window with the current clipboard image in it. Then save the thing as a png or do whatever else you’d like with it.

iPad Pro

The largest jump in quality of experience between iPhone models has been the 3GS to iPhone 4 change. The new device was faster, had more memory, and a much more solid build quality. But the biggest change in the experience was the screen. Going from 320 x 480 to 640 x 960 helped with games and graphics, but the big difference it made initially was in terms of text. Text went from acceptable to razor sharp. The pleasure of reading from a Retina Display compare to the old display is visceral. Going back to an old device feels like a substandard experience.

As Amazon prepares to enter the table market with the ability to supply an enormous amount of content upgrading the display of the iPad only makes sense.

Apple claimed that the iPad 2 has nine times the graphics power of its predecessor. That is more than enough power to push four times the pixels. It might require some additional graphics memory as well, but the power is already there to drive a Retina Display in the iPad 2. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see Apple introduce a Retina Display iPad model as a high end complement to its existing line-up this fall.

The device will make reading much more enjoyable. It might not match the readability of e-ink, but it will be infinitely more flexible, making for sharper games, movies, and other applications that we haven’t imagined yet.

To those that say the iPad 2 is selling as fast as Apple can make them, I remind you that this is the company that killed the hugely popular iPod mini to make way for the iPod nano, and just recently dropped Final Cut Pro for a Final Cut Pro X. If someone is going to make a better tablet this year, Apple wants it to be Apple.