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…people are selectively worse at incorporating information about a worse-than-expected future

There are aspects of my life where I’m optimistic but probably less so than most people. I’m not a pessimist; I’m a self-decribed pragmatist: I see wonder and beauty all around but I also see problems coming a mile away.

In my work as a software architect I consistently encounter a propensity for optimism from folks who dream things—as opposed to those who build things. The dreamers are “The Business” and they are “bully”. To varying degrees, anything short of “can do” is nay-saying.

Strangely, it’s the dreamers who tend to label the do-ers (as pessimistic) but not the other way ’round. In professional life it’s taboo for someone to tell an optimist that they just don’t know enough to understand the real risks involved in X, Y or Z.

Those conversations do happen rarely and don’t often result in much change. Why?

One answer could come from applying evolutionary psychology to the SDLC. It’s a topic I’m interested in considering further.

As a start, I’ve looked at The brains rose-colored glasses : Nature Neuroscience.

The best way to think about the problem from The Business’s expectation is:

optimists’ brains fail to generate a learning signal when confronted with the evidence that negative events are more likely to occur than predicted

The foundation of Agile Methods—XP—took this into consideration. XP focused on measuring “velocity” and included rules that used past velocity to govern / temper the optimism of a future iteration.

More details can be found here: optimism

I don’t talk on my cell phone very much. No one in my family does, either. And, according to the New York Times it seems that most people aren’t making cell phone calls, either:

Instead of talking on their cellphones, people are making use of all the extras that iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones were also designed to do — browse the Web, listen to music, watch television, play games and send e-mail and text messages.

via Cellphones Now Used More for Data Than for Calls – NYTimes.com.

The trend being reported on isn’t news, really. But it got me thinking about how much money I spend on mobile data and how much money I waste on unused call minutes. I currently have an iPhone with a $30 unlimited data plan, an 3G-enabled iPad with no monthly data plan and an additional line for work that costs $25 per month for 2 GB. $55 per month for 2 devices PLUS the cost of the calling plan!

AT&T is going to allow personal Wi-Fi hotspot functionality but this will come at an additional charge. The feature will get you 4 GB of data for $45 per month.

It’d be interesting to consider dropping my cell number completely and take all calls on Skype!

MobileCrunch had an interesting post titled “Is Microsoft Really Fighting the Face Down Culture?” where they discuss Microsoft’s marketing messages around the Windows Phone 7 UI.

On the surface the Microsoft ad campaign is amusing but they’re really missing the point of the constantly connected culture we’ve created.  While some mobile tasks are work-based (e.g., checking work email) there’s a huge amount of “head’s down” time that’s of our own choosing: gaming, Facebook-ing, texting…

The article includes a quote from Daring Fireball Linked List: First Windows Phone 7 Ad From Microsoft:

I don’t think people are on their iPhones/Androids/BlackBerrrys all the time because of inefficient UI design. I think it’s because we want to be on them. These devices are where our minds are drawn — like moths to a flame, perhaps — whenever we’re otherwise unoccupied.

A UI won’t change my life with mobile devices. I won’t put them down so I can spend quality time with my kid. Instead I’ll do what I’m doing today: spending quality time with my kid while consuming content together on my mobile devices.

I have no idea how often this is actually used but it’s one solution for “cookie death” that online marketers have had to tackle.

Evercookie is a JavaScript API that takes advantage of a number of available storage locations in a user’s browser to store persistent data. In most cases, the cookie will persist even after a user clears his the cookies from his browser or manually goes in and attempts to delete specific files on the machine.

Evercookie accomplishes this by storing the cookie data in several types of storage mechanisms that are available on the local browser.

via Researchers Find Methods to Kill Persistent ‘Evercookie’

Update: The hits keep coming! http://gizmodo.com/5732010/ios-43-gives-ipad-four-and-five-finger-multi+touch-gesture-support.

It’s incredible to have a device whose operating system gets updated with fantastic new features! For FREE!!

nearly 80 percent of respondents (77.6) said they use their iPads more often now than they did when they first got them

The real key was getting deeper into GoodReader.  I’m using GoodReader to annotate ebooks (PDFs), view email attachments, etc.  It’s able to connect to servers, email accounts,  iDisk, Dropbox and more which is the easiest way I’ve found to transfer content to the iPad.

I’m in the 80 percent. It’s gotten even better since multi-tasking support is added.

via iPad owners’ usage increasing over time.

In the old days of the Web there were “Internet Portals” and Yahoo! was king.  Then Google launched. Google’s simple UI made Yahoo!’s hierarchy seem like a mish-mash of links. So I dropped ‘em in favor of Google…just like everyone else on the planet.

I haven’t given Yahoo! much thought over the last decade. But amid rumors of yet another (get it?) 20% reduction in force I came across this interesting graphic that delineates some key milestones in Yahoo!’s history…and historic slide:

I do like the YUI Library and I also like Douglas Crockford (one of their employees) for his work on JavaScript and JSON.  I even think Yahoo! Pipes is cool. But Yahoo! as a company has been off my radar.

The full article is here: The Brutal Decline Of Yahoo Is Now An Infographic

My earlier post showed a nice visualization of browser stats but, sadly, it stops in August of 2009. To find out what’s going on now take a look at the w3cschools.com’s Browser Statistics page.

I hadn’t looked at these numbers recently and was shocked by 1.) IE’s decline, 2.) Firefox’s total adoption numbers and 3.) Google’s Chrome browser is on a meteoric rise:

Here is an interactive historical display of the major browsers in use on the web: http://www.axiis.org/examples/BrowserMarketShare.html

The graph comes from a set of examples for Axiis which is an open source data visualization framework. Unfortunately, it’s a snapshot in time that stops in August, 2009.

MTV started with “Video Killed the Radio Star“.  I’m going to start with this:

The web sites in the video fly by fast. Here are some of them that relate to cultural anthropology:

• http://savageminds.org/
• http://www.aesonline.org/
• http://www.worldchanging.com/
• http://www.solutionwatch.com/
• http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ca/current
• http://www.ucpress.edu/subject.php?sc=antcul

There’s also a reference to The Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine”: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php. (Interesting enough, I went there and found an archive of this site from 2005 that never got out of it’s embryonic state.)