"People," continued the taxi driver driving me to the airport in Dublin, "do the strangest things with chocolate." He paused, reflectively, before adding, "I mean in private."
When I didn't immediately respond, he hurried to explain himself. "You know, a Bounty bar?" I did. "I pick the chocolate off of the outside and then eat the inside separately. Do you do that?" As politely as I could I explained that I didn't like Bounty bars. "What do you do then?" he asked. The best thing that I could come up with was Oreo cookies, that I twist them open and eat out the middle, "A lot of people do that," I added. This puzzled him, until he brightened, "Oh, I heard about this biscuit in Australia and you bite off two of the corners and you drink your tea right through the biscuit. It has some sort of a cream filling that just melts as you drink. It's supposed to be just lovely." He thought for a moment. "It's Tam Tam or Yam Yam or something like that it's called."
I tried to imagine the Tam Tam or the Yam Yam and what it might look like. I was in Perth for about four days after SIGIR 2008, but didn't remember any cookies like that. "Do you suppose," I asked him, "that people just take the biscuit out of the package and look at it and think, 'oh, I should break off two of the corners and drink my tea through it' or was there one person who invented it and then it quickly spread as an idea throughout Australia?"
His response surprised me: he laughed! Then, "It's like the comedian," he pronounced. And then he filled me in: there is a comedian one-liner about watching a chicken lay an egg. "Hey, I think I could eat that!" was the punch line.
And so, I end up discussing with a Dublin taxi driver, the principle of affordance, the ability of an object to be acted on in its environment, and, in a larger definition, communicate its use via its appearance.
In multimedia information retrieval, I am obsessed with affordance in this latter sense. At the first glance or very quickly during interaction, the system should implicitly communicate to the user what it does, what the user can do with what it does and the extent to which it can be trusted to reliably do what it does in all cases.
A few years ago, I believed that a speech retrieval system should not show transcripts to users because users are disturbed by errors. Now we are all a lot further. People are used to reading relatively unedited or unconventional text in text messages, blogs (!) and comments. Now, the level of error can signal to the user that the text has been created by a speech recognizer and how well that speech recognizer can be trusted to capture the spoken content of the audio signal.
But his is negative affordance, the message what can't this system do. It is quite possible that negative affordance is much more challenging to communicate to the user since the space of possible non-uses is not intuitively constrained.
And with biscuits, of course, comes the problem of distributed affordance. What works well once does not continue working well with repeated applications. The package of biscuits should tell you, individually, we are delicious, but if you eat the whole package you won't feel nice and full, but instead you will have an unhappy stomach. Even it was written explicitly on the package, I imagine I would mostly ignore that message.
This is Part III (final part!) of the "Irish Chocolate Discussion", reflections on the conversation I had with a Dublin taxi driver and how that relates to finding things and search systems in general.
Showing posts with label trains. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trains. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Geotags and Geotrails
At the moment I am sitting in a German IC. I'm doing "Duivendrecht" ... "Apeldorn" ... "Hannover" ... "Berlin" and if I had a GPS that was logging my position, you would see that I was doing a certain trajectory at a certain speed. For me there is something soothing about sitting in the train watching Germany roll by. You've made the decision to go there and now all you have to do is wait and it will happen. In this state of doing nothing while doing something, I can unleash my thoughts, do a bit of mental housekeeping and just general feel like I'm absorbed into the German landscape. It's always been like this for me, and I can highly recommend it. If you try it within the Netherlands, you probably have to go to Groningen since the other trajectories would be too short.
In the last entry I mentioned Creative Tourism. This train ride to Berlin is my way of really feeling in touch with Germany -- a way of living and a way of being. If your reading posts in chronological order, you'll recall that our Near2Me concept links up two places people. If enough people take pictures at places with two different geotags, then the place must be related. If you like one, then you like the other. But what I am doing right now is not associated with a single geotag, it is associated with an entire trajectory and also a very specific "train speed". Perhaps our systems will be richer if we include "geotrails", a path with parameters of time and space. These are the doodles we draw and redraw in our travel experiences, patterns that represent something we like to do, but might also represent the type of thing that we should try in the future when we feel inclined to "branch out".
Two other examples for which geotrails could be helpful come to mind. The discussion about chocolate that I had with the taxi driver that drove me to the airport in Dublin on Saturday really stuck with me. But it is one of the things that strikes me nearly every time I am there. You can really talk to the taxi drivers. Not always, but sometimes you have these amazing conversations and that seems to be more important to them than the tip. Once I had a Dublin taxi driver refuse the tip.
I had one conversation where the taxi driver asked me what I did and I said I worked in a multimedia information retrieval lab. "So what do you do there?" I didn't know where to start, so I described to him one of the systems at our lab that processes videos of soccer games and does highlight detection. He thought that was interesting, and I then asked him what he thought counted as a highlight in football. Is it only the goals and the penalties, or what other parts do you want to see if you are watching a summary to the game. He gave a thoughtful answer to this questions. If you would look at my Dublin geotrails, there are a series of characteristic doodles, often ending at the airport that represent these experiences I have had in taxis.
My Amsterdam geotrails, on the other hand, show me giving the taxi stand wide berth. The taxis will drive you in circles there. They have to, sometimes, given the geometry of the city, but they'll add their own embellishments that drive your final price up. The only place that is worse is Brussels.
In Amsterdam, I prefer the bike. You'll see a lot of bike doodles. These are slower than the taxis and also go on roads where cards don't drive. Biking is the authentic Amsterdam experience. Visitors to the city often participate in the local culture by renting bicycles and riding around. This is Creative Tourism the way it was conceived to be carried out.
However, you would see the difference in the geotrails. Amsterdamers bike every day from point A to B and back again. Maybe there is C and D as well, but in general they know their routes, every stop light, every bump, every place where another bike might come out from an unexpected directions. They also know their routes at the time of the day that they characteristically ride them, for example, in the early morning, there was always a characteristic amount of traffic when I biked out from the Lelygracht in the center of Amsterdam where I used to live to the Science Park. Routes are optimized so that they do not take minute longer than they absolutely have to.
Slipping here back into the topic of my last blog, I would like to make the point that the tourist geotrails are totally different, they are slower, different times of the day and involve indirect routes. Tourists wobble a bit, they maybe haven't ridden a bike since they were kids. They stop unexpectedly to consult their maps. They stop for puddles -- and Amsterdamer has seen the route dry the week before and knowing exactly how deep the puddle is going to be rides through it. Tourists also stop for red lights -- Amsterdamers know which lights are conventionally ignored by bicyclists.
Don't recommend to me a quick straight shot to the Science Park if I am on vacation. I want to do the trail with a little wobble that ends me up at the Van Gogh Museum. Is that the authentic Amsterdam experience? Maybe not. But if you push the limit, authenticity is in the eye of the beholder. For the Amsterdamer, the authentic bicycle culture consists of complaining of how badly tourists ride bicycles. Take away commercial tourism and the city loses some of its characteristic spirt, the tension between those that live there and those that play there. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if this would affect Amsterdam's charm.
This is Part II of the "Irish Chocolate Discussion", reflections on the conversation I had with a Dublin taxi driver and how that relates to finding things and search systems in general.
In the last entry I mentioned Creative Tourism. This train ride to Berlin is my way of really feeling in touch with Germany -- a way of living and a way of being. If your reading posts in chronological order, you'll recall that our Near2Me concept links up two places people. If enough people take pictures at places with two different geotags, then the place must be related. If you like one, then you like the other. But what I am doing right now is not associated with a single geotag, it is associated with an entire trajectory and also a very specific "train speed". Perhaps our systems will be richer if we include "geotrails", a path with parameters of time and space. These are the doodles we draw and redraw in our travel experiences, patterns that represent something we like to do, but might also represent the type of thing that we should try in the future when we feel inclined to "branch out".
Two other examples for which geotrails could be helpful come to mind. The discussion about chocolate that I had with the taxi driver that drove me to the airport in Dublin on Saturday really stuck with me. But it is one of the things that strikes me nearly every time I am there. You can really talk to the taxi drivers. Not always, but sometimes you have these amazing conversations and that seems to be more important to them than the tip. Once I had a Dublin taxi driver refuse the tip.
I had one conversation where the taxi driver asked me what I did and I said I worked in a multimedia information retrieval lab. "So what do you do there?" I didn't know where to start, so I described to him one of the systems at our lab that processes videos of soccer games and does highlight detection. He thought that was interesting, and I then asked him what he thought counted as a highlight in football. Is it only the goals and the penalties, or what other parts do you want to see if you are watching a summary to the game. He gave a thoughtful answer to this questions. If you would look at my Dublin geotrails, there are a series of characteristic doodles, often ending at the airport that represent these experiences I have had in taxis.
My Amsterdam geotrails, on the other hand, show me giving the taxi stand wide berth. The taxis will drive you in circles there. They have to, sometimes, given the geometry of the city, but they'll add their own embellishments that drive your final price up. The only place that is worse is Brussels.
In Amsterdam, I prefer the bike. You'll see a lot of bike doodles. These are slower than the taxis and also go on roads where cards don't drive. Biking is the authentic Amsterdam experience. Visitors to the city often participate in the local culture by renting bicycles and riding around. This is Creative Tourism the way it was conceived to be carried out.
However, you would see the difference in the geotrails. Amsterdamers bike every day from point A to B and back again. Maybe there is C and D as well, but in general they know their routes, every stop light, every bump, every place where another bike might come out from an unexpected directions. They also know their routes at the time of the day that they characteristically ride them, for example, in the early morning, there was always a characteristic amount of traffic when I biked out from the Lelygracht in the center of Amsterdam where I used to live to the Science Park. Routes are optimized so that they do not take minute longer than they absolutely have to.
Slipping here back into the topic of my last blog, I would like to make the point that the tourist geotrails are totally different, they are slower, different times of the day and involve indirect routes. Tourists wobble a bit, they maybe haven't ridden a bike since they were kids. They stop unexpectedly to consult their maps. They stop for puddles -- and Amsterdamer has seen the route dry the week before and knowing exactly how deep the puddle is going to be rides through it. Tourists also stop for red lights -- Amsterdamers know which lights are conventionally ignored by bicyclists.
Don't recommend to me a quick straight shot to the Science Park if I am on vacation. I want to do the trail with a little wobble that ends me up at the Van Gogh Museum. Is that the authentic Amsterdam experience? Maybe not. But if you push the limit, authenticity is in the eye of the beholder. For the Amsterdamer, the authentic bicycle culture consists of complaining of how badly tourists ride bicycles. Take away commercial tourism and the city loses some of its characteristic spirt, the tension between those that live there and those that play there. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if this would affect Amsterdam's charm.
This is Part II of the "Irish Chocolate Discussion", reflections on the conversation I had with a Dublin taxi driver and how that relates to finding things and search systems in general.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Get out and pull
Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 4:45 AM I received an e-mail from the Nederlandse Spoorwegen, the Dutch train service. After greeting me by name, the mail went on to read, Door het winterweer zijn er meer treinen defect. Dat heeft gevolgen voor de dienstregeling. (Eng. 'Because of the winter weather more trains are out of service. This has consequences for the train schedules.') Of course, I appreciate the personalized warning and it would have been critical if I had needed to travel by train yesterday.
For me, this incident was an example of how information technology does help us as a society to be more efficient, cost-effective and perhaps even kinder to the environment. But now that the Nederlandse Spoorwegen has the possibility to broadcast a wide, personal warning and forestall hoards of cold and angry passengers on the platforms, doesn't that make it economic for them to operate on an even thinner margin--i.e., have even less resources on hand that they can swing into action in the case of weather emergencies? It's a slippery slope downwards to being in an even worse position to handle emergency situations. Are things more efficient, or have we just found another balance to inefficiency?
A little personalized knowledge is a dangerous thing. The 4:45 AM mail is, of course, going to be forwarded to bosses across the country -- I'm not coming in, or I'm going to be late today. Half the trains might still be running -- but is there any guaranteed that only half the train riding workforce has now flips into snow-day mode? The Nederlandse Spoorwegen is saving itself from weather problems with its information spreading, but it could actually be amplifying the weather problems for other sectors. What to do? I am certainly not going to advocate the fully personalized approach: The Nederlandse Spoorwegen knows every individuals's contribution to the overall economy and then only warns the less essential members away from trying to take the train on days that less trains are running. Perhaps I could live with the following 4:45 AM mail: 'Good Morning! We think that you want to go to Amsterdam this morning, if you leave the house in one hour there will be a train to Amsterdam picking you up on Platform 1 when you arrive at the station.' I suppose it would be most effective if the message was sent directly to my alarm clock.
But maybe we're not really moving towards putting our schedules entirely in the hands of the Nederlandse Spoorwegen. The final sentence of the 4:45 AM mail is perhaps the most important one: Kijk voor meer informatie op www.ns.nl. (Eng. 'Visit www.ns.nl for more information.) The mail is not warning me off -- what it is is a gentle information push that is inviting me to go out and search for my own information and to make my own decision. There's something you might need to try to find out today, it says. It pushes me to go pull. It tells me that I might just have an information need.
The responsibility of search is to be able to respond in a flexible manner to searchers that have been moved to search by a prompted information need. But maybe my search system should be on the look out for me and be responsible for sending the 4:45 AM mail as well. The Nederlandse Spoorwegen could then attend to its business of getting all of the trains running again on schedule. They wouldn't have to even mention it, and we'd all be willing to get out and pull.
For me, this incident was an example of how information technology does help us as a society to be more efficient, cost-effective and perhaps even kinder to the environment. But now that the Nederlandse Spoorwegen has the possibility to broadcast a wide, personal warning and forestall hoards of cold and angry passengers on the platforms, doesn't that make it economic for them to operate on an even thinner margin--i.e., have even less resources on hand that they can swing into action in the case of weather emergencies? It's a slippery slope downwards to being in an even worse position to handle emergency situations. Are things more efficient, or have we just found another balance to inefficiency?
A little personalized knowledge is a dangerous thing. The 4:45 AM mail is, of course, going to be forwarded to bosses across the country -- I'm not coming in, or I'm going to be late today. Half the trains might still be running -- but is there any guaranteed that only half the train riding workforce has now flips into snow-day mode? The Nederlandse Spoorwegen is saving itself from weather problems with its information spreading, but it could actually be amplifying the weather problems for other sectors. What to do? I am certainly not going to advocate the fully personalized approach: The Nederlandse Spoorwegen knows every individuals's contribution to the overall economy and then only warns the less essential members away from trying to take the train on days that less trains are running. Perhaps I could live with the following 4:45 AM mail: 'Good Morning! We think that you want to go to Amsterdam this morning, if you leave the house in one hour there will be a train to Amsterdam picking you up on Platform 1 when you arrive at the station.' I suppose it would be most effective if the message was sent directly to my alarm clock.
But maybe we're not really moving towards putting our schedules entirely in the hands of the Nederlandse Spoorwegen. The final sentence of the 4:45 AM mail is perhaps the most important one: Kijk voor meer informatie op www.ns.nl. (Eng. 'Visit www.ns.nl for more information.) The mail is not warning me off -- what it is is a gentle information push that is inviting me to go out and search for my own information and to make my own decision. There's something you might need to try to find out today, it says. It pushes me to go pull. It tells me that I might just have an information need.
The responsibility of search is to be able to respond in a flexible manner to searchers that have been moved to search by a prompted information need. But maybe my search system should be on the look out for me and be responsible for sending the 4:45 AM mail as well. The Nederlandse Spoorwegen could then attend to its business of getting all of the trains running again on schedule. They wouldn't have to even mention it, and we'd all be willing to get out and pull.
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