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Edward Tufte

Graphics Press, ISBN: 0-9613921-5-0 Publisher

Edward Tufte is probably the single most influential authority on communicating complex information graphically. He pretty much wrote the book(s) on the subject in his classic series The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations.

In this short booklet (24 pages), he devastatingly takes to task the shoddy quality of Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, and makes the case this information poverty is intrinsic to the tool itself, due to its limitations such as low resolution (cannot use complex data), poor typography, strong bias towards hierarchical outlines and fluff over substance. In Tufte’s own words:

The PP slide format has probably the worst signal/noise ratio of any known method of communication on paper or computer screen.

This echoes one of the reasons why Sun Microsystems banned PowerPoint slides, their abysmal information per kilobyte ratio. More worryingly,

In day-to-day practice, PowerPoint templates may improve 10% or 20% of all presentations by organizing inept, extremely disorganized speakers at a cost of intellectual damage to 80%.

The booklet is short and sweet. Tufte’s wicked sense of humor comes out in comparisons to Stalinist propaganda or in a set of slides by Peter Norvig showing how PowerPoint could have denatured the Gettysburg Address.

In my experience, PowerPoint slides are mostly used to vehiculate marketing garbage presentations. As such, there isn’t much content to damage in the first place, and the act of showing a PowerPoint presentation is in itself an excellent cue to the audience that they can do their crossword puzzles, tick off their grocery lists on their Palm Pilots or whatever other discreet way is at hand to salvage otherwise completely wasted time.

Tufte’s suggestions for improving the quality of presentations (give high-content handouts, eschew PowerPoint for anything but projecting low-resolution images, and above all, do not read out slides) are mostly useful for scientific or engineering presentations, which is probably a tiny proportion of PowerPoint’s market.

I installed Mozilla Firebird today. As I am encouraging my father to migrate away from the stale IE (since Microsoft obtained near-monopoly status, that browser hasn’t been updated to include such vital features like tabbed browsing), and I have already switched to Safari on my Mac, I also decided to have a new look at Firebird (I had tried an early version of Phoenix, 0.3 I believe). Firebird (formerly Phoenix, soon to be renamed Mozilla Browser) is based on Mozilla, but is less resource-intensive because it does not try to be all things to all people and is just a browser (and not a HTML editor, email program, newsreader, IRC client, dessert topping and floor wax). Firebird will be the official Mozilla browser, replacing the current Mozilla suite in the medium term.

The core rendering engine is the same, and it uses the same XUL cross-platform UI toolkit, so migrating from Mozilla is relatively painless. Bookmarks are compatible. You can even copy over saved passwords, albeit at the cost of removing strong cryptographic password protection on them. To do so, reset the Master password to empty, uncheck the “Use encryption when storing sensitive data”, and copy a file called XYZ.s from your Mozilla profile to your Firebird profile, where XYZ is a random series of digits, for more information see this article.

First impressions:

• It certainly loads faster.

• It honors the Windows default mail and newsreader settings, so when a mailto: URL is encountered, it starts Outlook for me as I would like it to, not the half-baked Mozilla mail client. Big plus!

• The toolbars are customizable

• It does not yet have the DOM inspector and Venkman JavaScript debugger, both very useful for web development, but they will eventually be available as extensions

• No annoying download manager to clean up, instead, a simple download box like IE and Netscape 4

• With a few simple changes to the config files, ads and popups are blocked without having to install a blocker such as WebWasher.

• The “Add bookmarks” command opens a dialog with the complete bookmarks folders hierarchy flattened into a single list (as opposed to a Tree control in Seamonkey). When you have a bookmarks hierarchy as large and complex as mine, this is unusable. I could use the bookmarks sidebar instead, but a more efficient way is to drag-and-drop into the menu, in a way reminiscent of how the Windows Start menu can be rearranged. Neither method is as efficient as Netscape 4’s “File as” functionality, but this comes close.

• The tabs don’t quite look as nice as Seamonkey’s. You do not have the ability to add a group of tabs as a single bookmark, but you can add them as a bookmarks folder, and all bookmarks folders havean “Open in tabs” option. Gain some, lose some.

• Bookmark keyword searching is amazing. For example, I can search IMDB for Hank Azaria by just typing “imdb hank azaria in the URL bar. Admittedly, Seamoney had that capability as well.

• Bookmark separators can have names, which makes for cleaner organization of bookmarks when subfolders are overkill.

I will try it a little bit longer, but I think I might well migrate to Firebird as my primary browser.

Economists use the term “ externality” to describe a situation where economic agents’ decisions are distorted by the fact they do not have to pay for some of the costs of their actions. This is usually addressed by regulation. The textbook example is pollution, but I find security to be at least as interesting.

In the US, the level of security associated with credit cards and credit reporting is abysmal. Most of Europe has switched to smart cards for their credit cards over a decade ago, leading to a much more secure system for offline purchases (which must be authenticated by the smart card and a PIN), rather than easy to tamper magnetic strips (which are kept, to allow visiting US tourists to make purchases). As the PIN code must be entered by the cardholder, a waiter in a restaurant verifies the card at the dining table and does not have the opportunity to engage in skimming.

There is usually no national credit bureau equivalent to Experian, Equifax or Trans Union in most European countries, because these would fall afoul of privacy laws. For this reason, credit card fraud is much rarer in Europe than in the US, and identity theft is almost unheard of.

In both cases, the externality is lax security, leading to lost time for consumers, whether simply an annoyance (credit card fraud) or a serious nightmare (identity theft). Credit reporting services do not bear most of the cost of identity theft, the hapless victims do. For online purchases, merchants are liable for fraud they have limited means to detect, and to add injury to insult, they also have to pay fees for the chargeback. Credit card companies figure the cost of processing claims and absorbing what little fraud they are liable for is less than the cost of upgrading the whole card reader infrastructure to use smart cards. They also think keeping perfunctory verification procedures will reduce barriers to impulse spending and thus increase profits.

They can do this, of course, because industry lobbying groups have been very effective at defeating consumer-friendly legislation in Congress or state legislatures. The time for action has come, however, because credit card fraud is now a primary source of funds for terrorists, whether abroad or in the US. To quote an interesting article in The Economist, it seems Al-Qaeda sometimes acts as a kind of venture capitalist for terror:

Units of his organisation are believed to raise money through financial and other sorts of crime. For example, Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who plotted to bomb Los Angeles airport but later co-operated with American authorities, says he was given $12,000 of seed-money to set up his operation. When he asked for more cash, he was advised to finance himself by credit-card fraud.

For the sake of all, the credit industry cannot be allowed to continue in its complacent ways any more.

Updated 2003-06-02 following comments from “Saffiyya” regarding merchant liability

A friend is moving from San Francisco to Paris, and I told him about a very low-cost option to ship books in bulk, the US Postal Service Airmail M-Bag. I used this service ten years ago when shipping books back from Yale to Paris, some of them were slightly battered in transit but all in all a remarkable service. It is also available for domestic use.

You basically buy the right to send a whole postal mail bag at a wholesale price, which comes to slightly under a dollar per pound for France. Interestingly, the French post office does not offer M-Bags to French customers but will accept those sent by the USPS.

Eric S. Raymond is a celebrity of sorts in the open source world. He is mostly self-aggrandizing, having to his credit a couple of books and two minor email utilities.

A side of him not many geeks are aware of is his frothing-at-the mouth diatribes such as this one. As a person of Indian ancestry, I was tickled by one of the more laughable assertions in this collection of racist and bigoted remarks, that the British somehow “civilized” India, which had highly evolved cities with refinements like sewers in a civilization that dwarfed Egypt 5000 years ago.

British colonialism had everything to do with the extraction of resources through the sheer application of violence (as in their invention of concentration/extermination camps during the Boer war, their ruthlessly efficient genocide in Tasmania, the Opium wars or the Amritsar massacre), not any Kiplingian post-facto rationalizations of a supposed civilizing mission.

I won’t dignify the rest of his viscerally anti-muslim prejudice with comment, but this raises an interesting point. Raymond is a techno-anarchist libertarian, and a neo-paganist. As such, his profile looks very similar to that of the Dutch fascist Pim Fortuyn. There was certainly too much indulgence for Fortuyn’s racist rhetoric and proposed policies simply because he was homosexual, a perfect illustration of what Bertrand Russell called the “fallacy of the moral superiority of the oppressed”.