A problem shared is a virus?
I’m taking a short break courtesy of the NHS to finally resolve the rather obvious problem indicated in the following X-RAY:
If you are lucky, I’ll post my previously unpublished essay on writing code while intoxicated with morphine and diamorphine (medical grade heroin). It’s a real treat.
See Also
Slightly jaded with modern art, my mood was lifted when I went along to a nice little display by Paul Freyer at the converted Holy Trinity church near Regents park. It’s a wonderful gallery space, and the church setting automatically blesses the works with an iconoclastic bent.
Highlight is the following piece:
Photo by my girlfriend - ace photographer - See her Flickr feed here.
I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to customer service and especially queues. I tend to take notes in my notepad when I see good examples and really bad examples of queuing systems. Though queues may seem trivial, understanding an optimising queues involves a skilful blend of load balancing mathematics and an understanding of the psychology of people waiting. The psychological understanding of recalled experiences is also essential to dampen any trauma to ensure repeat custom.
Donald Normal has written a pretty decent paper on the later, where he discusses the various methods for mechanically speeding up queues, creating the perception of fairness and most importantly, he concludes; leaving the customer with a positive feeling from the experience (which does not simply mean the shortest possible wait).
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/the_psychology_of_wa.html
Queues occur everywhere where a resource must be shared, and a basic grasp of consumer queues can really help when approaching more abstract queues such as the requirements pipeline vs engineering capacity, or even the order in which you respond to your work emails (in which case you are the shared resource).
I’m always happy to hear about good examples and bad if you have any, no matter how trivial - then let me know.
See also
The word innovation, is a bit like the word love. You want to save it for something really deserving. In the software and technology world, profuse usage of ‘innovation has lead to not only to cheapening of the word but has made it harder to distinguish true innovation from the background noise. As a small example: The use of an accelerometer does not automatically make your product innovative.
Last week I attended the kick off for the BT sponsored Small business week at their BT tower. Hosted by that bloke from Working lunch who isn’t Adrian Chilles, with a panel including Dragon’s Den’s Peter Jones, David Frost from the Chambers of Commerce and Maxine Benson from everywoman.com.
My favourite comment was from Peter Jones who said “What I mean by innovation is a very specific innovation which will generate success, like copying existing things which already work”.
Read the rest of this entry
Well, the first day of the Symbian smartphone is over. As usual, a shout out to the people behind the scenes who arrive early to set up the stands and make sure that all ticks along like clockwork.
The day started with a pretty lacklustre set of keynotes, containing zero juicy announcements that would be expected given imminent formation of the foundation.
Symbian CEO Nigel Clifford appeared to have his wings clipped in his talk (not only metaphorically since he appeared on stage in a sling). He recited the usual platform rhetoric interspersed with poor sporting analogies. The industry is anticipating the announcement of the the head of the Symbian foundation, but Nigel was mute on the subject.
My sources indicate that Nokia has already put forward a foundation head, a certain Mr Lee Williams( (Senior Vice President, Devices, S60 Software) from Nokia, but the choice was contentious and failed to get consensus from other founding members.
If true, this represents a lack of sensitivity from Nokia in their boot strapping of the foundation - the head of the foundation cannot be a seen as a Nokia puppet, it has to be someone who is at least perceived as neutral in the industry.
The head of the foundation is more of an evangelical role than that of an operating manager. I seriously thought that If Nokia were to select someone from their hierarchy, then it would be from the newly acquired Troll Tech division. And within Symbian, David Wood clearly stands out as an eager and popular candidate, and certainly a proven evangeliser.
Since the initial news of the foundation’s formation, there has been next to nothing in the media and an announcement of a new head would have provided some reassurance that progress is being made.
Update 22/10/08:
Day 2 of the Smarphone show came with a resolution and Lee Williams will now be taking the reigns.
As the winter draws in, cubicle life seems even more depressing - so you need some discrete cheering up.
Read at work is a brilliant idea. Poems and sonnets are dotted around the slices of pie charts and short stories adorn the labels of a dreary Gantt charts, so that you can take in some great works of literature while looking ever so busy.
Perhaps a bit cheekier, Diesel have have produced ‘Suitable for Work’ pornography. A very amusing viral - but beware before following the link, it’s just porn with cartoon drawings cov
Nokia recently launched S60 5th edition. The astute among you will notice that they went straight from S60 3rd edition to 5th, skipping number 4. This is due to Nokia’s fear of causing upset in the East now that the Western economies lie on the brink of collapse (Some consider the number 4 to be unlucky in parts of Asia).
So concerned are Nokia about this issue, that they will delay shipping the 5800 XPressMusic phone in Q4, sacrificing the lucrative Christmas period.
I’ve been using a USB mobile broadband dongle for over a year as my main internet connection.
It’s a HUAWEI based, Vodafone branded 3G mobile broadband solution. Overall I must say that it exceeded my expectations in terms of speed and I was quite impressed to be able to stream the odd bit of video content and particularly useful to for catchup on BBC4 documentaries (careful to stay within my ‘fair use’ quota).
About two weeks ago, iPlayer stopped working - claiming that I was not from the UK. None of the ‘geo specific’ content on the website worked, including video clips on the news site.
The video clips issue was fixed within days, but still no iPlayer.
Vodafone’s ISP details have not changed : clearly I’m in the UK:
Location : UNITED KINGDOM, ENGLAND, BATH
Latitude / Longitude : 51.378 LATITUDE, -2.366 LONGITUDE
Connecting through : VODAFONE-CORE-NETWORK-DEVELOPMENT
And the various free and commercial IP to Location lookup services have confirmed that my IP address is of UK origin. So it must be the Beeb blocking the content.
Finally, I found this little posting on the BBC Sport web site:
We have had to make the decision to block all users accessing geographically restricted content via 3G cards. This is because at the moment the mobile phone operating companies cannot tell us if users accessing content via a 3G card are roaming or not.
If we cannot say for sure that a user is in the UK, we cannot show them our rights-restricted content or live-streaming content.
Workaround
If you are willing to have the iPlayer download manager on your PC, then I have a simple work around: Use a proxy to pick your programmes, and then a straight connection to download them.
An open proxy is likely to be very slow, and so by reverting back - the download manager will eventually start connecting direct through Vodafone and download speed will be reasonable again.
Remember not to use an open proxy for any sensitive information.
A couple of thoughts
I would think that the prohibitive cost of data while roaming is an iron clad guarantee that no one intentionally uses the service abroad. Roaming is not a new thing, and it seems fortunate timing that the legal issue was discovered and mobile users blocked in concert with the launch of the Nokia N96, a product with iPlayer focused marketing campaign. (both iPlayer and N96 restrict the service to Wifi connections)
I’m pretty sure the 3G phone networks would buckle under the pressure of even a small percentage of handsets downloading iPlayer content, and as with fixed line ISPs, this would have been a prominent topic in discussion between the BBC iPlayer product managers and the mobile network representatives. I just hope that this wasn’t the solution proposed.
Update 26/10/08:
This issue has now been resolved - iPlayer clients on Nokia handsets still report “wifi only”, but IP addresses for mobile broadband cards are now correctly identified by the BBC as being British.
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 NHS have been running a section of their website called “behind the headlines”.
http://www.nhs.uk/news/Pages/NewsIndex.aspx
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”"