Happy anniversary, Word Munger!

Posted on 4/19/2011 by dave

Today Word Munger turns seven! That’s right, I’ve been filling this space with my musings for seven full years—or even longer if you count the original Word Munger, a hand-coded satire site I started wayyyy back in the year 2000. Here’s the first post there, about how some people simply can’t get over the 2000 Bush/Gore election debacle. I think I still get some of those jokes…

Word Munger has had a complicated history. Some years, I posted nearly every day. But over the years, I’ve also found other online venues — most notably, Cognitive Daily, which ran for five years. Between that and my duties at Research Blogging, my productivity here at Word Munger has waned recently. Looking now at the “recent posts” in the sidebar, I see that I’ve only posted 10 times since last September.

That’s partially due to my job, but perhaps more because I’m now training to run my first (and possibly my last) marathon. I’ve found marathon training to be so consuming that I wanted to write about every last training run. I decided not to bore my non-running readers with that, so I started up a separate blog, Mungerruns, for all things running. After I’ve completed the Big Sur Marathon less than two weeks from now, it’s possible that I’ll back off the marathonblogging and start blogging here more often. My running friends don’t seem to think that’s likely, though — they say that once you’ve run your first marathon, you’re hooked for life. I kind of hope that’s not true, because all that running sure takes a lot of time.

During the last year I’ve also worked on two other projects, ScienceSeeker and a monthly column at 3 Quarks Daily. ScienceSeeker is sort of a faster-paced version of Research Blogging, covering more dimensions of science, from lab life to politics to gender issues. The 3 Quarks column tries to understand contemporary political issues from the perspective of my stepbrother, a disabled artist who struggles to live on a $600 monthly Social Security check (they don’t yet have an archive so today I created a page with links to all my columns).

In the past year I’ve also sent my oldest child to college, and my youngest has been admitted to college, so I imagine that even bigger changes are in store over the next year as Greta and I begin life as “empty nesters” (that said, at this point it looks like being an empty-nester starts off with two bored young adults living with you all summer).

I can’t promise that I’ll be posting here more frequently over the next year, but I can promise that I’ll maintain the site for at least another year (at this point I plan on maintaining the site indefinitely), so I’d recommend you keep on coming back at least every month or so to see what’s on my mind. For more regular updates, friend me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter.

Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Science, 185 (4157), 1124 DOI: 10.1126/science.185.4157.1124

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What didn’t Watson the computer do?

Posted on 2/22/2011 by dave

I don’t pretend to know much more about computers than Stanley Fish does. But I do know a little bit more, and that little bit is the crucial bit.

Yesterday, Fish wrote a column in the New York Times belittling IBM’s achievement in developing a computer that can beat the best human contestants on Jeopardy. Fish compared Watson to an automated word-completion algorithm on his computer that is incorrect with frustrating frequency. Watson, Fish claims, isn’t any better.

Except that Watson is better. Unlike Fish’s program, Watson gets its answers right nearly all the time. Fish is unimpressed:

it has no holistic sense of context and no ability to to survey possibilities from a contextual perspective; it doesn’t begin with what Wittgenstein terms a “form of life,” but must build up a form of life, a world, from the only thing it has and is, “bits of context-free, completely determinate data.” And since the data, no matter how large in quantity, can never add up to a context and will always remain discrete bits, the world can never be built.

I’m sure Fish knows much more about Wittgenstein than I do, but I dispute this notion that there is some “form of life” that only humans, and never computers, can comprehend. Fish asserts that the computer has no “context,” but if Fish had seen the Nova documentary on Watson, he would have seen some impressive demonstrations of Watson seeming to build an understanding of context on the fly. In one case, Watson appeared to “learn” that all the responses in a particular category were names of months, missing its first answer, but seeing the error of its ways after the human contestants began to get correct “month” responses. How is this different from how humans learn about context?

In attempting to diminish IBM’s achievement with Watson, Fish quotes from a 39-year-old critique of artificial intelligence: A computer can’t adapt, Fish claims, and can “at best be programmed to try out a series of hypotheses to see which best fit the fixed data.” But this isn’t the way Watson is “programmed” at all. In fact, Watson was trained using machine learning, a technique that didn’t exist in the 1970s when Dreyfus wrote his screed against AI. Humans didn’t give Watson a set of rules, they gave it a procedure by which to develop its own rules. Then they fed it immense quantities of information, correcting it when it responded incorrectly, so that it could adapt its rules to the new information.

Here’s Fish’s understanding of what Watson is doing: “It decomposes the question put to it into discrete bits of data and then searches its vast data base for statistically frequent combinations of the bits it is working with.” Perhaps Watson is doing that, but clearly Watson is doing much more than that as well. Decomposes how? What does it do once it finds those combinations of bits? How does Watson decide which bits are most relevant? Fish doesn’t know, and in many ways, Watson’s programmers don’t know either. That’s what machine learning is, and machine learning is only going to get more powerful in the future. We teach machines how to create their own rules, then they learn things using that system.

They’re not as good as humans in many fields, but they’re already better than humans in some, like Jeopardy and chess. Maybe computers will never catch up to humans in some fields like art and poetry. But for most things that most of us do every day? Given enough time — say, 100 years — I wouldn’t bet against the computers.

Update: After thinking about this a bit, I have to say unless historical events end up massively impeding technological progress, that 100-year bet is way too conservative. Computers have only been around for about 70 years, so 100 years is like an eternity. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this come to pass in as little as 30 years. That isn’t to say humans wouldn’t be needed at that point; just that our relationship with computers will be very different from what it is now. We will start to interact with them more like we do with other people. We won’t think “how can I get this computer to do what I want?” We’ll think, “how can I work together with the computer to get the job done?”

Yang, H., Liu, Y., Bai, F., Zhang, J.Y., Ma, S.H., Liu, J., Xu, Z.D., Zhu, H.G., Ling, Z.Q. & Ye, D. (2012). Tumor development is associated with decrease of TET gene expression and 5-methylcytosine hydroxylation, Oncogene, DOI: 10.1038/onc.2012.67

Friese, M., Messner, C. & Schaffner, Y. (2012). Mindfulness meditation counteracts self-control depletion, Consciousness and Cognition, DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2012.01.008

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments

An imagined conversation with Netflix

Posted on 2/3/2011 by dave

Wii User: Hello, Netflix? I’d like to view interweb movies on my Wii console, just like it says I can on the ad in my latest Netflix DVD.

Netflix Customer Support Rep: You’re all set. Your Wii is ready to go.

WU: But I need to start up a subscription with you guys.

NCSR: No you don’t. It’s included in your subscription rate.

WU: But my Wii can’t connect to the interwebs.

NCSR: All Wii consoles connect to the intenet.

WU: They do? How?

NCSR: Why don’t you check out Nintendo’s support page at Support.nintendo.com. It explains everything.

WU: Can’t you explain how?

NCSR: That’s really not my job. The Wii is a Nintendo product.

WU: Do I have to pay extra for that?

NCSR: Not unless you don’t already have internet service at your home. Which I assume you do, since you can only order Netflix DVDs via the internet.

WU: That sounds pretty complicated. Why does the ad make it look so easy?

I think it must have been conversations like this that led to the ad I received today with my latest DVD from Netflix:

Basically the ad is a tech support call! The fine print reads “Broadband internet access required. For more info on connecting your Wii to the internet, go to support.nintendo.com. Wii is a trademark of Nintendo.”

My guess is, earlier versions of the ad just said something like “Now get Netflix videos on your Wii!” and then Netflix got deluged with support requests just like the one I imagined above.

RB
Munger, M., & Owens, T. (2004). Representational momentum and the flash?lag effect Visual Cognition, 11 (1), 81-103 DOI: 10.1080/13506280344000257

SS
Munger, M. & Owens, T.R. (2004). Representational momentum and the flash?lag effect, Visual Cognition, 11 (1) 103. DOI: 10.1080/13506280344000257

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Top Ten Reasons I Hate Top-Ten Lists

Posted on 1/21/2011 by dave

10. Ten? Why ten? Don’t some topics merit, say a top-20 list? Or on the other hand, sometimes there are only a few deserving items, so the list ends up getting padded with pointless choices.

9. Like this one.

8. Top-ten lists are often served up one or two items at a time, forcing you to click through page after page of items just to see what #1 is. If it’s a list, shouldn’t it be displayed in, you know, list format?

7. Top ten-lists often give no justification at all for the selections, or for the order of the selections.

6. Top-ten lists are often not even credited with an author, so you have no idea who to blame for the choices.

5. When there is an author, he or she often feels obligated to pick a few items you’ve never heard of, just to show off. If you’re listing the “Top 10 Movies of 2010,” don’t include three French documentaries you saw in SoHo and were never released outside of Manhattan.

4. Authors like to be controversial, so they also always list some “underappreciated” item like Gigli or Death Rampage 2007: The BloodPocalypse. Bad idea. They’re underappreciated for a reason.

3. Often top-ten lists are just linkbait. Why else would a site called “online psychology degrees” have a list of the top ten psychology blogs (or even better, the top 100)? Because then unsuspecting bloggers link back to the post (“Goody! I’m the #57 psychology blog according to this spammer I’ve never heard of”), which in turn gives the site a higher Google PageRank, so the next time some unsatisfied hairdresser contemplates a career change, she’ll be directed to the spam site instead of someplace where the proprietors are actually concerned about the quality of information they provide.

2. Gigli

1. You see now, here I am at #1, and you’d think I’d have something really relevant to say. But whatever it is, you’ll probably disagree. Which is the entire point of top-ten lists. Everyone loves to disagree with them. They’re absolutely ruthless psychological tricks. And they work. Which means, despite the fact that I hate them, I’ll probably click on the next link to one I see.

(Shameless linkbait: Thanks, Brian Romans, for suggesting I write this post)

Posted in General | 1 Comment

Some reflections on ScienceSeeker

Posted on 1/18/2011 by dave

On Saturday morning at the ScienceOnline conference in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, I was part of the team that launched ScienceSeeker, a new blog aggregator that strives to collect posts from all science blogs around the internet.

In contrast to ResearchBlogging.org, ScienceSeeker is inclusive. Whether you’re posting your trip to Maui or a detailed analysis of a journal article, it will show up on ScienceSeeker.

Won’t people who are looking for “real science” be discouraged by the site? I’d say if the site was launched two years ago, the answer would have been yes. But now with the rise of Twitter and the opening up of Facebook to a much wider audience, people are accustomed to getting a lot of noise with their signals. We list 50 posts on a page (and we may increase that number), so readers can easily scan past the posts that don’t interest them. No harm, no foul.

You can also filter (a bit crudely) by topic. So if you just want to see biology posts, you click on that topic, and you’ll see only posts from blogs listed in the “biology” topic. The problem with this is that we don’t filter on a post-by-post basis. So you’ll still see the Maui posts, political rants, and whatever else biologists like to blog about.

The reason for this is an elaborate compromise we worked out as we were developing the site. We wanted it to be usable from launch, so we pared down the feature list to those functions which were absolutely essential: Bloggers needed to be able to submit and claim blogs, and readers needed to filter by topic. There’s no search function, no way for individual users to edit their settings after they’ve submitted a blog, and no post-level tagging.

We finished the site in a whirlwind of activity during the last two weeks before launch. I was doing most of the CSS and graphic design, Mark Hahnel handled the WordPress install and found third-party plugins for some of our key functions, and Jessica Hekman and Chris Maden did the serious coding. Jessica in particular was simply amazing at pulling the site together, working an incredible number of hours, including a marathon session on Christmas day.

While the site is built on a WordPress framework, the guts of the system are all custom-coded plugins. Even the data for the individual posts on the site is handled by a separate database, not WordPress. The only thing we really use WordPress for is registration and administration, and as a frame for the visual presentation of the site.

On Saturday at launch, we got lots of positive feedback, and the site was tweeted all over the place, most notably by Bad Astronomer and his thousands of followers. By this morning, we’d had over 100 new blogs register, bringing the total of registered blogs well over 500.

But of course, there have been complaints as well—users want to edit/delete their accounts and they can’t do that. They want custom RSS subscriptions, and they can’t do that. They want their twitter account to automatically appear on the Member Tweets sidebar, and it doesn’t do that.

I was actually expecting more complaints—and I’m sure more will come, but overall, I’m quite pleased with the launch. The hardest thing about it is yet to come: Figuring out what enhancement we’ll offer next.

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What it takes to lose it

Posted on 12/2/2010 by dave

As of this morning, I weighed 200 pounds. That’s the least I’ve weighed since the early 1990s. At one point in the late 90s, with the stress of running a business and two small children, I weighed as much as 250, but I’ve slowly chipped away at that over the years. By the 2000s I was pretty steadily in the 220s. For someone my height (6′ 1″), the BMI calculator says 250 counts as “obese,” while 220 is just “overweight.”

There’s no question that, at 220 pounds, I was overweight. Last April, I began blogging about fitness over at Daily Monthly. I weighed 225, right around where I’d been for the past decade. I felt like I was in okay shape, but I’ve always thought I could do a little better. This summer I decided I would train for a marathon, and the first part of the plan was to get down to a weight of 200 pounds by December 1. I’d then run the Thunder Road Half Marathon in Charlotte on December 11, and look for a good marathon to run in the spring of 2011.

By the beginning of August, I weighed about 220, and I set mini-goals of losing five pounds a month. The first ten pounds came off fairly easily as I ramped up my training for the half-marathon. I was running nearly 30 miles per week, and just eating a salad at lunch and cutting back on snacks seemed to be all I needed to do to lose weight.

But by early October, progress stalled. Even as I began to increase my mileage, I couldn’t seem to lose any more weight. I’d feel like I was starving during my runs, and despite the fact that sweets had been banished, I couldn’t resist the urge to snack on whatever I could find around the house. Some days I was so hungry I got dizzy. I missed my November 1 goal of 205 pounds, weighing in at 207 on November 2. Finally, by the 7th, I was down to 205. During November, I boosted my mileage again, to over 40 miles per week. The pounds were coming off easier, but Thanksgiving loomed ahead. On Thanksgiving morning, after a long run, I weighed in at 199. But I knew there would be temptations everywhere all weekend long. I couldn’t resist leftover pumpkin pie for breakfast, or cookies throughout the day. By November 29, even after another 10-mile run, I was back up to 202. But we were out of pie. On December 1, I still weighed 202. I ate light all day, ran 6 miles, went to Pilates class, and ran another 4.3 miles this morning. Weighing myself as I stepped out of the shower (after hydrating and eating breakfast), I was finally down to 200 pounds. Here’s a chart of my weight loss for the past 3 months:

I’m sitting here typing this post wearing jeans I could barely squeeze into last year. The only way they stay up is with a tightly-cinched belt. On cold days, my running tights sag low on my hips. I’d replace them, but I simply can’t imagine switching from a size L/XL to S/M.

Even so, I still have a bit of a gut. Remember those can you pinch an inch? TV commercials from the 70s? I can still pinch well over an inch. But at least it’s not the 3 or 4 inches of abdominal fat I used to be able to grab.

At this point, however, I’m only about halfway through my plan to run a marathon. I’ve run half-marathons before, but never a full marathon. After my half-marathon 10 days from now, I’m going to be adding on even more miles, peaking in March at 70 miles per week. I don’t plan on “dieting” during this time, but I’m going to try to keep eating healthy foods, and we’ll see what happens. Even at 200 pounds my BMI is 26.4, which counts as “overweight.” To count as “normal,” I’d have to get down to 189. I’m less concerned about that than I am about putting in enough miles while staying injury-free. I’m registered for the Big Sur Marathon on May 1.

This is not a lifestyle I will be able to maintain over the long run. I’m deliberately cutting back on my writing and other work while I train, and I may have to cut back even more in the spring. But hopefully I’ll be able to use the discipline I’ve gained during this period to keep my weight at a healthy level. I won’t stop running, and I may even do another marathon or two, but on May 1, I expect to be the fittest I ever have been, and I don’t think I’ll ever be fitter. That’s fine with me. One good marathon is plenty for a lifetime.

Posted in General | 4 Comments

Race Report: Huntersville Fall Harvest 5K

Posted on 10/30/2010 by dave

At the last minute yesterday I decided I wanted to do a 5K this weekend, and the Huntersville Fall Harvest 5K fit the bill. It’s a relatively flat course, near where I live, and the weather was slated to be perfect — about 40 degrees at race time. I’m starting a new training program as I get ready to run my first-ever marathon, and when I’m doing speed work like intervals, etc., the program specifies that I should be running at 5K race pace.

Since I feel like I’ve improved a lot since my last 5K in the spring, it seemed like a good idea to run a new one. In that last race, the Bare Bones 5K in Salisbury, I ran a 23:55, which works out to about 7:42 per mile. Today I was thinking I might be able to run about as fast as 7:15 per mile. The plan was to start at that 7:15 pace, then see if I could hang on until the finish.

At the start we all crowded onto Verhoeff Dr., a two-lane rural highway that had been closed off by the local police. As we waited for the start, the last few racers from the 10K that had started an hour and a half earlier were heading to the finish, which involved them making their way through the crowd of 5K runners. Fortunately, the 5K racers were very polite, parting like the Red Sea and giving each 10K racer a hearty round of applause.

At the start, there was no bullhorn, just a guy with a gun, but that did the trick, and we were off, running through the beautiful, semi-rural course. The first mile was downhill, and a lot of folks started aggressively, including me. At the one mile marker, I felt good, and I made it in 6:57, faster than I had planned. Then the course turned uphill. If I was going to hit my target time, I needed to maintain my pace heading uphill. The hill was quite gentle, even more gradual than some of the flattest portions of my daily training run, so it really wasn’t too bad. I think I passed at least 20 runners on mile 2, which I finished in 7:14 — still on pace! All I had to do now was hang on to the end. I passed another few runners at the start of mile 3, which was still slightly uphill. I could feel myself starting to tire a bit at the end of mile 3, and a couple runners passed me. I tried to stay with them, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t kill myself and not run strong through the finish, so in the end I had to let them go. Mile 3 was finished in 7:16 — slightly off pace, but not bad. All that was left was around 2 tenths of a mile — the race website lists the race as 3.2 miles, even though a true 5K would be 3.1. I ran strong to the finish, finishing just behind the two guys who passed me in that last mile.

Unofficial finish time: 22:14. I can’t remember ever doing a 5K faster — does that make it a P.R.? That’s a pace of 7:06 per mile — even better than my target pace! Yes indeed, that is a bit of smug self-satisfaction you’re detecting just now. A great way to start the weekend!

I don’t think the official results have been posted yet; I’ll try to link to them when they are. If you’re interested, here’s the GPS record of my race.

Update: The results have been posted here. I finished 23rd out of 330 runners, and I was fourth in my age group. As it turned out, those two guys who passed me in the last mile were in my age group, so if I had managed to hold them off, I would have finished second. As it was, I was two seconds out of second place, and eight seconds out of first place in my age group.

Posted in Post-run ramblings | 5 Comments

How much does the weather affect my running?

Posted on 10/27/2010 by dave

For the past two months I’ve been running with a new toy, a GPS trainer that tracks (almost) exactly where I’ve run and how fast I ran. Lately I’ve been improving a whole lot, which has been extremely gratifying. But on this morning’s run I took a step backward, running slower than I have for weeks. What’s up with that?

Then I noticed on Facebook that several of my running acquaintances were reporting the same sluggish pace today. It was quite warm and muggy this morning. Could it be that all my “improvements” over that past month have really been due to cooler weather? Since my GPS device records every run, I thought I’d compare my Wednesday morning run pace (over about six miles) to the weather. This graph shows the results:

The blue line shows my pace in minutes per mile — so lower numbers are better. Green columns show the high temperature for that day, while gold columns show the previous day’s low, which I think comes closest to approximating the temperature at run-time, 6:00 a.m. As you can see, starting October 6, I improved dramatically, shaving almost a half-minute per mile off my pace. For a runner, this is huge! Then I continued that improvement on the 13th and the 20th, before regressing back to roughly my October 6 pace today. The pace changes don’t seem to bear much relationship to the high temps — my slowest pace was on the coolest day. But low temps tell a different story — my first dramatic improvement came on a day where the low was 19 degrees cooler than the previous week. My regression today came after a 15-degree rise from the low temp last week.

I also computed correlation coefficients for my run pace and temperature. The correlation between pace and high temp was 0.35, while the correlation between pace and low temp was a whopping 0.58!

Is this statistically significant? Nope — my N of just 8 means that p = 0.13. But it’s a fairly dramatic trend. However, since Wednesdays are the only days I run 6 miles, it would be hard to get a larger sample. Maybe I’ll reassess when things start warming up again in the spring.

Update: There have been a few requests on Twitter / Facebook to include more weather variables. I’ve heard dew point is a better proxy for humidity than “relative humidity,” so here’s a graph showing dew point instead of high temperature:

Just taking a look at the graph, dew point does not appear to explain the variance in my pace as well as low temperature. Indeed, the correlation coefficient for pace vs. dew point was 0.39 — slightly better than the high-temperature number, but not nearly as good as the low-temp correlation. And of course, like the other correlations, it’s not significant.

Posted in General | 5 Comments

Meme o’ the day: How plebe are you?

Posted on 10/26/2010 by dave

I’m not feeling very inspired today, so how about a meme, courtesy of Kevin Drum. The higher you score, the more non-elitist you are.

1. Can you talk about “Mad Men?” No.
2. Can you talk about the “The Sopranos?” No.
3. Do you know who replaced Bob Barker on “The Price Is Right?” No.
4. Have you watched an Oprah show from beginning to end? I don’t think so. If I ever did it was a long time ago.
5. Can you hold forth animatedly about yoga? No.
6. How about pilates? Yes. I just started taking classes about a month ago.
7. How about skiing? Yes. Though this was not considered elitist in Seattle where I grew up.
8. Mountain biking? Yes.
9. Do you know who Jimmie Johnson is? Yes.
10. Does the acronym MMA mean anything to you? No.
11. Can you talk about books endlessly? Not really. I’m a child the internet.
12. Have you ever read a “Left Behind” novel? No.
13. How about a Harlequin romance? No.
14. Do you take interesting vacations? They’re interesting to me!
15. Do you know a great backpacking spot in the Sierra Nevada? No. I think they’re over-rated. But this probably means I should score this one as a “yes.”
16. What about an exquisite B&B overlooking Boothbay Harbor? No.
17. Would you be caught dead in an RV? Sure, why not?
18. Would you be caught dead on a cruise ship? I did go on a cruise with my grandparents back in my college days and I thought it was kind of fun.
19. Have you ever heard of of Branson, Mo? Yes.
20. Have you ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club? No.
21. How about the Rotary Club? No.
22. Have you lived for at least a year in a small town? I’m not sure if Davidson, NC counts. It’s sort of suburban, but it fashions itself as a small town. But it’s a college town, so that probably only qualifies for half a point.
23. Have you lived for a year in an urban neighborhood in which most of your neighbors did not have college degrees? Yep.
24. Have you spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line? Yep. How about less than the poverty line itself?
25. Do you have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian? No, unless former evangelical Christians count.
26. Have you ever visited a factory floor? No.
27. Have you worked on one? No.

Score: 11.5 out of 27. I’m 43% plebeian. Kevin scored 63 percent. Clearly he’s got his pulse more on the heartbeat of America than I do. But as a liberal journalist who’s married to a liberal-arts professor, I suppose that’s to be expected.

One thing Mr. Murray didn’t provide with his quiz is any sort of scoring guide. What qualifies as sufficiently in touch with “real” America? 50%? 100%? Do all tea-party candidates have to pass the test? What if a liberal passes? Does she have to switch parties?

Update: There has been a twitter query about how to score this thing. I really don’t know — I scored a plebe-y answer as “1″ — but note that each question has a different “right” answer. So in my rubric, the higher your score, the more plebeian you are.

Posted in General | 3 Comments

“Upgraded”

Posted on 9/7/2010 by dave

WordPress has upgraded. Why is it that every time I “upgrade,” my old theme no longer works? Now I’m using the standard, generic theme. Nothing wrong with that. But I wish there was some way to get the upgrade process to work without breaking everything that came before.

Posted in General | 2 Comments

links for 2010-09-07

Posted on 9/7/2010 by dave
Posted in Technology | 1 Comment

What are a journalist’s responsibilities on Twitter?

Posted on 8/24/2010 by dave

I’ve never really thought of myself as a journalist. Sure, I write a column for an online magazine, and even get paid for it. But as a columnist, my job is a little different from that of a reporter. I have a distinct point of view—I promote research blogging—which is the kind of thing reporters try to avoid. That said, I also have been a critic of those who want to draw sharp lines between “journalists” and “bloggers,” and I’d add “columnists” to that list too, so I probably ought to resign myself to the fact that, for better or worse, I am a journalist.

But sometimes I take off my journalist hat and just chat with people. Sometimes I write completely non-journalistic blog posts about my travels. Sometimes I rant on Twitter (that one lost me a couple dozen followers).

And sometimes I express my amazement at an inane court ruling: “Yikes! Judge halts stem cell research http://is.gd/eAPR4″. This last statement, to my surprise, has given rise to a bit of controversy online. You can read about it here. Drugmonkey seems to feel that the statement is misleading because it could be read as meaning that the judge has halted all stem cell research (according to the article I linked, the ruling is unclear and may roll back all federally-funded research involving any human stem cells, or it may have a more limited impact).

While I agree that the statement could be misread (I suggested “Yikes! Judge halts a whole mess of stem cell research” as a revision), I do wonder if it’s reasonable to hold journalists’ tweets to the same standards we hold their edited articles and headlines to. A blog post or news article can be corrected, but a tweet quickly takes on a life of its own. It can be retweeted, and even if it’s deleted, it remains on people’s mobile devices and third-party Twitter apps. Maybe this means we should have *higher* standards for tweets.

On the other hand, few people see tweets as the definitive word on something. Unless they come directly from the source (e.g. Lady Gaga tweeting that she’s carousing in Vegas), we don’t take tweets as truth. More typically, tweets point to something else to gain authority — Like a New York Times article about a court decision.

I don’t think I’d enjoy using Twitter as much if all journalists and scientists were as careful in crafting their tweets as they are when they write formal publications. And I don’t think I’m alone. Twitter gets its power from its conversational nature. If everyone on Twitter had to be constantly on guard to avoid statements that might be misunderstood, then few people would think it was worth the bother.

Posted in Technology | 6 Comments

A first stab at a science blog aggregator

Posted on 8/20/2010 by dave

(Cross-posted from ResearchBlogging.org)

Soon after my two posts on science blog aggregation, Bora Zivkovic and Anton Zuiker contacted me asking for my input on a site they were thinking about creating.

The three of us had similar ideas: Now that many leading bloggers from ScienceBlogs have moved elsewhere, there’s no central place readers can go to find out what’s going on in science blogging. Anton and Bora realized that a basic hub for science blogging wouldn’t be difficult to create from existing tools: WordPress software and a few key plugins. So, after a couple weeks’ discussion, we put together a first-stab at a science blog aggregator in a few days. You can find it here:

Scienceblogging.org

The site is really just an aggregator of aggregators. Everything you see on the front page is a feed from some other bundle of blogs. In a couple cases, we made our own bundles using Friendfeed. The site is flexible enough to add additional bundles as bloggers and publishers form new blogging communities. It’s not ideal — I think the ultimate science blog aggregator will allow users to view blog posts by topic, and perhaps have some way of identifying the best posts. But it’s flexible enough that with some input from the community, we might be able to shape it into something really special. Check it out, and let us know what you think.

Posted in Technology | 6 Comments

Vacationblogging 2010: Now, with fewer photographs!

Posted on 8/15/2010 by dave

I’m sitting on an airplane taking advantage of in-flight wifi as I mull over the past six weeks away from home. We started with a week in Kalaloch, enjoying the beautiful Washington coast. Then we spent a month in Olympia, Washington, for a “workation” that turned out to be quite a bit more work than vacation. Greta and I have this idea that as our kids become more independent, rather than going on a typical vacation for week or two, we could spend the entire summer in an entirely new place, keeping up with work about half the time, and enjoying a different part of world the other half.

Because of scheduling issues with work and kids, this year’s workation was somewhat of a trial — not quite the whole summer, with only four weeks in full workation mode. And as it turned out, for different reasons, we both ended up doing more work for that month than we had planned. We still think the concept has some merit: We got to explore Olympia, a beautiful, walkable small city with an amazing Farmer’s market and some great restaurants. But we were working so hard, we really didn’t get to enjoy the place like we might have. We had planned, for example, to spend some of our leisure time reading the Iliad, discussing it each week over coffee. We only made it about halfway through.

We both agreed that if we do the workation thing again, we have to be in career situations that allow us to really take an honest break and not work 40+ hours a week.

Then last week we went back into full vacation mode, heading to San Francisco with Jim and Nora for our “last” vacation as a family. Jim will be heading to college in the fall at Berklee College of Music, and Nora is entering her senior year of high school, so although we’re not ruling out future travels with our kids, this is really the end of an era.

We had a great time in San Francisco, but since it was foggy most of the time and I didn’t want to carry a backpack around the city, I didn’t take many pictures. Coit Tower is a surprisingly engaging place to visit, not only for its stunning views of the city and its wonderful murals, but also for the walk down the stairs on Telegraph Hill through an amazing hillside neighborhood. The homes are connected by rickety wooden steps, with no automobile access at all. The “street” is a lovely wooded garden, inhabited by a flock of parrots, which I’m assuming are escaped housepets.

San Francisco is a great city to walk around, and I made a map of our exceptional (if hilly) walk that day. Nob Hill, Chinatown, and Telegraph hill are all highly recommended. Even the tourist-saturated Fisherman’s Wharf was a nice end to a long day hiking about town.

I also loved visiting the Golden Gate Park, which I was surprised to find is several miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s sort of a not-so-Central Park for San Francisco, with art museums, a science museum, and a fantastic Japanese garden and separate, enormous botanical garden. The only real disappointment was the Shakespeare Garden, which tourist guides said included every plant mentioned in Shakespeare’s works, along with plaques of the relevant quotations. It did include both of those things, but separately, so unless you were a botanist, there was no way of telling which plant went with which quotation.

Finally, for the last two days, we fulfilled our “kids’” request to visit Disneyland. It was fun reliving the memories of past Disney visits, and there were some excellent light shows at night, but I have to say, the next time I visit a Disney theme park, it’s probably going to involve grandchildren.

I did take a few photos, but I don’t have them at my fingertips here at 30,000 feet. If any of them turn out to be worthwhile, I’ll add them sometime over the next week.

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Some thoughts about science blog aggregation

Posted on 7/27/2010 by dave

After the shake-up at ScienceBlogs over the past couple of weeks, there’s been a lot of buzz in the social media networks over what to do next.

Sure, there are some other burgeoning science blog networks, but none seem to be prepared to assume the ScienceBlogs mantle (which ScienceBlogs itself hasn’t actually yet ceded). There are also some lists of all the bloggers who’ve left ScienceBlogs, but they don’t capture all the other science bloggers who were never a part of ScienceBlogs, or the many excellent bloggers who chose to stay.

To me, the obvious next step would be to find some way of collecting all these disparate voices in one place. Sure, ResearchBlogging does some of that, but it only captures posts specifically about peer-reviewed research, which is probably less than ten percent of what scientists and science communicators actually blog about.

One idea that shows promise, at least as a stopgap, is to use an existing social network to do the task. There’s already discussion over at Friendfeed about doing just that. The advantages of such a system is that Friendfeed already has tools in place to help people “like” and “dislike” posts, discuss them, and so on.

To see how this might work, I created a FriendFeed group for Anthropology, based on blogs registered with ResearchBlogging.org. You can check it out here. But this isn’t all Anthropology blogs, or even all Anthro blogs registered with ResearchBlogging — I cheated a bit because my default report of regisered blogs doesn’t include RSS addresses. I only used blogs from Blogger and WordPress since their RSS URLs are easily reproduced based on the blog URL. And there are other problems. Many blogs cover multiple topics. How would you decide how which list(s) to put them on? What if someone started posting pseudoscience, or moved their blog? Who would be in charge of monitoring the list to make sure it remains useful? And how many people would actually register with FriendFeed just to follow blogs? The beauty of a site like ScienceBlogs is it stands on its own — you go there to read blogs about science. Someone who’s only interested in science (and not social networking) is less likely to hang around a site like FriendFeed just to read science blogs. I’m unconvinced that a set of feeds could have the same influence as a dedicated science blog aggregator.

A more elegant system would be built into ResearchBlogging itself or a similar site. Then bloggers could register once, and change their information themselves as necessary. ResearchBlogging already has editors who ensure that the registered blogs report high-quality science.

But of course, such a system takes time and money to build. It would need to somehow differentiate itself from ResearchBlogging because it would be filling a different purpose. I think it’s a good idea, but I’m not sure I want to be the person in charge of it (and that’s assuming I can convince the management at Seed to pursue it). Maybe, even though it could be a slower process, a better approach might be to build the FriendFeed groups first, then see if the interest level is high enough to support a more sophisticated dedicated website. Even those will take a little work, which I can’t do on my own. It takes a lot time to copy and paste hundreds of RSS URLs into FriendFeed, so ideally we should divide the labor (I think I can provide a list of blogs and RSS addresses sorted by topic). Who’s interested in helping out?

Posted in Technology | 8 Comments

Leaving ScienceBlogs: What next?

Posted on 7/20/2010 by dave

In case you’re not up on the goings-on in the science blogosphere, let me bring you up to date. About two weeks ago, ScienceBlogs made a disastrous decision to sell Pepsi a “nutrition” blog with equal standing to all its independent, hand-picked science blogs. The hypocrisy in handing a nutrition podium to a company that is seriously implicated in the global obesity crisis was astonishing, and even worse, the dozens of bloggers who’ve worked for years to build ScienceBlogs’ reputation were taken completely by surprise.

Perhaps at least ScienceBlogs’ resident nutrition bloggers should have been consulted. Instead, they and many others have now left the collective. The icing on the cake occurred today when science networker extraordinaire Bora Zivkovic wrote a manifesto proclaiming his own departure.

Coincidentally, Greta and I left ScienceBlogs about six months ago, for different reasons. I simply wanted to move on to other topics, and because of our special system for managing the blog, Greta couldn’t keep up the blog on her own.

I decided to try an experimental blog, with a brand-new theme, The Daily Monthly. While many CogDaily readers made the shift to the new site, it never approached the popularity of Cognitive Daily, and readership stagnated. I decided to shutter that blog after just four months. While ultimately I don’t think it was a great concept for a blog, I do think that if The Daily Monthly had been a part of ScienceBlogs, it probably would have attracted much more attention — perhaps not achieving the popularity of Cognitive Daily, but still, attracting a decent share of readers.

Why? Because ScienceBlogs, for all its troubles, remains an incredibly powerful idea. As Bora points out in his post, there are now some other good blogging networks, but it’s unclear whether they will ever hold the same sway that ScienceBlogs does (did?). The site I manage, ResearchBlogging.org, can serve as a partial solution as well, since it loosely brings a large group of blogs together. But ResearchBlogging in its current form can’t highlight the issues of the day like ScienceBlogs does — not all science news, and little “breaking” science news, is peer-reviewed, which is a requirement for appearing on our site.

Social networking, too, can take up some of the slack, but it still doesn’t deliver the power of a dedicated, hand-picked blog network — otherwise The Daily Monthly should have been easily able to take off from the base of readership we had built at Cognitive Daily.

If they want to continue to have the kind of influence they used to have at ScienceBlogs, I think the bloggers who have left the site need to do something more than just start or restart their old, independent blogs. They need to form a new network — perhaps built around different principles, but a network nonetheless. They might choose to have a central site based on RSS feeds or some other aggregation system, but there needs to be a systematic way to connect their conversations. Otherwise, most readers will tune out. It’s simply too much work for most readers to follow a diverse set of disconnected blogs. Social networking sites like Twitter can bring important individual posts to light, but are less effective at sharing the extended conversations that go on between blogs.

The bloggers who remain at ScienceBlogs might be tempted to leave because their friends are leaving, but I’d suggest a cautionary approach. Even with all its problems and distractions, ScienceBlogs remains the most influential science blogging network in the world. If it is managed well — and I believe it is still in good hands with Evan Lerner as editor — it can move beyond this. Frankly, for most bloggers on ScienceBlogs, they have more opportunity to share their views with the largest possible audience by staying than they do by leaving. While Seed does make mistakes, it is capable of learning from them — it shut down the Pepsi blog before it had even gotten started.

Although ScienceBlogs may struggle to regain its credibility, for an individual blogger, leaving the network and retaining your influence is a much more daunting task.

Posted in General, Technology | 3 Comments

Vacationblogging 2010: Kalaloch Summer

Posted on 7/18/2010 by dave

You know you’ve arrived in Washington when you look out your airplane window and see this:

However, even though we arrived two weeks ago, that was just about the only view I had of Rainier until last Thursday. That’s because we spent our first week in Washington in a cabin near Kalaloch (pronounced “CLAY-lock”), at the mouth of the Queets River, on the Washington coast. There was a whole other mountain range (and usually plenty of fog) between us and Rainier. But I was surprised to actually get a decent photo of Rainier from the plane because they usually don’t turn out very good. We flew in just before sunset, so the light was quite dramatic. You can even see what remains of Mount Saint Helens in the background (it’s now barely half the height of Rainier, though, and considerably farther away, from this angle).

During our beach week, we were told that there was a heat wave going on, but we barely noticed. The warmest it got was about 75 degrees. That was warm enough for some tourists to test out the 38-degree ocean water, but not us. We’re used to 75-degree ocean and 95-degree weather at the beach in North Carolina.

Apparently once you got inland, the temperatures were hotter. It even surpassed 90 degrees in Seattle. But most days at Kalaloch were in the 50s and 60s.

This summer, with an 18-year-old son getting ready for college and a 17-year-old daughter off in France, Greta and I are trying something different — vacationing by ourselves. We got a cozy little cabin on the bluff above the water, and were on our own for a week, except for two days when my dad, stepmother, and stepsister stopped by for a visit.

The cabin we rented was on a steep bluff. You had to hike down a rough trail, then clamber over logs to get to the beach:

Once you were on the beach, however, it was isolated and pristine. We could walk a half-mile south to the Queets river, or miles and miles to the north. The farthest we got was the Kalaloch Lodge, which was part of Olympic National Park and served a mean bowl of clam chowder. While there were a few “crowded” spots near campgrounds and lodges, in general, the beach looked like this:

(Click on the picture for a bigger version). So basically it was an experience in isolation. The closest house to ours was a half-mile away, and not visible through the forest.

We took a couple excursions, most notably to the Hoh rain forest, filled with giant mossy trees:

Greta didn’t think I should try to climb up this one, which had fallen across the river:

Another amazing thing about the beach we were staying at was the abundance of eagles. We saw at least one eagle a day. One morning after a run on the beach, an eagle had landed on a piece of driftwood about 30 feet from where our trail met the beach. My dad had gotten back from a walk and was standing about 100 feet away. We approached to within about 20 feet before he flew away — the closest I’ve ever been to an eagle in the wild.

I didn’t get a picture of that one, but here’s one perched a bit farther away:

(Click for a close-up). While it was foggy for much of the time, we were treated to a couple very nice sunsets. It was lovely to sit on top of our bluff and watch the sun descend into the sea. On one occasion, due to principles of optics beyond my ken, the sun appeared to set three separate times. Here’s the best sunset photo I got:

Posted in vacationblogging | 3 Comments

Resolving (or complicating) the iPhone resolution debate

Posted on 6/11/2010 by dave

On Tuesday I posted that the iPhone 4 is nowhere near the capabilities of the human retina. But yesterday over at the Bad Astronomy blog, Phil Plait argued the opposite:

Jobs wasn’t falsely advertising the iPhone’s capabilities at all. … But a lot of people read the headlines and it taints their view; someone reading that article may be more likely to think Jobs, once again, has overblown a product to excite people. He didn’t.

Plait was talking about an article on Wired, which cited display expert Raymond Soneira, who argued that 477 ppi would be necessary to match the human retina at a distance of 12 inches.

Meanwhile, I was arguing for 1060 ppi, at 10 inches! Who’s right?

In a way, we all are. Again, I think the Clarkvision site has the clearest explanation of the research:

Blackwell (1946) derived the eye’s resolution, which he called the critical visual angle as a function of brightness and contrast. In bright light (e.g. typical office light to full sunlight), the critical visual angle is 0.7 arc-minute (see Clark, 1990, for additional analysis of the Blackwell data). The number above, 0.7 arc-minute, corresponds to the resolution of a spot as non-point source. Again you need two pixels to say it is not a point, thus the pixels must be 0.35 arc-minute (or smaller) at the limit of visual acuity.

In other words, at 0.7 arc-minutes, you can tell that a light source is not a point. So an 0.7-arc-minute pixel would be too big. Therefore, Clark argues, for a pixel to match the resolution of the retina, it must be half this size — 0.35 arc-minutes. Meanwhile, Soneira says a pixel need only be .6 arc-minutes. We know a .6 arc-minute pixel is indistinguishable from a point — you don’t have to go as small as 0.35 arc-minutes, so that makes some sense.

But Clark cites other research with converging evidence that we see pairs of objects at a resolution of 0.7 arc-minutes. That means single objects (pixels) need to be half that size. Plait counters with a Wikipedia link claiming 1.2 arc-minutes. Who’s right?

It’s hard to say, but in any case, these studies are all measuring something very different from what you use your computer display to do. They’re testing your ability to see lines, dots, or other very simplified figures. Why not study actual pictures, or actual text?

In fact, Clark did exactly that. He had viewers sort pictures printed at 150, 300, and 600 ppi. They could successfully sort the pictures from lowest- to highest-resolution. Thus, it’s quite clear that the 326 ppi of the iPhone 4 doesn’t display the highest resolution detectable by the human eye in realistic conditions.

Calling the new iPhone display the “Retina Display,” therefore, is an exaggeration at best.

Posted in Psychology, Technology | 3 Comments

Does the “Retina Display” live up to its name?

Posted on 6/8/2010 by dave

I’m a pretty big Apple fan. I have Apple computers, an iPhone, an iPod, and an iPad. But yesterday as I watched the coverage of Steve Jobs’ WWDC Keynote, I bristled at the name of the new iPhone 4 display. Jobs called it the Retina Display and seemed to be making the claim that there was no need to make a higher-resolution display because the human eye wouldn’t be able to detect any more pixels.

The new display does sport some impressive specs: 960 X 640 pixels, for a resolution of 326 pixels per inch (ppi). That’s four times the resolution of the previous-generation iPhone, and perhaps 10 times the pixel density of a typical desktop computer display. But the real question is, how does it compare to the human retina?

The answer is a bit more complicated than you might think. The retina isn’t like a computer display—it doesn’t have consistent resolution throughout. Most of the eye, in fact, has quite low resolution. You only see details in a tiny portion of the visual field, defined by a special portion of the retina called the fovea. But since the eye can move, a display needs to match not the average resolution the eye can detect, but its highest resolution—the resolution of the fovea, corresponding to just 1/2 of a visual degree.

The area seen by your fovea is roughly equivalent to the size of your thumbnail at arm’s length. But since your eye is constantly moving, you’re able to construct the illusion of seeing fovea-level detail in your entire visual field. And, in fact, you can see it, because as soon as you focus on a region of a display, your fovea orients to it.

What’s the resolution of the fovea? The best calculation I’ve seen is here. This is the critical bit:

How many pixels are needed to match the resolution of the human eye? Each pixel must appear no larger than 0.3 arc-minute. Consider a 20 x 13.3-inch print viewed at 20 inches. The print subtends an angle of 53 x 35.3 degrees, thus requiring 53*60/.3 = 10600 x 35*60/.3 = 7000 pixels, for a total of ~74 megapixels to show detail at the limits of human visual acuity.

The 10600 pixels over 20 inches corresponds to 530 pixels per inch.

Aha! Not 326 ppi, but 530, at a distance of 20 inches! But who holds their iphone 20 inches away? I’d submit that many of us hold it only 10 inches away. This means that to achieve the highest resolution discernible by the human eye, the iPhone would need a resolution of 1060 ppi, or roughly 3200 X 2100 pixels! My 23-inch iMac has a resolution of just 1920 X 1200. So if you could shrink my computer display to the size of an iPhone display, you’d still need to triple its resolution to match the perceptual power of the human retina.

But there’s another problem with the “Retina Display” claim. The iPhone, along with all computer displays, can’t display nearly the range of colors that the human eye can perceive. Take a look at this diagram (source: Wikipedia):

This is a 2-D slice of the 3-D range of colors the retina can detect. The triangle represents the range of a typical computer display. See how much lies outside that display? That’s stuff you can see that your computer can’t show you.

So while the new iPhone display is indeed impressive, and leaps and bounds better than the old version, it’s still nowhere near the capabilities of the human retina.

Posted in Psychology, Technology | 13 Comments

Is the iPad really that bad?

Posted on 5/28/2010 by dave

Maybe I just had low expectations for my iPad. I didn’t think it was going to revolutionize computing, or replace my laptop, phone, and TV set. I didn’t think it was going to have much impact at all on how I lived my day-to-day life, except for one thing: I hoped it would encourage me to read more.

Even though I was an English major, I’ve never been a great reader. I’m not the sort of person who devours multiple novels each week. Heck, I’m lucky if I read three or four per year. Sure, I spend plenty of time surfing the web, and I need to read a lot of blog posts and journal articles for my job, but that means that I’ve been spending a lot less time just sitting down and reading books over the past few years.

When I bought the iPad, I was thinking its primary use would be as a way to encourage me to do more of that. So, how have I done? In the nearly two months since I bought it, I’ve read about 1.5 books. That’s better than I had been doing, but not by much. I had also hoped to read more magazines and other periodicals on the iPad. How’d I do there? So far, only one magazine that I read frequently has come out for the iPad: WIRED. So I decided to pony up $5 and see what that was like.

My first impression: This is just like the physical magazine. It’s got all the things I like about WIRED, and most of what I don’t like. I didn’t hate it as much as some of the other early reviews, but I agree that it’s not the sort of transformative application that will suddenly return the magazine industry to profitability.

For $5 (well, $4.99), you get one copy of the magazine. This isn’t a subscription, it’s just a one-shot deal. I think that’s about what it costs on the newsstand, but if I have my iPad with me, I’m not typically going to be trolling newsstands for something to read. The price, clearly, has to come down.

Once you figure out the interface, it works well enough. The articles are clear and easy to read. If you rotate your iPad from horizontal to vertical, each page transforms to a completely new layout. The typography is much better than on a typical app or web page, with proper hyphenation and justification. Text is a little blurry, but very readable. Reading a feature-length article like Steve Silberman’s excellent story on biobanks is a much more satisfying experience than reading the same story online.

As the interfacelab review points out, the app is a bit of a hack job, an enormous 500-meg file, with each page of text presented as a jpeg image, not true dynamic text. This of course means you can’t search, select, or copy/paste. Other than the file size, that doesn’t really bother me. It’s a magazine, not a reference work. Still, particularly because of the file size, I’m hoping this is fixed in future versions.

Similarly, books on the iPad are a pleasure to read, but hardly an improvement over the real thing. Other than the convenience factor, I’d be just as happy with paper.

Where the iPad excels, however, is with PDFs. The experience of reading a PDF on the iPad beats a computer hands-down. I bought the iAnnotate App, which isn’t perfect, but does an admirable job with PDF annotation. I can highlight, type notes, bookmark, and search, both for my own notes and through the PDF text itself. Scrolling around the app is actually easier than fumbling through paper copies, and miles better than reading on-screen. Note-taking is intuitive and easy. Yes, importing and organizing PDFs could be easier (My ideal app would combine Mendeley and iAnnotate), and there needs to be an export function for your annotated PDFs, but overall, it’s fantastic. I haven’t printed a PDF since I bought this app. I even used it to go over my taxes—over a hundred pages (you don’t want my finances)—before filing them.

The other use I had planned for the iPad was Twitter. I love Twitter, but it’s a big time sink when it runs in the background on my main computer and distracts me from the task at hand. Now that I have confined Twitter to its own shelf, I get a lot more work done. That’s great, but I wish the Twitter experience on the iPad was a little smoother. Since the iPad doesn’t support multitasking, it can be hard to do simple things like copy and paste a link into a tweet. If you start a tweet in Twitterific, then need to add an @reference to it, your work might be lost while you search for the name.

Another major annoyance is cursor control. It works just like the iPhone: you touch your finger to the spot you want to place the cursor, and a little magnifying glass appears above your finger so you can line it up exactly right. The problem is, if you end up one character to the left of where you want to be, you have to do it all over again. Sometimes it takes me two or three attempts to get the cursor where I want it. If only the iPad’s virtual keyboard had cursor arrows, this problem would be solved. Cursor arrows are a MUST for the next-generation of the iPad OS. In case some people don’t like losing the screen real estate, it could be a user-configurable option. But once they have better cursor controls, I can’t imagine many people would want to go back.

A slightly thornier problem is cut and paste functionality. To select text to copy, you tap the screen and wait for a contextual menu to appear, then click on “select”, then select the text you want. But there’s a slight lag before the menu appears, and I often end up tapping several times. The same thing happens when I click somewhere to paste the text, but the problem is compounded because if the cursor is in the wrong spot, I have to start over. So even editing tiny 140-character tweets can be a bit of an ordeal. This needs to be streamlined in the future.

Surfing on an iPad is for the most part okay, but I can’t help feeling that everything loads just a little slower on the iPad. This may be due to ads, which I often have blocked on my computer, but even pages that I don’t block seem to load quicker on the computer. For me, this isn’t a big deal. Generally if I want to surf, I’m going to use a computer.

I do wish iPad developers would offer more “light” and “trial” versions of apps. With many apps costing $10 or more, it’s frustrating buying apps that end up not meeting my needs. I think if trial versions were available, developers would end up selling more paid versions.

But overall, the iPad does everything I hoped it would when I bought it. It’s a much more convenient way to keep all my reading material in one place (compared to physical books and magazines), and it’s a superior reading device for the documents I read most: PDFs. Now I just need to cross my fingers and hope magazine prices come down—and that the magazines I actually would like to read become available. Atlantic, Scientific American, National Geographic, and (ahem) SEED, let’s get going on this!

See also: iPad: First impressions

Posted in Technology | 3 Comments