The Buzz: The tablet doesn’t have real computing power.
The Anti-Buzz: It doesn’t, and that doesn’t matter.
Why: Because a tablet has a perfect view of the cloud.

One last Tuesday in January, one last look forward.

If you were making general tech predictions for 2012, and wanted to play it safe, the rise of the tablet is rich ground to make some inferences from. I think tablets are at the point cell phones were seven or eight years ago; there is going to be a race to the price floor, and an explosion of features.

The feature-splosion will not look the same as it did on cell phones because “apps” are the real features on your tablet. Sure, maybe you’ll get some solid voice recognition on there, and a few other interface enhancements, but the cool thing about the tablet is that tablet users are the ones who make the features. The device itself is going to cost 100 bucks one day, but the real spike is going to be in the usability.

Consider this scenario. I walk into a store, make my purchase, and am rung up on a tablet, not a register, which has small card reader plugged into it that swipes my debit card. The tablet is offered to me and I sign on it and give it back. The catch here is that this isn’t a hypothetical, this is an anecdote. This already happened. It’s happening right now. The war’s already over. Tablet won.

The tablet isn’t a “real” computer in a lot of ways, but it does enjoy the same open-ended modularity. It’s not really just about browsing the web and throwing some birds at some pigs, it’s about all the little pieces of data in our lives having a nice place to rest. Soon you’ll go to a restaurant and the server will take your order on a tablet, and then they won’t even return to the kitchen because now your order is also on the cook’s tablet. This is already happening somewhere, I’m sure. Within the next 5 years it will be normal, and in within the next 10 it will be in McDonald’s.

The basic advantages of computing can be enjoyed on a tablet, and in a form more digestible by “non-computer people” and so the process by which the tablet will swallow a chunk of the PC market has already begun. We won’t get the same schadenfreude we got with newspapers and booksellers and print in general because PC makers are either already entrenched underneath the Android platform, or they are jumping in quick with something. There will be no toppling of empires here, but we can enjoy the happy irony that Barnes and Noble, a bookseller, might one day be in a position to steal a piece of Dell’s market with the Nook.

Of course, a future of iPad restaurants is both a safe bet and an easy one. The mistake a lot of people make is that they believe technology is something that only other people develop. Apps are going to becoming increasingly varied, increasingly niche, and increasingly cheap and it’s not going to be long before you will need to get your fingernails dirty and research what’s out there. These stores that are already swiping cards and taking orders on their tablets are no different than you. They are business owners who have sought and found these solutions themselves.

Is it so far fetched to think that your office could have a tablet in every room instead of a computer? Yes, an office has large needs, and your database won’t fit on a tablet, and neither will the software that renders your x-rays, and large screens will always be of use to you too. So for now you are free to indulge in the fantasy that, hey, you’ve arrived, you have a nice big practice management suite and a fleet of strong computers and you never need to overhaul how you conduct business again. But a tablet is the perfect window into the cloud; in fact, these usable pocket computers are the perfect enabler of the cloud. Finally there is a platform that demands computation to be done elsewhere. A tablet can’t hold your database but it doesn’t need to because it just needs to give you results through a browser. Imagine showing a patient an x-ray, zooming neatly on that dual-touch screen. Imagine tablets instead of clipboards. Imagine your office looking like the halls of the Starship Enterprise.

It’s really not that far away. If I were a developer of practice management software, I would be racing to figure out how I could deliver my product on three computers and ten tablets. Your employees will like it more, will train to it easier, it will take up less space, require less maintenance, and it will cost you a lot less. The modern computer really can do anything, and a race to the price floor in tablets is a race to the price floor in everything.

The Buzz: Social media is trending down and of no use to your business.
The Anti-Buzz: It is still be a good tool and will undoubtedly be more so in the future.

Once again we are abuzz about social media and its use for you, the dentist and so I thought I would weigh in again, as time has granted all of us a bit more wisdom since last time. It is a tricky topic because nobody doubts that you need some sort of web presence, and sites like Yelp have reinforced the notion that the Internet is a strong word-of-mouth vector, yet the prospects of a dentist becoming the hippest thing on Facebook are grim enough that you couldn’t be blamed for not trying. However, in the spirit of it’s-still-January-and-I’m-looking-to-the-future I would urge caution against complacency: You never know when social media will become necessary for your practice. We’ve seen the rise and fall of MySpace and yet the mistake we’re all still making is that we talk about social media and Facebook as if they were the same thing. You should know how this works by now: things will change.

First, the bad news. The bad news for social media is that it is a burst bubble. The influx of new users is waning, and many upstart social media companies are failing, expected to fail, or considered overvalued. Don’t let this trick you into dismissing social media as some silly “fad” – this would be like dismissing the personal computer in 1985 because it wasn’t ready for dental-practice-prime-time.

The bad news for you is that social media isn’t exactly dentist friendly anyway. Yelp and similar sites are great for consumers in that they provide a source of reviews, and when the small business in question is a restaurant or hobby shop, there is usually a “personality” that can be well-represented in other contexts like Facebook Fan Pages or twitter-feeds-that-actually-have-followers. However, a dental practice, aside from your own web page, is likely to only be well-represented in these review-site contexts, and unfortunately these are contexts where you have little control. In places where you have control, (Facebook), gaining followers is an uphill battle.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that social media has given you many powerful tools and you should embrace them, (this is more or less what was advocated here and I understand Deploy Dental will be offering more advice soon: take it). There is no doubt you need some web presence; not having a web page for your practice is like volunteering to be removed from the Yellow Pages. So while your Facebook Fan Page might not draw a lot of interest, these social sites have provided you with a platform for hosting the resources you need to share with your customers. Your site should want a list of announcements, especially if you are the sort to make special offers. This can be a twitter feed, and embedded into your site. Have an informative video? Host it on YouTube. A slide show of images? Flickr or Photobucket. An interactive presentation that lets patients explore your practice? You know I love Prezi. The mistake thus far has been that we have asked what social media does for us. Turns out the appropriate question was: what can you do with it?

And what about the future? Even while the immediate value of existing outlets might be questionable, social media, despite hitting an economic plateau, is indicative of how a lot of humans want to interact with each other now. That change has already happened. It’s done. The decision has been made. What gets lost in the jealous buzz of who likes what network and why and how much money gets shuttled where is that social media the idea has brought an enormous number of  people to the Internet, and for many people it is their home base for their “Internet Day.” Not everybody surfs Facebook during lunch, (I don’t), and for many the novelty of social media wears off after a few months, but it is still the paradigm that defines how the average person interacts with the Internet. Eventually you are going to have to adjust for this, even if today is not the day and 2012 is not the year.

Consider Fitocracy, a newer social media site built around the idea of users sharing their fitness routines with each other. There are a number of things this site does well, most especially that people tend to stick to their workout schedules when they feel like their friends are watching. The idea of specialized social networks should make you perk up. You might not ever leverage the 70 trillion Facebook users out there, but as an example imagine a smaller network devoted to healthy lifestyle – we’ll call it HealthBrag – where people track the contents of their fridge, store and share recipes, share pictures of what they cook and eat because it is so much better than what their friends cook and eat, and provide links to their doctor, yoga instructor and dentist. Suddenly all the cool dentists are on HealthBrag and if you’re still fumbling with how all of this works, you’ll be left behind.

The Buzz: Piracy stifles creative talent.
The Anti-Buzz: No, obscurity stifles creative talent.
Why: The more you’re known, the more you’ll sell.

Dentists, you have it easy. As content producers your dentistry service is very hard to pirate.

Tomorrow – Wednesday, January 18th – might be an interesting day if these rumors are to be believed. For one, you won’t be able to read this Cory Doctorow article I am linking you to right now, you’ll have to read it today or Thursday.

UPDATE: This is the Google home page Jan 18, 2012. It is intended as a protest to the proposed SOPA and PIPA laws discussed in this article. (from the editor)

UPDATE 2: Related Article

UPDATE 3: SOPA blackout leads co-sponsors to defect

I try to avoid ham-fisted political opinion, and really try to avoid outright rants, but in January when I still look to the coming year it would be naive not to recognize that any discussion of tech trends has to consider the impact national governments have on our ability to innovate and communicate.

Social Media bubble? Cheaper tablets? Better voice recognition? You’ve never read a 2012 predictions article that predicts congress will break the Internet, have you? My father doesn’t shy from discussing the politics of health care, and so I will not shy from the politics of information technology.

Even so, the Doctorow article I just linked provides all the fiery argument I need. Go read Doctorow, then come back for my comments if you wish.

In a more cool-headed moment, I like to think that all of the panic is just that: panic. Which is not to say that I support SOPA, PIPA or any of our government’s other misguided attempts to regulate the unregulatable, but I sometimes think it too is just that: unregulatable. The cat is already out of the bag. Legislation such as this might have been devastating in 1996, when people still watched TV on their TV, and we relied on Seinfeld, not idle college students, to provide us with our communal sense of popular culture. However, if congress really does kill the Internet as we know it, I can’t imagine it will do so without backpedaling quickly.

I suppose a more violent, apocalyptic scenario is possible, but I’m more optimistic about the character of all actors involved. All in all, this is going to end about as well as Prohibition did; instead of playing Mafia on Facebook we’ll just be getting our Internet from the actual mafia.

(Editor’s note: The deeply flawed SOPA law that has caused much of this discussion has been dropped from the House agenda and is at least for now politically dead. Never the less the underlying issues are still active and important.)

The broader story that Doctorow describes – the war on general-purpose computing – is a very real one. I’ve batted around the topic of how innovation is counter-intuitive already; well, as Doctorow stresses, the impact of general-purpose computing is also counter-intuitive. With the general purpose computer, we’ve developed a technology that can, in fact, do anything, and it’s impact is hard to fathom. We’re only scratching the surface of what computing means for humanity, but still the common perception of computers are that they do the things that you use them for, not that they do anything. This mistake is what threatens computing most of all because it engenders the idea that computers are narrow tools that can be moderated.

Today, the battle is being fought over piracy. The intuitive understanding of piracy is that it siphons profits away from the artist. After these past weeks, you should probably expect that “intuitive understanding” is anti-buzz speak for “wrong.” The elephant in the corner is that there is no actual evidence that piracy damages an artist’s ability to profit. To a lot of people this sounds like crazy talk, (because, I admit, it is soooo unintuitive), but our friend Cory Doctorow has made all of his novels available for free here since the beginning of his career. He makes comparisons of himself to other authors who write similar novels of similar quality at similar times with similar reviews. The difference between him, the best-selling author, and the other guy is that his stuff is widely available.

When someone posts their home videos on you tube, accompanied by a Uriah Heep song, it violates copyright, but it also makes it more likely that one of their friends will discover that they like Uriah Heep, find other Uriah Heep songs online, and then purchase several albums. Or maybe they are lame and they only steal the songs. Maybe they play a bunch of Heep at their New Year’s party and one of their friends realize that, hey, they kind of like Uriah Heep … This is, of course, a hypothetical anecdote, but if you restructure your assumptions, it stops feeling so far fetched to consider that a relaxed attitude toward copyright protection is only going to increase the odds that somebody, somewhere is going to stumble upon your art and start paying you for it. The people in this chain of friends are people who would otherwise have been unexposed to Uriah Heep and never would have bought their music anyway. The argument is that those who are stealin’ when they shoulda been buyin’ are dwarfed by those who will buy it after they try it.

Exposure – it’s why there are free samples in grocery stores, product giveaways, giant sales, and music given away for free on the radio. Wanting to thwart large-scale piracy makes some degree of sense, but the vast majority of copyright violations these days aren’t organized crime rings, but just people being social and sharing and more or less giving free radio air time to the entertainment industry. Hollywood’s idea of copyright protection is an unfortunate catch-22 – they only want to give you access to their content if you pay for it, but you’re only going to pay for it if you’ve been exposed to it already. This is the old, inefficient, media-through-a-straw model of the 20th Century and Hollywood only clings to it because it is what they are used to. It seems hypocritical that the same people who want to “go viral” also want to lock up all their content in a box. They want you to give them money, but they don’t want you to have any fun with their product.

These aren’t my words, but: An artist’s greatest enemy isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.

However, I admit, that those of us who scoff at the worries of piracy often don’t suggest alternatives. Just let them get away with it? Maybe, in a legal sense, yeah. When you obsess over piracy, you kill that most coveted of marketing tools: word of mouth. So how do you combat piracy without throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Think of the medicine show: don’t settle for substitutes. Did iTunes stop people from sharing music online? Or did it just make legitimate purchases of music more convenient than stealing it? Convenience is piracy’s greatest enemy. Have you ever actually tried to steal a whole album  of music from the Internet? It’s really annoying. The connection is unreliable and slow, you often get imperfect duplications, such as tracks where you hear the CD skipping, or lower resolution. You assemble an entire album and none of it is recorded at the same quality and one song is accidentally the live version. At this point, you’ll gladly pay money to, like the medicine show says, not settle for substitutes.

You beat piracy by being better than it. If your legitimate, for-profit operation can’t deliver your product better than the basement-dwelling pirate with no budget, you deserve to fail. Legitimate digital marketplaces have surged in the last few years. From books to games to movies to music to television to “apps”, you are, right now only a few seconds away from purchasing whatever entertainment you want, which is quite a bit better than piracy is ever going to do.

In the spirit of the new year, I wrote last week about innovation and how it defies intuition. With the year still pretty new I’d like to keep such lofty ideas in the air. While I’ve waxed philosophic on innovation a few times, there really isn’t some magical strategy that just makes you innovate. In practice, you have to exercise your ability to think differently and to think counterintuitively. But what, specifically, can help you do that?

As I do get the “math and science” bug now and then, I want to go with that. Over the last few years I’ve learned a good deal more math than I used to know, and along the way I became fascinated with a particular law of probabilty. Now, bear in mind that this is a *law*, rigorously proven by math, and cannot be refuted by anyone, ever. It’s called Emmott’s Law and it goes like this: Probability has a 100% chance of being counterintuitive. Nothing separates the mathematicians from the employed quite like probability. So, against my better judgment …

The Buzz: Marilyn vos Savant was wrong that one time.
The Anti-Buzz: No, she wasn’t.
Why: I don’t know why I want to visit the horrors of the Monty Hall problem upon myself.

Actually, yes I do. I rarely get comments from you and it makes me sad, and nothing gets non-mathematicians talking about math quite like the Monty Hall problem. So go read about it here and here.

The summary is that a prize is behind one of three doors, and you choose one, but before you open it Monty Hall floats down from the sky and opens one of the other doors, constrained that he will never open the door with the prize, (that part is important), then offers you the chance to switch to the other unopened door. The question is, does switching doors increase your odds of getting the prize? The solution is that your odds of getting the prize are 2/3 if you switch, and 1/3 if you don’t, so yes.

People hate this claim, but it’s correct. It defies casual intuition, (either door is just a random guess, so they should have the same odds, right?), and people like to think that scientists are crazy and don’t live in the real world, so they are wrong because in the real world doors don’t play tricks like that. In seriousness though, not every one reads Parade magazine, so if the solution bothers you, go read about it.

I’m not here to just explain the most-explained math problem in the past 20 years because it’s already been done, ad naseum, for about 20 years. Instead I want to discuss why the popular perception of this problem, and probability in general, are important.

First, Savant’s famous discussion of the problem was not the first formulation of the problem, nor was she the first to come up with the solution, but it was the first time the problem was widely known, even in academic circles. Savant received some 1,000 letters from real actual mathematicians insisting that she was wrong, (despite publish mathematics papers 15 years prior that demonstrated otherwise). The bitter irony were those attacking her for perpetuating the deplorable state of mathematics education in this country, without realizing exactly how deplorable it really was, (and I’m sure MIT enjoys being the only university to initially accept the solution). If you don’t like this problem, don’t feel bad, because even the smartest of people got it wrong.

Go back to last week when I said that yesterday’s innovation is today’s common sense. I’m working on a PhD of my own, but as of this writing I am maybe only half as educated as the horde of mathematicians who foolishly lambasted Savant 20 years ago, but my story is that the Monty Hall problem is a part of one lecture one day in a sophmore level discrete math class. The eldritch magic that thwarted the great masters in 1990 is just a common mathemagical incantation in 2012, a bone thrown to any 20-year old willing to sit through discrete math. Deplorable mathematics education indeed; the paradigm shifted and we live in a post-Monty Hall world.

However, the world after the storm is fraught with the same problem: people were too accepting of the status quo, and they still are. Now any yahoo knows that when Monty Hall asks you to switch, you say yes, but most of these people couldn’t tell you why. In 1990 Savant was wrong because a bunch of mathematicians said she was and so, by the laws of peer pressure, she was wrong. Now every mathematicians says she is right and so, by the laws of peer pressure, she is right. Both worlds are just worlds where authority is given power when the math gets too hard. The person who reads the Monty Hall solution today and insists that switching doors does not improve your odds of winning is still wrong, but they are also a hero of sorts, because they are actually making an effort to understand the universe better and not simply accept the established wisdom. If they applied that attitude to something else, they might just invent the next tablet PC.

The other interesting discussion is why people so regularly get this question wrong. It raises serious questions about casual intuition about strategy and probability. The most often cited “bad intuitions” are that people tend to assume that all events are uniformly distributed, that all events are independent of each other, and that information does not change probability. I see these assumptions all the time, even among my colleagues.

Most people are used to dice or coins. A die is uniformly distributed, (all sides have equal probability of being rolled), and so is a coin. Die rolls are independent of each other. What you roll on one die does not affect what you roll on the other. Same with coins. Most people understand this too well – we all have that irritating friend who thinks magical fairness ghosts have control of the dice and will make a 5 more likely to come up because it is “due” – but most people have no idea what dependent events or conditional probability look like, (Hint: It looks kind of like Monty Hall floating down from the sky. With diamonds). Unfortunately, your casual interactions with probability set you up for failure. Nothing that matters behaves like dice.

And yes, information does change probability. Probabilities are not decrees from God, they are just calculations made with current information. When the information changes, so does the probability. If I roll a die and ask you for the odds that I rolled a 5, you would say 1/6. Correct. If I told you that the number I rolled was even, now what are the odds I rolled a 5? Zero. I can’t have rolled an even number and a five, it’s impossible. But a moment ago it was 1/6, not zero! I didn’t move the die, I just gave you information! Instead, if I told you that the number I rolled was odd, now what are the odds I rolled a 5? It’s not zero, but it’s not 1/6 either; it’s 1/3. Information changes probability, because probability is just a guess based on what is known.

So my question to you is, how often have your decisions and policies gone unchanged in the face of new information? How often have you overvalued your initial decision, trusted the status quo, and refused to switch doors? How often have you treated new information as irrelevant noise? That’s the lesson you should take from the Monty Hall problem, not the math, but avoiding the angry status quo stampede when you know it is wrong.

If you like this sort of puzzle, I suggest you try the Boy or Girl problem, and if you really want to shatter your intuition in half, google the “blue eyes island” problem, (I have reasons for not linking directly).

In the spirit of counterintuitive logic, I leave you with the best math joke of 2011:

Three logicians walk into a bar. The bartender asks, “do all of you want a drink?” The first logician says “I don’t know,” the second one says “I don’t know,” and the third one says, “yes.”

The Buzz: The wise observer is able to predict all tech trends.

The Anti-buzz: True innovation is always unpredictable.
Why: Because difficult problems always defy intuition.

Happy New Year! I’ve been at a loss for how to kick off the New Year in anti-buzz fashion. Do I review the past year? Do I make bold predictions about the coming year? I think the first is too easy and the latter is too hard, but this dichotomy is itself a good topic on it’s own.

This, of course, is not to step on my father’s toes regarding his own predictions, but big sweeping innovations tend to surprise us and we all collectively scratch our heads and wonder why we didn’t see it coming.

How can it be that bold innovations seem so obvious in retrospect, but are impossible to predict beforehand? This feels especially true with consumer electronics because a requirement of success with consumer electronics are that they are intuitive to use, and so the “seems so obvious” factor is exaggerated.

 For example, nobody asked for tablet PCs – the consumer didn’t see them coming – but once we saw them we all nodded and said, “Yes, that is what I want.”

And it’s fairly easy to summarize why tablets have been successful, what trends and signs should have helped us predict them, and what impact they might have on the near future. My quick take on tablets is this: They are netbooks. They fill the same function for users. People want the Internet without the computer, and they want it to weigh 2 pounds and fit in their briefcase. If I am to make one prediction for 2012, it’s that it will be the year we see the netbook die, but this is a pretty cowardly prediction. However, if you consider what I said about innovation a few weeks ago, iPad vs. netbook is a pretty good example of how these transitions happen. The iPad doesn’t out-netbook the netbook, it instead addresses the same public demand in a radically different way.

But why are things that feel so obvious so hard to predict? The seemingly paradoxical answer is that they defy intuition, (Yeah I know, “How does intuitive software defy intuition?”). It would be good to qualify “intuition” here. One might liken it to common sense. Intuition is imperfect, but it is fast and nearly always adequate. Intuition is what keeps you safe, what quickly solves most of your problems, and what keeps human civilization efficient. People make mistakes, and they make a lot of them, but as someone who studies artificial intelligence let me tell you: People spend most of their time making intelligent decisions, and making them quickly, and most amazingly, making them without a lot of facts or evidence. The human capacity to “just know” the right thing to do is amazing. We accomplish this with our magic bag of rules-of-thumb. Let’s call this bag intuition.

So here’s the catch: difficult problems cannot be solved with intuition.

Difficult problems need all the evidence, and also need the flexibility to ignore prior beliefs about the universe. Old rules-of-thumb become barriers to discovering something new or solving the unsolved. The cliche “thinking outside the box” comes to mind here. When you think of “difficult problem” you probably think of tax codes and other economic policies, or the cure for cancer, genetics and other medical research, or space travel, or electrical engineering and microscopic manufacturing techniques. Those are all difficult problems and all require counter-intuitive solutions.

The “gotcha” I’m going to provide here is this: pleasing consumers, that is, inventing new products that people actually want to buy, is also a difficult problem. Perhaps not as difficult as cancer, but definitely outside the box. Figuring out what will make people happier is hard work, and usually defies intuition. The new industry wisdom is that consumers often don’t actually know what they want. Asking consumers what they’d like to see on a product often pleases nobody, because the consumer isn’t obligated to inconvenience themselves with thinking outside the box, especially about the gadgets whose sole purpose is never to inconvenience them. The true innovator is able to know the consumer better than they know themselves.

The life-cycle of innovation, however, is that yesterday’s crazy counter-intuitive invention or scientific breakthrough is today’s common sense rule of thumb. Not that long ago the idea that our health can be affected by tiny organisms that we can’t see sounded crazy. Today, only a small percentage of us are doctors or biologists, and yet we all make pretty good guesses about sanitation that would have boggled the minds of yesteryear’s geniuses. Similarly, few of us are economists, but a lot of us have an intuitive understanding of business and capitalism that would have defied all intuition 200 years ago.

And so, simple as that, the lot of us will once again fail to see the next tablet PC coming, and will once again slap our palms to our forehead after it gets here, because that’s how it has always been: today’s innovation is tomorrow’s common sense.

The Buzz: Video Games speak their own language, and not everyone understands.

The Anti-Buzz: Video Games actually live and die by being easy to learn and understand.

If you are a parent, it seems likely that at some point this holiday season your children received that greatest gift of all: video games. There could be a series of articles on how the gaming industry drives advances in consumer electronics. The most obvious avenue is graphics; it would not be hard to convince you that as game makers sought to make their games more attractive than the competition, you gained the ability to turn your X-Rays into 3D models of your patients’ mouths.

In this post-holiday calm, it seems likely that you are either watching children play some sort of electronic game, or you are playing those games yourself, (or both). If you catch yourself wondering what the value of such activity is, I’m going to give you something new to think about: the gaming industry is on the cutting edge of user interfaces.

Even in academic circles, a lot of attention is given to studying how users interact with their technology, and how that interaction can be improved. User-friendliness is something I wrote generically about a while ago. What gets missed by both users and developers alike is that the gaming industry is a ruthless proving ground for exploring user-friendly interfaces.

If you think about, it makes sense. If video games don’t appeal to you, you might dismiss them as confusing or absurd, but in reality, much as games might compete over graphics and try to out-pretty each other, they are also competing to be easy to understand and learn, (This is not the same as being easy to master or easy to complete – just easy to dive into). With hundreds of app stores and flash libraries out there, another game is just a click away, so if yours is unnecessarily annoying, or trips over itself, you will lose your audience.

Gone are the days of the instruction booklet. Today, games teach you how to play them, often very gradually. This is referred to as “player training” and it models exactly what other software developers wish they could do with their products: train their users. Games do have some psychological advantages over, say, practice management software, but at the end of the day engineers too often ignore what game developers achieve in regards to user-training and intuitive interface design.

A rather famous and easily digestible example of player training is the game Portal, which might be the game that gets you into gaming as it is short, exercises your brain in unique ways, and very gradually teaches you how to play without you realizing that it is teaching you how to play. In fact, the game is so short that it is sometimes joked that the game is actually about player training because by the time you learn everything, the game is over. The real reason I mention this game is that it comes with a DVD-style developer commentary that provides what might be some of the best consumer-digestible insight into what I’m talking about, and it affirms the notion that game developers are very concerned with how accessible their game is to the user. Portal is almost “User-friendliness: the Game” except apparently the game also has something to do with portals, I guess.

Depending on your background as a gamer, this article may or may not resonate with you. It is just one of many such blog entries by game developers discussing the planning that goes into making their games. The quick summary is that the game “cheats” on behalf of the user, correcting small mistakes for the sake of making the game more intuitive and playable. This is hardly the first game to do such a thing, but this developer’s articulation of the philosophy is somewhat profound: Take input from the user, figure out what they want, then make it happen. This translates pretty well to software development in general.

The idea isn’t as simple as it sounds. In fact you might be asking, “Isn’t that what all software does?” The answer is no, it doesn’t. What software does is take input from the user, interpret that input very literally according to a strict set of rules about how that piece of software works, and then makes those things happen. The idea is that sensible intuitive things should happen in reaction to your input. This is, admittedly, much easier to implement in a game than it is in practice management software. Most of the time, a game developer can make assumptions about what the player’s goals are, (hint: the player is trying to win). A user’s goals in Dentrix are not always clear. Practice management software is orders of magnitude more complex than a game, and your use of it is pretty open-ended. Inferring what you might want to see happen is something, that, well, still requires a lot of research.

I attended a lecture on research being done to improve typical GUI components and this came up. It is usually easy to guess what button/scrollbar/text field the user means to click on, but there are a lot of objects that the user rarely uses that litter the screen, and this obscures how to make good guesses sometimes. On the other hand, I’m amazed at how my big fat fingers can mush into my iPod and it figures out what I want. It’s all a work in progress.

I am playing the role of Santa this week. I have brought you a sack of toys. Well, a sack of topics anyway. There are things in the spirit of this column that don’t really lend themselves to a full article, but I’m itching to address them. So prepare yourself for a series of mini-buzzes.

The buzz: Macs are not PCs.

The anti-buzz: PC stands for “Personal Computer”

So unless Mac fans want to admit they aren’t using a real computer, this distinction is erroneous. It would be like Budweiser launching a “Bud Light vs. Beer” ad campaign; we’d all chuckle and ask, “so you admit that Bud Light isn’t beer?”

I’ll grant that referring to non-Macs as PCs is a pet peeve of mine and I’ll grant that I’m being a little pedantic by making light of it, and I’ll also grant that Apple isn’t entirely responsible for the labeling anyway, even if it was their ads that popularized the nomenclature. But there really is more at stake here. A few years ago the “Mac vs. PC” dichotomy was relatively harmless. Now consumers are offered many alternatives to personal computers, notably tablets and smart phones, and further gray areas forged by e-readers and music players.

Smart consumers need to be aware of what a personal computer is, and what it offers that tablets and smart phones don’t, (and vice versa). Smart consumers need to stop thinking that the opposite of a PC is a Mac, because it isn’t.

The buzz: Half of everything is above average.

The anti-buzz: No, half of everything is above median.

More from the math/science/statistics rant scene, the misuse of the word “average.” Perhaps it is not really misuse, but unfortunate ambiguity.

“Average” is actually a broad term, but it is colloquially used to indicate the arithmetic mean. It is not actually wrong to say “average” when you mean “median”, but it is not what most people understand when you use the word that way. A lot of people conflate properties of mean and median and lump them under the superconcept of “average” and then start to infer or say misleading things.

A thought experiment: Assume there are only 10 dentists in the world, and that you can score these dentists from 0 to 100. Assume that 2 of them score at 100, 3 of them score at 96, 3 of them score at 80, and 2 of them score at an embarrassing 11. In this world, the average dentist scores at 75, and 8 of 10 (or four out of five dentists if you like) dentists are above average. What gets lost here is that the dentists who score 80 are among the worst half of dentists. Most people understand all this when you tell it to them so simply, but their day-to-day intuition always seems to revert back to thinking that “average” and “median” are the same thing.

The buzz: Unix is an old-fashioned, text-only operating system.

The anti-buzz: Today, Unix is a standard, and many things follow it.

This could be an article by itself, but it would easily be the most boring thing I have ever written. It can be a tendency to think of old text-and-arrow-keys applications when you hear the word “Unix.” When a modern operating system claims to be Unix, it can seem laughable to think that some enthusiasts are hunched over a blinking rectangular cursor and calling themselves “power users.” And if that were actually the case then Unix definitely would be laughable.

However, Unix is really just an operating system standard. Mac OS X is a Unix system. Linux is a Unix system. Google’s Chrome OS is a Unix system. For the typical user, all of the similarities are under the hood. Explaining it all is beyond the scope of this column.

If you want a quick takeaway on what the Unix standard means, the inside joke is that in Unix, everything is a file. The pipe between two processes is a file. The stream of data from your hardware is a file. All of your keyboard input is a file. Folders are files. Everything is a file. Now you know!

The buzz: Science is either good (right) or bad (wrong).

The anti-buzz: Actually, a lot of science is just mediocre.

I took up arms over common misinformation in popular science and statistics, but there is a broader, more abstract misconception that plagues the popular notion of science. Psychological studies on why male college students like pancakes more than female college students are easy enough to dismiss as harmless, regardless of their veracity. A lot of pop science is fluff.

However, sometimes it is not fluff. Sometimes it becomes politicians arguing over the results of studies on greenhouse gases. Sometimes it affects public policy, and when science becomes political, things get polarized.

So it is easy to forget that scientific results and scientific dialog are rarely so black and white. Most science is mediocre; one wonders why a particular strategy was used, or if a set of results isn’t a little underwhelming, but rarely does it happen that research is deemed “correct” or “incorrect”. Insight into universal truth rarely comes, and dismissal of “flawed” research would stymie a lot of progress.

The buzz: Virtual Memory allows you to have as much RAM as you need.

The anti-buzz: And you can just keep hitching trailers to the back of your car and have as much trunk space as you need too.

Many people are excited to learn that memory is interchangeable. It is. To a computer, all memory is just memory. You need temporary memory to juggle the tasks at hand, and you need permanent memory to store your files and data and applications for later use. And to this end you can use part of your hard disk as “virtual” memory – memory that bolsters your temporary memory, commonly referred to as “RAM”, (although “random-access memory” actually applies to everything that is rewritable and arbitrarily navigable, from magnetic tapes to solid state drives).

So, it’s true, your machine can effectively have more RAM by setting aside part of your hard disk. The revelation is that you don’t really want to. Such “virtual” memory, (scare quotes because there is nothing virtual about it – it’s memory), is for emergencies only. Hard disk access is sloooooow. If we slowed down time, and let one processor cycle take one second, then the amount of time it takes to retrieve data from traditional RAM is about 15 seconds, and the amount of time needed to retrieve data from a hard disk is 300 years. The difference is indeed that stark.

So the next time you take solace in your virtual memory, remember that the opposite is actually what happens more often: Parts of your hard disk are cached into your speedier temporary memory and manipulated there, written back to the real hard disk only when it is convenient. This gives a huge performance gain, and it is also why doing things like shutting off your computer without selecting “shut down” from some menu, or yanking out a flash memory stick without properly “ejecting” it can result in the loss of data. What you really need isn’t virtual memory, it’s virtual hard disk.

The Buzz: Operating Systems are a brand, inseparable from the machine they are sold with.

The Anti-Buzz: Operating Systems are just mediators, and more interchangeable than you might think.

So for me last week was finals week, which means I forgot to write an article for you guys, (you might have noticed?). So last Tuesday, instead of waxing philosophic about computers, I was preparing for and taking an exam on operating systems. And while I failed to pull together an article for you, it did occur to me that a good thing to cover here would be just that: operating systems. My recent impulse to babble about math and science is probably better tempered by a practical topic now and then anyway. So, operating systems: How do they work? What is their relationship with your hardware?

Where is the operating system?

The first thing that might come to mind for most people is that when they think of operating systems, they probably only think of two options: Mac and Windows. This is fine, but it does ignore the fact that your smart phone, (even if it is a “Windows” phone), has an operating system, as does your tablet and your Kindle. Of course, pointing this out only exacerbates the first common misconception I’d like to destroy, which is that the OS has anything to do with your hardware. If your observe that the iOS is only on iPhones, Mac OS is only on Macs, and Windows is only on “PCs”, (those scare quotes will be explained next week), you’d be forgiven for thinking that the OS was in fact part of the hardware itself, that it was encoded, at least partially, in the actual transistors of your machine.

No, all operating systems are 100% pure software, and they 100% live on your hard disk. They are just programs, not unlike all that other software you use. They are, however, incredibly reliant on the hardware they work with, so in some way specialized cases, such as your smart phone, both the hardware and the operating system were designed with each other in mind. However, computing hardware and software have become increasingly modular in design, so it is likely that all of these components can be made interchangeable, with some work, (That is, iOS on your PC, Windows 7 on your Kindle, whatever).

In fact we have seen this already to some extent, as it was widely publicized that a little elbow grease could get Chrome OS installed on a Nook Color, effectively turning it into a tablet at a fraction of the cost. In a brilliant stroke of 21st century thinking, Barnes & Noble responded by saying “Cool, we’ll just sell them this way,” instead of the usual, paranoid protect-our-product-from-our-customers that we are used to seeing from the entertainment industry, (I wouldn’t be surprised if, being a bookseller-that-survived-the-great-reckoning, B&N has a better set of priorities than many software companies).

Anyway, less surprising, (But maybe you did not know?), is that you can install Windows on your MacBook, and Linux too if you are so inclined. Some of you might be a little surprised to think of a machine with multiple operating systems, (you just pick which one you want to use when you boot up), but that should drive home the point that operating systems are just software, and all your things: photos, music, documents are just data. In my case I listen to the exact same mp3s when I am using Windows as I do when I am using Linux – it’s just data, and the operating system is just a portal to that data.

How does the operating system use the hardware?

Again, the OS is extremely reliant on hardware, most especially the CPU. A compiled OS will only work with one architecture, which was the real sticking point in the 90s…

 when considering the rift between Mac and Windows: they both were made to run on entirely different CPU architectures. Apple has since switched to Intel from PowerPC, and Intel rival AMD makes processors that obey the same instructions set as Intel. So Mac, Windows and Linux can all be run somewhat interchangeably on the same hardware.

Except, why do you only find Mac OS on Apple products? Because the OS is also reliant on device drivers, (Drivers, again, being pure software, that are effectively a bridge between the OS and the actual hardware). Very intentionally, Apple has ensured that Mac OS only has drivers for the hardware that their products actually use, thus ensuring that Mac OS will only work on Apple products, while Windows can be installed on a myriad of configurations, (And thus, there are myriad manufacturers), $including$ Apple products. This is why you can install Windows on your Mac, but not Mac on your PC, because Apple has intentionally created this barrier. This barrier is actually fairly small because there is no theoretical reason why Mac OS can’t be run on a larger scope of machines, and in fact there is a community based around doing just that.

So those are two primary hooks that cause hardware to limit your choice of systems, CPU model and the existence of drivers. At the end of the day, your operating system is the only software that actually has the privilege of interacting directly with any hardware, (including the CPU), and this is actually the entire point of an OS – to provide an abstraction of your hardware resources to other programs stored on your hard disk.

So why can’t I run Mac programs in Windows and vice versa?

In many cases the architecture is the same, which means that anymore there is not actually that much of a difference between compiled binaries of programs meant to run on different operating systems. However, the OS is the great mediator, and so any access to hardware goes through the OS, and each OS handles these things differently. When programs are compiled, they are still compiled to be OS-specific, even if they often share the CPU architecture, because going through the operating system uses system calls, and they are different for every OS. However, modular software libraries have made it increasingly such that making a Mac version and a Windows version of the same program is almost just a matter of just compiling twice.

The divide between operating systems is made worse by a lack of unity among file systems. A file system, at the end of the day, is just a schema for how files are organized on a hard disk, (Here, files includes your applications), and some operating systems only want to work with a subset of the file systems out there. In the case of Mac and Windows, they have to be really coaxed to even look at a drive formatted in the file system of the other.

So how does the operating system actually boot up and start running?

Terminology time! You’ve probably heard of a few of these terms, but never quite got the lowdown on what they are. Life on your computer begins with the motherboard and its firmware. On non-Apples this is referred to as BIOS, while Apple uses AFI. Firmware is software that is stored directly on a piece of hardware, (So your BIOS is not on your hard disk anywhere, it is stored in a tiny disk somewhere on your motherboard). So, the power goes on and your motherboard begins running its firmware, which in turn wakes up all your other hardware, makes sure it can see them, and then it tries to relinquish control over to some operating system, typically by looking for one on your hard drive.

When you start up your machine and get that wall of text, usually with stats about your hardware, before you get to your Windows loading screen or whatever, that is your firmware talking, and that is actually specific to your hardware, and will look the same regardless of what OS you eventually boot into.

The program that gets run by the firmware when it wants to boot up your operating system is called the kernel, (because it is the seed for everything that follows). The kernel is the operating system, these terms are practically interchangeable. This is the program that manages everything: which program runs on which processor and for how long, who gets access to what memory, and so on. All of that micromanaging required to mediate your software and your hardware, that’s what the operating system does, and that’s what the kernel does.

But what about windows and buttons and the GUI I use to start all my applications? Isn’t that the operating system?

Yes and no. Here is the other common misconception about operating systems. Users equate the abstraction of Finders and Docks and Start Menus with there actual operating system. The thing with the windows and the folders that let’s you navigate your computer and do stuff? That’s not your operating system, that’s a shell. A shell is a program that allows the user to issue commands directly to the operating system. And yes, clicking on the Start Menu and selecting a program counts as issuing a command to your operating system – “issuing a command directly to your operating system” isn’t some crazy hard-core thing that only happens on a text-only console.

So I say “yes and no” because it should be obvious that you can’t really use an operating system without at least one shell, which is why the casual user might equate them. Also, much as the firmware looks for a kernel, the kernel needs to start up at least one shell after it gets a grip on your hardware.

So, you can only be using one OS at a time, but any OS can have any number of shells. Most people just only use the one, the nice graphical one designed specifically for whatever your OS of choice is. The old-fashioned command line interface, still available on all machines, is another type of shell you could be using. But even among graphical interfaces, there is nothing to stop you from having multiple options for graphical shells, as is the case with Linux, where you can install a variety of different GUIs and use them all to navigate your files and launch applications.

I’m not trying to sell you on Linux, just trying to get you to understand that your operating system only sees things like “Start Microsoft Word” and doesn’t really care if it received that command from a user typing onto the command line or a user clicking on some icons. That thing where you click on icons is just another application, one meant specifically for you to tell the kernel what you want to see happen next.

I’m out of space here for this week, but I think I hit the basics pretty well. Next week I’ll play the part of Santa and give you a bag of goodies. Until then!

The Buzz: Paradigm shifts are large, obvious and revolutionary.
The Anti-Buzz: Paradigm shifts often happen at a much smaller scale, and sometimes go unnoticed.

So this is a technology blog and we technophiles love to talk about, say, e-books and how the traditional publishing world has come unraveled. We like stories about giants falling. A lot of people take some joy in the downfall of Blockbuster and Borders, not out of spite for either of those companies but just because it seems to be evidence that the world really is changing, changing quickly, and anyone who fails to adapt will fail utterly, even giant thought-to-be-invincible corporations. We like to get a good chuckle about how reliant we are on services that didn’t even exist five years ago. We are, in short, giddy over our near past and near future.

It has already been some years that the cellphone replaced the television as “the technology we hate but can’t live without,” (you’d think the declaration that people can live without television would have given some companies fair warning …) In an episode of Star Trek Data explains away television as a form of entertainment that went out of style in the 2040s. This will probably be the only accurate prediction in Star Trek canon. I think the cellphone would be dethroned shortly by social networking sites, except for the fact that a lot of people interface with those sites on their cellphone, so it’s probably a wash. The right name for it is “that thing where I am in constant contact with everyone I know.” Hate it, can’t live without it.

So, anyway, we’re all abuzz with the big changes, how empires topple and how things will never be the same. We often miss the small details, the non-headlines that make up the gradual evolution of how we run our lives. Paradigm shifts can happen in the micro. Nobody would dare use a web browser that doesn’t have tabs anymore. Once you taste that you don’t go back. If your favorite browser dropped tabs and went back to windows for each page, you would switch browsers, no question. When did that happen? When did the fulcrum shift on that lever? When did you start using a spam filter? When did you stop renting movies? When did you start reading the web for content? For news? When did all of these little things you would never live without suddenly take hold?

This week I encourage you to think small. Think of how you can start small revolutions, be it in the way you run a meeting or just a banal product preference. Things that are good are not things that can’t be better. One adapts by discovering something better, not by enduring something worse. Newspapers aren’t failing because they are bad. They are failing because so many things are better. Browsers without tabs aren’t bad, browsers with tabs are just better. (At least one of you is wondering what I mean by “browsers with tabs” – you didn’t even notice, did you?) So take your policies and your technologies, and think seriously about how they could be improved. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it? Tell that to Borders. Borders never failed to be a bookstore.

What would be better is if I didn’t just speak in platitudes.

So what makes a paradigm shift? It is not enough for something merely to be better. You don’t own the fastest car, and you don’t want to own the fastest car. You want to own the car with the power locks and the mp3 player. If you play games on your iPhone, you are not using the world’s most powerful gaming system, you are using the gaming system that fits in your pocket and let’s you check your e-mail.

But I might be misleading. Paradigm shifts are not about features, they are about alternatives. If Wal-Mart ever goes out of business, it won’t be because somebody out-Wal-Mart-ed them, it will be because somebody rendered the big box store obsolete, (And how that could happen is up to our imaginations at this point). Paradigm shifts are never about the dominant paradigm getting out-matched, they are about the dominant paradigm getting subverted entirely. Borders didn’t get crushed by other bookstores. They got crushed by ignoring ebooks and neglecting the increasing risk of brick-and-mortar overhead.

Paradigm shifts also are more gradual than you think. Only with the final stroke do we see everything. It is easy in hindsight to see why things come unraveled, but the unraveling was not instant. Things are unraveling right now, somewhere, but we won’t see it until it is done. There can be great rewards in finding these loose ends early.

How about an example: I don’t typically plug my favorite products, (though I have done it before), but as a case study, consider Prezi. If you want a personal example, here’s one that I made, and a flashier one someone I know made. Not everybody reacts as strongly I did when I first saw it, but I’m betting some of you can feel it: this could unseat PowerPoint as the preferred method of delivering presentations. This could be a micro paradigm shift in the making, and I thought an ongoing example was more fun than just a bunch of heady wisdom and pompous hindsight, (It is easy to pick on Borders now that they are gone). If you want to know how empires can be toppled, Prezi has everything going for it.

Prezi doesn’t out-PowerPoint PowerPoint. There are plenty of PowerPoint lookalikes already and none of them have made a dent, not even the free ones. Prezi isn’t a PowerPoint lookalike, it is presentation software that does everything PowerPoint doesn’t, and that’s why it is so dangerous.

It is web-based, and thus available on every platform immediately, even ones that haven’t been invented yet, (This isn’t just Mac vs. PC. You can use Prezi on your Droid). It is “in the cloud”, which aside from being a right-time-right-place buzzword, means that all of your presentations are backed up and available anywhere. You can work on your presentation on your desktop, add the finishing touches from your smartphone, present it from your laptop, and never once fuss with a USB stick or forget that the most current version is on your laptop, not your desktop. You can share your presentation with others simply by linking them to it. You can allow multiple users to edit the presentation at once, (similar to Google Docs). You can give your presentation e-conference style. If you didn’t get what “cloud” meant before, now you do.

But that isn’t enough. PowerPoint on the web is only a little exciting. Prezi’s style and tone is nothing like PowerPoint. The organization is intentionally free form. Open-ended presentations are encouraged, with the ability to explore with your audience and, (literally), zoom in on the details they find more interesting. A more traditional pathing approach is easily done as well, but movement isn’t “slide-to-slide” as much as it is idea to idea, and you can diverge from your path easily if you need to.

While the initial impression might be that Prezi is just Power Point with fancy graphics, the reality is that its design and interface encourage the user to put together better presentations. Most criticisms of PowerPoint are actually criticisms of the horrible ways people use PowerPoint. Wall-of-text, presenter-reads-from-slides. Prezi’s layout discourages that, and rewards the kind of presentations that audiences like. Bullet points, a few pictures, a visual hierarchy of ideas, and let the presenter do the talking. Even if you don’t agree, the important point is that Prezi is absolutely not Power Point, and that is why it might be a king killer.

Of course, one product over another isn’t really a paradigm shift. The paradigm is that we continue to model presentations on the way slide projectors used to work, even though none of us even use slide projectors anymore. Prezi reminds us that this is absurd, that we are using computers and the Internet and such barriers are artificial and pointless. It also reminds us that Power Point is 24-years old, and if it doesn’t change, it will die. (Prediction: it will change).

Finally, this isn’t an ad for Prezi, (though the businessperson in you might appreciate the tech tip), but an examination of how big changes happen and where they start. If you are looking to innovate, even on a small scale, (Maybe you question the magazines in the lobby? Maybe your desk isn’t conveniently organized? Maybe your sick-day policy leaves nobody happy?), the trick is in finding artificial constraints, finding the things you aren’t doing, and finding ways to make unpleasantries irrelevant.

The Buzz: Correlation does not imply causation, and so all statistics showing correlation should be shunned and ignored forever and ever.
The Anti-Buzz: Correlation does not imply causation. And you’re probably using the word “correlation” wrong whenever you bring that up.

I can’t just talk about computers all the time. So much of what excites me about them is theoretical; it was inevitable that I started talking about math instead of machines. This will be my first attempt at anti-buzzing about numbers, and dentists should be very concerned about numbers because apparently 4 out of 5 of you recommended a particular toothpaste/toothbrush/mouthwash in clinical trials and well, they can’t all be the favorite brand of 80% of the dentists now can they? As a subset of the medical community, I shouldn’t have to tell you about how statistics become misleading.

When it comes to science and medicine, there is a growing epidemic of non-reproducibility, and to make matters worse, the media likes to overreact to everything science-sounding. Nutritionists seem to revise the rules every year, (eggs are good, eggs are bad, cholesterol is good, cholesterol is bad, cholesterol is bad but eating cholesterol doesn’t raise your cholesterol), and the dark heart of the beast is that, well, a lot of clinical trials of any stripe are never reproduced. Reproducing results makes for a boring read, both inside and outside of the scientific community. Pop-journalism is in the business of selling narratives, and scientific articles are usually puff pieces based off old research that has been stashed away to fill-space-yet-still-sound-relevant. (Advice for life: Don’t read any article that begins “Researchers at [Name of Institution] discovered/found …” Double points scored for ignoring articles that describe “research” derived from having college students fill out a questionnaire).

The story isn’t that science is dishonest, but that pop-science tells a remarkably inconsistent story. It doesn’t help that people want to believe that large impersonal institutions are wrong. We love stories about how studios passed on Star Wars, publishers passed on Gone With the Wind, professors ridiculed the business model for FedEx, and CERN overturned the laws of physics. When it comes to science and statistics, people are more or less able to just grab whatever seems to reinforce the opinions they already have. Similarly, they use the uncertainty of science and the potential for misuse of statistics as a smokescreen to refute anything that supports the opposition, (“Those statistics are wrong because sometimes statistics are wrong.”) And this isn’t a political statement because everybody does it.

So when my articles becomes less computer and more science, righting common abuses of math are my primary motivation. It will pay dividends to you because you are in the business of making smart decisions about technology with the information presented to you, (and then making smart decisions with the information given to you by your technology). Also, when robots start diagnosing patients for you, it will be good if you are less cynical about it – it can be easy to dismiss new technology as just another large-institution-mistake.

So, this week’s math rant is brought to you by that old chestnut that everybody seems to spout whenever they want to draw conclusions from pop-science data: Correlation does not imply causation. It doesn’t! And what’s worse is that nothing short of time travel can truly imply causation. It is also good that the general public seems to latch onto this logical truth, because observing correlations is probably the easiest way to lie with statistics.

If it weren’t for our armchair scientists shouting down every would-be correlation we’d live in a world full of people who believed that ice cream causes drownings and cancer causes Hollywood. On the other hand, it is sort of annoying that armchair scientists like to shoot down every correlation as the devil’s lies. A lot can get glossed over in a huff, so here are some things to consider.

No Correlation, No Causation: Causation does imply correlation, so if I can show that no correlation exists, I can argue that a cause does not exist. Armchair scientists love this one. Taking the whole world at once, the vast majority of deaths are not caused by plane crashes. Similarly, the vast majority of air travelers are not killed in plane crashes. It would seem there is no correlation at all, at least according to the armchair scientist, therefore plane crashes don’t kill people. Armchair science in action! A lot of mistakes can be made when drawing conclusions from data in the wrong scope. Taking the entire world’s population is not a good way to demonstrate anything about airplanes. If you limit your attention to plane passengers, and track which ones die and which ones don’t, and note whether or not the plane crashed, I’m sure you’d show a strong correlation between plane crashes and death. Ugh, let’s move on to something less gruesome.
Lesson: Consider the scope. A lot of data you are fed is at a scope inappropriate for demonstrating anything useful.

Sometimes Correlations are Coincidences:
The now-classic example is that global warming got worse as old-fashioned sea pirates went out of style. Aside from broad historical trends, there really isn’t a connection between the two. Your intuition can easily sniff out silly arguments such as this. NFL attendance went up at the same time cell-phone ownership did, for example. Not all coincidences are so obvious, however. Nobody ever points out that serial killers typically eat breakfast, but they’ll observe any other normal habit in them if it tweaks them the wrong way, (They listen to rock music! Rock music must be bad!) Coincidences are in fact not really correlations at all, but people go wild every time they see two variables they care about make similar movements. Alarmists want to argue for cause and the armchairs shout “correlation does not imply causation” when what you are talking about isn’t even a correlation. Youth violence plummeted as video game revenue skyrocketed. If you feel strongly about any real-or-fictional connection between violence and video games, you are less likely to consider that this might just be a coincidence. A good deal many other things are likely responsible for the reduction in youth violence, and similarly, video game revenue was probably not suffering under the jackboot of adolescent crime. Revenue is also a particularly bad statistic; revenue only goes in one direction when population and prosperity increases. Broadway revenue hasn’t decreased even though it is an “obsolete technology.” More people with more money buy more things. Comparing video game industry revenue with anything tells you basically nothing.
Lesson: Just because variables coincide does not mean they are related.

Sometimes Data is Irreproducible:
Sometimes bad data sets are all we have available. From a purely statistical point of view, it would seem that there is a negative correlation between pirates and global warming, but we can’t very well go testing this hypothesis because we can’t just re-institute large scale global piracy. Again, I’m using silly examples, but very often we see data that describe large populations over long periods of time. While these things might demonstrate trends, you can’t just do the industrial revolution or World War II over again to see if you can replicate a possible correlation. A lot of “correlations” sneak by because we can’t technically prove they aren’t correlations, but any scientific claims that require time travel to demonstrate are sketchy at best. And by history I mean any chart that demonstrates something “over time.” Ignore all of them.
Lesson: Stats about history provide a good picture of history, but nothing more. (I’m ignoring regression analysis here, I know).

Empirical Science Tries to Show Correlations:
The flip side of believing bad statistics is skepticism for good statistics. A true correlation almost always means something. Shouting “correlation does not imply causation” at a carefully controlled experiment is just rude. Any number of things might be wrong with the research in question, but the entire point of empirical testing is to try to create an environment where a correlation has a high likelihood of implying causation. Science isn’t above criticism, not even from the peanut gallery, but shouting “your science is bad because sometimes science is bad” isn’t very useful.
Lesson: Don’t be too skeptical.

Correlations are Important:
Even when they have nothing to do with cause. A good deal of intelligence is knowing how to make good guesses based on available information. You want to know when two things are strongly linked, regardless of the causal relationship. If you live in a dry climate and work in a secret base underground, and I asked you to guess whether or not it was raining outside, you’d probably guess that it wasn’t because that is the safe bet in a dry climate. If three people carrying umbrellas trudge into the office, and then I asked you again, you might change your mind. Does this mean that you think umbrellas cause rain? No, it just means that you think the two coincide a lot. If you are presented with a strong correlation, and you dismiss it with “correlation does not imply causation” you might be missing the point.
Lesson: Consider all the implications of the information.

And so I will wrap up with a final litmus test for navigating pop-science: if you are reading science, and it isn’t boring or difficult, then you aren’t reading science.