Monthly Archives: August 2004

Vacation! Vancouver

My household is going on vacation! As I exit my current job I’ll be drawing down all my remaining vacation, so it only seemed polite to share it with the rest of the family.

We have a preference for city vacations. Shopping around for air fair we discovered we could fly to Seatle for around $230 round trip from Boston. So it’s off to Vancouver.

I’ve been involved with the Liberty Alliance Project over the last few years. Liberty is a industrial standards alliance and one way such organizations attract sophisticated labor and keep the lower classes out is by having the meetings in lots of exotic locations all around the planet. I hate that, but I really liked Vancouver the time we went there. Good food!

I’m reading a very nice book about Vancouver written by a Canadian humorest. It reports that while some people call Vancouver the “Evergreen Playground” since it has only rarely fallen below freezing there. Others refer to it as the “Everpiss Grayground” since they get a hell of a lot of rain. He assures me that July is the driest month; unless you plan you vacation visit in July. So we are going late in August. The mountain range that rises next to Vancouver catchs all that rain. The closer to the mountain the more rain. So one side of Vancouver gets about a 160 inches a year while the otherside only get a small fraction of that. I wonder why none of the pictures of Vancouver on the net seem to show clouds or rolling banks of fog.

We will only be there for a week, but send in your suggestions for fun stuff to do. We still need a place to stay as well.

Bragmansia

Bloom on our Bragmansia:

Bubblebee Bat asleep a finger tip.
These blooms are about ten inches in length. I assume these are some kind of tropical weed; the certainly grow like a weed, fast. Blooms on plants that haven’t undergone lots of manipulation by human breeders are typically shaped to fit exactly the creature that pollenates them. It’s a little sobering to image the huge creature that climbs into these blooms. A bat maybe? … Oh I do love the internet. Let me introduce the Bumblebee Bat which, sadly, may well be extinct.

Privacy Column Fodder

Feature comparison charts  showing N competing product offerings vs. M features are called column fodder in the sales and marketing liturature. Sales men like to offer them up to their customers in the hope that the customer will then turn around and use them to show his purchasing department that he carefully weighted the alternatives and picked the most cost effective product. The devil is in the details; so it’s a huge advantage if you can get the customer to use your template to do the analysis.

That disclaimer now made. I will fall victim to just that scam and recommend this one for it’s list of things to think about when working on a privacy policy.

It’s a good starting point for thinking about how hard this stuff is. For example consider the feature: “Requires member consent if info is shared w/3rd parties.”  All the vendors shown get a check mark for that. But I very much doubt that the term “3rd party” means the same thing for each of them. For example are a firm’s partners a “3rd party.” Contrast that to AT&T Broadband old policy that allowed release to 3rd parties; but then third parties turned out to be a huge group of people; include all their subscribers.”

Is God and early or a late adoptor?

My love affair with Textually.org continues:

In a court case which has fascinated Sweden with its intoxicating mix of sex, death and the workings of an obscure religious sect, a Swedish pastor has been jailed for life for faking text messages from God to get his nanny-lover to murder his wife and try to kill the husband of a second mistress. — here

Industry Consolidation and Powerlaws

Conventional wisdom holds that standardization is a means to create increased competition. This is not always the case. Conventional wisdom holds that deregulation is a means to increase competition. This is not always the case. Regulation and lack of standards are two ways that can frustrate the consolidation of small firms in an industry into larger firms.

This graph is an output of a simulation of an industry undergoing consolidation. The lines show the distributon of firm sizes in the industry. Each line on the log-log graph is one step toward a more consolidated industry. The line along the bottom shows the industry at the start of the simulation; a ten thousand firms all of size one. As the simulation proceeds firms merge; each merger creates a larger firm. Each line show the distribution of firm sizes after another hundred firms have been absorbed until there are only four thousand firms left; but notice that one of these firms has captured three thousand of the original firms in the market! Now that’s a way to concentrate wealth!

An Industry Consolidating

You can see the power-law distribution of firm sizes emerging spontaneously as the consolidation takes place. I.e. this is another means to create a power-law distribution.

Let’s peel back a bit more what’s going on here. This model is based on what graph mavens call a random graph. Each of the original firms is a node in this random graph. To start their are no links at all between them. The simulation proceeds by creating random linkages between these original firms. As links are introduced groups of firms are consolidated into now merged firms; or in graph theory terms you get connected components. Clearly if we do this long enough we will get one giant firm. That is often referred to a a phase transition; in which case we might say that the industry condensed or froze rather than consolidated.

Note that this model creates links between the original firms, so that a firm that is consolidated out of 100 of the original firms is a 100 times more likely to get a random link than one of the original firms is. That creates the usual rich get richer as well as the advantage to the early mover found in the power-law scenarios. The random nature of the linking also reminds us that there is no “merit” revealed by the distribution other than size and luck. Consider what that implies for the sleepy members of an industry the moment that the regulatory (or technological) barrier to consolidation is repealed and suddenly what was impossible before; mergers, are now key to the firm’s ongoing survival.

In the last step in the simulation graphed here you can see that the power-law distribution is on the verge of failing to provide a good fit; the industry is about to freeze up into one giant monopoly.

Both regulation and a lack of standards make it harder to create the random linkages that encourage this kind of consolidation. Something to keep in mind when chatting with the advocates of standards, deregulation, and free trade. Something to think about when large firms argue that deregulation and standards are good for small business. Something to think about when free trade advocates argue that free trade is an unalloyed good for small countries. It is more complex than that.

Continue reading

Social Miracles

This is a very nice appeal by Duncan Watts to not forget that central control and hierarchy is not the best way of solving organization problems. His desire it to temper the drive toward a centralized solution to the problem of “intelligence failure.” I’m glad he wrote it because if there’s one thing that’s rarely intelligence it’s a centralized hierarchy.

He tells some classic stories of organizations that engaged in such transcendent problem solving that the results seemed miraculous. They were. This is the kind of problem solving that only a healthy organization with a deep pool of social capital can pull off.

Much the same kind of recovery happened in lower Manhattan in the days after Sept. 11, 2001. With much of the World Trade Center in rubble and several other nearby buildings closed indefinitely, nearly 100,000 workers had no place to go on Sept. 12. In addition to the unprecedented human tragedy of lost friends and colleagues, dozens of firms had to cope with the sudden disappearance of their offices along with much of their hardware, data, and in some cases, critical members of their leadership teams. Yet somehow they survived. Even more dramatically, almost all of them were back in business within a week-an achievement that even their own risk management executives viewed with amazement.

Once again, the secret to their success was not so much that any individual had anticipated the need to build up emergency problem-solving capacities or was able to design and implement these capacities in response to the particular disaster that struck. Rather, the collective ability of firms and individuals alike to react quickly and flexibly was a result of unintentional capabilities, based on informal and often accidental networks that they had developed over years of socializing together and collaborating on unrelated and routine-even trivial-problems. When talking about their recovery efforts, manager after manager referred, often with puzzlement and no small sense of wonder, to the importance of informal relationships and the personal knowledge and understanding that these relationships had engendered

Perhaps the most striking example of informal knowledge helping to solve what would appear to be a purely technical problem occurred in a particular company that lost all its personnel associated with maintaining its data storage systems. The data itself had been preserved in remote backup servers but could not be retrieved because not one person who knew the passwords had survived. The solution to this potentially devastating (and completely unforeseeable) combination of circumstances was astonishing, not because it required any technical wizardry or imposing leadership, but because it did not. To access the database, a group of the remaining employees gathered together, and in what must have been an unbearably wrenching session, recalled everything they knew about their colleagues: the names of their children; where they went on holidays; what foods they liked; even their personal idiosyncrasies. And they managed to guess the passwords. The knowledge of seemingly trivial factoids about a co-worker, gleaned from company picnics or around the water cooler, is not the sort of data one can feed into a risk-management algorithm, or even collate into a database-in fact, it is so banal that no one would have thought to record it, even if they could. Yet it turned out to be the most critical component in that firm’s stunning return to trading only three days after the towers fell.

Thank’s to Karim for the pointer.

Movable Type -> WordPress

With luck I have now switched my blog from Movable Type to WordPress. I had taken a run at this some time ago and then decided that if I waited I could freeload on the work of others who would be making the transition easier, but a few months passed and it’s just as hard.

It’s not hard, it’s just tedious. Particularly getting my old links so they still mostly work. Reproducing my old formating; plus the usual minor upgrading, and getting all the mysql support working in the staging area and in the live site. Just work. I really like PHP My Admin for managing mySQL!

Now I can start discovering all the things that are broken. If you notice anything please leave a comment.

Curiously I discover I have about twenty posts I never actually published but left in draft form.

Paradise

Brad DeLong informs us that:

“Paradise” is derived from the Old Persian word for the wall around an enclosed, irrigated garden. Xenophon mistook the word for the enclosing wall for the word for the garden-park itself, and here we are.

I don’t see that explicitly in the OED; but it’s too delightful. Oh, and I agree that the New York Times better tear down their garden wall if they want to remain the paper of record.

Resignation

To the untravelled, territory other than their own familiar heath is invariably fascinating. Next to love, it is the one thing which solaces and delights. Things new are too important to be neglected, and mind, which is a mere reflection of sensory impressions, succumbs to the flood of objects. Thus lovers are forgotten, sorrows laid aside, death hidden from view. There is a world of accumulated feeling back of the trite dramatic expression–“I am going away.” – Theodore Dreiser in Sister Carrie

I like that my first day with the current employer was Halloween of 1999; and my last day in the office will be Friday the 13th. Four years, shorter than my usual time per employer; I’m such a homebody!

Now the recreation of looking for a new gig; suggestions welcome. I’m particularly interested in working on systems that help small entities leverage the internet – in quantity. email: bhyde at pobox . com