alsomike

I don't think that flies, because the point of her post was to identify a sexual assailant. She said she was the victim of an assault by another person, an issue of injustice which is a social and cultural question, and you said "Yes, but everyone is responsible for their own personal safety." This isn't about personal safety, it's about social justice, and yes, those are two very different things. So why are you trying to change the subject? The reasonable conclusion is that you're trying to weaken her claim to justice, which implies that you think we focus too much on justice, using social resources to protect women and they need to look out for themselves more.

The problem with the disciplinary board follows the same logic: just as vague, open-ended rules create more compliant behavior, you should expect that a student-run disciplinary board will also penalize deviant behavior much more enthusiastic precisely because the administration is hands-off.

The important question is whether the (explicit or implicit) rules are good rules, not whether you're permitted to self-police them. Self-policing may be more efficient, but the cost is less transparency and more conservative behavior.

I'm not sure how that is a benefit and I think a lot of people are mistaking the absence of rules with the absence of authority. The easiest way to get compliant people is to threaten them with punishment but not tell them what the rules are. They had 5 other students explain the nuances, rather than someone with authority because that way, they could still punish you for what those students told you was OK.

It's essentially an open door for exertion of arbitrary power, but dressed up so the people welcome it as freedom. Imagine if traffic laws were "use your own judgment" - no speeding signs, but the cops could still pull you over on a whim and ticket you for speeding. And you couldn't go to court to contest it because there are no rules, and we'd all be driving a whole lot slower. But at least we're being treated like responsible adults, right?

There are many drivers towards HTML5/CSS3, but at least one of them is meeting the needs of designers, so obviously this is in the process of being corrected. Like most people, I've been pretty anti-IE, but someone pointed out to me that HTML5 actually standardizes a lot of features that Microsoft implemented years ago - shadows, gradients, glows, embeddable fonts, opacity, etc. Vector graphics? Microsoft: VML in IE5, 1999. Mozilla: SVG in Firefox 1.5, 2005.

Maybe if open source and standards-based browser developers had taken the lead in supporting designers' needs, they could have overtaken IE years ago.

"Design for design sake" is just another way of saying you don't share the designer goals of engaging an audience and enhancing creative cognition. There's nothing wrong with that, people have different needs, so "good" means something different to a designer than it does to you.

But the most interesting finding was when they tested creative cognition - on that test, the "good typography" participants scored much better than the "bad typography" participants. This might explain why we designers insist on good typography (and other design principles). Creativity is a big part of our job, and we want to avoid things that might impair the performance of our creative cognition. But for people in other, "left-brained" professions, enhancing creativity is less important and engaging people is less important, so it makes sense that they would see design rules as irrelevant extra work of little value.

Designers rush to judgment when they see "bad" design because it almost literally hurts their brain. But, maybe the person who designed it or the audience for it doesn't have that kind of brain - and that's OK.

Dialog works because my perception of my interaction with software is that I'm in a dialog with it. When the interface mirrors that idea back to me, there's a fit or congruence and it feels comfortable, in the same way that an ergonomic handle is something like the inverse of the shape of your hand while holding it - I say "my profile" so the interface should say the linguistic inverse: "your profile". IMO, it has nothing to do with humanness or friendliness or emotion -- which is nice if it's contextually appropriate, but it can be irritating -- and more to do with cognitive ergonomics.

The idea of making computers more friendly, like a human, to make them easier to use is kind of a dumb idea when you think about it, like saying screwdriver handles should be shaped like human hands because we find it comfortable to hold someone's hand. Anyway, human-to-human interaction is often very awkward and definitely not intuitive, why should it be the ideal for human-computer interaction?

To the average user, the world looks quite different: [user] <---> [interface+system]. Here, the interface isn't part of "me", it's outside, part of the system, so it should speak as the system, not as "me". This is the user-centered perspective, because it reflects how users see the world.

I think this also speaks to why programmers generally tend to be bad at user experience - it's almost an ontological problem. What is software, really? Is it just system, with interface added in later, almost as an afterthought? Or is it interface+system?

Let's say there's been a rash of home invasions in a town, a criminal gang ripping people off, holding them at gun point, that sort of thing. Would you say that society shouldn't increase police protection because this is ultimately about the victims making good choices? What if the victims complain that the criminals need to brought to justice? Maybe the victims should be dusting for fingerprints, collecting evidence and investigating leads themselves, trying to recover their property themselves. If they can't, this just shows that they lack good morals and strong character traits like hard work and determination.

This is wrong because it doesn't matter whether you're a hard worker, you have the unconditional right to police protection and justice. We don't say that some groups of people are excluded from those rights because they haven't earned them - those are part of human dignity and you get them for free.

The argument that society ought to address poverty is argument about justice, that the suffering endured by the poor is a violation of their basic human dignity. When one of us is deprived of justice, all of us are deprived of justice, and the question of whether they can make choices to change their situation or whether they are morally worthy is irrelevant to this argument. The counter-argument is either that human dignity doesn't exist, or that the horrors and suffering endured by the majority of humanity so that a few can enjoy luxury doesn't constitute a deprivation of human dignity and justice.

You're right, it's brilliant.

The thing that gets me is when he says "If they have a great business, we’re the best amplifier out there." Every small business owner thinks they've got a great business! I'm sure their number one sales tactic is to exploit people's vanity, which may be perfectly legal, but it's a still pretty messed up thing to do.

And then he says "But we used to be all about helping people raise money for charity, we're good guys!" Yeah, but now you're pocketing other people's money, I guess things change.

What "natural disinclination" do you think women have, exactly? They don't like math? Women received 47% of math undergrad degrees in 2002 and that number has been stable for 20 years. They don't like computers? The physical sciences use computers pretty heavily, and women received 42% of undergraduates degrees in those fields in 2002, compared to 28% in 1983. They don't like the geeky sci-fi image? 42% of astronomy degrees went to women in 2002, compared to 25% in 1983.

Engineering degrees are still male dominated, women only got 20% of those, but that's still 7 points higher than the 1983 number. The percentage of computer science degrees that went to women decreased from 36% in 1983 to 27% in 2002, to 18% in 2008.

At least we can agree that there's something unique about computer science that it goes against the trend.

One easy thing you can do is to write down people's feedback and then read it back to them, letting them know that you are writing their name down next to it. You look accommodating and they feel like their opinion counts. And also, they feel accountable, which makes them less sure of themselves. But only mention who contributed an idea on a new revision if you intend to praise it. If you generated a revision to demonstrate a bad idea, be vague about who came up with them. Say something like "Last time we came up with some ideas to explore..." This makes it easy for them to back out without losing face.

Side note: I notice that a lot of programmers bitching about clueless managers and clients interfering with them doing their job, but it's suddenly different when designers do the same thing, that's when designers are told to be "team-players". Seems like a bit of a double standard.

Geographic directions transcend my own personal viewpoint, but they also transcend everyone else's viewpoint as well. Arguably, this would make people less sensitive to the issue of selfishness vs unselfishness, which is only a moral consideration when you assume individualism.

Now, I know what you're going to say: "Yes, but we only are allowed to have smart phones because the authorities have found ways of neutralizing their subversive potential! The apps that are truly threatening will be rejected!" I admit this is true - powerful corporate lobbyists have sabotaged my own app where you earn points and badges for turning off lights and composting your trash because of how devastating this would be in their attempts to keep people mindlessly consuming.

I guess what I'm saying is, keep hope alive. Yes, Apple's authoritarian iron fist thwarts our attempts at changing the world, but remember that Gandhi faced similar struggles against the violent British colonial regime, and Martin Luther King faced death-threats, even finally being assassinated. Yes, we mourn all our fallen apps that have been "assassinated" or "lynched" by Apple's arbitrary app store policies, but we must not lose hope, we must continue the struggle and endure these heavy losses. History is on our side!

This is unlike Apple's FaceTime ads, which also play on the same emotions, but that ad succeeds because it's set inside the human world. Facebook tried something similar with Places (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfX_ZQag1BM), trying to connect the technology with very strong emotions, nostalgia, etc. They did show a lot of real life scenes, but I think it also failed. They're selling the idea that Places helps you have serendipitous meetings with your "facebook friends", i.e. casual acquaintances you generally don't share those kinds of strong emotions with. It's completely incongruous for Facebook to try to brand itself around what are fairly private emotions that you usually reserve for only your most intimate relationships, especially after basically forcing everyone into public mode and declaring privacy dead.

The real problem is incentives. Developers who are willing to make the necessary commitments and sacrifices, take on the risks and the opportunity costs of building a startup are in a strong enough negotiating position to demand ownership. But this advantage is almost certainly weakening. For example, cloud computing makes it much cheaper to scale, which means performance is less of an issue, so cheaper, less experienced developers with less training become more viable. Even if outsourcing is undesirable for other reasons, it still puts local developers in a weaker position. At some point it will be possible to offshore development of a prototype, get some traction and then rebuild everything once you get funding. I know some startups have been acquired after the acquiring company outsourced a cheap ripoff of almost the same product to see if was a market for it with their customers, and then bought the startup. Why couldn't this also work for coming up with a new idea?