Accidental Light

Many years ago. Many, many years ago when I was at college all entertainment was mechanical (apart from some Asteroids and a 3D Tank game). It was claimed, although I am not entirely sure that I ever saw it done, that the pinball machines could be gamed to give free credits by spinning a 2p coin up the coin-return chute. So, here you have this big mechanical “black-box” that you can game through a rarely used output channel to give you free credits. You get the machine to do something that it is not designed to do. You got more credits than the machine wanted to give you without the machine being aware. Gamed.

We roll forward several years and nothing much has changed but instead of using 2p coins and a particular wrist action of which Shane Warne would be proud, input/ output flibberty-gibbet buffers are over and under-flowed and … well, you get the machine to do something that it doesn’t want to do without it knowing. Gamed.

But these posts are not about machines mechanical or digital but about process, the gaming of process and how everyone either forms circles of plausible deniability to deny the fact or layer process upon process upon check upon process to reduce the potential for gaming. Every process can be gamed. Every check is a process. Every process can be gamed.

All in the game yo, all in the game
- Omar the best character on television. Ever.

This weekend saw our annual pilgrimage to the New Forest to pick mushrooms and to stay at our favourite “Restaurant With Rooms” The Three Lions.

Last year the forest was alive and it was less the New Forest and more some kind of Enchanted Forest (you think I exaggerate). This year nothing: we found a few Ceps but I must have seen only about three different varieties of mushroom and probably about 20 mushrooms in total. Probably the worst year ever in the (now) eleven years we have been going.

Must check the sun-spot activity.

Following on from recent posts on risk from myself, Dom and JP on the subject of risk, quantification of risk and the management of risk I had the great misfortune to come across a specific instance of the null model of risk management.

My son (10 years old) plays football in a team on Friday evenings. He plays with a number of his friends and many of the parents come along to watch. One parent, a close friend of ours, was taking pictures of his son playing during the game. As he was taking his pictures, the referee halted play, ran over and informed him that he was not allowed to take pictures of the game due to “Child Protection Agency” rules.

Have you ever, ever heard of anything more ridiculous.

The previous game I was taking some pictures and was asked by someone as I was taking the pictures whether I was a parent of one of the players. When I answered yes he apologised and hoped I understood that they had to be careful.

So we have two instances: one where because a rule has been set no pictures are allowed and another where the community around the players and the game informally “police’ the environment themselves.

Which do you think is best?

The problem here is not with the referee it is due to common sense being codified in rules, guidelines or law. Once this happens, as people generally err on the side of caution when faced with rules, a strict interpretation of these rules will govern peoples behaviour.

Moreover, it is possible through Catch-22 that the very existence of the guideline, rule or law that the general level of risk increases rather than the intent embodied within the law to decrease risk. This is because common-sense (which usually guides you through all risk situations) will diminish as increasingly responsibilities of care and prudence are delegated to Government or to society. Individual responsibilities decrease. General responses to risk situations become impaired. Risk increases.

And so it starts: And The Walls Come Tumbling Down.

Since reporting Monday that Nine Inch Nails had dumped its record label and was to offer future albums direct to the public, Oasis and Jamiroquai have also joined the move away from the record industry, but the biggest announcement of all is news today that Madonna has dumped the record industry.

I heard somewhere that the average price paid for Radiohead’s new album In Rainbows is about £7-00. A pre-release survey showed £5-00 but this is potentially skewed by the nature of the survey being in public forum. In that same forum it is stated (whether true or not I do not know) that from a £9-00 album the artist sees £1-22 but I also guess that recording fees come out of the record companies pocket. Whatever - the economics for Radiohead (not that I guess they care) look very favourable.

Are we witnessing the tipping point?

I was going to return to the subject of risk but as so often happens synchronicity stepped in.

Being now the very proud owner (no owner, that is the wrong word, friend is better) of an iPod Touch hooked into The Cloud WiFi I am in a position to comment on how this works. Firstly, in a hotspot it works beyond expectations. Secondly, the gap between hotspots even in the City can be quite large meaning you cannot walk and browse at the same time. This is immensely frustrating.

On the bus on the way home from Covent Garden last night I had the WiFi sniffer open and in that entire journey I do not believe there was one instance when less than four WiFi networks were visible. In many areas we were beyond 20 visible. Of course, now people are more mature in their use of WiFi all of these networks are locked and, moreover, even if they were not I am not convinced one can hop between them (I may be wrong, of course). There were, though, a number of open wireless networks all marked BTOpenZone. And also interestingly a few marked “BTOpenZone Beta”.

Which brings us nicely to this artice I saw this morning: BT Links Up With FON:

Britain’s top fixed-line carrier BT Group Plc on Thursday teamed up with Wi-Fi crusader FON in a deal to allow more than three million UK broadband customers to use hundreds of thousands of hotspots for free

Now, this is very interesting. I have looked at and thought about FON before - the model is excellent but I was concerned that the model could not reach any sort of critical mass. Below this critical mass it would essentially, even though an excellent idea, wither and die. Could this link with BTOpenZone bring FON closer to critical mass? I think it could.

For anyone not conversant with the concept it basically means (if the model was universally adopted) that I could travel on the bus from Covent Garden to home hopping from WiFi hotspot to Wifi hotspot all open to me and in a universal model to everyone). Theoretically it means one city-wide, universal WiFi network comprised of essentially independent hotspots.

(Actually, I am not sure if you can switch seamlessly between hotspots - but that should be simple enough to fix, shouldn’t it)

The model that society is choosing to manage risk is the null model where risk is eradicated (as discussed in the previous post on this subject) leaving no risk left to manage - hence a null model. This null model selection also appears in other areas and especially (at least for the subject of this post) in the area of failure. Failure, if we wish, could be a synonym for risk. Or something. Maybe. But anyway, that is beside the point. For the purposes of this post they are similar and I stick by that.

There have long been conversations amongst parents about how primary schools, in particular, do not allow competitive sports. In my own primary school many, many years ago we had sports days where you had winners and losers. Kids cried, felt a sense of failure. Parents then dealt with it. After all, that is what they are paid for. This conversation regularly appears in the media as being a prime reason why British sports teams don’t win anything anymore. Because our children are not taught to compete. It’s why we always lose to Australia …. errr!

(Actually, Australia lost because they forgot the first rule of competition - always respect the abilities of you opponent)

The competition angle I think has a deal of validity but that is not what I am here to think about. I am here to think about the effect on our children of removing from their life the opportunity to fail. It is only through failing that we truly learn something at a deep level (rote learning does not impart a deep understanding of something - only failure and then success can do that). Children are programmed to learn through failure, learn through trial and error. You only have to marvel at how a small child can sit at a computer and see how a few hours later they are browsing the web. What is more instructive though is to watch how they do it. It starts by watching, then some random clicking and, at the start, almost continual failure until a small success kicks off the positive feedback loop and off they go. Rather like evolution don’t you think?

It may be argued that this is a different sort of failure but I am not sure it is. In sport it is only through failing that one understands how one can get better and (more importantly) what other people are doing that can be copied and learned from. Moreover, kids need at an early age to start dealing with this sort of failure - to understand that failure is not catastrophic but an opportunity to learn and to improve and, most importantly of all, to become all that you can be. And if you don’t learn how to deal with failure as a kid how are you going to deal with it as an adult?

Two quotes to finish from Homer Simpson:

You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is ‘never try’.

The second one I can’t find reference to so can’t supply the quote verbatim. Homer is reading a book - he finds that on the last page the hero dies. He doesn’t want to upset Lisa so he changes the ending. As he leaves the bedroom he says something like:

Ah Lisa. Now she doesn’t have to learn how to deal with death until someone close to her dies.

Hello world

I know JP has talked about this area before and I think I may have done at one point but that may have been over a coffee or in a dream rather than in a more public forum. In any case, can’t find any previous post so at the risk of repeating myself or, as always, becoming a master of “the bleeding obvious” here we go …

I was once asked the question at a previous employer: what is your capacity for risk? I gave what I though was a wonderful answer in that I explained I did not recognise risk intrinsically as being in any way separate from reward so the question was malformed and could not be honestly answered. (I am entirely sure they were stunned into submission by the wit and exactitude of my answer). The issue we have in society currently (and I do believe it is more of a recent development) is that we believe it is possible to assess risk independent of reward or maybe more exactly that the reward part of the equation can be discounted to zero leaving only the risk.

In Investment Banking (an industry well-tuned, whatever you may read or hear, to risk and the understanding of risk) the units used to measure risk and reward are the same. Money. In fact, there is no intrinsic difference between risk and reward. The calculations one makes shows that you will make a known amount of money if this and that happen and lose a known amount of money if this, that and the other occur. Of course, this is not true in life. A child climbing a tree gains the reward of adventure, curiosity and learning and runs the risk of a broken limb - it is clearly more difficult to understand the relationship between risk and reward and concomitantly more difficult to provide a balance.

But if the reward part is removed or discounted then the risk part becomes easy to quantify and the obvious result is you never let your child climb a tree. Parents are generally excellent at balancing the risk and reward - society (by which we mean elected or otherwise appointed governments serving as proxy) are not.

Society itself has of course changed drastically over the last few years (since the end of the Second World War). Previous to and during this event life was hard and life was fraught with risk. Death was common. The further back one goes the more common death becomes to a point, one assumes, where people lived with it and the threat of it every day. One must also assume that a society such as this with risk everywhere (seen and unseen) would have a much different attitude to a tiny bit of extra risk (such as climbing a tree). As society becomes (every year) more and more inherently de-risked through better health-care and other measures that tiny extra little bit of risk becomes measured against an ever-decreasing total risk. This is, of course, a good thing but the unwanted side-effect is that we concentrate far too much on this little extra bit of risk. It is far, far more important to us than it would be to a society 100 years ago.

I have a few more posts on this subject.

You’ll have all seen this by now, I guess, but while the muse is playing Knock Down Ginger I may as well join the growing throng.

For starters: Radiohead–probably the biggest unsigned band in the world–is putting out said album, In Rainbows, without any record label. For another: If you want to buy a digital download of the album, you go to Radiohead’s Web site and pay . . . whatever price you want to pay.

Download Radiohead’s new album and pay what you want

Someone needed to take an innovative step in this market and, unsurprisingly given their history, Radiohead are the ones to do it. They don’t need the money - and I kind of suspect they don’t really want it anyhow. In any case they can fill out as many arenas as they want to. Meaning: there is little down-side here for them.

How history will judge this first step, as a gallant but ultimately doomed bid for freedom or as a giant leap for mankind, will only become apparent when the money starts flowing in - or not as the case may be. When we can take a good look at the model and see how it works. Only then will it become clear whether it can be extended to bands who do need the money to buy their food. A validated model will allow almost any band the freedom to liberate themselves from their record companies and make their art and their money as they wish.

I think that this will work and I think it will work huge. When faced with the option of paying or not paying most people will pay. Whether they pay 50p, a quid or £9.99 they will pay. And if they come in numbers the oft neglected economic principle of revenue = average cost per unit * number of units sold comes into play. I suspect they will sell a huge number of records at a much smaller average cost.

My gut feel? The average cost will be somewhere between 3 and 5 pounds tending toward £5-00 because some people will pay around £10-00 because that is a round number and what you usually pay. More people will pay nothing than pay £10-00 and most of the rest will mentally split the difference and pay £5-00.

For a bit of fun go to the Radiohead Store - order a download and click the question mark from the basket.

In the continued absence of a muse landing on my shoulder to help me complete a few posts I have been working on we are forced to return to some old staples to fill in the time.

I was the second person in the UK to buy one of the original iPods. At least I believe this to be the case as they were first sold at an Apple event at the Business Design Center in Islington and I was second in line where they being sold. The guy ahead of me bought one and I bought two - so maybe a better statistic is that at one point I owned 2/3 of all iPods sold in the UK. Look .. it makes me happy, OK?

Now, with the iPod touch I can’t get hold of one - stock comes basically unannounced into the Apple Store and flies out without touching the sides. Queues out of the store apparently. Are we seeing another phenomenon here or is stock just limited? There are some killer features here - does everyone get it or is it just the latest shiny, shiny thing? Killer of killers is The Cloud charging just £3.99 a month for access to their Wi-Fi network(s). Now this is nothing like country-aide Wi-Fi - it seems, though, that they have wide coverage in The City (where I work) - so this is just a beginning. But now I can keep connected when on the move using (what appears to be) a fully-functional browser.

More interesting, maybe, is the access to The Cloud (essentially) for free with the iPhone. No doubt this is looked on by O2 as compensation for the user for having no access (yet) to 3G but why would O2 knowingly let a competing access channel onto a device locked into their network? Hell - maybe Steve just told them they had to and when they got off their knees they were straight onto the Cloud to strike a deal. But it strikes me a slightly odd.

Is this the start of a crumbling of the mobile networks and a move toward WiFi? It sure ain’t going to happen anytime soon but imagine what happens the first time someone manages to put Skype onto the iPhone . (Yeah, I know, some geek at Skype will already have done it - pound to a penny). Why would anyone use 3G services (when they come) from O2 when there is free wireless? I know, again, because WiFi won’t be country-wide.

This starts to smell a little like a disruptive technology.

A new technology comes along to compete with an old technology - it is better in some ways but worse in many others. New technology carves out a small but profitable piece of the market where its better points are important and its faults can be ignored or mitigated. Old technology does not care. New technology overcomes its faults. Old technology dies. New technology takes over.

I wonder if this is what His Steveness is thinking?