6log - How does that work, then?

Professor Pages and the Productivity Paradox

Andy Gueritz — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:33:44 GMT

On a plane flying back from Boston (Mass.), eaten second breakfast of the day,�watched a bit of "Where the Wild Things Are", annoying, fractious kid who needs therapy (or a sharp slap) and a bunch of needy, fractious rather dopey creatures, disappointed, switched it off, didn't even care to see if he was reconciled with his poor benighted mother, bored, listening to Muse, need a coffee, some battery life in laptop, here goes...

Recently, I was working with a colleague who exclaimed "You've got to�be a professor to understand that page" when looking at a consulting 2x2. � Indeed there are some great pages in the world that capture some key thoughts or concepts so concisely that they can be expressed just on one page, but need a voice-over to talk through the layers of meaning embedded, maybe like one of those pointillist paintings or a fractal montages that is made up of pictures that are made up of pictures...(but perhaps not a Dali-esque or Picassoid other world view?).

This diagram below (not the one being commented on, I hasten to add), captures the entire eco-system of outsourced application development on both technical & commercial dimensions, ranging from the narrow individual project up to the strategic vendor relationship level

Very clever, of course, but it really deserves to be supported by 20 following pages to unpeel the layers and break out the key concepts, etc., etc.

(oohh, a quick round of orange juice...)

But it looks like this when you morph it Dali-style...

...but that is just plain silly, of course. (but an excuse to try out the Virtual Plastic Surgery Software, why don't you give it a go on one of your favourite photos, and make your self look like your favourite film star, or the Bride of Wildenstein...)

Battery dying....break to watch X-Men Origins: Wolverine, just another load of shouting and uber-angst

Down on the ground now...

However, there are some charts that are very easy to understand, but they do convey a message that is counter-intuitive, and so take a while to get your head round.

This chart is a good example

This shows the output of a model of software development productivity which paradoxically shows that total coding cost falls whilst the developer daily rate increases. �This is, of course, quite counter to the expectations of typical Aggressive Sourcing gigs which tend to focus on bashing down the daily rates. � The Old Wives and proverb writers of yore new about this since the principle of "Pay peanuts and get Monkeys" is well known.

This is what they used to say, but I do wonder if this phrase might be considered racist in these days of off-shoring, say maybe it should now be "Pay Peanuts, get Numpties" or something like that...

The twist in the tail on this analysis is that in the formula P x Q, where P is Daily Rate, and Q is the number of days needed to complete the project, some people (yes, them) are not aware that Q is inversely proportional to P. �This is the essence of the move to Agile development methods, which favours people over process (amongst other things).

Finally, I also offer you the 2x2 I wrote all by myself one day after an afternoon's presentation by one of my erstwhile colleagues, a quite (self) important and entitled sort of chap who gave a long presentation from which I came out reeling with "Framework overload", having survived the discourse from the evolution of Sailing Ships to�Dell's policy build to order policy and positive cash to cash resulting...

So I drew this...

So there you go...

Aristotle and all that

Andy Gueritz — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:26:50 GMT

I have been away from my desk quite a lot recently cavorting around the motorways of England, racking up the miles on my poor hard-worked steed, but now I have a few minutes to sit down and pass on an interesting observation....

Just a momentary tangent before we head into the main meat, so to speak, there is another blog post that I have been meaning to write about Broadband Britain, Cloud Computing, the Innovators Dilemma, passing by the new statistic that the number of of old people in the UK now exceeds the number of young, and arriving finally at some as yet unthought pithy comment about Silver [read, Grey] Surfers. However, it is really just an excuse to create a comic juxtaposition alluding to the alleged practice of North American ethnic peoples (no longer Eskimo) to abandon their old folk on ice floes, whereas I have observed over the long miles I have travelled in the last few months that we British seem to abandon them at Cherwell Valley Services on the M40...so lets move on

Anyway, my recent revelation is related to this framework below plucked from the world of transformation consulting and change management as relayed to me some years ago by one of my erstwhile consulting chums. �The blobs relate to�managing communication with people during significant changes on three dimensions: Rational, Political and Emotional.

The 'sweet spot' is in the centre when all communications are most compelling as they appeal to all these three.

Coincidentally, whilst� trying to be a useful parent and reviewing a Classics essay, I prodded Google about some topic to draw back the veil of my ignorance on such topics and it popped up with Aristotle's three modes of persuasion

ήθος - Ethos
λόγος�- Logos
πάθος - Pathos

Thus, in seasonal form...

Whilst equating Ethos to the Political dimension somewhat turns my stomach when I think of the more venal and self-aggrandising aspects of the political world, the three blobs of the R...P...E model are a pretty good match for what Aristotle laid down.

So there you go....

Beware of BS Benchmarks & Krap KPIs

Andy Gueritz — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:03:40 GMT

Recently our esteemed Green Knight, Sir Jonathan Porritt was attributed with saying� "Overweight people are 'damaging the planet'". �Of course it turns out that he said something like this in about 2007, in fact building on a comment by the then Secretary of State for Health, Alan Johnson. �But somebody else unearthed it again for some typically twisted reason - nothing can be more topical than mixing global warming with a bit of "fatty slapping".

The hypothesis behind the hype is that fat people use more resources because they eat more food, but why not then include teenage boys (unfillable, as empty fridges around the country can testify),�people with very high metabolic rate, and other some such big eaters. �Ah, well, the logic goes that fat people also drive everywhere and so contribute more CO₂ than thin people who, of course, walk or cycle�everywhere. � Well, maybe it applies in towns, but it is certainly not true in the countryside, so drawing a different intersection in the Venn diagram I am sketching out here in hyperspace, maybe the headline should have read "Teenage boys and country�people with very high metabolic rates are 'damaging the planet''" - not quite so catchy, or right-on, eh?

But, of course, there is a secondary thesis which is that obese people can be "cured", especially if they all got out of their cars, walked and cycled, and stopped scarfing all the pies, whence their weight would magically drop away and they would join all the normal people in the happy mean.

�When you look at whole populations analytically then of course you usually see some sort of distribution (Normal or otherwise) of whatever factor (weight, in this case) that you might be measuring. � So the theory is that by thinning down the fatties, the shape of the distribution will be changed. However, there are flies in this particular ointment, and if you look around you can find suggestions that obesity is actually a structural feature of a/the/any human population,�that everybody has got fatter and that you need to treat�the population as a whole, not just�focus on the upper tail.

All in all, an example of�woolly loose thinking�gussying up to a political agenda.

BMI �is one of the weapons in the "fatty slapping" armoury, a metric with some very well documented short-comings, yet standard (mis-)guidance would label people like Lawrence Dilaglio, Jonah Lomu & Mel Gibson as over-weight or obese. �Whilst BMI might have some trivial diagnostic uses,�some lard-brained, fat-heads try to use it as a decision-making metric, vide 'Too fat' to donate bone marrow - the 18-stone 5'10" sports teacher with a technical BMI of 36.1 who was ejected from the National Bone Marrow Register. �To make a proper health assessment, you need to have a more detailed look at structural features, like waist size, percentage of body fat and so on, before�pronouncing.

Just pausing a moment to dissect BMI further, it has units of kg/m² which is not unlike the metric used to define paper thickness.��
Many organisations these days used 80gsm printer paper which is more environmentally friendly than the more sumptuous 100 paper of oldAnd even less rich feeling than the 120gsm paper that Tier 1 consultants use to create a table-thumping report - the�dollars are in the loudness of the thump. �
As Marshall McLuhan told us, the medium is indeed the message, thickness = quality, and just feel that silky china clay high white finish. Oooohhh...

Sorry, started to get rather indented there, must coach self, control tangents...

�So a person who has a BMI of, say, yeah, like 25, is like a piece of 25000gsm paper, no really...equally a piece of A4 paper might have a BMI of about 0.08...

Thus BMI is a prime example of a benchmark ratio or KPI that is NOT�a good basis for making decisions, as it fails to take�account of significant structural factors.

This parable provides an important lesson for practitioners in the world of Information Technology Economics, where many a ratio is measured and analysed by pundits including Gartner et al, a classic being "IT Costs as percentage of Revenue", one of their IT Key�Metrics.

It is�defined quite simply as:

If you dig into the typical drivers of the top and bottom parts of this formula as below, say,

MicroEconomic Drivers - Typical Examples
IT Costs	Revenue
Business configuration, e.g., Channel/Distribution infrastructure Organisation structure (e.g., headcount) IT Governance & Policies (e.g., Group standardisation) IS architecture and legacy (complexity) IT Service definitions and service levels Development methods & productivity Sourcing/procurement strategy & execution Supplier market diversity	Market Structure Competitive environment Market share Product design Consumer behaviour Sales & Marketing performance Customer Service (retention)

then you might surmise that it is quite possible that the Revenue numerator has significant elements that are certainly outside the direct control of the IT organisation, and indeed outside the control of the company, whereas the IT Costs are defined largely by the structure of the organisation, its distribution channels, and internal policies and practices. �The top line is also, I conjecture, more volatile than the denominator, and being mostly outside the control of the IT so a very unfair stick to beat the IT donkey with. �So in qualitative logical terms this metric is certainly appears to be a very poor 'apples and oranges' comparator.

If you stretch the analysis further, you can ask the question "what does it mean?" �Is the ratio intended to show the importance of IT? or IT leverage/gearing (bang for the buck)?

Well, if it is some level of importance we are trying to assess, then we should analyse the relationship between this�benchmark ratio and true measures of business value, such as, Operating Margin. �Looking across a range of industries the curve looks like this:

OK, is is a deliberately silly chart, just to make the point that this is clearly a wobbly relationship.
If you do a linear regression analysis of the relationship between Operating Margin% and the IT Cost/Revenue ratio and a sibling ratio "IT Cost as a %age of Total Operating Costs" (or "Systems Intensity" to its friends), then you get these results for R²

	R2
IT Costs as %age of Revenue vs Operating Margin%	0.175
IT Costs as %age of Op. Costs vs Operating Margin%	0.330

What this shows is that there is no particularly significant linear relationship between these two key metrics and Operating Margin, so quantitatively, the ratios�do not really tell you anything about how IT costs/investment drive overall business performance at all. �

Even within an industry ratio comparisons are fairly meaningless. �For example, in the past UK Banks had an average Systems Intensity around 20%. �If you were to calculate the Systems Intensity for Egg, the Internet bank, at its height, you would come out with a number ranging from about 17% to 25% depending on how you treat the IT cost component of outsourced product processing and some other structural factors. �And I do recall having a conversation with one Investment Bank CIO who declared, "Yes, of course, we do spend 20% of our operating costs on IT, it's how we set the budget!"

The whole averaging process loses information too. �Look at the four distributions�below, they all have the same mean (i.e., average) but are wildly different in shape.�

�Without further detail on their parameters than just the mean value of the curves, �you cannot make a sensible comparison at all.

So all these ratios give is some rather weak macro illumination of the�differing levels of IT spending between industries, like saying to a Bank "Did you know that, on average, Banks spend 7.3 times more on IT than Energy companies" to which the appropriate response is "YEAH, SO WHAT?"...

...Oh, and maybe, some vague diagnostic indication that there may (or may not) be something worth looking at with a more detailed structural review. �So, why not just go straight there, and dig out the real gold!

And so the morals of this story, O, Best Beloved, �are that just because you can divide two numbers, it doesn't mean that you should, and�be prepared to dig into the detail to truly understand how cost and performance could be improved.

Just so.

Just Words

Andy Gueritz — Thu, 28 May 2009 01:00:07 GMT

So it has been a torrid couple of weeks for MPs outed�having been caught with their hands in the cookie jar. � Schadenfreude,�Epicaricacy,�aighear millteach and their ilk are�good words to roll around the tongue, and savour whilst we lob cabbages and rotten tomatoes at those in the pillory: all the more unattractive�being that their "misfortune" was brought about by their own actions and a display of lower moral standards than� is clearly desirable in our political representatives.

Auto-Epicaricacy: a term I just made up, applying some word logic, would mean taking pleasure in your own misfortune. Definitely an unhealthy and paradoxical mental state, but I suppose optimistic, in that every cloud has a silver lining...

I was particularly fascinated and driven to ask "how does that work, then?" �by the declaration of one misadventurer that "Of course I feel that my reputation is tarnished, but my integrity is intact".

Integrity: the unimpaired state of anything : uprightness : honesty : purity - Chambers 20C�

What logic system do you have to apply, what set of axioms must one have, how must one deconstruct common sense to be able to make this statement? �For a start, you would have to look at redefining some core words: unimpaired, anything, upright, honest, pure - take your pick.

Words are a key part of a consultant's stock-in-trade, and pictures too. � One of my favourites satirical sites, now sadly defunct, was SatireWire which ran a series of bizarre and entertaining statistical charts like this...

Madrigals By Freshness

... a hearty lampoon of�opaque and confusing�"Management by Cartoon" Powerpoint presentations (one step up, though, from "Management by In-flight Magazine" which is significantly more dangerous).

And of course every industry has its buzz-words and jargon, which can be useful short-hand for many forms of communication, but often quite poisonous when they leak into other places. �

Note the use of the word "key" in the preceding paragraph - a consultant-y sort of word if ever there was one, it means important, significant, stands out from the crowd. �Non-key things are not interesting...now go back and carry on reading here�

The recent attempt by the Local Government Association to proscribe some logofluvial jargon-words was a valiant attempt to stop etymological pollution in Local Government communication with the rest of us. �I am certainly a fan of Plain English, and keeping things short and sweet with some sharp Anglo-Saxon monosyllables replacing� loquacious logorrheic verbal peregrinations, but equally a devotee of precision and conciseness which some longer words can bring to a sentence, by conceptual elision, perhaps. �

So I was interested to see some words on the list that I have used myself and as have many of my colleagues. �These are�words from the consulting domain that do have�proper surgically precise and correct�meanings in the right hands, but indeed deadly in the wrong. �Other words on the list would be posionous in any context:

"Baseline" is a word I know well that has meaning both in project planning and also in procurement - in both areas being the datum�from which you measure some sort of progress or achievement.
"Predictors of Beaconicity", however,� is never going to win any prizes for�clarity....[there are 1550 hits on Google for this phrase, but I am overwhelmed by disinterest and will not clutter my brain with�vacuous garbology]

The list is also very good material for Buzz-word Bingo...

And talking of words and in an interesting juxtaposition of neurons firing, I noticed that the BBC were having a Poetry Season. �Being a self-professed iconoclast and fact-based sort of person, I have a completely tin-ear for poetry which is just a form of "talking funny" (in an unfunny way,�unlike puns). �

So to finish, I have constructed a Boston grid attempting to make some sense and classify�some of the odder behaviours of my fellow human, viz....

	Normal	"Dressing Funny"
"Talking Funny"	Poets Committee meetings Consultants (some)	Morris Dancers Mickey Mouse Street Mimes Opera Singers Michael Jackson Klingons
Normal	Most people	Cycle couriers Bee-keepers Sports-people (most) Customer service agents in uniform Builders

Phosphenes & Palimpsests...

Andy Gueritz — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 21:27:39 GMT

About a year ago, I went though one of those few moments when I thought my normal powers of memory had somehow deserted me. It was not really anything important I couldn't remember, just the word that describes the the lights you see when you squeeze your eyes tight shut. Like this...

So not very significant in the scheme of things: not one of the words I actually use very often in conversation or in Powerpoint presentations. Just annoying, because the word was just lurking on the edge of my perception, out of reach. But something that you can get a bit obsessed about when information normally falls to hand or mind quickly...

So I Googled and Wiki'd and all those searching jobs that normally count as work, and kept finding Tom, Nicole and Stanley and their film, and other flotsam and jetsam on the endless waves of Web surf.

But, eventually, I created a mega-whiz, sharp-as-a-scalpel, spot-on search string that gave me that Eureka moment...Ding!

The word I was looking for was "Phosphene"

Mind you the Eureka moment was over quickly, as I came to that odd feeling that I had never known the word at all so how could I have semi-forgotten or demi-remembered it? But let us not confuse the story with such technical plot twists and devices.

Palimpsest is another word a bit like Phosphene, but in reverse, I know what the letters say, but the meaning slips my mind (a reused bit of parchment, in fact). It is however a word that I have read many times but never ever had the need to write down - until today. It is definitely a clever Stephen Fry sort of a word, or maybe a Will Self word

I wrote "normal powers of memory" at the top of this piece, though we Jungian Is "enjoy" the physical aspects of memory that are imposed by our brain chemitstry, being the dominant long acetylcholine pathway, compared the the short dopamine pathway of Es out there.

If you looked inside my head, it might look something like this...

...but brighter and probably in colour.

So I worked out many years ago that I should not waste my time remembering stuff, when a notebook works much better.

And so on into the Wonderful World of the Web, I have always found it useful to clip bits out and paste them into my digital scrapbook for longevity and to act as my long-term cyber memory. I gave up on browser Favourites early, as they quickly became useless signposts to where information was no more.

In my Adobe period, I printed bits of the Web to PDF files and stored them in a byzantine filing structure. But, eventually I settled on Onfolio and paid some brass for a real product...and then Microsoft bought it and gave me back my money because they were giving it away free in the Windows Live toolbar...then to become a zombie, twilighting product. The death knell was when they switched off the licensing servers last September.

RIP, Onfolio, you served me well

So I had to indulge in one of those distress-driven searches to find a new digital brain. I tried Ultra-Recall which can import Onfolio collections, but has the user experience of a broken lift. I tried TopicScape but that felt like I was in Castle Wolfenstein or Jurassic Park (the " 'I know this, it's UNIX' whilst looking at a mad graphical computerscape " moment), and a host of other paraphernalia and arcana.

So I have ended up with MacroPool's Web Research, which feels a bit like Onfolio...but German...so hopefully it will be most efficient. We'll see...

Bedtime? Says Who?

Andy Gueritz — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 03:16:57 GMT

Last week seemed to revolve around cars and driving, starting the week with�long distance trips (to Canterbury and Salisbury), then fixing�broken cars, a damaged engine undertray and nixed horns from an unwarranted attack by a particularly vicious piece of traffic calming, plus a petrol leak, culminating in thrashing my old M5 around Cadwell Park on a track day on Friday (a�good way to end�the week!). �

Cadwell Park is mostly associated with bikers, but is also quite entertaining in a car, especially a tail-happy BMW - when I first enquired about track day insurance a while ago, the bod on the phone gave me a quote, and then when I said it was Cadwell, they said, ah, and added another 50%!

Here is the old girl in her war paint...

...none the worse for our trip into the bushes in the snow a few weeks ago.

In a mad moment of preparation before one of the long drives, we threw out the rubbish bag from the back of the car. �I later got a text from home saying that we had just managed to recycle 28 empty Red Bull cans: something of a record even for me.

Quite coincidentally, I was idly running my eye over two piles of books on the table in my study, all in the process of being read or passing through to the bookshelves...

On the right is a workaday pile of business books that show some current industry themes (Semantic Web, Information Security, Agile IT Organisations..). �The left-hand pile, however, reveals my recent predeliction for texts�de-bunking mumbo-jumbo in all its irrational varieties, and I wonder if, maybe, this signals the start of the slippery slope to becoming Grumpy?

OK, Step forward, one and all, to tell me I'm already there...

Anyway, connecting Red Bull with grumpiness in any form, whether caused by lack of sleep, or too much blood in my caffeine stream, I was particularly exercised last week by an article in the paper - so, much so that I tore it out and carried it in my wallet, waving it at people, and saying "Says Who?".

I have it here now and�I am waving it at the screen in an agitated way. �It is entitled "Night-owl children ruin body clocks" from the Sunday Times, and the first sentence reads "Children who are allowed to stay up past their bedtime watching television or playing on a computer are at risk of late-night sleeplessness for the rest of their lives". �To me this is grade A bunkum, as despite the strictest bed-times enforced by my parents, a thin gruel of educational TV and definitely no computer games (not invented), today I inhabit a nether-world of late nights, living in a time zone that is somewhere about GMT - 2 ("Mid-Atlantic" according to Windows clock) or GMT - 3 �("Montevideo/Buenos Aires/Georgetown/Greenland").

I recall a moment during an interview many years ago with PWC Management Consulting, walking around the offices taking in the atmosphere. My escort said "We have hot-desking here, and starting time is 9-30am" (how civilised, I thought), "but if you don't get in by 7am then you don't get a desk" (ho ho, st&ff that for a game of soldiers, I thought)

Who are these mysterious people, "they" who dictate when we should sleep and wake? Who says what bedtime is and should be? �In a world of the Internet, Digital TV and 24hour opening at Tesco who needs to have a set bedtime? �Says Who? �Nanny? Granny? the NHS? [see footnote]

Alvin Toffler put his finger on this point in "Future Shock" many years ago, when he commented on the transition from cock-crow, to factory whistle and school bell - training us all to live, work and sleep to a rhythm of coordinated factory production. �Be a good little robot, and Thank Ford for the Brave New World. (OK, mixed literary allusions there, I know)

Well, ranting aside, I was pleased to see later in the week, another article in the same domain, but this one said��Teenagers improve grades with a lie-in..... � �Unlike Matter and anti-Matter which annihilate themselves in a E=MC² sort of way when they get mixed together, News and anti-News stories just sort of�disappear with a slight "moo" and a whiff of fish.

And so to bed...

[footnote:�the worrying aspect is that the article quotes the sort of statistics about insomnia, sleep-walking and sleep-related breathing problems that some intellectually challenged politician might seize on to force us all to go to bed at 8pm...for our own good]

The Rule of 7

Andy Gueritz — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:18:17 GMT

Being of a fairly rational turn of mind, I don't have much truck with Numerology and similar horoscopological mumbo-jumbo, but I have, over the years, observed that�product development tends to have difficulties around 7th major version of a piece of software, the antithesis of the "lucky number 7". �This is not a�rigorously tested rule (it could be 5 or 6 or 7 or 8), but something more�of an�intuition with some empirical basis: rule or not, if it comes to pass for Microsoft, it does not bode well for Windows 7.

...well, not according to the entrails of this goat that I have been using to forecast the future of the global banking system, anyway...

A more robust, analytical explanation is that these difficulties are some manifestation of James Utterback theories about dynamics of innovation; of product and process innovation and dominant designs...

... maybe mixed with a bit of boredom, laziness, hubris, and less rational, human things (lemma� here)

Windows is moving from�Vista (6),�to version 7, and so maybe it already had its bad moment. �However, it is difficult to see how much more development can go into the product as it is, at 28 years old, quite far down the right hand end of the innovation curve, beyond the flush of youth (worrying about its�pension, and oooh, it is so chilly, let's turn the fire up, and what are we having for lunch, i've lost my teeth...)

Exercise for the reader: try plotting where you think Windows 1.0, 3.1, 95, XP and Vista fit on the curve?

Many of the other core information technologies we hold dear today are also really quite ancient: RDBMS, Word Processors, Spreadsheets, all dating from the 1970-80s. �So what's new in the world, multi-touch, then, the much touted new technology for Win 7, who needs it on a desktop, I ask you?�

Don't get me going about Tom Cruise and Minority Report - although I do still keep half an eye on developments in data gloves...

There is a lot of talk of Cloud Computing and other exciting things, but apart from the fact that it is, in the main, new applications that will drive up usage, not base technologies, there is an interesting trend about where computing stuff actually happens, and more of it is likely to be happening in non-human places, and between consenting machines...

If these population estimates above are any way true, then only about 8% of connected devices are human-type information appliances,�the other 92% are machine or devices that do things useful or mysterious - the balance is tilted to the machines by the�50 billion�cockroaches in the basement;� analogous to the rat statistic - you are never more than six feet from one, but you may not know it...

If you take this Machine-to-Machine (M2M) intelligent device view of the world and mash it up with the Semantic Web & RDF �- creating machine readable data on the web, and maybe, as a by-product, defining the�lingua franca so that machine can talk unto machine.

So, if the�washing machine says, "I'll be back", get the h*ll out, Judgement Day is coming!

Snow, What Snow?

Andy Gueritz — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:38:16 GMT

Confusing as ever, over the last couple of days, the Lincolnshire Wolds handed out another helping of its quixotic and capricious micro-climate.

Whilst the rest of Britain wears a white overcoat, the skies over the Wolds looked like this...

...and the ground looked like this...

...ok, a little bit of snow, and it was slippery down the (unsalted) hill to town. Indeed, the score on the journey out on Monday morning was:

An oil lorry stuck in the mud/slush in the grass verge
An articulated grain lorry that had slid to a halt up the hill - being rescued by local farmer and tractor
one lady who had parked her car up the nice new Miss-Marple style finger posts
a couple of dainty wiggles and balletic sideways moves from the 4x4

But we made it past the place where, a couple of weeks ago, I took a 180 degree flip into the mud and bushes (rear wheel drive that time), on the ice-sheet provided kindly by Anglian Water who have never fixed the leak from the hill-top reservoir, and past the useless grit bin at the top of the hill.

Isn't there some sense of completeness in the Cosmos, in the fact that Wikipedia has an entry on grit bins (with pictures). Although this article and similar might give suggest some organisations have a rather more proprietorial attitude to their bins than Wackipedia might suggest...

The keener-eyed amongst you may be wondering about the pile of junk in the foreground - a legacy of last summer holiday. Unlike the sun-worshippers and other more conventional holidaymakers, I set myself the task of making a Pond Cam, to observe the comings and goings at the pond (and prove that I still "cut it" on a down and dirty bit of systems integration and soldering). And here it is replete with wireless infra-red camera and solar panel...

Well it works (day and night), which was a good result, but not without its challenges, like the relatively short range of the wireless transmitter, so this coming year I might just take a few days off in the summer to IP-enable the pond to close down the distance. Well, it is already mains-powered, so why not a little bit of powerline Ethernet, an IP Web-cam and some video streaming...

A bit of context here: It's a wildlife pond so is intended to look a bit scruffy, with bits of old rotting tree stumps (no suburban goldfish here), and it does the job very well!

Roll on summer (or the promised, but as yet unseen 15cm of snow).

Crunchy Octopus, with Pesto Sauce

Andy Gueritz — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 01:30:09 GMT

Life, media-style, is normally quiet in the nether regions of Lincolnshire, but having had an earthquake last year, it seems that�the papers are thirsting for more excitements from the Wolds. �So we have started the year with an exciting story "Tentacled Alien Destroys Wind Farm Generator", pictured below just after the accident (a genuine photo, for sure)...

I have commented before about the impact of global warming, but I think having an ocean-going octopus visiting now is rather premature, and in fact any, extra-terrestrial cephalopods foolish enough to embrace a windmill is going to end up as sushi.

Of course, the alien story is a good way of diverting attention from the otherwise suffocating�Credit Crunch

I was going to write something clever about "interesting times" here but when looking up the origin of the phrase it turns out that the alleged curse has very little provenance - the quixotic and capricious Wikipedia suggest it might be related to the proverb "It's better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period" (寧為太平犬，不做亂世人; pinyin: n�ng w�i t�ip�ng quǎn, b� zu� lu�nsh� r�n).

Bubbles are always predictable with 20:20 hindsight, and make a nonsense of some of the great prognostications and punditry, when all comes crashing to the ground. �Arthur C. Clarke summed up the dangers of prophecy as�Failure of Imagination, and Failure of Nerve. �To which we could probably add Failure of Intelligence to make an unholy trinity. �Intelligence comes in many forms of thinking process as well as keeping a good look-out. �Previous major failures of forecasting include the dot.com bust, of the prior forecasts for commercial trends were spectacularly off:

... and which also makes me think that, in the terms of control systems theory, that the whole global commercial and financial system is large and complex enough not to observable, let alone controllable (although the jury is out as to whether it is quantum indeterminate).

Which brings me to one of the classic, but flawed frameworks that are often used in the crystal-ball gazing process: the PEST analysis which attempts to scan important trends in Political, Economic, Socio-Cultural and Technological �domains. �Variants posited include:

PESTLE/PESTEL - Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal, Environmental;
PESTLIED - Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, International, Environmental, Demographic;
STEEPLE - Sociodemographic, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, Legal, Ethical;
SLEPT- Social, Legal, Economic, Political, Technological
FARM: Feudal, Agricultural, Religious, Magical (for medieval lords, thanes and serfs, etc..)

OK I made the last one up, but it demonstrates that�PEST is a rather basic cookie-cutter analytical tool, and certainly not MECE �in its scope. �Inevitably, the framework you use for forecasting is influenced by the current frame of reference and warps the lens with which you look at and filter the trends.

In the spirit of improvement, albeit strapping wings to a pig, I can offer my own variant: PESTO. �The "O" stands for "Oh sh*t", that category of all other things that we didn't think about in the other four categories, or plain just aren't under the microscope, or even do not yet�exist, be imagined or people don't think can happen, and so on.

The Red Queen trumps Karl Marx - change is constant and things always move on, become different. Change is, not dialectical, sorry Karl, you backed the wrong horse.

The solutions to long term forecasting problems, is to�think/work in short cycles, and react/respond quickly to keep up with the changes, and adapt to events as they arise. �Be Agile!

Postscript: I cannot finish without acknowledging the death of my Uncle Edward in December, the last Gueritz of his generation, and remarkable with it. You can read his story here

GPS-enabled Road Pricing. Hah!

Andy Gueritz — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:22:28 GMT

I recently had �to to go to Kent at short notice, and since I was heading into relatively unknown territory on a long journey, I zero'd my satnav trip details, a rare event.

When I got home, I flipped to the trip detail screen and was tickled to see this trip record shown below...

The distance looks right, �but behold, �my Max Speed was apparently 242 mph - was I�driving a Bugatti Veyron (top speed 258 mph)? �- I think not!

This makes you think about how useful is GPS data�as the foundation of a national road pricing system �- the answer is probably in chocolate teapot territory!

Many people think that a satellite based road pricing system would work roughly like this...

...with the satellites somehow detecting the position of your car and then transmitting the data to the Big Computer that adds up the price of the �the roads you have been sitting on, and then issuing a�bill.

But of course the satellites don't detect the position of the car at all, it is the Black Box in the car that does all the work, and so a GPS-satellite based road pricing system�would really work something like this....

...with the car working out where it thinks it is, and then (somehow, by mobile phone, maybe) sending the data to the Big Computer that...well, you get the picture, don't you...

If such a system were built, then once people�twig the way things work, the little Black Boxes will be wearing tin-foil hats - to block the incoming satellite signal, and then to stop the mobile phone signal going out; result: No road travel data = no payment.

�So the Power-That-Be would have design some sort of method of enforcement. �What better way than using the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras�that are sprouting all over the place. �

All you need to do is cross-relate the journey data received from the in-car black boxes with the location of sightings according to the�cameras. � The system would look something like this...

Thinking a bit harder than maybe my satnav did, then you can imagine many points of error:

confused satnav systems
lost distances travelled in tunnels, city canyons, and inside little tin foil hats
black box failures, including maybe "failures" induced by sharp, stabbling screwdrivers
failed/partial uploads of trip�records
misrecognised number plates
cars and drivers missing from the database
and�more...

Aaaaaaaaaagh, a merry feast of error compounding upon error, a veritable panoply of tainted data, a concatenation of absurdity! �

Multiplying up the error probabilities in this ordure-filled pipeline, and you will get a success probability in the mid-seventies percent. � Not good...

I have previously mentioned the risk profile of Government IT projects so I won't bang that particular drum again here, but you can always look�here to remind yourself...

My trip would have earned me about 18-points on my licence, a big fine, a 5-year ban, and probably 6 months in chokey for apparently travelling at 182 mph faster than the National Speed limit. �

So if/when we end up with a GPS-powered road pricing system, expect the worst!

Footnote: �the charming and naively executed diagrams in this post where brought to you courtesy of a DigiScribble pen. �It calls itself " The Mobile Digital Note-Taker", but using it underlined for me�the fatal flaw of all write-only devices...you can't see what it thinks you wrote until you upload - too late, way too late