Puzzle: Who said the following, when, and where? Hint: It was not Ted Nelson in "Those Unforgettable Next Two Years" at the Second West Coast Computer Faire in San Jose in 1977. The answer will be revealed at the bottom of the page. Don't peek.
"Information technology represents a radical discontinuity in industrial history.... It means changing your basic assumptions about what business organizations are supposed to look like.
"For instance, you have to abandon the assumption that managers are different from the people they manage. One of the things that made them appear different in the past was that they had information that the people they managed didn't have. Managers, we said, were the people uniquely equipped to deal with information, and for that reason we granted them authority.... If you used to think that what separated managers from workers was information, you have to abandon that assumption. Workers will have information too."
Shortly after I transmitted last month's column in which I waxed wroth over misuses of words and figures in the computer press, Jon Erickson showed me the cover of the January 17, 1989 issue of PC Magazine, with its award for technichal (sic) excellence. Then MacUser features editor, John Anderson, passed me a copy of the January 1 New York Times Book Review section, with a delightfully relevant article by John Allen Paulos.
Paulos decries, as I did, American innumeracy, the analog to illiteracy in the realm of numbers. He points out that most people have no real feeling for the difference between a million and a trillion, and lack the simple skills necessary to assess risks to life, limb, and freedom. (Canceling a European trip for fear of terrorists is silly; the expected value of the payoff in a lottery is always less than the cost of a ticket; even for very accurate tests, mandatory AIDS testing would probably produce vastly more false positives than correct identifications.)
It matters that the public not be quite such numerically numbskulls, Paulos claims, because innumeracy makes people suckers for simple scams and makes them poor citizens in a world where numbers count. I decided to discuss the subject on this page from time to time because Dr. Dobb's readers are as good a group as I can imagine to take the message forth, and even they (you, [we]) need an occasional reminder. Even a generally numerate book such as Alexander Hellemans and Bryan H. Bunch's The Timetables of Science (Simon and Schuster, 1988) can slip up: "correct to n decimal places" means rounded to n places, not truncated at the nth place. The expression "n times more" has been so thoroughly corrupted to mean "n times as" that it's probably unsalvageable.
Paulos's forthcoming book, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences, should be one such reminder. So are Darrell Huff's classic little How to Lie with Statistics (W.W. Norton & Co., 1954) and The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould, an impressive debunking of one of the hoariest and most malignant of statistical fictions, IQ.
Paragon's QUED/M, a text editor for the Macintosh, is highly regarded by Mac programmers. Now Paragon has introduced a full word processor based on QUED/M, and as soon as I saw the feature list, I requested the product. Still a sucker for a well-written press release, I guess.
The features of Nisus, though, look like Paragon has been peeking at my word processor feature wish list. The search-and-replace feature is a GREP that knows about fonts and styles and even graphics. You can draw directly into the text, overlap text and pictures, and wrap text around art, and can place pictures in headers or footers (of which you can have any number). Like QUED/M, Nisus lets you record, write, and edit macros; and gives you essentially unlimited undoing of almost any changes.
Nisus has a modeless catalog function for opening files, searching through unopened files, and other file operations. Paragon claims that Nisus can locate a word or phrase in unopened files faster than other word processors can search one open document. It'll balance quotation marks and parentheses and add line numbers on screen, and will compare files.
It seems to me that anybody who writes code and English on a Macintosh would be intrigued by what Paragon claims for Nisus, and as soon as I've worked with the product, I'll give you my report on how well Paragon delivered.
Answer to puzzle: Harvard Business School Associate Professor Shoshana Zuboff, in Inc. magazine January, 1989. Computer Lib comes to HBS. What on earth does Zuboff think could drive managers to lose their grip on the manager's edge -- information?
Competition. Companies that fail to put the information in the hands of those who carry out policy will not be able to compete with those that do.
Copyright © 1989, Dr. Dobb's Journal