I’m frustrated by the apparent unwillingness of officialdom to provide a forecast for swine flu.  I appreciate that there are reasons for that.  I’m peeved since, I think, the leading reason for their reluctance is fear, fear for their reputations.  The profession’s forecasting skill is lower than weather forecasters; so the probability they will get it wrong is very high.  To hedge the risk to their reputations they hedge the predictions.  So much so that no mortal can actual tease out a sense of what’s likely to happen.  I don’t think they are doing their job.  I gather that weather forecasters have guidelines, so when the hurricane in on the horizon their write a forecast who’s intent is to maximize some things.  Those things might be accuracy, or lives saved, or long term trust – but they have rules.  It appears that the pandemic community lacks rules about this and so we aren’t getting a clear forecast.

At this point we have some facts.  It appears that this flu is currently fatal for about .45% of those who are infected.  People talk about this flu being approximately as severe an infection as the usual seasonal flu.  What’s that mean?  Here’s one data point:  there have been 29 deaths in Canada, and 663 people sent to  hospital.  We can do the arithmetic .45*(663/29) imply that 10.3% hospitalization.  At this point we should have plenty of data to predict what percentage we would hospitalize, assuming we have the infrastructure to do so.

What got me thinking about the absence of a forecast was this headline grabbing statement by a health minister in Britain.  He floated and then immediately backed off of a lame back of the envelope calculation (a naive exponential interpolation) that predicted a hundred thousand new cases a day by late August.    But certainly there are better models of how a virus spreads.  I presume that if we set that aside the difficult question of the virus mutating those models can spit out a forecast.  So, what percentage of the population is going to get this?  What percentage are going to miss how many days of work?  Etc. etc.

A forecast is a precursor of good planning.  There are some forecasts, really bleak forecasts, for what might transpire if bird flu were to mutate into something more contagious while retaining its current virulence.  The plans those bleak forecasts trigger are extreme, i.e. be prepared to bunker down inside your house for three months as society unravels.  That creates a problem; what plan should people prepare to implement now.  Some would argue that they should prepare to implement that extreme plans.

Which puts in a situation where a line of really bad thunderstorms are on the horizon, with a serious risk of tornados, and people who want to prepare can only find advise for how to hunker down for a category five hurricane.  This is creating a situation where a lot of folks will do nothing.

I see from the news that California may issue registered warrants or what as a work around for not having the cash to pay their bills.  The newspaper men are calling IOUs, but it’s always hard to tell when a piec.e of paper transitions between stock, bond, currency, warrant, IOU, etc. Are these insturments better or worse than California’s bonds?

This reminded me of a story from the depression where.  In that story the local merchants arranged to convert the town issued tax warrants into their local micro-currency.  You can read that story in this posting, it’s the second story in the piece.

I enjoyed Lera  Boroditsky’s  essay in support of  the Whorfian hypothesis. Denialist like to mention grapple.  It’s is a kind of snow.  Slightly melted and refrozen.  So, see, English has lots of words for snow too. But I long ago picked a side in that argument: Language deeply effects your thinking.  So for me her wonderful essay is preaching to the choir.

It’s a great read, with lots of really fun stories.  There is a tribe which describes location via compass points.  “There is a spot on your shirt’s southwest collar.”    If you ask them to order a series of images in timeline order they orient them east to west; much as speakers of Mandarin speakers will order then vertically.    Bridges have male gender in Spanish, and female in German.  Asking and answering in English a people who’s native tongue is respectively Spanish or German will describe a bridge as – respectively:  big, strong, sturdy, towering v.s. beautiful, elegant, slender.

Some languages, like English, aren’t really into gender, while others have lots.  I can’t find anything to confirm this, but she reports that in some  Australian  Aboriginal languages have a gender used for shiny things.  Which is notable given where I presume they got the name for Google Wave.

Of course, what  Tim O’Reilly was trying to do when he gin’d up the term Web 2.0, the millionth word, was to shape the conversation.  He may have set his sights too low.

I have long been a huge fan of  Robert Cialdini’s first book, Influence.  The original printing is the best because it retains the maximal emotion.  He was horrified to discover that people had these clever tricks for manipulating his behavior.  The book is written as a kind of handbook for how to defend your self.  Later editions, and his later books, are colored by a more even handed attitude, and sometimes you think he’s gone entirely over to the darkside.  I’m suspicious the makes a good living giving talks to salemen.

I’ve not read the most recent book  Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive but there is a nice short summary of all 50 techniques to be found here.

Reading those I was struck by one entry:

As time goes by, the value of a favor increases in the eyes of the favor-giver, and decreases in the eyes of the favor-receiver. Researchers asked a group of people in the random office environment to exchange favors and then rate the value of the given/received favor in their eyes. A few weeks later the same employees were reminded of the favor, and asked to evaluate the favor again. Favor-givers consistently assigned higher value to a given favor, while as the time passed by, favor-receivers tended to assign lower value to the received favor.

Ha!  That’s amusing, but the reason why it’s amusing should be drawn out.  It’s amusing because the entire statement is an oxymoron, a farce in one line.  Such misunderstandings are always amusing.  It’s a category error.  Favors are gifts, they are not economic transactions.  When you do a favor your are not collect IOUs in the currency of some pseudo economy.  If you think you are, well then your not doing actually favor, your playing a game.  Keeping score.  And there is nothing wrong with playing a games, lots of games in this life.  Certainly lots of activities labeled as gift exchanges are in fact just point scoring in some game or another.  But if you think your playing such a game you presuming that the recipient knows the rules of your imaginary game fraught with affordances for misunderstandings.  And, that is the stuff of farce.

It helps to recognize that it is in the nature of public goods that the books do not balance.  To push them into that frame is to miss the point.  Recently I’ve come to saying to people who are suffering from this category error: “Those books don’t balance, nor should the, but if we must think in those terms how do you want the accounts to look when you arrive at your deathbed?”

Persuasion  is often the art of moving the decision into an advantageous frame.

Years ago I worked for a company that had no quality assurance, none!  No testing, nothing!  In point of fact they didn’t have a lot of things, furniture for example.  We had some folding tables and chairs, but not enough.  Performing without a net, wee!  That may have been the first time I mumbled “Look Ma!  No hands!”  We took a childish glee in our bravado.  I was talking to my inner mom.  I she smiled lovingly and quietly suggested: you be careful honey.

I’m always amused when I mumble that.  I’m the audience at my own farce. Self-awareness is better if amused.  I’ve worked on projects without: customer contact, product management, specifications, management, real engineers, sales, money, office, email, operations, user documentation, source control, a good editor, a sane language, clue, I could go on.  And, I must point out that these days, what with cloud computers, there is a fad for computer projects without computers!

In fact this pattern is so common that I’m starting to think there’s something to it.  We presume it’s a bug, but maybe it is a feature. In any case, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of being on the look out for it.

Each time there is a narrative.  There is always a list of awful things that happen if you add it back: lazy OPS, whinny QA, micro-managers.  There is a whole  literature  that lays the blame for institutional  inability  to innovate down to their fine offices and the heavy sauces in their company  cafeteria.    There is always a bit (or more) of a sense of mission in doing without.  This isn’t just hair shirt; it’s a real pleasure showing that you can rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time.  All while riding a bicycle with no hands!  These all create a kind of pride and solidarity in the team, along with a bit of a dirty secret.  In a sense all that narrative is an amazingly positive way to make good out of scarcity.

Do-without no-hands seem to be a positive.  And not just because you get a better story to tell to your grand kids.  Doing without can be a total win.  Lousy is often a damn sight more expensive than none for a lot of the parts of projects.  Money is always short.  Thrift is a virtue, it buys time.

The only time it blows up in your face is when the team becomes so deeply committed to positive aspects of forgoing this or that, and then suddenly what they desperately need is that.  One firm of my experience had lousy QA and it all blew up.  It took two expensive tries to fix that.  First they hired up some QA, but they got no respect and it failed.  They took the most senior of labor and stuck him with the job.  Their status, and their intimate familiarity with the local custom, let them route around the deeply entrenched belief that we could ride that bicycle with nothing but dancer like body language.

I’m beginning to have the same reaction to studies involving brain scans as I do to those damn evolutionary just so stories.  That is not entirely fair.  The former at least have some data.  The later don’t.  What pulls my cord about the brain scan stories is how often the researchers appear unaware of the existing work on what ever effect they are measuring.

Here’s a fun example.  The summary “Experts make us dumb.”  These guys stuck subject noodles in the scanner and had them make financial decisions.  The scanner let them see how hot the decision making bits got.  Sometimes they gave them expert advise, sometimes not. Unsurprisingly given advice the analytical bits took a breather.

The wonderful book Influence covers this result, and quite a few others.  People have a lot of cognitive shortcuts.  It’s  practically  a  tautology  that shortcuts often output the wrong answer.  But then that was my primary critique of that fun book.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest.  It does seem worth recognizing that in sentences like the following (via)

John Haywood, a prominent restaurant concept designer, agrees.  Processing, he says, creates a sort of “adult baby food.”  By  processing, he means removing the elements in whole food – like fiber and gristle – that are harder to chew and swallow.

The first sentence is serving two functions toward winning the  argument.  The paragraph is adding evidence to the  argument.  Labeling that evidence with it source and tagging it so we can decide if the source is credible is all well and good.  The more  wily  purpose of that lead in sentence is to trigger our decision making  apparatus  into shutting down.  Skimming that the brain is likely to note only the word prominent.  Aggressive  debaters will want to take note how you can apply a marginally credible expert like this.  Restaurant  concept designer?  The Wired article plays a variation on this game by dressing up their article with a picture of a brain scan.

I should have a category for rants.

Here’s something worth chewing on.

Justin Fox is steamed:

“powers that be saw fit to delete from existence … all web-only content that had previously resided on fortune.com, including the ‘London Calling’ columns I wrote every week in 2000 and 2001.”

and in turn he notes that International Herald Tribune reporter Thomas Crampton is too:

So, what did the NY Times do to merge these sites?

They killed the IHT and erased the archives.

Every one of the links ever made to IHT stories now points back to the generic NY Times global front page.

Even when I go to the NY Times global page, I cannot find my articles. In other words, my entire journalistic career at the IHT – from war zones to SARS wards – has been erased.

This is really a fact of modern life and work done for hire.  Thinking about my own my career: there are three pieces of code I was particularly delighted with.  My  employers owned  rights to all three.  They have all since been acquired, sometimes multiple times.  I suspect some of that code is still running, but I can’t see it nor can I show it off.

These stories are situated in three distinct frames: individual v.s. institutions, the mindless stupidity  of institutions, and society’s knowledge archives.  Justin and Thomas are principally pissed about the first.  And we should all be paying attention, since more of our identity and work is parked in 3rd party sites like Wikipedia, Flickr, Blogger and Facebook.  Companies are forever shooting themselves in the foot.  And, as Thomas highlights, these media firms are being extremely foolish.  They acquire another firm and just discard all the link juice, that’s just lame.  And finally the question an  archivist  would ask, i.e. of who looks after backing up society’s collective knowledge in these scenarios.  Remember the Times is if not on it’s death bed at least in intensive care.  I think we can confidently predict that the  accessibility  of all Newspaper archives are going to have a very rough ride over the next few years and the end state isn’t particularly clear.

But, most work disappears like this.  If your work product is less concrete (keeping a team on course say) or more concrete (building a boat say) then the disappearing work problem is possibly even more common.  Tempering this problem requires work in all three frames.

Arron write about his discomfort with the culture around one of the open source communities he’s dependent on.

“…  a tradition of edginess, individual expression, one-upmanship, and disregard for such fluffy, fake egalitarian notions as consensus, inclusion and good manners. It is expressed in the take-it-or-leave-it, I-don’t-owe-you-anything  …  a community which collaborates largely by aggressive competition and fierce meritocracy. …”

He goes on to contrast that with what we have tried to achieve in the Apache community.

“Apache, like …, is a strict meritocracy, but I believe that may be where the similarities end. There’s nothing wrong with giving credit where credit is due, but the Apache philosophy asserts that collaborative peer development trumps rockstars. Rockstars are an anathema to the ASF culture. In the long run, a large, diverse community of contributors provides a stability and quality”

I often wish that we, Apache that is, would find a word other than meritocracy to hang out on our shingle.  I have no truck with it’s clear association with social darwinism, but that’s for another post.

There is a lot of cultural diversity across the landscape of open source.  Rich writes a bit about the Perl culture in another posting.  It would make a  fascinating  sociology study to reveal those more transparently.  There are some projects that I’d like to be a part of, if only for their culture.  There are others I am part of, in spite of their norms.

Cultures (communities) are funny things.  There is a lot of cargo cult presumptions around them.  Teasing out what is  superstitious  ritual v.s.  fundamental  is very hard.  Humans are very good at making us stories which provide a plausible story for why this or that activity is  fundamental  v.s. superstitious.  For example, let me make one up:  Living in with such high population density the Japanese don’t shake hands for reasons of  hygiene.  That’s not true, the true story is more about how standards emerge, but that’s for another day as well.

Arron says something in passing that I don’t think is true, or at least is missing an important point.  He writes:

“If it’s unsurprising that a community of rockstars would gravitate to a hip tool like git, which favors individual forks, compared to a staid tool like subversion, which forces developers to work together in a centralized repository, then it should be equally unsurprising that the rockstars don’t care that they offend or drive others away.”

Which is similar, in a way, to something I read back in January: that git by encouraging forking makes it hard for users to find the high quality fork that they should probably adopt that it  dissipates  a valuable binding force for the community.

These are opinions I have harbored.  Recently, I have set these  opinions  off to one side.

There are lots of hard problems in open source.  One of them is certainly how to form a cohesive collaborative group around a code base.  Source control is a tremendous help in that.  In part because it provides a locus around which the work can  rendezvous.  It a campfire, and the community gathers around it.  I accept that.  But let’s be clear, it isn’t the only campfire.  Other examples:  the irc channel, the email, the bug tracking, the release process, the distribution system, the license, the social networks, etc. etc.

There is something else going on with git that members of my community, Apache, often are blind to.

Open source works best when your users crack open the seal and add features and fixes based on the unique scarce knowledge they have.  That scarce knowledge comes into two flavors.  First is that they are embedded in real world problems.  Second they often have unique talents.  Both of these are impossible to simulate back in the center of the project.  Open systems with liberal licenses enable the periphery to solve thier problems and exercise their unique talents.  To scratch thier itch.

But then what?  Well I tell you what happens next: nothing!

For a laundry list of reasons users do not contribute back their innovations, fixes, hacks, etc.  Which results in starving the project for the knowledge it most desperately needs.  Knowledge it cannot get any other way.

Well maybe that’s a bit strong.  You could write into your license a requirement that they give back.  Or, you could attempt moral suasion.  Or, you could create one or more firms that provide consulting and services and hope they collect and feedback what they learn.  But when all is said and done generally this step, the step between user scratches his itch and project gets access to the knowledge created, is simply broken.

The thing that blew me away about git was that it helps to address this problem.  It increases the  probability  that users will reveal their knowledge.  It helps to create a cultural norm toward that behavior.  To me this is far more important than the risk that their forking would  quench  the community campfire.  In turn I’ve come to believe that encouraging the early and public revealing of that work in progress has other key benefits.  It acts as a shout out.  It increases the chance that other folks with similar or complementary skills and problems are given a chance to come out of the woodwork.  That a positive for the community, it creates a stronger social network; not a weaker one.

So I’ve come full circle.  I used to see the central repository as a key tool in encouraging the group to form and maintain common cause.  I’m now more concerned about how groups avoid cutting themselves off from their supply of fresh knowledge.  There are a lot of tools we use to avoid starving – e.g. open licenses, convivial interaction norms, enthusiasm (not just respect) for diverse skills, etc. etc.

We can do a lot to make the source control frameworks encourage rather than frustrate these knowledge flows.  The key is to think about the knowledge in motion and to encourage that. The  knowledge  at rest is less important.