“quote collages”

Google is undoubtedly having an impact on the evolution of the English language. I’d be surprised if the folks at the Oxford English Dictionary don’t have a secret threshold number of hits needed for new words to become official. “Blog” was recently added (3.7 million Google hits). I’m sure “Findability” is next (3,690 Google hits). Google is changing authority in ways we don’t fully understand.

As information becomes increasingly disembodied and pervasive, we run the risk of losing our sense of wonder at the richness of human communication.

And in the context of e-commerce, I’m fascinated and encouraged by the ability of customer reviews on sites like Amazon and Epinions to empower and inform consumers, increasing pressure on companies to build better products.

Interestingly, these reviews are driven by participation economies that reward the Top Reviewers^AM with attention and trust. Note that the #1 Top Reviewer at Amazon (4550 book reviews) is Harriet Klausner^AM, formerly an acquisitions librarian in Pennsylvania. This just goes to show that librarians were destined to rule the Web.

A big intellectual move in my work and my teaching came together in Envisioning Information, which I think is the most original of the books, the most theoretical. It essentially opened the entire world of visual evidence up so evidence was no longer statistical graphics—it was the whole world of seeing and thinking, bringing together how seeing and therefore thinking could be intensified.

Excellence in visual design is largely realized through the creation of graphics that correspond with the mental tasks they are meant to support.

The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly—to develop strategies of seeing and showing. This seeing is not about “Aren’t these pictures of molecules beautiful?” Rather, the point is to recognize the tightness between seeing and thinking on an intellectual level not just a metaphorical level. That tightness is expressed in the very physiology of the eye: the retina is made from brain cells; the brain begins at the back of the eye. Seeing turns into thinking right there.

The purpose of analytical displays of evidence is to assist thinking. Consequently, in constructing displays of evidence, the first question is, “What are the thinking tasks that these displays are supposed to serve?”

My wife and I took our extended honeymoon in Japan in 1985 and lived there for a little while. The intellectual idea was to go to the farthest away, highest resolution, technically advanced culture— that is, to increase the variance of our seeing.

My view on self-publishing was to go all out, to make the best and most elegant and wonderful book possible, without compromise. Otherwise, why do it?

Robert Merton, the great sociologist,.. taught me a great deal about scholarship. It began when he looked over a manuscript of what ultimately became my book on political economy, Political Control of the Economy. Bob did a lot of editorial commenting and was a wonderful editor and kind critic, one-on-one. Near a completely undistinguished paragraph I had written, Bob wrote “an echo of Veblen,” a distinguished social theorist. What this said to me was not that the paragraph was good, but rather “Why don’t you try playing in the big leagues?”—that is, to do work that might last for a long time.

I like to give every student every day lots of pieces of paper, many handouts. For years I had a Xerox machine in my living room, running away the night before my lecture.

Along with thirty-two years of being a professor at Princeton and Yale, I also greatly enjoy teaching out on the road. I go about one week a month on tour and give a one-day course. This has been going on now for twelve years; 120,000 people have attended the one-day course. This does get the word out.

When most people begin their advice about communication, their first grand principle is “know your audience.” In practice, that statement too often leads toward underestimating the quality and interests of the audience. The know-your-audience philosophy can be a big step down the road to pandering to the audience. I think sometimes if we anticipate too much the characteristics of the reader, we are going to censor ourselves or change our work—and I think all too often wrongly.

Having grown up a bit, I try to get out of first-person singular when giving advice. It can be dangerous to listen to authors about how to write or establish communication; they can only say what has worked for them or how they work. With an N of 1, a sample size of 1, the variance is infinite.

In my work, there is an effort to raise standards-—by admiring excellence, saying that there are things that are good and there are things that are bad, so get out and tell the world about it.

A curious consequence [of my work] is that I have become a minor celebrity. I have a hint of what a real celebrity must go through every day—a flood of interesting, encouraging, importuning, angry, weird, scary communications. I am not sure quite how to respond to all this. Now and then I ungratefully mutter Bob Dylan’s remark: “Just because you like my stuff doesn’t mean I owe you anything.”

For those going into the corporate world, the key choice point is where you go to work. You had better, for example, see what clients the company has. Once you start working for the company it is probably too late. The socialization is strong, and the masking of responsibility is strong, so that it is probably a little bit late and a bit hard to ask people to change jobs because we don’t think the companies they work for are doing the right thing.

It is straightforward for me to be ethical, responsible, and kind-hearted because I have the resources to support that. I have a lot of privilege and plenty of resources that enable me to try to do good. I admire President Kennedy’s thought: “To whom much is given, much is expected.”

Probably the only generalization about the Internet is that there is none, which is to say that users can have nearly any experience they desire. Internet users are not prisoners—they are responsible for their experience since they can generate nearly any experience they wish (other than an in-depth historical analysis).

One problem from the user’s point of view is that any given manual may be perfectly fine, but most of us are confronted with a multiplicity of interfaces. Just start to add up all the interfaces: that stove, this dishwasher, that microwave, those cameras, that cell phone, this and that computer, and so on. All the differences among those interfaces make a difference. While all the interfaces can be perfectly good when viewed individually, in aggregate it is hard to have much retained learning. For example, when I get a new camera, I take it with me on a trip and dutifully work through the manual. I am the master of that camera in two to three hours and take a few good pictures. I put the camera down and come back a month later, and there is little that has been retained. Somehow we need to have interfaces and explanatory explanations of interfaces that lead to retention and avoid interference from the multiplicity of interfaces.

The top level of most product interfaces is quite good these days. The lower-down levels, where the featuritis fungus thrives, are too often jungles.

..for fifteen years or more, I was… making up of a continuous “story” about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my “story” ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ”He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf,” etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The “story” must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality..

Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen—in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all—and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.
3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
4. Political purpose—using the word “political” in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

By nature—taking your “nature” to be the state you have attained when you are first adult—I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, “I am going to produce a work of art.” I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

..The problem of language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it..

Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

Muhammad Waqar, Avi Wolfman-Arent, Yiran Xia, Victoria Sandoval, Jacqueline Orellana-Flores, Elizabeth Packer, Ramona Singh, Anuja Shah, Mayra Ramos, Emily-Kate Hannapel, Natasha Perez, Samir Paul, Ekta Taneja, Linden Vongsathorn, Michael Tsai, Nardos Teklebrahan, Matiwos Wondwosen…

I went to [my daughter Natalie’s] high school graduation Monday and a United Nations meeting broke out..

..If there is one reason to still be optimistic about America it is represented by the stunning diversity of the Montgomery Blair class of 2006. America is still the world’s greatest human magnet. We are not the only country that embraces diversity, but there is something about our free society and free market that still attracts people like no other. Our greatest asset is our ability to still cream off not only the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world but the low-skilled-high-aspiring ones as well, and that is the main reason that I am not yet ready to cede the 21st century to China. Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese.

This influx of brainy and brawny immigrants is our oil well—one that never runs dry. It is an endless source of renewable human energy and creativity. Congress ought to stop debating gay marriage and finally give us a framework to maintain a free flow of legal immigration..

It is hard to watch a graduation like this and not think about our enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan—the Taliban, Islamo-totalitarians like bin Laden and Zarqawi, and the retrograde regimes that support them. Their whole mind-set is about how to purify their world from “the other,” from diversity, from “infidels.” With enough brutality, they may win in Iraq. I still hope not.

But they will never win the future—because as soon as their oil wells run dry, their societies will be as barren, bland and unproductive as their deserts.

Our oil wells, by contrast, will still be pumping. They’re right there, hiding in plain sight, in the Blair commencement book:

Yueyang Li, Kenia Lopez-Reyes, Lucy Fromyer, Raya Steinberg, Zahra Gordon, Sreva Ghosh, Juan-Jesus Louis, Yendil Furcal, Yenusa Eke, Sofonias Frezghi, Yohanes Dejen, Edra Comegys-Brisbane, Yoel Castillio-Ortiz, Elijah Zuares, Placido Zelaya, Mimi Zou. And Jessica Smith.

In academia, in industry, and in the commercial world, there is a widespread belief that computing science as such has been all but completed and that, consequently, computing has matured from a theoretical topic for the scientists to a practical issue for the engineers, the managers, and the entrepreneurs..

I would therefore like to posit that computing’s central challenge, ”How not to make a mess of it,” has not been met. On the contrary, most of our systems are much more complicated than can be considered healthy, and are too messy and chaotic to be used in comfort and confidence. The average customer of the computing industry has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed.

For us scientists it is very tempting to blame the lack of education of the average engineer, the shortsightedness of the managers, and the malice of the entrepreneurs for this sorry state of affairs, but that won’t do. You see, while we all know that unmastered complexity is at the root of the misery, we do not know what degree of simplicity can be obtained, nor to what extent the intrinsic complexity of the whole design has to show up in the interfaces. We simply do not know yet the limits of disentanglement. We do not know yet whether intrinsic intricacy can be distinguished from accidental intricacy.

To put it bluntly, we simply do not know yet what we should be talking about.. The moral is that whether computing science is finished will primarily depend on our courage and our imagination.

And yet against all that dislocation and overload and multiplicity there is the interface. Most of the time we talk about the graphic interface as though it were a logical culmination of the digital revolution, its crowning glory, but the truth is, the interface serves largely as a corrective to the forces unleashed by the information age. Whenever I find myself being swayed by the fragmentation jeremiads, I like to sit down at my computer and go through the usual routines—check my e-mail, rearrange my desktop, log on to the Web—and concentrate all the while on what is really happening as I do these things. Because what is really happening, not on the screen but down in the innards of the machine itself, or out on the great expanses of the Internet, what is happening in that world is literally unimaginable. What is happening is that billions of tiny pulses of electricity are hurtling through silicon conduits, like an entire planet’s worth of digital automobiles making their way across the grid of a single microchip. And all those pulses self-organize into larger shapes and patterns, into assembly codes, machine languages, instruction sets. Some of these ethereal languages then transform themselves into flashes of light, or audio waveforms, and depart en masse from my machine into the sprawling backbone of the Net, where they disperse into countless separate units, and then thread their way through thousands of other microchips, before reuniting at their destination.

But what happens on the screen is this: a window pops open, a dialog box appears, a bright, cheerful voice tells me that I have mail.

No news here, of course, but something profound nonetheless. The great surge of information that has swept across our society in recent years looks genuinely innocuous next to the meticulous anarchy of real bit-space, that netherworld that lurks in our microchips and our fiber-optic lines. But we see almost nothing of that universe because we have built such sturdy mediators to keep it separate from us, translators that make sense of what would otherwise be a blizzard of senselessness. It is undeniable that the world has never seen so many zeros and ones, so many bits and bytes of information—but by the same token, it has never been so easy to ignore them altogether, to deal only with their enormously condensed representatives on the screen. Which is why we should think of the interface, finally, as a synthetic form, in both senses of the word. It is a forgery of sorts, a fake landscape that passes for the real thing, and—perhaps most important—it is a form that works in the interest of synthesis, bringing disparate elements together into a cohesive whole.

Seen in this light, all that ranting about the fragmented consciousness of the digital age sounds a great deal less convincing. After all, critics have bemoaned—or championed—the accelerated pace of the present, its dislocations and divided selves, ever since the industrial age powered up in the early nineteenth century. Think of Baudelaire losing himself in the shimmering, half-lit streets of Paris, becoming a “kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness.” Think of Joyce’s characters bouncing back and forth between biblical references and advertising jingles. Think of Marinetti’s poetry, renouncing “the ‘I’ in all literature” for the speed of the race car and the destructiveness of the machine gun. Conceptual turbulence—the sense of the world accelerating around you, pulling you in a thousand directions at once—is a deeply Modern tradition, with roots that go back hundreds of years. What differentiates our own historical moment is that a symbolic form has arisen designed precisely to counteract that tendency, to battle fragmentation and overload with synthesis and sense-making. The interface is a way of seeing the whole. Or, at the very least, a way of seeing its shadow illuminated by the bright phosphor of the screen.

When I think about the gap between raw information and its numinous life on the screen—something I try to avoid doing, because it is a dark and difficult thought, more than a little like contemplating the age of the universe—the whole sensation has a strangely religious feel to it, that sense of the mind trying to reach around a vibrant (and convenient) metaphor to the wider truth that lies beyond. Cathedrals, remember, were “infinity imagined,” the heavens brought down to earthly scale. The medieval mind couldn’t take in the full infinity of godliness, but it could subjugate itself before the majestic spires of Chartres or Saint-Sulpice. The interface offers a comparable sidelong view onto the infosphere, half unveiling and half disappearing act. It makes information sensible to you by keeping most of it from view—for the simple reason that “most of it” is far too multitudinous to imagine in a single thought.

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.

If I bow before the authority of the specialists and avow my readiness to follow, to a certain extent and as long as may seem to me necessary, their indications and even their directions, it is because their authority is imposed on me by no one, neither by men nor by God. Otherwise I would repel them with horror, and bid the devil take their counsels, their directions, and their services, certain that they would make me pay, by the loss of my liberty and self-respect, for such scraps of truth, wrapped in a multitude of lies, as they might give me.

I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed on me by my own reason. I am conscious of my own inability to grasp, in all its detail, and positive development, any very large portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole. Thence results, for science as well as for industry, the necessity of the division and association of labour. I receive and I give—such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.

This same reason forbids me, then, to recognise a fixed, constant and universal authority, because there is no universal man, no man capable of grasping in all that wealth of detail, without which the application of science to life is impossible, all the sciences, all the branches of social life. And if such universality could ever be realised in a single man, and if he wished to take advantage thereof to impose his authority upon us, it would be necessary to drive this man out of society, because his authority would inevitably reduce all the others to slavery and imbecility. I do not think that society ought to maltreat men of genius as it has done hitherto: but neither do I think it should indulge them too far, still less accord them any privileges or exclusive rights whatsoever; and that for three reasons: first, because it would often mistake a charlatan for a man of genius; second, because, through such a system of privileges, it might transform into a charlatan even a real man of genius, demoralise him, and degrade him; and, finally, because it would establish a master over itself.

“As long as you have some history and some quantifiable data from past experiences,” Mr. Snijders claims, a simple formula will soon outperform a professional’s decision-making skills.

Something researchers have known for decades: that mathematical models generally make more accurate predictions than humans do. Studies have shown that models can better predict, for example, the success or failure of a business start-up, the likelihood of recidivism and parole violation, and future performance in graduate school.

They also trump humans at making various medical diagnoses, picking the winning dogs at the racetrack and competing in online auctions. Computer-based decision-making has also grown increasingly popular in credit scoring, the insurance industry and some corners of Wall Street.

The algorithms behind so-called quant funds, he said, act with ” much greater depth of data than the human mind can. They can encapsulate experience that managers may not have.”

Other cherished decision aids, like meeting in person and poring over dossiers, are of equally dubious value when it comes to making more accurate choices, some studies have found, with face-to-face interviews actually degrading the quality of an eventual decision.

“People’s overconfidence in their ability to read someone in a half-an-hour interview is quite astounding,” said Michael A. Bishop, an associate professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University who studies the social implications of these models.

Max H. Bazerman, a professor at Harvard Business School, wonders how many managerial decisions can actually be modeled. “The vast majority of decisions that we make in professional life don’t have this quality,” he said.

He agrees that models can make better decisions about credit card applications and college admissions, he said, “but there are many decisions that are much more unique, where that database doesn’t exist. I’m as skeptical about human intuition as these folks, but it’s not only a computer model that we replace it with. Sometimes it’s thinking more clearly.”

Many in the field of computer-assisted decision-making still refer to the debacle of Long Term Capital Management, a highflying hedge fund that counted several Nobel laureates among its founders. Its algorithms initially mastered the obscure worlds of arbitrage and derivatives with remarkable skill, until the devaluation of the Russian ruble in 1998 sent the fund into a tailspin.

Mark E. Nissen, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who has been studying computer-vs.-human procurement, sees a fundamental shift under way, with humans becoming increasingly peripheral in making routine decisions, concentrating instead on designing ever-better models.

By making smart use of computer models’ advantages, ” you’ll become like the crafty A student who doesn’t work that hard but gets mostly right answers, rather than the really hard-working student who gets lots of wrong answers and as a result gets C’s.”

A French company, Poseidon Technologies, sells underwater vision systems for swimming pools that function as lifeguard assistants, issuing alerts when people are drowning, and the system has saved lives in Europe.

”The idea that girls could be ahead is so shocking that they think it must be a crisis for boys,” Ms. [Sara] Mead [author of a recent educational report] said.

Professors interviewed on several campuses say that in their experience men seem to cluster in a disproportionate share at both ends of the spectrum—students who are the most brilliantly creative, and students who cannot keep up.

What is beyond dispute is that the college landscape is changing. Women now make up 58 percent of those enrolled in two- and four-year colleges and are, over all, the majority in graduate schools and professional schools too.

Since the process of human development crosses all borders, it makes sense that Europe, too, now has more women than men heading to college. The disengagement of young men, though, takes different forms in different cultures. Japan, over the last decade, has seen the emergence of “hikikomori” — young men withdrawing to their rooms, eschewing social life for months or years on end.

At Dickinson [a U.S. College], some professors and administrators have begun to notice a similar withdrawal among men who arrive on campus with deficient social skills. Each year, there are several who mostly stay in their rooms, talk to no one, play video games into the wee hours and miss classes until they withdraw or flunk out.