I have multiple topics I'm eager to discuss:

1. JustGo - An easy to learn and use method for navigating through lots of information.
2. VibrantHealth - Making HEALTH matter in our non-system
3. TheySaid - A cheaper, faster way to learn what's in expensive academic journals
4. SmoothFlow - A system to eliminate unnecessary traffic jams.

JustGo - a simple way to interact with computers using just the mouse

Dick Karpinski

We are descended from tens of millions of years of ancestors who made it back to the nest, or we wouldn't be here. One consequence is that navigating geographically, that is turning left and right while moving around comes very naturally to us. We don't have much trouble finding the fridge or the couch, except maybe in the dark.

Jef Raskin, in his seminal "The Humane Interface" described a hospital information system which used a mouse with the two main buttons dedicated to ZOOM IN and ZOOM OUT. With the screen filled with a lot of information. To fit it on the screen some of it had to be written smaller, or even much, much smaller. To see the stuff written smaller, you go there and zoom in. What was really remarkable, in my mind, was that absolute novices were comfortable and competent with the system in less than a single minute of training. Even computer experts learned the system in less than two minutes.

Since that sounds wonderful, why change it? The zoom buttons are velocity based devices, like joysticks, as opposed to displacement based devices like computer mice. Thus you must pay close attention and stop pressing the button at just the right time so that the text there is the right size to read easily. How could that be improved? Make the zooming automatic and keyed to the size of the text in that location. Put a visible border around the stuff which is written smaller, and use roll-over, or mouse-over (moving the mouse pointer into that region) to trigger the zoom in. Make zoom out happen when you mouse out of the region.

The designer of such a zoom world would arrange that the parts of that world are easy to locate and identify. For instance, one might use captions below thumbnail images much the way there are signs identifying "Mens Clothes" in a deparment store, or "Condiments" in an aisle of a super market. Of course, the designer, (architect?), of such an arrangement should  also see to it that there is enough space between these regions so that you can get to the one you want without "falling" into some other contained sub-space. It's not hard.

This idea must be verified by user testing. There will be many ways to implement such auto zooming worlds, but any one will likely suffice to see if such a system is as pleasing to use as I hope. My current candidate for a convenient system in which this can be built is Sun's Lively Kernel. Online videos of two talks about Lively Kernel are available as a Google talk and as a session of EE380 at Stanford. Can you find another convenient way to implement such a scheme?

Notice that the thumbnails amount to links but navigating among them is as simple as possible if one's hand is already on the mouse. We might also provide a way to navigate by keyboard. Suppose that each thumbnail had a one or two letter key, perhaps shown as semi-transparent large letters covering the thumbnail image. Then by using a meta-key, perhaps called LEAP, and possibly located below the  space bar for convenient access by one's thumb, one might type the one or two letters thus moving the mouse cursor to the thumbnail and auto zooming into it. If one's hands were on the keyboard already, this would eliminate the 1.7 (?) second cost of moving a hand to the mouse.

These ideas started with "The Humane Interface" by Jeff Raskin.

VibrantHealth - Fixing health care in America in three years.

Focus on OUTCOMES, not procedures. Health care reform for HEALTH

Dick Karpinski

"Health Care Reform Now ! " was written by George Halvorson, the CEO of Kaiser Health Plan. He undersstands the problems, especially where incentives to the health care providers encourage inefficient and ineffective care. He suggests a method for introducing another participant into the process between the payers and the providers to do two main things. They will insist on the providers using an electronic system to request payment, a single consistent system which creates an electronic medical record for each patient and records actual outcomes.

The outcome data is currently missing so neither providers nor patients nor even payers can compare the results obtained by different providers whether primary care doctors, specialists, hospitals, or health care plans. When we can tell what outcomes are achieved, everybody can make better choices and better outcomes will naturally follow. Evertybody will insist on it. When our hospital kills twice as many mothers in childbirth as the next one, we WILL want to change what we are doing in pre-natal care and deliveries. Count on it. The payers who reimburse the providerswill care. The companies who pay the premiums will care. The patients who use the services will care.

We are currently paying twice what other developed nations pay for health care, and yet we suffer much worse health care results. We require emergency rooms to take every desparately sick patient who shows up, but we do nothing to help that person avoid becoming desparately sick. Sometimes we do no prevention even when the patient is insured. There are no payment codes for providing a patient advice which will prevent a hospitalisation in the future. We don't pay for that, so we don't get that. When we eventually bring the uninsured into the system, and we repair the system so it encourages prevention, we will fix many problems. Our health will improve. Our costs will go down. We won't need so many clerks paid to deny claims.

TheySaid - A cheaper, faster way to learn what's in expensive academic journals.

Dick Karpinski

We have already many open source academic journals such as the Public Library of Science.. This is where original research is published so scientists around the world, and sometimes even in outer space, can learn what has been discovered lately. But many academic journals still print on paper and charge high prices for individual subscribers and very very high prices for libraries. This makes those journals unavailable to third world scientists and other people without the support of wealthy companies. Copyright interferes with open access, but the right approach avoids that problem entirely. Ideas are not copyrighted, only the words used to express them.

The articles in such journals are tightly written. It often takes half an hour or more PER PAGE to read an article carefully. Even textbooks, while designed for students to learn from, are still hard to read and often dull, besides. But there is a better way. One system I like is Compendium. It focuses on the questions being asked. Any answer must link directly to the question it answers. Of course there are often many competing answers to a single question, and each of them can be supported or challenged by arguments for and against them. The general class of such systems, including IBIS, the Issue Based Information System, and QuestMap, another commercial product no longer sold, is called Dialogue Mapping and is in turn supported by a book of that name by Jeff Conklin.

If some students, enthusiasts, and professional but poor scientists were to create dialog maps from the best journal articles, they could become articles in a wiki. Perhaps people would contribute their work along these lines in just the way that people contribute to Wikipedia. Of course, these are original research which is not supposed to show up in Wikipedia. Instead, this is the way scientists tell each other what they figured out, and why the other guy's experiments are silly and wrong. Scientists are supposed to fight with each other, though it must be admitted that sometimes it seems more like a teenage food fight than we might like.

Dialog Mapping lets the multiple viewpoints coexist in a single document. It even allows for alternative forms of the questions which might thereby elicit better answers than the original questions. "That is not the right question to ask! Instead, ask ...." And you don't even write the words, you just insert the alternative question with its own set of linked answers. This small amount of structure lets the questions form a natural index into the detailed dialog. You can find the part you want quite quickly. That is, if you like, this gives you an efficient way to ignore the parts you don't care about.

SmoothFlow - A system to eliminate unnecessary traffic jams.

Dick Karpinski

 I was reading the stuff google showed me for "traffic waves", as suggested by a friend, and enjoying the truth of the effectiveness of anti-jam driving.

Then I thought that if we all (or actually even a small fraction of us) collaborated to do anti-jam driving we could improve gas milage and tempers for many many people.

Then I wanted the coordination communication to happen with auto-mesh WiFi in our auto-mobiles. I still can't see how to make this into a clear need for an auto-zooming UI. Damn. Well, take what you can get.

Then I wanted the WiFi device to speak to me while I was keeping my eyes on the road.

The radio speaks to me. And the TomTom GPS driving assistant speaks to me. Aha!

The TomTom is already intended to use sophisticated wireless (GPS) to help me drive better and save gas and reduce frayed nerves.

Just add 802.11S and a little software and 20% (or 10?, or 5?) of the drivers who respond appropriately to the spoken advice from their TomTom will save the highways from unnecessary traffic jams!

What an inexpensive fix to a widely distributed time, gas, and frustration wasting problem!

And a little step toward having the cars do the driving so we can enjoy the scenery and our cell phones and TVs and even our companions.

When we're ready, we can later add "cruise control" features to allow close spaced caravans, to reduce wind drag and improve lane capacity even more. Naturally it would auto-spread when zipper merges are needed.

Richard Karpinski, Nitpicker       dick@cfcl.com 

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