All Big Brothers Aren't Bad

Joel Trammell beat me to the punch with his posting: You can't manage an economy you don't measure:

"this problem, in part, was caused by lack of oversight"

I'll try to keep my outrage in check because I'm not an economist or an accountant or a lawyer. I don't really know what happened any more than anyone else (probably less than many people) but Joel's point resonates with me: If somebody had been watching and willing, then these problems could have been detected and dealt with earlier. In retrospect, it's obvious that excessive risks were taken for short term gain, and some folks were just plain crooks.

It's ironic that folks in the Financial Services industry were blind-sided by this crisis. For years they have been at the forefront of analysis and pattern recognition technology, driving many of the advances in the field. Software that could have detected Madoff's ponzi schemes is trivial compared to the sophisticated financial gaming models developed by the Quants. There's really no excuse except for a lack of someone who was willing to look out for everyone else.

At times like these we realize that sometimes a Big Brother can be a wonderful thing to have.

I'll bet that most of you think of George Orwell's Big Brother when you hear the term. Orwell's Big Brother scares the hell out of us - a omnipresent leader spying on everyone - but he's just a one dimensional character from a horror story.

We should also think of the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization... proving the point in real terms that having someone to look out for us can be a very good thing indeed.

But what about privacy?

My personal belief is that real privacy is an illusion in the 21st century. Maybe not for those living on the margins of society, but for someone like me the walls are transparent and thin. If you are curious and persistent you can probably dig up every embarrassing and questionable act that I've ever done. You can figure out where I live, where I shop, where I eat, where I travel. You can dig up former girlfriends, past employers and folks who can't stand me. My life may not be an open book - but opening my book is way too simple.

I'm not all that happy with my lack of privacy, but I am more concerned by the thought that someone can use that publicly available information to pretend to be me (identity theft). As I wrote in my 2004 blog Privately Famous:

"I know that many people fear a National Identity Card, and I can sympathize; Governments are notorious for turning oppressive. I hold the other view; I want a National Identity Card, and I want my DNA and finger-prints on file. Without a trusted identification authority (and I know that nothing is foolproof), it's just too easy for someone else to pretend to be me, and too hard for me to prove that I am me."

The price of Privacy can be way too high if it's carried to ridiculous extremes. Our fear of government prying led us to condone the gutting of regulatory oversight that we just naturally assumed was protecting us.

Forget the financial mess for the moment: Did you ever think that American Peanut Butter would be dangerous in the 21st century? Didn't Teddy Roosevelt institute food safety oversight a hundred years ago?


Regulatory oversight is certainly a potential evil - but it's a necessary evil. With the tools that we have today Big Brother can watch us, but we can also watch him. We have no real privacy, but neither does he.

Technology can help. We can help reduce the "red tape". We can help spot the suspicious. We can help predict the long term. We can help the watchers watch, and we can help watch the watchers.

We can help avoid messes like this in the future.

The Science of Art

If you've looked at my LinkedIn profile you've probably noticed that I've changed jobs quite a bit over the years. There have been many reason for changing jobs... but usually I've moved on to grow. I've moved on because I found something that interested me more, or something that challenged me more. On a few lucky occasions I've found things that were both more interesting and more challenging.

On other occasions I have moved on because I just couldn't stand it any more. Frustration over some aspect of my working days would build up until it was obvious (to me) that I was wasting my time and my talents. Something about the company was perversely keeping me from doing my job in the way that I knew it really should be done (or so I felt at the time).

I think that all of us who work for a living have felt something like this from time to time, and that's why I found Douglas Bowman's post on his departure from Google to be so poinient. Bowman's artistic design philosophy crashed head first into Google's statistical mantra. Classic case of irreconcilable differences... Make a clean break and part as friends.

Changing jobs is a personal matter... but Bowman raises an issue of wider interest in the community of UI designers and programmers:

"Is UI Design Science or Is It Art?"

The answer is of course both... and everybody has always known that. What's changed is our radically increased ability to apply Science to our designs. Analysis of our designs used to be woefully limited to focus groups or beta testers, but as Stephan Shankland points out: Google's practice of "Choosing color shades and pixel widths on the basis of the behavior of millions of Web page users is a fascinating development to the form-follows-function school of design."

With SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions it's much simpler to roll out a minor design change and "see what happens". It's much easier to employ the Scientific method. It's much easier to test instead of speculate.

Take this new "try it and see" capability with a grain of salt - you'd need Google's millions of users to even notice the effect of subtle changes - but the promise is intriguing.

Bowman's case warns us that there's also a down side if Science is improperly applied. Demanding statistical justifications for artistic design decisions is fraught with peril... You'll drive off your best artists and you'll likely lose out on true innovation.

Inspiration seldom comes from statistical analysis... and inspiration is usually at the heart of all good designs. Statistical analysis can measure the success of a design, and it should be more widely applied. Statistical analysis helps us continually improve a design, but it's not the genesis of good design.

Art first - then Science.

Picking Power

The Austin American Statesman has a great graphic by Roberto Villalpando in today's paper that compares the energy costs of building a new power plant - I'd love to post a link, but it doesn't seem to be on their online edition.  Here's a scan:

The graphic compares the factors associated with Nuclear, Coal, Natural Gas, Wind Farm, Solar and Wood Biomass power plants.  As you'd expect, it's all about tradeoffs.

I really applaud the Statesman for publishing this comparison.  You might take issue with the details ascribed to each option - but this clearly makes the point that there are pros and cons to every Energy option.  There are costs and savings associated with each option.  Nothing is cut and dried - each option requires careful consideration.  Trite slogans just don't cut it.

Power trip

MIT has come up with a battery that can fully recharge in seconds.

Wow.

Talk to anybody in the power industry and they'll tell you that the problem is storage, not generation.  Wind power is great.  Solar cells are great.  Solar furnaces are great.  Unfortunately they're all undependable because the wind and the Sun aren't necessarily there when you need them.

Response to this sad fact has resulted in bizarre plans like huge Solar Power Satellites orbiting the planet to beam down uninterrupted streams of microwave energy and relatively low tech solutions like the Luddington Pumped Storage Power Plant using a huge water reservoirs and gravity to store power.  Solutions like these are impressive, but they just don't work for cars.

Cars need portable power... and today that portable power is stored in gasoline.  Burning gas to liberate its power isn't that efficient - so folks are looking for substitutes.  The most common substitute that I have heard pitched is the Hydrogen Fuel Cell.  Hydrogen was kind of scary to the Coal and Gas Industries, but then someone got the great idea of making Hydrogen from Gas and Coal. Amazing how the same folks keep making money... isn't it?

MIT's new batteries kind of throw a wrench in those plans.  If you can fully recharge your car's batteries in a couple of seconds, then why lug around that Gas and Coal to Hydrogen Powered Fuel Cell?  Fortunately, you can still charge that battery from the local Gas and Coal burning Power Plant :-)

But I digress... a battery that charges in seconds is an incredible development.  Bill Joy identified batteries as the key stumbling block to practical electric cars:

"There's a range of new chemistries coming so that you can imagine, say five to ten years from now, instead of 100 watt-hours per liter we're at today, that a break-out company will have a 500 or thousand watt-hours--a five to 10 times (increase in) the energy density,"

Bill and the rest of us were thinking about batteries that held more power... not batteries that charge faster.  Our thought was that a Chevy Volt isn't practical because you have to charge it every 40 miles (or use the gas engine).  Give it a 400 mile range and folks will stand in line to buy one (and you can ditch the gas engine).

In retrospect - What were we thinking?

Would you rather have a large (400 mile) gas tank that takes 8 hours to fill or a small (40 mile) gas tank that takes 8 seconds to fill?  

There are lots of factors to consider before answering that question... but I suspect that fast beats slow most of the time.  If the MIT batteries really work and you can recharge your car in a few seconds, then I think that most folks will accept a battery powered car as practical even if they still have to charge it every 40 miles.

What do you think?

Is that a bad thing?

Joe Trammell recently blogged an interesting anecdote that concludes with the following moral:

"The first step in trying to improve any process in IT is convincing the people with the power to make decisions that the current process is flawed."

I'd remove the words "in IT" from Joe's statement.  In any organization, unless "they" agree that "it" is broken, "it" is not going to get fixed. Joe goes on to say:

"enterprise computing isn't just technical knowledge, it's also social interaction"

Amen!

In my experience, most software development obstacles are cultural.  People are different. One person's crisis is another person's acceptable annoyance - I'm not going to help you fix something unless I agree with you that it's broken.

There's no quick fix for this problem, but I think that we're headed in the right direction - BPMN, Business  Rules, Business Natural Languages -all attempts to foster better communication between Programmers and Business.  All attempts to help each camp understand what the heck the other camp is talking about.  All attempts to help each other understand what the problems really are.

We're not there yet. Communication is still a bit awkward and stifled - but we're getting there.