archigram teeshirts

The 1960's avant garde architectural movement Archigram is currently the subject of a series of Japanese limited edition tee shirts!!!

I would love to buy some, but I don't really think I can justify £20 plus per tee shirt. More importantly, just how wierd is that.

Archigram are fairly well known, if you are interested in that sort of thing, they developed theoretical projects such as a walking city, or a plug-in city, somewhat obviously these were never built, but they did serve to inspire the profession.

But why on earth would the japanese select archigram out of all possible sources for a range of teeshirts. There is a sort of manic futurism about the japanese, that chimes well with the work of Archigram. Perhaps the quiet considered British are just going to get left behind.

what if travel worked like the internet?

it is worthwhile attempting to learn a bit more about how the internet actually works.

When it comes to sending information across the wilds of the internet, it is split up into packets by routers and goes from router to router by what is deemed the best available route. This is informed by the feedback on previous packets, so if what was previously deemed to be a best available route is running slow, another route could be upgraded.

This is not intuitive stuff, most people don't understand it at all, it is how engineers might work, but not how most people like to solve problems. We prefer to make the effort of making a decision and then stick to it, we don't want to constantly revisit all our decisions.

But modern technology can just constantly review decisions, there is not a lot of cost to doing this, while there are situations where a flexibility over decisions is beneficial.

What if the transport network operated like this. What if for major journeys by rail, air or road, we were treated as dumb packets of information, and routed from node to node, each node then directing on the best available route from then on. As with the internet the real benefit of this is that it creates a more robust and flexible network. If one element goes down, then alternatives can quickly be filled to capacity, then further altnernatives filled to capacity.

As with air traffic, you would tag and track each individual at each stage of the journey, for example by presenting or swiping some identification, or through RFID tags, or some sort of GPS or positioning device. In air travel each time you touch down would be a node, in train travel you might need to seek your own nodes, receiving mobile phone notification that you should disembark at a station and seek a specific connection, in road travel a combination of satnav and mobile phone technology could perform the function.

This does seem a bit alien treating people as dumb packets, not entitled to make any decisions, but their fate informing the routing of subsequent travellers. It also suggests a network that is more like the internet with a lot of smaller routes, rather than a few great big motorways, but as recent weather problems have shown there are benefits to robustness.

mopping up

I'll try and mop up a few things with this blog posting.

Why don't they get the people who make film trailers make the whole film. I've been sorely dissappointed by pretty much every recent film I've seen. The trailers have been superb. But the films, long, dull, poor endings. All the best stuff crammed into two minutes of trailer, and everything else in the film is pretty much inferior.

Maybe this worked in the past when you only saw a trailer once, so you did not really remember it, but now you can watch a trailer any number of times, so you are well familiar with it by the time that you see the film.

Fortunately there seem to be a plethora of classic films coming out on DVD at the moment, so I'm ordering some cult films for my viewing pleasure. Recently seen Ghost Dog, and Kings of the Road.

The sun is out, at last. Time to get back out into the garden. Creeping ground elder is taking over one corner of my garden, so I might need to disregard my principles and apply weedkiller to avoid the whole place being taken over with it. I'm also stepping down from some community work. I've done it for three years, and at about half a day a week, it is really too much to fit in. The garden has been sorely neglected for a few years now, and it would be nice to just free up a bit of time at the weekends. Lately things have been an awful dash.

I've been doing my best to be organised, and I'm making progress on things, but there just seem to be too few hours in the day to get everything done.

BLDG BLOG by Geoff Manaugh

I have just finished reading the BLDG BLOG by Geoff Manaugh, named after the selfsame blog at

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/

I was really excited to get it as a Christmas present, and it was perfect reading fodder for a lazy and largely sofa bound Christmas break. It is brim full of architectural conjecture, full as only something drawn from a blog can be. The author shoots off on a myriad of conjectures, moving cities, floating cities, weather as a weapons. These are conjectures, sketching out possible futures, possible fictions.

Manaugh seems to care more for buildings than for people, but he is a warm and witty writer. This book is good company.

All in all the book is an attractive and enticing package, well illustrated throughout, episodice and endearing. Even if you are familiar with the blog, the book is a much better book than you might imagine, being much more than just a collation of blog postings. It hangs together well and reads smoothly.

Altogether recommended.

Customer Service

I know that big business is attempting to personalise the service that they can offer. So I get a personalised screen every time I arrive at Amazon, and a wishlist that I can publish to the world.

But micro businesses are taking this to a whole new level. We got a cheery postcard from the person we rented a holiday cottage from this year, when my wife orders from eBay retailers she gets a cheery postcard with her order, when I order shareware I can email the developer with questions or suggestions, I can comment on Redbubble and the designer of a teeshirt will amend it to reflect my comments.

The classic split used to be that a business was a commodity business or it was not. Perhaps there is a split between the micro business with micro business standards of service and the macro business with macro business standards of service. If you cannot make a compelling case that you are offering a high quality service at either the macro or the micro level, then perhaps it is time to start looking for a new business to be in.

doing digital

Maybe it is just me, but for some reason when I do something digital I always feel that it is somehow less worthwhile than something that is less digital.

So an email not worth as much as a letter, reading a website is not worth as much as reading a newspaper, organising a computer's hard drive is not worth as much as tidying up a room, sorting out my webpage is not worth as much as fixing a cupboard.

There is a certain satisfaction to be had from posting a real letter, but I suppose we had better get used to living in a virtual world.

Why doesn't Moore's law apply to everything else?

From Wikipedia

"Moore's Law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware, in which the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years.

The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore's law: processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras.[2] All of these are improving at (roughly) exponential rates as well.[3] This has dramatically increased the usefulness of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.[4][5] Moore's law precisely describes a driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop until 2015 or later.[6]

The law is named for Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who introduced the concept in a 1965 paper.[7][8][9] It has since been used in the semiconductor industry to guide long term planning and to set targets for research and development.[10]"

This is exponential growth, that could be charted with a logarithmic scale. The implications of this being, that things don't just increase by a regular amount, they increase a lot, every time. The rate of increase accelerates, it accelerates to inconceivable levels very quickly. Just do the maths, if the Romans introduced two rabbits to Britain, and the rabbit population doubles every year. After ten years there would be 1,024 rabbits, ten years later there would be 1,028,576, ten years later there would be 1,073,741,824.

There are some good talks on TED about the implications of Moore's Law by Ray Kurzweill. It is also interesting to hear engineers from the semiconductor industry talk about living with Moore's Law. No engineer wants Moore's Law to stop on their watch. In fact the underlying paradigm tends to shift to let Moore's Law continue, so vacuum tubes went out, and quantum computing appears on the horizon.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/edcorner/uploads/podcast/barrett091021.mp3

Anyway, this is all great. Listening to TED talks and Moore's Law evangelists does fill you with the gee whiz desire to aww shucks let put on a show and save the orphanage and save Africa while we are at it.

[aside - while the capacity of our computers has increased, how we use them has not changed all that much, software does not change much.]

But working in public policy none of the issues I come across seem susceptible to that sort of improvement. Child Poverty rates, life expectancy, levels of morbidity, public perceptions of safety and wellbeing.

None of the systems that we work through seem to be susceptible to that sort of improvement either. Is parliament 1,024 times better than it was ten years ago? Is our legislation 1,028,576 times better than it was twenty years ago?

Why is this so? Could we improve our lives at the same rate that we could improve our technology? What would a world look like that was changing in this way?

I believe that we are potentially on the brink of a new world. Just as Bill Gates left Microsoft to run his charitable foundation, applying an engineers rather steely logic to improving our human lot as a species, we too need to learn from engineers.

[aside - just what would a multi billion dollar charitable foundation run by Steve Jobs actually look like? It would certainly be tasteful, a little exclusive and pricey, and probably end up giving people things that they did not know they needed, yet.]

Engineers are not optimists, they are pragmatists, mix in a bit of venture capitalist, and you get a pretty unsentimental logic. Decide what you are going to do, decide on metrics that really measure achievement. Deploy resources to achieve this, measured against strict milestones based on actual achievement, not just measures of resources input. Constantly reality check what you are doing. Avoid the disengagement from reality that comes from building a product that no one wants, or will not achieve what you are after.

But government policy does not work like this. Public policy generally starts with a very unclear idea of what it is setting out to achieve, and even this is fuzzy and changeable, based more on political defensibility than rigourous logic. With only an unclear idea of what is the target, it is unsurprising that there is a lack of meaningful metrics to measure achievement. The political debate around the achievement of these fuzzy objectives is also suboptimal. Those responsible for delivery often have very polarised interests. For example those closest to delivery can always argue that they are not delivering because they need more resources. In reality they are unlikely to get more resources, so this is an undefeatable excuse. Those further away from delivery can always argue that there were adequate resources but they have been used ineffectively.

There is also the elephant in the room that in effect although we all like to talk about a few major initiatives, in reality most resource is already committed to ongoing work, or lost as unproductive overhead, or lost to chaff type work. You add a new task to someone's job,

but they already had a lot of work to do, = ongoing work

they need to train up and claim for expenses = unproductive overhead

and you ask them to give you detailed reports every month and answer your questions = chaff type work.

net result is not much progress.

For a commercial business, you might deploy software engineers to your new project, but in doing so you would close down the work they were doing before.

Most of what government does is not of much interest to anyone, and certainly not to politicians, but by and large it does need to be done.

If government is to become more focussed on delivery then it needs to have a far better understanding of what it is actually doing at the moment. Then it is simply a case of deciding what to do, what not to do, what to do differently. There need to be clear objectives, and clear metrics for delivery.

The debate has to move from simply being one about how much is spent to one on what outcomes are being achieved. We should challenge any claims about money being spent, asking instead what it has achieved.

The political debate also needs to move from one of easy soundbites, the media needs to move from kneejerk criticism based on juicy quotes and not evidence, the public needs to engage more deeply, realising that government services are complicated and difficult, but still capable of improvement over time. Modern technology makes government more transparent. It makes everything more transparent. It should be easier to see potentially useful metrics and apply them.

If this system of clear objectives, clear metrics, measurement against actual delivery of outcomes can be achieved then as a systems change it will lead to exponential growth. If government were only 5% more effective each year, in sixteen years it would be twice as good, and in twenty four years it would be three times as good, and in thirty years it would be four times as good. The real gains are to be had from improving systems and not from just allocating resources. But every step in improving systems is a step away from how it used to be done, for many of us it is a step into the unknown and unknowable. But we live in a competitive world, the only businesses that continue to thrive are the ones that are nimble and adaptable. They always live on the brink of the unknown. We should distrust the overly familiar and unchallenging.

dawn of the sofa surfers

If an iPod was the size of a room and cost over £1Million then they probably would not sell all that many.

I have used laptop computers for years. However combining a laptop with unmetered, always on wifi, so that you have wire free internet connectivity, and an internet that actually has compelling content, puts all the balls in the right place. Sitting on a sofa browsing the internet suddenly adds a whole new dimension to entertainment that was not available before.

Personally I do a bit of browsing, a bit of keeping up with my RSS feeds, a bit of exploring Google suggested blog articles, a bit of watching TED talks. I don't really know what the rest of my family does, but they do manage to find content that interests and engages them.

Being able to sit on your own sofa with a laptop is a different experience from sitting at a desk, however ergonomic your chair is. You sit on a sofa when you want to relax, you might read a book, browse a magazine, chat with friends, watch TV. It is time for yourself, when you are not some corporate drone chasing deadlines.

I recently bought a second laptop, one of the new aluminium Apple Macintosh laptops from the Apple Refurb store. There is just something about the design of the unibody laptops, suddenly everyone in the house wants one. It is a pleasure to handle, it is lovely to touch and stroke, it has a pleasing heft, the trackpad is much more intuitive and easy to use, the screen is a thing of beauty. It is almost as if they set out to create a magazine sized piece of aluminium jewelery. In the past I might spend the evening sitting on the sofa with the one and only family laptop sofa surfing. Now that we have two, I can be sitting on the sofa, with my wife, while we both sofa surf. Similarly anyone else in the family, if they get onto the laptop can spend their time sofa surfing.

It is not a new observation, but I believe that increasingly tv is a background to other more engaging and personalised content that we are browsing on laptops. So the television might be on, with four people in the room, but a couple of them are also browsing the internet, while one of them is reading, and someone else is flicking through a magazine, and all the time they are engaging in low level chit chat whenever one of them comes across something the others might like, so suddenly they are all watching a Youtube video of an acapella version of poker face.

Enjoy the future!

Desinging Futures

Dieter Rams the designer was interviewed by Gestalten to promote a new book and exhibition, and despite a lifetime in design, he said that the challenge for design in future should be around designing how we live, rather than around designing stuff.

http://www.gestalten.com/motion/clipHiRes?id=116

Acquiring stuff is easy, particularly now. We can all accumulate so much stuff that our houses are unpleasantly cluttered, countering our preferred minimalist aesthetic. Or we pay money to have our possesions held in storage, making space to accumulate more.

There can even be a sort of fetishistic love of stuff, the super luxury goods, "design" goods. But I think these are dead ends. An unproductive manifestation of materialism.

The real challenge is for us to determine how we will live. It is surprising that when there are a million designs for chairs, we have so few models for how we might live. There is probably a whole academic discipline, but rather than do any actual research, working for first principles.

We can arrange ourselves formally or informally.

So formal arrangements would be places like work, or voluntary organisations where people are ascribed clear roles and are expected to perform a certain function. In some situations money would be a factor, in others it would not. Another example would be where there are rules or conventions, such as how to behave in meetings or how to play a sport.

Then there are informal arrangements where there are not clear rules. These would include families, or friendships, and potentially flat sharing.

Asking a few questions to figure out how these things work -

why would people participate ?

what do they get out of it?

how do you make them work better?

why would people participate ?

often because they want to, or they have little choice. Looking at a family the adults get something out of the arrangements, mutual support, the pleasure of each other's company and a shared vision. For children participation in the family is generally less optional, but they would share the same benefits, although they would arguably be putting less into the family.

what do they get out of it?

sticking with the family, it is generally an easier way to live. People have scope to specialise, so that they can support the family doing what they do best, and avoid doing what they do less well. Many people find working together more natural and reassuring than working alone. Most people will enjoy company. Over a period of time, a diversity of approaches will reduce risk and increase robustness. Leading to an important point, a lot of the benefits of a family will accrue over a period of time, but they are hard to quantify.

how do you make them work better?

You can make any of these arrangements work better by appreciating the contribution of others more, by communicating effectively about issues, by establishing mechanisms to resolve disputes and reach important agreements. Ultimately there may need to be the sanction of excluding someone, but in practice this should be rare. I think that there does need to be a shared vision where the arrangement is informal. In theory where people are simply paid to work for an organistion, it really does not matter whether they are aligned to the goals of the organisation as long as their incentives direct them productively, but in practice we do seem to be moving away from that sort of purely theoretical model. It is difficult to imagine someone who was completely at odds with an employer, motivated solely by money, being a useful employee. Work nowadays requires too much discretion to be comfortable with people not sharing some overall vision.

Looking forward, I do think that we need to place a lot more emphasis on how we all live together. At the moment it is one of those things like air that we don't see, even although it is all around us.

Perhaps we do need to be returning to extended families all living together in the same house. But if we are, then we need to design our houses differently.

Perhaps we need to move to portfolio careers where people have much more job mobility and can take extended periods out of the work place, supported by family.

Perhaps we need to have a much more flexible idea about what is actually a meaningful contribution to society.

The existing stereotypes no longer work. The welfare state has created a system that incentivises dependency. We need to move to a system that incentivises independence, creativity, flexibility and imagination.

I am not sure that we can afford, or should tolerate a society where all the menial work is performed by university educated migrants, when our own population is unemployed or underemployed, passively consuming and disengaged from society.

We need to re-engineer society and the incentives that it offers so that everyone is able and encouraged to contribute as they can, while people are supported when they need to be. I don't think that breaking society down into the individual atoms of individuals is really helpful in this. There is a limit to what the state can achieve. People should be able to find support amongst their family and friends for the bulk of their issues, with the state providing support as a last resort. Where the state needs to step in it should be seen as a failure of society, and we should seek to reengineer society better.

All this will only work where there is a shared vision of what our society is about, what it should achieve, and where it is going. That is why the war gave society purpose and cohesion. Perhaps if we can create a clear enough vision of success for our future society we can knit together our individual atoms into something far greater than the individual parts.

Religion

It strikes me that Christianity is very much a religion for farmers, shepherds and fishermen. The lord is my shepherd, fishers of men. Celebrating the harvest home, and the joy of rebirth at Easter as the cold earth reawakens.

But we have been hunter gatherers for far longer than we have been farmers. I wonder what they believed, did they believe in gods, did they have creation myths.

Farmers have to work hard, plough the hard land, make sure that there is seed set aside for the next year. It is a life that favours hard work and prudence.

On the other hand hunter gatherers don't really work hard, it is quite a light life, with times of plenty, and times of scarcity, but one where you need to go with the flow of what nature provides. It is a life that rewards flexibility and an understanding of your environment. Perhaps their understanding of their environment was so close and implicit, that it was like guiding a sailboat before the wind. They did not mediate or complicate their understanding of their environment, they just observed it endlessly, and relied on it for their needs. Who needs a metaphor when you are living in the real thing.

I want something I can use from this

A paradigm is a metaphor that lets us see patterns in complexity. This is valuable because it helps us to interpret the past and predict the future, rather than perceiving events as random white noise.

By definition a paradigm is imperfect. It is a metaphor, it is not the real thing. It will explain some things, it will not explain others. A paradigm should be testable, if it bears up reasonably well then it is a usable paradigm, if it consistently fails, then it is a bad paradigm.

However a paradigm is can be used positively or negatively.

Negative paradigms are a form of fatalism; I am getting older and not so good at things, things always go wrong for me, people seems nice at first but once you get to know them they let you down, there is no point in trying because it won't work anyway. You can do all you like to keep fit but just get run over by a bus anyway. These negative paradigms often delight in their counterintuitive nature or rely on anecdotal evidence of people who were disproportionately lucky or unlucky.

Often these paradigms are a form of comfort, they tell you that there is no point in making an effort in future because whether you make an effort or not, the end result will be the same anyway. You have lost nothing by not making an effort in the past, because it would not have made any difference anyway.

There are positive paradigms too. These more actively and objectively seek to find a pattern in observed events that can be used to positive effect for example by modest changes in behaviour.

For example you might observe that people with a positive attitude and can do attitude at work tend to do better than those who are obviously negative, you could accept this as a general rule and then seek to demonstrate the behaviours that you have observed in others even if you do not feel that it is naturally you. Assuming you want to do better at work.

You might observe that groups of cyclists are more visible and hence safer than lone cyclists, and act upon it by cycling with others whenever you can. Assuming you want to be safe on the road.

Often these things can be little perceptual tricks, things that don't cost much effort but have a disproportionate effect. Things that make one example stand out above the others. Things that are associated with better long term outcomes.

Rather than using paradigms as an excuse for inaction, you can use them as a means of changing your own behaviour to achieve your own goals. It follows that you should have explicit goals, you should objectively observe/record relevant events, you should attempt to establish useful paradigms, you should amend your behaviour to test these paradigms, and be prepared to start all over again. Embedding the useful behaviours and constantly seeking out new paradigms and behaviours.

The world is one of constant competition against others - for example for jobs, and against an indifferent nature - for example seeking a long and healthy life.

You are born with what you are born with, but it is your paradigms and resultant behaviours that are what is really you, they are what you have actively chosen. What you do today makes you who you are tomorrow.

why democracy is over-rated

Within the western world we have always taken our particular society to be the model to which other, less developed societies should aspire. With the current economic depression, and building climate change, it is increasingly impractical that other countries should aspire to exactly our model of consumerist democratic capitalism.

The sacred cow amongst all the features of our society has always been democracy. It is difficult to defend consumerism or capitalism as something that starving people should aspire to, but democracy is surely all that is right about our society.

Democracy is invaluable in a post conflict society, unfortunately those are not that rare. It is useful in polarised debates.

However democracy is ridiculously clunky. You are allowed to vote a few times each decade. Is that really the best we can do.

It creates all sorts of distorting behaviour.
It encourages ridiculous and polarised arguments.
It encourages careerist politicians to align themselves with political parties, rather than their own ideals.
It places undue reliance on the small number of people who can combine popular support with the technical ability to govern to an adequate standard.

For a long time we have been defending democracy as a least bad system, rather than one that was actually good in itself.

But the bulk of the world is not run through democracy. I live within a small family, it is not democratic, nor is my wider family. My working environment is not democratic, nor is the community organisation that I am involved in.

That is not to say that people's concerns are ignored, or that things are never put to the vote.

All of these systems operate on a common sense sort of approach, where clear roles are ascribed, people have the opportunity to raise concerns, if you want something done, you will probably have to do a fair chunk of it yourself, and finally people have broadly similar abilities to do something.

These are not situations where there is a lot of telling other people to do something. There is a lot of asking people, influencing people, supporting people, being given permission to do things, etc etc.

Practical experience even supports this. If you are in a group that is forever putting things to the vote, then you are in a group that is frankly disfunctional. If you are in a group then there should be sufficient common ground on what you as a group are actually about, that issues that are so divisive and binary that they require a vote, should be remarkably rare.

The answer to a post democracy society is not that we should all be voting more often. Within America where they vote on propositions it is worse than anarchy. Democracy makes appalling decisions all the time, Hitler was democratically elected.

The people who make decisions should be the ones who have invested the time and effort to gain some understanding of the issue, and have some investment in the outcome. Clearly this has to be wider than just a particular interest group, demonstrating their venality. Recently British MPs seem to have been demonstrating far more venality than public interest.

There is a good supply of people willing to represent the public interest, probably never enough. These people are like gold dust within our modern super complex society. They are not motivated by greed or power, but the simple human desire to make things better, to leave things somehow better than they found them, or look after things that they know to be valuable.

These people are the capacity within our society, and they need to be nurtured and supported. They need to be offered opportunities, and development, given confidence and validation.

We want to live in a society that is more finely tuned to us. We do not all want to wear standard Mao jackets, whether they fit or not, all drive Model T Ford's in black, whether we like the colour or not.

I live in a small country, but I keep on getting told that all manner of things need to be administered on a regional basis, and even a region is far too big an area in which to make generalisations. Just as consumers of goods we demand near infinite variety and customisation, from houses to tee-shirts, as consumers of public goods, we demand a highly nuanced product. One that reflects where we live, our asprirations, how we see ourselves.

And between the public good and the private goods, there is a third area. The times when we are not delivering a public or a private service. Do we stop and offer advice to a traveller with a map, do we smile at our neighbours, do we tidy up the spilt rubbish, do we volunteer within our community. We increasingly need to operate within all these different realms if we are to create the kind of society that we want to live in.

That is not to say that these changes are onerous. We instinctively want to live in a village with a common village green, where we know everyone, and everyone knows our name, we want to know what is going on, and have people take an interest in our well-being.

Strangely the public sector seems to be falling behind the private in providing this sort of nuanced neighbourhood. Look at Amazon, RedBubble, LiveJournal. We want to create little online neighbourhoods, to look out for each other, insult each other from time to time, disagree certainly, but we keep on coming back to the honeypot of human interaction. That is why media is dead. How slow to watch a film, or tv programme. We want to be there with our friends, real or virtual. We want to stop to get a cup of tea, then make jokes as they occur to us. The interactivty with people you enjoy is now the killer product.

I have long argued that any meetings that are not enjoyable are unsustainable, any job that is not enjoyable is unsustainable. If you have to bully people into doing something you can only do it until they find another option.

While the private sector is increasingly offering this sort of nuanced, interactive, fun, engagement, the public sector is stuck with old models. The public sector still works on democracy, struggles with the idea of focus groups and qualitative evidence gathering, what do they tell us, are they undemocratic, why not stick a user group/board on top, would that fix it.

What is required is truly decentralised decision making. The centre has a function, but it is not the top of the hierarchy. It is merely one node within the structure. A node with more connections than most, granted, but merely a node that specialises in facilitating and co-ordinating other nodes within a network.

Through my life I have always thought that the real decision making power lay somewhere just outside my direct experience, whenever I accessed one source of power, I realised just how limited and constrained it was. They were able to influence, and make decisions granted, but not on a whim, and only within certain parameters. Where ever you go to, the real power seemed to lie somewhere just out of reach, just beyond the horizon.

That is because all the nodes just have different types of power and influence. None are absolute. The accounting department is no more or less important than the chief executive's office.

We need to change the narrative, away from the cynical red-top and Private Eye narrative that those who make decisions are venal and self serving. The people who make decisions are ourselves. The barrier to entry is not money or who you know. It is the patience and diligence of getting involved and accepting you have power but like a cyclist that power is only proportionate to how much effort you put in, how much you actually do yourself.

A world of cyclists is always safer than a world of motorists. Because the effort and energy and decisions are decentralised and spread out. It is more difficult for cyclists to make bad decisions, they make bad decisions more slowly, and suffer the consequences more directly.

We need to re-engineer our world where we are not cynics but participants. Where it is our time and energy that drive decisions. Where we know things could be better, and we work towards that. There is a role for government in this, for the private sector, but the real motor needs to be the people asking for more power, not politicians trying to find someone to take it.

[attached video by Bruce Sterling is on a vaguely similar theme, and is incredibly worth listening to.

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/07/video-from-reboot-11/

]

capacity

when is something too big?

Yesterday we struggled to get to where we were going in the car because a major attraction was so large that all the local roads were backed up with cars trying to get there.

Then we struggled to find a parking space in a nearby village/town where we were going to eat lunch. Despite all the available parking spaces being taken, it was not at all obvious where all the people associated with these cars were, the shops certainly were not busy, we had the restaurant virtually to ourselves.

The maths are not that complicated, any business will need customers, but the number of customers is dependent on the number that will or can get to you. For a bricks and mortar business, they need to be able to get parked or be able to get to you via some other mode of transport, or even just live within walking distance.

For those trying to encourage economic growth, perhaps the best idea is not to focus on supporting businesses, but investing in the infrastructure that lets people access a bricks and mortar business. Putting on more trains, or better buses, or more parking, lets more people get there, let the business focus its efforts on making them want to come.

Too often the problem is a pinch point, the businesses are fine, but there is no way that enough customers could actually visit to sustain them. The importance of modal shift in traffic usage is key. Old fashioned town centres just cannot function if they rely on individual people each driving there, then seeking a parking space. The logistics of the space required to park all the cars driven by enough people to sustain all the shops is absurd. Whereas a few extra train carriages come at relatively little cost in terms of space and infrastructure, but bring in hundreds of extra customers.

graft

Often the only approach that is going to be successful is just sheer hard graft.

We recently had a temporary member of staff, who was also finishing off studying for a legal qualification, and I have never seen anyone work so hard. Everything she was given she just got on with it, when she had a spare minute she pulled out her text books and worked through them.

At the same time I was studying a criminal paralegal course, and I tried to adopt the same attitude, just putting in the hours studying. Applying an element of critical thought, always asking if I was studying the right thing, in the most appropriate way. By the end I had put a lot of hours into the course, and got a result that was much better than I had hoped for.

By stripping out ideas of talent or aptitude, just seeing the issue as one of graft, applying the hours of effort required, constantly making decisions on how best to use your time resource, the emotions get drawn out of the process. It just becomes a more straightforward transaction. There is not a sense of entitlement, or that life is not fair, just a sense that you need to get on with it.

There is a similar lesson in Geoff Colvin's work on Talent is Overrated
http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/talent-is-overrated

Although media coverage has focussed on Malcolm Gladwell's book on Outliers, the Geoff Colvin book actually looks to be the better of the two. It stresses the value of deliberative practice, where you deliberately focus on the areas outwith your comfort zone and practice those, all the time getting feedback on how you are doing, until you finally get better at them. It even puts a figure of 10,000 hours on the time commitment required to be really remarkably talented.

Of course it is always possible to identify people that just seem to have a natural aptitude, but once you start to look into it, by and large their aptitude has been obtained via a huge amount of prior application. I overheard a conversation on the train, some architects chatting, and they mentioned the notebook that one of their number kept, it was packed with hugely detailed and wonderful drawings of architectural features that he had seen, they all kept such notebooks, but his stood out as incredibly impressive. Yet he kept the notebook to himself, never showed it to anyone. It was not a product in itself, it was just part of his creative process.

The designer's notebooks at the ECA were one of the most impressive things there. The endless iteration of ideas.

But what is talent? If we follow the definition that we are talking about a remarkable ability in something, then by definition that is all we are talking about. Media functions to bring to our attention people who can do remarkably well things that we can only do badly.

But what intrinsic merit is there in such talent. Does it benefit the individual? Does it benefit society?

We are not failures because we are not remarkable, we have made other choices, those hours went into something else. Often caring for others. But we can learn from people who just put in the hours of study, who did not just get lucky. People who jot down things, and organise their lives.

Perhaps the remarkable thing about remarkable people is that underneath they are actually not so much different from ourselves, they just put their time into different priorities. The question we should be asking is how wisely we did spend those hours, and how wisely we will use the hours before us.

Difficult Decisions

Difficult Decisions - people often talk about having to make difficult decisions. Should I leave the security of this job for something more satisfying, should leave an unsatisfying relationships.

However when you start to think about it, in technical terms these decisions are generally not actually that difficult. The information is probably more qualitative than quantitative, but it is well established, you generally have time to gather more information if it would be helpful. Generally it is a case of deciding between a very small number options, options which are disimilar enough to make it difficult to make meaningful comparisons.

However we make these sorts of decisions all the time, every day. Often what characterises Difficult Decisions is that they seem to be optional decisions, there is the default option to continue as you are, and the decision to do something different. Accordingly the decision is not a fork in the road, it is a choice of carrying on along the well established motorway that you are on, or to consider the little known and poorly signposted alternative route, that sounds like it may be appealing, but you cannot see far down that road, it twists and turns, and although it sounds appealing, you really have no way of knowing where it will lead.

What makes these decisions difficult is not that they are technically difficult. They are not actually that technically complicated.
They are assymetrical - you understand one option far better than you understand the other.
They are not time pressured - you can continue as you are, in effect make no decision.
They involve you in doing things you are uncomfortable with.

That is at the root of the issue, when we are talking about Difficult Decisions we are instead talking about unpalatable choices. There is always the default, the do nothing option.

But we are decision making creatures. When we are too lazy, or scared, or complacent to make decisions then, in a way we cease to be. We become part of the generalised mass, neither good nor bad, just drifting along.

Life is too short to drift by failing to make any decisions. There are worse things than failing, there is failing to try.

Part of what I like about investing in shares is that it forces you to make decisions, it keeps you in the habit of making decisions. You have to decide on a strategy, to refine and review your strategy, every month I decide on what to invest my money in. Investing in shares you just have to accept that you cannot have perfect knowledge. You are balancing risk and reward, the greater the uncertainty the higher the potential reward, you can consider other's expertise, but in the end you have to follow you own judgement. You need to accept that you will never make the optimal decisions all the time. Share investing just does not work like that. If you had perfect knowledge then you would just invest all your money in the most profitable share for the next year, and sell it all when it reached its peak. No one does that, no one can. Almost by definition every investing decision is less than optimal. You are accepting failing, accepting that you will lose money, others will have done better than you. I suspect that Game Theory has something sage to say on this sort of thing.

It is good for the soul engaging in the challenge of investing, teaching yourself through your results, the expertise of others, introspection. What has gone well, what has gone badly, what should I do more of, what should I do less of.

We are born to learn, to try and fail, pick ourselves up again. That is to be alive.

what studying has taught me

After months of study, I took my exam in criminal paralegal studies earlier this week. It will be a couple of weeks before I know my result. The exam date, 20 May, has been effectively tatooed on my brain, one of those dates after which everything could be safely postponed, and before which my panic would rise like a tide. Truly, my thoughts about an impending exam are akin to those of Edgar Allan Poe, on premature burial, except maybe more mournful and morbid.

It has been a long time since I have done any proper studying, the sort of studying that is examined afterwards. So what did I actually learn?
1 obviously I might have learnt a little about criminal law
2 studying took much longer than I had anticipated. The subject is one of those that largely, does not fit into neat boxes, it inter-relates, one topic merging into another. This entailed making the effort to get a fair chunk of it into my head, so that it could make sense. Like driving a car, or being dead, you cannot just be a bit dead, or mostly know how to drive. It is either or. So, quite a few days here and there catching up with my reading, and reading ahead.
3 the source material sucked. The subject is all over the place, with common threads. There are also countless different ways to refer to things. Our textbook had apparently been written quite quickly by a variety of people. It lacked an index or glossary, and was haphazard in using and defining terminology.
4 the lectures were great, particularly once you got a feel for what was useful colour and what was examinable syllabus. However scheduled from 17.00 to 19.00 on a Wednesday evening, I am getting a bit old for those sorts of hours nowadays.
5 it was necessary to plan how I was using my time, continously. For example, I took notes of class lectures, then wrote them up, then checked them against the text book. This was taking too long, and falling behind, so I took time off to catch up. Some work I had to do more quickly just to keep on track.
6 sometimes you need to cut your losses, as the exam neared, it was clear that I was still struggling with some topics, and I was better off aiming to pick up a few extra points on something I found easy, than battling with something I found impenetrable.
7 one approach did not work for everything. There were key facts, that were in my fifty pages notes, and even then extracted into a shorter note. Those just needed to be rote learned. There were also stories and things to understand, that were easier for me to learn, as long as I could find a way of understanding them.
8 my personal learning abilities, are very reliant on me understanding something. If I don't understand something, then I find it incredibly difficult to learn.
9 prioritise and decide on what to study right up to the wire, make decisions on what is the best use of your time. For example a little rote learning, or reading more generally.
10 past papers are your friends, learn to master past papers, but don't rely on getting an carbon copy exam. We certainly did not!

But most of all, I learnt about the sheer wierdness of trying to learn something. Would that you could just pour the knowledge in somewhere. Or run a mental programme that undertook to stick all this knowledge into your head.

Maybe the answer is difficult, because the question is badly framed. Learning is not a single process. It includes different tasks, and actually novelty of approach makes things memorable, routine makes them less so.

Learning is about
rote learning of facts - dates, names,
understanding - knowing how concepts interact with each other, and how you can apply them to problems
weltanschuung - German term for a view of the world - each subject has its own view of the world. This is one of those things that is so big, that you tend not to notice it. You probably won't get told what it is. But in order to pass the exam you need to tap into what the teachers expect you to be able to do, and how they expect you to approach questions. There is no point answering an accountancy question as you might an English question.

For learning as an individual, there are probably a variety of tasks
listening,
reflecting
questioning
talking
writing
discussing
studying to rote learn.

The more different ways you try and get material into your head, and the more you manipulate it, summarise it, explain it in your own words, the more likely it is to be retained. Hence a chat after class about something, might help it to stick, when reading it in the text book again did not. As above, novelty helps.

It is also important to recognise that some subjects are just infinite. Criminal Law could easily be a four year degree course. We studied it in two months. So we could not know everything, and although there was a slimmed down syllabus for us to study, it was haphazard, and there was no guarantee that it covered everything in the exam. By the end, I just had to accept that I would never master everything in the syllabus, but with application I could know enough to pass.

With luck I will have passed by a decent amount, my target was just to pass, but getting above 60% would be gratifying and above 70% would be fantastic. Professionally it does not make any difference, and actually knowing about the subject is more important, but I suppose I just rise to the competition.

Towards a new economy

It is pretty much a cliche of measuring performance, that by setting indicators you end up distorting activity to produce the desired results in your chosen indicators, with the associated risks. For example there are perverse incentives, if you are paid to complete tasks, then you are encouraging people to complete the straightforward tasks that they know they can do quickly.

Inevitably it is very difficult to choose good indicators, or metrics.

You might measure Inputs - that is the amount that you are putting into the system, the amount of spending, work, effort. But there is no guarantee that measuring Inputs will actually tell you anything about how effective any of these inputs actually are. There is no merit in being busy if none of it is achieving anything.

Alternatively you might measure Outputs - that is the amount of things that you are generating. This sounds better, if you are producing lots of widgets, then that must be a good thing. But if they are defective widgets, or widgets that no one wants to buy. But what about services, are you answering lots of phone calls, but doing it very badly. Is it really better to be sending out lots and lots of emails. Should my boss pay me more because I am actually sending him millions of emails?

Alternatively you might measure Outcomes - that is some sort of measure of the change that you are seeking to effect. In business terms it is easy enough, it is profit or market share. In government or a service within a business it is less easy. Obviously the Ministry of Defence wants to win battles, but how can you disaggregate that down to individual contributions. Perhaps there are underlying trends that mean that you will never achieve the high level outcomes, but you still need to direct energy towards them.

Intuitively we can tell when people are working well, it is about commitment, innovation, quality of service, reliability, adaptability, resilience. It is just that a simple set of indicators are very bad at capturing this. They make us think that we can understand something without really understanding it, a shortcut avoiding the effort of doing some thinking and research.

The economy has changed a lot recently. Perhaps part of the problem was that we did not really understand it, but we thought that a few indicators would tell us all we needed to know. But the nature of indicators is that they skew activity.

So we thought that rising house prices were good, and sure enough they went up. We thought that low inflation/interest rates were good, and they stayed low. We thought that low unemployment was good, and it stayed low.

But we were not really thinking about more structural issues like the balance of payments, like the affordability of credit, like the resilience of the economy.

Economics is unscientific in that it tends to assume that all other things being equal doing X will lead to Y. When in real life all other things do not remain equal.

Although we are entering a new era, economic policy has not. It still seems to be fixed on making things go back to the way they used to be, but perhaps we might learn a few lessons, so we don't need to change much, just iron out a few wrinkles and things can just go back to the way that they were.

Why not look at some different indicators, our streets are full of litter, generations of families are disengaged from work, most people have minimal engagement with nature or a wider society, we are slowing killing off other species, and ultimately our planet, we are re-enacting the tragedy of the commons on a global scale.

When we are tackling these issues with all our strength, then perhaps we should worry about house prices and dinner parties. Common sense tells us that the economic progress was destroying our planet. We need to adopt some better perspective, and let that inform what we do.

Supply and Demand

We all know how capitalism works. If demand increases prices go up, if supply increases then prices go down, supply and demand are the real things, while the prices float up and down in response.

But the housing market does not work like that, people like to make a profit on their houses, so they will gladly have their house on the market for a long time, holding out for what they think their house is worth.

But supermarkets don't sell milk like that, they sell it as a loss leader, to bring people into the shops.

But shares don't work like that, when prices go up, people are more keen to buy them. When prices go down, people want to sell them.

Maybe what everyone always knew about supply and demand and prices really isn't so true after all.

random stuff I like

I like

moleskine icons
http://pica-ae.deviantart.com/art/Moleskine-Icons-91551480

Lamy 2000 four colour pen
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lamy-L401-2000-multi-colour-pen/dp/B000UTKMDQ/ref=sr_gnr_fkmr?ie=UTF8&qid=1238308458

Paperchase small noto notebook
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Paperchase-Small-Journal-Black-Design/dp/B000UJDWKQ/ref=pd_sim_dbs__7

do I believe in Kondratiev Waves?

Further to my recent blog entry, do I believe in Kondratiev Waves?

Yes and no.

• I believe they are a useful descriptive tool, and as good a model as any,
• however they clearly have little or no predictive power. Recent history suggests that the wave has a period of around fifty years, but it is exceedingly difficult to fit postwar economic history to the model, and intuitively it seems unlikely that the model would hold true for both the nineteenth and twenty first century.

I have however used it as an aid to thinking about investing. See the attached diagram, literally on the back of an envelope.



Assuming that

• you buy only for capital value, not for dividends,
• value is global world value, individual shares, markets and countries, could contradict trends.
• shares increase in value over the economic cycle - the cycle is around fifty years long
• you want the cash value of your shares to increase over time
• smaller bull and bear markets will operate against these overall trends
• any action you take is infinitessimal and will not affect markets

If you buy at point A, the top of the market, then you will have to wait for nearly fifty years, according to the Kondratiev wave, until you can sell again at a profit! If you buy at the bottom of the market point B, then you will never lose money when you sell.

I believe that we are at a point between A and B, probably on the early stages of the fall. On that theory, now is not a time to buy shares if you want capital growth. The situation is likely to change when;

• we near the bottom of the dip
• share purchase becomes the most advantageous asset class because other asset classes become even less attractive. For example if interest rates are substantially less than inflation, then investing in shares might be worthwhile, even if you still expect them to fall in value. You can always get a dividend from shares and you have not lost value until you actually sell them. If you can control when you sell, then you can recoup money. Investing in a bank, unless interest rates exceed inflation, you are losing money. There is no equivalent scope to recoup losses by timing withdrawl from a bank. At the moment though, you would be losing money faster by buying shares, and you might need to invest for circa fifty years to see a profit on current share purchases.

My view is that investors should continue to invest, but for the time being put your money into the bank. The time to move back into shares is some time away, but the relationship between inflation and interest rates could make it worthwhile to invest sooner. The current emphasis should be on retaining value, and caution, against the background of a falling market.

The small investor is exceedingly unlikely to make money in the current market, but they should continue to set aside money for when the situation becomes less unfavourable and keep monitoring individual and overall share values.