Rich Cooper's question re. market studies on FLIPP Explainers

[David Cox]

Rich,

Thanks for your patience in my delay in responding to your request about market studies or economic projections in the FLIPP user population. Before I launch an answer, let me say how interesting I found your Web site to be  :-)   http://www.englishlogickernel.com . I will enjoy returning to its many dimensions. 

Thanks for a second thing. In thinking about an answer to your question, I realized something that *reverses* one of the fundamentals about FLIPP -- that chunks of content "need" to be marked/ bordered in frames.  Aha! They don't. Instead, content frames can be distinguished in other ways: by different type faces, or different color.  This seems crucial to me because my non-computer-programming-mind thinks that eliminating frame lines makes software design for FLIPP Explainers vastly simpler.  8-)  Simplicity in explaining and understanding logical complexity is FLIPP's reason for being.

This is on the same level of revelation to me as Simon Polovina's and others' emphasis that all information presented to software users can profitably be understood as transactional. (I hope I have interpreted Simon's view adequately.) What I feel is missing from virtually all software-user instructions -- Microsoft's Vista, for example -- is the immediate feedback from user to automatic (or at least eventual) chunk-by-chunk redesign of those instructions for users. An example: each set of next-frame choices a user faces could display the % of success experienced by users who had traveled the same path of frames to that same decision point -- even the users who had gone through that intersection just moments earlier.

The FLIPP Explainer site is to be revised. The "frameless frame" idea your question prompted, Rich, and Simon's transaction emphasis will be major parts of the redesign.

Replies to your question:

1. I am unaware of any software that allows a system architect or programmer to conveniently create FLIPP Explainers where the program automatically does most of the housekeeping of adjusting and rearranging chunks. Software companies that specialize in diagram/ chart drawing do not respond when I ask them -- for safekeeping, perhaps. The experience cited in the FLIPP Explainers Web site was all from Procter & Gamble where users (mostly accomplished systems people) had easy access to P&G-ers who had experience using the method. 

2. I've used line-drawing and text boxes in MS Word. I've used Excel-like databases with very small horizontal columns to draw FLIPP diagrams. 

3. I don't know who the FLIPP Explainers users are now.

4. The market is, I believe, extremely large. FLIPP applies to any subject, any natural language. Examples of actual applications made -- that I know of -- are listed at http://www.flipp-explainers.org/applications1.htm The instructions to users are simple: "Read top down. Don't cross through vertical lines." Chunks are designed to be juxtapositionally (?) connectible by implied but obvious IFs, THENs, ANDs, ORs, NOTs.

5. The diagram at http://www.flipp-explainers.org/casestudy1.htm is a good introductory, real example. It has only 8 user scenarios -- not many, yet the user said it was their most difficult operation to train tax experts on. My interest is in seeing something like a building floor layout of rooms which diagram is easily modified by a 10-year old and which automatically retains all logic-chunk-connected user paths -- even when many millions exist in a single diagram. For example, seeing such a program work in modifying the case study tax diagram would do what I would wish for.

Thanks for the interest and for the very productive question, Rich.

Best,

DJC 5/12/08  Cincinnati OH
 
(DJC 4/23/08) What FLIPP users would greatly benefit from is an extremely simple
> computerized way for non-programmers to modify FLIPP Explainers to reflect
> changes.

(RC 4/23/08) I've taken a look at your explanation at
> http://www.flipp-explainers.org/demonstration.htm and followed your past
> contributions to the CG list.  This is the first time I've seen you mention> a need for software, but I can see how a FLIPP user might need a software > tool to maintain a complex set of these FLIPP charts.   
>
> I'm a software product developer, as you can see from my website at
> EnglishLogicKernel.com.  Can you inform me about any market studies or
> economic projections in the FLIPP user population?  It would be nice to
> understand the needs and volume better.  
> -Rich
> Sincerely,
> Rich Cooper
> EnglishLogicKernel.com
> Rich@...

[Rich Cooper Elk]

Some parts of this message have been removed. Learn more about Nabble's security policy.

Hi David,

 

Thanks for your patience in my delay in responding to your request about market studies or economic projections in the FLIPP user population. Before I launch an answer, let me say how interesting I found your Web site to be  :-)   http://www.englishlogickernel.com . I will enjoy returning to its many dimensions. 

I’m glad to hear you found the site useful!  Any suggestions you may have would be very welcome.  

Thanks for a second thing. In thinking about an answer to your question, I realized something that *reverses* one of the fundamentals about FLIPP -- that chunks of content "need" to be marked/ bordered in frames.  Aha! They don't. Instead, content frames can be distinguished in other ways: by different type faces, or different color.  This seems crucial to me because my non-computer-programming-mind thinks that eliminating frame lines makes software design for FLIPP Explainers vastly simpler.  8-)  Simplicity in explaining and understanding logical complexity is FLIPP's reason for being.

Agreed.  There are many possible ways to mark each option in a unique way with software that chooses a convention for representing FLIPP charts.  Any of the visual choices you mentioned above could be implemented to make it attractive to the user.  

This is on the same level of revelation to me as Simon Polovina's and others' emphasis that all information presented to software users can profitably be understood as transactional. (I hope I have interpreted Simon's view adequately.) What I feel is missing from virtually all software-user instructions -- Microsoft's Vista, for example -- is the immediate feedback from user to automatic (or at least eventual) chunk-by-chunk redesign of those instructions for users. An example: each set of next-frame choices a user faces could display the % of success experienced by users who had traveled the same path of frames to that same decision point -- even the users who had gone through that intersection just moments earlier.

Yes, but two users traversing the same path (of any length) don’t necessarily share the same context.  The starting data governing user A is very likely to be different than the starting data governing user B.  That contextual information needs to be represented by the system in class structured ways so that if A and B have a common context at the beginning, their personal choices can converge.  

The FLIPP Explainer site is to be revised. The "frameless frame" idea your question prompted, Rich, and Simon's transaction emphasis will be major parts of the redesign.

One way to implement it would be for a program to concentrate on displaying one choice at a time.  When the user agrees to the instruction at point X, s/he should be able to click OK and move to the next choice.  I don’t think seeing the whole set of frames would be very useful to a user, as much as seeing the frame that s/he wants to work with next, even if that is the only frame presented to the user at that point in his or her decision sequence.  

Replies to your question:

1. I am unaware of any software that allows a system architect or programmer to conveniently create FLIPP Explainers where the program automatically does most of the housekeeping of adjusting and rearranging chunks. Software companies that specialize in diagram/ chart drawing do not respond when I ask them -- for safekeeping, perhaps. The experience cited in the FLIPP Explainers Web site was all from Procter & Gamble where users (mostly accomplished systems people) had easy access to P&G-ers who had experience using the method. 

There would need to be some marketing information available before a company would invest R&D in developing the software.  Some validated estimate that N copies of the program will be sold (leased, rented, contracted …), and how much revenues can be expected that can result in a profitable project.  

2. I've used line-drawing and text boxes in MS Word. I've used Excel-like databases with very small horizontal columns to draw FLIPP diagrams. 

3. I don't know who the FLIPP Explainers users are now.

4. The market is, I believe, extremely large. FLIPP applies to any subject, any natural language. Examples of actual applications made -- that I know of -- are listed at http://www.flipp-explainers.org/applications1.htm The instructions to users are simple: "Read top down. Don't cross through vertical lines." Chunks are designed to be juxtapositionally (?) connectible by implied but obvious IFs, THENs, ANDs, ORs, NOTs.

5. The diagram at http://www.flipp-explainers.org/casestudy1.htm is a good introductory, real example. It has only 8 user scenarios -- not many, yet the user said it was their most difficult operation to train tax experts on. My interest is in seeing something like a building floor layout of rooms which diagram is easily modified by a 10-year old and which automatically retains all logic-chunk-connected user paths -- even when many millions exist in a single diagram. For example, seeing such a program work in modifying the case study tax diagram would do what I would wish for.

Thanks for the interest and for the very productive question, Rich.

Best,

DJC 5/12/08  Cincinnati OH

Good to hear from you again!

-Rich

(DJC 4/23/08) What FLIPP users would greatly benefit from is an extremely simple

> computerized way for non-programmers to modify FLIPP Explainers to reflect

> changes.

(RC 4/23/08) I've taken a look at your explanation at

> http://www.flipp-explainers.org/demonstration.htm and followed your past

> contributions to the CG list.  This is the first time I've seen you mention> a need for software, but I can see how a FLIPP user might need a software > tool to maintain a complex set of these FLIPP charts.   

> 

> I'm a software product developer, as you can see from my website at

> EnglishLogicKernel.com.  Can you inform me about any market studies or

> economic projections in the FLIPP user population?  It would be nice to

> understand the needs and volume better.  

> -Rich

> Sincerely,

> Rich Cooper

> EnglishLogicKernel.com

> Rich@...

[David Cox]

CGers:  This is a long and heavy piece about FLIPP Explainers.  I suggest that if you've had experience creating a FLIPP chart, you may want to skip this.
It continues a conversation with Dr. Rich Cooper. The point is not to advertise a method, but more to allude to a different (?) way people have teamed together.
DJC

Rich,
Thanks for the apt comments. I have three thoughts. 8-)   . 

1.  Your comment:  "Yes, but two users traversing the same path (of any length) don't necessarily share the same context.
The starting data governing user A is very likely to be different than the starting data governing user B. That contextual information needs to be represented by the system in class structured ways so that if A and B have a common context at the beginning their personal choices can converge."
 
In the Tax Preparer situation http://www.flipp-explainers.org/casestudy1.htm , only after considerable discussion by the trainers of that season's 70 new people, did the trainers conclude that in every case, they wanted the trainees to use only the single 1st chunk in the diagram -- with no variation.  This is how they (after considerable talk) wanted tax preparers to act.  "Act" is pivotal.  FLIPP seems to be suited for knowledge transfer when it is designed precisely as user action/  skill transfer:  This is different information from "how the system operates" but because it is offered, new users may think it is for them some way.

This company's single starting chunk was important not only to the trainers, but also to later supervisors of new and old tax preparers, and manager of the branch office.  Literally, everyone was 'on the same page.' The supervisor's appraisal is at page 2 of  http://www.flipp-explainers.org/casestudy1.htm .  It was important to trainees:  if someone asked them how to be fully successful first try, they could point and not say a word.

I agree that, "...contextual information needs to be represented by the system in class structured ways so that if A and B have a common context at the beginning their personal choices can converge."  I suggest that in FLIPP, that is exactly what can be shown as a type of conceptual graph.  This departs from text's linear structure whose logic code is hard to decode. I am reminded of a P&G systems agent whose first language was not English.  Her comment is listed on the opening page of the FLIPP Web site: "...As one whose native language is not the language that I have to employ in my daily contacts with people, I find it often extremely hard to make myself clear in what I want to say.  FLIPP charts are just the thing for me."  Of course, that all was many years ago;  people's text writing has improved so much since then. (I'm kidding.)  I teach English -- try to -- to several speakers of Russian (Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) and a Chinese student.  As anyone would know, their English sentences tend be one-word long (i.e., short).  8-) .  The linear structure of written and spoken sentence language mismatches the branching and merging structure of  logic ORs and ANDs.  Even native speakers of English are often unclear, imprecise when their logic even starts to be complex. "Logic" is -- IMHO -- "the most major hindrance most easily conquered" when people want to understand each other.  Game boards like FLIPP often picture logic strings, choices, and prohibitions thereby avoiding logic symbols and logic language.  It is important that FLIPP game boards and FLIPP rules are specific-language independent;  they require no translation.

I checked back later years after this Explainer was started. My contact said it continued unchanged for a number of years with just the date change.  Maybe some changes would have been better.  "No change" is sure convenient.

2.  Flow charts -- which may seem like FLIPP diagrams -- aren't.  Some reasons are clear.  John S. pointed out that the meaning of the connecting lines is often not clear (What do the connector lines on organization charts mean?  Obviously, they don't represent the information flows of the people represented. They don't represent lines of responsibility.  Where are the customers, the employees, the suppliers, the regulating agencies, the scientific community?  The rules for flow charts usually feature single-word boxes -- hardly like the full descriptions for the Tax diagram users. The 20 million rules for English seldom appear and, unfortunately, don't apply to French, German, Swedish, Arabic, etc.  FLIPP's one rule can easily appear on each Explainer.  Some suggestions on how to implement FLIPP Explainers are at http://www.flipp-explainers.org/howtodesign.htm .  'Molecular' patterns-- building block combinations -- often reappear in Explainers.  Several  are illustrated at http://www.flipp-explainers.org/patterns.htm .  FLIPP is compared with other diagramming methods at http://www.flipp-explainers.org/formats.htm

3. Your comment, Rich, about different contexts applies when individuals find an anomaly or think of a change off the chart or page.  We can point exactly to the place on an Explainer where it applies -- a place that may be common to multiple paths. (The first chunk in the Tax example is common to eight paths.)  This pointability is clearer and (appealingly) faster than a learner's trying to word a description that may be unwelcome simply because it is likely ambiguous to the system managers. Both people may become pained. :-\   The Tax case study involved several people thrashing around in ambiguities until molecular parts of their Explainer were settled.  Contexts can easily involve a million distinct, valid paths.  It takes only two or three frames to double the number of paths -- so system logic can require multiple millions of partly-overlapping paths.  One loses track and traction easily when the context is that complex, and when the system is changing, the managers are changing, the software and hardware are  changing, the product is changing, the competition is changing, the faults in the earth's crust have destroyed a city, the government and laws are changing, the customers are changing.  As A.G. Lafley's book title "The Game Changers" suggests, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._G._Lafley , we are game changers.  Being high-performers of existing logic methods seems not enough for the coming days of change.

Any CG ers who get this far are eligible for undisclosed awards. :-D

Good thoughts, Rich.  I'd appreciate your further comments.

Best,

Dave   Cincinnati OH   5/13/08

Rich Cooper Elk wrote:

Hi David,

 

Thanks for your patience in my delay in responding to your request about
market studies or economic projections in the FLIPP user population. Before
I launch an answer, let me say how interesting I found your Web site to be
:-)   http://www.englishlogickernel.com . I will enjoy returning to its many
dimensions. 
 
I'm glad to hear you found the site useful!  Any suggestions you may have
would be very welcome.  
 
Thanks for a second thing. In thinking about an answer to your question, I
realized something that *reverses* one of the fundamentals about FLIPP --
that chunks of content "need" to be marked/ bordered in frames.  Aha! They
don't. Instead, content frames can be distinguished in other ways: by
different type faces, or different color.  This seems crucial to me because
my non-computer-programming-mind thinks that eliminating frame lines makes
software design for FLIPP Explainers vastly simpler.  8-)  Simplicity in
explaining and understanding logical complexity is FLIPP's reason for being.
 
Agreed.  There are many possible ways to mark each option in a unique way
with software that chooses a convention for representing FLIPP charts.  Any
of the visual choices you mentioned above could be implemented to make it
attractive to the user.  
 
This is on the same level of revelation to me as Simon Polovina's and
others' emphasis that all information presented to software users can
profitably be understood as transactional. (I hope I have interpreted
Simon's view adequately.) What I feel is missing from virtually all
software-user instructions -- Microsoft's Vista, for example -- is the
immediate feedback from user to automatic (or at least eventual)
chunk-by-chunk redesign of those instructions for users. An example: each
set of next-frame choices a user faces could display the % of success
experienced by users who had traveled the same path of frames to that same
decision point -- even the users who had gone through that intersection just
moments earlier.
 
Yes, but two users traversing the same path (of any length) don't
necessarily share the same context.  The starting data governing user A is
very likely to be different than the starting data governing user B.  That
contextual information needs to be represented by the system in class
structured ways so that if A and B have a common context at the beginning,
their personal choices can converge.  
 
The FLIPP Explainer site is to be revised. The "frameless frame" idea your
question prompted, Rich, and Simon's transaction emphasis will be major
parts of the redesign.
 
One way to implement it would be for a program to concentrate on displaying
one choice at a time.  When the user agrees to the instruction at point X,
s/he should be able to click OK and move to the next choice.  I don't think
seeing the whole set of frames would be very useful to a user, as much as
seeing the frame that s/he wants to work with next, even if that is the only
frame presented to the user at that point in his or her decision sequence.  
 
Replies to your question:
 
1. I am unaware of any software that allows a system architect or programmer
to conveniently create FLIPP Explainers where the program automatically does
most of the housekeeping of adjusting and rearranging chunks. Software
companies that specialize in diagram/ chart drawing do not respond when I
ask them -- for safekeeping, perhaps. The experience cited in the FLIPP
Explainers Web site was all from Procter & Gamble where users (mostly
accomplished systems people) had easy access to P&G-ers who had experience
using the method. 
 
There would need to be some marketing information available before a company
would invest R&D in developing the software.  Some validated estimate that N
copies of the program will be sold (leased, rented, contracted .), and how
much revenues can be expected that can result in a profitable project.  
 
2. I've used line-drawing and text boxes in MS Word. I've used Excel-like
databases with very small horizontal columns to draw FLIPP diagrams. 
 
3. I don't know who the FLIPP Explainers users are now.
 
4. The market is, I believe, extremely large. FLIPP applies to any subject,
any natural language. Examples of actual applications made -- that I know of
-- are listed at http://www.flipp-explainers.org/applications1.htm The
instructions to users are simple: "Read top down. Don't cross through
vertical lines." Chunks are designed to be juxtapositionally (?) connectible
by implied but obvious IFs, THENs, ANDs, ORs, NOTs.
 
5. The diagram at http://www.flipp-explainers.org/casestudy1.htm is a good
introductory, real example. It has only 8 user scenarios -- not many, yet
the user said it was their most difficult operation to train tax experts on.
My interest is in seeing something like a building floor layout of rooms
which diagram is easily modified by a 10-year old and which automatically
retains all logic-chunk-connected user paths -- even when many millions
exist in a single diagram. For example, seeing such a program work in
modifying the case study tax diagram would do what I would wish for.
 
Thanks for the interest and for the very productive question, Rich.
 
Best,
 
DJC 5/12/08  Cincinnati OH
 
Good to hear from you again!
 
-Rich
 
 
(DJC 4/23/08) What FLIPP users would greatly benefit from is an extremely
simple
  

computerized way for non-programmers to modify FLIPP Explainers to reflect
changes.
    

 
(RC 4/23/08) I've taken a look at your explanation at
  

http://www.flipp-explainers.org/demonstration.htm and followed your past
contributions to the CG list.  This is the first time I've seen you
    

mention> a need for software, but I can see how a FLIPP user might need a
software > tool to maintain a complex set of these FLIPP charts.   
  

I'm a software product developer, as you can see from my website at
EnglishLogicKernel.com.  Can you inform me about any market studies or
economic projections in the FLIPP user population?  It would be nice to
understand the needs and volume better.  
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich@...