How To Review Sellers on Amazon

Amazon not only allows you to review products, but it allows you to review individuals who sell and buy. This reputation-maintenance system is vital for selling goods from peer to peer.

When you review a seller, you are asked to give an overall rating (in stars) but also to answer questions regarding whether the product arrived on time, and as described.

But on top of that they ask for a written description. I have no idea what to put in there.

For example, recently I bought a used book. I paid for it; it arrived on time; it was in good condition. I'd already indicated this with the canned questions, but Amazon requires me to actually write something about the transaction. Problem is, there is nothing more to say. In the past this has kept me from reviewing people.

When faced with a recurring problem, it's good to make a policy, because the need to make a decision over and over can be paralyzing. If it's a silly problem, like this one, it's better to have a funny policy, so the annoyance is reduced. So I chose a stock phrase and I'll put it in all my reviews.

I chose:

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

This is the creed of the US postal service, which I discovered through the Laurie Anderson track "O Superman."

That's what I'm going to put in the free-text section of seller reviews from now on. I recommend you all use it too.

Pictured: USPS building with the creed inscribed on it. From Wikipedia.

How To Configure Your Desktop to Maximize Viewing Space

A long time ago I wrote a blog entry about why I love vertical screens.
http://jimdavies.blogspot.ca/2008/03/big-screens.html

I still love vertical screens, for the same reasons: reading, programming, and writing are essentially vertically-oriented activities. So why are screens oriented horizontally?

I can only speculate. If anyone knows of an actual historical account, please let me know.

The first home PCs were connected to the television set. TV sets, like movies, have an aspect ratio that is wider than it is tall. This makes sense for pictures and scenes, where there is often more of interest along the horizontal axis than the vertical (after a certain height, it's just sky.)

Then we had dedicated monitors, but they kind of had to fit on top of a keyboard. So here is a picture of my first PC, the TRS-80 Model 4.

Now we have laptops, and they suffer from the same problem. The keyboard is wider than it is tall, so for the thing to be able to close, the screen needs to be horizontal too. But if you have a desktop computer, and most of what you do on it is programming, reading, or writing, I would recommend a vertical screen.

I sometimes use a MacBook, which has a horizontal screen. But it gets worse. The "dock" is along the bottom of the screen, by default, which takes up valuable horizontal screen space. Then, if you're writing, Word by default puts its menus, etc., at the top of the screen. The result is that for writing you have extremely limited space to actually see your document:

To me, this is a ridiculous situation. Here is how I have arranged my desktop, to try to deal with this problem:

See how much more of the document is visible?

I'll tell you how to do this.

First, move the dock to the side. You can change this with System Preferences: Dock

Second, make the dock smaller. You see those six lines between the apps and the folders? You can click and drag that to make it bigger or smaller. Find a size you feel comfortable with.

Finally, in MS Word you can put the the menu screens on the side. Grab the lower right of the toolbar and drag so that it looks vertical. Grab the top of the bar to move it to one side or the other.

Happy writing.

How I Chose the Title of my Science of Imagination Blog

I had some ideas, and set up an online poll. This is a great way to get names of companies, titles for books or websites, etc.

That's why the blog is called "Science of Imagination" at Psychology Today. You can see the blog here:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-science-imagination

How Great It Was To Go to High School in the 80s

For some reason, the 1980s has become one of those iconic decades that people will be nostalgic about for a long while. I had a young person ask me what it was like to go to high school in the 80s, as though it were some magical time, and we all were walking around wide-eyed with wonder.

I explained that high school was high school, and it sucked just like high school probably always will. But also, when you're living in something it's hard to see it from the outside, to see what's good about it. It's not like we were walking around saying "Wicked, dude, we're living in the 80s!!"

That is, the 80s mean something now that it didn't mean then. Then, it was just... now.

Looking back, we can see some things that made it special: music videos, daring fashion, new forms of music, some which lasted (hip hop) and some that didn't (new wave, hair metal).

But for me what was most exciting about that time was the introduction of computers and video games. Video arcades were new, and exciting, and now they are all but gone. I'm glad I got to experience them in the 80s, and I was appreciative of them then, too.

But computers are the new thing that keeps being new. Where in the 80s we were excited to get a computer at home (my first was the TRS-80 Model 4) or a game console (mine was Intellivision), the 90s opened our eyes to the internet and the Web, CGI movies, and email, and the 00s gave us social networking, etc. Computers continue to amaze us.

I've been reading about the Pleistocene, the era where human beings spent much of their time evolving. It was a time of highly variable environments. Things have settled down now, in the Holocene.

So once in a while you should sit back and appreciate, and say to yourself "Wicked, dude, we're living in the Holocene!!"

Pictured: An Atari 2600 game console. From Wikimedia Commons.

The Importance of Sharing Medical Data

There are (at least) two medical cultures in our world: treatment and research. The doctors you typically interact with were trained to treat patients, using the findings of medical researchers. Their primary professional concern is the welfare of their patients. This has some negative ramifications, only one of which I'll talk about today.

Medical researchers conduct studies. Sometimes people get helped in them, and sometimes they don't. But the progress of medical science depends on these studies. There are two basic ways to do empirical studies-- you can run an experiment yourself, or you can run analyses on data that have already been collected.

Running a study yourself is extraordinarily expensive, in terms of time and money. What would be great for medical research is if they had access to already-existing data. With this they can find trends.

There are many, many more treatment doctors than medical researchers. Why would a treatment doctor (hereafter simply "doctor") want to share the data of his or her patient? In general, they wouldn't. The logic is simple. Sharing patients' data is at least a minor breach, or a potential breach, in their privacy, and it does nothing to help the health of their patients. The doctors' mandate is to help their patients, so you can see that they have no incentive to share data.

The result of this is that medical researchers (hereafter "researchers") do not have access to treatment and outcomes for typical patients treated by doctors. The lack of coordination, combined with fears of privacy, have held back medical research, so more people suffer.

Medical privacy is important for two reasons:

1) Standard privacy concerns: “I just don’t want other people to know.”

2) Real, practical concerns “Nobody would date me,” “my insurance rates would go up.”

A government that has socialized medicine is in a unique position to stop this. They can enforce a centralized database of anonymous medical data on all patients, treatments and follow ups that can be used by medical researchers fight disease.

For countries with socialized medicine, this should be thought of as a part of what you pay as a citizen to have your data contribute to future citizens’ health, much like a tax. You pay taxes, you share data (or at least make it an opt-out policy; see below.) 

But as I heard Tenenbaum say in the question period of a talk (see reference section), privacy is something everyone but the very sick care about.

The technical details are important. Every available step should be taken to ensure privacy. However, just because it won’t be perfect does not mean we should not do it. The potential loss of privacy for some individuals is an acceptable price to pay for the benefits of such a database.

Let’s take cancer as an example, as argued in Tenebaum and Shrager (2011). It kills millions of people, and is one of the primary killers in industrialized societies. Cancer, at an abstract level, is out-of-control cell reproduction. But this happens due to thousands of different kinds of mutations. As a result, it is a prime candidate for individualized medicine.

Oncologists (cancer doctors) treat patients with several medicines at once (“cocktails”). Doctors’ primary motivation is to make their patients well, so they have little incentive to contribute what was learned with each of their patients to a wider community. But it is exactly this information that is needed to scientifically explore individualized treatment.

Gleevec is a drug that helps only 3% of melanoma patients. Cancer drugs are typically tested on heterogeneous cancer patients. When a medicine can only help 3%, it becomes prohibitively costly, if not impossible, to find significance in research experiments. Millions of patients are required. Simply put, there are not enough cancer patients in the world to find drugs that help such a small percentage of people, if we are doing testing the way we’ve been doing it. And because many potential drugs will only help a small percentage of people, we'll never get them to market the way we're doing it.

“Cancer Commons” is a web based learning community that is a step in the right direction, as is Patients Like Me, a voluntary sharing site. But it should go much further than hoping people should volunteer. Policies like this should be opt-out, not opt-in, because many more people will participate. As Wikipedia says, regarding organ donation, "For example, Germany, which uses an opt-in system, has an organ donation consent rate of 12% among its population, while Austria, a country with a very similar culture and economic development, but which uses an opt-out system, has a consent rate of 99.98%."

Let's pool our data and beat this thing, finally, shall we?

Pictured: Image of a cell by MRK.

Reference

Tenenbaum, J. M. & Shrager, J. (2011). Cancer: A computational disease that AI can cure. AI Magazine, 32(2), 14--26.

(or watch the talk at http://videolectures.net/aaai2010_tenenbaum_cac/)

Packing Everything You Need

Packing for travel can be a stressful experience, because you often can't be sure whether you've packed everything you need. The solution to this problem, is, fortunately, easy.

Very simply, you make a list of "Things To Pack." You keep this list in a place where you can always find it, and you keep updating it. This works because usually you have to pack the same things when you travel. It's not like each time is a major customization problem.

Where To Put the List

The list should be kept in a place where you can't lose it. If you want to keep it on paper, which I do not recommend, then the best places for the list are probably in your suitcase, or perhaps in your filing cabinet under "travel" or "packing." However, a digital list is easier to update and search for.

Keeping this list in the "cloud" is great, because it's accessible from everywhere and automatically backed up. It is one of the many lists I use googledocs for. Here is why I prefer googledocs to Word files:
http://jimdavies.blogspot.ca/2009/08/why-i-am-starting-to-like-google-docs.html

If you don't want to use googledocs, you can use Dropbox (which stores the file on your computer as well as in the cloud). If you don't like using the cloud, then I'd make a folder on your hard drive called "reference material" or something, and put your important documents in there.

The file is called "Travel: Items to Bring pack" which sounds awkward, but in googledocs it's wise to put every keyword in the title you might ever use to search for it. For example, sometimes I might search for "what to bring" and other times "what to pack."

What Should Be On the List

I didn't put clothing on the list-- hopefully that's obvious enough.

The list is broken up into sections. I'll describe the sections I use and examples of what I put in those sections, but you should make your own sections and items that work for you. When you go on your first trip using a list, keep a new list of things you forgot to put on the primary list, and update it when you get home. After two or three updates, you'll feel confident that if you use the list you won't have forgotten to pack anything important. Bon voyage!

Morning of:

This list is for what to do just before you go on your trip, presumably because you'll need some of these things out the night before. For example:

• pills and medicine
•     toothbrush (or just keep a separate toothbrush in your toiletries bag)
•    Call credit card and advise them of your travel. (not something to pack, but a good place to put a reminder nonetheless)
•    Sunglasses
• Chargers for everything

Carry-On:

These are things to bring in your carry-on bag. Although it feels great sometimes to not have any carry on at all, once I got stuck in the Philadelphia airport for three days. I usually pick and choose from this list.

• Wear:
• shirt with pocket
•        Carleton alumni jacket
• gum
• Passport
• Permanent residency card
• wallet and everything in it, make sure you have enough money
• serious book or iPad or iPhone with a book
• pen
• flags (for marking books)
• Ear Plugs,
• Headphones, both big and tiny
•     Microphone hook up for headphones
• Jams iPod
• charger in for phone, cord for kindle if bringing it
• Conference:
• Little Notebook
• Business cards
• pocket for receipts if you need to collect them (see
  http://jimdavies.blogspot.ca/2009/05/how-to-save-travel-receipts.html)
• empty keyring (if you’re staying at someone’s house)
• empty bottle of water (fill it after security)
• glasses
• sunglass clips
• glasses cleaning supply (should be in toiletries kit)
• glasses case
• Pockets:
• iPhone
• pen
• wallet
• index cards
• handkerchief (for eye mask)
•         handkerchief (nose blowing)

Long-Term Travelling around

This is for trips longer than five weeks or trips in poor countries.

• A dozen Visa-sized photos of yourself
• photocopies of passport.
• guidebook (phrasebook at www.travlang.com)
• sandals
• hygiene items
• gift items
• a few changes of simple clothes
• one nice outfit for clubbing/finer dining
• pen knife (make sure it's not in your carry on when flying)
• daypack (probably your carryon)
• camera?
• sturdy shoes
• power adapter
• padlock
• universal stopper (for sink for washing clothes)
• bungee cord (for drying line for clothing)
• reading light (functions as flashlight)
• ziplock bags (for keeping things dry)
• Some DVDs, and CDs for car rentals (in car bag)

Survival

This list is for camping or when you'll really be out in the boonies and might be in a situation where your survival in the wilderness might become a problem.

• Baggie of cotton balls covered with Vaseline
• or baggie of cotton balls with hand sanitizer. (for starting fires)
• Flint and steel
• Hand santitzer
• Shrill Whistle
• Swiss Army Knife

For the Car

If you're taking a road trip, or will be renting a car wherever you're going, there's a list for that too.

• GPS, bag of car stuff
• connector for car/iPhone
• CDs for rental cars (not every rental has a aux input)

With Dog

If I'm travelling with Mrs. Wiggles, I need to bring special stuff.

• Kennel
• Dirty Shirt (for comforting dog while in kennel)
• Pig Ear to chew
• leash
• food
• arthritis medicine
• dog bowls 
• flexible water bowl (there’s one in the car bag)
• File with vaccinations, etc. (in the car bag)
• nail clippers

Beach Vacation

• Baseball cap
• Serious sunglasses
• Sandals
• Suntan lotion
• bathing suit

Where To Keep This Stuff

You don't want to be running all over the house, frantically looking for these things. So keep them in your suitcase! When it's time for me to pack, I bring out my suitcase, which has all kinds of stuff already in it, such as a spare bathing suit, my bag of toiletries, etc. I also have in there one of those canvas grocery shopping bags. What I do is, I keep in the suitcase the things I need for the upcoming trip, and put the unneeded things in the canvas bag. This bag sits in my house until I return. After I unpack, I put the canvas bag and its contents back in the suitcase. 

Pictured: My beloved in NYC. Photo credit: me.

How To Read Books: Print Books, Tablet, Phone, or E-Reader?

When electronic books started to become popular, I think I had an assumption that I would end up liking some kind of format and stick to it. That's not what happened.

I talk to a lot of people who claim they prefer print books to tablet, phone, or e-reading. Most of these people have never read a book on one of these devices. They imagine they won't like it, but they are usually basing this belief on what it feels like to read sitting at their computer, which is a very different experience.

I'm a little surprised that I find myself consistently reading books on my smartphone, tablet, dedicated e-reader, and in print. Here's why.

Tablet

I have an iPad, and if I had to pick a favorite way to read, this would be it. It's an original iPad, but I still adore it. I like my iPhone; I love my iPad.

The Good: 

1. I can read books from any company. I downloaded applications from Kindle, Kobo, and iBooks comes with my iOS software. For a while I tried to read fiction on the Kobo and non-fiction on the Kindle, but now I just read everything on the Kindle or kindle app. I have not used iBooks. I also have comics applications, which is great. Comics look amazing on a tablet, and I don't even have a retina display. 
2. I don't have to hold up the tablet. My friend got an iPad and was complaining that he needed to hold it up, unlike a laptop. I have a case (from a company called inCase) which allows me to prop up the iPad. Having a case like this fundamentally changes how I interact with the machine. The device is not cold to the touch, it holds itself up in multiple positions, and I can toss the machine around without worrying that it will break. The picture at the top is of how I normally read. Lying down.  It might be a bit hard to see, but the case is on my belly, and I really don't have to touch it to read. I tap the side to turn the page, but if I have to grab my drink or something, I can just leave the iPad, unlike, say, a large hard cover book. Also, when I'm eating, I'm using my hands to eat, and it's nice to have the tablet keeping itself up. I only have to reach out when I want to turn the page. It might sound like a lame complaint, but I don't like having to hold up a book all the time. My fingers get sore, or tingly, or cold. Hardcover books can be heavy. Paperbacks can require some sustained strength in your fingers to keep open. I love not having to do that with my iPad. 
3. Highlights and notes are on the web. For the Kindle app, anyway, you can go to your account on the web and see all the highlights and notes you made for every book, including ones you've borrowed! I already made a blog entry on this awesome feature, so I won't go into it here.  http://jimdavies.blogspot.ca/2012/07/exporting-kindle-notes-and-highlights.html
4. The iPad is the best PDF reader out there. I don't read a lot of books as PDFs, but I read some, and many papers. The iPad's quick zooming, and the Goodreader app's highlighting and note taking make it a total pleasure. I prefer reading papers on my iPad to paper. 

The Bad:

1. The iPad is still kind of heavy. I know I have an original iPad, and the newer ones are lighter, but even the iPad mini is a bit heavy compared to a dedicated e-reader and many books. 
2. It's Big. It's big and heavy enough so that I don't always have it with me. This means I can't read on it all the time. 
3. It's hard to flip through pages. The tactile nature of pages in a book allows you to flip through them quickly, with spatial memory of where things were. This is especially problematic for books with end-notes and reference sections. 
4. Magazines. This entry is mainly about books, but I have to complain about reading magazines on the iPad. The app designers figure that I'm just reading for fun and would never want to save anything that I read. The Wired magazine app, for instance, looks great, but I can't make notes, highlight, and there are no page numbers. So I will continue to get magazines in paper form. 

Smartphone

I have an iPhone 4, which is a great machine. It's way better for reading than people think. People say the screen is too small, but I find that it's not for two reasons. First, if the book is good you stop noticing  the device. Also, turning pages is so easy it becomes automatic and unconscious. Basically, the phone disappears.

The Good: 

1. I can read in the dark. This is also true of the iPad. My beloved falls asleep before I do, and I can read in bed without the lights on. This is something you can't do with most dedicated e-readers or print books. People often complain that the screen is too bright. But when I am reading at night, I turn down the brightness. It's easy. It's so dim that my beloved can't even tell I'm reading, but it's easy to see the text. Having a black background helps a lot. When I show people how I read on my iPhone at night, they are often shocked and say something like "I think I could read like that." The brighter one shows how I normally read and the other is how I read at night on the iPhone.Sometimes by beloved is reading on her phone next to me. We'll both be reading in a room that is completely dark, which I find amusing. I always use white on black-- I find it more comfortable.
2. My iPhone is always with me. Have you ever heard the expression "the best camera is the one you have with you?" It's true with books too. Even though in an ideal world I'd probably read on my iPad most of the time, the fact is I don't usually have my iPad with me when I'm on the go. But if I'm in a long line at the grocery store, for instance, I can whip out my iPhone and read. I love it. 
3. One-Handed Reading. The phone is the only device I can read on that I can hold completely one-handed. I can't even do this with my Kindle device. I can hold the iPhone and turn pages with one hand, which is great sometimes. I can also switch hands when one gets tired. 

The Bad

1. Sometimes I get tired of holding the device. iPhones are not super light, but even holding your hand up for a long period of time can be tiring. 
2. It is a little small. This is not so much a problem for me for reading, but for highlighting and making notes, I miss the iPad a bit. 
3. It's hard to flip through pages. See above.

Dedicated E-Reader

I have a Kindle Touch, and in general I like it.

The Good

1. The screen looks great. It looks great in the bright sunshine, under normal light. 
2. It has a long battery life. I can read for a long time and not have to worry about the battery. In general I'm reading on my couch, so it doesn't matter, but for travel and things like that, the Kindle family is handy. 
3. Whispersync. This is a feature of Kindle that is supposed to keep you up to date on your bookmarks and notes throughout all of your devices. So in principle I should be able to read on my Touch, then pick up my phone at the store and it will know where I left off. In practice, I find this doesn't work all the time. More on that later. 
4. It's light. You get a big screen with very little weight. That's nice. 
5. Text-to-speech. With the device, but not the app on the iOS devices, you can (with certain books) have the kindle actually read to you aloud! The other day I took a walk for over an hour. I put on headphones and just listened to my book as I walked. When I was done, the whispersync allowed me to just start reading where the listening left off. It's amazing. 

The Bad

1. It's cold. I should probably get a case for it, like I did for my iPad, but that would add to the weight. My hands sometimes get cold on the metal device. The Kobo I had was more comfortable to hold. But I got rid of it. http://jimdavies.blogspot.ca/2010/09/why-im-returning-my-kobo.html
2. I need to turn on a light. I can't read on my Kindle without a light on, which is sometimes inconvenient, such as when I'm reading in a room with insufficient lighting, or for whatever reason I don't want to turn on the lights (e.g., my beloved is sleeping next to me.) 
3. Taking notes is clunky. The on-screen keyboard isn't as nice as the iPad or the iPhone. It's workable, but I find myself taking fewer notes when I'm reading on the dedicated Kindle device. 
4. It's hard to flip through pages. See above.
5. It's hard to hold with one hand and turn the pages. The Kobo was great for this, but my Kindle touch not so much. Holding it in portrait mode is uncomfortable. It's okay when you're sitting down, but if you're lying down it's kind of uncomfortable to hold with one hand, and very hard to turn the pages. So I end up reading it in "landscape" mode, which is better for me because There is a place for my thumb on the side of it. I still basically need two hands, though, which seems really silly on a dedicated e-reader. 

Print Books

I still read print books, but I'm winding down, and reading fewer and fewer of them.

The Good

1. They're often cheaper. Especially if you buy used, print books can be a lot cheaper than electronic books. 
2. You can re-sell them or give them away. You can't do this with electronic books, although with Kindle you can lend people books for a two-week period. If they ever borrow or buy the book, the highlights they made will return. Awesome. 
3. It's easy to flip through pages! I often have bookmarks for where I'm reading, the notes in the back, and the references section. Currently impossible with e-books.
4. They look good on the shelf. 

The Bad

1. They take up room on my shelf. I'm overflowing with books. 
2. They're heavy. 
3. They're unsearchable. All the electronic books are searchable, and technically, a paper book is not, but there is a workaround with Google books, so this one doesn't even really count. http://jimdavies.blogspot.ca/2009/08/how-to-search-your-paper-books-as.html

Conclusion

So I'm surprised by two things. One, that I've written so much about reading formats on my blog already, and two, that I actually use all of my reading devices, and continue to use print.

I have to mention that whispersync has not worked as beautifully as planned. Sometimes it just doesn't work, and it will put me ahead many pages on my e-reader. This is especially a pain because turning pages on it is slow, and it might take a few annoying minutes of page turning to find your place again. So I end up reading a different book on every device! It's not so bad; I tend to read multiple books at a time anyway. So right now, for instance, I'm reading "How Music Works" on the iPad (it's the iPad enhanced edition with music clips), a book on electronic publishing on my iPhone, "The Chairs Are Where the People Go" and a draft of my sister's novel on my e-reader, and two books in print.