Not A Thing: Temporal Spatialization

All right, this breaks with the blog structure/content because it isn't a thing that needs to exist, but it's just too cool to ignore.  

From Labspaces (emphasis mine):

In their time study with the Yupno, now in press at the journal Cognition, Nunez and colleagues find that the Yupno don't use their bodies as reference points for time – but rather their valley's slope and terrain. Analysis of their gestures suggests they co-locate the present with themselves, as do all previously studied groups. (Picture for a moment how you probably point down at the ground when you talk about "now.") But, regardless of which way they are facing at the moment, the Yupno point uphill when talking about the future and downhill when talking about the past. 

Interestingly and also very unusually, Nunez said, the Yupno seem to think of past and future not as being arranged on a line, such as the familiar "time line" we have in many Western cultures, but as having a three-dimensional bent shape that reflects the valley's terrain.

This is phenomenally cool--a natural extension of the better-known Polynesian spatial reference system with geographically-based reference systems, like the Hawaiian "mauka" (towards the mountain) and "makai" (towards the sea).  If that's your spatial reference system, of course the way you conceptualize time spatially will fit into that.  I wonder how universal spatialization of time is--do all groups do it?  Obviously they don't all do it the same. . . 

Thing 18: Merging File & Task Management

Most of the tasks I do involve a number of different files. Designing an experiment means I've got to have open the papers I'm building on or referring to, plus notes on the design, plus IRB forms proposing or approving the new experiment. Creating the stimuli for an experiment means I've got to have the stimulus-creation program (Excel, Presentation, a compiler, whatever) open, plus my notes about what the stimulus should be. Analysing data means I've got to have my lab notebook open, plus the analysis files I'm creating, plus any old analysis files I'm using as models. This means that a big part of the cognitive load of resuming a task is remembering what files I need to complete it, and where they all are.

I've found a couple of half-solutions of various kinds. After an awful lot of digging around on the web, I did find a sadly now-defunct tool called Multifire; it allowed the creation of a txt file that referred to different documents or folders or websites, which opened them all by a double-click. It's a little limited, since it can only open any given file type in its default program and doesn't allow for any specification there--and anyway it's since vanished from the web completely. My favorite task-management tool, Remember the Milk, supports adding a URL to a task, but not any other type of file reference.

I would love to see a utility that has all the wonderful task-management features of RTM, but also allows a wide variety of files to be grouped with tasks. So, a task like "check readiness for new experiment" would include a link to the stimuli to be tested, to the consent & questionnaire files for review, and to the recruitment text for posting.

Man, I really want this to be easier than it is.

Thing 17: A Better Podcast Function for Sonos

I love my Sonos: almost immediately after you get it, it starts to feel like a natural feature that all living spaces should have. But it handles podcasts so, so badly--unnecessarily badly. It pretends that we're all listening to radio shows, so the only portal to the podcast world is RadioTime. RadioTime has a middling-to-OK catalog but no better, and the Sonos/RadioTime interface does an incredibly poor job of using the functionality of podcasts.

Thing seventeen-A: I want an RSS-like list of new episodes, across all feeds. Right now, the easiest way to do that is to look at the BeyondPod episode listings on my phone, then search for those shows and add them to the playlist. This is unutterably stupid.

Thing seventeen-B: I want to be able to subscribe to audio feeds using their URL.

Thing seventeen-C: I want to be able to see the episode notes, or at least the full title! The truncated titles means that quite often, all you can see of an episode is "A Podcast Named George: Ver" where the full title is "A Podcast Named George: Versimilitude in Geology". Some podcasts have longer titles than others, so for some, you can't even see the full title and get nothing at all of the topic. Since many podcasts don't put dates in their titles, it's not easy to figure out the date, either.

Thing seventeen-D: I want to be able to import and export my list of subscribed podcasts. Lots of podcatchers are using OPML to allow for this, so it's not a hard problem--it just needs an intake mechanism.

There are probably other features that I want, but a podcast area of the Sonos with these four would go a long way. Adding Stitcher (which is supposed to make a continuous "radio station" out of your podcast subscriptions) could have gone a long way, if it weren't for Stitcher's terrible implementation and problematic advertising & distribution policies, which keep some shows I like from signing up.

I know there are behind-the-scenes plumbing and approach problems with some of these requests, but I can't imagine they're really all that hard to solve. Podcasts are a major component of the audio I listen to, and the lack of an intelligently-designed podcast arena in Sonos is a serious drawback for me.

Thing 16: A Bottle-brush for Drying Wineglasses

Washing wineglasses by hand is a pain, and there's no way around that. But drying wineglasses is a pain, and there IS a solution to that. Drying wineglasses is hard because you have to choose between forcing a tea-towel to the bottom of the glass to dry it, or leaving it out to air-dry for hours. This could be simply solved by a thing like a bottlebrush, with the brush made out of strips of tea-towel. It does fall into the dreaded "single-use tool" category, though, and I'm not sure there's any way around THAT either.

Thing 15: Better Android App Management

I use the Android Market and the Amazon App Store and various other random sources to get my Android apps, like most people. But it has a problem: there's absolutely no equivalency between the two for updating--whatever you download through Market will only update through Market, and likewise for Amazon. This wouldn't be a problem if both stores listed updates at the same time, but they don't. There's been a Tweetcaster Pro update listed in the Market for weeks now, with no parallel update in Amazon. The problem is particularly bad for paid apps, since you have a license for that app in one marketplace but not the other.

I don't know enough about the infrastructure behind the problem--on the developer or the marketplace side--to suggest a good solution. Any solution involving a universal app-license-clearinghouse runs afoul of Google's hands-off(ish) approach to the Android world. But it needs to be cleared up, or I suspect users will tend to choose a "home" marketplace from which they only go afield for something very specific and desirable.

Thing 14: Clearer Patient Flow in Medical Settings

I'm hoping my recent extensive involvement with medicine as a patient is drawing to a close, for now; but it has certainly made me think more about interaction and facility design in medicine than I had before.

I should say upfront that I had a very good experience, over all; in all of the inning and outing of hospitals and imaging labs and doctors' offices, everyone was very kind, helpful, and appropriate. It was apparently a tricky situation, which now (knock wood!) seems to be on the mend due to the diligence and knowledge of all the medical-type peeps involved. So kudos and thanks to them.

However. The institutions housing these medical-type peeps all seem to have different interaction models--some of them run everything out of registration, some seem to register only for admitting patients, some I haven't figured out yet--and at no time does anybody tell the patient: Here at this office we use Medical Interaction Model 2. This means that when you come here, you should always go to the registration office first, no matter what you're here for. I'm sure from the other side of the desk it's perfectly obvious what the patient should do, but particularly when you've encountered a wide variety of different interaction models in a short period of time, from the patient side it's bloody confusing.

So here's what I want from medical offices: Clarify what you want me to do! If I need to go to registration, then go up to the health center, then to the outpatient lab for the end goal of getting blood work done, don't tell me to come in and get my blood drawn unless you know I've done that at this location for a very similar reason before. On a simpler level, when you visit a doctor's office and you're ready to leave, sometimes you stop at the reception window on the way out (new appointment? other arrangements? pay copay?) and sometimes you don't. That moment of hesitation--where am I supposed to be, and what am I supposed to be doing?--seems minimal and tolerable, until you experience it and its nasty cousin (being in the wrong place or without the right paperwork) repeatedly.

One solution requires no added hardware at all, just a little more talking on the part of the nurse, or whoever the final point of contact is: ask if the patient has done this before, explain what the different steps are. Simple, but tiresome for the nurses over many repetitions. A more elegant solution for a hospital or medical campus that would take much longer to implement is some kind of hardware (phone app? museum-style personal guide device?) that knows what the end medical goal is and what the intermediate steps are. Less time is wasted going to the incorrect place, and patients feel less like they've been abandoned in the middle of a rabbit warren with no particular indication what the next step ought to be.

I'm not satisfied with either of these solutions--maybe in tandem they would be acceptable--but what I want to happen is clarified interaction flow in medical settings; the basic patient question "Where am I supposed to be next, and what do I need when I get there?" should be anticipated and provided for more thoughtfully.

Thing 13: Belongings Shelf in Medical Rooms

I've spent a lot of time the last few days in medical rooms of various sorts--ER rooms, imaging rooms, regular doctor's examination rooms. And one thing they never, ever have is a place for the patient to put their belongings: purse, shoes when you get weighed, clothes when they come off. So you keep them in your lap, put them on a chair or under a chair. It kinda sucks. And I'm sure it's inefficient--I've managed to keep all my bits, but what if you get transferred while unconscious? What if something on the floor trips medical personnel in an emergency?

So this is today's thing that should exist: A small shelf or cubby, specifically for patient belongings. There's enough wall space in pretty much every room I've seen that this shouldn't be a logistical problem. It should just happen.