Robin's Interesting Thoughts

Horace Dediu makes an important argument that Apple’s stock price has been based simply on the value of its latest products, whereas “the process of product development at Apple is worth nothing.”

In other words, from the market’s perspective:

Innovations are valuable, but there is no such thing as an innovation process. If there was such a thing, then we could measure it and put a number on its value. Until then, innovation is nothing more than a spin of the roulette wheel.

Dediu’s unspoken point, of course, is that the market is missing something huge: Apple has honed and demonstrated its ability to repeatedly design, produce, and sell innovative consumer electronics products. I am absolutely convinced that their success is not due to luck but rather to a finely tuned innovation process. That doesn’t mean they will never release duds, of course, but it means that on the whole they can be counted on to continue to disrupt markets with innovative products. The wider technology community misunderstands this ability so deeply that instead of trying to copy Apple’s innovation process, they insist that it is nothing but good luck and good marketing.

The University of Washington has about 30,000 undergraduates, about 500 of which were enrolled in introductory classes in the statistics department. Assuming that number holds every quarter, 1500/30000 = 1.6% of UW students take an intro statistics class each year.

There are 18 million college students in the United States. If the overall percentage who take statistics is the same as at UW, then about 300,000 college students take intro stats each year in this country.

Bret Victor released a really excellent article about what is missing in the user interfaces of current technology, and what we should consider when crafting visions for the future. Compelling and easy to understand.

I call [iPad] technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade….

We live in a three-dimensional world. Our hands are designed for moving and rotating objects in three dimensions, for picking up objects and placing them over, under, beside, and inside each other….

To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It’s obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.

Read the whole article, which has great pictures as well.

“There is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians, and spectators.”

-Liz Coleman, president of Bennington College [TED talk]

In high school, I made a website on ancient Roman architecture as a class project in world history. That was over ten years ago. A few days ago I got an email:

I recently came across your resource website at http://www.robinstewart.com/personal/learn/romarch/links.htm and I found it to be extremely helpful in some personal academic research I’m doing — I just wanted to say thank you.  As a student and an educator, it is a rare treat to come across such thoughtful and concise online resources like this, especially the older ones. In my humble opinion, this is one of the timeless treasures of the Internet.

I forwarded that along to the teacher of the history class, with the subject line “History project website still useful more than ten years later…” His response:

Hi Robin.  Wow.  That is really kind of awesome.  I wouldn’t have bet money that the site was still on-line. Bravo all over again.

I guess this is why I keep things around on my website.

From the trenches of science, it’s easy to label evolution deniers and global warming skeptics as dumb or at least uninformed. But we should remember that the scientific method is not an intuitive process, and takes a lot of time to learn.

For one thing, the scientific method is based on probabilities, which humans famously misunderstand. We play the lottery because we have a chance of winning, even though that chance is vanishingly small. We tend to think of very large or small probabilities as less extreme than they actually are, so when scientists say there is a 95% chance (or even a 99.9% chance) that, say, smoking causes cancer, it is easy for us to simply hear “they’re not sure.” Intuitive science is based on stories and anecdotes, rather than quantifiable statistics. We might pray and then find out that our friend returned to health. So there’s “a good chance” that the one caused the other. Isn’t that the same as scientists saying “there’s a good chance” that antibiotics were the cause of her recovery?

For another thing, it’s not immediately obvious that we need controls and placebos. If we want to find out whether an intervention works, why would we do an experiment that doesn’t actually use the intervention? Worse, isn’t it morally wrong in many cases to not give the intervention? In order to prove that an educational or healthcare strategy is effective, we have to not use the strategy in some classrooms and hospitals. Scientists are monsters!

These are just the first few tricky aspects of science that come to mind. As I re-read the Intro Stats textbook, I’m reminded how subtle a lot of this is, and how even professional scientists can sometimes get it wrong. That doesn’t mean we should be skeptical of science as a whole, though science itself relies on a healthy skepticism of individual results (another subtle distinction!). It does mean that scientists and journalists should try to explain the scientific process, over and over, day after day, when presenting results to the public. Because if you’re not doing science every day, it’s easy to forget how it works.

I hope to do what I can to help everyone do more science every day.