An ode to the most popular song in history to have 22 beats in every phrase. OutKast!

(Sorry, Flash only. Link to audio for iOS).

In the past, I have experimented with a number of OS X apps to keep track of journal (and other) articles. But in the end, I always end up going back to regular old folders and files. I find there is too much overhead in using other apps dedicated to the purpose of keeping track of articles. So, I have a regular old folder called “papers” that I store on Dropbox, and then inside there, I have a hierarchy of categories like “theory” and “HCI”, etc, and sometimes folders for sub-categories inside those.

Part of the greatness of OS X is Spotlight searching, which works pretty well to find papers containing text of interest. That said, the default spotlight search does contain quite a bit of noise. For example, by default it shows you only the top few papers, it contains other things like images and irrelevant file types, and searches your entire hard drive rather than only journal articles. Naturally, for every search I would click “see all” to display the full list of matches, and then I would sort by type and go through every matching PDF file.

After using a Mac for over 5 years and seeing smart folders on the sidebar of the Finder, I just recently thought of making a smart folder for journal papers, and it is much more useful than I would have guessed. Essentially, smart folders are like “saved searches”, but it’s even better, because I did not realize that you can modify the searches on the fly.

First, I will describe what it looks like and how it acts. On the sidebar of Finder, I now have an entry called “PDF Papers”. If you click it, it lists every paper (pdf file) contained in my “papers” folder. That is, it shows every pdf file anywhere inside a folder contained in the “papers” folder. It sort of flattens the hierarchy within the “papers” folder.

But, you can also type in the search bar at the top of the window to filter the papers listed by the text you type (it filters with text inside the files, and not just the filenames). This is great for me because by default it only includes stuff in the “papers” folder (removing stuff that isn’t journal articles, such as drafts of papers I’ve written, which always provide lots of noise in my Spotlight searches), and it doesn’t show other file types, or only show me the “top 3” matches.

To add this, in the Finder, go to your “papers” folder, select “Find” from the “File” menu, set it to search in your “papers” folder as opposed to your whole Mac, set the kind to only include PDFs, set it to search “contents” instead of file names, and then “save” the search. Voila - it’s on your Finder sidebar.

I’m always surprised when my favourite solution has been staring me in the face for such a long time.

Does Toronto Blue Jay Jose Bautista deserve to be the MVP this year? Let’s review his statistics in the American League:

• 10th place on base average
• 3rd place slugging percentage
• 5th place runs scored
• 1st place total bases
• 1st place home runs
• 3rd place RBIs
• 2nd place walks
• 1st place extra base hits
• 2nd place outfield assists (and he played almost 1/3 of games at 3rd base)
• 1st place outfield assists per game
• had 15 more home runs than second place finisher in AL
• had 28.6% more home runs than second place finisher in ML

In addition, in terms of all-time stats:

• biggest increase in home runs from one year to the next in baseball history (had 54 this year and 13 last, giving an increase of 41, which is the biggest difference)
• the seventh player in history to have 50 home runs, 30 doubles and 100 walks in one season
• percent home run difference between him and second in MLB is the biggest difference since 1989, and the fourth most since 1934

That last stat shows what an awesome power hitter he is. The steroid era is passed, and so it’s impossible to win the most homers ever (you can’t beat a whole league that is juiced and he is not beefy like all those guys in the late 90s), but he had way more than anybody comparatively. And 100 walks. And most outfield assists per game.

That’s a no brainer MVP year to me.

Stats from baseball-reference.com and realclearsports.com.

Sting has always been great at using space in his music, which shows in the song “Seven Days”. It has a “Walking on the moon” quality to it, that shows off drummer, Vinnie Colaiuta really well. I like the soft touch on the ride cymbal during the bridge.

For the first time since I was a teenager in the 90’s, this year I followed baseball quite closely. Baseball doesn’t seem to be all that much different now than it was then, as far as I can recall. It has always been heavy on the statistics relative to other sports, and the stats themselves have gotten a bit better. The managers do more “extreme” things than when I was younger. For example, I often see an infield shift so fierce that the third baseman stands where the shortstop usually stands, and the shortstop, second baseman and first baseman all stand on the right side of the infield. Even announcers have gotten in on the game too, presenting more unusual statistics than just “batting average”. For example, if it is interesting, they often show the “spray” of a hitter, indicating the number of times they hit the ball to various areas of the diamond. Or they will break up the strike zone into various “sections”, and show hitters success rates when the pitch arrives within the various sections.

My perspective on the game has changed slightly as a result of experience (and education). I am better able to view the game statistically than when I was younger. This is a subtle change, but rather than viewing events as “successful” (for example, a player I like getting a hit) or not, I think much more globally and with “shades of grey”. As in, these are the stats, and here is what we can globally predict based on that. This is a property we are trying to minimize or maximize, and so let’s examine some reasonable strategies to see how well they achieve the objective.

Thinking of events as either “successful” or “unsuccessful” often fools humans into having silly goals. For example, this is a profile of a basketball player, Shane Battier, who is a defensive star. One strategy that only he uses is that instead of trying to block shots on defence by putting his hand in front of the ball, he always tries to stick his hands in front of the shooter’s eyes. This fascinating strategy requires a step away from a “successful” or “unsuccessful” viewpoint, and a focus more on the global, statistical viewpoint. Indeed, if he tries to stick his hand in front of their eyes, he is blocking the shot 0% of the time. If his goal is to block shots, this approach is “unsuccessful” 100% of the time! With the traditional blocking shots approach, the goal of getting the shooter to not even get the shot off is “successful” some of the time. This is a subtle idea, because if a shot is blocked, then guaranteed, they aren’t going to score on that shot. But that guarantee might really come at hidden cost.

If we remember that the strategy of blocking shots is not really the goal, then we can try other, more “shades of grey” strategies, that may not come with a guarantee. If instead, the goal is to minimize the number of points scored by the opponent, it might actually be better to sacrifice the goal of the opponent not shooting altogether. Essentially, the “blocked shot” strategy can get you trapped in a local maximum.

A very similar example of this same phenomenon is discussed in this article on the second serve in tennis. To briefly summarize, modern tennis players can serve extremely fast, and the faster they serve, the harder it is for the opponent to score. However, the harder they serve, the less accurate they are at getting the serve inbounds. And, on each point, the server gets two attempts at getting the serve inbounds before they lose the point. The general strategy has always been to use the first serve to serve as fast as possible, knowing that if they are unsuccessful at getting it inbounds, there is still a second chance. And, should the first serve fail, the server essentially always serves considerably slower, then raising the probability that they will not double fault. But at the same time, this raises the chances that the opponent will get the point. But the problem is that “getting the serve in” isn’t really the thing we should be trying to maximize. It is merely an interim strategy in the larger goal of trying to maximize your chances of getting the point. It is again very deceptive because if you don’t get the serve in on the second serve, then guaranteed, you will not win the point. But, as described in the article, it seems that they would be better off statistically to serve fast all of the time. Thus, thinking of the serve as being “successful” or “unsuccessful” could be causing a problem. Instead we should realize that the serve being inbounds is just a strategy, and not the main goal, and there might be a better strategy, without a guarantee, that maximizes the chances of getting a point. ¹

Humans do not have fine-grained control over our own motor systems. We can’t predict the precise results of our own motor systems, or of our opponents. There are a ridiculously large number of moving parts, and with such a huge number of parameters to any kind of a complex computational system, we can’t think about all of them in our own heads. The next best thing we can do is to ignore some information, establish some rough patterns and think statistically. We are stuck thinking in shades of grey.

¹ As discussed in the tennis article, the optimal strategy may not be to serve fast all the time, but something more subtle. Indeed, it could be that tennis players do not have the energy to serve fast for a whole match. But still, it seems possible to me that tennis could employ strategies which are crucial in baseball, such as deliberately altering speeds to throw off the prediction mechanisms of the opponent. Perhaps serving fast 30% of the time on the second serve would be better. It seems clear that the current strategy is not the optimal one.

I’ve found my new favourite album for the year. I don’t discover much “modern” music, but I came across Janelle Monáe watching the musical act on the show “So You Think You Can Dance”. The musical acts on that show are usual nausea inducing, but I immediately loved the performance. It reminded me of James Brown, but more melodic. This was a similar performance of the same song “Tightrope” on Letterman. The song builds throughout the whole performance and the second half is worth watching.

I got her album “Archandroid”, and absolutely love it. It’s an album in the 70’s style, where the songs flow between each other, and is a concept album. It’s meant to be listened to in order. I’ve read that her influences are James Brown, Stevie Wonder and Outkast. You can hear them all over. Here’s another album cut called “Cold War” (music starts at 10s).

The song reminds me rhythmically of the song Bombs Over Baghdad, by Outkast (another great group), but again, more melodic. Here’s their video for comparison (embedding only in Flash, here’s a direct link for iOS).

The whole album is gold, and I recommend it. It’s nice to see a modern artist who is doing something innovative. She’s pushing pop music forward.

I’ve had the iPad for almost two weeks and when I got it, I thought I’d try to use it for work in lieu of Macs as much as I could. But more importantly, I thought I’d try to use it instead of paper as well. For the most part, I spend much of the day either on paper or on a Mac, so this is quite the experiment for me.

My goal was to only use the desktop, or paper, for specific tasks only after having first made an effort to do it on the iPad, and only after having determined that it really made sense for that task to not use the iPad. There is indeed a tradeoff of some sort for every task that I encountered, and it takes some thought as to which tradeoffs are worth taking.

iPad as paper

There’s a handful of things I usually do on paper:

• research notes, math and diagrams

• quick notes that need to get recorded quickly, such as from meetings, or general stuff I need to get done

• editing research and papers that have already been typed

• reviewing papers

• reading published papers

For sketching out research notes, I have traditionally used pen and paper. This is highly task dependent, as for really quick ideas, I tend to type directly instead of using pen first. But for longer ideas where I’m really thinking as I’m writing, I use math and diagrams. Typing directly for this type of activity is painful, and I would conjecture is harmful to creativity. On the iPad, I’ve tried using an app called Note Taker HD together with a stylus. This is a video of what the app looks like, as it is not the “obvious” writing mechanism. It’s a really clever implementation (it’s written by the person who made VisiCalc). It creates some tradeoffs in it’s favour over paper, but overall, the experience on paper is still better for me I think. I haven’t tried any other ‘pen’ sketching apps, but I’m skeptical of this class of apps. Paper is simply too good for sketching out ideas, and math especially.

For jotting down quick notes where typing is satisfactory, or when I just want to quickly record something, I’ve been using Simplenote. This is the same app I’ve used for almost two years on the iPhone, and it’s great. It’s been documented well elsewhere, but essentially, it’s a clone of the Notes app, however it syncs with their web server, which in turn syncs with all your devices and various desktop apps, such as Notational Velocity on the Mac. It’s super quick, which is exactly what I want. No extras like images, or rich text. I use it for just about everything, from keeping track of weights at the gym, to organizing things I need to do at work. Plain text is just what the doctor ordered for so many things, and adding more structure does complicate the experience.

For whatever reason, during the last two weeks, I haven’t edited any papers that were already typed up (a rarity), but I strongly suspect the results will be similar to that of reviewing papers. For reviewing papers, I have been using the app iAnnotate. With this app, PDF files can be read, marked up with note annotations, free drawing, lines, highlighting, underlines, and crossed out lines. All annotations show up in Preview.app or Adobe Reader, which is essential if I’m going to send the PDF to someone else. It works quite well for reviewing papers. I make notes on the paper as I encounter them, and then load up the “summary” of the annotations made, and compose the review (this final step, I do on a Mac, while reading the annotations on iAnnotate). I’ve used it extensively already, and I believe that there isn’t much lost relative to paper, and in fact, I believe that there is quite a bit that is gained such as the faster speed of typing over pen. A Bluetooth keyboard is key for annotating, because PDF files are more natural to read in portrait orientation, but the onscreen keyboard is nicer in landscape, and typing on the screen requires holding the iPad differently than reading. Usually, I keep the iPad in my lap in portrait, tap a position on the screen, and then type the note on the bluetooth keyboard beside me.

For reading published papers, in the past, I have always printed up papers if I’m going to spend more than five minutes reading, as I’ve always far preferred reading on paper to a monitor. I don’t find this is the case here. I’m not sure why, but the reading experience seems to be as good as on paper. It’s probably a combination of a number of factors. There are about 100 PDF reading apps out there, and even iAnnotate is pretty good for reading. Although I haven’t tried it, Papers looks interesting as it will sync your entire published library with a Mac. I may end up trying this, but won’t recommend anything interesting yet.

iPad as PC

After the two weeks, I’ve determined that I will definitely use the Mac for any task that benefits from having two ‘windows’ open at the same time, such as adding some information from an email into an calendar event, or typing up something while referring to notes I have on the iPad. These types of tasks are not practical on an iPad, since you can really only have one ‘window’ in focus at the same time.

For regular stuff that I do on my Mac, there is again tradeoffs. In certain situations, I quite like Mail on the iPad. It’s great for filtering messages into mailboxes quickly, composing quick emails, or long ones with a bluetooth keyboard. Where it falls short is if you want to refer to one email while composing another one. For these more ‘heavy’ emails (I had to send a few this week), I prefer to use the desktop. Calendar also works quite well, but I will continue to keep iCal open on the desktop so I can create events while I refer to whatever I’m reading on the iPad. When I’m away from my desktop, this app works quite well.

For email notifications, I’ve been using the app PushMail on both iPad and iPhone. It gives you a custom email address, and you can forward your email to that address¹. Then, when you receive an email, it immediately displays a push notification that looks like a new SMS. It displays the sender, subject and a small amount of the body of the email on both iPad and iPhone. The advantage of this app, is that usually after seeing the summary, I decide to delay reading the full email until later, and save the time of further task switching, quitting my current app, and opening Mail, reading the email, and returning my attention to what I was doing before. I’m always conflicted with these sorts of apps that deliberately distract me, and I don’t employ any other types of deliberate distractions other than for email. But email is unfortunately used for a wide variety of priority levels, and so if you’re going to check your mail anyway, this is the fastest way to know what’s in your inbox with the least distraction possible. To not overwhelm myself with new email sounds everywhere, I turn off all mail sounds (both Mail and PushMail) on the iPad. I only hear a sound through PushMail on my phone when I get a new message. I also use this app to turn off email sounds at night on the phone.

For anything related to files, the iPad tends to deal with them differently than a PC. Apple seems to have (deliberately I’m guessing) made it slightly difficult to move files from a PC onto the iPad and back. The first official method is using iTunes. I’m certainly not going to ever do that. The second is to use a method of copying files from one app to another. Apps can have an ‘open in’ menu, and when you click it, you can open the file in any app that declares that it knows how to deal with that file type. It then makes a copy of the file in the new apps sandbox. As an example, the Dropbox app allows you to see any file in your Dropbox, and then ‘open in’ any app that knows how to read that file. This works relatively well for most situations, and is how I’m opening PDF files in iAnnotate. Unfortunately, the Dropbox app (the current version) does not declare itself to understand any file types. So it is easy to use this app to copy Dropbox files to other apps, but then there is no way of getting the files back into the Dropbox app. Both directions can be done with the app Air Sharing HD however, which is a kind of ‘one stop shop’ for files. You can mount Dropbox, iDisk, or any SSH volume (which let’s you mount an entire Mac’s file structure by turning on file sharing), view the files, perform basic file operations, such as copy, move and delete, and it supports ‘open in’ in both directions so that you can ‘roundtrip’ files starting and ending in Dropbox or on a Mac. It also does some stranger functions like printing (after turning on printer sharing on your Mac). Part of the purpose of this device is to not have to print, but it will probably come in handy at some point.

The other method that Dropbox is useful though is not with the Dropbox app itself, but with other apps that use the Dropbox API. The Dropbox API provides a way for apps to read and write to a user’s Dropbox directly. And those that do are fantastic, because they avoid the whole ‘open in’ thing, which involves opening a bunch of different apps, and copying things around, and having multiple versions of your files. The Dropbox API will allow apps to edit files on your Dropbox and that’s it. The Documents to go and Office^2 apps use the Dropbox API to edit Word and Excel files right on the Dropbox without making new copies. Personally, for those apps where I want to interact with a desktop, I’m giving strongest preference to apps that use this API first, then those that support the ‘open in’ functionality, and will ignore those apps that only use iTunes file sharing (unless I don’t care about sync’ing).

maturity

I believe that the iPad is very well suited for someone like me, and it has effectively replaced paper for anything where I don’t mind not using a pen for making notes. I don’t see myself using a printer much anymore. It has been sufficient for replacing a desktop for situations where I don’t need to refer to two things at the same time. It’s also been enjoyable to use, and I suspect it will become more enjoyable as the platform and apps mature, and more become available.

¹ For those worried about privacy using PushMail, they have a privacy policy indicating that they don’t store the emails, but just build the notification and discard it. And moreover, I built a little procmail recipe to only forward the first x characters of the email, which is exactly what is required to build the notification. You can ask me for it if you’re interested.

The talk was given by Dan Pink, a former speechwriter of Al Gore (with wicked animation by others). He discusses the differences in work based on whether or not there are incentives, and also based on the difficulty of the task. I certainly recommend giving it a listen.

I am a total non-expert on this, and I didn’t read the discussed papers (I’m lazy on this particular topic), but I found the video interesting. I’m surprised that this topic hasn’t been tackled in a scientific fashion before recently, as it seems pretty straightforward.

The talk seems centred on two ideas. The first being that after someone receives a significant reward, in aggregate, afterwards, they will not perform as well later. The second establishing that some of the best work occurs when knowledge workers are doing what they want.

Without reading the papers (again, I must qualify that I know nothing about this, but I suppose nobody expects me to be smart on interestingmonkey.com), it does seem possible that these studies aren’t measuring the overall work accomplished in this system versus other systems. From what I understand, it is measuring the work accomplished after rewards are given, per individual based on the reward level. First, it seems possible that a carrot in the future may indeed help one work harder before they have gotten the carrot. Furthermore, a company’s real goal would likely be to maximize the total work of all their employees in aggregate, rather than just their top employees. There is also the possibility that a company (say) may not be able to recruit knowledge workers that are as good if there were not any incentives in place. I’m playing devil’s advocate (all these points may have been tackled in places), but are there any thoughts on the ideas in the talk, at least from an intuitive standpoint? Might it make more sense to set an appropriate salary based on the position, and then give similar raises to everyone?

I really should just read the papers. I’ll do it if someone pays me.

This is an interesting result showing that in baseball, if you know that you are going to get an extra-base hit off the bat, you are better to start running at an angle, away from the straight line to first, immediately. All baseball players run straight to first, and then curve away only shortly before getting to first. I see no reason why teams can’t test out this experimentally.