Category: Ramblings

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March madness

March has been an extraordinarily busy month for us–hence the lack of postings, reviews, et al. First we had Julian up from Down South for a long weekend; then Kenny came to stay for a short week before he bounced off on his tour of Europe; and now we’re in the middle of Susan’s two-week visit to see her new granddaughter. At the start of the month, Penicuik enclosed and glazed our porch, and Abi spent a lot of time and effort tiling it and putting up a coatrack, a new house number plate, and a doorbell. Alex decided that the coming of spring heralded the era of the Potty, and has been peeing like a big boy and wearing big boy underwear for a week now. Still a bit anxious about the poo, though. (I’ll leave you to guess how much fun that is. The question of how much negative reinforcement to apply is also a difficult one.) And I’m still working a full 40 hour week some distance away. (Aww, diddums.)

(Actually, the 40 hour week is more than I have done for about three years. After Alex was born in 2001, I was working a four-day week at Cedalion. At the ill-fated Tribune I was working five days, but the days were 7 hours, and the commute was a 15-minute bike ride. I can’t say that I’m happy about giving up part-time work. Everyone has their own comfort zone in the time-money continuum, and I feel like I’m out of mine right now.)

So anyway: most of my spare time right now goes into parenting. I’ve cut out a lot of dead weight from my RSS subscriptions, but I still can’t even keep up-to-date with reading my favourite sites. The idea behind my new Alphasmart is that it will allow me to wring the odd paragraph out of the tiny niches of time scattered throughout my day. (The fact that it has enormous geek toy value has nothing to do with it, of course.) March is a write-off, though. Maybe in April….

Oh yeah, and I’ve joined a gym. I’ve put on all the weight I lost during last year’s diet, and then some. Solution: eat less, and get more exercise. Screw Atkins. Been there, still have the psychic scars from the bread deprivation. Just getting removing all the gratuitous chocolate from my daily intake is going to shave a substantial number of calories from my weekly intake.

(“Gratuitous” chocolate: the Kit-Kats, Snickers, Rolos, Toblerones, etc. that just happen to fall into my shopping basket at the newsagent, supermarket, or sandwich shop. Sometimes they even jump right out vending machines into my surprised arms. Imagine that! Gratuitous chocolate is different than “Planned” chocolate, which covers the use of chocolate in home baked cakes and cookies, desserts at restaurants, and munchies at the cinema. I trust that all you chocoholics are with me on this distinction.)

Still, exercise is needed, and cycling to the cinema with Alex once a week isn’t going to cut it. I can’t see myself using the gym much more than once or twice a week, but they also do Tae Kwan Do classes. I’ve fancied giving TKD a go for some time, and attending a class might encourage me into a proper routine. We’ll see how it goes.

After swearing blind last year that I would never use Mozilla Mail again, I find myself in the process of migrating to the Thunderbird mail client. It’s clean, tidy, and fast. Outlook was starting to feel all big and bloaty and slooooow to start up. But a lot of applications are doing that right now, so it’s probably time to rebuild my computer again. Especially as I’ve only got about 1.5GB left on my 80GB main drive, and 2.5GB on the 80GB backup drive. It’s a good thing that you can pick up a 250GB drive for under £150 these days. And seeing as the only practical way to back up a 250GB hard disk is another 250GB hard disk, I find myself trembling with geeky joy at the thought that pretty soon I might be running my PC with half a Terabyte of storage under the hood.

“More than a single person will even need,” yada yada. It’ll probably last me a year, tops. (Hello Virtual Machines!)

Oh, you want some photos, too?

Alex and Martin at the Falkirk Wheel

Alex and Martin in Murthly

Bedtime now.

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Favourite TV series

Sara’s comment on my Farscape entry the other day set me thinking. Does Farscape feature in my top 5 all time television series? What are my top 5 (or 10)? I’ve produced lists of my favourite films, albums, and videogames, but top TV shows is not a list I’ve ever given much thought to. (Some day I’ll need to put together a list of my favourite books, too, but that’s going to be really difficult.)

Continue reading “Favourite TV series”

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Fun with mathematics: Benford’s Law

If you gather a large collection of numbers from a naturally occurring source (for example, the surface areas of rivers, or typical sales figures for a shop), what is the probability of any given number in the collection starting with the digit “1”?

Because numbers don’t start with the digit “0”, there are nine possible digits for a number to start with: 1-9. So you’d expect the probability of the first digit being “1” to be one in nine, or about 11%, right?

Wrong. Because of an curious statistical phenomenon known as “Benford’s Law“, the probability is actually about 30%. The odds of the first digit being “2” are about 18%, and they decrease down to 4.6% for a “9”.

Simon Newcomb, an astronomer, first pointed out this phenomenon way back in 1881, but it never got much attention. It wasn’t until the physicist Frank Benford did a much larger study of numbers from dozens of different sources in 1938, and found that the rule applied pretty much everywhere, that it received more notoriety. And it still isn’t as well known as the birthday paradox (where the odds of two people sharing a birthday are about 50% if you get as few as 23 folk in a room), so you can easily use it as an amazing fact for impressing chicks at parties.

But Benford’s Law can be used for much more than just courtship. Because it applies across most naturally occurring number distributions, it can also be used to detect fraud in financial accounts, and to spot faked results in clinical trials. In recent years, professor Theodore Hill of the Georgia Institute of Technology has written several papers discussing the difficulty of faking data. His 1996 paper, “A Statistical Derivation of the Significant-Digit Law” also provides a solid explanation for just why Benford’s Law works the way it does.

Nifty.

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More evidence of Tribune’s dodginess

More hilarious antics from those wacky characters who used to run Tribune Risk and Insurance Services (from The Scotsman):

“A SENIOR director of Tribune Risk & Insurance was convicted of falsifying insurance documents just seven months before joining the board of the collapsed Midlothian insurer.

“According to court papers obtained by The Scotsman, Jack Walker was fined £1,500 by Edinburgh Sheriff Court in March 2000 for misrepresenting insurance quotations through his brokerage firm Danahy Walker.

“Although Tribune was set up by Walker’s wife Evelyn, he became a director of the company in October 2000. By the time the liquidators arrived at the company’s Eskbank headquarters, he was running the company.”

That’s interesting. When I joined the company, I was given the impression that Jack Walker had started the company himself. Evelyn Walker was still on the company books as an employee, but her importance to the business appeared minimal. Before Tribune’s web site was taken down, it had the following to say about Jack Walker’s history in the industry:

“Tribune was established in 1998 to meet the needs of intermediaries like IFAs, Mortgage Brokers and Solicitors. […]

“Tribune’s Managing Director Jack Walker has over 30 years of experience in the insurance industry as do many other members of the team including Sarah Kelly, Steve Dixon and Alan Watkins, Tribune’s Senior Account Managers. This experience is matched by Tribune’s development of new technologies and systems to drive forward customer service and ease of use for intermediaries.”

No mention of company founder Evelyn Walker. How odd! One could be forgiven for thinking that her stake of the company was merely a front for shady dealings, such as deceiving 40,000 insurance policy holders and about a hundred employees. Surely not! That would be terrible!

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Status Reports

A few weeks ago Rands posted a couple of articles (1 and 2) about status reports, those things that people hate writing, hate reading, and rarely tell you anything useful even when you do. In particular, he tries to come up with some ideas about how they can be improved in order to actually contribute to the running of a company instead of just slowing everyone down with paperwork.

I’ve been wanting to comment on these articles for a while, but I’ve had trouble crystallizing my thoughts. I’m still not sure if I can, but if I don’t get this out before the New Year, it’ll just sit in my head forever. It’s not a refutation of anything in particular that Rands said, just a bunch of ramblings that his articles sparked off in me.

To start with, there are two issues:

  1. Why are status reports necessary?
  2. Why are they such a problem?

The answer to these are linked:

  1. Managers need true and accurate information to run the company
  2. Providing true and accurate information–whether it’s good news or bad–is rarely in an underling’s best interests.

In any human organization, whether that’s a family, a company or a country, there is a certain amount of friction generated by self interest and lies, however white and small. Like in mechanical systems, this human friction can be minimized; but just as the second law of Thermodynamics forbids perpetual motion machines, basic human nature means that the whole truth will never make it from one end to the other intact.

A typical modern company is made up of three elements, in varying proportions:

  1. Systems
  2. Processes
  3. People

Those are the ingredients for a beast that eats raw materials and shits finished product (metal into cars, requirements into code, whatever). Status reports are a process. Wikis and blogs are systems. There is only so much in the behaviour and output of a company you can change by tinkering with its processes and systems.

In traditional industry this “so much” can be large, because you’re delivering tangible output from assembly lines (systems) and logistics (processes). Still, there is a limiting factor imposed by the people who have to operate the factory: it’s the workers who implement the directives from management.

In the “knowledge” industry (software houses, financial institutions, etc.) people play a much greater part. Which is a problem, because people are so much more complicated than systems and processes. They get depressed, they affect morale in their departments, they raise awkward questions in meetings, and they need paid every damn month.

Executives hate this, which is why they cream themselves over workflow and knowledge management systems that promise to get the workings of the company out of the heads of their staff, and into easily tweaked databases. These knowledge systems can then be shipped offshore to wherever the labour costs are lowest this month, the original staff can be made redundant, and the executives can jerk off about shareholder value in their annual reports and reward themselves with some healthy stock options.

But surely reducing a company’s reliance upon its people, and increasing its systems load can’t be the only option for affecting overall performance? I don’t think that Rands’s quest for a more systems-based approach to status reports is going to lead to massive redundancies, but I do find it symptomatic of this particular school of thought.

So what’s the alternative? I can only think of one:

  1. Hire people you can trust
  2. Give them a measurable stake in the success of the company

The (big) problem with this approach is that it isn’t scalable. From my experience, it works fine with a company up to about 30 people, but after that it breaks down. First of all, the company starts to get too big for the founders to handle all the recruitment themselves, and secondly, unless the company’s revenues scale with the number of employees (hint: they don’t), the “measurable stake” dwindles to the point where it’s nothing more than a 5% Christmas bonus.

So here we’re back to where Rands started: how do you improve communication in a larger organization, when you’ve had to hire people you don’t even know, let alone trust, and where the only stake an employee has in its success is the continued arrival of his salary every month?

Here is also where Rands ended: have people tell the truth.

Teams represent[ed] by more compelling Status Reports are going to be rewarded by getting their agenda fulfilled. People will talk about these teams and wonder about their success. Soon, we’ll be talking about the products created by these teams and trying to figure out what is the secret of their success… which is simple… they’re just writing down the truth.

Except…they won’t. Human friction, selfishness, and little white lies to cover your ass will get in the way. Better social software (whatever) will result in more innovative ways for staff to hide what it is they’re really doing all day. The content-free status report will be replaced by the content-free daily blog entry. It may be a slight improvement, but only a slight one. If you want to tweak the people of a company, you actually have to tweak the people, not just the systems they work with.

Summing up: damned if I know. But if I ever start my own company, I’m going to try and keep it small and successful, rather than aiming for enormous growth and a fat IPO.

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Recruitment Agents

Recruitment agents, taken collectively, are sharks and snakes. I’ve spoken to a number (a very small number) of friendly snakes, and I know of at least one shark who sees fish as friends, not food. But they’re a tiny minority, and they’re still sharks and snakes.

Just thought I’d get that off my chest. Draw your own conclusions about how the job hunt is going.