myowelt

The Swiss Ban on Minarets Confirms the Contact Hypothesis

2011-01-23T13:25:00.015+01:00

In November 2009, Switzerland held a referendum that sought approval for a constitutional ban on minarets. 57.5% of the voters supported the ban. The ban was supported by the Swiss right wing party SVP. Poster ads that supported the ban used images as the ones below, tapping on anti-muslim sentiments and on diffuse fear towards muslims. Thus, the referendum has been widely interpreted as a vote against foreigners by the media.

A student of mine, Michael Jäckli, had the idea to use archival polling data from the referendum for a test of Alport's Contact Hypothesis. It suggests that "interpersonal contact is one of the most effective ways to reduce prejudice between majority and minority group members". Thus, Swiss municipalities (the smallest unit for which polling data is available from the Swiss bureau of statistics) with a low percentage of foreign nationals should show a high rate of approval of the ban, while municipalities with a high percentage of foreigners should show a lower rate of approval.

In order to test this assumption, Michael obtained the agreement to the ban on the municipal level from the Swiss bureau of statistics, along with indicators for educational level and social-economic status for the municipalities. He was then able to regress the agreement for the ban on the percentage of foreigners:

As visible in the plot, municipalities with a below-average percentage of foreigners tended to accept the ban at above-average levels. Without controlling for other variables, an increase of the percentage of foreigners in a municipality by 1% would decrease its agreement to the ban by 0.37%.

As lower education and social status is usually associated with more right-wing political views, Michael tested whether the negative relationship between the percentage of foreigners and the approval of the ban still holds under statistical control of these two variables. The according stepwise hierarchical regression is presented below.

It reveals that low economic status and low educational levels are indeed associated with an acceptance of the ban. But even if these factors are controlled for, there is still a significant yet small negative effect of the percentage of foreigners on the approval of the ban: Municipalities with a low percentage of foreigners tended to support the ban.

Why does an increase of the percentage of foreigners decrease the support for the ban on minarets? Possibly because municipalities can profit from their foreign population: An inspection of the bivariate correlations of the measurement variables (see below) reveals that the percentage of foreigners is associated with higher levels of education and social-economic status.

The R code that produced these results can be found below. Michael's data set can be downloaded in .CSV-Format here.

# import the data

minarettdata <- read.csv(file = "minarettdata.csv")

# inspect the data

head(minarettdata)

length(minarettdata$municipality_nr)

# make the data available

attach(minarettdata)

# generate the plot

plot(foreigners, minarett_approval, main = "Approval of the minaret ban in all Swiss municipalities\nas a function of municipal share of foreign nationals", xlab = "Municipal share of foreign nationals (in %)", ylab = "Municipal share of voters approving the ban (in %)")

abline(lm(minarett_approval ~ foreigners), col = "blue")

abline(h = 57.5, lty = 2)

abline(v = 22, lty = 2)

text(x = 60, y= 48, round(coef(lm(minarett_approval ~ foreigners))[2], digits = 2), col = "blue")

text(x = 22, y = 26, "Swiss-wide share of foreign nationals (22%)", cex = .70, pos = 4)

text(x = 49, y = 60, "Swiss-wide approval of the\nban on minarets (57.5%)", cex = .70, pos = 4)

mean(foreigners)

mean(minarett_approval)

# test the stepwise regression

library(QuantPsyc)

lmodel.1 <- lm(minarett_approval ~ SES + edu_level)

summary(lmodel.1)

lm.beta(lmodel.1)

lmodel.2 <- lm(minarett_approval ~ SES + edu_level + foreigners)

summary(lmodel.2)

lm.beta(lmodel.2)

# determine the significance of the increase in R-squared

anova(lmodel.1, lmodel.2)

# print the correlation table

corstarsl2(minarettdata[,2:5])

library(xtable)

xtable(print(corstarsl2(minarettdata[,2:5])))

# clean up

rm(minarettdata, lmodel.1, lmodel.2)

Aus dem Kontext gerissen: Eine Meldung zu einer Facebook-Studie und ihre Geschichte

2009-11-14T20:37:00.001+01:00

(special circumstances require a post in German)

Unsere Studie gibt die Interpretation, dass "Facebook-Verweigerer" (Morgenpost) mehr Berufserfolg als Facebook-Nutzer hätten, nicht her.

Im Jahr 2007 publizierten Ellison, Steinfield und Lampe eine Studie [1], in der sie einen Zusammenhang zwischen der Nutzungsintensität der Online-Plattform Facebook und dem sozialen Kapital von amerikanischen College-Studenten feststellten. Dies könne sich wiederum positiv in anderen Lebensbereichen auswirken. Zitat: "our findings demonstrate a robust connection between Facebook usage and indicators of social capital, especially of the bridging type. ... Such connections could have strong payoffs in terms of jobs, internships, and other opportunities" (S. 1164).

Meine Studentin Anett Cepela kam auf die Idee, die Studie zu replizieren. Mich wunderte an der Original-Studie, dass die Autoren die Nutzung von Facebook als unabhängige Variable verwendeten, d.h., die Nutzungsintensität von Facebook nicht mit weiteren Variablen erklärten.

Ich schlug daraufhin vor, die Studie um einen Persönlichkeitsfragebogen zu erweitern. Wir erstellten einen neuen Fragebogen, der die Skalen der Originalautoren verwendete: Facebook-Nutzungsintensität, soziales Kapital (bridging, bonding, maintaining), Selbstwert, und Lebenszufriedenheit. Zusätzlich enthielt er die "Big Five" Persönlichkeitsmerkmale Extraversion, Neurotizismus, Gewissenhaftigkeit, Verträglichkeit und Offenheit. [2]. Der Fragebogen war so gestaltet, dass zu Anfang gefragt wurde, ob man ein Profil auf Facebook habe. Wurde diese Frage mit Nein beantwortet, wurde gefragt, ob ein Profil auf einer anderen Plattform bestünde. Es folgten die Fragen zur Nutzungsintensität von Facebook oder, alternativ bei den Nutzern anderer Plattformen, zur Nutzungsintensität der am häufigsten genutzten Plattform. TeilnehmerInnen, die nirgends ein Profil hatten, wurden nicht nach Nutzungsintensität gefragt, konnten aber die anderen Skalen des Fragebogens beantworten. Die Zürcher Pendlerzeitung "20 Minuten" druckte einen Aufruf zur Teilnahme in ihrer Printausgabe.

Ca. 1000 Personen füllten den Fragebogen zumindest teilweise aus. Wir erhielten 681 vollständig ausgefüllte Fragebögen, davon 345 von weiblichen und 336 von männlichen Personen. Das Alter unser Befragten reichte von 13 bis 89 Jahre, mit einem Durchschnittsalter von 27 Jahren. 573 der Befragten gaben an, ein Profil bei Facebook zu haben. Davon hatten mehr als die Hälfte (335) noch ein Profil auf einem anderen sozialen Netz (z.B. mySpace oder XING). 46 der Befragten hatten kein Profil bei Facebook, aber bei einem anderen Netzwerk. Nur 62 Personen gaben an, überhaupt kein Profil auf irgendeinem sozialen Netzwerk zu haben. Letztere waren im Durchschnitt 37 Jahre alt, die Nutzer von sozialen Netzwerken waren im Durchschnitt 26 und gaben an, im Durchschnitt 187 Freunde auf ihrem meistbenutzten sozialen Netzwerk zu haben.

Wir haben anschliessend für die Nutzer von sozialen Netzwerken analysiert, welche Faktoren ihre Lebenszufriedenheit beeinflussen. Genau genommen haben wir ein Strukturgleichungsmodell in LISREL mit den latenten Variablen Extraversion, soziales Kapital, Facebooknutzung und Lebenszufriedenheit berechnet. Wir verwendeten zur Parameterschätzung den WLS-Algorithmus für ordinal skalierte Daten [3].

Im Ergebnis zeigt sich tatsächlich, dass eine höhere Nutzungsintensität (mehr Freunde, mehr Zeit auf der Plattform) dazu führt, dass die Nutzer über mehr soziales Kapital verfügen und zufriedener sind, wenn man ihre Persönlichkeit ausser acht lässt. Nimmt man jedoch die Extraversion als Persönlichkeitseigenschaft in die Berechnung auf, verschwinden die Zusammenhänge fast gänzlich: Je stärker die Extraversion eines Menschen, desto mehr soziales Kapital hat er, und desto mehr ist er auf Facebook unterwegs und desto zufriedener ist er. Aber diese drei Dinge hängen vor allem von der Persönlichkeit ab. Die Effekte der Facebook-Nutzung auf das soziale Kapital und auf die Lebenszufriedenheit sind unter Berücksichtigung der Effekte der Extraversion kaum vorhanden. Genau gesagt: Der standardisierte ß-Koeffizient zwischen Facebook-Nutzung und bridging social capital beträgt in Gegenwart der Extraversion nur 0.08. Laut Cohen [4] kann man bei Korrelationen unter .10 nicht mal mehr von einem schwachen Effekt sprechen.

Das war das zentrale Ergebnis unserer Studie. Dieses Ergebnis halte ich statistisch für abgesichert und belastbar. Die Ergebnisse stehen somit im Widerspruch zu den Ergebnissen der Amerikaner.

Leider habe ich mich dazu hinreissen lassen, die 62 Personen in unserer Stichprobe, die nicht auf Facebook sind, mit den 619 Nutzern von sozialen Netzwerken (573 Facebooknutzer + den 46 Nutzer anderer Netze, die nicht auf Facebook sind) explorativ zu vergleichen. Es zeigte sich eine leicht erhöhte durchschnittliche Lebenszufriedenheit bei den Nicht-Nutzern (M = 5.39) als bei den Nutzern (M = 5.11, t(74.16) = 1.83, p = .07, Cohens d = 0.24). Dies war nicht auf Alterseffekte zurückzuführen, da Alter und Lebenszufriedenheit in der Gesamtstichprobe schwach negativ zusammen hingen (ß = -.06, p = .08). Der Unterschied zwischen den Gruppen in der Persönlichkeitseigenschaft Gewissenhaftigkeit fiel etwas deutlicher zugunsten der Nicht-Nutzer aus (t(73.70) = 2.36, p = .02, Cohen's d = .32). Allerdings gab es in der Gesamtstichprobe einen schwachen positiven Zusammenhang zwischen Alter und Gewissenhaftigkeit (ß = .12, p = .001). Deshalb kann dieser sowieso kleine Effekt auf das Alter der Teilnehmer in den unterschiedlichen Nutzergruppen zurück geführt werden. Alle Analysen, die ich in diesem Absatz berichtet habe, habe ich explorativ gerechnet. Die Effekte sind schwach und aufgrund der sehr kleinen Gruppe der Nicht-Nutzer (62 Personen) nicht belastbar. Von Repräsentativität ganz zu schweigen.

Nun habe ich einer Mitarbeiterin unser Kommunikationsabteilung ein Interview zu den Ergebnissen unserer Studie gegeben, deren Ergebnisse noch nicht mal publiziert sind. Das war wahrscheinlich mein zweiter Fehler. Der dritte Fehler war, im Interview nicht nur die belastbaren Ergebnisse zu berichten, sondern auch die explorativen. Ich habe dabei auch Studienergebnisse von dritter Seite berichtet [5], die einen Zusammenhang zwischen Gewissenhaftigkeit und Berufserfolg herstellen. Ich habe mich dabei zu der Aussage hinreissen lassen, dass man vermuten könnte, dass Facebook-Nutzer weniger Gewissenhaft seien und weniger Berufserfolg hätten, als Nicht-Nutzer. Ich habe das sofort relativiert, indem ich auf den Alterseffekt und auf die sehr kleine Gruppe der Nicht-Nutzer hingewiesen habe. In dem Artikel, den die Kommunikationsabteilung unserer Universität geschrieben hat, wurden die explorativen Ergebnisse auch erst am Schluss berichtet. Dort steht:

Und wie fühlen sich die Nicht-Nutzer von Facebook? Von den total 681 Befragten hatten 46 kein Profil bei Facebook, jedoch bei einem anderen Netzwerk, und 62 gaben an, überhaupt kein Profil auf irgendeinem sozialen Netzwerk zu haben.

«Aufgrund der kleinen Anzahl der Teilnehmer gänzlich ohne Facebook-Erfahrung muss man die Aussagen zu dieser Gruppe mit Vorsicht geniessen», warnt Meyer. Doch könne man sagen, dass der sich abzeichnende Trend eine interessante Implikation habe: Mehrere Studien zeigen, dass Gewissenhaftigkeit – eines der Big-Five-Merkmale – positiv mit dem Berufserfolg zusammenhängt.

Die Ergebnisse der Facebook-Studie legen nun nahe, dass die Nicht-Nutzer eher gewissenhaft sind. Daraus könne man rückfolgern, dass engagierte Facebook-Nutzer weniger Berufserfolg haben als solche, die Facebook wenig oder gar nicht nutzen. «Denn Menschen, die nicht auf sozialen Netzwerken sind, sind gewissenhafter und sie haben in der Regel mehr Berufserfolg», so Meyer. Allerdings sind sie auch älter als die Facebook-Nutzer, was bei diesen Ergebnissen eine Rolle spielen könnte. Weitere Studien sollen mehr Klarheit bringen.

Das ist so weit in Ordnung. Der Satz «Denn Menschen, die nicht auf sozialen Netzwerken sind, sind gewissenhafter und sie haben in der Regel mehr Berufserfolg» gilt natürlich nur in den genannten Beschränkungen. Ich wünschte nur, ich hätte ihn so nicht stehen lassen. Die Presse hat den Bericht aufgegriffen. Aus "Facebook allein macht nicht glücklich" wurde erst "Facebook macht nicht glücklich". Beim Tagesanzeiger konnte ich den entsprechenden Artikel noch korrigieren lassen, aber die Agenturmeldung der SDA war nicht mehr aufzuhalten. Auf Google News finden sich schon 37 Meldungen, wenn man nach "Universität Zürich Facebook Studie" sucht. Die Studie wurde von den Medien gierig aufgenommen und auf den verhängnisvollen Satz reduziert:

"Erfolgreicher im Beruf - ohne Facebook" (Berliner Morgenpost)

"Facebook-Verweigerer sind erfolgreicher im Job" (Welt Online)

"Forscher streiten über Facebook-Studie" (Express)

"Studie: Facebook-Muffel im Job erfolgreicher" (Bild - allerdings neben der Schlagzeile noch einer der richtigsten Artikel)

Bei der NZZ ist unter dem verkürzten Titel "Facebook macht nicht glücklich" immerhin aufgefallen, dass die verschwindend kleine Anzahl der Nicht-Nutzer in unserer Studie in der Presse irgendwie verloren ging. Den Redakteuren beim Handelsblatt war das auch egal ("Facebook macht nicht glücklicher").

Das wird mir eine Lehre sein. So wird ein Satz aus dem Kontext gerissen und zu einer Meldung. Unsere Studie gibt die Interpretation, dass "Facebook-Verweigerer" (Morgenpost) besser im Job als Facebook-Nutzer seien, nicht her. So steht es jetzt aber überall im Internet zu lesen. Ich werde mich nie wieder vor der Presse zu Spekulationen hinreissen lassen. Und ich berichte nicht noch mal von Ergebnissen, bevor sie publiziert sind.

[1] Ellison, N., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of facebook "friends:" Social capital and college students' use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12, 1143-1168.

[2] Körner, A., Geyer, M., Roth, M., Drapeau, M., Schmutzer, G., Albani, C., . (2008). Persönlichkeitsdiagnostik mit dem NEO-Fünf-Faktoren-Inventar: Die 30-Item Kurzversion (NEO-FFI-30). Psychotherapie, Psychosomatik, medizinische Psychologie, 58, 238-245.

[3] Jöreskog, K. G., & Sörbom, D. (1993). Structural equation modeling with the simplis command language. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

[4] Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

[5] Barrick, M., & Mount, M. (1991). The Big Five personality dimensions and job performance: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 44, 1-26.

SPSS / PASW Statistics 18 for Mac: The Same Junk as Always

2009-10-17T17:04:00.009+01:00

So I write this rant about the horrors of SPSS 16 for Mac. As a result, SPSS Inc. invite me into their beta program for SPSS 17 and offer a free license for it in return. Fair enough. I participate in the program, do all their required testing and submit plenty of bugs. The time window for their beta testers is four weeks. Four weeks. I find that way too short but thats how they operate.

After the end of the beta testing, I never received my free license. I sent them one e-mail about it that was never answered. So when they invited me into their SPSS (which is now called PASW: Predictive Analysis Software) 18 beta, I didn't do anything.

So now PASW 18 ships and I install it with a screen shot app at hand. The first thing I see is this readme window (underlining added by me):
Wow. They still cannot handle foreign characters. I complained about that two versions ago. A company that is producing a statistics software is unable to display a text file containing ä, ö, and ü correctly.

After the install finishes, PASW 18 Mac launches with this gem (you will have to click on it for the large version to see what I mean):

Look at the shadows of "PASW" in the top blue bar and the red line next to it. They are pixelated! These images were obviously produced for a smaller resolution but were magnified to the current size, producing this highly unprofessional experience. So the first two impressions I get give me a feeling that not much care has gone into the production of this software. Attention to detail: Nope, sorry.

The data window features new icons at the top as one can see on the following image.
Unfortunately, that was the only time I ever saw it. After the install, I quit ~~SPSS~~ PASW. Every time I have launched it since them (including after reboots), ~~SPSS~~ PASW crashes on start up:
It. Crashes. On. Every. Launch. On my MacBook Pro (2.33 GHz, 4GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.5.8), ~~SPSS~~ PASW 18 is inoperable. What an enormous piece of junk.

Virtual Reality Social Psychology

2009-10-15T22:02:00.010+01:00

Today I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the Institute of Work and Organizational Psychology at the University of Neuchâtel (Institute de Psychologie du Travail et des Organisations (IPTO), Université de Neuchâtel). See here. I was invited by Prof. Marianne Schmid Mast and had the opportunity to see her laboratory and meet her cool team before my talk. In Neuchâtel, they do something I had never seen before: Virtual reality social psychology.

Social psychology studies, among other things, the interactions between individuals. Which is a challenge for laboratory research, because it adds a large amount of complexity (and costs) to experiments. For example, if a researcher wants to study the effects of group diversity on group performance, each observation requires not a single participant, but an entire group of participants. If a researcher wants to study a behavior that is evoked by a specific social interaction, it gets even more complicated: Suppose a researcher thinks that individuals will share less information with an incompetent supervisor than with a competent supervisor. An according experiment would require a supervisor who is either competent or incompetent in every experiment. Also, this supervisor should possibly exhibit the same interactions towards all experimental participants in one condition. One way of doing this is by hiring an actor for the role of the supervisor, which is often not feasible.

At Prof. Schmid Mast's Lab, they do such studies in a different way. They use virtual reality; a 3D virtual immersive environment. The experiment participant wears a head-mounted display (HMD) that gives him or her her the impression of being in another world. In this virtual world, one can interact with avatars, virtual representations of individuals. Those are programmed by the experimenters in such a way that they exhibit a certain interpersonal behavior, which is of course always constant and fully controllable by the experimenters. At the same time, the system logs data that is difficult to acquire in normal laboratory settings, such as interpersonal spatial distance between the participant and the avatars. In combination with verbal codings of the participant, one gets an extremely rich and reliable source for social interaction data.

Below is a picture of me trying it out. There is a diagram showing how the system works in the background: Four cameras pick up the infrared signal that the blue LED at the back of the HMD emits. A highly sensitive motion sensor (the little blue box next to the LED) picks up the tiniest movement of the head. These data are combined by the tracking computer in order to determine the spatial position of the participant. A second computer renders the environment accordingly and projects it in 3D into the HMD (visible on the second picture on the right screen in the background). The graphics are extremely good, I'd say they match current high-quality ego-shooter games.

The possibilities of such an experimental paradigm are endless. For example, I was in a virtual world where my own avatar was a woman. I could see my reflection in a mirror and it would correspond to my head movements (the face was almost photorealistic), but it wasn't me - it was this other person. The experience was insofar fascinating as it felt extremely real. In another scenario, I found myself standing on a narrow wooden board across a crater in the street. The crater was about 30m deep and 10m in diameter. I could see to its bottom - I was standing above this gaping hole. On a narrow piece of wood. I could feel the vertigo and my palms started to sweat. When the experimenter asked me to jump into the abyss, I couldn't. I knew that this was only virtual and the graphics looked more like the ego shooter that my brother used to play but still - I couldn't get myself to jump off the board for a couple of minutes. It felt that real.

Only an imbecile would not see the possibilities of such a technology for psychological research. Body image. Behavior therapy. Social interactions. I am sure that in a couple of years, the employment of 3D VR environments for psychological research will be as common as the use of fMRI today. Just that spending half an hour in a virtual world is much more fun than spending ten minutes inside the narrow tube of a scanner.

An R Function for the Blau Index of Diversity

2009-08-12T22:02:00.006+01:00

In diversity research, one is often interested in how an individual feature is distributed among the members of a group. In other words, one is interested in how diverse a group is with regard to that feature. If the particular feature can be expressed in a metric way, e.g. age or organizational tenure, researchers use measures of dispersion for quantifying the diversity of a group with regard to that feature. For example, the standard deviation of the average age of group members can be employed to indicate the age diversity of a group.

If researchers wish to quantify the diversity of a group with regard to a nominal feature, such as ethnicity, gender, or education, they usually employ the Blau Index (Blau, 1977). The Blau Index is calculated by
where p is the proportion of group members in a given category and i is the number of different categories of the feature across all groups. If a group is homogeneous with regard to the feature in question, i.e., if all group members have the same nationality, the Blau Index of the group for nationality is 0. If all members of the group have a different nationality, the Blau Index of that group for nationality approaches 1. The maximum Blau Index for a feature in a given data set depends on the number of categories of that feature in the data set.

A number of studies have linked the Blau Index of (management-) teams to team processes and team outcomes (e.g., Bantel & Jackson, 1989; Richard, Barnett, Dwyer, & Chadwick, 2004; Chandler, Honig, & Wiklund, 2005; Pitts, 2005). Threfore, I also wanted to include the Blau Index for various features in the analysis of the data I obtained in an attempt to replicate and extend a study by Homan, van Knippenberg, van Kleef, & De Dreu (2007).

In doing so, I was unable to locate an R function for calculating the Blau Index. I therefore wrote my own and thought that others might also find it useful.

The function takes two arguments:
A numeric vector, groupID, denoting the group of every person/participant in the data set.
A second vector, feat, that can be either numeric or string, denoting the expression of the feature for each person/participant in the data set.

The function returns a vector of length = number of groups with the Blau Index for each group.

Example:

groupid <- c(1,1,1,2,2,2,2)
feature <- c("male", "male", "male", "female", "female", "male", "male")

blau.index(groupid, feature)

[1] 0.0 0.5

Here is the code:

blau.index <- function(groupid, feat){
blau.index <- rep(0, length(levels(as.factor(groupid))))
if (is.numeric(feat)) { # if the feature is denoted as a numeric ordinal variable
for (i in 1:length(levels(as.factor(groupid)))){
for (j in 1:length(levels(as.factor(feat)))){
blau.index[i] <- blau.index[i] + ((sum(feat[groupid == i & feat == j])/j)/ length(feat[groupid == i]))^2
}
}
} else { # if the feature is denoted as as strings
number.of.features <- length(levels(as.factor(feat)))
feat.num <- rep(NA, times = length(as.factor(feat)))
for (i in 1:number.of.features){
feat.num[feat == levels(as.factor(feat))[i]] <- i
feat.num[is.na(feat.num)] <- (number.of.features + 1)
}
for (i in 1:length(levels(as.factor(groupid)))){
for (j in 1:length(levels(as.factor(feat.num)))){
blau.index[i] <- blau.index[i] + ((sum(feat.num[groupid == i & feat.num == j])/j)/ length(feat.num[groupid == i]))^2
}
}
}
blau.index <- (1 - blau.index)
return(blau.index)
}

I would appreciate suggestions for improvements.

References

Blau, P. M. (1977). Inequality and heterogeneity. New York, NY: Free Press.

Bantel, K., & Jackson, S. (1989). Top management and innovations in banking: does the composition of the top team make a difference? Strategic Management Journal, 10, 107–124.

Chandler, G. N., Honig, B., & Wiklund, J. (2005). Antecedents, moderators, and performance consequences of membership change in new venture teams. Journal of Business Venturing, 20, 705–725.

Homan, A. C., van Knippenberg, D., Kleef, G. A. van, & De Dreu, C. K. W. (2007). Bridging faultlines by valuing diversity: Diversity beliefs, information elaboration, and performance in diverse work groups. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(5), 1189–1199.

Pitts, D. (2005). Diversity, representation, and performance: Evidence about race and ethnicity in public organizations. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 15, 615–631.

Richard, O., Barnett, T., Dwyer, S., & Chadwick, K. (2004). Cultural diversity in management, firm performance, and the moderating role of entrepreneurial orientation dimensions. Academy of Management Journal, 47, 255–266.

How to make a list of own publications in LaTeX in APA Style with sub-headings

2008-09-27T09:48:00.002+02:00

Your PhD is through and you apply for a post doc or, after that went through, write a grant proposal. And you have to attach a list of your own publications. You wrote everything else in LaTeX, so that should be in LaTeX as well. How do you do that in APA style and with subheadings (e.g., "Peer-reviewed journal articles", "Manusripts under review")? It took me a while to figure out so I thought I'd share it with the web. First, apacite and biblatex seem to be incompatible, so that does not work out. My solution is a combination of the apacite package and the bibunits package. This works for me:

...
\usepackage{apacite}
\usepackage{bibunits}
...

\begin{document}
\large{\flushleft Publications by Bertolt Meyer}\\

\begin{bibunit}[apacite]
\nocite{meyer2008stics,meyer2008gpir,patil2008}
\renewcommand{\refname}{\normalsize Manuscripts under review}
\putbib[blit]
\end{bibunit}

\begin{bibunit}[apacite]
\nocite{meyer2008}
\renewcommand{\refname}{\normalsize Monographies}
\putbib[blit]
\end{bibunit}

...
\end{document}

This requires a BibTeX bibliography file blit.bib in the same folder that holds the document. Somehow, a reference to my usual bibfile containing all my references didn't work, so I copied all of my own publications into a seperate bib.

Running latex over the above codes produces a sub-bibliography file bu[i] for every section, so in this case bu1 and bu2. Bibtex has to be run seperately over these two, which does not work from within TeXShop, so you have to do that from the console. The \renewcommand{\refname}{\normalsize Monographies}command changes the bibliography heading or title from "References" to something custom ("Monographies" in this case) and adjusts the font size of the bibliography heading acordingly.

The Finnish Husband

2008-08-20T15:01:00.003+02:00

The husband and his group's design ideas for creating a new sense of identity for the inhabitants of the former Finnish capital Turku were mentioned quite extensively in the Finnish newspaper Turun Sanomat today. They asked a few inhabitants what they like about their city and many said that they like the river. So one of their ideas is to illuminate the river at night in order to give it a stronger presence. I don't know what the fish make of that, but the newspaper liked it. They actually used one of the husband's mock-up photos of the illuminated river on the top right of the article.

The longest Finnish word I found in the article is kulttuuripääkaupunkivuonna. I think it translates into Capital of Culture, as Turku will be the European Capital of Culture in 2011.

UPDATE: The Finnish tabloid Iltalehti also brought the story. Can someone please tell me whether they like it?

My PhD thesis was published today despite copyright screw-ups

2008-08-20T14:33:00.004+02:00

Since I embrace the concept of open access very much, I published it on the electronic document server of Humboldt-University Berlin. It can be accessed here. The great advantage of doing it this way lies in the possibility of people finding your work through a google search. By putting the document on an open access server, you make the full text available to the entire internet. Fortunately for me, my science (Psychology) is internet-dominated enough to not devalue this publiation channel. From my perspective, open access has many advataes: It is quick, cheap, and ensures the highest possible range.

However, it comes with at least one issue. My dissertation contains quite a few figures. A lot of those were taken or adapted from other sources. I thus had to seek permission to reprint from the respective copyright owners. I made the worst experience with Oxford University Press. I sent them a request to use a small diagram (boxes with text) from a book they published in 1995. Their very brief reply:

I am afraid that we would not grant permission for this as it is our policy not to allow our material to be placed upon open access websites.

Simple as that, with no further explanation whatsoever. I can understand some of the reservation that copyright owners might have, but forbidding me to use a simple figure that consists of four boxes and a swirl in an academic content just because it is available on the Internet is too much. Screw you, OUP. What year do you think it is?

Starchitecture

2008-08-07T22:50:00.002+02:00

The husband finally has a website that displays his gorgeous architectural designs. I'm sure that he's up for quite a career.

Re: Grok or: Information, Knowledge, and Mental Models

2008-07-16T13:35:00.009+02:00

Jack Shedd has an insightful piece on his blog concerning shared patterns of thought and language:

If you ever meet two folks who collaborate well, who can finish each other’s thoughts, chances are they share a pattern language. ... Recognizing that our language is not absolute, that labels are open to personal interpretation; Slap whatever label you’d like on it, I’ve found no better way to think of it than in the term of patterns.

This is an issue thats widely discussed in Psychology and Philosophy. It comes down to the difficult relationship between language and thought, and between knowledge and information. Consider Jack's figurative example:

The best way for me has always been to repeat back whatever idea I hear in my own words and try hard only to use terms I know I share with the person. If someone says they want a “patriotic” logo, I immediately say, “So something with red, white, and blue, maybe stars or stripes in it?” Maybe that’s what the person was thinking. Maybe not. He might have been thinking of something airy and old, with black-letter type and dark brown hues. That could be patriotic to someone who thinks of the Constitution, and not the flag, as patriotism itself. He’s no more wrong or right than I am in my definition.
But oh, what a dick I’ll look like when I turn in that blue logo with the star. The client will think he’s chosen the wrong designer, that I didn’t understand his business at all; Worse, that I didn’t listen to him. That’s the first thing everyone thinks when there’s a mismatch. They blame you and think you didn’t listen. Even if you listened perfectly. Even if you took detailed notes. Everyone always thinks it was a lack of effort on your part. That you’re somehow dense, or dumb.

From my perspective, the problem lies in different interpretative frameworks and different cognitive biographies. Both persons (subjectively) know what a patriotic logo is, but their knowledge is highly subjective and contextual. Each person has his or her own "interpretative framework" (Polanyi, 1958). In communication, this subjective knowledge structure is transformed into information that does usually not convey its full set of attributes. The German philosopher Ulf von Rauchhaupt nails it quite well in his definition of knowledge:

The interpretation of information that leads to knowledge by an individual can be seen as an organization process: The process of interpreting data as information is already an act of organization: we perceive the data, order it and link it with other informationfrom our previous knowledge.... In this way, the new information becomes a part of our knowledge for further acts of interpretation. What we know then has a higher degree of organization than the barely obtained information.... Contrariwise, knowledge becomes information again if it is expressed. In order to express knowledge, an individual cannot supply his or her entire network of previous knowledge, which consists of his or her entire history of experiences, his or her cognitive biography. In order to share and exchange knowledge, humans have to partially reduce it to information. The possibility of such a reduction, the possibility to encode knowledge into information, is the reason for the sometimes synonymous use of the terms knowledge and information. Information is a condensed form of knowledge, knowledge is information whose organization exists only for the knowing person (Rauchhaupt, 2005, p. 98f, own translation).

Note that in von Rauchhaupt’s view, knowledge is represented as a network of organized information. Jack has come up with a practical solution: He will verbalize a part of his network of previous knowledge that is connected to the information that he perceives and integrates into his network of previous knowledge. This approach has its limitations, especially if implicit knowledge is involved, but I see it as a good mental exercise that can potentially limit misunderstandings and conflict. Furthermore, I find it quite fascinating that someone arrives at a similar description of the problem based on general wisdom. Furthermore, I think that Jack's illustration nails the issue quite well.

However, I would contradict Jack's original claim that two folks who collaborate well, who can finish each other’s thoughts, share a pattern language. I would say that these two individuals share a task-relevant mental model. In research, such mental models have been operationalized (measured) as knowledge networks (graphs), in line with von Rauchhaupt's concept of a network of organized information. For example, Mathieu et al. (2000) elicited team members' mental model with a structural knowledge elicitation technique similar to my AST.

It turned out that teams in which the resulting knowledge graphs were similar, i.e. in which mental models were similar, performance was higher.

References:

Mathieu, J. E., Heffner, T. S., Goodwin, G. F., Salas, E., & Cannon-Bowers, J. A. (2000). The influence of shared mental models on team process and performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85(2), 273–283.

Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge. London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Rauchhaupt, U. von. (2005). Wittgensteins Klarinette - Gegenwart und Zukunft des Wissens [Wittgenstein’s clarinet - present and future of knowledge]. Berlin, Germany: Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag.

UPDATE: Jack sent me an E-Mail and asks:

What is the distinction between a "knowledge network"
and the "pattern language"?

I should have made that clearer. The term "pattern language", as far as I understand Christopher Alexander's use of the term, is a codified (i.e. articulable, speakable) repository of methods for solving typical problems (that occur in design-related areas).

Knowledge can be defined as a set of structural connectivity patterns whose content has been viable for the attainment of goals [1].

Therefore, knowledge is always a network of components that have been referred to differently in different fields and by different scholars, but the network organization of knowledge is something that most people can agree upon.

There are similarities between the concepts pattern language and knowledge, but the difference I see between the concepts lies in the dependency of a pattern language on a codifiable language (and possibly in its dependency on a specific field of expertise). This dependency on codification becomes quite clear in Wikipedia's notion of a pattern in this context [2]:

"A single problem, documented with its best solution, is a single design pattern. Each pattern has a name, a descriptive entry, and some cross-references, much like a dictionary entry. A documented pattern must also explain why that solution is considered the best one for that problem, in the given situation."

In a pattern language, a pattern is thus something explicit and almost objectively true. Knowledge on the other other hand relies in no small parts on implicit content and connections, i.e. things we know but cannot articulate, _especially_ in the context of doing something. Consider these two sentences (example by Wittgenstein):

1. I know the height of the Mont Blanc.
2. I know how a clarinet sounds.

Both sentences constitute knowledge and both pieces of information have an entire network of associated information to them in the head of the person who says either of these sentences. However, neither the associations with these pieces of information, nor the associated items need to be explicitly available, i.e. speakable. We know more than we can say [3]. The network associated with the second sentence cannot be made explicit in such a way that a receiver who has never heard a clarinet before acquires the same knowledge as the sender.

This issue taps in the fundamental question on the relation between language and thought. Without going into too much detail, my point is: Similar knowledge structures between two individuals can lead to the point that those two individuals share a pattern language, but that must not necessarily be so, because parts of the knowledge structure cannot be articulated. However, similar knowledge structures condition successful cooperation in task performance (at least thats what some scholars claim; others, like myself, argue that a certain amount of cognitive heterogeneity between team members facilitates higher team performance).

Thus, the configuration of knowledge structures conditions the ability to work together, but the link between knowledge structures and pattern languages is not 100%, i.e. there can be diverging languages that base on similar knowledge (structure/networks). It is possible that two people can have similar knowledge, can work together, but have a different pattern language.

References

[1] Meyer, B., & Sugiyama, K. (2007). The concept of knowledge in KM: a dimensional model. Journal of Knowledge Management, 11(1), 17–35.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language#What_is_a_pattern.3F

[3] Polanyi, M. (1983). The tacit dimension (Reprinted ed.). Gloucester, MA: Smith.

Obtaining the same ANOVA results in R as in SPSS - the difficulties with Type II and Type III sums of squares

2008-05-24T15:39:00.017+02:00

I calculated the ANOVA results for my recent experiment with R. In brief, I assumed that women perform poorer in a simulation game (microwolrd) if under stereotype threat than men. My students who assisted in the experiments used SPSS for their calculations. I realized that they obtained different results than I did, with the same model on the same data set. As I was new to R, my initial calculation, an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) with the dependent variable microworld performance (MWP), the treatment factors gender and stereotype threat, and the covariate reasoning ability, looked like this:

I see two significant main effects of the treatment factors, a significant effect of the covariate, and a significant interaction effect. However, Quick-R tells me this:

WARNING: R provides Type I sequential SS, not the default Type III marginal SS reported by SAS and SPSS. In a nonorthogonal design with more than one term on the right hand side of the equation order will matter (i.e., A+B and B+A will produce different results)! We will need use the drop1( ) function to produce the familiar Type III results.

I do not want order to matter and adjust my calculation accordingly:
What a difference: The main effect of the participants' gender on thir microworld performance does not reach statistical significance. However, that is still not what SPSS produces:

UNIANOVA MWP BY GENDER STTHREAT WITH reasonz
/METHOD=SSTYPE(3)
/INTERCEPT=INCLUDE
/CRITERIA=ALPHA(0.05)
/DESIGN=reasonz GENDER STTHREAT GENDER*STTHREAT.

In SPSS, the main effect of gender is still significant. I dug a little deeper and found another line I needed to add to the R command in order to get exactly the same result:

As you can see, these results are identical. But why all these differences? What does options(contrasts=c("contr.sum", "contr.poly")) actually do and what the heck are Type-III sums of squares? I surely did not learn about these things at my university. I thus did a little reading.

It turns out that the decision about which type of sums of squares to use is based on the question whether it is reasonable to report main effects in the presence of an interaction. Let's review the hypothesis of the experiment: It assumes that women exhibit a decrease in microworld performance under stereotype threat. This is an interaction hypothesis. An error bar plot (lines representing 1 SE) reveals that this is the case:
The plot indicates a significant interaction between gender and stereotype threat. The main effect of stereotype threat is obtained by averaging the performance scores of all participants (both male and female) over the two stereotype threat conditins. This will lead to a low average score under the stereotype threat condition because of the interaction, because the female participants score so extremely low unter stereotype threat and account for the lower average. Thus, it makes no sense to look at the main effect of stereotype threat if an interaction of stereotype threat * gender is present.

Looking for a main effect of stereotype threat under the presence of a significant interaction is a violation of the marginality principle that assumes that all terms to which a particular term is marginal are zero. Lower order terms are marginal to higher order terms, i.e. the main effects of two factors A and B are marginal to the interaction effect A*B. Thus, in this case, the marginality principle would assume that if we inspect and report main effects of gender and stereotype threat, the interaction of stereotype threat and gender is zero. That is not the case and the above example illustrates that - under the given hypothesis - it is useless to report the main effect of stereotype threat.

Now, the problom with Type-III sums of squares (also referred to as marginal sums of squares) is that they are "obtained by fitting each effect after all the other terms in the model, i.e. the Sums of Squares for each effect corrected for the other terms in the model. The marginal (Type III) Sums of Squares do not depend upon the order in which effects are specified in the model" (source). In the case with stereotype threat, that clearly doesn't make any sense: Reporting the Type III sum of squares (as SPSS does per default) for the main effect of stereotype threat means doing so while correcting for the interaction. But it is precisely this interaction that caused the main effect in the first place! Thus, Type-III sums of squares violate the principle of marginality and do not make any sense in the stereotype threat case. Even more so, Type-III sums of squares do "... NOT sum to the Sums of Squares for the model corrected for the mean". I wonder whether this renders the usual way of calculating a factor's effect size eta-square by dividing the SS of the factor by the total SS useless, too?

Anyway, coming back to the ominous contrasts=c("contr.sum", "contr.poly"): In order to obtain the correction for the rest of the factors in the model that Type-III SSs deliver, R needs to know how to balance the factors in the calculation of the SSs. Therefore, it requires a cotrast matrix with zero-sum columns (see here). The R-help for the options() command (?options()) tells us:

contrasts:
the default contrasts used in model fitting such as with aov or lm. A character vector of length two, the first giving the function to be used with unordered factors and the second the function to be used with ordered factors. By default the elements are named c("unordered", "ordered"), but the names are unused.

As the treatment factors gender and stereotype threat are unordered factors, R will use contr.sum in order to construct a contrast matrix of the apropriate order (i.e., 2), because contrasts=c("contr.sum", "contr.poly") was specified. contr.sum(2) produces

[,1]
1 1
2 -1

My first attempt at Type-III SSs in R above produced nonesense and differed from SPSS, because this wasn't specified.Without going into too much detail here (basically because I haven't yet understood everything myself), there is an alternative to the sequence-dependent Type-I SSs and the marginality-violating Type-III SSs: Type II sums of squares preserve the marginality principle. This is how to get them, and this example illustrates that they are diffrent from Type-III SSs and that they are - at least in this case - order independent:
SPSS can do the same by specifying /METHOD=SSTYPE(2) in the UNIANOVA syntax.

The remaining problem in the present case is the main effect of gender. It does make sense to investigate the effect of gender in the presenence of the interaction with stereotype threat, because it could be that women are generally poorer complex problem solvers than men and perform especially poor under stereotype threat on top of the general difference. In fact, the error bar above indicates that this is the case. This leaves me with one main effect that cannot be interpreted (stereotype threat) and another one that can be interpreted. Which SSs should I use? I am a bit lost.

Beautiful Correlation Tables in R

2008-04-09T21:35:00.003+02:00

I have achieved another victory in getting R to produce SPSS-like results. In experimental psychology, an analysis of measurement variable correlations is a common method in the course of a statistical analysis. Thus, I wanted R to produce a publication-quality output similar to SPSS: a correlation matrix of measurement variables that contains only the lower triangle of observations, where observations have two decimal digits and are flagged with stars (*, **, and ***) according to levels of statistical significance. However, as statmethods notices:

Unfortunately, neither cor( ) or cov( ) produce tests of significance, although you can use the cor.test( ) function to test a single correlation coefficient.

I did a little research and found this post on the R-help list. I modified Chuck Cleland's code a little so that the following command on the swiss data frame (provided in the Hmisc package) produces a beautiful output:

> corstarsl(swiss[,1:4])

Fertility Agriculture Examination
Fertility
Agriculture 0.35*
Examination -0.65*** -0.69***
Education -0.66*** -0.64*** 0.70***

If one employs the xtable package that produces LaTeX tables from within R, xtable(corstarsl(swiss[,1:4])) produces this:
Isn't that beautiful? I like it a lot. Here's the code (as I said, much of it taken from here):

corstarsl <- function(x){
require(Hmisc)
x <- as.matrix(x)
R <- rcorr(x)$r
p <- rcorr(x)$P

## define notions for significance levels; spacing is important.
mystars <- ifelse(p < .001, "***", ifelse(p < .01, "** ", ifelse(p < .05, "* ", " ")))

## trunctuate the matrix that holds the correlations to two decimal
R <- format(round(cbind(rep(-1.11, ncol(x)), R), 2))[,-1]

## build a new matrix that includes the correlations with their apropriate stars
Rnew <- matrix(paste(R, mystars, sep=""), ncol=ncol(x))
diag(Rnew) <- paste(diag(R), " ", sep="")
rownames(Rnew) <- colnames(x)
colnames(Rnew) <- paste(colnames(x), "", sep="")

## remove upper triangle
Rnew <- as.matrix(Rnew)
Rnew[upper.tri(Rnew, diag = TRUE)] <- ""
Rnew <- as.data.frame(Rnew)

## remove last column and return the matrix (which is now a data frame)
Rnew <- cbind(Rnew[1:length(Rnew)-1])
return(Rnew)
}

Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials

2008-04-08T09:46:00.004+02:00

Marvelous piece mocking exaggerated demands for randomized experimental designs. Some journal review editors should definitely read this.

"Objectives: To determine whether parachutes are effective in preventing major trauma related to gravitational challenge. ... It is a truth universally acknowledged that a medical intervention justified by observational data must be in want of verification through a randomised controlled trial. ... Results: We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention. Conclusions: As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organized and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute".

(via the social science statistics blog)

More Beautiful Error Bars in R

2008-04-01T16:30:00.004+02:00

The rather complex structure and syntax of R (at least to the spoiled SPSS user that I am) comes with a steep learning curve but also with a huge profit: Flexibility. I managed to produce multiple clustered error bars in R today that come across better than a comparable SPSS output:
With regard to my experiment, the graph shows that despite the fact that an ANOVA does not deliver a significant interaction effect of microworld and participant gender, the effect of stereotype threat varies over different microworlds. FSYS produces the smallest gender effects and exhibits the smallest (and statistically insignificant) gender differences in the no stereotype threat condition.

With regard to R, two days of extensive reading and trial-and-error (and my sketchy previous knowledge) have enabled me to achieve almost all the graphical functionality I require (ANOVA interaction plots are next). Maybe R's learning curve isn't that steep after all. What I learned today: the use of the par() function for changing R's graphic output settings and using that to create a multiple figure environment that I then filled with three custom-generated error bars.

Beautiful Error Bars in R

2008-03-31T16:55:00.004+02:00

One of the reasons why I haven't made the switch from R to SPSS is R's lack of proper error bar graphs. I use them frequently because they are easy to interpret: If you plot the means of several groups of participants in one error bar chart and scale the error bars to a length of one standard measurement error, non-overlapping error bars indicate a significant difference between the according means. In fact, the APA advocates the use of error bars for reporting results since 2005 [1]. This way of reporting differences in means is also called "Inference by Eye" [1].

After my rants about SPSS, my wise R mentor, Stephan Kolassa, pointed me at the gplots library that features a good function for drawing error bars in R: plotCI(). Stephan also pointed me to Rseek.org, an excellent search engine for R related queries. I fiddled with Stephan's example code in order to reproduce my SPSS clustered error-bar chart from last week's post on stereotype threat in complex problem solving:

And this is how I got in in R:
I like it very much; the only thing I need to work out is how to offset the bars in the same conditions so that overlapping error bars don't actually overlap but are drawn next to each other with a few pixels between them.

If you would like to try this out for yourself, here is the R code that produces the image above:

# Clustered Error Bar for Groups of Cases.
# Example: Experimental Condition (Stereotype Threat Yes/No) x Gender (Male / Female)
# The following values would be calculated from data and are set fixed now for
# code reproduction

means.females <- c(0.08306698, -0.83376319)
stderr.females <- c(0.13655378, 0.06973371)

names(means.females) <- c("No","Yes")
names(stderr.females) <- c("No","Yes")

means.males <- c(0.4942997, 0.2845608)
stderr.males <- c(0.07493673, 0.18479661)

names(means.males) <- c("No","Yes")
names(stderr.males) <- c("No","Yes")

# Error Bar Plot

library (gplots)

# Draw the error bar for female experiment participants:
plotCI(x = means.females, uiw = stderr.females, lty = 2, xaxt ="n", xlim = c(0.5,2.5), ylim = c(-1,1), gap = 0, ylab="Microworld Performance (Z Score)", xlab="Stereotype Threat", main = "Microworld performance over experimental conditions")

# Add the males to the existing plot
plotCI(x = means.males, uiw = stderr.males, lty = 1, xaxt ="n", xlim = c(0.5,2.5), ylim = c(-1,1), gap = 0, add = TRUE)

# Draw the x-axis (omitted above)
axis(side = 1, at = 1:2, labels = names(stderr.males), cex = 0.7)

# Add legend for male and female participants
legend(2,1,legend=c("Male","Female"),lty=1:2)

[1] Cumming, G., & Finch, S. (2005). Inference by Eye: Confidence Intervals and How to Read Pictures of Data. American Psychologist, 60(2), 170–180.

A reply from SPSS Inc.

2008-03-31T09:14:00.003+02:00

SPSS Inc. replied to my open letter on the poor quality of SPSS 16 for Mac:

Dear Bertolt:

I want to acknowledge your email/blog and apologize for the inconveniences caused by SPSS 16.0 for Mac. Your bugs, issues and suggestions have been logged and we will work on fixing them in future releases.

We are getting ready to start beta testing SPSS 17.0 for all three platforms -- Windows, Mac and Linux -- in a couple months. Would you like to participate? We would love to have your input. Beta testers get a free copy of the final software.

Thanks,
Arik

________________________
Arik J. Pelkey
Sr. Product Manager
SPSS Inc.
Phone: [deleted]
www.spss.com

________________________________

I do acknowledge the friendly mail and the fact that they didn't try to reason or to justify certain issues. However, note that they apologize for the inconvenience SPSS caused, but not for the bugs, i.e. for the quality of their software. That may sound like splitting hairs, but to me, it's a difference. Why can companies never ever say something like: "We know we screwed up big time. We're sorry." Why does it always have to be some sort of marketing speech? Anyways, I do appreciate their invitation to their beta program which I am going to accept (criticism should always be constructive, eh?).

However, I also suggested two steps on SPSS's part in my reply: Firstly, SPSS should publicly acknowledge certain issues with SPSS 16 for Mac. Secondly, I urge SPSS to review their internal processes for software testing. A more rigorous product testing would have saved them and me a lot of time and nerves.

SPSS 16 for Mac Doesn’t Make the Cut

2008-03-31T08:55:00.002+02:00

Mark Kupferberg took up my open letter to SPSS on his Blog. He agrees with me on the poor impression that SPSS 16 for Mac's UI creates:

I haven’t personally seen SPSS 16 for the Mac, but looking at the pictures Bertolt provided, I can certainly see why one might be concerned. It really does look like something that belongs on Windows 3.1.

Some of the people who commented on my rants defended the UI for two main reasons: First, it has been this way since the first release and its good that it stays the same, and second, that it's what Windows users get, too. I think that both views are flawed, because a good piece of software can improve its UI without turning its users away. Changes to the worse have to be avoided of course, but no changes at all just for the sake of stability doesn't sound like a sound argument to me. And secondly no, the Mac UI is not what Windows users are served. The icons on Windows look similar, but they're smaller, integrate better with the overall design and the entire UI makes a more organized impression on me:

Learning R for SAS and SPSS Users

2008-03-28T12:41:00.003+01:00

For all of those who as frustrated with SPSS as I am, decisionstats has a great tip:

So you decided to cut down on your Statistical software expenses and decided to get R.

but the problem is you know SAS /SPSS and you need to learn R fast enough to justify switching over …….

the ideal book for you is http://oit.utk.edu/scc/RforSAS&SPSSusers.pdf

SPSS 16 for Mac: Insulting users. An open letter to SPSS Inc.

2008-03-27T13:45:00.011+01:00

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen at SPSS Inc,

As a psychologist working in experimental research, the statistical analysis of data is the bread and butter of my daily work. Like the majority of my colleagues in the social sciences, I use the de-facto industry-standard for this task: SPSS; the very product your company is bulit on, the very product that is supposed to deliver a "statistical package for the social sciences" - what SPSS originally stood for before it became a brand.

Let me remind you that this is an exclusive piece of software that comes with a steep price tag of $639 for the single base version for higher-education institutions ($1699 for commercial users).

I am writing you this open letter concerning the quality of your most recent version of SPSS for the Mac - the first version that runs on intel-based Macs, SPSS 16.0 for Mac.

SPSS 16 for Mac - that I have to use on a frequent basis - is the most insulting piece of software I ever came across. I have been frequently annoyed by software in my life time, but this is the first time that I actually feel insulted by a commercial piece of software. Its astonishingly poor interface design and the long list of bugs I discovered during a single week of intense usage make me wonder whether SPSS 16 for Mac was ever used for its intended purpose at your company before you dared to ship it to us - your end users and customers. Do you think that just because we're scientists, you can throw this half-baked crap at us?

The poor impression begins right after double-clicking the icon, when SPSS displays its spalsh screen:

Non-English characters, as they appear in the name of my organization (Universität Zürich), are not displayed correctly. Your programmers have obviously never heard of proper internationalization.

Secondly, the overall appearance makes me think its 1996.

Especially the tool-bar looks exactly like I would expect a toolbar to look like in a 1990s piece of cheap shareware:

I mean, honestly, is this some kind of joke? This interface does neither convey any informational value nor scientific professionalism (if that was intended). The only thing it conveys is your utter lack of interface design principals.

But apart from such minor issues (as you seem to think that UI design is a minor issue), the list of bugs in SPSS that I came across during a single week of working with SPSS 16.0 for Mac is mind-blowing.

Double-clicking a saved viewer output in the finder opens an empty data file instead. Double-clicking the output in the finder again leads to an error-message that tells me that the file is already open (which it isn't).
If I go through the cumbersome process of defining input parameters for a data file in text format, and save the parameters as a template for future imports, I cannot load the template the next time I want to use it. When I click on the template file in the open template-dialog, nothing happens.
If I select "Data... -> Merge Files -> Insert Variables", choose an external file and tell SPSS to add certain variables from that file to my current file while dropping others, the resulting syntax produces an error and nothing happens.
Importing variables with values that are stored in the decimal format (e. g. "4.023") from a text file produce missing values, i.e. they're not imported at all despite the fact that they're displayed correctly in the preview of the import wizard. Changing the variable type from numeric to string doesn't help.
The menu bar in the output viewer disappears from time to time. Only quitting and restarting SPSS brings it back.
When re-opening a saved viewer file, the font face of all custom-edited headlines is changed from Arial 16 to Times New Roman 12.
Overall performance is incredibly slow.
In the output-viewer, double-clicking a diagram for editing and closing it again sometimes leads to all changes being lost.

These are just the most prominent bugs I came across. I am sure that there is more where that came from. Do you have any kind of testing whatsoever at SPSS? What kind of impression do you think such experiences create? On my part, it creates the impression that you disrespect your users.

According to Eric Sink, there are three categories of software:

MeWare: The developer creates software. The developer uses it. Nobody else does.
ThemWare: The developer creates software. Other people use it. The developer does not.
UsWare: The developer creates software. Other people use it. The developer uses it too.

For me, SPSS is an extreme example of ThemWare. You seem to have no clue about the poor quality you're creating - at least for the Mac. This impression is extremely stark because I have to use your products alongside beautifully designed pieces of software such as bibDesk, Apple Pages, and Apple Mail.

In my opinion, there is a piece of statistical software that is just the opposite of SPSS: R. It doesn't sport a graphical interface such as SPSS (it's syntax only, like SPSS used to be), but it's certainly more powerful, creates better graphs, and is built and maintained by a community of people that care for their product and actually use it. I've been trying R alongside SPSS for six months now and I haven't come across a single bug. If R had a powerful graphical interface, your product would be off the market within a week.

My experience with SPSS 16 for Mac will make me change to R once and for all. Furthermore, I will encourage my colleagues to do the same.

Frustrated,
Bertolt Meyer

Note: The link to the three categories of software stems from Jeff Atwoods coding horror.

Update: Two more bugs I can reproduce:

Copy and Paste from Excel is not working
Importing Excel Files produces "?" as values after the 40th variable

Update 2: According to this sitemeter-entry, someone from SPSS has read this post. I wonder whether I will receive a reply.

Update 3: The story has been picked up elsewhere and SPSS replied.

Gender Effects in Complex Problem Solving

2008-03-27T12:28:00.009+01:00

I am really excited about my most recent experiment on gender effects in complex problem solving (CPS). Complex problems represent the type of problems that managers and politicians face on an everyday basis: A complex and dynamic (changing on its own over time) system needs to be transformed from a current state into an ill-defined goal state; the system is networked (i. e., tweaking at one screw will lead to unanticipated changes in other parts of the system) and multiple, possibly conflicting goals need to be pursued. The ability to solve such complex problems is tested with so-called "Microworlds", complex computer-simulations that place the gamer in a semantically framed complex problem scenario: A company needs to be saved from bankruptcy, a system needs to be steered within certain parameters, a forest needs to be catered for, an eco-system must be maintained. These microworlds run over a simulated period of time (usually several months), many variables can be tweaked, and decisions taken at an early step influence the further cause of the game. A bit like SimCity if you will. CPS performance is largely determined by certain factors of intelligence and by knowledge on the system in question. This knowledge is usually obtained during the problem solving process itself. Thus, the ability to identify connections, to understand systems, and to learn quickly is a key determinant of CPS.

Since complex problem solving is considered to be a core managerial competence, microworlds are frequently employed in assessment centers by large corporations such as banks and business consultants.

However, I came accross two studies that bothered to examine microworld performanc scores seperately for male and female experiment participants. All other studies I came accross did not report individual findings for the two sexes. I have an idea why: The two abovementioned studies reported gender effects in the direction that men outperform women. Those two studies (both from the 90s) explained the gender effect with higher intelligence levels of male participants and with higher levels of computer experience among male participants. If these artifacts were controlled for, the statistical difference between male and female complex problem solvers would vanish. That was not the case in the experiment I conducted in my PhD-thesis. I found severe gender differences in CPS performance, even after controlling for several variables: Intelligence, learning, computer experience, and economic knowledge. These variables were unable to explain the gender differences I found.

Now, one wouldn't say that women are poorer managers than men. At the same time, if my results hold true, the use of microworlds in assessment centers favors male applicants over female applicants. This sounded like an important issue to me and I decided to pursue the matter further.

My brilliant colleague Carmen Lebherz suggested the concept of stereotype threat to me when I told her about my odd findings. Wikipedia:

"Stereotype threat is the fear that one's behavior will confirm an existing stereotype of a group with which one identifies. This fear may lead to an impairment of performance."

In my case, the either explicit or implicit stereotype that women are poor in CPS (or in "computer-related stuff") may have impaired the performance of my female experiment participants. I designed an experiment in order to test this assumption. We employed a 2 x 2 x 3 between-subjects design: gender (male / female) x stereotype threat (yes / no) x microworld (Taylorshop / FSYS / ColorSim). Stereotype threat was altered by the instructions that the experiment participants received. In the stereotype threat condition, participants were told that we would measure their ability to solve complex problems with a complex problem solving microworld. We told them of the role microworlds play in assessment centers and asked them to do their best. In the non-stereotype-threat condition, we told them that we would like them to play a kind of computer game and that we would be interested in the emotions that this game would create (which we measured with Marx & Stapel's 2006 questionnaire).

The result: Over all three employed scenarios, female experiment participants exhibited much poorer performance under the stereotype threat condition than under the non-stereotype-threat condition, as the graph below illustrates (standardized CPS performance is indicated on the y-axis over all three microworlds).

The weird thing is that this happens both to women who think that men do better in microworlds and to women that do not think so, i.e. the effect of stereotype occurs regardless of the salience of the stereotype.

Further analyses of covariance will hopefully shed more light on the conditioning factors of these effects (we measured motivation, frustration, anxiety, intelligence, experience with computer-simulations only to name a few). However, this is a compelling example for the role of the situation and setting on human performance.

I will try to write up a paper on our findings as soon as I finish data analysis. In the meantime, I would like to thank my collaborators and the people who enabled this experiment: Heinz Gutscher for the generous funding and the tremendous working conditions at his group, Jürgen Boss for adapting ColorSim for use in my expriment (during his xmas holidays!), Annette Kluge for providing me with Jürgen's taylor-made version of ColorSim, Dietrich Wagener for providing a copy of FSYS, my students Jeanine Grütter, Marisa Oertig, and Rahel Schuler for their great efforts in conducting the experiments (179 participants in the lab in six weeks!), and finally our great and willing participants.

hi-speed wifi

2008-03-13T22:42:00.004+01:00

I always thought that the German ICE is the top of the food chain when it comes to bullet train technology. Dubbed as 'Maybach on rails' by Deutsche Bahn, I was convinced that hi-speed train traveling couldn't get any better. Comfortable, great design, and laptop power outlets at every seat.

Well, thats nothing. It's nothing compared to the latest french TGV lyra that I had the pleasure to ride last weekend. 4 hours and 20 minutes from Zurich Central to Paris Est (at a steep 200 EUR return). The train was well designed, nice colors but it didn't feel quite as luxurious and solid in comparison with the ICE. Until I booted my laptop, detected a Wifi and found this:
The train apparently has its own web server that displays the above site. In the center is a flash-based live map that displays the current location of the train. The box on the top left displays the current speed (up to 340 km/h) and the completed percentage of the journey. The best thing however is the third menu-item on the left: Internet! During approximately 2 hrs of the journey (and within France), that link fires up a free internet connection (realized by orange mobile). I checked my emails and surfed the web at decent speeds. For free.

Fuck you Deutsche Bahn, the holy grail of coolness now resides with the french, and an overpriced WLAN-Service on one lousy connection that is only available to first-class passangers can't stick up with that.

Hi-Speed trains rock: You travel from center to center, no airport annoyances (check-in, security, weight limitations, waiting at gates, endless journeys to shitty airports and god-knows-what), its much better for the environment, and there's power for laptops. If you ask me, it's the best way to travel - at least in Europe.

Paris was fantastic by the way.

Windows Vista SP1 installation circle of death

2008-02-20T12:54:00.002+01:00

It turns out that the auto-update function of Windows Vista (ON by default!) downloads SP1 for Vista and leads to a continuously rebooting system after install for many users (see thread on Microsoft forums here) User echostormfury summarizes his extremely frustrating experince with M$ tech support:

3 hours on the phone with Microsoft Technical Support did not get me anywhere except to a "professional level technician" that asked me right off the bat to pay $249 for the incident support
[...]
So I now have to migrate my data out, reinstall Windows, and salvage my files in a new install.
[...]
Points Learned:
Microsoft Sucks (Relearned)
Microsoft Windows Vista Sucks (Relearned)
Microsoft Windows Update should BE TURNED OFF from Automatic Updates (Not feasible or practicle, but I'd rather be hacked and whored than risk losing ALL MY FILES again due to stupidity rather than devious ingenuity)
RAID with Windows is trouble (sync a backup instead daily, or image weekly)
A likely culprit: AVG may be contributory to this problem
And did I mention, Microsoft Sucks?

Microsoft you owe me 14 hrs of my time

my first Windows Vista experience

2008-02-20T12:40:00.004+01:00

After hearing and reading a lot about Windows Vista, I recently had my first experience with it. For an experiment I am currently conducting at UZH, I borrowed ten identical laptops from our competent and helpful IT services department. I received ten seemingly new HP Compaq nw8440 machines with Vista Business. Their specs from the system preferences: Intel Core 2 T7400, 2.17 GHz, 2 GB Ram, 80 GB HDD. The windows performance index (is that the correct translation for Windows-Leistungsindex?) of those gizmos was 4.2 (anything above 4 indicates a top machine, according to system info). So a very decent set-up. However, the continuously blowing fan was the adequate sound track for an experience that felt slow and clumsy. Despite the advanced speed of the system, responses were slow, a lot of HDD access without any applications running. An update of Windows Defender took more than five minutes during which the system was inoperable. I found the frequent security warnings and announcements extremely irritating. Even native Windows-System applications that are rooted deep within the system, such as Defender or Update, caused the screen to fade to grey and displayed a frightening warning message ("Windows defender update is about to launch, are you sure you want to proceed?"). To sum it up: It was a horribly annoying experience. I am so glad that I switched to the Mac, I'd never want to work with Vista. It feels bloated, clumsy, and slow.

The first proper and decent looking electric car (EV) will ship in Europe this year

2008-02-08T23:57:00.000+01:00

I promised myself that I will never buy a car with a conventional combustion engine that runs on regular fuel. I told myself that I will wait until a proper battery-powered electric vehicle is available before I buy a car. It looks as if I could buy my first car this year: a Think City. Think Global AS, a Norwegian automotive company that used to be a subsidiary of Ford, is now advertising its new electric car (EV), the Think City, which features a maximum range of 180 km with one charge, a maximum speed of 100 km/h and a charging time of 10 hours for a full charge. And above all, it looks like a regular small car:
Technology Review's December issue has a lengthy story on the baby (in German) and refers to it as "an iPod on wheels". However, the most important information is missing from the official website and the review: Availability and Price. I wrote an E-Mail to Think and received a very prompt reply. Here is the deal:

The car will be launched in the UK, Norway, Switzerland and Denmark in 2008. In 2009 we will look to launching in more European countries plus the US and Canada.

Switzerland! Hooray! I can get one this year! I knew it was a good idea to move to Switzerland.. If I can afford it, because the little gizmo comes with a steep price tag and a little catch:

The car costs from 199.000.- NOK [Note: at current conversion rates, thats 24.772,53 EUR]. In addition, one rents a battery pack for 975.- NOK [121,37 EUR] (plus tax) a month.

The indicated prices are for the Norwegian market and will be adjusted for in other countries. We have included the mobility agreement because;
1. The battery is still quite expensive.
2. Think is responsible for the battery functioning as it should.
3. Think will deliver a new battery when needed without any additional costs.
4. It will be possible to "upgrade" to other battery technologies when available.

According to the Technology Review report mentioned above, the true reason for this "mobility agreement" is another one: The battery is so expensive that it doesn't make sense to fracture its price into the price of the car; the overall price for the car would be beyond reason. Thus, they found a clever way of fracturing out the cost of the energy pack: You buy the car but you lease the battery, i.e. technically, you don't own the battery but pay a monthly fee to use it. I think that is rather clever. And at "180 km range at the price of a glass of mineral water" (company website) and with drastically reduced taxes due to zero-emission, 120 EUR per months looks like a fair deal to me.

I probably won't buy one though, because its limited range destines its prime use to commuting to work and for shopping, and I do both very conveniently by Zürich's perfect public transport. Sigh. But who knows? If the range expands I'll get one. And I am really glad that there finally is a decent electric car available in Europe. Well done, Think!

Even if you don't speak German, make sure to check out the beautiful photo gallery of the Technology Review Article. I especially like the plug beneath the fuel tank cap.

On the link between the brain and the body

2008-01-31T12:23:00.000+01:00

I attended LEARNTEC 2008 a week ago where I gave a presentation on scientific findings on knowledge management. On the last morning, I attended a session on brain research and innovative teaching concepts. Prof. Dr. Gerald Hüther of Göttingen University gave a stunning talk on the "requirements for successful learning from a neuroscience perspective". His main message was that the development of the brain is primarily condinioned by bodyliy experiences of the brain. According to him, the structural connectivity pattern of our brain is in no way determined by genes, but it structures itself according to bodily experiences prior to one's birth. Thus, a conceptual separation of mind and brain is obsolete, because the primary impressions that shape our brain come from the body. The brain is continously shaped through experiences and different experiences shape different brains (racall Simon LeVay's 1992 study that indicated that the brain of homosexual men is differently structured than the brain of heterosexual men).

Hello Züri

2007-10-27T17:14:00.000+02:00

Ok, here it goes. I finally managed to open my new (German) blog on my new life in Switzerland. Check it out here.

The Rule of Least Annoyance

2007-10-16T22:01:00.000+02:00

On all of my recent journeys, I encountered situations in which I was annoyed by other travelers. Travelers who try to jump the queue at the check-in. Passengers who block the aisle during boarding by undressing and stowing in super slow-mo while 100 others are stuck behind them; most of them still outside of the plane. People who smuggle two pieces of hand luggage past the check-in only to have one piece taken away from them by gate staff while others wait behind them. These people annoy me to death. They exhibit zero interest for the annoyance they create for the people around them.

When standing in line at the security check, I take off my jacket and belt, empty my pockets and take out my macbook before I reach the x-ray scan. When I board the plane and reach my row, I take a step into it before stowing my hand luggage.

There is a very simple rule in traveling: Create the least possible annoyance for the people around you. I advocate death penalty for those who break this rule. And I suggest a service similar to youparklikeanasshole.com, e.g. youbehavelikeanasshole.com.

Because Change Happenz

2007-10-16T21:55:00.000+02:00

I hereby make it official: I have moved to Zürich! I am based at the chair of social psychology at the Institute of Psychology at Zürich University (UZH) now. And no, that does not mean that I have handed in my PhD (although I'd say it's 99% complete). I will document my move to Zürich and my impressions on a separate blog (in German) soon. I now live outside of the European Union!

LWA07

2007-09-26T11:55:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, I had the privilige to give an invited talk on the barriers in knowledge management at the LWA07 (Lernen-Wissen-Adaption) at the Martin-Luther University in Halle. I summarized the findings of our 2004 delphi study on the future of KM and of my 2005 case study on user-perception of two knowledge management systems and received a lot of positive feedback. I also learned the new fad: Experience Management. Difference from Knowledge Management? It's about knowledge that comes from personal experience. Oh. Now thats something different.

Daniel Rocks Glasgow

2007-09-24T16:24:00.000+02:00

The husband has a blog. I hate the fact that he's away. I miss him.

Freaquisch PopCulture Mayham

2007-08-03T14:56:00.000+02:00

I did a few posts on music and pop culture on this blog in the past. I teamed up with my two best music loving friends hansblond and legun for a new (German) blog where all our music-related stuff will go in the future. Check out le freaque!

My EndNote/Word Nightmare...

2007-08-03T14:11:00.000+02:00

...looks like this:
(translation: Not enough RAM. You cannot undo the operation. Proceed?)
Or like this:
(A COM exception has occurred)
Both windows pop up regularly when I open my PhD thesis (about 210 pages) in Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac on my MacBook (1,83 Ghz, Mac OS X 10.4.10, 1 GB RAM) and try to edit a citation. When I wrote the thesis, I did not use CiteWhileYouWrite, but inserted EndNote in-text citations like this: {Author, Year #Record} (or {, Year #Record} if I wanted to omit the author's name). It was just faster to type. When I finished my document, I clicked on "format bibliography" in my EndNote PlugIn, and Word started working, until the above COM exception occurred. Now dare you, this is a legal and fully registered Version of EndNote (I spent 100 EUR for an upgrade to Mac in January!), so I contacted EndNote support. They were friendly and asked me to send in the document and my library, which I did. Then they formatted my document on a Windows machine for me without any substantial advice on how to avoid the problem in the future. Which is not much use because some citations were arbitrary (I forgot to place the #Record) and of course they didn't get it right. So I did the following thing: I opened a clean and fresh Word document and pasted my thesis chapter-by-chapter into the new document. I avoided two citations which the EndNote support suspected for having caused the error. After every chapter (about 20 pages), I formatted the bibliography. Guess what, already after the 3rd chapter, Word started to slow down extremely, and to re-run page breaks over and over again. After the fifth chapter, both above error messages started to show up again. Citations would remain unformatted untiil I manually clicked into them, this would sometimes help. It took me an ENTIRE DAY to auto-format my bibliography and as a result I have a complete document BUT: Whenever I open the document and try to edit a reference in the text (or add a new one), Word freezes and the above errors appear. Sometimes that happens without me doing anything.

Thus, I have a frozen version of my PhD that I cannot edit. This is a complete nightmare and a catastrophe beyond belief. I now switched to LaTeX (gwTeX / TeXShop / BibDesk) and typeset the entire document again. I should have done that right from the beginning. Not only does it produce a beautiful thesis, but its also a much better workflow. My advice to everyone: Do not write your PhD on a Mac with Word/Endnote. Both pieces of software appear to be badly ported from Windows to the Mac (see here for Word), and their shortcomings in terms of performance multiply into one big piece of junk. What an annoying waste of time and money. I am frustrated beyond belief. I will NEVER EVER use Word/EndNote again for scientific purposes.

The iPhone has a removable SIM card

2007-07-10T10:55:00.000+02:00

Remember how Walt Mossberg claimed that the iPhone does "not support SIM cards"? I even spent an entire post on this subject. It turns out that Walt was wrong. CNN:

Contrary to earlier reports, the SIM card is removable via a small drawer on the top of the iPhone.

Maybe Walt's quote meant that it cannot use T-Mobile's cards? Which is true, as the iPhone is SIM locked to AT&T in the states.

iPhone: European model and SIM card slot

2007-06-27T10:51:00.000+02:00

Walt Mossberg:

[The iPhone] can't use the digital cards (called
SIM cards) that would allow it to run on T-Mobile's network.

All mobile phones in Europe operate on the GSM and/or UMTS network standard, both of which rely on SIM cards. To my knowledge, there is not a single mobile Phone on the European market that does not have a SIM card slot (although some phones are locked for exclusive operation with certain provider SIM-cards ("SIM lock")). Thus, the European version of the iPhone, announced later this year, will have to feature a SIM card slot, most probably with SIM-lock, as the iPhone will be exclusive to one operator in Germany: There was a story on Germany's biggest online news mag, Spiegel Online, on the fight among operators for the iPhone contract. Translation of the title and intro:

Monopoly business: German mobile network operators brawl over the iPhone

One player gets it all: Like in the USA, Apple seems to plan granting only one mobile network operator in Germany the exclusive right to sell the iPhone. A grim fight over the cult device has erupted among the industry.

21-year-old student missing since June 7th

2007-06-19T13:54:00.000+02:00

Tanja Gräff disappeared from a party at her college in Trier (southern Germany). Her university has set up a web page with information.

Come on Word

2007-06-07T11:24:00.001+02:00

This is why writing my PhD thesis with Microsoft Word was a bad idea.

Extreme Geoexhibitionism

2007-06-06T16:29:00.000+02:00

If plazes isn't enough for your web 2.0 geoexhibitionism, try hipoqih (however you pronounce that). You download a plugin for your GPS-enabled mobile device and the service will display your whereabouts in realtime on a google-maps mashup. Guys, this is really scary.

(via hansblond and live.hackr)

What happens if you drive over a MacBook Pro

2007-05-26T11:36:00.000+02:00

The guy forgot his MacBook Pro on the trunk of his car and drove off. When he realized, it had already fallen off and had been run over a few times by snow trucks and SUVs... So the guy dries it, tries to boot it and guess what: it doesn't start. My favorite: He's on apple care and will call them on monday to see if the can help him. Check out the pictures of the autopsy.

new plazes beta test: first impressions

2007-05-20T22:59:00.000+02:00

I had the unparalleled pleasure of meeting (a fraction of) the plazes crew at the designmai on Friday. News: There will be a new plazes soon (yay!) but they will discontinue the mobile plazer app for symbian phones (sob). Stefan told me that only 10 people in berlin are using it - and I am one of them. I was so struck by the bad news that they gave me a beautiful plazes t-shirt (Daniel liked it) and invited me into their new (closed) plazes beta that I just tried out. The new features that struck me first:

plaze yourself over the web
twitter functionality (tell everyone what you're doing)
set past and future plazes
groups

I think that web-plazing is the most important feature because it will allow people to use plazes who do not carry their laptop with them all the time but use different desktop machines at different places (Hans? you'll have to join now, dammit). I also think that it is really important to have a small dashboard-page that you can run in a small browser window that lets you set plazes and twitter easily. Web-plazing probably makes up for the loss of the mobile plazer, but I don't really see sms-plazing as a full replacement because it is much slower and much more cumbersome. (The increasing popularity of twitter and the inclusion of this functionality into plazes proves my first negative comment on twitter wrong). Setting past and future plazes also adds to the functionality. I have yet to explore the benefits of the group stuff. AFAIK no official release date yet.

How to burn 4 billion dollars with a blog entry

2007-05-18T15:27:00.000+02:00

Whoa. My favorite tech blog, engadget.com, reported yesterday that the iPhone will be delayed until October 07 and that Leopard will only ship in January 08. They got this from an internal memo being circulated inside apple's corporate e-mail. That turned out to be a fake, but engadget's report caused the apple stock to drop from $108.83 to $103.42. Within minutes. The power of blogging.

Berlin Mayor 2.0: Klaus Wowereit on plazes.com

2007-05-15T10:02:00.000+02:00

Our wonderful, adored and beloved mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, has gone web 2.0: He is now a plazes user! (link to his profile). In case you don't know what plazes is: A web service that tracks your location (via the MAC address of the router your laptop is connected to or via an app on your symbian mobile phone) and shows it on the Internet. Keep track of your hangouts, log the cool plazes you visited, add your flickr pics and geotag them. I am a big fan (see my profile here) and plazes provides the nice little gadget displaying my location on the right side of my blog. And since locations are transmitted via RSS on plazes, I can now keep an eye on Wowi here.

The e-cigarette: smoking without consequences

2007-05-10T18:57:00.000+02:00

Kraisch! Quitting smoking was hard enough, but I would still be puffing those things away if I wouldn't be afraid of cancer (and the costs). Looks like these worries will soon be gone with this gizmo. I want one.

It feels like a cigarette, looks like a cigarette but it isn't bad for your health. A Chinese company marketing the world's first "electronic" cigarette hopes to double sales this year as it expands overseas and as some of China's legions of smokers try to quit. Golden Dragon Group Ltd's Ruyan cigarettes are battery-powered, cigarette-shaped devices that deliver nicotine to inhalers in a bid to emulate actual smoking.

If you're living in the EU, smoke without remorse for € 249.
(via endgadget.com)

Your favorite celebrity as web 2.0 doll

2007-05-09T15:59:00.000+02:00

Hans is going to love this one. Waste hours by dressing your favorite celebrity doll online. Big fun.

(via pop64.de)

Get a mac ad on the myriad of vista options

2007-05-09T10:04:00.000+02:00

I am particularly annoyed by the myriad of different editions of Windows Vista. So is poor PC in Apple's new Get a Mac Ad.

Once you decide to upgrade your PC to Vista, that's when the real fun begins. Because there isn't just one Vista, there are many. Contrast that to MAC OS X - a single, full featured OS that runs on evry Mac.

Statistics as art

2007-05-09T09:59:00.000+02:00

Chris Jordan transforms abstract statistical figures into compelling peices of contemporary art:

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books.

(Thanks to Michael Sengpiel)

Pet Shop Boys live in Berlin

2007-05-08T21:34:00.000+02:00

I have this fantasy: I am terminally ill and the Make a Wish Foundation grants me one final wish. I ask for a cup of tea with Neil Tennant.
I've been a fan of the Pet Shop Boys since 1993's very. Their albums were the sound track of my adolescence and my first love. I still adore their music, not for sentimental reasons, but because I really like it. Electronic and innovative (I consider Trentemøller's Sodom remix on the Fundamental album one of the best PSB remixes ever). They came to Berlin yesterday and I went so see them with Daniel. Neil was great as always: "We'll play songs from the eighties, the nineties and from however we call this decade". My favorite: "Let me introduce everyone on stage [introduction of dancers and singers follows]. On the keyboards: Chris Lowe! And my Name is Neil Tennant and we are STILL the Pet Shop Boys."

Gregor Schneider cube Hamburg

2007-05-06T22:00:00.000+02:00

A family event called me back into my hometown Hamburg over the weekend. The spae between the Galerie der Gegenwart and the Kunsthalle currently hosts Gregor Schneider's "Cube Hamburg, 2007" - a massive black cube that was banned from the biennale in Venice because organizers feared it might provoke islamic extremists responses due to its similarity with the Kaba in Mekka. Although I was told that the artist denied any intentional similarity during the presentation of his work, I consider the resemblance as quite striking. I really liked it.

New Homepage

2007-04-24T16:54:00.000+02:00

What I totally forgot to mention: I have a new homepage! Yeah I know, what a lime thing to have in times of blogs,but its still the best way to bloat with your publication list. So there it goes. I created it with iWeb on my new MacBook and it was real easy. Making things that look nice involves really very little effort on a Mac. Its probabely not as cool as handcoding it in HTML and CSS line by line, but it just takes up less time. So if you read this, check it out and tell me what you think. Feedback is greatly appreciated.

Implicit knowledge in complex system control

2007-04-21T10:02:00.000+02:00

What does it take to be a successful manager or politician? In Psychology, tasks that these groups face on an everyday basis are called complex problems. Complex problems are characterized by their dynamics (the system that is being altered during problem solving is constantly changing on its own), by the fact that multiple goals have to be achieved at the same time and by their network structure: changes to one variable usually lead to changes of other variables as well.
Experimental Psychology simulates complex problems with computer-simulated dynamic scenarios, also referred to as microworlds; computer games that place the subject into the role of a manager of a factory or a mayor of a small city. Over a simulated period of time, the subject has to improve some target value (e.g. factory profit or item sales) and has a variety of variables that he can change for influencing the system (e.g. number of machines, number of employees, wages, welfare, advertising budget etc).
The current state of research argues that it does not require a special skill for complex problem solving, but that complex problem solving ability is determined by a person's intelligence, especially his/her ability to process information, and by a person's knowledge of the problem domain, i.e. structure of the system. However, research has also shown that with longer experience of system control, subjects tend to show better problem solving abilities without showing an increase in verbalizable knowledge. The question whether this was a sign for implicit knowledge or just some artifact has been heavily debated.
In my experiment, I devided my subjects in two groups. One group learned how to control a complex scenario from texts, the other group also and learned from texts and was able to try out the scenario during the learning period. Both groups scored equal in a post-learning test for verbalizable system knowledge, but the group that had experience with the szenario performed better during actual scenario control. This dissociation between verbalizable knowledge and increased scenario performance is a clear indication for the development of implicit knowledge.
On top of that, the group with experience learning showed a higher density in knowledge organization in my Association Structure Test (AST). This supports my theory that implicit knowledge correlates with a higher density in knowledge organization (which can be found here).

A few thoughts on the VirginiaTech shooting in Blacksburg, VA

2007-04-18T09:59:00.000+02:00

What a horrible tragedy. My thoughts are with the friends and families of the victims. Unimaginable. If someone close to me would get shot dead at the university by some maniac... I wouldn't know what to do.
Contrary to some people's views, I think it is reasonable to contemplate the reasons and background of this horrible incident. I cannot understand the laws of gun control in the USA and I especially cannot understad those who argue for more guns after the tragedy, claiming that it would have taken only one armed student to stop the shooting. If the shooter had not been able to get a gun in the first place, no one would have had the necessity to stop him.
Gun control does not prevent all of such incidents - the shooting in Erfurt is a sad example. But it drastically reduces the risk of such things happening. My problem is: I cannot understand why the rights to bear and possess arms is so important for many Americans. I know it is a constitutional right, but just why is it so important? Why do so many people in the states want to own a gun? Comments are really appreciated.

BBB - BitchyButchBrussels

2007-04-16T09:40:00.000+02:00

Last weekend, I had the great pleasure to DJ at the BitchyButch Party in Brussels. One of BitchyButch's organizers, Michelange, is friends with the organizers of PopPourri (Hans and Seba), where I sometimes play. Michelange asked the two whether they would like to do an evening in Brussels, and Hans asked me to play. So on Saturday, after very few hours of sleep (I played at PopPourri the night before), Seba, Hans and me took a plane from Tempelhof to Brussels. Hans had warned me that he had no idea what to expect, and my worse-case scenario was a tiny bar with a few bear-type gays. It turned out very different: Bitchybutch was a great party, mixed crowd, packed dancefloor, beautiful club. We had a great night with loads of rock, indie, elektro and pop. It turned out to be a fun weekend with my first international appearance. :-) Thank you, Michelange, Hans & Seba!

Multitouch tangible display - the Minority Report interface gets real

2007-03-21T14:46:00.000+01:00

Ok, I may be a little late to report this, but what these guys designed is simply so stunning and amazing and might really change some perspectives we have towars computer-user interaction. Wath this:

They're also planning to use this for the visualization of social networks. It will make a great tool for visualizing and manipulating large graphs. I wonder if apple's I phone multitouch interface uses the same technology?

Bye, PC... Sony Vaio Notebook for Sale.

2007-02-27T09:27:00.000+01:00

The transition period is over and my switch to Mac complete. I don't need my PC notebook anymore and I am offering it on ebay here. Speaking of ebay: I have received three mails from people asking me for an instant buy option (at ridiculously low prices). Seems to be a new strategy for bargaining low prices instead of bidding? Which would explain why 18 people watch the thing and 0 people bid. Weird.

Anarchic collaborative LED art

2007-02-15T18:17:00.000+01:00

What a neat idea: Instead of vandalizing the walls next to your favorite section of your train ride to work/university/whereever with pointless graffitti, you can you channel your artistic aggession into something much more subtle: LED throwies! The Web 2.0 version of grafitti. An LED throwie is a little glowing LED with a battery and a magnet attached to it. You can build one yourself (instructions here) for less than 1 EUR apiece. The idea is build hundreds of them, to wait until nighttime, grab some friends and toss them to metal surfaces. Anarchic collaborative LED art. Batteries last for 1-2 weeks depending on the color of the LED.

A common subgraph approach to knowledge network comparison

2007-02-10T12:52:00.000+01:00

In my PhD - thesis, I develop a computer-based psychometric test: the Association Structure Test (AST). For every subject, the AST elicits a graph representing the subjects' knowledge structure for a specified knowledge domain. The AST is based on concepts by Schvaneveldt, Jonasstn, Yacci and Beissner, Eckert and Bonato. The aim of the AST is to predict individual performance in intellectual tasks with graph-theoretic concepts derived from the subjects' knowledge graphs. A typical knowledge AST-elicited graph looks something like this.

(This participant was a cleaner that completed the AST with the stimulus “carpet cleaning”)

The problem is that the graph-theoretic measures I employ (density, size, degree, relative maximum path length and clusters) do not correlate with outside criteria under all circumstances - sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. I am thus looking for a better measure and the idea is to develop a kind of smilarity measure for comparing subject's knowledge graphs to an expert's reference graph for performance prediction. This has been done before in Pathfinder-based approaches, but in these studies, all networks had the same number and type of nodes because nodes represent knowledge concepts that had been selected by experts prior to knowledge elicitation and the subjects only had to do pairwise comparisons between expert-selected concepts. AST-elicited networks employ subjects' free term associations as nodes and thus all graphs differ in size, degree and node label. The idea is to apply similarity algorithms that determine structural similarity between two graphs regardless of node types as employed in chemistry for proteine comparison, e.g. a common subgraph approach as suggested by Le, Ho and Phan. The idea came up in a discussion with Gunnar yesterday (thanks to Hans for introducing us) and Gunnar was so kind to offer to do the calculations for which I am very very greateful.

time to go

2007-02-07T13:20:00.000+01:00

Ok, it has been on engadget today, but this gadget is so i-want-one that I can't resist to write something about it. And it has been conceived here in Berlin (at the UdK)!
The idea is so simple: a watch that knows where you are, where your next appointment will be, how to get there and how much time it takes to get there. The JITWatch gets the data (GPS position, local transport time tables and appointments) via bluetooth from your mobile (given that you have a working GPS dongle, a GPRS/UMTS flatrate, an always-on-attitude and coverage) and tells you when to leave and where to be. Still very prototype and maybe a bit too Stuttgart in terms of engineering, but still.. i want one. By Martin Frey.

visualizing search context

2007-02-06T11:50:00.000+01:00

exalead.de allows users to add context to searches (only in german so far). A search result also shows you associated terms, and you can select some of them to include in your search and exclude others in order to refine it. From a user interface perspective, it is an HTML version of the skillMap's graph-based exploration of a tag's surrounding. However, in the skillMap, the context of a tag is set by the community, whereas in exalead, the context is relies on automated text mining. This approach is also called "moderated search". Kartoo.com would thus be somewhere in between the skillMap and exalead, because it also displays context based on automated text mining, but does it in a graphical way. One cool thing about Kartoo is its text extraction algorithm which tries to give a brief summary of the page you MouseOver on the left. For the skillMap homepage, this works a little better than the topicalizer (read my previous post on the topicalizer here).

Again, thanks to Andreas.

automatic tags vs user-generated tags, pt2

2007-02-06T11:44:00.000+01:00

Can tags be clustered automatically and brought into some form of hierarchy?
In our skillMap approach, we rely on the crowd intelligence of a/the community to network tags manually into a weak hierarchy. However, there is a discussion going on whether it is feasible to do that automatically, for example here:
www.connotea.org/search?q=tag+clustering
www.rawsugar.com/www/2006/20.pdf
www.bibsonomy.org/search/tag+clustering

(thanks to Andreas)

2zimmer

2007-02-05T14:59:00.000+01:00

Ach schön. o2 schmiss mal wieder ein umsonst-konzert ("o2 music flash") und daniel und ich waren schnell geneug mit der antwort-sms, um noch ein ticket zu ergattern. Also gings am freitag den 02.02. ins spindler & klatt. Strömender regen, lange schlange, brechend voll. Ich finds bei diesen o2-konzerten immer etwas blöd, dass es keine vorgruppe gibt - der beginn ist dann immer etwas unvermittelt. aber es war wie immer großartig - 1:45h gespielt, tolle sachen auf dem neuen album und eine live-version von freie liebe die so elektrogeschrammelt daherkam, dass sie echte clubqualitäten besaß. seht selbst.

automatic keyword generation/tagging

2007-02-02T11:55:00.000+01:00

A lot of the hype in the web2.0 world is around the concpt of tagging. Tags are attached to objects by human beings, but there are thoughts whether this can be done automatically. One of the first services that offer free public auto tagging is the topicalizer. It auto-generates keywords for any URL along with a load of other statistics (e. g. readibility etc). It didn't work very wellfor the German sites I entered, but it as a nice API. I would really like to do a study determining the similarity of automatically generated tags and user-generated tags (i.e. with delicious tag clouds or skillMap-tags).

don't beleive the hype

2007-02-02T11:29:00.000+01:00

The Hype machine dives into the long tail of obscure blog entries on new music, take a slice of the tail and processes it to identify upcoming music hypes. Hype machine is the winner of the most recent mashup camp at MIT. (thanks to Matt Stevens)

The Hype machine about itself:

The Hype Machine keeps track of songs and discussion posted on the best music blogs. Easily listen, discover and buy songs that everyone is talking about!

GigeOm:

The Hype Machine combines blog posts from a set of curated music blogs with Amazon sales data and upcoming events. It includes an amazing hacked integration with iTunes that takes you right from the web page to the track you’re interested in. If you prefer buying through Amazon, The Hype Machine figures out what CD page to display.

Second day of the Web n+1 workshop @ Sun Microsystems (Switzerland)

2007-01-25T15:34:00.000+01:00

Andreas Blumauer of the Austrian semantic web school gave an overview presentation of semantic web technologies. I met him before at the KnowTech2006. He sees the rise of semantic web technologies as a result of the Glocalization: A mixture of Globalization (Expansion) and Localization (Specificity). In this world, knowledge workers integrate information in complex working environments, but this happens on a personal and local level. Information systems should provide an overview among this limited local level. He said that information systems should be able to answer the following questions, but are currently unable to do so: Who knows what, who knows who? Who knows somebody, who knows something about X?

I mentioned that the skillMap is actually capable of answering exactly these questions and he agreed. The rest of the day went along with overniew presentations of SW-related technologies such as RDF, OWL, SPARQL and D2RQ. I really learned a lot; D2RQ will possibly allow SPARQL-queries to the skillMap without the need to implement RDF om our side. Good news for a possible pilot with Sun.

Plane delay due to snow chaos postponed our arrival in berlin to midnight. I was totally exhusted when I arrived home. Poor Stephan's plane to Stuttgart was cancelled and he had to take a bus from Zurich and was home at 3.

First day of the Wb n+1 workshop @ Sun Microsystems Switzerland

2007-01-25T15:23:00.000+01:00

Insights from the internal Web n+1 workshop at Sun microsystems in Zürich on 23/24 january that we were kindly invited to by Peter Reiser.

On the first day, we received positive feedback from the Sun people on our skillMap/tagNet project that I demonstrated twice during that day. Some quotes of participants' reactions:

"I think its really cool"
"they're onto a real problem"
"their model is the better model"
"It would be useful to pilot"

That was a great start and we hope to get approval for a pilot that we planned during the afternoon. High spirits in the evening, great swiss Käsefondue at Swiss Chuchi in central Zürich. A big thank you to Peter for the kind invitation and a tremendous day. I met some great people, for example Matt Stevens, Henry Story, Dave Levy and Chris Gerhard. I got a short mention in Dave's blog.

skillMap / tagNet project and tagNet vision

2007-01-25T15:20:00.000+01:00

I checked with Stephan and he says its ok to post the following description on the project we're currently working on: We're developing a technology that enables a community to jointly connect tags with each other with reference to their relation. In a playful graphical interface that is based on preFuse, users can draw lines between tags indicating how they're connected. In this way, a semantic structure of tags is created over time in a community-based bottom-up approach. We call this the tagNet. tagNets allow semantic search, mtching algorithms and similarity ratings for obejcts that have networked tags associated to them.

Sarah and me developed the tagNet vision based on her original vision of a knowledge management system that we call skillMap. It is a java applet that implemented the concept of networked skills in an application we call the skillMap. In the skillMap, there is two networks: a social network of people and a taxonomy of their skills. People tag their own skils and everyone in the community networks these skill into a loose semantic structure. The resulting data structure is a connection of a social network and a bottom-up skills folksonomy. The application of a similarity algorithm I am working on in my PhD thesis on this structure can answer questions like Who knows what, who knows who? Who knows somebody, who knows something about X? Who should talk to whom? Where are communities of practice?

My PhD thesis

2007-01-25T14:43:00.000+01:00

Time to sum up the process. Since updating my page at the institute is so cumbersome, I can as well do it in my blog. My PhD thesis is about knowledge: what it is, how it's represented and how to measure it. It is also about how knowledge influences performance and how knowledge overlap in groups affects group performance. I don't really have a catchy title yet but it will be something like 'structural knowledge assessment and knowledge-related determinants of performance in complex problem solving' or something similar. It basically consists of the following parts:

1. What is knowledge and how is it conceptualized in the field of knowledge management? I've written a paper with Kozo Sugiyama on this, it will appear in the February issue of the Journal of Knowledge Management. One of its core assumptions is that unconscious access to structural knowledge is part of individual implicit memory.

2. Based on that assumption, I developed a computer-based psychometric test, the association structure test, that derives a knowledge graph for a given stimulus based on free term associations and reaction times. Unfortunately, it doesn't work quite as good as I expected as I explain in a paper that I successfully submitted to the WM2007 conference. I am also co-chairing the workshop on new approaches for implicit knowledge in knowledge management (NAIK2007) with Wolfgang Scholl at WM2007.

3. Based on structural assumptions from (1), I have developed a similarity algorithm for the skillMap. The skillMap started as a Knowledge Management System envisioned by Dr. Sarah Spiekermann and I have contributed to its actual design and development. There is an own post on that project, but the algorithm calculates a similarity measure between persons based on their knowledge self-assessment. That seems to work pretty good, but I currently cannot publish anything on this as we're trying to spin off a company and sell the technology.

4. Prof. Scholl, the supervisor of my PhD, formulated some theories on how knowledge overlap inside teams influences their performance. Hy says that there is a second-order polynomial connection between cognitive similarities of team members, knowledge increase and performance. I was able to validate his claim with an experiment I conducted in summer 2006. The paper on this is completed and I am currently waiting on his feedback prior to submitting it.

I hope to turn it in in June...

social, social, social

2006-12-15T14:03:00.000+01:00

bei jyve.com kann man die eigene expertise taggen und sich für synchrone online-kommunikation für fragen zur verfügung stellen, die in den eigenen expertisebereich fallen. Für skype gibt es ein plugin, mit dem man sich eingehene anrufe über jyve bezahlen lassen kann. Mit diesem plug-in klingts für mich wie ein do-it-yourself 0900-service. Mal angenommen ich schreibe da rein, dass ich psychotherapie oder jurostische beratung anbiete? Wer kontrolliert das?

Und schon wieder eine neue social networking-plattform: 7just7. Wer braucht denn noch so einen gesichtslosen dienst?

ich bin MacBook

2006-12-12T23:31:00.000+01:00

was für eine woche - meine erste woche mit einem mac. seit vierzehn jahren besitze und ich benutze ich computer, es waren immer pcs. bis letzte woche. seit nikolaus bin ich - dank der großzügigkeit des instituts für wirtschaftsinformatik - stolzer besitzer eines MacBooks. Und so macht es sich auf dem schreibtisch:

Dank parallels laufen windows xp und mac os x gleichzeitig. Und das funktioniert so: von apple boot camp runterladen, eine partition für win xp anlegen (wichtig: auf NTFS formatieren, parallels kann kurioserweise keine FAT32-installationen auf boot camp invoken) und installieren. dann die neueste beta (build 3036) und parallels tools for bootcamp herunterladen.
Unter windows xp booten, die bootcamp-tools installieren. neustarten. jetzt wirds tricky, erster bug: wenn man von nun an windows bootet, kommt ein auswalmenü, indem man angeben muss, ob man windows nativ von der boot camp partition startet, oder ob man windows innerhalb einer parallels virtual machine ausführt. das problem: Bei mir funktioniert die tastatur bei diesem auswahlmenü nicht, bei vielen anderen auch nicht. Die lösung: eine externe tastatur anschließen, damit gehts (oder windows .ini-dateien verändern). Da ich auf das editieren keine lust hatte, war dies eine gute gelegenheit, dem neuen mac-shop, der direkt bei mir gegenüber eröffnet hat (mac-basis), einen besuch abzustatten. Super-nette jungs, kann ich nur empfehlen, da werde ich jetzt stammkunde. Schnell eine tastatur gekauft und weiter gings.
Mac os x booten, parallels installieren. Create custom virtual machine auswählen, dann die boot camp option wählen. Nun sollte windows im fenster von der boot camp partition starten. Beim booten im windows xp bootmenü "parallels configuration" auswählen. Wenn windows im fenster läuft, in der parallels menüleiste unter actions... -> install parallels tools auswählen. Das installiert kleine helferchen, die es einem erlauben, zwischen windows und mac os daten per copy und paste auszutauschen. Außerdem ermöglichen sie den sogenannten coherence mode, der mir einen aufschrei des entzückens entlockte: Die windows-umgebung wird ausgeblendet und geöffnete windows-programme sind als eigene fenster auf der mac os x - oberfläche zu sehen. Autonome windows-fenster unter MacOS X! Wers nicht glaubt:
Unglaublich! Nachdem meine daten nun auch auf dem neuen mac sind kann ich ab morgen den pc endlich zu hause lassen. Nur blöd, dass mein neuer mac lediglich 80 gb festplatte hat, davon sind jetzt nur noch 36 frei und ich hab noch nicht mal alle meine musik rübergespielt, von meinen fotos ganz zu schweigen. egal, ich freu mich auf unsere gemeinsame zukunft.

wlan teilen

2006-12-01T15:01:00.000+01:00

jetzt bin ich auch ein fonero. Das heißt, dass ich mein wlan mit allen anderen mitgliedern der FON-community teile. Dazu kauft man auf der FON-website einen speziellen wlan-router ('La Fonera'). Dieser wird an den bestehenden router mittels lan-kabel angeschlossen und sendet zwei SSIDs. eine ist nur für einen selbst nutzbar und WPA-verschlüsselt, die andere ist öffentlich. Über die öffentliche SSID können dann alle bei einem mitsurfen, die sich in reichweite befinden und bei FON registriert sind. Die bandbreite, die man über die öffentliche SSID zur verfügung stellt, kann man begrenzen. Wenn man nur bei FON registriert ist, ohne selber einen La Fonera zu betreiben, ist man 'alien'. Der zugriff aufs internet über La Foneras kostet dann 3 EUR am tag. Es gibt zwei mögliche rollen für betreiber eines la foneras: linus und bill. Als linus darf men auf allen La Foneras auf der welt umsonst surfen, bekommt aber nix dafür, wenn sich jemand bei einem selbst einbucht. Als bill muss man wie die aliens 3 EUR bezahlen, um irgendwo anders mitzusurfen. Dafür bekommt man aber die hälfte des umsatzes, die mit dem eigenen La Fonera entstehen aufs eigene PayPal-Konto gutgeschrieben. Ein La Fonera kostet 29.95 EUR inkl. versand zzgl MwSt.

Vor einigen wochen bekam ich über plazes den link zu einer befristeten aktion, bei ders La Foneras umsonst gab. vor drei tagen kam das teilchen an:

und so sieht er aus, ungefähr so groß wie eine zigarettenschachtel:

Neben der antenne sind noch zwei anschlüsse: strom und eine lan-buchse. Ich hab das kästchen mit meinem router verbunden, es hat sich eingebucht, fertig. Die Registrierung erfolgt bei fon.com: Man muss sich in seien La Fonera über die öffentliche SSID einbuchen und landet dann auf einer speziellen seite bei fon, auf der man angibt, wo das kästchen steht und wie viel bandbreite man freigeben möchte. Ich habe meinen La Fonera ans fenster zur prenzlauer allee gestellt. Im umkreis um unser haus sollte mein öffentliches signal jetzt empfangbar sein. die standorte aller La Foneras kann man sich übrigens auf FON maps anzeigen lassen. Also los, surft mit auf meinem wlan!

pop pourri!

2006-11-26T18:08:00.000+01:00

am 8.12. lege ich zusammen mit drew bei pop pourri auf. indie, pop, elektro. ich werd wohl erstmal von 23 bis 2h spielen und dann später noch mal.css, kasabian, the gossip, mando diao, afi, schrottgrenze, muse, hope of the states, trentemoller, fischerspooner...

die blase wächst

2006-11-17T10:01:00.000+01:00

Was für eine merkwürdige Idee: auf twitter.com kann man der Welt erzählen, was man gerade macht. Langsam wird das mit dem Web 2.0 absurd. Blase 2.0 titelte Spiegel Online vor einiger Zeit. Inzwischen sind sie so weit, dass sie Dinge verschenken: Gestern kam mein t-community Willkommens-Headset (dringend nötig, mein altes ist kaputt); mein FON-Router (Die Umsonst-Aktion scheint leider vorbei zu sein) sollte nächste Woche ankommen, dazu dann mehr.

der zune saugt

2006-11-15T23:17:00.000+01:00

Ok, ich bin auch ein iPod-Fan, obwohl mir mein kleines weißes Schmuckstück im Juli beim 2:0 gegen Schweden in der ersten Halbzeit geklaut wurde. Tut immernoch weh und ich sehne den Tag herbei an dem mein Kontostand für einen neuen reicht. Aber soll ich mir wirklich wieder einen iPod kaufen? Oder doch lieber Microsofts gegenentwurf, den Zune? Besser nicht. Denn: das Ding ist furchtbar zu installieren, Fehlermeldungen sind mit Fotos von Mädchen beim Orgasmus hinterlegt und CNN und NBC sind sich einig, dass der Zune saugt. Außerdem kann ich meinen neuen iPod bald im Flugzeug ans Inflight-Entertainment anschließen. Wie Rick heute so treffend sagt: The zune is like my dad trying to look cool.

Die zentralen Erkenntnisse der A&O-Psychologie

2006-11-02T13:56:00.000+01:00

Im Konsens bei der heutigen Mittagspause von Tobias, Sebastian, Robert und mir beschlossen:

Organisationspsychologie: Einfach öfter miteinander Mittagessen gehen (bei mehr Berufserfahrung: miteinander einen trinken gehen).
Ingenieurpsychologie: Die Leute einfach fragen, was sie wollen.
Arbeitspsychologie: Einfach selber machen lassen, am besten in der Gruppe.

Mein Blog 2.0

2006-11-02T11:31:00.000+01:00

Im Rahmen des Projektes InterVal haben wir eine social software fürs Wissensmanagement entwickelt, die skillMap. Gerade letzte Woche wieder auf einer Konferenz, der KnowTech06, vorgestellt. Nun haben wir aber die Idee, aus der skillMap noch viel mehr zu machen - eine Technologie, mit deren Hilfe man bottom-up eine Quasi-Semantik in User Generated Content bringen kann. Und da wir dafür gerade auf Investorensuche sind und uns deshalb zur Zeit auch in der Web 2.0-Blase tummeln, dachte ich mir, dass es Zeit wäre, (a) mein Blog zu reaktivieren und (b) es auf Web 2.0 zu trimmen. Nach dem Motto: Nicht drüber reden, sondern machen. Deshalb jetzt auf der rechten Seite mein aufgemotzter Sidebar. Plazes zeigt, wo ich gerade bin und wo ich war, del.icio.us gibt einen Überblick über meine im Netz getaggten Seiten und Qype verrät, welche Locations (Clubs, Restaurants, Bars) ich in Berlin so mag.

Und a propos Web 2.0: Ein Video sagt mehr als 1000 Worte. Dieses Blog habe ich ja, wie im Archiv zu sehen ist, auf einem Konferenztrip nach Japan im November 2005 angefangen. Vorher war ich drei Monate in Japan am JAIST und hatte dort eine spannende aber auch harte Zeit. Und einen typischen Tag im Leben eines Austauschstudenten am JAIST sieht man unten. So viel erst mal zum Relaunch, in Zukunft wieder mehr.

DB Reisezentrum

2005-11-20T15:16:00.000+01:00

Diese kleine Episode ist mir vor Jahren mal passiert, aber ich dachze ich stelle sie hier mal ein wo ich sie sowieso auf der platte hatte:

DB-Reisezentrum, Hamburg Hauptbahnhof, kurz nach elf. Mindestens fünf verschiedene Warteschlangen zu so unterschiedlichen Schalterclustern wie „Express ohne Information ohne Reservierung“, „Abholung, Fahrscheine Inland, Reservierung“. Ein über 90-jähriger Opa mit fast ebenso ücheliger Oma im Schlepptau, von den Menschenmassen und der neuen kundenorientierten Schalteranordnung sichtlich überfordert wählt er die Flucht nach vorn. Aber der Herr am Expressschlater (ohne Reservierung, ohne Information) erklärt ihm, er dürfe nur Hochschwangere vorlassen (die Dienstanweisung würde ich gerne mal sehen) und so tappst er etwas hilflos durch die Schlangen, bis er sich dann schlussendlich an der meinigen anstellt.

Dann sagt die junge Frau, die als erste vor dem Servicebereich steht: Kommen Sie mal her, gehen’se mal vor, sie fallen ja sonst um, bevor sie dran sind. Er stakst also vor, dann die end-50-jährige zwei Positionen hinter Ihr und zwei vor mir, die aussieht wie eine Kreuzung aus meiner runzeligen Englischlehrerin und meiner dicken lesbischen Religionslehrerin und eine Aidsschleife am Revers trägt: Das ist ja nett, dass Sie den Herren durchlassen , aber eigentlich hätten Sie ja (ihr Ton jetzt sehr gereizt) fragen müssen denn hier stehen ja schließlich noch andere... Ja, ich zum Beispiel denke ich und sage ganz freundlich zu Ihr, Hey, bleiben Sie mal locker. Bringt mir sofort Sympathiepunkte bei dem Mädel vor mir aber nicht bei ihr, sie wird wütend: Was mir einfiele und ich solle mich nicht einmischen. Wieso, denke ich, stehe ja in der selben Schlange, sage aber bloß: Genau das meine ich, bleiben Sie mal locker. Das würde Sie immer noch selbst entscheiden, wann sie locker sei. Prima denk ich, dann lass Dir dabei helfen wenns so schwer ist. Denke ich aber bloß und halte dieses mal den Mund. Sie ob meiner Dreistigkeit pikiert aber erstmal still.

Später ist sie dran und fertig und geht an mir vorbei und ich leise aber noch hörbar, sehen sie, hat doch gar nicht weh getan. Sie braucht zwei Schritte bis sie sich sicher ist, dass sie das gerade jetzt wirklich gehört hat, bleibt stehen, dreht sich um. Jetzt ist sie sauer. Sehr laut, quer durch den Raum. Was fällt Dir ein, und sagt wirklich die Worte RESPEKT VOR DEM ALTER. Jetzt spinnt sie total denke ich und sage bloß, was fällt Ihnen eigentlich ein, mich zu duzen (wollte ich immer schon mal sagen). Sie sagt, nichts anderes hätte ich verdient (auf den Rotzlöffel warte ich vergeblich) und geht, ich lache ihr fröhlich hinterher und bin dann dran.

big 5

2005-11-20T15:05:00.000+01:00

Das bin also ich... hm.

Advanced Big 30 Personality Test Results

Sociability	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	95%
Aggressiveness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	89%
Assertiveness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	94%
Activity Level	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	98%
Excitement-Seeking	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	92%
Enthusiasm	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	81%
Extroversion	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	91%
Trust	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	93%
Morality	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	67%
Altruism	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	90%
Cooperation	\|\|\|	4%
Modesty	\|\|\|	5%
Sympathy	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	89%
Accommodation	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	58%
Confidence	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	91%
Neatness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	76%
Dutifulness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	56%
Achievement	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	96%
Self-Discipline	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	93%
Cautiousness	\|\|\|	4%
Orderliness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	69%
Anxiety	\|\|\|	6%
Volatility	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	40%
Depression	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	35%
Self-Consciousness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	36%
Impulsiveness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	89%
Vulnerability	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	71%
Emotional Stability	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	54%
Imagination	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	71%
Artistic Interests	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	93%
Introspection	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	72%
Adventurousness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	92%
Intellect	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	92%
Liberalism	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	87%
Openmindedness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	84%

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je regrette everything...

2005-11-15T15:06:00.000+01:00

...ist der titel dieses großartigen stückes von dj hell, das aufgrund der repeat-1-funktion meines mobilen musikabspielgerätes zu meinem titelsong für diese reise geworden ist. viel zu früh aufgestanden heute morgen bzw viel zu spät ins bett gegangen gestern, der wakeup-call (ohaiogozaimasu!) holt mich direkt aus dem tiefschlaf. strahlend blauer himmer dröhnt ins zimmer, getupfte wolken und eine fernsicht die so kristallklar wie eine rodenstockbrillemitzeissmarkengläsernbrillenwerbung ist. wir wünschen ihnen noch einen erfolgreichen tag sagt die automatische stationsansagestimme der straßenbahn in hannover, wenn man zur cebit hannover messe laatzen endstation aussteigt. wieder zu viel gefrühstückt (ich kann ja aufs mittagessen verzichten, wird eh billiger), zurück ins hotelzimmer, ein marmeladenfleck auf der krawatte, herrje, was für ein belangloses scheiss-spießerproblem, ich wusste nicht, dass wasser noch fiesere flecken als marmelade auf seidenkrawatten macht, erstmal das jackett drüber und die halbe stunde verbleibende zeit für ein par e-mail genutzt, das diskursprojekt schreitet vorn, sehr schön, jetzt aber los, endlich zur konferenz, der keynote-saal halb gefüllt.

Zunächst kurze warme begrüßungsworte der präsidenten der ifsr oder wem auch immer, dann die keynote speeches. zunächst herr koji omi, mitglied des house of representatives, bis vor kurzen japanischer minister für forschung und entwicklung, berät die japanische regierung immer noch in diesem feld . er gibt einen überraschend tiefen einblick in die hochschul- und forschungsförderungspolitik japans. Kein wunder dass die unis hier so reichlich ausgerüset sind: japan fördert forschung und entwicklung mit ca. 20 milliarden dollar jährlich. Allerdings an vier wissenschaftsbereiche gekoppelt: material science, telecommunication, physics und computer and information science. Was denn mit den humanitaries sei, will ein zuhörer wissen. Naja, wenn diese sich in den genannten bereichen mit technologie beschäftigen würden, dann sicher. pragmatismus auf japanisch. ein professor aus china zitiert eine studie von nonaka, nach der die japanische wissenschaft zwar in einigen bereichen weltspitze sei, aber insbesondere in solchen forschungstätigkeiten zurück nstünde, in der kreativität und innovation gefragt sei. Ob herr omi das auch so sehen würde und wenn ja, was die japanische regierung dagegen zu tun gedenke. Herr omi lässt sich das aufwendig übersetzen, presst die lippen zu einem strich zusammen und sieht den frager aus china mit beiden händen aufs rednerpult gestützt scharf an. er würde die frage nicht verstehen. hat er aber offensichtlich doch, denn er schiebt dann nach, dass er nicht glaubge, dass kultutrelle spezifitäten der japanischen kultur einen größeren einfluss als andere faktoren auf den erfolg der japanischen wissenschaft nehmen würden. Ich frage mich, ob ich gerade zeuge der aktuellen japanisch-chinesischen krise bin.

Im anschluss tritt prof. tamito yoshida hinter das rednerpult und überrascht mich mit einer dediziert ausgearbeiteten hochkomplexen grundsatzvorlesung über die gruindprinzipien der wissenschaft, in der er das newtonsche wissenschaftsmodell grundlegend in frage stellt und ein neues postuliert. Ich lese seinen vollständig vorliegenden vortrag wort für wort mit und bin begeistert, obwohl ich aufgrund seiner ausführlichen referenzen zu konzepten aus der griechischen philosophie, erkenntnistheorie, physik und vor allem aus der biologie nur die hälfte verstehe. Unter anderem folgert er aus der genome theory, dass die der natur zugrunde liegenden machanismen sich nicht als Gesetze, sondern als Programme beschreiben lassen, die gewisse freiheitsgerade beinhalten. genau wie die phenotypischen ausprägungen eines organismus vom genotyp unter dessen realisierung unter bestimmten umweltbedingungen determiniert sind. Ferner versucht er das dilemma der trennung von wissenschaft und praxis bzw. angewandter wissenschaft aufzulösen, in dem er den terminus der designing science einführt: wissenschaft hätte immer das ziel, etwas zu gestalten und der gestaltungsfokus determiniert den gestaltungstyp. grundlagenwissenschaft gestaltet sich also (in meinem verständnis autopoietisch) selbst, während angewandte wissenschaft artefakte gestaltet. ich muss das alles noch mal in ruhe nachlesen, aber mit einem hochkomplexen ausgearbeiteten wissenschaftstheoretischen grundlagenvortrag hätte ich hier wirklich nicht gerechnet. ich bin positiv überrascht.

In der anschließenden kaffeepause wiedersehen mit sugiyama sensei, meinem gastprof am JAIST diesen sommer. er freut sich tierisch über die flasche riesling, die ich ihm mitgebracht habe. die 7 eur in die aufwendige holzkiste waren eine gute investition, wir verabreden uns zum lunch. erse vorträge, erstaunlich interdisziplinär. ein biologe vergleichr das verhalten von zellen im menschlichen körper mit dem verhalten von akteuren in gesellschaften. Dr. Gregory von der university hull hält einen vortrag über ein modell über organisationalen wandel, das sie mit hilfe von luhmanns systemtheorie verbessern will. luhmann, ich bin angetan. Der britische prof vom vorabend referiert über die absurditäten im bisher erfolglosen versuch der britischen regierung, ein programm zur entsorgung nuklearer abfälle aufzulegen.

lunch mit sugiyama. er wollte einen beitrag zu einem graphentheoretischen paper leisten, das hatten wir bei meinem aufenthalt am jaist im sommer besprochen. ich spreche ihn darauf an, er hats vergessen. ich kanns nicht glauben. es ist ihm so unangenehm, dass er mich sofort für abends zum essen einlädt.

nachmittags stellt eine jaist-studentin in unfassbar schlechtem englisch ihre diss vor: sie versucht das individuelle verhalten von individuen mit agenten zu modellieren, die mit persönlichkeitaspsychologischen konzepten füttert, die sie in genetische algorithmen überführt. ich verstehe nicht viel von dem was sie sagt aber es klingt sehr spannend.

Der tag verstreicht eher ereignislos; nach dem letzten vortrag nimmt sich sugiyama.sensei sofort meiner an. im schlepptau noch prof. hori vom jaist sowie zwei studentin, darunter auch die mit den agentenmodellen. prof. hori hat früher in der gegend um kobe gewohnt und führt uns zielsicher in ein yakitori-restaurant, wo ich zu eibem exzellenten yakitori-menü eingeladen werde, wir tafeln zwei stunden, dann zurück ins hotel. auf diese weise bin ich auch elegant (und kostengünstig) um einen abstecher in die hostessenclunbszene kobes herumgekommen. ich fahre mit dem portliner zurück nach portisland und gehe schlafen, denn schließlich muss ich morgen früh meinen ersten vortrag halten.

Der wecker klingelt um 7.20h und ich genieße ein weiteres japanisches frühstück im hotelrestaurant: miso-suppe, reis, gebratener fisch, salzig eingelegte pflaumen, japanisches omlette. Das nato (fermentierte sojasprossen), das sich die japaner zum frühstück in den reis rühren, fasse ich nicht an. es schmeckt so, wie kräftiger schimmelkäse für jemanden schmecken muss, der in seinem leben noch nie käse gegessen hat.

in der ersten session hält sugiyama zuerst seinen vortrag und er zitiert mein wissensmodell in extenso, ich bin ganz stolz. dann bin ich dran und stelle mein paper über die verknüpfung des seci-modells mit dem multi-modalen gedächtnismodell nach engelkamp und zimmer vor. Dr. gregory ist auch unter den zuhörern und gibt ganz doll positives feedback, ich erröte. Sugiyama verabschiedet sich und dann begegne ich jose. Jose aus spanien, 31, graphentheoretiker, in den letzten zügen seiner diss am jaist. seine gegenwart habe ich am jaist immer ganz besonders genossen. wir lunchen zusammen und bringen uns auf den neuesten stand, im anschluss eine weitere session, dann bin ich wieder dran und stelle die skillMap vor. es läuft wie am schnürchen, ich komme gut mit der zeit hin und habe ausführlich gelegenheit, das system zu demonstrieren. Es hagelt nachfragen, vor allem von dr. gregory. Am interessantesten aus meiner sicht die nachfragen von einer gruppe vom institute of Systems Science der Chinese Academy of Sciences um Dr. Xijin Tang. Dort beschäftigt man sich seit über zwei Jahren mit der Unterstützuing von gruppenprozessen durch mapping von personen und themen. Die gruppe hat dazu auch ein system mit dem titel Group Augmentation Environment entwickelt.

Das tool soll die zusammenstellung von gruppen erleichtern und stellt personen und themen grafisch dar, wobei die nähe von personen zueinander engere soziale beziehungen darstellt und begriffe in der nähe von personen autorenschaft symbolisiert. Das ganze ist zwar etwas rudimentär aber vom ansatz her dem unsrigen nicht unähnlich. Dr. Tang habe ich als sympathische und aufgeschlossene junge Wissenschaftlerin erlebt, die uns herzlich dazu aufgefordert hat, zur KSS 2006 (Knowledge and Systems Science) in Peking, die von der Chinese Academy of Sciences gehostet wird, einzureichen.

Nach der session steht das soziale highlight der konferenzu auf dem programm: der dinner cruise! mit 4 reisebussen geht es vom tagungsort zum pier aber noch kein schiff weit und breit. Ich stehe mit jose am wasser, wir frieren. ir reden über meine zeit am jaist, darüber, wie viele ausländer doch auch und vor allem wegen der weiber nach japan kommen. jose meint, ich hätte es in der beziehung ja eher ruhig angehen lassen im sommer; ich sehe mich, die implizite lüge vermeiden wollend, die eine andere antwort beinhaltet jhätte, dazu veranlasst, ihm zu erklären, dass ich nicht im selben team spiele wie er. Hätte ich ihm das früher erzählt sagt er, er hätte mich in kanazawa ein paar leuten vorstellen können. ich bin gerührt, das schiff läuft ein. die concerto, ein vergnügungsdampfer der deutlich größer ist, als ich erwartet habe. wir boarden.

gedränge, und erst auf dem schiff bemerke ich, dass an unseren tickets kleine papierschnipsel mit buchstaben angetackert sind. alle haben A und werden deshalb in den großen festsaal in den bauch des schiffes gelotst, nur auf joses und meinem ticket steht ein C. und so werden wir in die 'diamond lounge' auf dem oberdeck geführt. ein separee für vielleicht 20 personen mit schweren weißen tischdecken, kronleuchtern, einem eigenen buiffet, sofaecke, und einer eigenen klavierspielerin! ich halte das zunächst für einen irrtum, vom gefühl her sollten hier nur professoren sitzen, aber jose zwinkert mir zu. da fällt mir ein, dass ich das ticket ja von akiko bekommen habe, mit ihr hatte ich im sommer eine gute zeit und sie ist ja im organisationskomittee dieser konferenz... und tatsächlich, sie hat einen großteil der ausländerclique in die lounge gemogelt, großartig! während unten noch reden gehalten werden, die über lautsprecher zu uns übertragen werden, stürzen wir uns aufs buffet. eile ist geboten, dennn laut programm geht der cruse von genau 19.20h bis 21.05h. so absurde programmzeiten gibt es wahrscheinlich nur in japan, aber um es gleich vorweg zu nehmen: um punkt 21.05h legen wir wieder an. Aber vorher speisen wir königlich, geizen nicht mit dem rotwein und genieße4n die aussicht aufs nächtlich erleuchtete kobe.

zurück am pier sind wir in feierlaune und beschließen, noch in eine bar zu gehen. der bus bringt uns nach sannomiya, wo jose, akiko, shoko und wie-heisst-sie-doch-gleich eine nette bar ansteuern. ohne dass es abgesprochen gewesen wäre bestellen wir alle harte sachen, cuba libre, gin tonic, whiskey... wir bleiben bis 2 und stellen uns ordentlich einen rein. lampen an, ganz großer spaß. shoko, akiko und ich teilen uns das taxi zurück nach port island. ich taumle ins bett. was für ein tag.

Am nächsten morgen komme ich nicht wirklich pünktlich hoch, zur ersten session bin ich zu spät und das frühstück im hotel musste auch ausfallen.

earthly paradise?

2005-11-14T15:05:00.000+01:00

völlig absurd, dass 'wir sind helden' ihren aktuellen hit erstens ins japanische übersetzt haben (sa itte miyo) und zweitens das ausgerechnet von meiner japanischlehrerin naoko sato. und so dudelt das ding aus meinem ipod, schöne untermalung für diesen etwas wirren grauen tag. auch passend: 'je regrette EVERYTHING' von dj hell im superpitcher remix (danke hans)(zu haben auf beatport.com).

um 7.30h der wecker, draußen grau in grau, der himmel und die betonnene unendlichkeit darunter, japanisches frühstück mit miso-suppe, fisch, salzigen eingelegten pflaumen und reis, mit dem portliner rein nach kobe, aber viel zu früh, alles öffnet erst um 10 oder 11, die stadt genauso in einem zwischenstadium wie gestern nacht, ich laufe durch die einkaufsgassen und durch chinatown, ein kaffee wäre super, es braucht fest 20 minuten bis ich ein kaffee ausgemacht habe, in dem es erstens heisen kaffee und zweitens selbigen auch zum mitnehmen gibt. irgendwann ist es dann doch 11, inzwischen habe ich eine gute mentale karte der stadt. warum kann sich dieses land eigentlich diesen überschuss an personal leisten? japan ist weißgott kein niedriglohnland, aber an jeder noch so kleinen baustelle steht einer, der nur dafür bezahlt wird, eine fahe oder einen leuchtstab zu schwenken um passsanten und oder autos vor der offensichtlichen gefahr zu warnen. diese unendlich vielen leute in den kaufhäusern, in der boutique, in der ich mir ein neues hemd kaufe sind drei verkäuferinnen in meiner nähe, eine um mich bemüht und nach dem zahlen kommt - selbstverständlich hier - der kassierer mit der tüte hinter dem tresen hervor, begleitet mich bis zum ausgang und übergibt mir dort die tüte. domo arigato gozaimasu!

ich gehe zum zentralen pier mit den sehenswürdigkeiten: kobe tower (belanglos), das maritime museum (montags geschlossen) und dem kobe earthquake memorial park. zwei sachen fallen mir daran auf. erstens ist er ganz schön klein ob der tatsache, dass er an eine der größten naturkatastrophen in der geschichte japans erinnern soll. zweitens, und das finde ich wirklich schockierend: überall fotos vom ausmaß des wirtschaftlichen schadens. in einer vitrine mit der überschrift "scope of earthquake damages" werden ausschließlich die ökonomischen folgen dargestellt. der hafen von kobe zu 90 % zerstört, darüber gingen aber 70% des güterverkehrs des landes, daher ökonomische krise usw. endlose videohelikopterflüge über die zerstörten hafenanlagen, bei jeder einstellung leuchtet die betroffene stelle in roter led-umrandung auf einem 3x3m-modell des hafens unter dem video auf. über die opferzahlen und das menschliche leid kein wort. Auf einem gedenkstein erfahre ich dann doch, dass über 40.000 menschen ums leben gekommen sind. über diese dokumentationstechnische schieflage kann mich auch die beeinbdruckende erhaltung eines stückes pier im originalzustand direkt nach dem beben nicht hinwegtrösten.

auf dem pier gegenüber ein riesiges quadratisches zelt mit tagesleuchtfarbenen buchstaben: earthly paradise 2005, hiro yamagata. sieht nach kunst-kacke aus, ich gehe hin, zahle 700 yen eintritt ohne zu wissen, worauf ich mich einlasse. ach so. der typ hat 12 uralte mercedes 220 cabrios (aus den 20ern?) mega-aufwendig bemalt, da stehen sie nun vor mir, in schwarzer halle mit leuchtenden farben, die motive fast schon kitsch underinnern mich in teilen an airbrush-motive: eine elefantenherde vor dschubgelhintergrund an tränke bei nacht. blumen. ozeanmotive mit wssser und muscheln. üppige leuchtende farben, stark ins kitschige. und das auf diesen traumautos. blöde und vulgär denke ich zunächst, wie in einem oldtimer-museum. aber je länger ich zwischen den dingern umherlaufe, desto mehr gefällt mir das. aber nur wegen des titels: paradies auf erden. paradiesische motive, unberührte natur in leuchtenden fröhlichen farben auf wunderschönen alten autos, die für jeden wertekonsdervativen spießer einen unerreichbaren besitztraum darstellen - das finde ich eine wunderbare konzeptualisierung des paradiesbegriffs. ich muss grinsen.

ich fahre zurück ins hotel, dusche, ziehe das neue hemd an (ärmel zu kurz und kragen zu weit), mache mich fein, gehe ins netz, mache e-mails, schaue aus dem fenster, höre musik. Ich bin eine stunde zu früh, der empfang ist erst um sechs aber ich bin schon um 16h in meinem zimmer. draußen wird es dunkel, ich trinke tee aus der elektrischen teemachmaschine in meinem hotelzimmer, liege auf dem bett und denke nach. was zum teufel mache ich hier eigentlich. die zeit vergeht langsam, je regrette EVERYTHING. das zimmermädchen hat offensichtlich eines meiner beiden großen handtücher ersatzlos mitgenommen. wenn sie das morgen noch mal macht, habe ich nichts mehr zum mich-abtrocknen. ich mache ein foto von mir vor dem spiegel. 'na, findest du dich wieder toll?' hätte daniel früher zu mir gesagt. stirb. endlich ist es zeit zu gehen.

Als ich am internationalen konferenzzentrum zur ifsr 2005 ankomme merke ich, dass registration bis 18h war und der empfang um 18h losgeht. ich bin also zu spät aber egal, alle schon da, nur josé und sugiyama sensei fehlen, großes wiedersehen mit tunc, andre. shoko und akiko, händeschütteln mit nakamori-sensei. Es gibt sushi und hähnchen, ich esse schon wieder zu viel verdammt, ohne den ausgleichenden sport werde ich dieses mal zu- und nicht abnehmen, verflucht. Ich fange an mich zu betrinken. die party geht laut programm von 18-20h, d.h. um 19.45 wird abgeräumt und um punkt 20h verlassen wir als letzte den saal. wir sind in dieesm falle ein professor aus england und ich. wir hatten uns bis dahin schon den ganzen abend köstlich unterhalten, er war 5 jahre bei der britischen botschaft und arbeitet seit dem an einer japanischen uni, japanisch spricht er auch. wir beschließen, noch in die bar des konferenzhotels zu gehen, wo wir die einzigen gäste sind. wir bestellen long island ice tea, wir sind beide voll, sprechen über wissenschaft in japan usw usf, irgendwann kommen ins private. er hat familie aber ausscjlielich in england, frau, kinder, enkelkinder. mir fällt auf, dass er keinen ehering trägt. er liebe japan, er hätte hier ein 'interesting social life' . dann fängt er an, mir von seinen zei freundinnen zu erzählen. oh gott denke ich, verflucht, dasd klischee stimmt doch immer wieder: meistens kommen sie wegen der frauen. er schwärmt mir von den asiatinnen vor, dabei ist er mindestens 60. er zeigt mr eine sms von wegen ich vermiss dich und komm mich besuchen, aber sagt er, die ist von einer hostess und sieht mich verscgwörerisch an. über die japanischen hostclubs, in denen man für konversation mit damen bezahlt, weiß ich bescheid, wir reden lang und breit über diese merkwürdige japanische institution während wir uns ordentlich einen reinstellen. ich merke, dass er in diesen etablissements stammgast ist. ich muss an professor unrat von heinrich mann denken. wir bezahlen (getrennt, geizhals) und dann sagt im rausgehen, orgen abend stünde doch nichts offizielles auf dem programm, er würde mir gerne einenhostclub in sannomiya zeigen. 4000 yen die stunde. schaun mer mal. oh gott. abgründe. schnell ins bett.

hallo welt

2005-11-13T14:21:00.000+01:00

myowelt habe ich mein blog genannt; myo ja als präfix für ganz ganz kleine dinge: ein kleiner ausschnitt aus meiner kleinen welt. kein tagebuch, nur schnipsel.

heute fühlt sich meine kleine welt ganz groß an. weil ich sie heute in kobe erlebe, meine erste kongressreise ins ausland, allein. die inszenierung eines klischees. flughafenbekanntschaften mit visitenkartentausch (www.karajohnstad.com), onflightentertainment in der economy-class, rotwein und schlaftablette verschaffen mir gerade mal 3 stunden schlaf, höchstens, ankunft osaka kansei 8:47 lokale zeit also 0:47 deutsche zeit. das lächeln schon etwas gequält. bus nach osaka hauptbahnhof, gepäck wegschließen. denkste. alle schließfächer belegt, ich finde ein schild von wegen gepäckaufbewahrung aber kann die ortsbeschreibung nicht entschlüsseln, das kleine geschlechtslose japanische männchen, das ich mit meinem restjapanisch um hilfe frage (sumimasen, kore ha dochira desu ka?), reagiert ganz wunderbar japanisch: klar will er mir helfen, nimmt mich gleich ins schlepptau, hat aber offensichtlich selbst keine ahnung, findet es selbst nicht, telefoniert eine freundin per handy herbei (wo kommt die so schnell her?), ratlosigkeit im doppelpack, wir zu dritt zur information, da werden sie geholfen, ich bekomme eine wegbeschreibung und die beiden verschwinden.

in osaka erst mal klischee olé: shopping. bei takeo kikuchi hätte ich wieder den ganzen laden leerkaufen können (und der verkäufer gab sich alle mühe mich von dem vorhaben nicht abzubringen), bin aber dann doch 'nur' mit kapuzenshirt und longsleeve da raus. weiter durch die stadt gelaufen, plötzlich straßenfest mit tanz und vielen großen und kleinen menschen. irgendwann genug, weiter mit dem zug nach kobe. aber zuerst verlaufe ich mich im unterirdischen gedärm zwischen osaka hankyu, osaka umeda und einem kaufhaus so dermasßen, dass ich fast 20 minuten brauche, um meine orientierung wiederzufinden. Das ist auch so eine sache, die ich bereits bei meinem letzten langen besuch als typisch japanisch erlebt habe: das unterirdische bahnhofsteile mit anderen u-bahnstationen, übergangstunneln und kaufhaustiefgeschossen eine wirre schier endlose parallelwelt aufspannen, die von einer dermaßenen gier nach konsum getrieben und bevölkert wird, dass es unvorstellbar ist., alles voller cafés und läden. Klar hat man bei uns auch in den 70edr jahren versucht, fußgängerunterführungen mit läden zu füllen, das bonner loch ist mein lieblingsbeispiel, aber das sind immer kloaken geworden in denen sich bestenfalls dönerbuden und viatnamesische blumenverkäufer halten. wer käme in bochum auf die idee, in der unterführung zwischen hauptbahnhof und wertheim ausgiebig in edelboutiquen teure importware zu shoppen? wenn die deutschen die passagen so exzessiv bevölkern würden wie die japaner es stets und ständig tun hätten wir kein problem mit der binnennachfrage. Aber durch diese merkwürdige über-und unterführungsshoppingarchitektur, die einen von einem konsumtempel in den nächsten befördert, bekommt man so eine ganz merkwürdige wahrnehmung der stadt als fast irreal, weil dieses drinnen-draußen-konzept, diese trennung, verschwimmt. Endlich finde ich meinen bahnhof, kaufe ein ticket (zweite bewährungsprobe für mein restjapanisch) und fahre los.

Zwischen osaka und kobe nimmt die bebauungsdichte nicht ab, die gesamte buchtbebauung eine einzige megastadt, unterschiedliche namen nur politische und willkürlich erscheinende konstrukte. Von kobe sannomiya mit dem portliner auf portisland, künstlich aufgeschüttete insel vor kobe mit genauso gesichtslosen betonwürfeln wie überall sonst in japan, konferenzzentrum, hotels, wohnungen, eine schule, ein krankenhaus.

Nach der herbeigesehnten dusche möchte ich eigentlich nur noch ins bett aber nix da, so klappt das mit dem jetlag nicht, es ist ja erst 18h, also wieder auf, zurück in die inzwischen künstlich erleuchtete stadt zum abendessen, ich habe seit dem frühstück im flieger keine einzige kalorie zu mir genommen und mein magen knurrt. zielsicher wähle ich in kitano-cho ein udon-restaurant, dass, wie sich nachdem ich mich niedergelassen und bestellt habe herausstellt, auch von den örtlichen prostituierten (bzw. der japanischen version davon) bevorzugt wird. die knapp bekleidete dame, die mich auf der straße mit "massage, sir?" ansprach, betritt jedenfalls kurz nach mir mit zwei weiteren freundinnen im schlepptau den laden; sie sehen so aus, als würden sie das gleiche machen. das spricht aber zumindest nicht gegen die qualität des essens denke ich. spezialität des hauses scheint neben udon als beigabe ein metall-eimer mit satten 300g kimchi zu sein, für 500 yen. Ich kanns mir verkneifen und schlürfe mein udon seto in rekordzeit.

draußen packt mich plötzlich die gier nach süßem, ich kehre auf meinem fogenden spaziergang in dreien dieser kleinen bäckereien ein die es überall gibt; mit einem kleinen tablett und einer zange bewaffnet bedient man sich aus den appetitlichen regalen voller bällchen, törtchen, gebäck... süßgebäck mit schwarzem sesam werde ich mal nach deutschland importieren und damit millionär werden. mit vollem magen und schlechtem gewissen gehts nach einem kurzen gang durch die chinatown kobes zurück zum hotel. Ich bringe den wlan-adapter, den mir die rezeptionisten, die mit ihrem von einer beachtlichen deformation des schädels (die sie erfolglos mit ihren haaren zu verdecken versucht) leicht entstelltem gesicht in einem japanischen horrorfilm mitspielen könnte, ausgehändigt hat, zum laufen und erledige noch emails.

um 22.30h endlich die zeit fürs bett, ich schlafe sofort ein.