A single bank can’t cope with a “run on the bank” - the act of all depositors demanding their cash in hand- due to the way that fraction reserve banking has evolved (by far the most ubiquitous form of banking in the world). A chain of bailouts is usually established (starting with the central bank of a country), so that in the event of a run, the deposits can be honoured; Provided that the country hasn’t gone bankrupt.
However, as demonstrated by the nationalisation of Northern Rock and some of the Icelandic banks, it’s actually the fear instilled in depositors which lead them to frantically withdraw, and as soon as a critical mass of withdrawals is reached, the bank collapses and accounts are frozen. In many cases, if people left their cash alone, the bank would most probably survive and return to business.
Banks such as Iceland’s Kaupthing are currently plastering their web sites with re-assurances to convince its customers that their savings are safe, but it seems like an impossible mission for a bank with a “funny name”.
From what Financial Analysts have been saying, Kaputhing should be in a strong position having not invested in sub prime based securities, but all that is moot if savers leave in droves.
The apparent house of cards that is the fractional reserve system is bostered by uptime the system has sustained without no apparent problem over many decades. A run was seen by many as a curious thought experiment.
I tried to put together a Game Theory view of a run on the bank. I’m a bit rusty on Game Theory, but here’s my simple attempt.
Below is a model of an individual investor’s strategy and payoff when played against the strategy of the average (or majority) of savers. The assumption being that if the average saver withdraws all his money then this constitutes a run on the bank.
Figure(1) shows it in words, and (2) attempts to assign arbitrary values to the payoffs.
As you can see, the position the banks want to be in is the top left box in which all deposits are kept in the bank and everyone is happy (this is co-operation). However as an individual investor, if you co-operate while average jo withdraws, you stand to lose all your deposits.
If you withdraw while the average depositor sits on the savings, then you have a favourable outcome for all as with co-operation. But since you don’t know what the average saver is doing, the only rational strategy is to withdraw regardless. If you are lucky, you could be one of the early ones who get their money.
A further problem is that Internet banking makes it extremely easy for account holders to initiate a withdrawal at any time of day - especially at night if they can’t sleep after hearing the latest scare story in the media. Investors can whip out their laptop, issue a transfer and then sleep easier.
Useful resources:
-Money as debt video - This first part of this animated 47min video “the Goldsmith’s tale” provides an excellent primer as to exactly what money is, and how fractional reserve evolved.
- Prisoners Dilemma - The origins of Von Neumann Game theory and a good mix of game theory, RAND corporation craziness and Axelrod’s evolution of cooperation (well worth a read).
The web site is the antidote to the poor quality and sometimes downright irresponsible “health and nutrition” reporting in the media. It takes claims such as “broccoli kills cancer”, and re-constructs the actual finding or trial, paying special attention to any optimistic extrapolations made from animal or culture test, which don’t always translate into benefit for man.
It’s no surprise to see the two worst offenders - The Daily mail and BBC online as regular subjects of the site.
You could play a game of match the pairs with BBC health headlines over the last few years “Coffee makes you infertile, no- coffee makes you more alert”, “mobiles give you cancer, no-mobiles safe from cancer”, “red wine good, red wine bad, good, bad”. If I had the inclination, I would write a BBC health story generator which took a list of familiar foods (coffee, chocolate, red wine, green veg) and pairs them with your most feared disorders as either a cause or cure.
The problem is that -especially on a slow news day- the press rush to publish any new study on the health benefits of a compound before the academic has even put his pipette and test tubes down. The data in such embryonic form is really not suitable for public consumption. It’s the meat and potatoes of Journals, where others may wish to critique the study or try to reproduce the results.
Announcing that anti depressents are useless doesn’t really help those readers who already have problems sticking to their drug regime.
Counter example I recently read an article on the Irish times on the benefits of cranberry juice for Urinary tract infections. It stands out as a good piece of health reporting, mainly because it concedes that there is no magic bullet super food and it comes several years after the mainstream press were tarting ’round cranberries as the latest super food.
The article references the Cochrane review (a worldwide systematic review), and clarifies the benefits by age group and sex but also mentions the simple fact that not every can stomach a glass of cranberry juice every day; Indicating that an all natural solution might not be optimal.
I realise that most people would be bored to tears by the detailed analysis, but the NHS site strikes a good mid ground, and maintains a friendly un-patronising tone.
PS In case you are wondering. The picture is a visual gag I ’shopped in response to a Gillian Mckeith quote “Dark leaves are good for you because they contain “chlorophyll - the ‘blood’ of the plant - which will really oxygenate your blood”"
With iTunes 8.0, Apple continue to ram their wares down PC users throats. Apple have a bit of history of covertly pushing unrelated software. First it was the uneasy bundling of Quicktime and iTunes (It is possible to download Quicktime without iTunes, but Apple don’t always make this choice obvious). Then there was the opt-out installation of Safari via the Apple iTunes software updater.
According to MacWorld, there were half a billion downloads of iTunes for windows at the start of the year. If this is even close to being true, then it represents a vast sales channel, and massive asset for Apple.
As an iPod user I have itunes installed on my machine. But it’s an old iPod (two years old). I tend to upgrade the iTunes in order to get rid of the annoying notifcation window but also because I hope that one day an update will address the bugs and performance issues : Even in the latest software I’m frequently presented with a black window which only redraws correctly when I resize it.
Today I noticed the following icon on my control panel:
I realise after searching that I’m a bit behind the technews and others have pointed this out which has lead to MobileMe becoming a separate download. But when I tried to uninstall it, I was greeted with a security dialog which said “unknown software wants permission to run”.
There are many technical reasons why this sort of bundling is advantageous, especially when there are true dependencies between software components. But, it’s this sort of bundling and abuse of distribution channels that helped to seal Microsoft’s reputation as the beast of Redmond.
Apple OS X and the pre-installed Apple apps are pretty decent, but Apple’s PC software is about as stable as Naomi Campbell in Vivienne Westwoods; The PC offering amply demonstrates the problems of sustaining quality across more than one hardware and software platform, no matter who you are, and reminds us of the key benefit of being a 100% in control of your offering.
From twaw.com: Ballmer of Microsoft, with his particular brand of Cartesian dualism recently said:
Nokia leads the smartphone market today with about a 30 percent share, “If you want to reach more than that, you have to separate the hardware and software in the platform,”
Ballmer knows that the one thing that MS cannot compete with Apple on is user experience and quality of integrated product: That is the USP of the Mac and the key reason is that h/w and s/w guys work together to create the final product. But, he also knows that the one thing that can erode those qualities is greed and over expansion.
So, a year on and the first Android phone is on its way in the form of the G1 launched on T-Mobile.
I was kindly invited to last night’s T-Mobile’s winter showcase and got a chance to try out the G1.
Initial impressions
The hardware is solidly constructed, has a large screen and when closed offers quite an attractive form factor. The screen is lovely with the browser text readable at very low zoom levels – in landscape orientation, the whole width of the BBC news web site can be accommodated by the screen. The flip screen is fun to play with and seems to be able to take plenty of punishment.
The keyboard is capable and I was happy with the accuracy while tapping out short text messages.
The main thing that hit me was how amateurish the graphics design is: Basic consistency is broken. For example, some of the icons on the main home page are isometric with a shadow, and others are flat. Items on the screen appear scattered and unconstrained. The clock has the shadow heading south east where as the icons are north east. In fact it looks like a typical Linux desktop : designed by engineers. The only thing missing is eyes which follow your finger around. This is in stark contrast to the iPhone which forces icons into a regular grid and applies a consistent shadow/reflection whether you want it or not.
A good design often revolves around a set of constraints, and I had initial suspicions that the support for three different input methods represented a lack of design discipline and failure to commit to one input method. At first it appears to offer the user the best of three worlds; you can search with the keyboard, scroll around a web page with your finger, and then use the tracker ball to skip between hyperlinks. I’m sure you get used to it, but I really didn’t like all the switching and felt genuinely disoriented several times - I kept looking for the familiar back button on a Nokia or the meny button on the iPhone.
The initial Android SDK presented a very simple and fast phone like UI. And frankly I’m quite disappointed at the way it has grown to obfuscate simple tasks. I wasn’t obvious to me how to write a text message – which is criminal for a phone.
I initially thought that the scrolling of text messages across the top of the screen was a nice feature. However, I’ve found this to be undesirable with the iPhone : When I put my phone on the table, I don’t want other people to be able to see who’s texting me – particularly in meetings or when I’ve popped to the loo. The guy demoing suggested that it displays the notification even when the device is locked (though I can’t confirm).
I posed the following question to a number of the T-Mobile staff. “If I have all my music on iTunes, how do I get at least some of it onto the device”. No one could really answer. It sounds as if you must drag and drop content using USB mass storage which is not great.
The browser is capable and the despite the urge to pinch the screen with the finger and thumb (no multi touch support), the zoom buttons worked ok – the zoom is fast and responsive but still it feels cumbersome compared to the iPhone’s browser.
I briefly played with the Google apps, and they were pretty much as expected. Similar to the downloadable apps for Gmail and maps.
It’s clear that this is a mixed heritage device. As well as the Google applications, The hardware looks as if it was designed to accommodate Windows mobile, and there are elements Danger / t-mobile’s side cick. This is not surprising, since Android was originally a start up formed by ex Danger!’s Andy Rubin who oversaw the T-Mobile Sidekick device.
The sidekick was not widely available outside the US, so you may not have seen one in action.
The clash of different ideas about what the phone should be is evident in the final software but perhaps surprisingly, T-Mobile’s input seems limited. The only branding I could see was the the web’n'walk shortcut which appears on the home screen. T-Mobile have bravely let Google run with this, and according to them - they have no real influence on the apps which their users can download (ouch for potential support costs!).
Some thoughts
One of the problems with this device and launch is that no one is really sure what’s being launched. Is it just another HTC device which happens to run some Google software, or is it another signs of Google’s inevitable dominance of all our internet access points?
As a device, the only new feature it brings (aside from the gimmicky compass/street view) is the liberal 3rd party market and the promise of unlimited breadth of applications. Bootstrapping such a ‘killer feature’ is difficult – you need to create compelling devices which people will buy in volume order to attract developers and at the point of sale, if your main selling point is the openness of the platform, then you need to have compelling applications which really do generate the sales. It’s a very similar model to selling games consoles only that a games console is a very specific and unambiguous product.
Getting a phone to market with a new operating system is an enormous task, and I think the engineers are to be commended for their effort with this phone and platform. It’s a lot more stable and the performance is a lot slicker than many other platforms at a similar stage of maturity. Also with the Java/Dalvic split, I think the story for 3rd parties is a sound. Device manufacturers can change the guts of the phone by modifying the Linux c code and hack it to death to ship a device, while the Android APIs can evolve separately and can remain relatively static over time.
If the market is there, and if selling apps is made easy, then I’d be very pleased to develop for this platform – the architecture seems fairly sensible.
Conclusion
I don’t see the point of beating up on a version one phone for the lack features. In the current marketplace, I think it’s brave to launch a phone with less features and to get those features absolutely spot on. I think this is where Google have missed a trick – if they produced a mid entry phone with a less confusing UI then Android could have established itself as “S60 done right”, but instead by going for the iPhone form factor for the first device, they will inevitably draw comparison with shiny one and at least from my initial playing around G1 will come out unfavourably.
One of the problems with adopting the current set of web technologies is that it’s not possible to draw a diagonal line or a circle, or other two dimensional primitive using Javascript and HTML4 alone (I.e in a standards compliant way).
Many people bitch about Flash being proprietary, but until recently it was the only credible option for doing anything more advanced than laying out boxes of text and images.
An application such as Google Maps avoids using Flash, but streams pre-rendered tiled images: It doesn’t draw all contours of the streets in the web browser. While this approach works well for google (the client implementation is fairly simple), it doesn’t make much sense to use this approach for applications such as Google Finance, where stock price graphs can be zoomed in and out. In fact, Google use Flash for the later.
Just to make sure you understand the problem. Imagine the creating a simple analogue clock face using HTML4. Since the hands of the clock are drawn at all angles, the turning hands would have to be supplied as individual images (up to 60 or for each hand!), and the second, minute and hours hands layered on top of each other. It might sound like a crazy waste of resources, but I’ve seen it done this way several times despite computers being able to programmatically draw lines for over fifty years.
Take a trip over to the “web2.0″ BBC home page and you will notice that whole page is rendered using Javascript+HTML except the lovely old style clock which has been supplied as Flash movie. (right click on the clock to see the Flash menu)
The Canvas
When Apple adopted WebKit for their DashBoard widget. They were faced with this very problem : how do you draw clock faces, CPU dials. Thermometers and so on, with a technology which doesn’t support basic drawing? Forcing programmers who want to draw arbitrary lines and text using the horrid SVG is very cruel and so Apple decided to slip in their own proprietary “Canvas” tag.
The canvas element basically tells the web browser to reserve a rectangular area of a certain width and size within the web page and leave it blank. Javascript can then get a handle to a particular canvas object by ID and can issue 2D drawing comments for drawing lines, rectangles, circles, text : all the commands familiar to developers using Java, Flash or any other environment which supports the notion of a Graphics context.
Inventing new HTML tags is a bit cheeky really, since it fragments and might give some people the impression that the “standard” technology can do more than it’s really capable of. But luckily, Mozilla and Safari co-operated and worked to get Canvas standardised in the forthcoming HTML5. I believe that Opera supports it in it’s latest browsers but currently IE only support canvas through plugins.
Being based on WebKit(Apple’s browser engine), the S60 browser and widget runtime should support Canvas. However, I tried some canvas test on my E61 and it didn’t work. My E61 is pretty old software now so I’ll have to get hold of a more recent device to find out.
The introduction of a single tag may seem like a small addition. But now we can finally have animated clock faces (aren’t they beautiful). And more over, applications such as Google finance could potentially be ported to standards based APIs.
Google would love to move away from a dependence on Flash I’m sure, and so Apple have helped them a lot here. It also means that even the simple use cases such as drawing pie charts in an Excel knock off will be possible using the Canvas API, which again adds weight to Google’s Office offering.
Proponents of SVG say that Canvas is against the spirit of the web : Anything text drawn on the canvas will not be indexed by search engines since it’s all painted as needed, and elements within the Canvas cannot be accessed from the DOM. But while SVG works ok for content designed using graphics tools, it’s totally stifling and slow for programmatic graphics.
Canvas is also more mobile friendly that SVG. It makes it much easier for vendors to hardware accelerate drawing operations, which means it could be layered on top of the OpenVG API to improve the performance of web apps on mobile devices.
Personally I welcome Canvas. After all the madness of fiddling around with CSS and HTML DIV elements across different browsers. It’s nice to be 100% in control of what happens in that reserved area of the screen and knowing that eventually all browser will support it.
I think people are beginning to see that the right solution to a problem doesn’t necessarily have to involve XML.
There was a little note on the JQuery blog on the 28/09/08 announcing that both Microsoft and Nokia are adopting JQuery as a “native” Javascript library for their web run-times.
In my mobile AJAX paper, which I wrote for Symbian, I detailed the lowest level workings of AJAX. I also pointed out that writing code which deals with layout and animations is extremely fiddly and that it’s almost always better to adopt a good Javascript library to do it for you.
While the iPhone has been graced with several Apple look and feel libraries such a s iUi, there have been limited options optimised for S60 form factor and input method.
Since JQuery is open source, a developer can already include it in a mobile web page or package it along with a widget installation. But as is, there are no guarantees that the framework will work perfectly with the S60 browser/engine. So the good news is that Nokia will take the burden of testing JQuery and will no doubt provide a load of s60 look and feel controls on top.
This was pretty interesting though:
“To start Nokia will be moving a number of their applications to work on the run-time (such as Maps) and building them using jQuery. jQuery will become part of their widget development platform, meaning that any developer will be able to use jQuery in the construction of widgets for Nokia phones.”
I think this is wrong on a couple of counts.
Why would Nokia throw away native Maps applications with thousands of man hours work already paid for?
I’m pretty sure that the 3D tracking view of Nokia maps would be impossible to reproduce using the widget framework as it is.*
Performance: Google’s native C++ apps on S60 are few and far between. But gmaps is the one which has had significant investment
I can imagine that some sort of 2D maps control/view could be provided, but I don’t think the widget library is mature enough to tackle a full navigation app just yet. Once you get over a couple of hundred lines of code, it really becomes difficult to test and structure your code.
I would be happy to be proved wrong though.
Further reading - what exactly is JQuery:
Over at the JQuery For Designers web site, there are a number of tutorials on using JQuery which are fairly accessible. The screen casts provide a good intro if you just want a flavour of JQuery.
Given the recent spate of nationalisations in the UK and accross the pond, I couldn’t help but be amused at the apparent role reversal of the former cold war arch-enemies.
Laissez faire capitalism is flourishing in post Soviet Russia while the US engages in one of the biggest nationalisation projects of all time.
Just finished watching The Wire Season 5: The final season of David Simon’s master work which builds on existing coverage of the key Baltimore city institutions (the police, the gangs, the unions, administration and the schools) by focusing on the media, or more specially: the daily news paper and the decline of the aspiration for quality in modern journalism.
Again the paper is portrayed as a dysfunctional institution where practitioners are ultimately let down by those in charge. “Do more with less!” is the motivational slogan of senior management when announcing the job cuts and the systematic replacement of the experience staff with the cost saving journalism graduates.
The newsroom story revolves around a reporter who gets front cover column inches by fabrication, embellishment and downright lies, and is reminiscent of the Jayson Blair Times plagiarism scandal.
Aside from Simon’s career as a journalist, I can see why he would have been attracted to the Blair story in the context of the Wire:
‘The Times moved to uncover how management had allowed a young reporter with what appeared to be obvious problems to rise so quickly through the paper’s ranks. The Siegal committee, after a months-long investigation, found “a series of management and operation breakdowns” and “a stunning lack of communication within the newsroom.’
I did some digging around and found this gobsmacking 10 page retraction from the New York times. It’s a fantastic read; The words resonate like an organisation brought to its knees. I can’t imagine how much care went into that piece.
I also found out that the show’s much derided ComStat* system of accountability by targets and key performance indicators not only exists pretty much as described in the show (the system in Baltimore is called CitiStat), but in its effectiveness at reducing crime rates and improving public services is seen as a model worthy of reproduction in other cities. So much so that pilots of CitiStat were run in several cities in Scotland in 2005 and 2006.
Systems such as these start with the idea that at a low to medium level of the hierarchy, the staff should be given clear targets, but how they met those targets is not specified and certain amount of discretion and understanding of the situation in a local context is expected rather than total adherence to a bureaucratic generalised system.
While the sentiment is sound, the following clip from Adam Curtis’ “The Trap”, like The Wire draws attention to the problems endemic in a system which rules by targets alone:
The Wire is ultimately scathing of our ability to organise ourselves into institutions and concedes that the even those attempting to ‘do the right thing’ only do so when they have nothing to lose. No one remains morally clean by the end of the show.
I deal with money as part of my voluntary work at the hospital and was once asked by a patient if I could change a £50 note. I’d never seen such a high banknote before and so had no idea about the distinguishing traits of the note, or who the hell John Houblon was.
Even though the high value of the £50 means it deserves more scrutiny than say a £20, it’s unfamiliarity means that it’s hard to recognise give away faults.
The patient was insistent that she had no change, and being bed bound had no means of getting any. This make it hard to pay for a TV/phone card or a pack of fruit pastels, so I popped down to the cashier’s office for some advice. The cashier said that most business flat refuse to accept the notes due to high incidence of fraud. But, his curiosity was peeked and he tried the two tests that he knew : Tearing the note to reveal the metal thread, and rubbing the note on a white piece of paper (the ink is always a little wet on a genuine note).
After a couple more tests, the cashier was happy and we changed the note for her.
The bank of england web site details the counterfraud features built into the notes.
The gaff of the journo is tragic, but we can sort of sympathise imagining him scouring the intenet for something to write for a deadline, his wife on the phone complaining about another late night and the kids haven’t seen him all week. It’s possible that a simple silly edit may have gone undetected.
But then if you read down the page, this was in no way a subtle wikifiddle, as illuminated by one of the perpetrators:
Dear David (and could the mirrornews email please be forwarded to the sport/football editor),
Thank you for your article in today’s Mirror (18th September 2008) about Omonia Nicosia. The bit I enjoyed most was the following paragraph -
“Despite City’s raised profile, they must make do with the UEFA Cup this season and Hughes will not tolerate any slip-ups against the Cypriot side, whose fans are known as the ‘Zany Ones’ and wear hats made from shoes.”.
Why? Well, shortly after the draw was made, a friend and I made a few alterations to the Wikipedia page for Omonia. The “Zany Ones”, “hats made from discarded shoes” and the “song about a little potato” are, as you may have discovered in Nicosia, completely fabricated.
The clues were there in the rest of the article.
They have a new sponsor - Natasha Kaplinsky - and their former players include Jean Claude Van Damme and Richard Clayderman. My favourite is in the Board of Directors section…
# Governor of Football: Nikos Charalambous
# Governor of Basketball: Petros Souppouris
# Governor of Volleyball: Photos Ioannou
# Governor of Hitlersball: Albert Hall
I hope you take this in the spirit it was meant, and hope this reminds you not to trust everything you read on Wikipedia.
Any donations to our Friday beer fund would be most welcome. Perhaps your editor would like to contribute your fee for the article, as you evidently didn’t do any fact checking.
will be available on DVD in time for Christmas 2008, or you can start with 