The Stripy Strudel's Journal

In an imaginary, ideal and pitch abstract world live people who don't give a damn about being trapped in our thought experiment: they're people, too, and try to get their human fun from life. Just like us, they meet, make friends, mix and give each other simple pleasures. And just like in our world, they have social obstacles, having grown up in somewhat different cultures and then gotten mixed together. That's why what's natural for some is unthinkable for others.

For example, some people love massage of the head so much that they're willing to spend hours scratching, stroking and massaging each other's heads — if they find someone like them. But here's the catch: for some others touching the scalp is a taboo that can't even be mentioned. Because nobody knows whether it's disgusting or delightful for someone, you can't really offer this to a person: what if they get offended? So two head massage lovers don't dare to offer it to each other because each one of them is afraid that it's unacceptable for the other. Same thing with nose-rubbing, round dances, riding horses together, pat-a-cake and numerous other ways in which our speculative poor things bring enjoyment to each other.

Here is the problem the society is facing: invent a way for fans of various pleasure to recognize each other. It seems trivial: why not introduce conventional signs? For example, a red T-shirt could mean a round dance devotee. But it's not that easy: a round dance lover wouldn't like those for whom round dances are a taboo to know about their devotion. Hey, there are places where they won't let you in if you wear that! Therefore, a signaling system has to be more selective.

Let us call the whole range of ways to please each other acceptable for a person their easiness, as in “he's an easy (uncomplicated) person”, “she's easy to be with”. An easiness is a mathematical set. Let us designate the easiness of a person X as E_X. Then the requirement to a signaling system should be stated as follows: for every person Y, conventional signs worn by Y should suffice for X to derive E_X ∩ E_Y. Consequently, for each of his devotions X will only find out whether it's shared by Y, but he won't find out about those of Y's passions that X himself dislikes. He'll find out what he can what he shouldn't try with Y, but won't know anything shocking or destructive to their friendship.

A solution to this problem can be a variety of signs with limited knowledge of them. For every questionable pastime A enthusiasts establish a club, society or some other kind of community for A-doers. To become a member, one needs to do A with any current member. For lovers of A it's not a problem but rather a pleasure, but those for whom A is unacceptable won't even think about joining the community. Of course, the lists of community members are kept in secret. Because the world is ideal, everyone knows about every such community, and can and will join all the relevant ones. In a closed meeting, members of the A-doers society decide on a sign by which fans of A will recognize each other. It can be anything: an item of clothing, an accessory, a feature of speech or gait, a code word or gesture. Different communities pick essentially different signs, so that it's impossible to tell by the look of how many communities a person is a member. This way, everybody only knows the signs of belonging to those communities one is oneself a member of, and when X and Y meet, they instantly see what their common easiness, the intersection of E_X and E_Y, is, and within that intersection they feel at ease with each other.

The problem and the solution have been found in brainstorming together with Wheezle, for which I'm thankful to her. This way, we have determined by experiment that joint brainstorming is included in our common easiness. And if you, my dear readers, also love head massage — welcome to the club!

По-русски: Общество любителей фантазировать с умным видом

The development of information technologies sometimes looks like the eternal fight between Good and Reason. Whatever great technical solutions people invent, others always come up with creative ways to abuse them. I tried to compile a list of ten things surrounding today's regular computer user that are often misused, often to the harm of the user. The criterion was that the misuse should be so widespread that the very usefulness of the particular technology is questioned, and software authors develop technical means to restrict or disable its use. As it's a hit parade, I'll start from the end.

10. <meta name="keywords">. This HTML element was intended to list the keywords for the web page to help search engines find pages relevant to given keywords. Of course, some webmasters were so eager to advertise their sites, “helped” so much that a search for a popular keyword would bring you anything but what you were looking for. Since 1998, search engines started ignoring <meta name="keywords">. The last search engine still honoring the keywords finally gave up on them in 2002.

9. Quoting in e-mail. Quoting fragments of an e-mail when replying to it helps the reader match particular statements in the original message with replies to them. Because an e-mail application doesn't know which parts of the message the user is going to reply, it has no other choice but to begin with quoting the entire message and let the user remove unwanted parts. Those users who don't adhere to selective quoting as means of providing context, as well as those who don't know how to use it, leave the entire quotation intact. As a result, correspondence between two such users is an ever-growing chain containing all the messages they've previously sent each other. Some modern e-mail applications implement automatic hiding of quotations.

8. Windows desktop. The desktop was conceived as a place where the user can temporarily store documents and other files being worked on, shortcuts to often-used applications and other frequently used items. And that's what happens, but every other application somehow thinks it will (or should) be used often, and therefore it deserves a shortcut on the user's desktop. This kind of rubbish gets mixed with the really useful items, turning the desktop into a mess. One version of Windows introduced a new feature: Desktop cleanup wizard that tries to guess what on the desktop the user needs and what is actually rubbish.

7. Notification area of Windows taskbar. This area, often incorrectly referred to as system tray, is a good place for running programs to display their realtime status because it's always visible. Today's typical Windows user has about ten icons there and doesn't know what most of them are for. Those small applets do anything (their author wants): preload “their” application for quick launch, notify about updates, show ads — except for actually showing any kind of realtime status. In Windows XP, Microsoft implemented a solution as brilliant as treating appendicitis with painkillers: they hide the icons the user doesn't want to see instead of providing an easy way to identify and remove the offending rubbishware.

6. Automatic startup on Windows logon. Some programs, such as a keyboard layout switcher, really make sense to start automatically, but the possibility for a program to put itself into the automatic startup list is really appreciated by authors of adware, spyware and other evil programs. To make it worse, there are several such lists, and a typical user doesn't even know about most of them. Plenty of programs exist for cleaning those up. Surprising is the inaction of Microsoft who, despite their increased attention to security in Windows Vista, still allow programs to get comfortable in a startup list without the user knowing.

5. Word processing software. These applications were invented to make preparation of documents with prevailing text and no special requirements for typography easier than it is with desktop publishing programs. For many modern users, “word processor” has become synonymous with “text editor”, and the complex, heavy formats of word processors are now widely used to store, and, even worse, transfer any text at all. An extreme case is an empty e-mail message with a Microsoft Word file attached. Many mailing list servers automatically delete such messages or strip these attachments to avoid annoying the subscribers and wasting bandwidth. Here one can also mention using spreadsheets to keep and transfer simple lists without any calculations.

4. HTML e-mail. Emphasizing important parts of a message, marking up headers and creating hyperlinks are really useful features. I'd love to have them if only they didn't come bundled with the usability disaster of HTML in e-mail. Authors of e-mail software who implement HTML message composition seem to think that the point of HTML is that the user can specify the color, font and background for his e-mail. Instead of logical markup describing the structure of a message we got means of decoration so much loved by teenagers and advertisers but so much annoying for everyone else. To make it worse, images loaded by HTML messages from remove servers are often used by spammers to track who actually opens their e-mails. Though the idea was that the plaintext alternative would only be used by old e-mail clients that don't support HTML, all those clients which do still have an option to use the plaintext version instead of HTML.

3. Browser detection. All web browsers introduce themselves to servers, so that those can detect what browser the user has and serve an appropriately “optimized” version. I don't know where webmasters got that idea, but many of them decided that, since they “support” a particular set of browsers, everybody else should simply be denied access: apparently, no web page at all is better than a web page that possibly doesn't work. There is a number of ways to detect the browser, some of which are based on particular distinctive features to check for. All modern browsers can spoof themselves for more popular ones to avoid being denied service. Even the current market leader isn't an exception: during the first episode of the browser wars, they had to make Internet Explorer identify as “Mozilla 4.0 (compatible; MSIE …)”, and that's what it still does after ten years.

2. Pop-up web pages. Opening a web page in a pop-up browser window can be useful when viewing enlarged images in a photo gallery, online help on using a web service or a shopping cart. Yet the most popular use of pop-up windows is to display in-your-face advertisement. Most modern browsers either come with a built-in pop-up blocker or have an add-on for that purpose. These pop-up blockers have to be smart enough to guess which pop-ups are legitimate and which are advertising rubbish.

1. E-mail. E-mail, one of the most important today's communication means, is plagued by the most severe technology abuse problem. The volume of spam is estimated to be 85–90% of all e-mail transferred in the world. The total losses from spam, including lost productivity, wasted technical resources and measures for dealing with spam is an order of hundreds of billions of dollars per year, while the costs for spammers are laughable. Technical means for dealing with spam are diverse, but none of them is able to solve the problem completely. Spam makes the practice of publishing your e-mail address as a means of communication questionable. In fear of robots harvesting e-mail addresses from public web pages, many users avoid publishing their addresses on open message boards or mangle them, for example by replacing @ with “at”.

По-русски: Забивание шурупов гаечными ключами

What can you do when a vaguely familiar melody has taken over your head and threatens to not leave you alone until you recall where you heard it? You can try your friends and colleagues — it works sometimes. Doesn't help me, though: few of my current colleagues have heard, for example, the “Yeralash” TV show theme which I happened to remember today. But wouldn't it be cool if, say, Google indexed all the music published on the web and implemented searching among it! The user sings a fragment of a tune into the microphone, and the search engine finds melodies containing similar parts.

Theoretically, it's quite possible, though I doubt it would be commercially justified today. However, human is an ingenious creature, though this ingenuity doesn't always work for the mankind. There isn't a single technological achievement which man wouldn't find a way to abuse! Developers of the e-mail protocols didn't foresee spam, developers of HTTP didn't think of phishing (fraud using fake pages looking like banking websites). Some time ago, using meta keywords to find relevant web pages looked like a reasonable idea. With our present experience in the modern web, it's not that hard to imagine how the new type of search would be abused.

The simplest and mildest abuse would be recording and publishing advertisement songs to popular melodies. Such ads can easily be targeted, for example, Britney Spears' music could be used to target teenagers. A more aggressive approach: a commercial medley matching several different queries. An extreme case would be search spam, nonsensical sound files without a general musical structure, containing sequences of notes similar to those found in hundreds of popular songs; the only purpose of search spam is to redirect the user to the advertised website, often a fraudulent one, regardless of what they were searching for.

Of course, it's possible to devise technical measures against abuse, new ways to abuse against those technical measures, and so on. Given the modern pace of IT development, this scenario looks likely and usual. Typical sci-fi literature often misses out this important aspect of future technologies. It's hard to imagine holographic TV without annoying commercials, a “global data bank” (Internet, that is) without “search engine optimization” (it's a modern politically correct term for purposeful distortion of search results in favor of your web resources), and a future e-mail without spam. But I'm also sure that future will bring us conceptually new methods of abuse, impossible with the current technologies. We'll see.

По-русски: <meta name="keywords" content="технологии, будущее, злоупотребление">

From all the features of my PDA, I only use two; all the others have turned out to be useless or unusable. Firstly, I read books with Haali Reader; secondly, I use the to-do list, but only to keep the shopping list for the supermarket.

The look of this to-do list is trivial: there is a list with a square to the left of each line; the square can contain a check mark. This simple application also has a menu where I should point out two items:

• Active tasks
• Completed tasks

Obviously, tasks are subdivided into active and complete. Initially, I can see both kinds in the list. If I pick “Active tasks” in the menu, I'll only see the active tasks, and when I open the menu next time, there will be a check mark to the left of the “Active tasks” item. So I can only see active tasks (I've enabled this mode a year ago and have already forgotten what I did to get there), and now I want to see all the tasks. Question: what should I pick in the menu?

Here is how I think: “Right now I can only see active tasks, and the ‘Active tasks’ menu item is checked. I cannot see any completed tasks, and the ‘Completed tasks’ item is unchecked. It seems like the categories of tasks currently shown have check marks in the menu. In addition to the active tasks that I already see, I also want to see the completed tasks, so I need the ‘Completed tasks’ menu item to have a check mark. Usually, when I want a check mark to appear for a menu item, I have to click the item.” Of course, I make a decision like this rather intuitively, but it is actually backed by reasoning like this.

After considering this for a second, I pick “Completed tasks” in the menu, and what I get is… the list of only the completed tasks! After that, the “Completed tasks” menu item has a check mark, but the “Active tasks” item hasn't. At a second attempt, I realize that, in order to see all the tasks, I have to remove the check mark from the menu item that has it, which returns the system to the “normal” state (as opposed to the “special” modes where only active or only completed tasks are shown).

Of course, I'm long used to such behavior of this application, but I've never understood it and have rather memorized the “irregularity”, just like I had to remember that the marks for cold and hot water in my bathroom are switched. Every time I use the tap, I routinely recall, “The wrong way!” and tilt it to the side marked with red to get cold water. Similarly, every time I use the menu in the to-do list application, I recall that it works “the wrong way”.

Earlier, when I encountered such interface solutions working “the wrong way”, I thought them to be bugs or design mistakes. However, mistakes of this kind are quite common and are often similar to each other, fitting in a pattern. Moreover, such solutions are often found in applications and devices that non-technical users usually describe as simple, intuitive, easy and convenient to use. It seems like there are two approaches to interface between a human and a machine, and maybe even two systems of thinking. I might not have chosen the best names for them, and someone might have already described and studied them, but nevertheless I'll try to provide brief descriptions.

Object-oriented approach

This approach is often found in technical experts, especially programmers. The approach is centered around the notion of an object (such as a document or the system as whole). An object can be in one of a multitude of states, and it transitions from one state to another under influence of various factors, including user actions. In order to control the object, it's important to know its current state, that's why this approach great attention is paid to informativeness of the interface, that is, to its ability to inform the user about the current states of objects. The problem the user is facing is perceived as the difference between the current and the desired states of the system, and is solved by applying the inputs necessary to get the system into the desired state. To solve a problem successfully, one has to understand the structure of the system, its possible states and the transitions between them, that's why the object-oriented approach favors documentation that describes concepts, principles and the overall system organization.

Procedure-oriented approach

This approach is prevalent in people who aren't technical experts. The approach is centered around the notion of a task. In order for a problem to be solved, it has to match one of the tasks that the application or device is designed for (ideally), or at least to be possible to break up into a sequence of such tasks. The problem is solved by applying the inputs that get the system to produce the desired result. That's why the procedure-oriented approach favors documentation that provides step-by-step instructions for solving typical problems. Because the critical part is knowing what input is necessary to perform a task, attention is paid to discoverability of these inputs (toolbars, context hints).

It's hard for me to write about the procedure-oriented approach because it's not how I think, and everything that's made that way feels unnatural to me. The conclusions I'm making are based not on my personal experience from using this approach but rather on the analysis of the systems following it.

I'm surprised not by the very existence of two different approaches, but rather by the gap between them that is so wide that people following one of them can't even project the thoughts of those following the other approach onto themselves. The existence of these two approaches answers a lot of questions:

• Why cannot programmers design a good interface for non-programmers?
• Why do televisions and videotape recorders have such “stupid” menus that an experienced programmer often cannot configure them without the manual?
• Why are the “easy to use” image processing applications (that often come along on a CD with a scanner or a digital camera) unusable?
• Why don't you have to press “Enter” on a doorbell after entering a one-, two-, or three-digit apartment number?
• Why do home appliances so often have those (annoying to many programmers) automatic transitions from one state to another after a delay?
• Why cannot many people master programming?

On the other hand, new questions arise:

• Is the bias towards one of the two approaches inborn or is it rather acquired with upbringing?
• Can a person following one of the approaches learn to use the other one?
• Does schooling affect the choice of approach?
• Does the object-oriented approach determine the choice in favor of a technical occupation, or is it the other way round?

The original entry in Russian features a poll: Object-oriented vs. procedure-oriented approach. It is possible to vote in the poll after logging in to LiveJournal; registration of LiveJournal accounts is free.

Which of the approaches better describes your way of thinking?

• Object-oriented approach.
• Procedure-oriented approach.
• A third approach not described here (please comment).
• The subdivision into the two approaches is fundamentally flawed (please comment).

Please don't vote if you haven't read all of the above. Also don't vote and accept my apologies if you regard asking the question inappropriate.

UPDATE: I have to agree with kalinka_malinka. This entry is an example of how to run knowingly non-representative surveys.

UPDATE: Another interesting aspect of the problem (in Russian).

По-русски: Все программисты с Марса, все пользователи с Венеры

Note: This has been initially posted as a comment in a discussion about a recent epidemic of a social virus about a little girl needing blood for transfusion. The fake message has been started by a LiveJournal user, and contained a plea to forward it to as many people as possible.

During the recent epidemic, I've got the message saying that someone needs B group blood dozens of times, and the shocking thing about it was that some of the people I got it from were:

1. Smart people, and I've got no doubt about it. I can warrant that some of the people whom I got the message from are smart, I've been studying together with them and I know them rather well. They are capable of complex mental activity both at work and in private life (so that it's not “common idiocy” when a professional outside of his workplace is helpless and naïve like a child).
2. People we haven't talked with for quite a while. If those people decided to send the message to me, it means they were sending it to everyone in the contact list, and maybe even outside the contact list.

The most scaring is that the first and the second groups have non-empty intersection.

A little analysis.

None of the forwarders tried to change the text or at least add something to it like “Do you think it's true? What if it is?” to express their degree of trust for this information. Does it mean everyone trusted it for 100%? Of course not. Maybe the hoax got them convinced for 60%, and they decided to forward it. But forwarding or not forwarding is discrete, it's either 0 or 100%. This way, 60% is rounded up to 100%, so we end up with stable reproduction of the worm. If every forwarder expressed their degree of trust, after three or four hops the information would “fade out” and turn into a tale that nobody is going to believe. It's this “rounding” that ensures the reproduction of the worm: the forwarded message looks exactly the same as the original. No gossip transferred the traditional way, through mouth and ears, achieves such steady reproduction as an electronic rumor gets nowadays when text can be copied and forwarded without distortion (experiments show that oral rumors, even when the forwarders are actively trying to reproduce the information exactly, get distorted to full loss of content after ten hops, and after three or four they loose half of the meaningful content).

Why does spam about this subject get reproduced the most steadily? One could build a mathematical model of gossip reproduction with the following parameters:

1. Persuasion threshold — the degree of belief necessary for the reader to take the information seriously.
2. Eloquence coefficient — the factor (usually less than one, but may as well be greater) expressing how the persuasiveness of the message changes when it's forwarded once. For electronic messages forwarded by verbatim copying, the factor equals to one.
3. Distribution factor — the number of recipients that a single participant decides to forward the information to when 100% convinced.
4. Connectedness characteristic — a property of the acquaintance graph (the average number of common contacts that two people in contact have).

Because the connectedness characteristic is a property of the medium and doesn't depend on the message content, this leaves us with the remaining three values. All of them affect the process of message distribution. When the persuasion threshold is high, the eloquence factor is low, or the distribution factor is low, the process fades out after some predictable number of links. This is what happens to most of the lucky mails: you usually get them from a contact or two, but no real epidemic begins. However, when the aggregate attenuation factor (the ratio of the number of active forwarders on the current iteration to that number on the previous iteration) that depends on the aforementioned parameters is greater or equal to one, the process doesn't fade out but instead continues until all closely-linked part of the acquaintance graph is informed. In practice, that means informing close to all potential forwarders in the Russian part of the Internet.

The persuasion threshold, the eloquence factor and the distribution factor depend on the message content. What made the aggregate attenuation factor exceed one in this case? The persuasion threshold, as it seems, is lowered for messages of this type because people prefer to be safe than sorry: “I'm only 25% convinced that it's true, but if it is, I could save someone's life by forwarding this”. However, the potential forwarders in LiveJournal are gullible enough already, one just has to remember this: “They're going to make ICQ a paid service. To not let it happen, please forward this to all your friends”. So I don't think it was the persuasion threshold that played the crucial role. The eloquence factor of one is also typical for electronic communication (though in some cases the forwarders decide to retell the message in their own words, which usually makes the eloquence factor less than one). This leaves us with the distribution factor. An indirect confirmation to this is that I received the message from some people I rarely talk to. It's for this specific kind of information that the distributors feel it especially important to maximize the number of recipients by all means because they think that someone's life depends on it. (The latter might not be exactly true. For the most, as it seems to me, it's more important to ease their own conscience than to save the little girl's life, and to ease the conscience, one has to perform the ritual of forwarding the message to everyone possible, so that one can say: “I did for the unfortunate wretch everything I could”.)

По-русски: Факторы воспроизводства социальных вирусов

Is there anyone who never played strategy computer games? Even those who aren't fans of the genre know that all strategy games model development. From primitive communism to capitalism, from cabins to skyscrapers, from a village to a megapolis, from a savage tribe to a superstate. This is what all the strategy games I've heard of are based upon. As you advance through them, the infrastructure becomes more complicated, more technologies become available, weapons advance. As a result, all modern strategy games are essentially reimplementations of several immortal prototypes, just with new graphics and sound effects. Among these prototypes are Dune, Civilization, King's Bounty and some others. It's time for something new. So, as usual, exercising my rights as inveterate dilettante and pencil-pusher, I hasten to publish my idea for a strategy game.

In contrast to traditional strategy games, the goal of the new game will be retrogression instead of progression. As we know, progress is not only good for you but also bad for you, and some of its bitter fruits our generation already has to enjoy. Let's make as pessimistic a peek into the future as we can, and we'll have the starting conditions for the new game. The player is entrusted with a country suffering from various negative effects of technical, economical and social advancement. Not a big or small one, just your typical fictitious country with a western-type mentality. The ecology is rubbish, the gene pool keeps degenerating, the national health fades away before your eyes, the society suffers from poverty and unemployment, the birth rate is plummeting down. Without player's intervention, the whole population is doomed to extinction in a century or two, which would be several hours of playing time. The only way to fix the situation is to gradually abandon the achievements of progress: hazardous industry, pernicious technology, unhealthy lifestyle.

Every next mission in the game starts off with a worse situation than before. The first mission has it just slightly harder than what we currently have in Russia. The further, the worse it gets, and closer to the end of the game people live under transparent domes because the air outside is poisoned by hazardous production. They've forgotten how to walk because they get used to individual vehicles since infancy. Nobody can see a thing without glasses with huge lenses. All kinds of information about a person, from the ID to the preferred flavor of synthetic meat, is stored in the centralized database, and one can't even go to the toilet without access to it. Only few courageous couples dare to have kids because the last healthy baby has been born maybe a century ago. Until the age of 6 or 8, every child usually lives in a hospital where they usually undergo primary education — of course, through a computer. Even prohibition of abortion and contraception wouldn't help increase the birth rate because of the popularity of adult entertainment technologies that substitute for the real sex. Prohibition of these technologies as well, and any other prohibitions or sudden changes can easily lead to a sharp increase in suicide rate because, as one might have guessed, a healthy mind is also a rare occasion. As a result, the population would still go down, so there aren't any quick and easy solutions in the game. Ultimately, at the last level, a human is essentially a brain with life support systems connected to the Internet, and it's up to the game developers whether it's going to be at all possible to complete this last mission.

In the beginning of each mission the player is given a goal consisting of several conditions. Each of the conditions has to be met in order to complete the mission. One of the conditions will always be to achieve a certain rate of yearly population growth (though the growth is always negative at start, that is, the population is diminishing). The other conditions are specific to the mission. For example, they can be to bring the infant mortality rate down to a certain threshold, to abandon the radioactive production, to have a thousand people who can walk on foot, or even (at one of the last missions) to have one baby born naturally, without in vitro fertilization or artificial incubation.

A fairly standard set of strategy game tools is at the player's disposal. One can construct and demolish buildings, adjust economical parameters such as taxes, run incentive campaigns that economically stimulate those meeting certain criteria (for example, parents with two kids), change the legislation within certain limits, encourage or discourage some scientific, social or cultural activities, and (this is one of the most powerful tools) use the highly developed mass media to induce one or another way of thinking and acting and affect the popular preferences.

One point is so important that it's worth reiteration: there can be no quick and easy solutions or winning strategies. For example, you can't simply remove the transparent domes because the air outside is poisoned. If you stop the hazardous production that poisons the air, people will starve without the resources they need. This means that an alternative has to be prepared. All transitions have to be smooth, and any radical action does more bad than good. One of the responsibilities of the quality assurance department when testing the game should be looking for winning strategies. Any very simple algorithm that leads to completion of the mission should be considered a grave defect that has to be fixed, most probably by adjusting the weights of various factors and interdependencies in the game model.

Unfortunately, I'm almost sure that this idea will never be implemented. Hardly any game manufacturer will be impressed by it (most probably, they won't even find out about it). But I'd really like to play such a game myself, even though I'm not a fan of strategy games.

По-русски: Полный назад!