creative writing - technical subjects - non-fiction vs fiction

This is a question I tried to ask in Novelizing non-fiction, is it worth it? But was un-clear and maybe too generic.

Let’s say I am a scuba diving expert and I could write a non-fiction book about advanced diving techniques, some of them are unique and stem from my personal experience.

Is it better to write that as a non-fiction book or develop a novel on the subject?

A non-fiction book on the subject may not interest many readers. However, If it is a novel, i am afraid that the tech info which is shown rather than told would be lost on the reader. It would seem just like the writer did some basic research on the subject, and my own personal contributions to the field would be lost in a general novel rather than a specialized book.

Here are some thoughts:

NON-FICTION

• Smaller but dedicated audience


• Most bought manuals are 101 introductory types


• Even an advanced book would usually need to include 101 background



• Theorethical dry explanatory text

FICTION

• Potential broad audience, but low interest in the subject


• Technical secondary to the story needs


• Advanced notions may be lost in the background


• Empirical rather than theoretical

Please don’t comment on successful diving books/movies like The Big Blue. Although I do hold proffessional diver qualifications, I mean this question to be broad and applicable to various lifestyle non-fiction subjects

Any opinion or fact showing the way to go?

Answer

Instead of "fiction" (made up) and "non-fiction" (facts) I'll use the terms "novel" and "textbook".

We expect a novel, both fiction and non-fiction, to be about experience and possibly ideas, and textbooks to be about detailed information.

But there are countless counter examples. For example the scholarly field of ethnology often employs first person narration to report observations and reflect and theorize. Many ethnological reports read like autobiographical novels or travel journals.

There are also examples of narrative works that attempt to teach methods and techniques, most notably in the area of spirituality.

The question to me would be how detailed you want to go, and how big your ideas are. If you basically have one or a handful of world shattering ideas, a narrative approach is better, because a novel can become a cult classic. But if you have a lot of detail and no interesting story to tell, a good handbook can become a standard in a field.

There are mixed forms, where a novel has a technical appendix, or a textbook is spiced up with short stretches of narrative. Wether you perceive these as neither fish nor fowl, or possibilities along a continuum of types, is a question of taste. The extremes are certainly most striking.

"The drift of stock price becomes the risk-free interest rate" under RNP

Assume that the evolution of a stock price is geometric Brownian Motion

$$ dS=\mu Sdt+\sigma SdW(t) $$

where $S$ is the stock price at time $t$ (current time). It says in my book that "under the risk-neutral probability measure, the drift of stock price $\mu$ becomes the risk-free interest rate $r$" and it writes

$$ dS=rSdt+\sigma SdW^{*}(t). $$ where $W^{*}$ is a B.M. under RNP $Q$ (risk neutral probability).

Is the above equation definitely correct? Is there a justification for this?

Answer

Yes, you may as well take this as the definition of the risk-neutral probability $Q$.

I will now try to give you some intuition for that kind of construction.

Assume the risk-free interest rate $r$ is constant and that the world ends at time $T$. Suppose you have a security $B=B_t$ which is riskless, i.e. which follows the dynamics $$ dB/B = r \, dt $$ so that, since $ dB/B = d \ln B $, you can easily see that $B_t = B_0 e^{rt}$. In other words, the process $B_t$ grows at the same speed of the risk-free rate. For this security, the price at time zero is $B_0$, which coincides with the discounted value of its expected payoff: $$ e^{-rT} E[B_T] = e^{-rT} E[B_0 e^{rT}] = e^{-rT} B_0 e^{rT} = B_0 \,.$$

Now consider a stock which is risky, as it follows the dynamics $$ dS/S = \mu \, dt + \sigma\,dW $$ with $\mu > r$ and $\sigma$ constant and $dW$, a standard Brownian Motion, being the source of risk. This time the process $S$ grows in expectation with speed $\mu$, and its discounted expected payoff $$ e^{-rT}E[S_T] = e^{-rT} S_0 e^{\mu T} = S_0 e^{(\mu-r) T} > S_0 $$ is bigger that its current value $S_0$. Why is it so? Well, because there's some risk involved in holding $S$, so that its price should be lower w.r.t. a riskless security! This way the investor who buys the stock at time $0$ will be compensated for bearing this risk, i.e. he will pocket a risk premium. The risk-neutral probability $Q$ is the one which gives the right price when you look at the discounted expected payoff, i.e. $$ S_0 = e^{-rT}E^Q[S_T]\,. $$ If you followed my reasoning so far, it should now be clear that $Q$ is that probability for which $$ dS/S = r\, dt + \sigma\, dW^Q $$ with $dW^Q$ being a Brownian Motion under $Q$.

discovery - Do unique icon contours help people scan?

Many years ago, I ran across a good icon design tutorial. It said that having unique contours to icons help users scan for the item they're looking for. If this is true, why don't iPhone and Android app icons use unique contours?

iPhone icons are all rounded squares. The only visual cues for zeroing in on an app is the inner design. I don't know about you guys, but sometimes it takes me 5 seconds to find the Map app.

Android icons only have a few contour variants: square, circle, talk bubble, ... In my opinion, Android's limited set of contours is worse than iPhone's uniform contours. It tricks people into utilizing the contours to help them parse, even though it won't help them. For example, I'm often confused when trying to find the music speaker icon because it has the same concentric circles as the camera and settings icon.

What ever happened to good old fashioned Windows style icons? I think Window's icons elevate scanability over consistency / style. I never find myself aimlessly gawking at Windows icons because almost all contours are unique.

Answer

Many years ago

That's probably the key factor. The rendering technology we now have is considerably different than what we had in say 1985 or 1995.

Now, that shouldn't really change the principles of good icon design, but it has changed the trends over the years. OS X and Windows have become progressively 'shinier' over the years at times implementing almost full blown illustrations and 3D renderings as their icons. And people can be suckers for shiny…including those of us that design the icons. ;o)

Fortunately, it seems that we've gotten that mostly out of our system and we're now moving back towards a saner visual icon language. Windows Phone 7 is an interesting move back towards the traditional concepts of icon design.

Now, all that said, the question was more about app icons. An app icon is just as much about UX as it is about what the marketing department wants/needs. I can be a bit more forgiving of the app icon than the internal UI icons of the app. App icons are really mini advertisements. But I do agree, some of the icons (including Maps), become lost as it's less of a true icon and more of a small photo.

present value - Why is PV(tax shield) calculated using cost of debt capital for discounting?

I understand that (interest payment)×(corporation tax) is the cash flow saving (assumed to go on in perpetuity) and it can be written as (debt)×(cost of debt capital)×(corporation tax). But why is it discounted with cost of debt capital? If it is a cash outflow saving on the whole operation of the company, why isn't is discounted with WACC?

Improve Design for Master/Detail View

I'm trying to put together a design draft for a UI in a business application that will allow a user to view a list of documents that will be published to recipients in one or more departments in a company.

The list on of documents is on the left. I'm trying to include some relevant metadata in the document row, such as the name of the document, the company that the document will be published to, the number of departments in that company that the document will be published to, and the date that the document was created.

When a user selects a document, the selected row is highlighted and I display the details of that document on the right. So basically this is a master/detail view.

On the right, I display metadata specific to the document in the top section, and in the middle section I display a list of the departments that the document will be published to. If a user selects a department in the list, then the two buttons below the list labelled "x Recipients" and "x Views" will change based on the number of recipients in the selected department and the number of times individuals have viewed the document from within the application.

If the user clicks on the "X Recipients" button, then a list of recipients are displayed below. When a recipient is selected, then inline actions appear. If the user clicks on the "X Views" button, then a list of users and the dates/times they viewed the document will appear.

I've spent quite a bit of time researching UX guidelines for master detail lists, but I feel like I've hit a brick wall, as, this view has to display quite a bit of metadata, but I still feel like the layout and appearance isn't good enough such that it stands out in a clear and concise way to the user.

Any input/feedback/suggestions on potential improvements would be greatly appreciated.

Answer

You're trying to create a nested master-detail-detail relationship, which is often difficult to accomplish in general. But your main problem here is visual, the relationships aren't visualized well because all three levels share the same BG color, which makes it seem like they're all "top-level". If you give the "details" panes the same BG color as the selection indication, it will immediately become clearer. Also, the recipients/views area is basically a tabbed control, so it would be good to make it look like one.

website design - Greyed-Out vs Invisible

What is a good criterion or rule-of-thumb for determining when a control should be greyed-out and when should it be completely invisible?

Answer

It depends an awful lot on how you expect the application to be used.

If all your users are power-users (like Photoshop in @edgarator's answer) then you typically want to grey out rather than hide - you want your users to know that the feature is there, and they're going to be using your app for a while.

However if your users are less technical or (more likely) only occasional then you don't want to clutter the interface with controls that they're never going to get round to using. They're not going to hang around to find out why a particular action or control is disabled.

In these cases I switch to a few rules:

• 
  

  If the action is never going to be available to the user (for instance if they don't have rights or they haven't purchased the feature) then always hide it. I hate blank buttons on the dashboard of a new car.

  
  



• 
  

  If the action can be enabled by user action on the same page/screen (for instance a next button that needs a mandatory input box filled in first) then mostly disable.

  
  


• 
  

  If the action can be enabled by the user by doing something on a different page/screen then it comes down to whether you want them to go find how to enable any greyed-out options. Usually I find that it means you'd be better off rethinking how the pages/screens flow through what the user is trying to do.

  
  


• 
  

  If there is a lot of disabled functionality, for instance a whole extra block of form inputs then it's a judgement call. I tend to hide it and then highlight it should the user need it.

  
  

Basically the goal is always that the user can use it with the minimum of manual, so grey out something when you want them to know that there's something they can do to enable it. Hide an action to avoid distracting them.

fonts - Use Matlab 2014b figures (via Inkscape) in pdfTeX

I know there are many threads related to this topic, but I still could not find a satisfying solution.

Summary Matlab 2014b figures -> export as .eps or .svg -> load into Inkscape (problem is in here: text is not recognized) -> use Inkscpe to save as .pdf_tex -> use in scrreprt document (pdfTeX)

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The goal: I want to use different Matlab 2014b plots in a scientific paper. Within those plot I want to use the same LaTeX font as it is used in my scrreprt document.

The problem: When I export or print the Matlab figures as .eps or .svg (possible in 2014b) it is not possible to use the document font (type and size) or access the text (labels, axisticks) Inkscape.

What I've done so far: I used matlab2tikz. This lets me access the plot with the "correct" font. But it does not create the results I want to have. This thread mentions a related problem.

I greated some figures in Inkscape (.svg) and used the export method which provides .pdf_tex files. Then I used \input to include them into the to the document. This works very well ("correct font and nice quality"), so I want to use this method, but in the first place I need to print/export the figures in a way that lets Inkscape read the text as text and notas pixels in a picture.

What is definitely not desired Setting the Matlab figure 'Interpreter' to 'Latex' looks nice in the figure, but is useless when including it into a latex document

I appreciate any help. Thanks in advance.

p.s.: I redirected this Question from http://tex.stackexchange.com