Irreal

Except for you young guys for whom they’re pretty much the same:

“Japan’s sole pager provider will end its services Tuesday, with the device, first introduced in the country half a century ago, made redundant by mobile phones.”

(Are we really being asked to be nostalgic about…pagers?!) https://t.co/L3mzj3IKi5

— Kontra (@counternotions) October 1, 2019

If you aren’t a fairly young person you almost certainly have first-hand knowledge of pagers. A colleague once described them to me as an electronic ball and chain. Unless you’re in the pager business, they won’t be missed. At all.

Of course, now cell phones are serving the ball and chain function but somehow it seems much less onerous. Perhaps because we all carry one anyway. I think it’s likely that anyone who doesn’t have a phone today is someone who doesn’t want one for some reason.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a pager in the US. A quick DuckDuckGo check reveals that there are, apparently, still some companies offering service. Who are the customers for these services? Has anyone seen one in the wild recently?

Back in June, I wrote about the light-mode/dark-mode controversy and the article by Adam Engst claiming—and citing substantiating research—that all the claims of dark mode’s superiority are nonsense and, in fact, the opposite of the truth. In particular, dark mode is not easier on the eyes, is not easier to read, and doesn’t lead to better comprehension. Contrariwise, it’s light mode that does all those things.

As a member of the elite despised light mode minority, I found his article gratifying but didn’t take it very seriously. Now, though, it’s time to fire another volley. Over at Gizmodo, Andrew Couts claims that Dark Mode Is for Suckers. You can tell by the title that Couts’ piece is a bit more hyperbolic than Angst’s evenhanded recitation of the research.

Nonetheless, Couts also cites research and backs up his rhetoric with facts. His explanation for the prevalence and preference for dark mode is fashion. People claim that dark mode looks better and who can argue with someone’s subjective judgment on such matters. Couts counters that fashion comes and goes and that what seems trendy today will seem horrible in a few years. He could have illustrated his argument with, say, avocado colored kitchen appliances but chose an even more terrifying example. Follow the link to see what it is. If you dare.

I stumbled upon a very interesting article from 2016 entitled The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think. The real point of the article, though, is “You are not the user.” Whatever you think about your users’ assumptions and skills is almost certainly wrong. It follows, therefore, that you shouldn’t use your own assumptions and skills in designing your user interface.

According to the article, the average developer has a higher IQ, higher literacy level, and is probably younger then most of their users. That’s a pretty breathtaking statement but the conclusion is not at all controversial: you can’t develop for yourself because, in technology, you are among the top elite.

A good part of the article is devoted to fleshing out the assertion that developers are in a special class as far as technology is concerned. Here are some of the major findings from a study of a several industrialized countries.

• 26% of adults can’t use computers at all.
• 14% of adults can perform only very simple tasks such as deleting an email.
• 29% of adults can perform only well defined tasks requiring little or no navigation such as finding all emails from John Smith.
• 26% of adults can perform underspecified tasks that require some interpretation and extra tools. An example of such a task is finding a document on a specific subject sent to you by John Smith in October of last year.
• 5% of adults can perform more complex, underspecified tasks requiring interpretation, extra tools, and monitoring of results. An example is finding the percentage of emails from John Smith that were about sustainability.

Developers are in that last small group. It’s easy to assume that most people have reasonable computer skills but it’s just not true. As the article points out, “You are not the user” is one of the hardest lessons to learn and accept. It’s an interesting article that expands on the above points and is well worth reading.

Betteridge’s law tells us to answer that question with a “no” and that’s—at least partially—the right answer. “No” is the right answer because scientists and statisticians can’t agree on what should replace the p-test. It’s the wrong answer because it’s not working and an uncomfortably large part of scientific research is proving to be irreproducible, a fact that many statisticians and other scientists are attributing to an over reliance on the concept of statistical significance.

Over at Science News, Bethany Brookshire has an excellent article on what science would look like without the concept of statistical significance. Most everyone agrees that using the p-test as a binary indicator of whether or not an experiment “succeeded” is inappropriate. The problem is that they can’t decide on what to do instead. As Steven Goodman, a Stanford University medical research methodologist, puts it, Everyone knows what they’re against. Very few people know what they’re for. Some simply want to tighten the p-test criteria from .05 to .005. Others, like Aubrey Clayton, want to replace the p-test all together with Bayesian Analysis.

Statisticians seem overwhelmingly in favor of replacing the p-test as a way of deciding the worth of an experiment. Blake McShane, a statistician at Northwestern University, notes that statistics is often wrongly perceived to be a way to get rid of uncertainty but it’s really about quantifying the degree of uncertainty. Seen in that light, it’s not that the p-test is bad, it’s the notion that you can use it to eliminate uncertainty that needs to be replaced.

Take a look at Brookshire’s article. It’s interesting and provides a good summary of a serious problem.