Confidence is a preference of the habitual voyeur of what is known as…
Recently, I’ve started asking for people’s confidence levels (from0% to 100%) of project-related events happening. And although in itsearly stages, I’ve been disappointed by the results thus far,confidence generally being way higher than the reality.
RichardFeynman beautifully exposed the flawed methodology behind riskassessment at Nasa in his role on the commission to investigate the1986 Challenger disaster. Nasa failed to realise (admit?) that if there arelots of uncorrelated bits of the Shuttle each with a near 100%probability of surviving the mission, each of which is critical toavoid disaster, then the probability of the Shuttle returning safelyto Earth can fall unacceptably short of 100%.
The realisation of risks in projects I manage has a lesser impact. But an impact nonetheless. So I intend to keep alog of all the confidence estimates I receive (column B), together with theperson whose confidence is being shared (column A) and the binary outcome of theevent in which they have confidence (column C, 1 meaning the predicted event happened, 0 meaning it didn’t). I figure that if people’sconfidence levels are true reflections of reality, then the sum of column B will equal the sum of column C. And sumifs based on people’s names will identify the optimists, realists and pessimists.
=SUMIF(A:A,"John Smith",B:B)/SUMIF(A:A,"John Smith",C:C) will give me an optimism quotient for John. I can then divide any confidence percentage I receive from him by the quotient to get a more realistic view of whether the event will happen.
3G coldspot: an update
I’ve mentioned before the existence of a 3G coldspot around Vauxhall. Here’s an update, with further data now available.
The coldspotbegins midway across Vauxhall Bridge. By midway, I mean midway.Literally. The rising half of the bridge brings with it a successfulinterface with the internet. As soon as the bus tips to descend downthe gentle slope of the western half of the bridge, the connection disappears. Entirely. I knowexactly when my last Google Reader article download can be made, and Ihave to choose it carefully, to maximise my coldspot reading pleasure. The coldspot continues up the full lengthof Millbank and St. Margaret Street, round the perimeter of ParliamentSquare, ending at the turn on to Parliament Street, at which point, the 3G warmth returns. Bloody annoying,I tell you. And here is the 3G coldspot map.
http://intranet
Following Icann’s decision to allow a free-for-all of TLDs, my plan is to register http://intranet and make my millions through advertising aimed at users looking for their colleagues. Don’t tell anyone though; it’ll be our little secret.
Question time
My friend Rob is stepping into the world of psychology. It’s a bold move that he took a couple of years ago, leaving behind the world of management consulting in favour of mental stuff (stuff about the mind, that is), having spent the intervening years learning stuff at university.
Anyway, my friend Rob would like your help, and I too would like it if you would help him. It’s a survey. It’s for his dissertation. And your reward for 20 minutes’ effort is knowing that you’ve helped him. What more could you ask for?
Please click on this link to take the survey. I thank you, as indeed will Rob.
Westwood in da field
The controversy should not be over Jay-Z headlining Glastonbury. The controversy should be over the fact that Westwood is there to represent him from a reporting perspective.
Weetabix
Not sure why, but the strapline for the ’80s TV advert for Weetabix has entered my head recently and not found its way out. I’m quite enjoying it.
If you know what’s good for you, you do, OK! Weetabix!
What’s on the menu?
Thinking about it, the Ribbons in Excel 2007 are not that revolutionary. They’re horizontal, visual representations of what were the dropdowns that appeared from the menu bars; re-organised allegedly to be more logically grouped. For some reason, I felt that they were marketed as something more than that in the run-up to the launch of Vista and Office 2007.
It’s the re-organisation that troubles me, possibly because the grouping is still not fully logical, possibly because it’s different from the File | Edit | View | Insert | Format | Tools | Data | Window grouping of its predecessor. I read a very short article on Daily Dose of Excel recently that said nothing more than if you can’t find what you’re looking for in Excel 2007, you’ll find it on the Insert menu.
Apologies: I’m rambling, but I’m allowed given the title of the blog. (I’ve never really considered after naming the blog whether it lives up to its name. Another segue.) Basically, I still don’t quite know where to look for stuff in Excel 2007. My preconceptions are obviously still there, formed by 20 years in Lotus 1–2–3 and pre-2007 versions of Excel. But when I can’t immediately find something now, I try to ask myself “where would it logically be” and often fail to come up trumps. The Home menu doesn’t seem right to me, combining lots of formatting stuff with content movement (Copy/Cut, Paste and its various offspring, insertion and deletion of columns and rows), and sorting and filtering.
To me, it would make more sense to have a Format menu item and an Operate item, the latter to cover the likes of insertion and deletion, clearing, filling, finding, selecting. (Shit! I’ve just realised that almost nothing in the Edit sub-menu within Home has anything to do with editing. Sort, Filter, Find, Select, Sum, Fill have nothing to do with editing!) All of your filtering and sorting should be firmly in the Data menu item.
And why the fuck PivotTable/PivotChart button is under the Insert menu and not the Data menu beggars belief. (If everything inserted goes in the Insert menu, then why don’t Insert Function and Insert Row/Column join the party?)
I like the concept. However I believe there was a set of workshops held by Microsoft (some of the most important workshops in Excel’s history) in which Post-Its containing all of Excel’s functions were arranged into areas on a whiteboard. But the wrong people turned up. (I didn’t get an invite.) So the result is OK, but it’s not quite right.
As an aside, I’m wondering whether things should ever appear in more than one location. Or should everything have one and only one home?
BTW, I’ve held off on writing such a post until a month after starting to use Office 2007, to allow my opinion to mature.
Pocket rationalisation programme
The contents of my pockets are reaching mammoth proportions, and that’s not me boasting!
As I posted some time ago, summer exacerbates the issue surrounding pocket contents, as there are more things to carry with you (sunglasses) with fewer pockets across which to distribute the contents (owing to the lack of coats and the like). Of late, my pockets are asked (at various parts of the day) to support some or all of: iPod, wallet, BlackBerry, phone (a chunky MDA Vario 3), keys, loose change, sunglasses.
Having done a benefits analysis, a pocket rationalisation programme has been commissioned which aims to significantly reduce the volume of artefacts that will be supported by my pockets. The programme will include a stream to assess the number of necessary objects, one to understand the most appropriate transportation device for the objects (pocket or other), and one to assess the volume of each—there is thought to be scope for reducing the volume of both the wallet and sunglasses case. There will be an underlying change management piece aimed at instilling new ways of working in myself to avoid future Costanza-esque wallet proportions.
Our kitchenware delivery system
My daughter rarely sees the dishwasher being loaded, as most of this activity is conducted after she’s fast asleep. So she only ever sees it being emptied, something I often do with her ‘help’ at 6.30am while her breakfast is warming. Given that she only ever sees clean dishes being taken out of the machine and loaded into the relevant cupboards, maybe she thinks it’s a kitchenware delivery machine, new crockery and cutlery being delivered to the house every morning. How cool would that be?
My gain is your gain
About a week ago, I unsubscribed from the digg feed in Google Reader. The move has added immeasurable value to my life, saving me from navigating through pages and pages of tat in search of that mediocre gem of a story on my morning bus journey to work. I can instead spend the very time saved writing similarly tatty posts to contribute to the wealth of information and drivel that is the internet. Everyone’s a winner.
Musical gerunds
As far as I’m aware, there are few songs whose titles are a non-finite clause including a gerund. (Surprised no one else has writen about this very subject.) The only two I can think of are Squeeze’s Pulling Mussels from a Shell and Shed Seven’s Chasing Rainbows. The only such band is Counting Crows, although not sure whether this is acting as a present participle.
That is all.
Google: ripping the heart and soul out of the internet?
Google is great. Probably not the opening sentence you’d expect given the post’s title. Let me explain.
If I had a multitude of email accounts, I could get all of my mails consolidated into a single place, all with a lovely Google-esque front-end. My calendar is similarly lovely in its Google look-and-feel. And with Google Reader, all textual content I could ever wish to read is also presented in a comforting, consistent interface, all of the titles appearing underlined in blue (to indicate their clickability), content in Arial black, mimicking the interface of its other offerings, Search included. Hell, even Google’s adverts are comfortingly consistent.
But has this consistency and predictability ripped the very heart and soul out of the internet? I no longer visit my friends’ blogs; nor more business-related ones. Instead I access them via Google Reader. When I shared the concept of this post with a colleague today, he relayed a recent story of someone asking him whether he liked his blog’s re-design. “What re-design?” came my friend’s reply, as like me he’d been accessing all of the guy’s content via Google Reader. Before and after the re-design, all content had been available in 12-point Arial black, with bold, blue, underlined headings and blue, underlined links.
Information has been commoditised, in a similar way to how Apple has commoditised music with iTunes. We as users have gained hugely through consistency, immediacy and ease of access. But we have lost out too. No longer are we delighted by the beauty of someone’s site design, nor do we appreciate the painstaking effort that has gone into the stylesheets that underpin it. Instead, we scroll through our content through a consistent front-end, hungry for the content itself over and above the beauty of its presentation. With iTunes, content of the musical variety is accessible literally at the click of a button, without the opportunity to experience the joys of the physical products that accompany the music, the record sleeve, the vinyl itself, or the CD artwork and the booklet’s contents.
Maybe it’s time to take a step back, to appreciate the frame within which the content sits, or to appreciate the artwork accompanying a music purchase.
Quote of the day: Robert Mugabe
"We’re not going to give up our country for a mere X on a ballot. How can a ballpoint pen fight with a gun?"
Robert Mugabe, 16 June 2008
The World’s Greatest?
Now that R. Kelly has been acquitted, is it OK to listen to his music again? (I completely understand that an embargo of the music of Gary Glitter is a given.)
Pressing times
I used to estimate that the average shirt took five minutes to iron. Tonight, I added some science and accuracy to this. Below are the results.
Dress-down Fridays meant that tonight’s quota of creased-up shirts totalled four. And tonight I decided to iron to music (iPod and earphones), something I rarely do but something which brings with it a mechanism for time-based accuracy.
For the first shirt, an easy-iron, blue-check number, the end of its ironing coincided beautifully with the end of The Libertines’ Can’t Stand Me Now, a song that’s bugged me for a few days now, in none other than good ways. So shirt one: 3m 27s.
Shirt two was a cerise, difficult-to-iron item, the ironing of which took exactly the same length of time as the first: the first 3m 27s of 4Hero/Minnie Riperton’s Les Fleur. Third up was a very simple purple-check number, complete in a lightning 2m 44s, accompanied by Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5. And the blue shirt that used to have a twin came last, reverting to the three and a half minute standard, this time to The Human League’s Together In Electric Dreams.
I think the 2m 44s shirt was a freak, and I’ll probably find out in the week that one of its sleeves remains unironed. So the verdict is 3m 30s for a shirt, 30% quicker than the original estimate.
21 June
The nights are drawing in.
That was my favourite saying that my Dad used to say during my childhood, usually within a couple of days of 21 June.
Can’t Stand Me Now
For the last hour or so before leaving work yesterday, I was longing to leave the building, plug in my new in-ear earphones (in-earphones?) and blast The Libertines’ Can’t Stand Me Now into my head while walking along sun-drenched Whitehall. I have no idea why. But I was. And I did. And I loved it.
Tenth percentile?
Yesterday evening marked a first. I got into a Streetcar that I’d hired and adjusted the seat so that it was further away from the steering wheel than when I got in. Bring it on!
Which came first?
A story’s strapline in tonight’s London Lite reads Little Brit Matt in first gay celebrity divorce. I question the order of the adjectives, believing the article to be about a gay divorce that happens to involve celebrities, as opposed to a celebrity divorce that happens to involve gay people. Thoughts?
My day in court
Yesterday, I had my day in court. Actually, my day in court lasted about six minutes. But ‘day in court’ sounds a lot more impressive. So yesterday, I had my day in court.
It came about after being metaphorically screwed by a drain-unblocking company back in October. For their 3h 30m visit, they felt it appropriate to charge me a staggering £975.
Having previously completed and faxed across a form adorned with my debit card details, I had no recourse with the bank after they’d stung me.
So I filed a claim for £539 with Money Claim Online to cover the disputed amounts, including a premium they charged as a result of their doctoring the completion time after the invoice had been signed. Scum.
Money Claim Online is associated with Northamptonshire County Court and provides a mechanism for getting a claim filed online. They then process the paperwork necessary to invite a defence (which the company filed) before the case is referred to your local court (in my case Wandsworth) for the hearing.
My hearing was scheduled for 10.15 yesterday morning. No one from the defence showed, and after walking into the courtroom at 10.35am, I was out by 10.41am. When I say courtroom, I actually mean a guy’s office laid out in a T-shaped table arrangement, him sitting at the T-bar, with seats either side of the stem allowing the warring parties to face one another to discuss their dispute. For a few moments while readying myself in the sparse, uninviting waiting room, wondering whether any of the fellow occupants represented the defence, I felt like Atticus Finch.
The judge (for that’s what I think he was; no wigs or hammers though) reviewed my case, asked the odd question, and summed up (for my ears only, since beyond his, there were no others in the courtroom/office) by saying that I’d put forward a strong case and judged in my favour.
The company has until 1 July to pay the £589 owed (including the £50 fee that I paid to Wandsworth for the privilege) before the nasty boys are sent in.
All in all, it was a pleasing experience, despite some nerves on Monday night. The end-to-end process took too long, and it was irritating that Money Claim Online was not integrated with the local court system (hence having to pay court fees twice), but all in all, I have few complaints.
Let’s see whether the money comes through. As soon as it does, I’ll name and shame the organisation in question, mainly to warn others of their unscrupulous ways.