Views of a Modern World

Everything else Rick writes

Did not find

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NB: Now that some time has passed and we’ve moved from the Mueller Report to the House Investigation to the Impeachment to the vote, this is not a “hot” topic but one just about the nature of proof and belief and the words we use to describe them.

“Did not find” vs. “found no”

I’ve been surprised at the number of “journalists” who have made a high-school level mistake in reporting on the Mueller report as described by the Barr letter. The Barr letter says several times words to the effect that the report “did not find collusion/a crime” and does not say the report “found no collusion” or “found no crime.” Now, I guess that most folks read those as meaning the same thing because nearly every report I’ve seen (even form people who write enough puns that I think they pay attention to words) has used words more like “The report found no collusion….”

Now maybe my very expensive law school education has warped me permanently, but those two phrases don’t mean the same thing. In general, the second means that the report cleared the president and his campaign; the first, the words used by Barr, say only that the report did not find a crime and leaves open the possibility that there was a crime.

Now, I don’t know who did what, and as someone wrote yesterday, we’re all better off if the President didn’t in fact commit any crimes. But until we see what the report says, I’m not in favor of slanting the words to favor the president when the Attorney General didn’t do that.

iPhone App ideas

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So I’ve had this idea for an iPhone seismograph app that a person could use on a rollercoaster or taxi ride on the FDR or regional jet flight.

Here are a couple apps I’ve come across that are in the same vein:

Noise:
Decibel X is a free app for the iPhone (also available on Android) that is a noise meter. It pretty accurately measures noise on a decibel scale. I use it to monitor the noise levels in restaurants and workplaces in an effort to increase quiet. When I am recording podcasts I use it to ensure there’s little background noise. It’s also entertaining and instructive to measure sound levels outside in nature and urban areas. — KK  (from Cool Tools)

Potholes:

Consider Boston’s Street Bump smartphone app, which uses a phone’s accelerometer to detect potholes without the need for city workers to patrol the streets. As citizens of Boston download the app and drive around, their phones automatically notify City Hall of the need to repair the road surface. Solving the technical challenges involved has produced, rather beautifully, an informative data exhaust that addresses a problem in a way that would have been inconceivable a few years ago. The City of Boston proudly proclaims that the “data provides the City with real-time in­formation it uses to fix problems and plan long term investments.”

Yet what Street Bump really produces, left to its own devices, is a map of potholes that systematically favours young, affluent areas where more people own smartphones. Street Bump offers us “N = All” in the sense that every bump from every enabled phone can be recorded. That is not the same thing as recording every pothole. As Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford points out, found data contain systematic biases and it takes careful thought to spot and correct for those biases. Big data sets can seem comprehensive but the “N = All” is often a seductive illusion.
Source: https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740–9713.2014.00778.x

These couple ideas make me think that a Richter-scale app must be doable.

Efficiency is free [in the long run]

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Efficiency is free in the long run, argues Seth Godin.

I read his post as saying two very different things:

First, shifting costs to other people ends up costing more money overall. That’s what economists call a negative externality (and the genesis of many NIMBY complaints — no one wants to be on the receiving end of a negative externality, like a cement factory or pig farm, the two business endeavors that seem remarkably common in legal casebooks). The idea that one person can do something that’s more profitable because costs fall on a third party generally offends our sense of fairness, and it makes us realize that if a party is not tracking the true costs and benefits of its proposals, it might make a poor decision.

Second, Seth seems to be saying that many profitable investments in the long run are not being made in the short run. As articulated by Tom Nonnenmacher, that’s indicative of a discount rate problem.

The first issue is a big-picture legal/societal/moral/ethical one,that we’re not going to solve today. We have lots of rules that allocate responsibility for things. Laws exist (or don’t) because we want to assign costs for externalities to certain parties. For example, “allowable” limits for discharge of pollutants are set by governments for various reasons, but one legitimate reason is how much the public gains from that behavior. To shift a bit, we have a law that allows persons harmed by vaccines to recover from a fund administered by the federal government, in part because the legislature has determined that the public good is increased so dramatically by the use and prevalence of vaccines that it’s worthwhile for society to bear the costs of those infrequent injuries to persons from vaccines (rather than making the manufacturers directly liable to those persons).

The second issue, though, of discount rates is one that can be fixed, or at least addressed, by good leaders and managers. Firms need to start from a position of understanding about the returns that they’ve actually made from different projects (rather than guessing about overall returns, or assigning corporate-level weighted-average returns to each project beyond the first step of the process). Then, managers should work to understand what happened between the plan for the project and the outcome: what factors affected the variance, which factors improved vs. worsened results, and how much did each factor contribute to the final result? This source of change analysis will eventually become table stakes at the C-level; once you see it in action, you realize that it’s the only way to run a railroad.

Stepping back, though, the question of overly high discount rates (leading to favoring near-term, short-risk projects over longer-term projects) is impacted by different factors as well. One is sensitivity to short-term, i.e., quarterly, financial reporting. Another is understandable but probably not well-understood concern about projections (will we really make that much?) and execution (can we really accomplish those tasks?) and timing (will it really happen that fast?). Those three are all sensible; the issue I think about as a board member is whether the company has really thought through these issues and really “forecast” the numbers vs just throwing them into excel and tweaking them until the bottom line looks okay. Imposing higher discount rates because of internal risks – things that the company should be able to know and influence over the course of the project – is a bit of sloppiness or intellectual laziness. After all, if you don’t understand what the underlying factors really look like and what the variance in the estimates is, then adding a top-level discount factor is probably just as unknowing. It’s like saying, “I don’t know how much that car is worth, so I’ll offer you $100.” A similarly unsophisticated approach is setting a high/medium/low number for some item without any real understanding of why the number might be different, what the distribution of the possible outcomes is, or why any of those three numbers were actually picked other than that one is highest, one is lowest, and the third sits in-between. In other words, there’s too often no information present in that choice.

What’s the point of all of this? The point is that it’s the job of the leaders to dig into the elements of underlying business risks and put them into the plan in some way based on what’s going on. The job of the board is to dig into those risk analyses and think about them in a few ways: what is the distribution of likely outcomes for some factor? How does that change the total outcome? Will we be able to mitigate negative results along the way? How does this range of outcomes fit into our total corporate portfolio of activities?

Ultimately, finding profitable investments and allocating capital to fund them is the job of the CEO, and it’s the board’s job to take a big-picture view and keep the entire corporate portfolio in mind so that each project fits the company’s strategy and strategic plan.

Collar stay punch

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I saw this guitar pick tool in the Uncommon Goods website some time ago. Around that time, I had the idea (since I don’t play guitar) of a similar tool that would punch out collar stays for dress shirts. However, between not wearing as many formal dress shirts at work and life, I never really followed through with my manufacturing contact friend.
Pick Punch

Now, though, someone has caught up to me (my fault for not publishing this years ago, I suppose).

Behold, the collar stay punch!
Pick Punch Collar Stay Punch

Someone’s gone further and turned it into deliberate marketing at CollarCard, where they pre-print the card with your design and prep the collar stays so they can be popped out.

I guess we need another use for all those hotel key cards now….

Occam’s Safety Razor

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Occam’s Safety Razor

Occam’s Safety Razor: when you don’t know what the answer is, start with something that almost certainly can’t hurt.

Everyone talks about Occam’s Razor, usually getting it wrong in the process. I generally prefer the Karl Popper interpretation that it’s just about ease of testing and not an actual “law” because sometimes things are in fact complicated.

But if you don’t have an explanation or solution or prescription for your problem, start with something that is almost certainly not going to hurt and is likely to do some good. Personal problem in your life? Eat better or exercise. Those surely won’t hurt you and you might get somewhere while you’re figuring out the rest. Business problem? Start by improving free cash flow.

In the Army, we’d call this hitting 50-meter targets (the closest targets on the basic rifle qualification course are the 50m left and the 50m right; they are much easier to hit than the 300m target). People who like football metaphors say things like “blocking and tackling.” Other people say “pay attention to the little things and the big things will take care of themselves.” The point is always the same: there’s likely to be some clear (not necessary simple or easy) fundamental task that will make almost every situation better while you’re trying to solve the big problem.

In college volleyball, we’d do this by starting with a strong effort to establish a clear pattern of hitting hard, fast spikes right in the center of the net. Once that was working, only then would we start to expand our offense and try other shots.

What’s the point? The point is that the principle of Offensive – seize, retain, and exploit the initiative – is your friend even when you don’t know exactly what to do. Find something that’s not going to hurt and start doing that. You’ll find your way eventually.

Library v Amazon

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At some point I looked over my Amazon wish list and saw a lot of books that I wanted to read but wasn’t sure I really wanted to keep for a long time. So I wondered if there was a tool that would track my wishlist and then pop up and tell me if the book was available in my local library.

I saw a mention in Lifehacker (and then again recently in Cool Tools) for a Chrome plugin that does this for some library networks. Library Extension does exactly that. I get excited when I see these things making their way into the world, even if I’m not the one doing it, or getting credit for it, or anything at all. I am happy when people have slightly easier lives.

A different angle on this is creating a tool/script/webapp/Alfred workflow for sending a book name to my library’s auto-bookbag interface and adding it to my list. What we should do with our libraries is treat them like our Netflix queues, where we add books and eventually they make it to the top of the list (and sometimes a book jumps the queue, like when Sapolsky recommends James Gleick’s Chaos).

I think that there might also be a related need for an ISBN cross-lookup tool to get the same book in different formats (or whatever might trigger different ISBNs for what people would consider the same book).

Personalized amusement park video

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This idea falls into my “Orphans” category: projects or ideas that I find interesting but that I know are really low on my priority list. I figure it’s more fun and helpful to write about them and release them into the wild. If nothing else, I can put a David-Allen approved “DONE” label on these in my mind.

This article about a personalized video of surfing lessons reminded me of an idea I’d had a while ago.

When I’ve taken my kids to large amusement parks, a common feature these last 5–10 years has been the “photo pass.” The photo pass is an all-you-can-eat digital photo subscription. So, rather than pay $29 for a single photo of the three of us on a Harry Potter ride, we pay whatever – $99 or $129 – for several days’ worth of all the photos that get taken, on rides or even the standup photographers near the entrance or other scenic spots (like in front of the Millenium Falcon!).

What I’d thought of some time ago was a similar, but better, value-added service that such a park could provide. With the number of both personal video sources (smartphones, tablets, and video cameras) and park-owned cameras of various kinds), the park could create a model where as part of the package, they provide me with a personal video camera, as well as a site to upload any other personal video (or pictures). Then, at the end of each day, I can turn in that camera to the park, and they get to work. They can take my video and maybe park-owned video that I appear in that fits a B-roll kind of definition – waiting in lines, passing security checkpoints in rides and attractions, eating lunch. There’s almost certainly lots of video available. And with Fastpass (at Disney) running on a GPS-enabled smartphone (and probably bluetooth tracking too), it should be easy to get a crowd shot with me in it.

The editing work could be done by a team of video editors in an off-cycle time zone 8 or 12 or 14 hours away, which might be convenient for many reasons. But here’s another idea: an AI tool that has part of the idea in place. Magisto (www.magisto.com) is supposed to be an AI-powered editing app. Their target is to help small businesses create marketing and product videos almost automagically. They take uploaded video and analyze and edit it to create a short piece.

Whether Disney takes all the footage and pushes it into an AI editor or has a team of folks across the world cleaning it up, it’s probably 2–3x better than any regular person’s editing and 1000x better than the editing that almost everyone WON’T DO FOR THEMSELF. That’s my point. Unless editing is your thing, a little bit of skill from someone else will lead to vastly better outcomes compared to what you probably won’t do.

And then I get to walk away with a good-looking video (on DVD too) and maybe a book of photos that won’t just live on my hard drive, never to be seen again. Grandparents (at least my parents) would be happier with a book they could look through than a link to an online album.

Cruel World

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The publish date on this article describing this video is September 2017. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch it until now, August 2019. It was a bad idea.

I made it 45 seconds in, about 12–15 seconds of real content, and I choked and had to stop.

The video is bodycam footage of an Arizona police officer detaining a young teen for (as far as I can tell) nothing illegal. He turns the kid around to handcuff the boy and the kid’s anguished cry hit me right in the gut. This is what it means to know that a piece of media requires a trigger warning. That’s how this makes me feel – such a sharp, suffocating feeling, like an explosion going off right next to me, slamming every one of my emotions to the side, past the edges of my body, and then they snap back after I hit pause, like my brain recoiling from a concussion, smashing around inside my skull.

Typing this post gives me a smidge of distance so I can get the words out about how terrified this makes me that my son, doing nothing wrong, will feel the fear that that poor kid did. It’s the kind of feeling that I can’t even dig into because it’s so overwhelming. I am one of the folks who says that, “Hope is not a strategy” in business contexts on a regular basis. But I’m terrified of this, and I am afraid that cozying up to the fear to understand it would just make me angry, when there’s no one to be angry with.

I don’t know how I’ll ever look at even a few more seconds of this. It is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. My own near-death experience was like water off a duck; the thought of my son’s anguish and fear could only be surpassed by its reality.

Goodbye, cruel world, I’m leaving you today

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye

Goodbye, all you people, there’s nothing you can say

To make me change my mind, goodbye

*Also: this isn’t a suicide note. As his namesake wrote, you’ve got to “rage against the dying of the light.” And that’s what life is. The fact that there’s goodness in the space between the infinite blackness is to be accepted with gratitude, not cursed for not being bigger or longer or brighter.