Google Chrome and Chrome OS could Be Huge

The move to an all-Cloud life is curving upwards. Most people have wifi most of the time they crack open their computers and mobile broadband hotspots are getting nearly cheap (more in my next post). Maybe we don't have to carry powerful laptops anymore?

In order to work with the high school class I help teach, I bought a Chromebook to match what the students have. I bought the best one out there and it was just $239 (in store is cheaper), many Chromebooks can be had for around $120. The specs are light in some ways, a 14" screen (1366x768), 2GB RAM, 16GB Hard drive (not a misprint), but it is made for connectivity and mobility: 1 HDMI port, 3 USBs ports (one is 3.0), SD slot, 802.11ac wifi, bluetooth, camera, a nearly 3000 mAh battery which seems to last forever (they always do at first, don't they?), and it comes with 1TB of Google Drive storage for two years for free - ah, there's the real hard drive. I do wish Google Drive was versioned content management, like Time Machine, but I can't even see old revisions of Google-originated documents, maybe I'm missing something.

I used the machine for only a few days, but it's clear that I can do nearly all of what I need to do on it, and I like the keyboard navigation better on it than a Mac. With my Mac crashing almost as much as Win98 now, and Macs being WICKED expensive, I have to consider if I could replace it for a mere $250 (with resale values on Macs seemingly near 95%). The Chromebook is about 10% lighter than my MacBook Pro 15", so I don't mind being lighter in the hand as well as the wallet.

When I moved to the Mac from Windows I moved everything to the cloud - a lot of that was moving things to Google Drive, much of it what have been great online services - Evernote, ToDoPro, Mint, and all the mobile apps and websites I use. I've already learned that machines come and go, but your data is always your data, so keep everything near permanent backed up to external hard drives  (except my Google data, which I should do). The idea was to create OS independence, so I could move to - and away from - the Mac easily.  Could I move to Chrome OS?

After 6 years, 3 Macs (one a used starter, one run over after 5 years - they do last, one recent replacement) and 3 iPhones (4S, 5S, 6Plus), I am still not very tied to MacOS/iOS. I am somewhat tied to Aperture (sort of, you can get at the pics underneath their database easy enough) but the only real major tie to is TimeMachine - one of the main reasons I moved to Mac in the first place. Since I have a lot of data backed up on Time Machine, I'll always need a Mac around, or a Virtual Machine for a MacOS, and I will always have that around. Heck I could always have a virtual machine for OS/2!

It's not just me, most people are far less tied to OS's now that we are all using apps in the cloud. In fact, maybe people are more tied to Google's main services than the various operating system they are using on their various devices. In the meantime, Chrome has recently become the majority browser. It's been a long war, but Chrome is winning and none of the competitors can recapture share (Microsoft and Opera certainly won't, Safari can only change as far as their OS penetration, and no further, and Firefox is improving but it will be hard to keep up without the same level of funding).

Chrome is now invading other OS's desktops.  After adding a Chrome Extension, I automatically got this helpful new Google portal on my Mac dock, just like the one on my Chromebook's start menu.

Ah, so I can use all those apps that plug into Chrome on all my devices? Nice. I don't think it's hard to see Google growing their eyeshare from here.

But I'm a developer! How could I get along on a Chromebook? The time for development to move to the cloud is near, maybe not here, but near.

We almost had cloud-like development in the 1990's with ClearCase - a virtual file system, very similar to Google Drive, but with controllable versioning, like Time Machine (on steroids). It could never quite work because the files a developer edits were always local because the developer tools were always local so it was very slow as the compiler reached across the network to find the net file, 10,000 times. I can here some of my old IBM mainframe friends that they were developing in the cloud, and it's true, though the cloud was usually in the building.

In 2015, developers have many tools living in the cloud - editors, compilers, builders, test runners, test and production machines. They seem mature enough for Javascript development, though the tools for Java may be somewhat behind. (I'm trying out Cloud9, no review ready yet.)  All we need now is a little terminal. Ah, but ChromeOS has bash and if that's not good enough, maybe Ubuntu on a Chromebook would work!

Jack-a-Roe & Women Warriors

I went to the tailor shop today (as an aside run by a wonderful elder Italian gentleman, Joe Giullo, Rte. 9 Shrewsbury, near The Bean Counter).  Of course the rest of the day I was singing (and playing) "I went down to the tailor shop to dress in men's array..." from Jack-a-Roe, a traditional song that the Grateful Dead kept alive for millions.  A particularly interesting version can be heard here.

The lyrics are very dense - a wealthy merchant's daughter is courted by many, but Jack-a-Roe, a sailor, was her true love.  He left to sail in a war so she went down to the tailor's shop to dress in men's clothing and snuck aboard a boat as a man.  After the war, she found her true love wounded, got a doctor to heal his wounds, and they got married.

As I often want to do with traditional songs, I looked up the history.

Jack-A-Roe also occurs as Jackaroe or Jackaro. It is one of a number of closely related songs that also occur as Jack Monroe, Jack Munro, Jack The Sailor and The Love of Polly and Jack Monroe, possibly also as Jackie Frazer. Possibly the earliest recorded version of a similar song is titled Jack Munro and is held in the ballad collection of the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. This dates from roughly around 1800.

Here's the original ballad, posted as a bill, between 1774 and 1825, as a war protest.

Jack Munro ("In Chatham town there liv'd a worthy merchant man ...") 

The theme of the woman warrior is not unique to the West, of course.  A similar ballad around 400 AD  inspired Mulan.

Robtos: Trust me, I'll get you a beer!

Robots are becoming useful now that engineers are realizing it's all about the human interaction.



Summary of the Boston Globe article from the ACM News:

Robot May Furnish Lesson in Human Trust
Boston Globe (07/05/10) Johnson, Carolyn Y.

Boston-area scientists are using a new robot to study the signals that people use to decide whether to trust one another within minutes of meeting. "There should be some signal for trustworthiness that's subtle and hard to find, but [it is] there," says Northeastern University's David DeSteno. The robot, called Nexi, has advantages over human participants because people use subtle gestures, or engage in unintentional mimicry, that can be hard to measure or control. Nexi has many human expressions, but researchers can control every aspect of its behavior, which enables them to test what nonverbal cues might seem more or less trustworthy. The research also could help roboticists find ways to design machines that will be trusted partners for humans. The experiment is a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern, and Cornell University. At the end of the experiment, researchers measured how trustworthy the participants found Nexi to be using an economic task in which they decided how many tokens to exchange with Nexi and predicted how many tokens Nexi would give them.

If that creeps you out too much, maybe just try having your computer to get you a beer.

The Real "Avatar" (The Last Airbender)

I saw The Last Airbender this weekend with my 13 year old and his friends. If you don't know, the movie is based on the cartoon called Avatar : The Last Airbender. I call it the "real" Avatar because Avatar the blockbuster movie hardly reflects the meaning of the word. The word "Avatar" comes from the Sanskrit word for "descent," meaning a spirit (or "God"), descending to the material world as a human. You may think such a notion is preposterous, or you may have deep faith that some Avatar is your personal savior (like Jesus Christ or Krishna), but in either case, an Avatar, fictional or factual, is more closely related to the Last Airbender than the Marine in the virtual blue suit.

As you might expect, I enjoyed The Last Airbender more than Avatar. Avatar was three hours of over-the-top drama. The Last Airbender was far more subtle. Instead of yelling and screaming and in-your-face interaction, Aang, the main character's strongest imperative was telling an animal "Be nice."

Noah Ringer, who played Aang, was phenomenal. I was expecting to be disappointed, as most were by Hayden Christenson playing the adult Anakin Skywalker. Monks with power are very difficult to play, but Ringer did what great actors Ewan MacGregor and Liam Neeson could not pull off - maintain a constant state of grace and even temper while exercising power in difficult circumstances (Alec Guinness, the original Obi-Wan Kenobi, maintained grace, but his style was better suited for stage than film).

The theatergoers, including my triad of 13 year olds, did not like the movie. They picked on the things missing from the cartoon, like the villian's missing ponytail or the fact that Aang was pronounced more properly like a mantra than like it was in the cartoon (rhymed with "hang"). After comparing Aang to the Jedi, I was met with disbelief by the 13 year olds. "Aang is not a monk - he's a warrior!" That led to a 15 minute diatribe about the Bhagavad Gita's ("What? What do you mean we've never heard of the most widely read book ever?!") Arjuna the Archer, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Star Wars. I think I got enough into their minds that it will spark their interest when they come across it again sometime.

China's Government Advocates for Workers

According to this IBD story, "Chinese workers are usually represented by government-sponsored unions. "

Now I suspect this may not be all it's cracked up to be since "Many recent labor disturbances were organized outside these communist-backed groups." But still can you just imagine a government advocating on behalf of workers? I suppose if you remember America in the 1930's or 1940's, you might remember, but in my lifetime, government has been 98% a tool of business interests - the capitalists - not labor. I know there was once or twice a raise in the minimum wage (fat chance of that happening again now that Ted Kennedy is dead). And I am well aware that those who rely on FOX News for their worldview think labor and teachers have an undue influence on government, but just that fact that the notion that the government advocates for labor is a foreign idea to most Americans (and anathema to many) shows how tilted the power in this democracy has become. Some say America is now Fascist, who by definition "seek to organize a nation on corporatist perspectives, values, and systems such as the political system and the economy."

Sure there's corruption in China, as there is in the U.S., but at the end of the day, the Communists truly do look out for the workers. This may be idealogical, but is likely just as much a matter of self-preservation - the Chinese government is well aware that without economic growth, the people would revolt and who knows what will happen then. In any case, it will be fascinating to see how the U.S. corporate-oriented government will compete with the Chinese worker-oriented government over the next 50 years.

Pre-Internet Publications

As I was writing a blog post on switching to the Mac, I started discussing my first programming on the Mac. Since it was pre-Internet (or at least pre-browser), I didn't think I'd find any about the articles that come out of my first professional post-B.S. work, but I did come up with the references via David A. Rosenbaum's C.V.:

Rosenbaum, D. A., Engelbrecht, S. E., Bushe, M. M., & Loukopoulos, L. D. (1993). A model for reaching control. Acta Psychologica, 82, 237-250.

Rosenbaum, D. A., Engelbrecht, S. E., Bushe, M. M., & Loukopoulos, L. D. (1993). Knowledge model for selecting and producing reaching movements. Journal of Motor Behavior, 25, 217-227.

Bushe, M. M., Vaughan, J., & Rosenbaum, D. A. (1994). Pascal external functions for Strawberry Tree's "Analog Connection Workbench." Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computer, 26, 461-466.

This was some of the most memorable and fun work I've done. The model for reaching control was a computer model that acted like a baby at the start. This baby would randomly reach in different directions using different combinations of angles of various limbs. Each angle would be given a cost so that moving your torso was more costly than your wrist, and bending at angles that were difficult (like scratching your back) was also costly. After a few thousand trails, the model learned to reach for objects at novel locations using fluid lifelike movements. Lots of hours with Mac programming manuals always handy.

The "Pascal" paper was a different experiment. We were seeing how well someone could mimic tapping out a beep-beep rhythm with varying delaying between the beeps (.1-1.0 seconds or so) when heard aurally or seen visually on a screen. Aural won. The article was about writing Mac software to hook up with a hardware/software package called "Strawberry Tree." It involved some low level z80 processor instructions to pick up analog signals from a external board hooked up to a Mac. Can't say it was all that fun, but doing the dirty work made it publishable.

Ultimately, though I'm always dissatisfied by cognitive psychology experiments. They are too contrived. "Life is a bowl of concurrent schedules," as my behaviorist professor Dr. John Donahoe, liked to say. Looking back, I can honestly say that he was the most influential professor I had. I think I had the best work-study gig on campus as I wrote a neural network simulation for Dr. Donahoe. A harbinger was the nights that I was up until 2AM writing the visuals. Dr. Donahoe didn't think the visuals were that important, he really just wanted the numbers, but I wanted to see the network learning. I still remember how his face lit up when the dark lines lit up yellow as connections were made. An early positive reinforcement that has been reinforced many times since in my UI and visualization work.

Williams Syndrome

Williams Syndrome, is a genetic condition that causes a lack of social fear - people with Williams Syndrome are really friendly even with people they don't know. Fascinatingly, they also have no or nearly no racial bias, from a recent Discover Magazine article:

Typically, children start overtly gravitating towards their own ethnic groups from the tender age of three. Groups of people from all over the globe and all sorts of cultures show these biases. Even autistic children, who can have severe difficulties with social relationships, show signs of racial stereotypes. But Santos says that the Williams syndrome kids are the first group of humans devoid of such racial bias...

It's very interesting to think about the fact that we are born with a predilection to racial bias. It makes more sense when I think about what I read in Guns, Germs and Steel that said when two tribal people who don't know each other meet each other in Papua New Guinea, they will first start naming off people who are related to each other to see if the other person knows them. If they find a match, they are OK, if they don't find a match, they fight. I guess those conversations could last a very long time.

Serendipitously, I've never heard of Williams Syndrome until this morning. Then Dylan and I visited UMass for an Open House. I talked to Dylan about the story on the drive to UMass (hmmm, is this the kind of conversation that inspired Dylan to want to teach science?). Then not one, but two different speakers mentioned Williams Syndrome in passing during their speeches. Weird. One was talking about the opportunities at UMass and mentioned how he worked with local kids with Williams Syndrome. I forget the context the other speaker mentioned it in. Our tour guide came close to the concept as she was doing her thesis on social contact.