not mailing but drowning

Email takes out a large slice of my day.  On my first serious day back at work after the Christmas break, I spent all morning on the backed up emails (despite having been monitoring and keeping up to some degree); at lunchtime I had one more email in my inbox than I'd had first thing: I wasn't even keeping up!

Someone at work has suggested that we all adopt the Email Charter.  It's got much excellent advice, and a few things I disagree with, which I'll explain here.

1. Respect Recipients' Time. This is the fundamental rule. As the message sender, the onus is on YOU to minimize the time your email will take to process. Even if it means taking more time at your end before sending.

This is the fundamental rule of all writing. Don't just dash something off, expecting your reader to pick through the verbiage to extract your meaning.  This is particularly true if your writing is to be read by more than one person: the total reading time is multiplied by the number of readers.  Hence the important role of reviewers and editors in published writing: to reduce the amount of time people waste reading nonsense.  Be your own editor: proofread and edit down your emails. Don't fall back on Pascal's excuse: "I am sorry for the length of my letter, but I had not the time to write a short one."

2. Short or Slow is not Rude.  Let's mutually agree to cut each other some slack. Given the email load we're all facing, it's OK if replies take a while coming and if they don't give detailed responses to all your questions. No one wants to come over as brusque, so please don't take it personally. We just want our lives back! 

Way back in the day, before email was ubiquitous, before personal computers were common, we used to get our business letters typed up by secretaries.  I heard back then (I'm talking mid 1980s here) via the grapevine that one of the secretaries thought that my business letters were "short, to the point of rudeness".  I always forget to put in all that initial polite handshaking part, and just cut to the chase.  So email is perfect for me!

Slow, though?  Well, that depends on what you mean by "slow".  More than 10 minutes, that's not slow.  More than 24 hours -- I'm beginning to worry that your spam filter ate my email, and might think about sending it again.  A simple "ack" can help allay this worry.

3. Celebrate Clarity. Start with a subject line that clearly labels the topic, and maybe includes a status category [Info], [Action], [Time Sens] [Low Priority]. Use crisp, muddle-free sentences. If the email has to be longer than five sentences, make sure the first provides the basic reason for writing. Avoid strange fonts and colors.

This confuses two issues: the subject line, and the body, of the email. The body part is really covered by point 1. Subject lines should be a clear "title" about the topic of the email. There are a few points I think are important about subject lines.

1. Your reader doesn't have the same context that you do, so the subject line that's best for you isn't necessarily the best for them. Let's say you are a project manager where all your emails are currently about project BettaWidget.  You email financial support with a query.  Subject "Financial query" is great for you, but pretty useless for them, as most of their email is about financial queries!  Subject "BettaWidget" is more informative to them, but won't mean much to you when you get the reply.  So, try "BettaWidget financial query".  It's essentially the union of your tag set and your recipient's tag set. 
2. Good subject lines mean one topic per email : the one related to the subject line.  Two topics leads to lack of clarity, and the danger that one topic will get overlooked.  In the past, it also meant irritation of not being able to file it in the right place. But now we have tags rather than hierarchical folders, this isn't so pressing.
3. Change the topic, change the subject line!  If your conversation has drifted off onto something else, change the subject line to reflect this.  This links to point 6 below. 

4. Quash Open-Ended Questions. It is asking a lot to send someone an email with four long paragraphs of turgid text followed by "Thoughts?". Even well-intended-but-open questions like "How can I help?" may not be that helpful. Email generosity requires simplifying, easy-to-answer questions. "Can I help best by a) calling b) visiting or c) staying right out of it?!"

Maybe a further "d) other (please specify)" is needed to allow for the creative solution that you are secretly hoping for!

5. Slash Surplus cc's.  cc's are like mating bunnies. For every recipient you add, you are dramatically multiplying total response time. Not to be done lightly! When there are multiple recipients, please don't default to 'Reply All'. Maybe you only need to cc a couple of people on the original thread. Or none.

It can be difficult to know who needs to see an email. Sometimes there's a few people who need to see it and do something, and a few who need it for information only.  The first should be recipients, the second should be the "cc"s.  But it can be hard to distinguish these categories: Gmail doesn't do this unless you look at "details", for example.  It might be worth having a couple of lines of intro:

1. Hi X, Y, Z (for action)
2. cc A, B, C (fyi)

I haven't tried this (yet), but it might help address the problem.  If you have people in the list who are neither for action nor for info, why are they there?

The "to all" message that starts out "To all of you who haven't done X" is the most problematic.  I confess that I have been guilty of this on occasion, usually when pressed for time, but I wince when I do it.  I hate receiving these, as I'm left thinking "have I forgotten to do X?", and have to waste even more time checking that, yes, I have done X.  Don't send to "all" with the disclaimer; send it just to those who haven't done X.   It may take less extra time than you think---you will be saved reading all those aggrieved emails from people telling you that actually, they have done X---and it saves the time of everyone who has done X (not least because they won't be sending said aggrieved emails!).

6. Tighten the Thread. Some emails depend for their meaning on context. Which means it's usually right to include the thread being responded to. But it's rare that a thread should extend to more than 3 emails. Before sending, cut what's not relevant. Or consider making a phone call instead. 

This isn't so much of a problem -- we can read as far through the historical provenance as we need to.  It saves deleting something that's actually needed.  And the academic in me feels bad at removing references: it's almost verging on plagiarism.

"Or make a phone call instead."  No.  No, no, no.  Absolutely not. In case I wasn't clear about this: no, do not make a phone call instead.  The glorious, wonderful thing about emails is that the recipient is in control of when, and whether, to respond. If I don't respond to your email, it's because:

1. I'm busy in a meeting. Some of my colleagues are bemused that I don't answer my phone when I'm in a meeting with them.  When I do answer, the person calling often asks if I am free to talk: yes, I am, if I wasn't, I wouldn't have answered the phone.
2. I'm busy doing some real work, and don't want to be disturbed.  It takes 15-20 minutes to get into a concentration "flow" needed for technical work; it takes a second to be broken out of it.  My phone is on such a soft ring I can ignore it in flow.
3. I need to do something, find something out, contact someone else, read a document, even just think a bit, before I can give you a meaningful response, so it will take some time.
4. I'm ignoring you for now.
5. (unlikely) It's lodged in my spam filter.

The phone is ideal for a conversation that needs some back and forth discussion.  An example happened last week.  A colleague emailed to say that their group had been having a planning discussion, and she needed to tell me about it, and it was easier to talk through than write down.  Using email, we set up a time to talk.  The call lasted 50 minutes (it would indeed have been hard to write down!)  If you want to talk to me on the phone, email me and ask me to call you (tell me when, so that I don't disturb you in turn).

7. Attack Attachments.  Don't use graphics files as logos or signatures that appear as attachments. Time is wasted trying to see if there's something to open. Even worse is sending text as an attachment when it could have been included in the body of the email. 

Absolutely!  Central admin in particular seems to delight in circulating emails that say "please read the enclosed", which results in you spending 10-15 seconds reading that instruction, scrolling down to the attachment, downloading it, and opening it, only to be confronted with a few lines of text that could easily have been pasted into the email.  10-15 seconds, multiplied by every recipient, multiplied by every such email, amounts to a lot of wasted effort.  Especially when the attachment has been forgotten in the first place!  (Maybe those helpful little "did you mean to send an attachment?" popups, which sometimes appear when you forget a promised attachment, should be complemented with "do you really need to send this attachment?", when you don't!)

8. Give these Gifts: EOM NNTR.  If your email message can be expressed in half a dozen words, just put it in the subject line, followed by EOM (= End of Message). This saves the recipient having to actually open the message. Ending a note with "No need to respond" or NNTR, is a wonderful act of generosity. Many acronyms confuse as much as help, but these two are golden and deserve wide adoption.

EOM isn't even needed if you have an email client like that shows the beginning of the body text, or not, if there isn't any.  OTOH, NNTR seems to add extra acronym burden when there's already the well-known and perfects acceptable FYI.

9. Cut Contentless Responses. You don't need to reply to every email, especially not those that are themselves clear responses. An email saying "Thanks for your note. I'm in." does not need you to reply "Great." That just cost someone another 30 seconds.

This is another slightly tricky one.  Again, sometimes there's a need for an "ack", or at least the recipient feels the need to say "thanks", whatever.  Maybe an extra "RSVP regrets" or some explicit opt out scheme is needed in such cases?

10. Disconnect! If we all agreed to spend less time doing email, we'd all get less email! Consider calendaring half-days at work where you can't go online. Or a commitment to email-free weekends. Or an 'auto-response' that references this charter. And don't forget to smell the roses.

tl;dr: let's follow the Email Charter (except that phone call business, of course!) and make our, and our recipients', inboxes hold only short, content-full, attachment-less, relevant subject-lined, pertinent emails!

This may be a short term problem, though.  Apparently, teens don't use email. The next generation will need a Text Charter instead.

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Sir Patrick Moore, 1923 - 2012

Sir Patrick Moore, astronomer, presenter of The Sky At Night since 1957, author of many popular astronomy books, inspiration to several generations of astronomers, myself included, has died. Still sitting on our TV's hard disc recorder is last Monday's episode of The Sky At Night, not yet watched.  Goodbye, Patrick.

Patrick Moore

The Sky At Night, "A Night to Remember".
 The BBC's 1969 moon landing team: Patrick Moore, Cliff Michelmore, James Burke
(but why is this picture reversed?)

Patrick Moore (photo credit: Paul Grover, from Telegraph article in 2010)

• Telegraph obituary
• BBC News

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gamified research

My day job includes working with people who research on flocking, social networks, and other complex interactions of groups of agents.  A while back, some of our researchers decided to see if their work could be brought to the public through "gamification".  Over the summer, the University has funded a couple of interns to work on this, and now ComplexCityApps have just released the first game for the Android: Floqua.

As the game's website says:

Find all of the lost fish in each level and guide them to safety in the castle. The tricky part is keeping them in your flock. Swim too fast and you'll leave your fish behind. Watch out for the predators: they're hungry!

The game is now available through Google play.  I confess, I've spent more time than I should herding fish.  It's easier than herding cats, which is part of my day job...

In addition to being a fun game (we hope!), it's educational (we also hope!).  You can simply play the game.  But, if you want to know more, there are pointers to the science behind the app.

And the developers have bravely been keeping a blog, so you can also dig down into some of the game design process, including effort to make sure the colour-coding of fish types is accessible to colour-blind players.

Okay, I'm off to try the next level, which has two rather hungry predators trying to eat my fish...

hiding from predators...

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narrating complexity

Our new interdisciplinary network on Narrative and Complex Systems is having its first workshop, in York.  Yesterday we had a great time explaining to each other what we did, from narrative in fiction, in films, in computer games, to the narrative of complexity and emergence, and trying to discover common concepts.  We finished the day by brainstorming a mindmap:

This process was amazingly helpful in distilling our ideas.  The result, however, is pretty incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't there!

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Malaga meals

I'm just back from Malaga in Spain, where I was a member of a PhD thesis defence panel.  It was a very interesting thesis, which I enjoyed reading, and I got to meet up with several colleagues, and have lots on good conversation.

And good food, of course. On the Thursday evening, the supervisors and I went out for a "tapas crawl" -- ham and cheese in the first place, anchovies, cod, and tuna in the next, then finishing up at a Moroccan tea shop.  Along the way we passed the Moorish Alcazaba Fortress and Roman Theatre.




Friday breakfast was churros (fried dough) which are eaten after being dipped in thick hot chocolate -- very more-ish.







Lunch was paella and grilled swordfish on the beach, "serenaded" by green parakeets in the palm trees.  The warm sunshine made a pleasant change from the grey and raining England I had left 24 hours earlier, but I did make sure to sit in the shade.




Dinner, after the defence, was a kind of "up market" tapas, in that there was lots of (relatively) small, varied, delicious and ... different ... courses.

1. Pear draped in salmon covered with blue cheese, accompanied by blackberries
2. Ham and honey crepes
3. Cod in a tomato sauce (okay, quite tame in comparison, really)
4. Lamb, goats cheese, and sweet onion chutney
5. Pork and pate rounds with strawberry sauce

There were several of us dining: the panel, the supervisors, and the successful candidate.  Although we cleared the early courses, it just so happened that we all left some of the final one.  And it was the final main course: next was delivered the sweet course.  So, was it coincidence that we all faltered at the planned final fence -- or would they have continued serving new courses for as long as we continued eating?

Oh, and in between all the meals, as well as the defence there were meetings, presentations, discussions ... and coffee.

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climbing up onto the shoulders of giants

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants – Isaac Newton 

Newton was not first to say this (and it may or may not have been a jab at Hooke), but the idea is sound: we can get further because we don’t have to invent everything from scratch; we can build on what others have done before. So, if we need to solve a particular problem that needs calculus, we don’t have to invent calculus from scratch to do so, we can use what Newton (and Leibniz, of course) invented. Standing on their shoulders, we can see further.

But how do we get to stand on the giant’s shoulders? (I’ll keep the metaphor to a single giant, as standing on the shoulders of multiple giants sounds too much like a circus act. And I am focussing on the mathematical giant.) We aren’t born up there on the giant’s shoulders. While we don’t have to grow into the giant (invent calculus), we do have to climb up the giant (study calculus).

And the giant is getting ever bigger. On the one hand, this is good: being so much higher we can see so much further. On the other hand, what happens when we have to spend our entire lives climbing up the vast growing giant, and never reach the viewpoint on the ever-distant shoulders?

We need short cuts up the giant. Fortunately, other are building ropes and ladders and lifts: tools to climb the giant more easily. So, we now have computer algebra packages that can solve our differential and integral equations for us; we no long need to spend years studying and practising how to do this.

But wait! cry the purists. That is cheating.

there is no Royal Road to geometry – Euclid

Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything. – Greg Egan

There are no shortcuts, the purists insist. Mathematics is not a “spectator sport”. You have to do it, be immersed in it, internalise it, in order to really understand it.  The youth of today, with their fancy calculators and computers, they don’t really understand arithmetic and algebra and calculus.  Get off my lawn!

There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to criticism of youth, of course. Plato, in Phaedrus, has Socrates rail against this new-fangled literacy:

 [writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so. 

This sounds suspiciously similar to those modern complaints about using calculators rather than mental arithmetic, or using computer algebra programs rather than slogging through pages of pushing symbols around. These devices give only the “appearance of wisdom”.

I do have some sympathy with this view. There does seem to be a lot of blind trust in the output of calculators and computers. However, I’m not sure it is purely the fault of the calculators. There can be uncomprehending blind trust in symbol pushing, too. I remember, many years ago, being in a computer shop, buying four items. The shop assistant wrote down the prices, and laboriously added them up, with much crossing out. When they announced the total, I said “that’s wrong”. They got a bit huffy, but then I pointed out their total was too small: it was less than one of the items on the list! As well as their huffiness, I detected a faint feeling of puzzled wonder from the assistant: how had I known? Despite the hand calculation, the assistant had no feel for the numbers. Maybe Socrates would have said that they should have added the numbers in their head? (Notice here that I didn’t know what the right answer was, but I knew the suggested answer was wrong.)

Another example comes to mind, again from many years ago. We were buying some new pillows: four for £4.99 each. The shop assistant wrote down 4.99 four times in a list, and added them up. Meanwhile I was going “£4.99 is a penny less than £5, so that’s £20 minus 4p, or £19.96.” I had the right money ready by the time the assistant came up with the answer, and was again met with puzzled wonder. (I’m sure that’s the real reason supermarkets took the prices off their goods: to stop some customers freaking out the cashiers by having the right money ready!)

I recounted this pillow story to my mother, who, faster than I did my shortcut calculation, simply multiplied 4.99 by 4 in her head, and got the right answer. I was almost as much in awe of this feat as the shop assistant had been in mine. But which approach shows more understanding of numbers: my short cut or my mother’s brute force calculation? Is it possible that slogging through all those exercises merely enable us to do calculations quickly, without thinking? And if there is no thought, then what have we actually gained? After all, one can learn by rote and merely “parrot” remembered answers.

Back to climbing that giant. What we need is a way of taking short cuts up and of having the “feel” for the numbers. An approach that could work is critical thinking about the supplied results (whether supplied by computer, or by our own unthinking calculations). We can keep the feel by using even shorter short cuts and heuristics that give an approximate answer, as a sanity check. Those shorter cuts and heuristics supply the feel, and when they are done automatically, they are the feel.

So, education shouldn’t be focussed on getting students to wade through pages and pages of exercises, pushing symbols (be they numbers or letters) around (unless they enjoy that sort of thing, of course). It should be more focussed on training in the use of short-cut tools, education on where and how to apply the tools, and meta-training in critical thinking about the results those tools give. Then we can climb the ever-growing giant fast enough to get to the top in time to see something before we die, and confident that we’ll understand what we do see when we get there.

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no olives please, I'm British

I'm getting ready to fly out to Thessalonika tomorrow, to examine a PhD thesis, and give a seminar. My very gracious hosts, on learning that this would be my first ever trip to Greece, have also laid on a little sight-seeing for me, so that I can soak up some culture.

I'm looking forward to the food, too ... except ... I haven't confessed to them yet that I don't like olives...

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