FW: Adobe CEO interview (Marcus Carr)

[liviabemail-tech at yahoo.com]

This is all really good reading.

From: Marcus Carr <mcarr at allette.com.au>
CC: 
To: Framers List <framers at FrameUsers.com>
Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 10:15:01 +1000
Subject: Re: FW: Adobe CEO interview

 
Hi Dan,

Daniel Emory wrote:

> It’s estimated that 40% of the US adult population is non-literate,
> which means they don’t read books or newspapers. This has been
> accompanied by a rapid decline in the ability of college students to
> write a half-way decent paragraph in English. The California State
> College system, the largest in the nation, takes almost any applicant
> who got through high-school degree with half-way decent grades. But
> about 40% of its first year students are not capable of doing 
> college-level work, and thus their first year is dominated by
> remedial classes in English, Math and other subjects they should have
> mastered in high school.
> 
> These declines all coincide with the growth of the internet, and the
> shift from obtaining knowledge from paper books to learning from
> feeble snippets of on-line text. The blogosphere, dominated by those
> who are at least competent in the English language, consists mainly
> of opinions unsupported by any factual basis.

Although I feel that what you are saying may well have merit, I'm 
reluctant to jump to any conclusions too quickly. A favourite example of 
misdirected causality is the inexplicable reduction in crime for young 
males in New York city. Politicians claimed for years that it was due to 
their "tough on crime" policy, yet the drop surpassed that of cities 
with similar policies. Eventually someone figured out that it coincided 
with abortion being made more freely available - less children being 
born into poor homes where they weren't wanted translated into fewer 
boys thinking crime was the way up and girls thinking pregnancy was. Of 
course it's not conclusive, but it's as plausible as the mismatched 
"tough on crime" line...

There could be an element of that in your reasoning, I feel. Whether 
information is to be delivered on paper or on screen doesn't predispose 
it to being written at a certain level of quality. Whether it's being 
delivered electronically or on paper, there will *always* be a need for 
people who are able to write clearly. Some information is too critical 
to risk misinterpretation.

It's certainly true that there's a lot of poor writing on the internet, 
but that's partly because there's so much information. Take this posting 
as a case in point - I don't claim to write with any particular 
proficiency, but you're reading it because it landed in your email. Had 
it not, it's extremely unlikely that we'd be exchanging letters about 
this topic, if for no other reason than the fact that we didn't realise 
the other was interested in it.

> When you read tomes from the 1990’s extolling the promise of
> hypertext to change the way people think and use information, (I
> recommend the “Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook by Berk and Devlin), you
> begin to realize that it’s promise was still-born. The hypertext
> pioneers envisioned a rich panoply of link types that would create
> hypertexts which were true “searchable mazes” Frame Technology,
> beginning in FrameMaker 4, added a rich variety of hypertext link 
> types which would have realized that original vision.

True, but linking is difficult. It's easy if the ends of all of the 
links reside in your domain, but how do you know if the point within a 
document owned by someone else still means what it did when you first 
pointed at it? It's tough enough for a link to even know whether the 
document still exists, let alone how it might degrade gracefully to 
another resource, how to determine the impact of the missing link on the 
viability of the rest of the document, etc. It's still relatively early 
days and linking is one of the key components of a rich internet, so 
it's getting plenty of attention.

> When Adobe took over FrameMaker, it could have carried out that
> vision by implementing all of the FrameMaker link types in PDF. It
> failed to do so. And so, the HTML standard, with only the most
> primitive hypertext link type, became the standard. There was some
> hope that the XML standard would have rich linking capabilities. It
> added a few additional link types, but nowhere near enough to realize
> the original promise of hypertext.

You certainly could be on to something with that - one of the ways that 
FrameMaker could be kept relevant would be to concentrate heavily on 
linking, including to documents outside of the current book. PDF would 
provide a great platform for that - it might even be enough to increase 
the use of PDF on the internet. (They'd want to make loading a PDF 
quicker and less obvious first though.)

> Getting back to what I state in the first two paragraphs above, I
> maintain that the ability to acquire in-depth knowledge of a subject
> is a discipline which is difficult to master. And I have no doubt
> that well-written, well-organized paper books, particularly on
> difficult subjects, will continue to be the best way to acquire real,
> in-depth knowledge of a subject, and subsequently serve its owner as
> a valuable reference source.

In-depth knowledge isn't always desirable - the rapid growth of the 
internet is proof of that. If it was always desirable, the internet 
would not be as valuable a resource as it is, as it wouldn't satisfy 
people's requirements for the reasons that you cite.

That said though, there is truth to what you say - the real question is 
whether it matters. In my parent's day, neat cursive handwriting was 
very important. It was arguably less important in my day and for my 
daughter, it will be of little importance, as in her life, she will 
unquestionably use a keyboard or some other device far more than she 
ever writes with a ballpoint. The same is true of mathematics - you can 
do complex calculation on your phone now, so it's not critical that you 
understand logarithmic tables and the like. I don't think that it's 
better or worse, just different.


Marcus

From: Peter Gold <knowhowpro at gmail.com>
CC: Framers List <framers at FrameUsers.com>
To: Marcus Carr <mcarr at allette.com.au>
Date: Sun, 20 May 2007 22:43:57 -0500
Subject: Re: FW: Adobe CEO interview

 Marcus Carr wrote:
 >
 > That said though, there is truth to what you say - the real 
question is
 > whether it matters. In my parent's day, neat cursive 
handwriting was
 > very important. It was arguably less important in my day 
and for my
 > daughter, it will be of little importance, as in her life, 
she will
 > unquestionably use a keyboard or some other device far more 
than she
 > ever writes with a ballpoint. The same is true of 
mathematics - you can
 > do complex calculation on your phone now, so it's not 
critical that you
 > understand logarithmic tables and the like. I don't think 
that it's
 > better or worse, just different.

If legible cursive writing was the sole measurement of 
ability, I'd be in the same boat as many doctors - floating 
off to oblivion.

However, I'd qualify Marcus' comment about using one's phone 
for complex calculations. If you don't have the knowledge to 
derive a statement of a need for calculating a solution by 
using observation, experience, and analytic thinking, and lack 
the knowledge to present the problem statement to the 
calculating device, then, unless the device itself has the 
intelligence to do it for you, and is willing to do it (think 
"I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that") it's whether it's the 
original calculus (stones used as counters), abaci, or 
iPhones, it's useless.

My mother's criticism of the multiplication table matrix 
printed on the back cover of my grade-school composition books 
was, "You'll never learn to multiply by yourself, if you can 
just look it up!"

Interestingly, on "60 Minutes" today, there was a segment on 
Nicholas Negroponte's "One Laptop Per Child" project.

"MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte's dream is to put a laptop 
computer into the hands of every child. Lesley Stahl reports 
on his progress in Cambodia and Brazil."

In those countries, government subsidies bring the cost of 
these computers down to $100. When they become available in 
the U. S., they'll cost $200, because for each one you buy, 
one is given to a child in a country where they're really needed.

The video's available at:

http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=2830221n

One of the sequences bore out the premise that even young kids 
can figure a lot of this (learning to use the computers to 
write, look for information and learning to use it) out for 
themselves, and help others to do it.

________________
Regards,

Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices

From: Marcus Carr <mcarr at allette.com.au>
CC: 
To: Framers List <framers at FrameUsers.com>
Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 14:34:05 +1000
Subject: Re: FW: Adobe CEO interview

 Peter Gold wrote:

> If legible cursive writing was the sole measurement of ability, I'd
> be in the same boat as many doctors - floating off to oblivion.

Me too - it takes me longer to read my shopping list than to get my 
groceries... ;-)

> However, I'd qualify Marcus' comment about using one's phone for
> complex calculations. If you don't have the knowledge to derive a
> statement of a need for calculating a solution by using observation,
> experience, and analytic thinking, and lack the knowledge to present
> the problem statement to the calculating device, then, unless the
> device itself has the intelligence to do it for you, and is willing
> to do it (think "I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that") it's whether it's
> the original calculus (stones used as counters), abaci, or iPhones,
> it's useless.

Yes, I agree with that, and I suspect that Dan may as well. (Dan, I hope 
I don't misrepresent your opinion in this post - I mean "Dan" 
metaphorically rather than personally.) The thing that's changing is 
that the internet is providing those devices, so we're able to get 
correct answers without really understanding what the question was.

Take a mortgage calculator - you can pick a mortgage product, plug in 
the amount that you want to borrow and it will tell you what your 
monthly payments would be. It knows that the product you chose attracts 
an initiation fee and that for the amount that you wish to borrow, the 
bank will give you the mortgage for 25 points less than the standard 
interest rate. At a deeper level, it knows that the repayments are based 
on the assumption that the fee will be paid out of the amount borrowed, 
and numerous other details. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't 
want to know those things - I want to know if I'm in the ballpark.

Dan might question the accuracy of the calculator and the inability to 
cross-check it (especially if he was a Floridian voter... :-) and I 
would agree with him. The average person will lose the ability to do 
these calculations, but in order to create the calculator, someone will 
always have to understand how to do them. The same applies for writing, 
I suspect - most of us will be able to muddle along, but specialist 
writers will always be required.

This does leave us with a gap in our knowledge - we have no choice but 
to trust the calculator because we couldn't figure it out if we wanted 
to. I'm less concerned due to a combination of factors - I don't really 
care in the first place, I'm fairly certain that given the vagaries of 
the bank's policy I wouldn't be able to figure it out anyway and 
finally, I *want* the bank to tell me how much it will be. I can put 
much more faith in an answer that they provided than one that I worked 
out for myself.

> My mother's criticism of the multiplication table matrix printed on
> the back cover of my grade-school composition books was, "You'll
> never learn to multiply by yourself, if you can just look it up!"

Multiplication is an interesting case of abstraction in itself. 
Mathematicians (which I am *not*) regard multiplication to be shorthand 
for addition, but we don't teach that to kids. The question 5x6 can also 
be posed as 5+5+5+5+5+5, but the multiplication version is less verbose, 
so we pretend that they're different operations in order to make it less 
confusing. Well, that and the fact that the addition table matrix would 
have required a substantially bigger back cover...

> One of the sequences bore out the premise that even young kids can 
> figure a lot of this (learning to use the computers to write, look for 
> information and learning to use it) out for themselves, and help others 
> to do it.

It's hard to even imagine the next couple of generations of computer 
users. I'll get out of computers before then - it'll hurt my brain way 
too much trying to keep up with a grade 6 programming class...


Marcus

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