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Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Learn to Understand Your Own Intelligence

Three years ago I listened to a lecture on cognition that changed the way I
think about intelligence. This is the crux. There are two types of
cognition. The first is normal cognition. This is the ability to
retrieve knowledge from memory. When you are asked a question on a test
and produce an answer, that’s a display of cognitive ability. The
second type of cognition is metacognition; the ability to know whether
or not you know.

Have you ever been asked a question that you knew the answer to, but
you couldn’t find the right word? This is called the “tip of the
tongue” phenomenon and I’m sure we’ve all experienced it. You know that
you know the answer, but you fail to produce it. If someone said an
answer, you would know instantly if it was correct or not. In these
cases metacognition exists without cognition.

In short, cognition is knowing, metacognition is knowing if you know or not.
Both can exist together, but many times they don’t.

How Does this Affect Intelligence?


So what importance does this have and how is it relevant to self
improvement? The fact that there are two different kinds of cognitive
ability means that there are different types of intelligence.

In traditional education, intelligence is measured by cognitive
ability. For some people this is works well. They can easily produce
everything they know on a test. But for others it doesn’t work out so
well. The people that know something cold but can’t find the right
words on a test are awarded with poor grades and considered inferior.

But does this inability make them any less intelligent? They know
the answer. If the question came up on a task, they could refer to a
book or a quick Google search. In reality they’re just as effective as
the people that aced the test. They just can’t prove it as easily.

The Importance of Knowing what you know

Unless you’re taking a test or playing Jeopardy, metacognition is
more important to success than cognition. In real life, when you’re
faced with a question the first decision is whether you know the answer
or not. With strong metacognitive ability this is easy. If you know the
answer, but can’t come up with it, you can always do a bit of research.
If you know for sure that you don’t know, then you can start educating
yourself. Because you’re aware of your ignorance, you don’t act with
foolish confidence. The person who thinks they know something that they
really don’t makes the worst decisions.

A person with poor cognitive ability, but great metacognitive
ability is actually in great shape. They might do poorly in school, but
when faced with a challenge they understand their abilities and take
the best course of action. These people might not seem intelligent at
first glance, but because they know what they know, they make better
decisions and learn the most important things.

Clever but mediocre people

At the opposite end of the spectrum are people with great cognitive
ability but poor metacognitive ability. These people are proclaimed
geniuses at a young age for acing every test and getting great SAT
scores. Unfortunately, they’ve been ruined by poor metacognition; they
think they know everything but they really don’t. They are arrogant,
fail to learn from mistakes, and don’t understand the nuances of
personal relationships; showing disdain for persons with lower
cognitive ability.

So who is superior? In a battle of wits the higher cognitive ability
prevails, but life is not a single encounter. It is a series of
experiments in succession, each building upon the last. Learning
requires knowing what you don’t know, and taking steps to learn what
you need to. People with poor metacognitive ability never realize that
they don’t ‘get it’. They also don’t realize what’s important.

This doesn’t preclude them from material success. But, perhaps
that’s a poor measurement of intelligence as well. There are many
people who become rich and successful by their cleverness and cognitive
ability, but as human beings are quite mediocre. Is the man that makes
a million dollars, but is cruel and abusive to his employees and
family, really more intelligent than the poor man who lives a modest
and loving life? I don’t intend to demonize wealth, only to state that
it should not be the measure of virtue.

Use your metacognitive ability

So what do we know and what do we not? And how can we tell the
difference? There is so much to know in the world that the most
brilliant human minds can grasp only the tiniest fraction. For this
reason we should always be in doubt of what we know. The closed mind is
oblivious to its surroundings, while the open mind absorbs them. Like a
sponge, it soaks up observations, becoming fuller and more robust.

But we can’t live in total doubt. If we did we would never act,
paralyzed by our inadequate knowledge. We must trust our intuition. If
something makes you feel a certain way, that feeling is real and must
be respected. Act based on your own convictions, not those of others,
and keep an open ear for new ideas.

The most important mental power is the ability to know what you
don’t know. The recognition of a fault is the first step to
improvement. Don’t try to hide a lack of knowledge. People will see
through it and you’ll appear foolish and arrogant. If you admit your
ignorance, people will help you learn and respect your humility. For
intelligent people this is the toughest lesson to learn. We are used to
being right, and consider being wrong shameful. We’re afraid to lose
status by looking stupid. This vain arrogance is a great weakness and
the source of many problems. To crush it and embrace humility is the
mark of true wisdom.



Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Intutive Software?

Found this article on Tech Republic while browsing my junk mail just now, and found that this is not junk at all ..... :


Would you want your brakes installed by someone who is on their first day on the job with no training and expects fixing brakes to be intuitive? I didn’t think so. But this is essentially the expectation that we have been perpetrating in this industry for years now.

Somewhere along the way we lost track of the fact that software is often used to accomplish some very complex tasks. As a result, this expectation has turned into a curse. Users now feel entitled to sit in front of any given piece of software and instantly understand its every nook and cranny. And if they can’t, it’s the software developer’s fault for not making intuitive software. This is an unrealistic expectation, and it’s time to start reversing the trend. Below I present what I perceive to be the problems that have perpetuated the myth of intuitive software, as well some potential solutions.

The problems

The first part of the problem is the idea that users who have no experience or understanding of the field of knowledge the software addresses should be able to use the software. If I sat in the cockpit of a 747, I would not expect to be able to fly it after glancing at the controls (even if I did put in countless hours of Wing Commander), yet this is the first mistake users make when blaming the software developer. “I don’t know what it means when it asks me to enter my IP address, so this software is hard to use.” Would users prefer for the software to ask for their system administrator’s e-mail address, and then automatically e-mail that person and ask them to reply with the IP address? Or, would the user want the software to provide a short tutorial on networking? If the user does not understand what an IP address is, no application should be teaching it to them; the software should be looking for a way to get the information without the user’s help.

The next part of the problem is that even users who are knowledgeable in the problem domain are not necessarily going to “get” a piece of software if the domain is sufficiently complex. Word processors are a great example. A word processor is a piece of software designed to do hundreds of tasks — everything from writing grocery lists to legal briefs to screenplays, all of which have different workflow requirements, formatting needs, and so on. Needless to say, any piece of software designed to do not just one complex task but hundreds of complex tasks is going to be complex. Given the complexity of these pieces of software, why would we expect someone who is good at writing essays out by hand to instantly “get” a word processor right away?

ERP and CRM applications are some of the favorite punching bags in the industry. It is common knowledge that a huge number (some studies show the majority) of licenses sold for applications like SAP go unused. These projects have an astoundingly high failure rate, and when you consider their sticker price, that is really unacceptable. One of the typical causes for a project to be declared a failure is that it is “dustware.” That is, after a year-long integration and millions of dollars in consulting fees and license costs, the users fire it up, stare at the screen for five minutes, shut it down, and it sits on the shelf for eternity. Well, not to give these enterprise-class vendors a free pass, but I do not think that plopping a user in front of a complex piece of software untrained and with no documentation is a good way to get them to use it. If I expect a crane operator to be trained in that piece of equipment before using it to lift 10 tons of steel, I think it’s reasonable to think that someone should be trained before using a piece of complex software.

What is most frustrating to me is that things were not always this way (at least, that’s my recollection). WordPerfect 5.1, which is often remembered with a mixture of fondness and disdain, required you to purchase a keyboard overlay, a 100 - 200 page Quick Reference guide, and have a 500 page in-depth manual on your desk to be well-equipped to use it. But the simple fact was, you really needed to read a few hundred pages of text to get the gist of what was happening before you could sit down and do real work. That was also an era when there were local users’ groups for users to get together and help each other out. In addition, companies also sent their employees to computer training.

Now employers are looking for computer savvy and computer literate employees, which seem to mean, “I can use Google to find Gmail.” Instead of teaching true computing skills, such as how to form effective search queries, how to discern which Web sites are credible, and how to maintain security of private data, schools are letting students play on Facebook and LiveJournal, and saying, “Oh, the kids are learning how to use a computer.” Nonsense. The students are learning, at best, how to use a particular Web site that will be different by the time they graduate.

Proposed solutions

Our industry needs to do more about this issue. Sure, we occasionally throw our hands in the air and spew forth a loud “RTFM!” Which would help if “TFM” wasn’t often so useless. After all, why bother writing good documentation when the only people who care to read it are those who can figure it out on their own? It’s a catch-22. So first up is the documentation. If your application is addressing complex tasks, you can’t count on an intuitive interface.

A complex task will require either a ton of walk-through style wizards (which power users hate and even beginners eventually outgrow); or an interface like a command line; or a toolbar crammed with buttons, lots of keyboard shortcuts, or some other way of packing a lot of functionality into a small screen space. And with interfaces like that, the documentation needs to be better. Unlike a wizard-driven interface, you do not have a paragraph to explain each choice; at best, you have a tooltip to explain what function the icon represents. Users in these situations need to be able to rely upon the documentation to give them in-depth information.

A fallacy is that in order for software to be intuitive, it needs to be different from the “hard to use” products on the market. Networking devices are a good example. If I were to market a networking device, I would do my best to emulate the Cisco IOS to the most minor detail. Even though the Cisco IOS is not intuitive (in fact, it is one of the most consistently miserable pieces of software I have ever dealt with), nearly every network administrator has spent a lot of time learning the intricacies of IOS. By emulating a really obnoxious system, you are actually working with existing user knowledge. You see this a lot in the *Nix world. Because so much of *Nix counts on pipes and redirects, applications tend to implement the I/O patterns of existing applications in order to be a drop-in replacement, even if they support their own (and probably better) I/O as well. If you are trying to break into an existing market, you will want to provide a UI that looks like the current king, even if you have a better one as an alternative. If possible, try to use both, with an easy way of switching between the two.

We also need to stop counting on the community to provide support for us. A huge temptation, particularly in the current economic climate, is to put some freeware wiki or forum software on a server, link to it from the Support section of the Web site, and expect that users will train each other. I am not saying this doesn’t happen or telling you not to set up a wiki or a forum. I’m saying that even with these tools, your staff will need to spend a lot of time on the wiki or forum and provide many (if not most) of the answers — at least until you get a number of MVPs on board and editing the wiki.

Also, I would like to see more new user and experienced user modes for software, particularly in super-complex applications. It would be even better if the software could seamlessly transition on a feature-by-feature basis. For example, once a user does Task A a few times without too much help, the software stops using wizards, but the first time a user does Task B, the software still has him in training wheels mode. I think this would be a great way to combine the promises of agent-based systems with the guidance of wizards and hands-on tutorials.

Finally, let’s get honest and drop the “easy to use” bullet point in our marketing materials when possible. Instead, we need to start putting in good tutorials and have our sales reps offer free (or highly discounted) training. What do you think costs your company more money: sending a trainer on site for a week to get new users up to speed, or not having a customer renew its license because no one ever used the system and then bad-mouth your software to boot? In the long run, it makes more sense to give free (or highly discounted) on-site training to big accounts and free online training to smaller accounts than it does to lose the upgrade fees.

In conclusion, software does not need to be intuitive to users who don’t know the field; and even for users who understand the work, complex tasks are going to have complex software. But, software developers need to keep finding ways to make sure that users get up to speed and can fly on their own.

J.Ja

Disclosure of Justin’s industry affiliations: Justin James has a working arrangement with Microsoft to write an article for MSDN Magazine. He also has a contract with Spiceworks to write product buying guides.








Monday, December 29, 2008

How To Become A VC - Guy Kawasaki

I was browsing the web this morning and found a 2006 blog on "How To Become A Venture Capitalist" by Guy Kawasaki at his blog site. Interesting read for those who are thinking of going into the VC business. Here it is : http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/11/the_venture_cap.html


Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Hadron Collider Tested!

The Hadron Collider has been tested(http://www.news.com.au/comments/0,23600,24328608-5014239,00.html)! Are we trying to create a black hole here on earth? Remember "Songs Of A Distant Earth" ! And we haven't even invented proper embryo freezing to save mankind.....

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Online RoR Tutorials ....

Free peoples of Middle Earth !


The rulers at http://www.buildingwebapps.com have been gracious enough to bestow knowledge to us commoners on RoR. Please head over there to enhance your skills! The direct link to the tutorials is on the bar at the top of this page, to your left .....

May open source live long and prosper....


Thursday, September 4, 2008

Tempus Vernum

Ergo 
Oceanus, maritimus, 
Ergo 
Opacare, matutinus, 
Ergo 
Septentrio, meridies, 
Ergo 
Occidens et orientis, 
Ergo 
Oceanus, maritimus, 
Opacare, matutinus, 
Septentrio, meridies, 
Occidens et orientis, 
Ergo 
Terra, stella, 
Hiems et aestas, 
Ergo 
Autumnus et tempus vernum, 
Ergo 
Radius solis 
Et umbra, 
Ignis, aqua 
Caelum, luna, 
Terra, stella, 
Hierns et aestas, 
Autumnus et tempus vernum... 

Tempus vernum... 

SCARAB ....

What is SCARAB ? and who are SCARABians ?