I just came back from Cambridge (the one that actually has a bridge over river Cam) where I attended Artificial Intelligence in Design ‘02 and updated the international scientific community on the progress of my research work, dontcha know. I have a few random things to note:

I blog because it is important to me that I have a record, a chronology of my life. I have mentioned several times that memory is an important concept for me. I would now like to extrapolate and say that records are important to me. Any kind of recorded information is an important resource to me. While I have trimmed down the amount of stuff I keep around me considerably, I accumulate books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, and photos. Memories are bits of recordable information, and I want them recorded and safely archived.

Aaron Sloman, the keynote speaker at AID ‘02, started his presentation by expressing his gratitude to the developers of Linux. He proudly ensured us that there wasn’t a scrap of Microsoft software on his laptop. At the end of his presentation a member of the audience asked him to show the first slide again so that he could copy Sloman’s URL and email address. Sloman did that with a single keystroke (the “G” key, for some reason) and asked the audience “can PowerPoint do that?”

Of course, PowerPoint can do that, and the single key is “Home” - a somewhat more logical choice, and a use for that key that is intuitive and in agreement with user interface standards used by applications on Windows, Mac OS, and other platforms.

This highlights an arrogance which is common in geekdom. There is ideological purity in this stance, but in its extreme cases, as exemplified by Aaron Sloman, this purity is protected at the expense of utility. Taking pride in not using Microsoft software is a negative attitude. It is also inflexible. Why not instead use the software that works best? Sloman’s presentation looked quirky, although it’s hard to tell whether it was because of the software or its user. Using PowerPoint certainly would have improved the presentation by suggesting the use of bullet points. This one-hour keynote was supported by 76 slides which contained a total of 10,103 words. That amount of text is hard to even read in an hour, and it certainly could not be classified as a visual aid. Of course, the source of this is an inability to design well: if the URLs and email addresses were displayed on the last slide, there would be no need to repeat the first slide at the end, for example.

Another example of how the ideological purity of the Linux-otaku might compromise utility comes from Sloman’s web page. Verbatim:

Please never send me Microsoft files, e.g. Word. I read only files that conform to published freely available platform-independent specifications, e.g. html, plain text, postscript or PDF. I use only unix/linux systems and free software for my work, never PCs running windows.

Note the use of the words “only” and “never.” Microsoft formats are a de facto standard, whether we like it or not. The choice to disregard this reality is certainly inconveniencing, both for Sloman and his correspondents. Furthermore, even if you do not want to use Microsoft software, it is not necessary to close yourself to Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files; there exist open source programmes for Linux which are perfectly capable of both viewing and editing files in these formats.

I do not mean to pick on Professor Sloman in particular. He just stimulated me to consider these issues. Of course, there are valid reasons to dislike the evil empire of Bill Gates. Open standards deserve everyone’s support: they are necessary for interoperability, and I often rally for them. Open source software offers obvious advantages over proprietary solutions. However, there is a task to perform with these tools at the end of the day and one must choose the tools that will achieve the desired results. Open standards and open source projects are meant to make the user’s life easier, not harder.

I used to share this pure ideology. I applied it to web design standards. I refused to write HTML code that did not conform to the recommendations published by the World Wide Web Consortium. However, after a long struggle, I realised that if there are no browsers sufficiently supporting the standards they might as well not exist. So I moved from what should work to what did work. That’s all for my little rant in support of pragmatic outlooks versus idealism.

Aaron Sloman’s presentation also included these words, hidden somewhere in the text of slide 56:

The five Fs: Feeding, fighting, fleeing, freezing, and reproduction

Which brings me to another insight I had during the keynote: Pornography and sexual taboos are not merely a Victorian concept. Copulating secretly from the other members of the society provides evolutionary advantage to both the male and the female, by concealing the identity of the biological father of offspring. This is good for males whose strategy is to inseminate as many females as they can and have the females’ significant others provide resources for their offspring. It is also good for females who get to spread their bets by producing offspring with different males while trapping a male provider by making him believe that the offspring he supports is his own.

Finally, I have updated my research page with the material that I presented at Cambridge. If you were ever curious, this should give you a good idea about what I am still doing at university.