Alexey Feldgendler

Posts tagged with "society"

Observations with a Straight Face, issue 3

Sunday, July 3, 2011 9:59:00 PM

This entry concludes the series about amusing philosophical, anthropological, sociological and other principles. Many of them seem nothing but witticisms at first, but these “laws” are empirically valid and have some degree of serious value.

The Basics of Human Breeding

Sunday, June 26, 2011 9:59:00 PM

humor, society

Homo sapiens has been bred from the australopithecus and differs from its wild relatives by the three-fold increase of the brain volume, developed ability for vocalization and a nearly complete absence of hair, the latter being quite practical. Its easy maintenance, learning ability and loyalty make a human the favorite pet for gods of all ages.

n+1's a Crowd

Sunday, June 5, 2011 9:59:00 PM

humor, mathematics, society

A hypothetical planet P is inhabited by sentient beings of n different genders g₁, g₂, …, g_n. Successful reproduction requires one member of every sex. In the ideal case, such a group is involved in exclusive long-term relationship and forms a complete family where each parent plays one of the n unique parental roles.

Grandma's Marketing

Sunday, May 29, 2011 9:59:00 PM

humor, society, psychology

This week's entry is about a promising new type of marketing: promoted superstitions. It's a kind of product placement, similar to when a movie character drinks the advertised beverage, but in this case, an unconventional medium is used: artificially created pieces of “popular wisdom”. A typical problem is chosen for this purpose, such as to “get rid of cold” or “find out if husband cheats”.

In the former case, superstitions fall on fertile ground because common cold tends to pass without treatment. Because of this, any absurd activity that was carried on diligently enough during the illness will be perceived as if it “has worked”. While in fact the cold would pass just as well without it, one has to carry out a double blind test on a decent sample to say that with confidence. But for popular wisdom, the typical sample size is one, but an impressive one.

When it comes to “finding out if husband cheats” and other sorts of divinations, other effects come into play. Firstly, if a method produces vague results, they can later be interpreted retroactively in a way that agrees with the actual events. Secondly, a prophecy that came true will be much better remembered than one that was a miss (Jeane Dixon effect).

There are also some other fallacies that can be exploited by superstitions. For example, if the advice is given by a specialist (no matter in what field), or if it's allegedly used by a celebrity, or if it's known since antiquity, the subjects will be generally more susceptible.

So the approach is to spread rumors about the efficacy of particular rituals, for exmaple, on forums where credulous visitors exchange advice on how to get rid of cold or turn away the evil eye. The superstition will be soon picked up by those for whom it “worked”, or who just likes to give others unverified advice. If you're especially lucky, grandmothers will insist on their granddaughters doing your ritual.

Here are some examples. Rubbing Coca-Cola into the temples every two hours helps cure cold. To find out if your husband cheats on you, put a pinch of Vegeta in his coffee — if he notices it, he's a cheater. To invite money, dispel seven Lipton teabags in the wind at midnight. Got another one? Please comment!

По-русски: Бабушкин маркетинг

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Observations with a Straight Face, issue 2

Sunday, May 22, 2011 9:59:00 PM

owsf, society, psychology

This entry continues the series about amusing philosophical, anthropological, sociological and other principles. Many of them seem nothing but witticisms at first, but these “laws” are empirically valid and have some degree of serious value.

Benford's law is an empirical observation that in many, although not all, large arrays of real-life numerical data, the first digit of the figure won't be uniformly distributed: it will be 1 in about 30% cases, with diminishing frequences for other digits, all the way to the least frequent 9 which occurs in less than 5% values. Take heights of city buildings (in any measurement units), country populations, taxpayers incomes, and they will most likely closely follow Benford's law. The explanation is straightforward in cases when the logarithm of the value has uniform distribution, but the law surprisingly holds also in many cases when this is not true. As it often happens, although the law was stated by Frank Benford in 1938, it was first observed already in 1881 by the astronomer Simon Newcomb. He noticed that in logarithm books, the earlier pages, which contained numbers starting with 1, were much more worn than the other pages.

Parkinson's law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Cyril Northcote Parkinson who stated this quite true law seems to have stumbled upon some fundamental principle, various manifestations of which have since been given their own names. Douglas Hofstadter stated the recursive Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. Roemer's law, which says that in an insured population, a hospital bed built is a bed filled, is actually being used in health planning in the US. Wirth's law saying that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster (Niklaus Wirth) seems to be a particular case of the Jevons paradox: technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase, rather than decrease, the rate of consumption of that resource (William Stanley Jevons). If there indeed is something common behind all these phenomena, that law is still to be discovered and named after someone.

The Jeane Dixon effect, named after the American astrologer Jeane Dixon, is the tendency of some predictions out of a large amount made to come true. Those predictions that came true can then be brought to public attention while forgetting about the numerous predictions that proved wrong.

The Navigation paradox states that increased navigational precision may result in increased collision risk. Before widespread availability of GPS, ships and airplanes used to follow random trajectories that only roughly resembled navigational paths. Surprisingly, when navigational electronics allowed vessels to follow these paths with greater precision, the collision rates went up. Today, as a mitigation measure, pilots are recommended to fly one or two miles to the right of the center of the airway.

The Thomas theorem, formulated by William Thomas in 1928: If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. A classical example: false rumors about a bank's bankruptcy can cause many of its clients to withdraw their money, causing the bank to become bankrupt in reality. According to John Keynes' beauty contest theory, stock share prices depend not so much on the market players' real estimations of their worth as on what they think others estimate their worth to be.

По-русски: Наблюдения с серьёзным лицом, выпуск 2

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Mind-blowing Success

Sunday, May 15, 2011 9:59:00 PM

sci-fi, society, psychology

One doctor was a good specialist, even a very good one, but that wasn't enough for him. He dreamed of being a genius. Over time, this turned into a dream about his son becoming a genius.

Our doctor was a specialist in brain physiology. He studied the brains of outstanding men of science and art, and found a common feature, an anomaly. After years of trial and error, he created a state-of-art medication which, if taken during the first months of life, causes this anomaly to develop in the child's brain. And so much did he wish for his kid to become a genius that he secretly gave the experimental pill to his newborn son.

His son grew up like a real Wunderkind. In only three years he graduated from school, in two more he was done with the university, but even at the age of thirty he hasn't learned the basics of human communication. His astounding rise in the field of neurosurgery was only rivaled by the swift onset of his paranoia and bipolar disorder. At the age of thirty-three, his eccentric behavior crossed the line, and he got suspended from his duties and sent to a mental hospital for compulsory treatment. Throughout the treatment, he keeps working on his “research” which during the last two years were nothing but a hardcore paranoid delusion. Soon after discharge he commits suicide because the world, obviously, is not ready for his discoveries.

Nevertheless, the contribution which the poor man has made to neurosurgery before his disease consumed him was invaluable. Not only did his name appear in textbooks on the subject, but it was given to diseases, methods, procedures and even streets.

The old father whose last name did finally get engraved on a golden plate, tried to destroy the remaining samples and notes about his ill-fated research, but found that all of that was missing. The results of his work got into the hands of secret government agents. The government started using the drug to boost the scientific and creative potential of the nation. A special secret organization would pick out candidates: moderately successful but hugely vainglorious scientists, artists, composers. They were offered geniality for their children. The men in black didn't mention the inevitable by-effect of the “elixir of geniality”: the progressive psychiatric disorders that would first be the driving force for the outstanding mind, but later lead either to suicide or to a complete mental disintegration.

In mere half a century, the country became a leader in science and a trend-setter in literature, art and music. The achievements of the new Beethovens and Einsteins are forever recorded in the history of mankind. And only the parents of the “synthetic geniuses” know the price of their immortality.

Inspired by the article “10 madmen who got us infected” about the mental disorders of Yesenin, van Gogh, Gogol, Hemingway and others (in Russian). It made me think about the price of geniality.

По-русски: Сумасшедший успех

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Observations with a Straight Face, issue 1

Sunday, May 1, 2011 9:59:00 PM

society, psychology, owsf

This entry starts a new series about amusing philosophical, anthropological, sociological and other principles. Althouh many of them seem nothing but witticisms at first, the criterion for this series is that the “law” is empirically valid and has some degree of serious value. The numerous corollaries and “laws” inspired by the Murphy's law have failed to get the spotlight here.

Poe's law is an adage named after its author Nathan Poe: Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing. In other words, hardcore extremism is indistinguishable from a well-made parody because a parody is crated by taking something to the extreme. If you're sceptical, read ChristWire.

Conway's law, stated by computer programmer Melvin Conway, says: …organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. Although it seems humorous at first, this is a valid sociological observation with abundant examples. The initial version of the adage was: If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a four-pass compiler.

The Peter Principle was introduced by the eponymous book by Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. A system which rewards competent employees by promoting them will keep raising an employee until they are no longer competent, which is their level of incompetence. However, many real hierarchical systems can function because not all their employees have reached their incompetence levels yet, and those who haven't are the ones doing actual work. An exaggerated version of this principle found in Scott Adams' “Dilbert” comics states that the least competent employees get promoted to middle management to minimize the harm from their activity. This “Dilbert principle” has been subsequently described in detail in the eponymous satirical book by Adams which is recommended reading at some courses in management.

Schneier's law, attributed to the cryptographer Bruce Schneier, was stated in a speech by Cory Doctorow as follows: Any person can invent a security system so clever that he or she can't imagine a way of breaking it. A similar principle was earlier formulated by David Kahn in his book “The Codebreakers”: Few false ideas have more firmly gripped the minds of so many intelligent men than the one that, if they just tried, they could invent a cipher that no one could break. A recent example: Bangladesh extremists were using a cipher of their own invention based on Excel transposition tables. The idea of this cipher is known since ancient history as the Caesar cipher, and to break it is considered the most trivial exercise in cryptanalysis. Modern ciphers such as AES were rejected by the extremists because they are known to the infidels, which in their opinion lowers the security.

A decent conclusion to this issue will be Stigler's law which says: No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. Because similar discoveries are often made independently by different people, and an idea is usually associated not with the one who was first but rather with the one who drew attention to it, examples of Stigler's law are surprisingly abundant. Stephen Stigler who published “Stigler's law of eponymy”, attributes its discovery to the sociologist Robert Merton, making Stigler's law an example of itself.

По-русски: Наблюдения с серьёзным лицом, выпуск 1

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Nanoforecast

Sunday, April 17, 2011 8:42:00 PM

humor, sci-fi, society, top10

My optimistic forecast says that by the middle of the 21st century, not only will nanotechnologies have been completely developed, but also pilot experiments in picotechnologies will commence. Here is the list of top ten uses of nanotechnologies in 2050.*

10. Embryo etching for desired coloring patterns in pets.

9. Tagging of visitors of a shop or establishment with nanodust which not only allows for tracking of their subsequent visits, but also for analysis of which other visitors they interact with.

8. Smuggling of illegal substances in the trafficker's blood inside a multitude of nanocapsules that prevent both detection of the substance and its premature excretion from the blood stream.

7. Molecular level discreet surveillance.

6. Means for conceiving a baby of the desired sex.

5. Delivery of tactile sensations directly to the skin receptors during computer games.

4. Creation of dynamic tattoos (animated, interactive) with high-tech paint.

3. Combination of a data medium with a playback device (books and movies on interactive paper) solely for the purpose of making duplication difficult as well as limiting the number of views.

2. Hair loss prevention nanogel.

1. Prevention and treatment of cellulite with nanorobots that counteract fibrosis of the hypoderm.

* Ranked by the estimated gross total number of nanounits produced for a specific purpose during the year.

По-русски: Нанопрогноз

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The Magellanic Generation

Sunday, February 20, 2011 10:59:00 PM

sci-fi, language, society

After long years of listening to the silent Universe on all frequencies, the SETI project finally bears fruit. A signal from the Large Magellanic Cloud has reached Earth, and its irregular pattern cannot be explained by natural processes. The scientific world boils with anticipation of the greatest discovery in the history of astronomy: a proof that an extraterrestrial civilization exists. Whole institutions are founded for investigation of the mysterious signal. After a few years of storming research the unconventional method of modulation is understood. The signal encodes sound which is not incompatible with human ears. The similarity between the aliens and humans is striking: not only do they use the same range of acoustic frequencies for communication, but also their language is quite close to ours phonetically.

The broadcast seems to be a round-the-clock alien radio station. Judging from the repetition patterns of various programs with recognizable voices of the hosts, the sending planet must have about 28-hour long days. Most of the time is used for various talk broadcasts, but there is sometimes music whose sound is utterly unmelodious and alien to the human ear. But the biggest challenge is, of course, the language. Despite the efforts of the world's linguists, the language stands undeciphered for complete lack of hints like bilingual texts, pictures with captions, or just about anything that could help us match the language against a known one. The mysterious language is colloquially called Magellanic.

Meanwhile, the broadcast continues, and it is now accessible to anyone on Earth as an Internet radio station called “Radio Magellan”. Words from the crackling, rhythmical language so much unlike anything earthly, repeating phrases (jingles? commercials?) and even some of those weird tunes become parts of the pop culture. In contrast to the baby steps of the “proper science”, the Internet is ripe with interpretations of the language so bold that they make linguists shiver. Young people use sonorous words according to their “folk” understanding.

Any weird idea is eventually going to be found by somebody, and a club appears on the Internet for parents who regularly play “Radio Magellan” to their children under three years old. This starts becoming popular. It turns out that repeated listening of the alien radio activates the same parts of children's brains as normal human speech: without yet knowing any other language, they start learning Magellanic. They babble in a mixture of human and Magellanic, but soon learn to separate languages, and generally speak only human languages after three years of age. The children say they understand the language of the aliens but cannot explain what the broadcast is about because human languages lack the words, notions and categories necessary for that.

Despite the effort of an activist group fighting to prohibit retransmission of “Radio Magellan” on Earth, the teaching of Magellanic to infants continues, and its popularity grows rapidly. The first generation of the transgalactic polyglots comes of age and takes places in the human society. Some become writers, artists and architects and astonish their fellow countrymen with bold, unconventional ideas and visions; others contribute to science and technology; yet others become politicians.

At the age of 42, one of them, an attorney, forgets his native human language right in the courtroom. He mumbles something in Magellanic (which nobody has heard from him in his entire life) and does not seem to understand human speech. Another one, his peer from the “Radio Magellan” generation, is invited to visit him, and they have a long conversation in the alien language. After that, the guest leaves silently, and never again in his life says a word in any of the nine earthly languages he used to speak.

An epidemic begins. Adults and children who have been taught Magellanic stop speaking human languages after talking to their peers in Magellanic. The relaying of “Radio Magellan” is hastily suspended, but it's too late. In a couple of months, 4% of the Earth population isolate themselves from the rest of the mankind with a language barrier they have voluntarily built. People still live like humans, can communicate with simple gestures and don't seem to be an immediate threat to the society (although there are particular cases of extremism from both sides). Many husbands still live with their now “silent” wives, parents with children, and those call each other to talk Magellanic and go to their own parties with alien music. Radio and TV stations in Magellanic appear. Now pretty much all children are exposed to Magellanic one or another way in their early lives. Those who grow up in Magellanic-speaking or mixed families never begin speaking a human language, and the rest forget human languages at school age.

In a hundred years, human languages are a minority. Most of them are lost, and the biggest ones — English, Chinese, Russian, Spanish and a few others — are preserved by activists who deliberately isolate their children from the Magellanic culture. Nevertheless, the number of human language speakers is on a steady decline.

The events described here are recorded in a disappearing language by one of its last keepers. People who speak the old way are now sticking together in small isolated villages. They understand less and less of what's happening in the world because pretty much all media are in Magellanic.

Meanwhile, gigantic radio stations are built in several points of the globe. They use the recently developed new technology to send an immensely powerful radio signal beyond the Milky Way. The new human culture needs to be brought to the dwellers of remote galaxies.

По-русски: Магелланово поколение

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So That a Regular User Can Understand

Sunday, January 30, 2011 10:54:00 PM

existence, humor, sci-fi, society

Usability testing of a new version of a software product is in progress. The test subject sits at the computer and makes occasional cautious clicks in the application window. In an adjacent room, crowded behind a sound-proof wall with a one-way mirror, a group of experimenters observes the user.

The developers watch the test subject with disappointment while he looks, confused, at the menus, toolbars and dialog windows that they themselves know and understand so well. They say:

— Doesn't he see? The “Apply” button is right there!
— Damn, where the hell is he clicking?
— Did he just dismiss the error message without reading? What's he thinking?
— Do we even have the automatic download feature in this version?
— We do, but it doesn't quite work… See, it crashed.

This happens in usability labs all over the world. Meanwhile, our civilization is being watched by omnipotent beings residing in the extradimensional abyss. They comment:

— Look at them idiots, every time someone actually understands something, they burn him at the stake. Can we fast forward to the point when they're done with the burnings?
— Another caloric theory here. Look, maybe we should actually implement caloric if the users want it so much?
— Why did they call the electron charge “negative”? Isn't that backwards? Now they have current “flowing” in the opposite direction, what were they thinking?
— Don't they understand the structure of the atomic nucleus? What's so difficult?
— Looks like they got it now… But wrong, dammit.
— What are they're doing here, looking for Higgs boson? Did they find it?
— Do we even have the Higgs boson in this version?
— We shouldn't, didn't we it from everywhere?
— Oops, looks like we forgot to remove it from one place… Everything has just crashed.

По-русски: Чтобы было понятно обычному пользователю

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Apparitions Anonymous

Sunday, January 9, 2011 4:24:00 PM

existence, sci-fi, society, psychology

Here is the first story that I'd like to share this year.

A man dies suddenly and becomes a ghost. He walks out from under an overturned truck and feels unharmed, but nobody can see, hear or feel him. He sees relatives bury his disfigured remains in a sealed coffin. He shouts into people's ears that he is alive, but nobody notices. His wife goes to sleep in tears on her usual side of the bed, unaware that her husband's ghost lies next to her, unable to touch her.

Time goes by, and life continues without our hero. His job is taken by a new employee, and the protagonist is shocked to realize that this guy doesn't have half the experience it takes. His belongings goes to the heirs, and they start selling the things he valued so much. His wife paints the walls in the living room a color he would never have picked.

A year has passed. Although a ghost doesn't need to eat or sleep, our hero still goes to his side of the bed every night, eats breakfast together with his silent wife, and spends the days watching his relatives, friends, colleagues. He passes through walls and doors of homes and offices and sees everyone move on, everyone but him. Our hero starts feeling desperate.

That jerk who was hired in his job often gives the wife a lift home. What could she possibly find in him? This so-called “journalist” can't put two words together. One night our hero comes home after a long walk and crashes into the bed without looking, but notices something strange. In a moment, he is terrified to realize that, being incorporeal, he has lain down into the space occupied by the peacefully sleeping semi-literate journalist lying next to his wife!

The protagonist rushes out of the bed, jumps out of the window without breaking the glass, and doesn't get hurt from falling eight stories. He stands on a road in front of a bus, but it goes through him, followed by trucks, cars, motorbikes… He runs down the subway and jumps in front of a train, and, of course, that doesn't hurt him either. In his last desperate attempt, he reaches the crematorium and lies down into a coffin. The flame that melts metal doesn't even make him warmer. He sees no point in moving anywhere and, depleted of all energy, he falls asleep right in the cremation chamber.

He wakes up because someone is shaking his shoulder. It's the first human touch he feels since his death. The stranger is another ghost. It turns out there are many like him, and it's not the first time a desperate one ends his run here, in the crematorium.

The new acquaintance brings our hero to a meeting of the Apparitions Anonymous. Ahead of him are twelve steps of spiritual rehabilitation, and the first step is to admit that you have died and cannot return to life. While walking those steps one by one, the apparitions anonymous learn to forgive, to accept, to let go, and their connection to the material world fades away. Together with them, our hero realizes that life is for the living, and that the dead, instead of clinging to the earthly existence, are to leave this world forever. Having walked the entire way, most stop being ghosts and and leave for eternal piece outside of space and time, but the protagonist decides to stay and become a mentor for other such ghosts as he once was.

По-русски: Общество анонимных привидений

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Thoughtful Fantasizing Club

Wednesday, September 17, 2008 1:27:00 AM

emotions, mathematics, society, psychology

In an imaginary, ideal and pitch abstract world live people who don't give a damn about being trapped in our thought experiment: they're people, too, and try to get their human fun from life. Just like us, they meet, make friends, mix and give each other simple pleasures. And just like in our world, they have social obstacles, having grown up in somewhat different cultures and then gotten mixed together. That's why what's natural for some is unthinkable for others.

For example, some people love massage of the head so much that they're willing to spend hours scratching, stroking and massaging each other's heads — if they find someone like them. But here's the catch: for some others touching the scalp is a taboo that can't even be mentioned. Because nobody knows whether it's disgusting or delightful for someone, you can't really offer this to a person: what if they get offended? So two head massage lovers don't dare to offer it to each other because each one of them is afraid that it's unacceptable for the other. Same thing with nose-rubbing, round dances, riding horses together, pat-a-cake and numerous other ways in which our speculative poor things bring enjoyment to each other.

Here is the problem the society is facing: invent a way for fans of various pleasure to recognize each other. It seems trivial: why not introduce conventional signs? For example, a red T-shirt could mean a round dance devotee. But it's not that easy: a round dance lover wouldn't like those for whom round dances are a taboo to know about their devotion. Hey, there are places where they won't let you in if you wear that! Therefore, a signaling system has to be more selective.

Let us call the whole range of ways to please each other acceptable for a person their easiness, as in “he's an easy (uncomplicated) person”, “she's easy to be with”. An easiness is a mathematical set. Let us designate the easiness of a person X as E_X. Then the requirement to a signaling system should be stated as follows: for every person Y, conventional signs worn by Y should suffice for X to derive E_X ∩ E_Y. Consequently, for each of his devotions X will only find out whether it's shared by Y, but he won't find out about those of Y's passions that X himself dislikes. He'll find out what he can what he shouldn't try with Y, but won't know anything shocking or destructive to their friendship.

A solution to this problem can be a variety of signs with limited knowledge of them. For every questionable pastime A enthusiasts establish a club, society or some other kind of community for A-doers. To become a member, one needs to do A with any current member. For lovers of A it's not a problem but rather a pleasure, but those for whom A is unacceptable won't even think about joining the community. Of course, the lists of community members are kept in secret. Because the world is ideal, everyone knows about every such community, and can and will join all the relevant ones. In a closed meeting, members of the A-doers society decide on a sign by which fans of A will recognize each other. It can be anything: an item of clothing, an accessory, a feature of speech or gait, a code word or gesture. Different communities pick essentially different signs, so that it's impossible to tell by the look of how many communities a person is a member. This way, everybody only knows the signs of belonging to those communities one is oneself a member of, and when X and Y meet, they instantly see what their common easiness, the intersection of E_X and E_Y, is, and within that intersection they feel at ease with each other.

The problem and the solution have been found in brainstorming together with Wheezle, for which I'm thankful to her. This way, we have determined by experiment that joint brainstorming is included in our common easiness. And if you, my dear readers, also love head massage — welcome to the club!

По-русски: Общество любителей фантазировать с умным видом

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What About the TV?

Wednesday, August 6, 2008 5:54:00 PM

poll, society

Problem statement: What should be done to the TV so that reasonable, smart people watch it, those who now mostly say “I've thrown that box away a long time ago”? Restriction: the idea has to be implementable with today's TV, not with a hypothetical future entertainment station connected to the Internet.

At iCamp 2008, Irina Serbina on behalf of the TeleMost group of companies has run a contest for the best solution to this problem (original problem statement). I teamed up with Katya who represented a humanitarian project “Sun Children” at iCamp. Without really running for the prize (which would require limiting ourselves to only realistic ideas), we started brainstorming.

As we thought, it wasn't about the quality of the material. It's always possible to find out what the audience likes to see, and show even niche broadcasts. Incidentally, most ideas submitted to the contest were about one or another way of finding out what the viewers like and letting them influence the programming. However, the problem is that nowadays a significant part of the population is not willing to allocate much time to TV and adjust their schedule to match the TV broadcasts. It's not just because of modern time management, but also simply due to the information space being saturated so much that someone not watching a TV programme isn't missing the greatest entertainment. A modern viewer of the type we're talking about is willing to allocate maybe 15 minutes a day to TV, and that's when they want it, not when some particular broadcast is scheduled. If we learn to use this kind of time slot, we can have their attention for 15 minutes a day, otherwise they won't watch anything at all. Of course, having a viewer like that involved so much that they participate in programming through some kind of voting is out of question.

Nevertheless, some people with such attitude towards TV still watch particular channels such as National Geographic or Animal Planet. What's special about these is that they always broadcast essentially the same. If one likes watching animals, they can turn on Animal Planet and have their deal of creatures when they like it, in the time slot they have. This means that TV channels should be like this. Not that they should be about nature; some would allocate 15 minutes a day to business news, some to car races. There should be channels about car races, cats, science news and stock reports. Hundreds of niche channels should exist, one per every topic that's currently represented by one or two items in the TV schedule. It's not a problem if every such channel only broadcasts half an hour of material over an over and only change it once a day or even several days: such viewers don't watch TV for long periods anyway. With today's development in cable and satellite broadcasting, hundreds of channels are a reality, and frequencies are no more precious. A modern household cable decoder uses three digits for channel numbers.

The strategy of having a multitude of highly specialized channels will allow to show highly relevant, targeted ads without causing repulsion, while short length of a typical broadcast (5 to 15 minutes) will make it unnecessary to insert commercials within a programme. Small businesses will have the opportunity to run one or two channels with only a little highly specialized material in their areas of expertise and have some ad revenue next to large TV companies owning some 50–100 channels.

The approach to TV viewing will change. Instead of TV schedules, we'll have channel guides (updated once every several weeks due to frequent channel launches and retirements), because it's the channel's format that determines what they broadcast, and whenever you watch it, it's going to be what you expect. A viewing session will begin by choosing a channel, either a favorite or a new one to try out, and will usually include several channel switches. A viewer will make their own TV schedule: a little sports news, a little sketch comedy, a little ice dancing — similar to the way we make our own blog reading repertoire using LiveJournal friends feed or various aggregators. Possibly, improved TV sets appear, as well software for computers with TV tuners, that build a kind of aggregation feed automatically, based on an “Add this channel to my repertoire” feature. Maybe also counters of some sort emerge for measuring the popularity of channels.

Instead of trying to guess what the viewer would like to see, hundreds of channels will give them everything conceivable and let them choose. The Internet consists of numerous websites, and everyone chooses for themselves if they like to read Wikipedia or 4chan. Attempts to give the user all they need on one ideal portal, on the other hand, have failed.

The described strategy doesn't exclude traditional TV channels with complex schedules alongside highly specialized ones. If you're willing to watch a TV programme for 40 minutes, know when it begins and try to finish your chores before that time, the traditional channels are for you. But if you watch nothing but National Geographic or Animal Planet, or don't have a TV at all, but do however watch clips on YouTube on the topic you like, when you feel like it, then you might also like choosing among specialized TV channels independent of the time of day.

The Russian version of this entry (see link below) features a poll. I have included English translations in the poll and encourage all readers to participate. You'll need to register a free LiveJournal account to vote.

UPDATE: A story about the contest on the TeleMost website.

По-русски: Что сделать с телевизором?

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Hammering Screws with Wrenches

Sunday, July 13, 2008 12:45:00 AM

web, society, top10

The development of information technologies sometimes looks like the eternal fight between Good and Reason. Whatever great technical solutions people invent, others always come up with creative ways to abuse them. I tried to compile a list of ten things surrounding today's regular computer user that are often misused, often to the harm of the user. The criterion was that the misuse should be so widespread that the very usefulness of the particular technology is questioned, and software authors develop technical means to restrict or disable its use. As it's a hit parade, I'll start from the end.

10. <meta name="keywords">. This HTML element was intended to list the keywords for the web page to help search engines find pages relevant to given keywords. Of course, some webmasters were so eager to advertise their sites, “helped” so much that a search for a popular keyword would bring you anything but what you were looking for. Since 1998, search engines started ignoring <meta name="keywords">. The last search engine still honoring the keywords finally gave up on them in 2002.

9. Quoting in e-mail. Quoting fragments of an e-mail when replying to it helps the reader match particular statements in the original message with replies to them. Because an e-mail application doesn't know which parts of the message the user is going to reply, it has no other choice but to begin with quoting the entire message and let the user remove unwanted parts. Those users who don't adhere to selective quoting as means of providing context, as well as those who don't know how to use it, leave the entire quotation intact. As a result, correspondence between two such users is an ever-growing chain containing all the messages they've previously sent each other. Some modern e-mail applications implement automatic hiding of quotations.

8. Windows desktop. The desktop was conceived as a place where the user can temporarily store documents and other files being worked on, shortcuts to often-used applications and other frequently used items. And that's what happens, but every other application somehow thinks it will (or should) be used often, and therefore it deserves a shortcut on the user's desktop. This kind of rubbish gets mixed with the really useful items, turning the desktop into a mess. One version of Windows introduced a new feature: Desktop cleanup wizard that tries to guess what on the desktop the user needs and what is actually rubbish.

7. Notification area of Windows taskbar. This area, often incorrectly referred to as system tray, is a good place for running programs to display their realtime status because it's always visible. Today's typical Windows user has about ten icons there and doesn't know what most of them are for. Those small applets do anything (their author wants): preload “their” application for quick launch, notify about updates, show ads — except for actually showing any kind of realtime status. In Windows XP, Microsoft implemented a solution as brilliant as treating appendicitis with painkillers: they hide the icons the user doesn't want to see instead of providing an easy way to identify and remove the offending rubbishware.

6. Automatic startup on Windows logon. Some programs, such as a keyboard layout switcher, really make sense to start automatically, but the possibility for a program to put itself into the automatic startup list is really appreciated by authors of adware, spyware and other evil programs. To make it worse, there are several such lists, and a typical user doesn't even know about most of them. Plenty of programs exist for cleaning those up. Surprising is the inaction of Microsoft who, despite their increased attention to security in Windows Vista, still allow programs to get comfortable in a startup list without the user knowing.

5. Word processing software. These applications were invented to make preparation of documents with prevailing text and no special requirements for typography easier than it is with desktop publishing programs. For many modern users, “word processor” has become synonymous with “text editor”, and the complex, heavy formats of word processors are now widely used to store, and, even worse, transfer any text at all. An extreme case is an empty e-mail message with a Microsoft Word file attached. Many mailing list servers automatically delete such messages or strip these attachments to avoid annoying the subscribers and wasting bandwidth. Here one can also mention using spreadsheets to keep and transfer simple lists without any calculations.

4. HTML e-mail. Emphasizing important parts of a message, marking up headers and creating hyperlinks are really useful features. I'd love to have them if only they didn't come bundled with the usability disaster of HTML in e-mail. Authors of e-mail software who implement HTML message composition seem to think that the point of HTML is that the user can specify the color, font and background for his e-mail. Instead of logical markup describing the structure of a message we got means of decoration so much loved by teenagers and advertisers but so much annoying for everyone else. To make it worse, images loaded by HTML messages from remove servers are often used by spammers to track who actually opens their e-mails. Though the idea was that the plaintext alternative would only be used by old e-mail clients that don't support HTML, all those clients which do still have an option to use the plaintext version instead of HTML.

3. Browser detection. All web browsers introduce themselves to servers, so that those can detect what browser the user has and serve an appropriately “optimized” version. I don't know where webmasters got that idea, but many of them decided that, since they “support” a particular set of browsers, everybody else should simply be denied access: apparently, no web page at all is better than a web page that possibly doesn't work. There is a number of ways to detect the browser, some of which are based on particular distinctive features to check for. All modern browsers can spoof themselves for more popular ones to avoid being denied service. Even the current market leader isn't an exception: during the first episode of the browser wars, they had to make Internet Explorer identify as “Mozilla 4.0 (compatible; MSIE …)”, and that's what it still does after ten years.

2. Pop-up web pages. Opening a web page in a pop-up browser window can be useful when viewing enlarged images in a photo gallery, online help on using a web service or a shopping cart. Yet the most popular use of pop-up windows is to display in-your-face advertisement. Most modern browsers either come with a built-in pop-up blocker or have an add-on for that purpose. These pop-up blockers have to be smart enough to guess which pop-ups are legitimate and which are advertising rubbish.

1. E-mail. E-mail, one of the most important today's communication means, is plagued by the most severe technology abuse problem. The volume of spam is estimated to be 85–90% of all e-mail transferred in the world. The total losses from spam, including lost productivity, wasted technical resources and measures for dealing with spam is an order of hundreds of billions of dollars per year, while the costs for spammers are laughable. Technical means for dealing with spam are diverse, but none of them is able to solve the problem completely. Spam makes the practice of publishing your e-mail address as a means of communication questionable. In fear of robots harvesting e-mail addresses from public web pages, many users avoid publishing their addresses on open message boards or mangle them, for example by replacing @ with “at”.

По-русски: Забивание шурупов гаечными ключами

12 comments

Business Household Tips

Sunday, June 15, 2008 2:37:00 PM

humor, society

The web is full of tips for job candidates on how to write a decent resumé, how to behave in an interview and so on. On the other hand, there's a clear lack of advice for employers looking for good candidates. Here I'm making up for this lack basing on my recent experience from dealing with HR departments of various companies.

Healthy competition never harms business. It's only better if two of your HR managers make a go at the same candidate independently of each other.
Big companies often hire a staffing agency, and the biggest ones might want to hire several to help each other.
A conveyor is the best form of labor management. The better you manage to divide the hiring process into elementary operations and assign them to different people, the more candidates you'll be able to put through the production line in a unit of time.
There's no point in storing of the information you can always get from the candidate. Ask them for their full name, address and telephone number every time you need these.
Everybody wants to work for you, though not everyone realizes it yet. If you look for prospective candidates and approach them, always ask them to send you a copy of the CV you've found on their personal website, and inquire about why they want to work for your company.
Never miss a chance to approach an employee of your competitor. In the end, it's them, not you, who are bound with those non-compete clauses.
If you're in USA and arranging a phone interview with a European, write something like 03/04 12pm PST. Everyone knows that the day comes after the month, and that PST stands for Pacific Standard Time.
Engineers' work time is too valuable to have them conduct phone interviews. It's enough if an engineer prepares a list of questions with correct answers for the HR employees.
Always include a “tricky question” in your phone interviews. Collections of such questions you can easily find on the web.
If your teams have fixed interview schedules, assign candidates to teams basing on which interview comes next.
If possible, invite a European candidate to your American office, and the other way round.
Write an ultimate, ideal letter to a candidate and use it in all cases. Provide for all possibilities ranging from accepting a student for summer practice to enticing a superstar from a competitor. Start with “Dear Sir (Madam)”.
Ultimately, replace all your human HR managers with robots. Machines never eat, sleep or make mistakes, and some are even able to reproduce without going on maternity leave.

По-русски: Хозяйке предприятия на заметку

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<meta name="keywords" content="future, technology, abuse">

Tuesday, January 22, 2008 8:27:00 AM

web, society

What can you do when a vaguely familiar melody has taken over your head and threatens to not leave you alone until you recall where you heard it? You can try your friends and colleagues — it works sometimes. Doesn't help me, though: few of my current colleagues have heard, for example, the “Yeralash” TV show theme which I happened to remember today. But wouldn't it be cool if, say, Google indexed all the music published on the web and implemented searching among it! The user sings a fragment of a tune into the microphone, and the search engine finds melodies containing similar parts.

Theoretically, it's quite possible, though I doubt it would be commercially justified today. However, human is an ingenious creature, though this ingenuity doesn't always work for the mankind. There isn't a single technological achievement which man wouldn't find a way to abuse! Developers of the e-mail protocols didn't foresee spam, developers of HTTP didn't think of phishing (fraud using fake pages looking like banking websites). Some time ago, using meta keywords to find relevant web pages looked like a reasonable idea. With our present experience in the modern web, it's not that hard to imagine how the new type of search would be abused.

The simplest and mildest abuse would be recording and publishing advertisement songs to popular melodies. Such ads can easily be targeted, for example, Britney Spears' music could be used to target teenagers. A more aggressive approach: a commercial medley matching several different queries. An extreme case would be search spam, nonsensical sound files without a general musical structure, containing sequences of notes similar to those found in hundreds of popular songs; the only purpose of search spam is to redirect the user to the advertised website, often a fraudulent one, regardless of what they were searching for.

Of course, it's possible to devise technical measures against abuse, new ways to abuse against those technical measures, and so on. Given the modern pace of IT development, this scenario looks likely and usual. Typical sci-fi literature often misses out this important aspect of future technologies. It's hard to imagine holographic TV without annoying commercials, a “global data bank” (Internet, that is) without “search engine optimization” (it's a modern politically correct term for purposeful distortion of search results in favor of your web resources), and a future e-mail without spam. But I'm also sure that future will bring us conceptually new methods of abuse, impossible with the current technologies. We'll see.

По-русски: <meta name="keywords" content="технологии, будущее, злоупотребление">

1 comment

Cultural Exchange Between Doomed Civilizations

Sunday, October 21, 2007 3:32:00 PM

society, existence, sci-fi

You can mend a broken cup, straighten a car body and even rebuild a demolished building, but you cannot change the past. Cannot remove an awkward moment so that nobody remembers it, cannot make it as if a mistake you've made has never happened, cannot take back what you said carelessly. But it's the impossible that is the most desired! Along with eternal life, telepathy and teleportation, the topic of time travel is a fertile field for sci-fi writers for more than a century. The modern science doesn't rule out the possibility of one-way travel to the future, but is it that interesting? The most fruitful are those models of time travel that allow going to the past (or returning from the future) and thus spawn causality paradoxes. Some authors fondly ignore the arising contradictions, others build mystical and humorous effects upon them, and yet others construct complex models of the world to resolve the paradoxes.

One such model that allows for travel into the past has recently come to my mind. I haven't found any implementations of it in literature and am so far pretending to authorship. However, it's likely that someone had this idea before me; if it reminds you of some literary work, please comment.

On some planet there happened to arise life. In absence of competition, primitive organisms multiplied, adapted to various environment conditions, evolved into better developed species and finally gave rise to an intelligent being, for unambiguity let's say to human. Little by little, intelligent organisms built a civilization; empires grew, matured and collapsed; ages passed of stone, iron, gunpowder, electricity and atom. Sadly, the technological progress hadn't changed the man's essence, and the science was a slave of warfare in the stone age as well as in the time of atom. After a hundred generations of people who held the nuclear buttons, the hundred and first gave in to the primitive cruel chieftain sitting inside and unleashed the ultimate fatal war that destroys everything living on the planet, from human to amoeba.

The planet became unsuitable for life for billions of years, but numerous times the half-lives of the radioactive nuclei had passed, and the conditions on the surface became favorable for conception of life. Once again from a primitive organism to a humanoid, once again from a savage to a nuclear physicist, once again a fatal button, a world war and death of everything living. This happened several times, with inconceivable gaps of many billions of years between. Every evidence of a former civilization vanished in the abyss of time, and each time the mankind was unaware that there had been intelligent life on the planet before.

Of course, not only nuclear weapons could human minds produce. In its prosperity, each civilization gave many different fruits: developed medicine, computers, great works of art. Among many scientists, there always were those who invented something similar to the achievements of the former civilization because great minds think alike. Each time, by trial and error humans found electricity, radio, aircraft, microprocessor and… time machine. This machine worked according to the Novikov self-consistency principle: it was physically impossible to use it for such a travel that would generate a causality paradox. Because a travel into the past would allow an individual to affect oneself or one's ancestors and thus contradict the present, the machine couldn't perform such a travel. You couldn't go back a year, a hundred years, or a hundred centuries because of the physical limitations of the Universe, not on the designer's whim.

However, those who experimented with the time machine could easily find that it was quite possible to go into the very remote past, billions of years ago. This way, every civilization discovered the others that lived before. In a similar manner, it was possible to travel into the age of a future civilization and come back (but not before the time of departure) without generating a paradox. The possiblity of travel between the ages was determined by the fact that each civilization was doomed to collapse, and by changing something in a previous age, the traveller wouldn't change anything in one's own. Time travel gradually became usual, just like normal travel, and governments even had to pass laws to limit immigration from the past and the future. Cultural exchange between the former and later ages only further increased the similarity of historical processes and secured the same inevitable end.

The stability of this model is based on the postulate of inevitable convergence of macroscopic history to a predetermined outcome. If you like, the gloomy plot can be given a romantic development: in some age, a man is born whom the time machine cannot send into the past, and the reader realizes that this man is “the One”. He is predestined to bring ideas that will finally avert the imminent death. This is why the time machine cannot send him into a former age: otherwise the previous civilization would have survived until the present and generate a paradox. After numerous reincarnations, the new mankind finally finds a spark of hope for a better future.

По-русски: Культурный обмен между обречёнными цивилизациями

2 comments

Programmers are from Mars, Users are from Venus

Sunday, September 3, 2006 9:27:00 AM

poll, society, psychology

From all the features of my PDA, I only use two; all the others have turned out to be useless or unusable. Firstly, I read books with Haali Reader; secondly, I use the to-do list, but only to keep the shopping list for the supermarket. The look of this to-do list is trivial: there is a list with a square to the left of each line; the square can contain a check mark. This simple application also has a menu where I should point out two items:

Active tasks
Completed tasks

Obviously, tasks are subdivided into active and complete. Initially, I can see both kinds in the list. If I pick “Active tasks” in the menu, I'll only see the active tasks, and when I open the menu next time, there will be a check mark to the left of the “Active tasks” item. So I can only see active tasks (I've enabled this mode a year ago and have already forgotten what I did to get there), and now I want to see all the tasks. Question: what should I pick in the menu? Here is how I think: “Right now I can only see active tasks, and the ‘Active tasks’ menu item is checked. I cannot see any completed tasks, and the ‘Completed tasks’ item is unchecked. It seems like the categories of tasks currently shown have check marks in the menu. In addition to the active tasks that I already see, I also want to see the completed tasks, so I need the ‘Completed tasks’ menu item to have a check mark. Usually, when I want a check mark to appear for a menu item, I have to click the item.” Of course, I make a decision like this rather intuitively, but it is actually backed by reasoning like this. After considering this for a second, I pick “Completed tasks” in the menu, and what I get is… the list of only the completed tasks! After that, the “Completed tasks” menu item has a check mark, but the “Active tasks” item hasn't. At a second attempt, I realize that, in order to see all the tasks, I have to remove the check mark from the menu item that has it, which returns the system to the “normal” state (as opposed to the “special” modes where only active or only completed tasks are shown). Of course, I'm long used to such behavior of this application, but I've never understood it and have rather memorized the “irregularity”, just like I had to remember that the marks for cold and hot water in my bathroom are switched. Every time I use the tap, I routinely recall, “The wrong way!” and tilt it to the side marked with red to get cold water. Similarly, every time I use the menu in the to-do list application, I recall that it works “the wrong way”. Earlier, when I encountered such interface solutions working “the wrong way”, I thought them to be bugs or design mistakes. However, mistakes of this kind are quite common and are often similar to each other, fitting in a pattern. Moreover, such solutions are often found in applications and devices that non-technical users usually describe as simple, intuitive, easy and convenient to use. It seems like there are two approaches to interface between a human and a machine, and maybe even two systems of thinking. I might not have chosen the best names for them, and someone might have already described and studied them, but nevertheless I'll try to provide brief descriptions.

Object-oriented approach: This approach is often found in technical experts, especially programmers. The approach is centered around the notion of an object (such as a document or the system as whole). An object can be in one of a multitude of states, and it transitions from one state to another under influence of various factors, including user actions. In order to control the object, it's important to know its current state, that's why this approach great attention is paid to informativeness of the interface, that is, to its ability to inform the user about the current states of objects. The problem the user is facing is perceived as the difference between the current and the desired states of the system, and is solved by applying the inputs necessary to get the system into the desired state. To solve a problem successfully, one has to understand the structure of the system, its possible states and the transitions between them, that's why the object-oriented approach favors documentation that describes concepts, principles and the overall system organization.
Procedure-oriented approach: This approach is prevalent in people who aren't technical experts. The approach is centered around the notion of a task. In order for a problem to be solved, it has to match one of the tasks that the application or device is designed for (ideally), or at least to be possible to break up into a sequence of such tasks. The problem is solved by applying the inputs that get the system to produce the desired result. That's why the procedure-oriented approach favors documentation that provides step-by-step instructions for solving typical problems. Because the critical part is knowing what input is necessary to perform a task, attention is paid to discoverability of these inputs (toolbars, context hints).

It's hard for me to write about the procedure-oriented approach because it's not how I think, and everything that's made that way feels unnatural to me. The conclusions I'm making are based not on my personal experience from using this approach but rather on the analysis of the systems following it. I'm surprised not by the very existence of two different approaches, but rather by the gap between them that is so wide that people following one of them can't even project the thoughts of those following the other approach onto themselves. The existence of these two approaches answers a lot of questions:

Why cannot programmers design a good interface for non-programmers?
Why do televisions and videotape recorders have such “stupid” menus that an experienced programmer often cannot configure them without the manual?
Why are the “easy to use” image processing applications (that often come along on a CD with a scanner or a digital camera) unusable?
Why don't you have to press “Enter” on a doorbell after entering a one-, two-, or three-digit apartment number?
Why do home appliances so often have those (annoying to many programmers) automatic transitions from one state to another after a delay?
Why cannot many people master programming?

On the other hand, new questions arise:

Is the bias towards one of the two approaches inborn or is it rather acquired with upbringing?
Can a person following one of the approaches learn to use the other one?
Does schooling affect the choice of approach?
Does the object-oriented approach determine the choice in favor of a technical occupation, or is it the other way round?

The original entry in Russian features a poll: Object-oriented vs. procedure-oriented approach. It is possible to vote in the poll after logging in to LiveJournal; registration of LiveJournal accounts is free. Which of the approaches better describes your way of thinking?

Object-oriented approach.
Procedure-oriented approach.
A third approach not described here (please comment).
The subdivision into the two approaches is fundamentally flawed (please comment).

Please don't vote if you haven't read all of the above. Also don't vote and accept my apologies if you regard asking the question inappropriate. UPDATE: I have to agree with kalinka_malinka. This entry is an example of how to run knowingly non-representative surveys. UPDATE: Another interesting aspect of the problem (in Russian). По-русски: Все программисты с Марса, все пользователи с Венеры

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Serving Those who Serve the People

Saturday, July 22, 2006 9:17:00 AM

poll, society, psychology, economics

Some work just for money, others achieve immediate satisfaction from doing the job, and for others still it's important that their work is of use to someone. Isn't it nice to know that a person becomes a little more happy, content and healthy from what you do for them? It's easy to feel something like this when you work as a hairdresser: a man comes shaggy-haired and leaves with a trendy haircut, saying thank you to you as he looks in the mirror. It gets harder if you repair hairdressing equipment. A man wouldn't have his haircut without this work as well, but he doesn't experience it directly. There seem to be different kinds of services: some of them are rendered to a person directly, and some are only indirect. For a more detailed classification of services by this principle let's consider the following set of rules.

Services rendered to a person directly are first order services.
Services rendered to subjects rendering nth order services are services of order n+1.
Production of goods is comparable to rendering of services. For example, baking bread is rendering a first order services.
Performing work as an employee is considered rendering a service to the employer if the nature of the service is substantially different from what the employer (the enterprise) renders to its consumers. For example, an employed hairdresser renders a first order service, but a packer at a confectionery renders a second order service to the enterprise because this service (packing) is different from the service rendered by the enterprise to its consumers (supply of finished confectionery articles).
Reselling of goods or services without introducing a qualitative change in their nature doesn't increase the order of service.

I work for SWsoft, Inc, a company that makes web hosting automation software. Here is how I analyze the order of my service:

When browsing a website, an internet user consumes first order services from the content author. (Of course, there are specialized websites for those who render specific services of various orders, but our web hosting automation software are not specifically tailored for hosting of such websites, so this fact doesn't increase the order of the service.)
The author uses a web hoster's service to host the website. This is a second order service. The end user mentioned above doesn't experience this service directly.
The web hoster routinely uses the automation software made by our company. Even though sometimes content authors use it as well, it's targeted at those who sell web hosting services, and contains specialized tools for this. Therefore, the web hoster consumes a third order service by purchasing our software.
Finally, I personally render a fourth order service to the company by working as a software architect. My output is not finished software, it's substantially different from what the company offers to the consumers, so my services are of the fourth order.

This concludes the chain because there aren't any special goods or services targeted at software architects for web hosting automation products. Even though there are products targeted at software architects in general (such as Rational software), they aren't specific to architects in this particular branch and therefore have a lower order. The higher the order of services, the narrower the specialization of labor. Higher orders become possible only with overall advancement of the industry characterized by increased branching of trades. I'm not sure if it's for good or bad, but I'm sure that there wasn't anything like fourth order services a couple hundred years ago. High order services make the service circulation chain longer. For example, in a small 19th century town the shoemaker would fix the barber's shoes, and the barber would shave the shoemaker's beard. The chain was two persons long. The distance could be bigger between some other professions, but not a lot. It's much harder now to trace the circulation of services between a web hosting automation software architect and a lawyer in an auditing company. Back to the original topic: the opportunity for satisfaction from realizing that your work is useful quickly diminishes with the growth of the order of services. Starting with something like the third order, it's nearly impossible, so those who render such services have to look out for other ways of getting satisfaction. For example, to me the work itself is interesting as an abstract task that I'm constantly solving. The original entry in Russian features a poll: Your work. It is possible to vote in the poll after logging in to LiveJournal; registration of LiveJournal accounts is free. What kind of work do you do? Examples: fixing televisions, writing articles for a financial magazine, driving a subway train. What order are the services you render? (1…6) What is the primary source of the satisfaction the work brings you?

Knowing that I'm doing a useful job.
The very process of working.
Knowledge, experience, or physical form I gain.
Communication with colleagues, partners, clients.
Money.
My work doesn't bring me satisfaction.

Please don't vote if you haven't read all of the above. It's also interesting if you trace your service chain in a comment like I traced mine. UPDATE: The average service order according to the poll participants is suspiciously close to π. По-русски: Трудиться на благо тех, кто трудится на благо народа

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Factors for Reproduction of Social Viruses

Saturday, January 21, 2006 1:31:00 PM

mathematics, society, psychology

Note: This has been initially posted as a comment in a discussion about a recent epidemic of a social virus about a little girl needing blood for transfusion. The fake message has been started by a LiveJournal user, and contained a plea to forward it to as many people as possible. During the recent epidemic, I've got the message saying that someone needs B group blood dozens of times, and the shocking thing about it was that some of the people I got it from were:

Smart people, and I've got no doubt about it. I can warrant that some of the people whom I got the message from are smart, I've been studying together with them and I know them rather well. They are capable of complex mental activity both at work and in private life (so that it's not “common idiocy” when a professional outside of his workplace is helpless and naïve like a child).
People we haven't talked with for quite a while. If those people decided to send the message to me, it means they were sending it to everyone in the contact list, and maybe even outside the contact list.

The most scaring is that the first and the second groups have non-empty intersection. A little analysis. None of the forwarders tried to change the text or at least add something to it like “Do you think it's true? What if it is?” to express their degree of trust for this information. Does it mean everyone trusted it for 100%? Of course not. Maybe the hoax got them convinced for 60%, and they decided to forward it. But forwarding or not forwarding is discrete, it's either 0 or 100%. This way, 60% is rounded up to 100%, so we end up with stable reproduction of the worm. If every forwarder expressed their degree of trust, after three or four hops the information would “fade out” and turn into a tale that nobody is going to believe. It's this “rounding” that ensures the reproduction of the worm: the forwarded message looks exactly the same as the original. No gossip transferred the traditional way, through mouth and ears, achieves such steady reproduction as an electronic rumor gets nowadays when text can be copied and forwarded without distortion (experiments show that oral rumors, even when the forwarders are actively trying to reproduce the information exactly, get distorted to full loss of content after ten hops, and after three or four they loose half of the meaningful content). Why does spam about this subject get reproduced the most steadily? One could build a mathematical model of gossip reproduction with the following parameters:

Persuasion threshold — the degree of belief necessary for the reader to take the information seriously.
Eloquence coefficient — the factor (usually less than one, but may as well be greater) expressing how the persuasiveness of the message changes when it's forwarded once. For electronic messages forwarded by verbatim copying, the factor equals to one.
Distribution factor — the number of recipients that a single participant decides to forward the information to when 100% convinced.
Connectedness characteristic — a property of the acquaintance graph (the average number of common contacts that two people in contact have).

Because the connectedness characteristic is a property of the medium and doesn't depend on the message content, this leaves us with the remaining three values. All of them affect the process of message distribution. When the persuasion threshold is high, the eloquence factor is low, or the distribution factor is low, the process fades out after some predictable number of links. This is what happens to most of the lucky mails: you usually get them from a contact or two, but no real epidemic begins. However, when the aggregate attenuation factor (the ratio of the number of active forwarders on the current iteration to that number on the previous iteration) that depends on the aforementioned parameters is greater or equal to one, the process doesn't fade out but instead continues until all closely-linked part of the acquaintance graph is informed. In practice, that means informing close to all potential forwarders in the Russian part of the Internet. The persuasion threshold, the eloquence factor and the distribution factor depend on the message content. What made the aggregate attenuation factor exceed one in this case? The persuasion threshold, as it seems, is lowered for messages of this type because people prefer to be safe than sorry: “I'm only 25% convinced that it's true, but if it is, I could save someone's life by forwarding this”. However, the potential forwarders in LiveJournal are gullible enough already, one just has to remember this: “They're going to make ICQ a paid service. To not let it happen, please forward this to all your friends”. So I don't think it was the persuasion threshold that played the crucial role. The eloquence factor of one is also typical for electronic communication (though in some cases the forwarders decide to retell the message in their own words, which usually makes the eloquence factor less than one). This leaves us with the distribution factor. An indirect confirmation to this is that I received the message from some people I rarely talk to. It's for this specific kind of information that the distributors feel it especially important to maximize the number of recipients by all means because they think that someone's life depends on it. (The latter might not be exactly true. For the most, as it seems to me, it's more important to ease their own conscience than to save the little girl's life, and to ease the conscience, one has to perform the ritual of forwarding the message to everyone possible, so that one can say: “I did for the unfortunate wretch everything I could”.) По-русски: Факторы воспроизводства социальных вирусов

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The 21st Century: Goodbye to Quality?

Saturday, October 29, 2005 12:11:00 PM

poll, society, economics

According to a story of unknown credibility, on the border of the 19th and 20th centuries investors considered automobile to be economically hopeless. Nevertheless, Henry Ford had managed to obtain a credit of $1400 to build automobile construction under very tight conditions. It seemed that the revenue from car sales wouldn't be able to cover the investment within the term for which Ford could get the credit. Henry Ford might never have become the man who made automobile available for millions of people — if not for the idea, brilliant in its economical efficiency, that came to his mind. The idea was to produce cars deliberately less reliable than it was possible, and to make money by selling spare parts. A quote attributed to Ford: “I make cars to sell parts for them”. The new business model let Ford build a profitable enterprise, return the credit in time, and become the world's first mass producer of cars. Ford brought much to both industry and society. For example, the modern 40-hours week and the very notion of “weekend” became de-facto standard after having been implemented at Ford Motor Company. However, one of his innovations, namely “to make a worse product than you can when it's economically justified”, gave the world a dubious gain. Of course, if not for Ford, someone else would have come up with this idea, great in its simplicity; or maybe someone already had implemented it before him. Today you can see live examples of this wherever you look, and it's time to think about the reasons and consequences of this phenomenon. It's important to note the difference between production of goods or services of simply low quality and production with quality deliberately lower than the producer is capable of ensuring. For example, a software producer who releases software with bugs doesn't necessarily fall into this category because it's impossible to get rid of all bugs (moreover, it's possible than the capabilities of this producer are so limited that they can't make less than one bug per ten lines of code, or that the programmer does a bad job because he's underpaid). We are more interested in a producer who releases software without sufficient debugging in order to make money on paid support or upgrades. So what are the reasons that can make it economically justified to make deliberately worse products than it's possible?

Releasing unreliable products stimulates demand for add-on goods or services (spare parts, repairs, tech support).
Short life of the product stimulates demand for more units in replacement of broken or worn out ones.
Low prime cost of a low-quality product allows to bring the consumer prices down and obtain greater revenue by entering the mass market.
Low-quality goods are possible to produce faster or in larger quantities, which leads to competitive advantage over those who make quality goods.
In the modern market, quality is no more the primary tool of competition, inferior to, for example, efficient advertising.
The market has come to a situation where, for the above reasons, all the competitors release low-quality products; under such conditions it doesn't make sense to try to achieve better quality in this branch because the consumer will have to choose among the available offers anyway.

It's hard to say whether it's good or bad that Henry Ford's approach is widely implemented in modern industry. Of course, many consumer products, such as cars, we'd never have seen without it, or they would be elite goods available to just a few. On the other hand, the lowering of quality directly affects the consumer. It's especially prominent due to the last reason in the list: as a chain reaction, it impels the makers to skimp on quality more and more in order to gain competitive advantage by other means (low prices, high volumes, advertising). Competition based on “who makes better” seems to have been left out of the modern economy and survived only in particular branches with very specific markets. Each one of us is both a producer and a consumer. At work, we take part in production of goods or services, the rest of the time we consume what others produce. As a consumer, everyone is, of course, interested in having quality goods, however, as a producer, one might find it profitable to skimp on quality. Obviously, a single person's attitude towards quality can be contrastingly different when they routinely switch between the two roles. This means that there must be a conflict point somewhere where two approaches meet. In my opinion, there are three possible models for a person's attitude towards quality:

One can accept that most of what one consumes is of low quality, just like what one produces.
One can have double standards and expect high quality goods from the market while making low-quality production.
Finally, one can demand quality of the goods offered and have the same attitude towards one's own output.

It's worth noting that an employee who follows the third model is inevitably in explicit or, more commonly, implicit conflict with the employer who strives to save on quality. I must say I'm of the third kind. The second model I can't fit in my head at all, and for the first one I'm probably too old-fashioned. Having done some creative work well brings me direct æsthetic satisfaction, and it's for this satisfaction that I'm working in this particular branch and at this particular enterprise. Recently I've turned down an offer of a significantly higher salary elsewhere for a job that I could do but which was completely uninteresting to me. Having taken this decision, I've realized that I don't only work for money; an important part of what I get from my work is the very æsthetic satisfaction that I wouldn't have if I did a worse job than I can in favor of, say, production rate. This means that my and my employer's goals are unfortunately different: I squeeze the maximum æsthetic pleasure from my job by doing it as well as I can, while the employer strives for tighter timeframes, higher volume and everything else but quality. This conflict of interest is currently implicit. If it becomes explicit, I'll have to change my job. The original entry in Russian features a poll: How do you combine the two attitudes towards quality?. It is possible to vote in the poll after logging in to LiveJournal; registration of LiveJournal accounts is free. How do you combine the two attitudes towards quality?

Model 1.
Model 2.
Model 3.
A totally different model (please comment).
I don't face this problem (please comment).

Please don't vote if you haven't read all of the above. По-русски: XXI век: прощай, качество?

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Full Speed Astern!

Monday, October 10, 2005 4:39:00 PM

programming, society, gamedesign

Is there anyone who never played strategy computer games? Even those who aren't fans of the genre know that all strategy games model development. From primitive communism to capitalism, from cabins to skyscrapers, from a village to a megapolis, from a savage tribe to a superstate. This is what all the strategy games I've heard of are based upon. As you advance through them, the infrastructure becomes more complicated, more technologies become available, weapons advance. As a result, all modern strategy games are essentially reimplementations of several immortal prototypes, just with new graphics and sound effects. Among these prototypes are Dune, Civilization, King's Bounty and some others. It's time for something new. So, as usual, exercising my rights as inveterate dilettante and pencil-pusher, I hasten to publish my idea for a strategy game.

In contrast to traditional strategy games, the goal of the new game will be retrogression instead of progression. As we know, progress is not only good for you but also bad for you, and some of its bitter fruits our generation already has to enjoy. Let's make as pessimistic a peek into the future as we can, and we'll have the starting conditions for the new game. The player is entrusted with a country suffering from various negative effects of technical, economical and social advancement. Not a big or small one, just your typical fictitious country with a western-type mentality. The ecology is rubbish, the gene pool keeps degenerating, the national health fades away before your eyes, the society suffers from poverty and unemployment, the birth rate is plummeting down. Without player's intervention, the whole population is doomed to extinction in a century or two, which would be several hours of playing time. The only way to fix the situation is to gradually abandon the achievements of progress: hazardous industry, pernicious technology, unhealthy lifestyle.

Every next mission in the game starts off with a worse situation than before. The first mission has it just slightly harder than what we currently have in Russia. The further, the worse it gets, and closer to the end of the game people live under transparent domes because the air outside is poisoned by hazardous production. They've forgotten how to walk because they get used to individual vehicles since infancy. Nobody can see a thing without glasses with huge lenses. All kinds of information about a person, from the ID to the preferred flavor of synthetic meat, is stored in the centralized database, and one can't even go to the toilet without access to it. Only few courageous couples dare to have kids because the last healthy baby has been born maybe a century ago. Until the age of 6 or 8, every child usually lives in a hospital where they usually undergo primary education — of course, through a computer. Even prohibition of abortion and contraception wouldn't help increase the birth rate because of the popularity of adult entertainment technologies that substitute for the real sex. Prohibition of these technologies as well, and any other prohibitions or sudden changes can easily lead to a sharp increase in suicide rate because, as one might have guessed, a healthy mind is also a rare occasion. As a result, the population would still go down, so there aren't any quick and easy solutions in the game. Ultimately, at the last level, a human is essentially a brain with life support systems connected to the Internet, and it's up to the game developers whether it's going to be at all possible to complete this last mission.

In the beginning of each mission the player is given a goal consisting of several conditions. Each of the conditions has to be met in order to complete the mission. One of the conditions will always be to achieve a certain rate of yearly population growth (though the growth is always negative at start, that is, the population is diminishing). The other conditions are specific to the mission. For example, they can be to bring the infant mortality rate down to a certain threshold, to abandon the radioactive production, to have a thousand people who can walk on foot, or even (at one of the last missions) to have one baby born naturally, without in vitro fertilization or artificial incubation.

A fairly standard set of strategy game tools is at the player's disposal. One can construct and demolish buildings, adjust economical parameters such as taxes, run incentive campaigns that economically stimulate those meeting certain criteria (for example, parents with two kids), change the legislation within certain limits, encourage or discourage some scientific, social or cultural activities, and (this is one of the most powerful tools) use the highly developed mass media to induce one or another way of thinking and acting and affect the popular preferences.

One point is so important that it's worth reiteration: there can be no quick and easy solutions or winning strategies. For example, you can't simply remove the transparent domes because the air outside is poisoned. If you stop the hazardous production that poisons the air, people will starve without the resources they need. This means that an alternative has to be prepared. All transitions have to be smooth, and any radical action does more bad than good. One of the responsibilities of the quality assurance department when testing the game should be looking for winning strategies. Any very simple algorithm that leads to completion of the mission should be considered a grave defect that has to be fixed, most probably by adjusting the weights of various factors and interdependencies in the game model.

Unfortunately, I'm almost sure that this idea will never be implemented. Hardly any game manufacturer will be impressed by it (most probably, they won't even find out about it). But I'd really like to play such a game myself, even though I'm not a fan of strategy games.

По-русски: Полный назад!

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Why do we Bury our Dead?

Saturday, November 20, 2004 8:02:00 PM

poll, society, psychology

Note: This entry has been originally written about the Russian society. It may or may not be relevant to European or North-American societies which I know next to nothing about. It has occurred to me that, be it for the better or worse, our modern society has ceased to honor many traditions of the past. Of course, there are many religious rituals practiced by one or another group of the society, but there is hardly another kind of traditions that are still as mandatory for everyone as those related to death: funeral, burial, mourning. These rituals have managed to stay general while all the others became internal to specific social layers or groups. This is why the expression “ritual services” nowadays is unambiguously understood as pertaining to this particular category of rituals. However, it's not that straightforward. When most members of the society do something similar, it doesn't mean they all have the same reasons to do it. For example, the original idea behind clothes was protection from cold and rain, and that's how it's still used up to date, but it's hard to believe that a girl going to a beach wears bikini to keep herself warm. A possible reason of the special treatment of burial rituals in the modern atheistic society is that death is one of the few transcendent phenomena that people encounter in their everyday life. Death, cessation of conscience, transition between living and lifeless — this is probably the only phenomenon surrounding our lives that can't be explained with the laws of materialistic science. Other such phenomena, such as existence of the Universe, irreversibility of time, are just as well incognizable, but they don't apply to our daily life directly, don't intrude into it and make changes that can't go unnoticed. Death literally “makes” us respect it, and this might be why the modern society, having lost the universal respect for the Sun, Earth, Life, Creator, still retains the universal respect for the death. After thinking about it for a while, I've come up with a list of four dominant reasons that make people respect the burial traditions. These four reasons could be called kind of stages because each next one originates from the previous, reinterpreting and enhancing it. I'm not judging these reasons here and not claiming that one of them is somehow better than another; I'm also not trying to study the direction of historical development that transforms the previous reason to the next. This is just an attempt of unbiased analysis. Here follow the four dominant motives for honoring the burial rituals.

1. Pragmatical.: This is the most ancient motive, and it's hardly ever found in modern societies (though it might still dominate in some remaining tribes). The transcendent and the ordinary were so tightly intertwined in the life of ancient societies that death could hardly pretend to any special place among the other, not yet cognized phenomena. The burial rituals were regarded as commonplace actions with immanent tight causality. When placing a sword and a shield into a dead warrior's tomb, the ancient hardly felt themselves executing a ritual; it was rather a common action necessary to prepare the dead for future fights in the afterlife. The need for it was as obvious as a living warrior's need for ammunition.
2. Symbolical.: Compared to the previous motive, the perception of ritual actions has changed from direct to indirect via symbols. It seems like the point of transition was the use of magical symbols (such as pentagrams) guarding the dead from demons. It's important that a pentagram, unlike a sword, is not a direct bearer of some force, but it rather signifies such a force. This transition is caused by delimitation between the transcendent and the ordinary: phenomena such as death are no more common components of everyday life, and it's only through symbols that interaction with them is now possible. Most modern rituals dealing with death seem to have originated under domination of this motive. The tombstone, coffin, burial and mourning in cultures based on Christianity or Judaism are symbols signifying the respect of the living for the dead and helping the souls to find peace. It is important that an individual realizes the meaning of the symbols. The causality is still strong because the nominal meaning of the symbols is regarded as their actual role (a pentagram is a real defense weapon).
3. Formal.: The nominal value of the symbols is retained but their causal role is lost. Burial is still perceived as something done for the dead, but there is no clear understanding of how it helps the dead and what would happen if the ritual is neglected. I suspect that this motive is dominant for most of the modern population of Russia. It's worth noting that as an incentive, this motive can be no weaker or even stronger than the previous one: the loss of causal reward is compensated by the obsession to do everything properly.
4. Social.: Like a fourth derivative, this motive is a product of further regression of the third one. Not only the alleged factual role of the symbols, but also their nominal value is lost. An individual no more thinks that the dead really need burying. The grief from the death of a close relative changes its central object, shifting from sympathizing the dead (“poor Yorick!”) to dealing with the loss by the living (“how can I live without Yorick?”); condolence becomes important. The living perform the burial not for the dead but rather for each other, projecting onto each other the retained from the previous stage and now self-sustaining need for proper execution of the ritual. A variation of this motive is when someone conducts the ritual not for another person, but in order to follow the ethical or formal laws of the society; I'd still call it the social motive because it's the incentive originates from the individual's socialization.

Undoubtedly, any classification of imprecisely expressed phenomena is doomed to be imperfect, and it's possible to point out a multitude of transitional types between any two; also, the same individual can behave under influence of different motives at different times in life. The original entry in Russian features a poll: A small statistic survey not pretending to be representative. It is possible to vote in the poll after logging in to LiveJournal; registration of LiveJournal accounts is free. Which of the motives best describes your personal reasons for conducting burial rituals?

Pragmatical.
Symbolical.
Formal.
Social.
I have no reasons to conduct burial rituals.
The described classification of motives is fundamentally flawed (please comment).

Please don't vote if you haven't read all of the above. Also don't vote and accept my apologies if you regard asking the question inappropriate. Ready to be bashed by specialists in cultural studies and sociology as well as other interested parties. PS: Did you think it's going to be all screwdrivers? По-русски: Почему мы хороним своих мертвецов

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