Management personality

Excerpts from a summary of the NYT Magazine "Boss Science":

It’s much more important to be open than to be intelligent if you want to succeed as a leader. And conscientiousness is good for being the person who does stuff, not the person who leads. Agreeable is a good trait for a great team player, bad trait for a boss. Neuroticists are good when you need to hear about the worst-case scenarios, all the time.

Blowback

Blowback is the name used by the CIA for the Law of Unintended Consequences. Examples:

1. Encourage and arm Hussein in Iraq, leading to an oil crisis in the Persian Gulf.
2. Subsidize corn production and lead to American obesity and illegal immigration from Mexico.

Internet speels doom for Merchants selling access.

The telecom industry collapsed with cheap bandwidth.

The Recording Industry and Motion Pictures industry found their business models outdated with the advent of MP3s, Napster and P2P file sharing.

The publishing industry is struggling in the wake of the onslaught of blogs and online newscasts.

The next casualty is going to be the mortgage industry -- Prosper, Zopa, Lending Club and others are making it easy to borrow small amounts of money. How long before greedy realtors, who merely "provide access to money with no fiduciary responsibility", are out of business?

Value of Software..

Software itself violates the free market. For an item to have value, it must have utility and scarcity. As the marginal cost of production of a unit of software is damn near 0 (it is fractions of a penny of electricity), software does not have scarcity. Thus it has no value. The rules of economics don't apply to it, or more correctly, an entirely new model needs to be created, but does not currently exist.

Oil prices...

If diesel is less than regular unleaded, then there is a shortage of refinery capacity - which primarily drives up gasoline prices.

If diesel is more than regular unleaded, then the price of crude oil is driving the prices.

alcoholism and obesity

Q: What is the common link between alcoholism, an American problem of the past several decades, and obesity, the central problem of the next few decades?

A: The federal subsidy for corn is the common cause.

Google vs. memory...

This post says Google is making us dumber.

Unfortunately, that is the curse of all technology -
First we do not bother to remember small things.
Since we cannot recall small things quickly, we lose our edge.
Then we lose our ability altogether in that domain.

Google is to human memory what the calculator was to arithmetic ability -- replacement.

Losing "Being Lost"

Some musings from a post on Shaping the future --

Right now, Nokia is designing global positioning system receivers into every new mobile phone they plan to sell. GPS receivers in a phone SIM card have been demonstrated. GPS is exploding everywhere. It used to be for navigating battleships; now it's in your pocket, along with a moving map. And GPS is pretty crude — you need open line of sight on the satellites, and the signal's messed up. We can do better than this, and we will. In five years, we'll all have phones that connect physical locations again, instead of (or as well as) people. And we'll be raising a generation of kids who don't know what it is to be lost, to not know where you are and how to get to some desired destination from wherever that is.

"Being lost" has been part of the human experience ever since our hominid ancestors were knuckle-walking around the plains of Africa. And we're going to lose it — at least, we're going to make it as unusual an experience as finding yourself out in public without your underpants.

Predicting the future is tough business, and anyone might get lost in the eddies of time, but not in 3D space anymore, it would seem. Another one: driverless cars.

They're going to redefine our whole concept of personal autonomy. Once autonomous vehicle technology becomes sufficiently reliable, it's fairly likely that human drivers will be forbidden, except under very limited conditions. After all, human drivers are the cause of about 90% of traffic accidents: recent research shows that in about 80% of vehicle collisions the driver was distracted in the 3 seconds leading up to the incident. There's an inescapable logic to taking the most common point of failure out of the control loop — my freedom to drive should not come at the risk of life and limb to other road users, after all. But because cars have until now been marketed to us by appealing to our personal autonomy, there are going to be big social changes when we switch over to driverless vehicles.

Once all on-road cars are driverless, the current restrictions on driving age and status of intoxication will cease to make sense. Why require a human driver to take an eight year old to school, when the eight year old can travel by themselves? Why not let drunks go home, if they're not controlling the vehicle? So the rules over who can direct a car will change. And shortly thereafter, the whole point of owning your own car — that you can drive it yourself, wherever you want — is going to be subtly undermined by the redefinition of car from an expression of independence to a glorified taxi.

One thing is fairly clear - dreamers will never be out of business!

France+ US = Canada ?

Saw this blog post today ad it set me thinking...

France is very socialist and the US is very capitalist; time-wise, the French value leisure, the US, work; the French emphasize equal society, the US, meritocracy; the French take care of their poor but shun the immigrant (an immigrant is a foreigner even if legal and 3rd generation, there is no way to ‘become French’), the US welcomes immigrants (comparative to almost any western nation) who want to work and embrace our values but we don’t take care of our poor. We both, however, tend to be nationalistic, arrogant, deeply politically divided, and idealists about our countries’ history and founding values of freedom and equality.

As France has moved left, the US has moved right, and it seems that both countries are having a little buyer’s remorse. Wanted: A country with lofty goals, a society that recognizes that hard work is the force that creates a civilized world, but also that it isn’t worth much if you don’t take the time to enjoy and think about the civilization you’re working so hard to create, one that wanted to include all members of it’s society no matter race or social class, but also kept a strong sense of identity and individual freedom. Let’s see, a cross between the US and France. Hmmm…Canada, anyone? Yeah, really friendly people would be a plus, too.

false positive vs. false negative

Recently saw this great post on Slashdot by an anonymous author:

To Google, hiring is mathematically equivalent to Information Retrieval, except that they only care about "precision" not "recall".

What that means to lay-people is that so long as they can maintain 10,000 applications coming through per-month, false negatives (passing on a suitable applicant) do not matter because there'll be another candidate along in a minute. False positives (hiring an unsuitable applicant) are all they need to focus on. The "fit factor" is effectively the search string of traits; however, with such a large candidate pool, they can focus their "hiring algorithm" entirely on rejecting candidates where it is even slightly difficult to ascertain whether they fit or not.

So, their advertising blitz "aren't we a great place to work for" is a part of what lets them keep their hiring process easy. If they get bad PR and applications fall, then they'll need to worry about recall as well as precision.

Also, read Two Kinds of Judgement, which discusses this issue in some depth.

Cubicles, not walls in offices..

The law of unintended consequences strikes again. Joel Spolsky explains why companies cram employees into cubicles rather than private offices, despite lower productivity of the former. In short, the government has defined what a business may define as a deductible business expense in favor of cubicles!

We're going to need a much bigger space now: on the order of 15,000 square feet. To build that much office space could cost a couple of million dollars. With the lack of deductibility, your bank account goes down by three million dollars. The landlord will pay a fraction of that, but not enough to make it affordable.

There's a loophole. Office furniture can be depreciated much faster than leasehold improvements, over 7 years. So for $20 of office furniture you can deduct about $3 a year: better than nothing. Even better, office furniture is a real asset, so you can lease it. Now you're not out any cash, just a convenient monthly payment, which is 100% deductible.

This is why companies build cubicle farms instead of walls, even though the dollar cost is comparable.

Not all beauty is in the eye of the beholder!

Excerpt from an essay on the inherent (non-subjective) quality of art:

My main point here is not how to have good taste, but that there can even be such a thing. And I think I've shown that. There is such a thing as good art. It's art that interests its human audience, and since humans have a lot in common, what interests them is not random. Since there's such a thing as good art, there's also such a thing as good taste, which is the ability to recognize it.

Art is man-made. It comes with a lot of cultural baggage, and in addition the people who make it often try to trick us. Most people's judgement of art is dominated by these extraneous factors. ... So it turns out you can pick out some people and say that they have better taste than others: they're the ones who actually taste art like apples.

... the people [with good taste are the ones] who (a) are hard to trick, and (b) don't just like whatever they grew up with. If you could find people who'd eliminated all such influences on their judgement, you'd probably still see variation in what they liked. But because humans have so much in common, you'd also find they agreed on a lot. They'd nearly all prefer the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to a blank canvas.

Software Development at Microsoft.

Ever wondered why Microsoft Windows is so horrible to use? Here is a description of how the "Shutdown" option was coded. Excerpts from The Windows Shutdown Crapfest:

... that nets us an estimate ... of 24 people involved in this feature. Also each [of the three teams] was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let's add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature. Twenty-four of them were connected sorta closely to the code, and of those twenty four there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked. Somewhere in those other 19 was somebody who did have final say but who that was I have no idea

[H]ere's how the design process worked: approximately every 4 weeks, at our weekly meeting, our PM would say, "the shell team disagrees with how this looks/feels/works" and/or "the kernel team has decided to include/not include some functionality which lets us/prevents us from doing this particular thing". And then in our weekly meeting we'd spent approximately 90 minutes discussing how our feature -- er, menu -- should look based on this "new" information. Then at our next weekly meeting we'd spend another 90 minutes arguing about the design, then at the next weekly meeting we'd do the same, and at the next weekly meeting we'd agree on something... just in time to get some other missing piece of information from the shell or kernel team, and start the whole process again.

Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. At a different periodicity, changes are integrated down the tree from the root to the nodes. In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes.

So in addition to the above problems with decision-making, each team had no idea what the other team was actually doing until it had been done for weeks. The end result of all this is what finally shipped: the lowest common denominator, the simplest and least controversial option.

More interested in feeling good than doing good.

How do you contribute to charity? Is it really the optimal choice to make?

... the way we choose to dole out cash betrays our true motives. Someone with ₤50 to give away and a world full of worthy causes should choose the worthiest and write the cheque. We don’t. Instead, we give ₤2 to the street collector for Save the Children, pledge ₤15 to Comic Relief, another ₤15 to Aids research, and so on. But ₤15 is not going to find a cure for Aids. Either it is the best cause and deserves the entire ₤50, or it is not and some other cause does. The scattergun approach simply proves that we’re more interested in feeling good than doing good.

None of this is to say that these contributions are worthless nor economically insignificant. Just don’t get too starry-eyed about the motives behind them.

Made in Japan

Wars allowed for the rapid adoption of interchangeable parts (guns for Napolean), electrification (WW1 factories) and containerization (Vietnam military supplies), collectively creating the wealth of the Western World.

... during the Vietnam war ... as early as 1965 the military build-up was being hampered by what the journalist Marc Levinson calls “the greatest logistical mess in the history of the US armed forces”. In The Box, Levinson’s new book about the shipping container, he argues that container shipping provided the answer. Once the military was sold on the idea, there were two swift consequences: a dramatic expansion of container shipping to US forces in Europe, and fleets of empty ships sailing back from Vietnam, offering cheap rates to the rapidly expanding Japanese manufacturers. The rest is history.

Too busy to...

Excerpts from an article on why people no longer do the simple things in life -- cook, tend the garden, or even walk the dog:

Personal value systems ... can guide a person's decisions as much as monetary measures can. A simple stir-fry dinner ... comes in one of two ways: ready-made or made from scratch. Though the ready-made meal might cost more, someone who earns $30 an hour might not mind coughing up an extra $5 (about ten minutes' worth of wages) to save ten minutes of preparation time in the kitchen. That person might value convenience more than culinary prowess.

Everything is just another chore to be finished ASAP. No one has time to stop, stand and stare.

How to start a war?

A quote from Hermann Goering, Hitler’s Reichsmarshall:

“Why, of course, the ‘people’ don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship…. The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

Three Interesting methods to start a war (scroll down to Feb 13, 2007):
(1) The FDR way of manipulation (Japan)
(2) The LBJ way of forgery (Vietnam)
(3) The GWB way of invasion (Iraq)

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

The New York Times Magazine reports that healthy food is good for you. That the food lobby would rather have you eat "nutrients" than eat wholesome food.

D'oh!

The amazing power of gubernatorial veto

Gov. Jim Doyle used his partial veto 139 times to shape the state budget to his liking. Among his moves was to increase a transfer from the transportation account to the general fund from $268 million to $427 million. To do so, he crossed out hundreds of words, stringing together individual words from unrelated sentences to write a new sentence. To get the $427 million figure, he took individual digits from five sets of numbers.

See pages 373-374 of 2005 Wisconsin Act 25.

Inequity in wealth distribution

Excerpt from article on the Gini coefficient:

In their study for the World Institute for Development Economics Research, Giovanni Andrea Cornia and Julius Court (2001) reach policy conclusions as to the optimal distribution of wealth. The authors recommend to pursue moderation also as to the distribution of wealth and particularly to avoid the extremes. Both very high egalitarianism and very high inequality cause slow growth. Extreme egalitarianism leads to incentive-traps, free-riding, high operation costs and corruption in the redistribution system, all reducing a country's growth potential.

However, extreme inequality also diminishes growth potential by eroding social cohesion, and increasing social unrest and social conflict, causing uncertainty of property rights. Therefore, public policy should target an 'efficient inequality range'. The authors claim that such efficiency range lies between the values of the Gini coefficients of 0.25 (the inequality value of a typical Northern European country) and 0.40 (slightly lower than that of countries such as China and the USA). The precise shape of the inequality-growth relationship depicted in the Chart obviously varies across countries depending upon their resource endowment, history, remaining levels of absolute poverty and available stock of social programs, as well as on the distribution of physical and human capital.