Musings – Page 6 – Andrew E. Scott

Leadership, Simplification and Elegance

I’ve come across many different explanations of “what is a leader”, but the one that seems to make the most sense to me is that a leader absorbs complexity. Where there is chaos, ambiguity, confusion and complexity, the addition of a leader makes things simpler and clearer. People know what they should do.

Unfortunately, I don’t remember where I came across this definition, but I was reminded of it again as I read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. Most people would agree that Jobs was a leader in his industry and, together with his lead designer Jony Ive, has transformed many consumer electronics products.

Isaacson describes Jobs as aiming for “the simplicity that comes from conquering complexities, not ignoring them.” He also quotes Ive as saying “Simplicity isn’t just a visual style … It involves digging through the depth of the complexity … You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.”

Adding features to a product makes it more complex and often more difficult to use. Another quote from the book has Jobs instructing the programmer of the iDVD application: “It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says ‘Burn.’ That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make.”

As I read these quotes, I was going “Yes!” Leadership and simplification, it became clear to me, were two aspects of the same endeavour.

Additionally, internal reports are the “product” that we deliver to company executives, and can benefit from this sort of product simplification thinking. Providing decision-makers with more options is often unhelpful – the outcome that is best is creating an environment where decisions can be made easily and confidently. However, this shouldn’t be done by merely eliminating options (e.g. just giving the “top” 2 or 3) – this provides a veneer of simplicity rather than conquering the complexities underneath. Providing thought leadership and guidance involves understanding the problem deeply.

Another way I think about strategic analysis is that it is like an “argument” – it concludes with recommendations that follow logically from the data. In this way, a simple and powerful argument can be considered elegant – a concept well known in mathematics. The computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, commenting on mathematical elegance, said “Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.” This is probably something that Jobs would agree with.

In any case, the definition of leadership that I started with is itself an elegantly simple one: absorbing complexity.

Search for children assists paleontologists

This is something that blew my mind last week. Some paleontologists are convinced that there were fewer dinosaurs than we thought – that some different types of dinosaurs were just the adult form of another one, despite the fact that they look completely different. It’s explained in this 20 minute TEDx talk:

To completely spoil the video, Jack Horner (the paleontologist inspiration behind Jurassic Park) believes that:

the Dracorex, Stygimoloch and Pachycephalosaurus were the same dinosaur
the Triceratops, Nedoceratops and Torosaurus were the same dinosaur
the Edmontosaurus and Anatotitan were the same dinosaur
the Nanotyrannus and Tyranosaurus were the same dinosaur

and he deduces this through cutting open dinosaur skulls and bones at the Museum of the Rockies where he is the curator. Those skulls/bones of the suspected “younger” dinosaurs are spongy while the “older” ones are more solid. If other museums were happy for scientists to cut open their dinosaurs perhaps this would’ve been discovered sooner.

But perhaps there’s another angle. If women were more involved in the science of paleontology earlier on, perhaps this would’ve been discovered sooner.

Part of the basis for the theory is that no child dinosaurs (ie. small / less-developed specimens) of the now-suspected “older” dinosaurs have been found to date. To my admittedly non-expert mind, this is pretty damning evidence right there. According to Wikipedia, the Torosaur (for example), was first discovered in 1891. Somehow, it has taken over a hundred years for a dinosaur expert to come up with evidence to support the simple theory that the reason there are no child versions found in all this time is that there are no child versions, ie. that it is an adult version.

Horner himself puts forward the explanation that scientists just like to name things – the more dinosaurs, the more chance for names. However, attempting to put on a feminist-shaped hat, I would also think that an alternative explanation is that the predominantly male dinosaur collectors of the early years of paleontology were not interested in looking for child dinosaurs – the only interesting dinosaurs were the big ones, that probably also turned out to be the male ones. I wouldn’t blame the individual collectors for this – I would think it likely that this was the culture of the industry at the time. Hence, it’s only as the industry changed, and more women came into it for example, that such thinking changed – thinking that enabled a real interest in finding child dinosaurs and explaining what happened to them. (And I realise that I’m falling for a stereotype here that women would be more interested in dinosaur children than men would be, but I suspect it’s true all the same.)

This is merely a hypothesis, and informed merely by personal speculation and a few web searches today. For example, an article from 2010 in Wired trying to identify significant female paleontologists in the face of a complete lack of their public presence. Also, a blog post from a female paleontologist describing how it has traditionally been a male-dominated profession (the photos of Paleontologist Barbie are worth a look, too). In any case, I wonder if there will be further breakthroughs due to the changing gender mix in science.

What is the equivalent salary of a stay-at-home parent?

We’re about to have both our kids in child-care, for at least some of the week. This means they’re joining around a million other kids across Australia using the child-care system, according to the government. For various reasons, all of the families represented by that statistic are using professional child-care instead of completely looking after their kids themselves.

Professional child-care isn’t free, of course, so it is open to only those families who can afford it. Specifically, they need to be able to afford the child-care even after accounting for the additional income that might be brought in through allowing a care-giver such as a parent to enter the paid workforce. I wondered exactly how much income would need to be brought in to offset the paid care, so I’ve thrown together a quick spreadsheet on the economics of child-care.

To put two children into care, five days a week, for all but four weeks of the year, at a child-care centre that charges $87/day, the now-employed parent would need to earn at least $30,970.06 full-time to offset the costs. At a centre charging a higher rate of $120/day (but less than a reported maximum of $135/day), the salary would be $52,773.72. If there were three kids, then the salary would need to be $84,308.94.

Instead of looking at this as the amount that would need to be earned to go into the workforce, it can also be viewed as the amount that is being effectively earned by not going into the workforce. A stay-at-home parent is “worth” at least a salary of $30,970.06 from that perspective. I recognise that other costs avoided or reduced could also be included, reflecting domestic chores also performed by the stay-at-home parent, from cleaning to cooking, however these might also be shared with others depending on the household situation, so I will leave them out of my simple analysis.

To put this in context, $30,970.06 per year is $595.58 per week, and the Australian minimum wage is $589.30 per week. Taking a minimum wage job to put two kids into child-care doesn’t make much sense if you just look at the numbers. On the other hand, according to the ABS, the average full-time adult earns $1,322.60 per week (or $68,775.20 per year), and if we look at women only, it’s $1,165.00 per week ($60,580 per year). So, assuming the stay-at-home parent can leave home for an average wage, it is probably economically positive.

Knowing this is one thing, but it doesn’t do anything for the twin challenges of finding child-care places and finding a decent paying job.

Password Strength Misguided

When I sign up to a new website, there’s typically a “password strength” indicator on the page where I submit a login name and password. Usually to get a strong password score, I need to have the password be at least six characters long, include both upper and lower case, and often a number or punctuation somewhere in there, too.

For passwords that I have used at work, this sort of scoring is used, and in addition, a strong password is considered to be one that hasn’t been used for too long (say, isn’t older than 3 months) and isn’t one that’s been in use before (say, within the last 3 years). This is all “hard-wired” into the password change system so that it is difficult to avoid.

However, it looks like mainstream IT media is now acknowledging that these concepts of password strength are misguided, and lead to passwords that either need to be written down somewhere (because they are too hard to remember) or are trivial manipulations of common words to make them comply with the policies (which make them easy for hackers to discover using computer software). Wired Magazine published an article on 13th January describing this problem and suggesting that finally research is being done to come up with passwords and policies that really are secure.

While normally “easy to use” and “secure” are attributes that necessarily lie at opposite ends of the design spectrum, when it comes to passwords, they aren’t too far apart. An easy password is a memorable password, and a memorable password is more secure because it doesn’t need to be written down (or even kept inside a password manager, such as LastPass or KeePass).

There’s a great comic from xkcd that covers that point. It suggests that simply using four common words strung together is both more memorable for people and harder for computer software to crack than typical complex passwords. The analysis used is to consider how many possible combinations exist that computer software would have to try before striking upon the correct password – entropy (measured in units of bits) is higher when more possible combinations exist.

Using this approach, 26 different possibilities (one for each letter) has 4.7 bits of entropy, and 70 different possibilities (lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numerical digits plus four common punctuation symbols) has 6.1 bits of entropy. A password made up of six characters with each of 70 possibilities has six times 6.1 bits of entropy, for a total of ~37 bits.

However, 5,000 different possibilities (one for each of the 5,000 most common words in English) has 12.3 bits of entropy. A password made up of four such words (even if all in lower-case, without any punctuation) has ~49 bits of entropy, which takes over 5,000 times as long for computer software to crack. In fact, just using three such words gets you ~37 bits, for equivalent security.

One problem with this approach is that many password systems have a maximum length, say of 12 characters. It’s not clear that imposing such a short limit increases security, but regardless, many systems do this. Four words strung together are likely to exceed 12 characters, making these passwords impractical on such a system. I wondered if there was some way to retain the spirit of this approach but fit within 12 characters.

I downloaded a list that claimed to be the 5,000 most common words from www.freevocabulary.com (it turned out to have 5,010 unique words) and did some tests on it. If you use the first three letters from words on this list, there are 1,103 different possibilities, which has an entropy of 10.1 bits. Putting four of these three-letter prefixes together would give you an entropy of ~40 bits, which isn’t too bad.

So, while I’m no password security expert, it does appear that you could use a “random four words” approach for most sites, and fall-back to just the three-letter prefixes of those words when a site has a maximum password length that’s too short for the normal password. In any case, this suggests that there is fertile ground for research into passwords that are both memorable and secure.

However, I know that even while such passwords are more secure than the typical complex password, unfortunately they still won’t be accepted when I try to register them at new websites. They’ll fail on the password strength indicators! Sadly, this is a case where both ease of use and security are being let down.

Speaking of Bespoke

The Internet promises to disrupt many industries, but it’s finally getting around to disrupting the garment industry. There are now many sites devoted to providing exclusive-brand quality at mass-market-brand prices. They use approaches like out-sourcing design to their customers, taking a smaller profit margin than typical designer or bespoke operators, generating a larger volume of sales through global exposure via the Internet, and providing generous terms for dealing with wrong sizes.

Threadless and Cafe Press are the grand-daddies of the market, but there are now some Australian outfits getting in on the act, such as Shoes of Prey who are getting a profile for their high-end women’s footwear.

However, I want to do a shout-out for Carbon Copy Shirts who I’ve bought a few business shirts from. They have a great deal at the moment of 3 shirts for $99 that I’ve taken advantage of. Now the shirts have been through the wash a couple of times, I can say that they are good quality and they are in the regular wear cycle.

Technology Forecasting

Several years ago, I bought a book by Richard Feynman about science and the world. The following passage has stuck with me:

Now, another example of a test of truth, so to speak, that works in the sciences that would probably work in other fields to some extent is that if something is true, really so, if you continue observations and improve the effectiveness of the observations, the effects stand out more obviously. Not less obviously. That is, if there is something really there, and you can’t see good because the glass is foggy, and you polish the glass and look clearer, then it’s more obvious that it’s there, not less.

I love this idea. It’s not just that you test a theory over time and if it hasn’t been disproven then it’s probably true, but that over time a true theory becomes more obviously true.

In forecasting technology trends, this is not necessarily a helpful thing. The more obviously true something is, the less likely it is that other people credit you with having an insight, even if it dates from when it was unclear.

Still, the converse of the idea is definitely helpful. If a theory requires constant tweaking in the face of new evidence, just to maintain the possibility of being true, it most likely isn’t.

I have no trouble coming up with crazy ideas about how technology might develop, but faced with a number of equally crazy ideas, it is difficult to know which are the ones with some merit and which are false. Happily, the above approach gives me a process to help sort them: giving them time. The ideas that are reinforced by various later developments are worth hanging on to, while those that fail to gain any supporting evidence over time may need to be jettisoned.

Ideas that I initially supported but have been forced by time to jettison include: Java ME on the mobile, RSS news readers, ubiquitous speech recognition, mobile video calling, and the Internet fridge.

One idea that I’m proud to have hung onto was that of mobile browsing. I saw the potential back in the late 1990s when I was involved in the WAP standards, enabling mobile browsing on devices such as the Nokia 7110, even if it was wracked with problems. Several colleagues, friends and family members dismissed the idea. However, over time, mobile browsing received more evidence that it was credible, with the successes in Japan, the appearance of the Opera browser, and then Safari on the iPhone. Now, I regard Safari on the iPad to be the best web browsing experience of all my devices – PCs included.

While Feynman was a great physicist, and his advice has helped me in forecasting technology trends, there’s no guaranteed way to get it right. The last word should belong to another physicist, Niels Bohr, who is reputed to have said: prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

Placebos and Advertising

It isn’t just that expensive wine is more enjoyable, but actually paying more for wine makes it more enjoyable. Researchers from CalTech and Stanford found that the brain’s pleasure centre has more activity when tasting $90 wine compared with $10 wine, even when it is exactly the same wine.

I find it amazing that the brain has such sway over the body, but it’s something that the advertising industry has known for ages.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, I first read about the work of Louis Cheskin, whose work in advertising since the 1930s was revolutionary. His theory of sensation transference was used to design product packaging that would change the way people felt about, and even experienced the product. In one example with underarm deodorants, Cheskin sent the same identical formulation to testers in three different packs with unique colour schemes. The testers consistently reported differences in fragrance and effectiveness, and one colour scheme even resulted in rashes. Cheskin’s consultancy group was named the Color Research Institute, for obvious reasons.

So, given this background, I shouldn’t have been surprised by a recent article in Wired Magazine on placebos. It reported that the “placebo effect” is not a single effect at all, and using different colours or shapes of a pill can make that pill more or less effective in its treatment, even if that pill is just a sugar pill. In other words, the packaging of drugs, whether it is the form of the pills, or the design of the box, or how the medical practitioner gives it to a patient, can change how well a drug works.

While the placebo effect is associated with snake oil, it is considered to operate equally on legitimate drugs. That’s why in clinical trials, the main hurdle is to achieve levels of effectiveness higher than a placebo. But since the placebo effect itself can be made stronger or weaker, or achieve particular effects, you could imagine a trial where the placebo is chosen to have a weak effect so the drug stands a better chance of succeeding at trial. In fact, the Wired article claims that the placebo effect has become stronger recently, making it harder for drug trials to succeed. I can see a more worthwhile application of the placebo effect being to tailor packaging so that not only does it add to the drug’s effectiveness, but may even offset side-effects.

Perhaps in the future, the list of active ingredients on a drug’s packaging will also need to include aspects of the packaging like colour or shape. I may choose to avoid my paracetamol tablets if they are blue because it upsets my stomach. However, there’s one piece of information that’s already on the packaging that may yet be proven to work for other drugs (as it works for alcohol): the price.

And I will leave you with the thought that if more expensive drugs turn out to be more effective (purely on that basis), then may heavy subsidies of certain drugs be causing more harm than good?

Contactless Sport

The other week, I got my first contactless credit card – a Visa payWave. You’ve probably seen the ads for payWave and PayPass cards – the banks have been issuing them for a while now – and I was keen for my old card to expire so that I could get a new card with this feature.

That said, I haven’t gotten the chance to use its contactless capabilities yet, but that’s not to say I haven’t noticed anything different. The day after I added the new card to my wallet, my Myki travel card stopped working.

The problem is that both my Myki and my new payWave credit card use a wireless standard called ISO/IEC 14443 that operates at 13.56MHz. Myki uses a technology called MIFARE that complies with this standard, while payWave uses contactless EMV technology. However, while they are sisters in the technology domain, neither card pays any attention to the other when in my wallet, and they interfere when I put the wallet near the reader in a station turnstile.

One solution to this is to replace the wallet with a special RF-shielded one, like this, and place the different cards in the right spots so that interference doesn’t occur. However, while I experimented with some strategically-placed aluminium foil in my wallet, in the end all I needed to do was ensure that the EMV and MIFARE cards were distantly separated by a chunk of other plastic cards and a coin pouch (I know my wallet is chunky, but I can still fit it in my pocket!).

While this may be a first world problem, it’s still something that’s going to occur more and more as new contactless cards are added to the wallet. Today, I have just a travel card and a payment card. But in the future, I am likely to have more payment cards, plus a contactless library card, drivers licence, medicare card, health insurance card, auto club membership card, frequent flyer card, etc. It won’t be possible to distantly separate all these cards from each other, and they won’t play as nicely with each other as I would like.

One of the great advantages of contactless is that it’s so convenient. For example, I don’t need to take my Myki out of my wallet to get through the station turnstiles. However, in the future scenario above, that sort of convenience might apply to one card, but not to the rest.

As a software guy at heart, I see the logical solution being to turn all of these cards into pieces of software running on a single piece of hardware – that way the multiple pieces of hardware won’t conflict at the radio level and, essentially, changing the game. Whether that hardware is a phone, a dongle or just another plastic card, this has got to be the future for contactless.

A trick of the mind

Back at Uni, there was an easy trap when doing essays where you would photocopy all the readings or sources (at some expense) and think that you’d done something significant towards completing the task. All of the insights required for writing a good essay were contained in them somewhere, and now you had them in your possession. While getting all the prescribed material together was a necessary step, it also had to be read and mentally processed before the actual writing could commence.

There’s a similar situation when it comes to doing presentations. Getting the presentation material together is one step, but there is more work to be done before the actual presentation can be given. Memorizing the presentation and having it ready to fluently present is critical, but it is often left out of training courses on giving presentations. They just recommend endless rehearsal until the material is ready to go, despite (if they are like me) most people not having the time to do this.

I recently attended a presentation course that, while being excellent in many other aspects, also left the memorization part out. (It’s worth calling out the one presentation course, one of many, that I’ve attended that did include it: Think on your feet.) However, the presenter of the recent course at least did point me in the direction of an improve-your-memory book by Tony Buzan.

It’s been an interesting read, and the main conclusion from it is that to improve your memory, you need to memorize stuff. That may be a bit trite, and seem rather circular, so let me expand.

Things naturally stick in our memory when they have a lot of associations with things already in our memory. That’s why when you hear about something related to one of your hobbies, you might find yourself having memorized it without any conscious effort. Hence, if you want to use this trick in a new domain of knowledge, you start by learning a bunch of facts in that domain that will give you a good chance of having memory associations to any new thing you come across.

Buzan’s book provides both an approach to memorize arbitrary facts (with some effort) as well as a compendium of facts from various domains to get the reader started. Unfortunately, none of the domains was sufficiently interesting to me to bother memorizing, but I will probably try to apply the basic approach to some other domains.

The basic approach to memorizing facts has two aspects: creating highly memorable mental scenes (incorporating multiple senses, high drama, etc.) and a way to map numbers to keywords (eg. 55 maps to cake). Together, a user of the approach takes arbitrary facts, makes them memorable and associates them with a number in a sequence related to the particular domain of knowledge.

Anyway, let’s see how it goes. It’s great to have a new tool in the kit bag when it comes to presentations, although it seems like it would be more widely applicable. It’ll be great if I can remember to use it!

The cycle of www

In the early days of the web, it was common to have nearly every website begin with “www.” as a way to indicate that the domain name related to a website, rather than (say) an ftp site, or a news site, or any of a dozen other common types of site on the Internet. However, as more people begin to believe that The Web == The Internet, this practice has slowly disappeared among the “cool” sites. This guide on the net even suggests that “pro” sites should avoid using “www.”

If you type “www.twitter.com” into your favourite web browser, you’ll find that you end up at “twitter.com” (minus the “www.”). Similarly for www.wordpress.com, www.go.com, www.thepiratebay.org, www.digg.com and www.stackoverflow.com – to pick a few other popular sites. While many other sites support leaving off the “www.” in the first instance (such as mine), redirecting you automatically to the site, these listed sites use the www-free name as the canonical version.

Even if this practice continues to build in popularity, in the longer term, it is going to need to change or it will cause a problem.

The trigger will be the complete opening up of the top-level of domain names so that instead of “.com” or “.au” suffixes on names, or a preset list of them, absolutely anything will be possible as a domain name suffix (also known as the top level). Things like “drink.coke” and “stop.spam” could be completely legitimate domain names. Aside from the dot (full-stop, point, period, etc.) in the name, there is nothing about it that would indicate that you should type it into your favourite web browser.

It is convenient for me to be able to click on links in emails that I receive. Another aspect of the above is that my email client (or the sender’s) won’t be able to automatically tell that some domain names should be turned into links, so I may not realise that I ought to visit them. But if I do, I’ll need to cut-n-paste the name, rather than just make an easy click.

The work-around is to put “http://” at the start of every one of these new domain names, so that it’s clear to both human and machine that something is an address on the web. Simple – just add 7 characters to the beginning.

However, this is also achieved by putting the 4 characters “www.” at the beginning, which is universally understood to refer to a website. It’s about half as long, easier to type (especially on mobile devices), and less techy.

So, let the cycle turn, and have it become more common for popular and cool – and “pro” – sites to use “www.” (again).