Author Archives: Espen

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About Espen

For details, see www.espen.com.

Ubiquity interviews Vaughan Merlyn

John Gehl of Ubiquity fame has interviewed my pal Vaughan Merlyn, a stellar IT management consultant and all-around good egg who shares some of his experiences and views. Vaughan writes a fine blog and is extremely good at navigating the rather tricky no-mans-land that still lies between business and IT. He has spent much time and effort extending and deepening some of the strategic models of IT supply and demand that we rely on in this business, in light of advances in technology and IT savvy (or, as Vaughan calls it, IT maturity) in large organizations:

When I say business IT maturity, that is a short hand way of saying business demand maturity and IT supply maturity. I think that in the majority of cases, i.e., more than a half of the situations we see – there is a reasonable degree of similarity between the business ambition and the IT ambition. For perhaps a quarter of the cases, there is a CIO who is well ahead of business. And those are the most frustrating cases. The other case is where the business is well ahead of the CIO. And that usually sorts itself out pretty quickly because sooner or later there is a change of CIO.

Here is some hard-won experience on what advisory consulting is all about:

[…] I often find that what [clients] think is the problem they are looking for help with is quite different from the actual problem they are experiencing. And very often I find some of the most important work that we do happens before the engagement begins. I think it was Jerry Weinberg, one of the great wise men of the early IT days pointed out that one of the problems with project management is when a project officially starts, it’s already been going several months. It just hasn’t yet been called a project. So there is a lot of baggage already there. I think similarly, when you sit down with a client to frame up an engagement, I find the actual act of getting clarity on what is the issue, what would the outcomes be if we successfully solved this issue, that often is enormously helpful for the client – obviously it’s important for the consultant because you can easily spin wheels trying to solve the wrong problem. But I have seen the light bulbs go on with my clients – not just little glimmers of Christmas tree lights. I mean massive flashbulbs go off as you take them through a process of issue clarification. And they realize that perhaps the problem that thought they had isn’t the real problem. So I think that is a value that a good consultant brings to the table – helping to clarify what the real issues might be.

Budding consultants, take note!

ME in The Economist

There is a good article on Myalgic encephalomyelitis in The Economist, accurately (as far as I can tell) reporting the current state of research and the growing realization that this disease does in fact have a biological basis and is not the a syndrome of malingering from people wanting attention.

ME is a harrowing experience for those that suffer it and a drain on energy, social life and economy of their families. A complicated, exclusionary diagnosis and the fact that the loss of energy puts the patient in an especially weak position vis-a-vis the medical bureaucracy means that many suffer more and longer than they should. It is not being "burned out", "hitting a wall" and is not caused by stress or depression. It might cause depression in the patient, on the other hand, from being in a continually exhausted state.

A diagnostic test would help enormously. At present, a patient can go for years without adequate treatment because many doctors do not recognize ME/CFS as an illness at all. If the illness can be diagnosed fast, the patient can be helped faster – and will face less of a challenge understanding and making the surroundings understand what the problem is.

Fighting spam again

Comments are turned off until further notice. Comment spam storm. I am implementing comment challenges, and cursing the cancer of spam that threatens the freedom of the Internet at drains away badly needed productivity…..

Update later in the day: Opened again. Will try with a little tuning of keywords first….

You are what you eat, and we eat oil

Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, 2006

Michael Pollan is the author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, where he basically took on the flood of diet advice and replaced it with “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In this book, he discusses the problem of what to eat today, which is not something most species wonder about, either because food is scarce and they will eat everything they can lay their hands on, or because they are so specialized that they can only eat one kind of food (like koalas and eucalyptus leaves, of pandas and bamboo shoots and leaves.) This choice is faced by all omnivores, such as humans.

The book tracks down the history of three meals: One industrial, one pastoral (i.e., organically grown), and one personal, where Pollan had to make everything himself, including hunting down the meat. Or, in other words, one meal from industrial society, one from the traditionally agricultural, and one from a society of foragers. The further back you go, the more he has to fudge the experience (and the same goes for the producers/foragers, I suspect.)

The industrial part of the book talks about corn, a plant that supplies the basis for most of what we eat (from corn flakes to meat (cattle now eat corn rather than grass) to sweeteners). Corn is highly productive, but cannot exist without human intervention. The rather twisted logic here is that the productivity of the farmer destroys farm life, and may destroy food as well.

The organically grown part is based on an analysis of an organic farm (“small” organic as opposed to “big” organic such as Whole Foods) which relies on local markets, crop and species rotation, and quality rather than quantity for profits. Back-breaking work and battles with a regulatory regime set up for industrialized farming (for instance, the meat processing plant needs to have a bathroom specifically for the USDA inspector).

The foraging part, of course, verges into the artificial – Pollan hunts feral pigs, but does it by SUV and with a high-powered rifle with a scope. But it is fun, and allows for some pretty interesting discussions of our relationship to food.

The book is full of interesting viewpoints and facts, and tells you things that you did not know – for instance that “free-range” chicken means that the chicken have access to grass and air. However, since they only live 8 weeks and have access to grass and air through a door that they don’t dare venture out of, having always lived inside, this does not mean the chicken has had a life that much different from the fully industrialized chicken.

Here is one quote I liked (page 293): “The adult human brain accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from carbohydrates. Food faddists take note […]”

In other words, the book is the supply-side prelude to In Defense of Food. I have not read that one, but it is on my list of books to read, triggered by Omnivore’s Dilemma. In the meantime, I listen to his talk at Google, and so can you:

How free is the Internet?

Semi-liveblogged notes from a seminar at the Nobel Peace Center, Oslo, arranged by the  Norwegian Board of Technology. I ran out of battery towards the end, and had to leave before the final session. (On the plus side, the Nobel center has free and available wifi, which I deem a Very Good Thing indeed):

Introduction: Bente Erichsen, head of the Nobel Peace Center: Parvin Ardalan, one of the founders of the One Million Signatures initiative to protest discrimination against women, could not come as her passport has been confiscated by the Iranian government and she is not allowed to leave Iran. Ingvild Myhre, Chairman Norwegian Board of Technology: Increase in state-sponsored censorship on the Internet.

Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet Law at Oxford and founder of the Berkman Center:

Filtering the Internet is hard compared to most other networks, because of the "best-effort" routing, otherwise known as "send-and-pray". Impossible to filter in the cloud, but at the point of the ISP you can filter. Examples include geographical filtering (movie releases, newspaper articles in the US about British law cases, Google.de removing neo-nazi material from the index, videos about various things at Google Video made unavailable by the uploaders (check-box solution)). In China, Google states that due to local law, some search results are withheld. ChillingEffects.com now gets the letters that Google receives with take-down notices. Microsoft implemented a filtering of their msn blogging system to satisfy the authorities (though it leaks like a sieve). This "check-box" form of filtering at the source is likely to increase. This not need to be measurable at the net itself: In Singapore, your expressions can cause you to lose our house to a defamation suit.

Much harder to measure surveillance than blockages. China has experimented with various measures. For a while, Google.com was redirected to a Chinese University search engine. Blocking access to content is a "parking ticket" offense, Various sites are blocked (drugs, pornography, religion, some political issues.) Saudi Arabia has a pretty clear filtering policy, quite open about it, not much fervor.

Filtering at the device. Access is shifting from PC to cell phone and other locked devices, and many of these new endpoints are controlled by vendors and thus open to pressure.

Many technology companies are at the horn of a dilemma here – witness Google’s dilemma going into China. Sullivan principles offers a middle way (started out with apartheid in South Africa), now written into American law (at precisely the time Sullivan repudiated them.) Are there ways to work with the government to concede to some of the restrictions while doing the ethical thing?

Many other services: Livecastr allows direct filming from cell phone, LiveLeaks, WikiLeaks, psiphon – allowing people to see Internet the way you see it. Automatic translation now at the point where it allows chatting between two speakers.

Jimbo Wales: Can Wikipedia promote free speech?

Wikipedia is a freely licensed encyclopedia written by thousands of volunteers in many languages. Now the 9th most popular website on the web. 12th most popular in Iran. How global? Follows Internet penetration, basically – large in English, only 15,000 articles in Hindi despite 280 mm speakers of Hindi.

Wikipedia in China: First block June 2-21, 2004, then September 23-27, 2004, then from October 19 2005 until now. Lately, BBC and Wikipedia in English has been unblocked, unclear why, probably Olympics. Wikipedia in Chinese has more than 170,000 articles, 12th largest of all Wikipedia. More Chinese speakers outside of China than there are Dutch people anywhere. Mistake to think of this as written outside China – the firewall is porous and of the 87 administrators, 29 are from mainland China.

Censorship in China is discreet and done at an industrial level, the aim is not at individuals. Most youngsters know how to get to Wikipedia. If you set up a mirror you will be shut down, but the Chinese authorities have avoided having sad stories about people being arrested for reading Wikipedia.

Core point: Wikipedia is free access. You can copy, modify, redistribute, redistribute modified versions, and you can do this commercially or non-commercially. Baidu redistributes Wikipedia (except the pages they censor) in China (though they put "all rights reserved" on it).

Quality? German Wikipedia compared to Brockhaus, in43 out of 50 articles, Wikipedia was the winner. Not an archive, not a dump, not a textbook. Not a place to testify about human rights abuses, but the place to document human rights abuses in a neutral way. Want to be an encyclopedia, access to knowledge should not be censored, therefore Wikipedia does not take the middle ground and refuses all kinds of censorship. Jim thinks Google does a huge mistake, but theirs is a considered decision and they are sincerely trying. As customers, we should put pressure on Google. Force Google to tell us what they are doing in China to change the policies they now have to abide by.

Every single person on the planet? Available in many languages, but many of them do not have many articles. Showed a video of Desanjo, the father of the Swahili Wikipedia, wrote day an night, recruited people, now 7000 articles. Have now started the Wikipedia Academy in Africa, will start many of them.

How do you design a space where people can engage in conversations? Make it open – like a restaurant that people want to be in.

Discussion: 

(I didn’t catch all of this discussion, partially because I participated in it. Notes a bit jumbled, will edit later.)

How powerful is Wikipedia? JW: More powerful than we like, especially a problem with bios of living people. We have the flag "The neutrality of this article is disputed", which I wish some newspapers would adopt.

Can you have a neutral point of view on human rights? JW: You can represent something in a neutral way, representing the different views. For instance, you can be neutral on abortion, saying that according to the Catholic church, this is a sin.

Things going in the right direction? Zittrain: Hard to say, social innovations such as Wikipedia tend to overcome attempts at censorship?

(My question, which was only partially answered.)What are the power implications over time for Google and Wikipedia. Both are on the ascendant now, profitable and popular, but does there need to be a different contribution model for a more stable wikipedia, and what happens when google no longer is running at a huge profit?

Mark Kriger: What worries you about the Internet five years out, at the edge of chaos? Zittrain: At the edge of chaos is suburbia: The tame, controlled online lives where things are OK, there is no reason that one bad apple can spoil everything. Jim Wales is now working on Wikisearch, more transparent about the search ranking. You don’t have a lot of investment in your use of Google, it is easy to switch, but that is not the case with many of the other services that are out there. Some regulatory interventions would be good about giving people the right to leave and easily take their information with them.

Citing Elie Wiesel: The opposite of good is not evil but indiffernence. Do not see the Internet as a shopping mall, keep it moving.

Part II: Ce
nsorship on the Net

In the absence of Parvin Ardalan, a movie from Iran about the million signatures movement was shown. It calls for equal rights for women in terms of judicial protection, divorce, inheritance and so on. A number of women have been arrested for collecting signatures. Parvin Ardalan was one of the organizers of this movement, and she has been arrested for this and has received a 2 year suspended prison sentence. She could not come, but the actor Camilla Belsvik delivered the speech for her:

  • Internet censored in Iran, but remain the most active medium for discussion of women’s issues. It has given women power, which has upset the power balance in families and between wives and husbands, and given them a mean of entering the public sphere.
  • On the Internet, women can connect and find a place for expression about their private lives. Especially for young women, using blogs, this has been especially important. They can talk about their romantic and family relationships, power structures, violence and sexuality.  This was a revolutionary development for them.
  • Some women have attained public identities even though they write anonymously.
  • Internet came to Iran during the reconstruction area in the 1990s and became more available during the reform years starting 1997. Women’s activism has been there, but in small groups. The reform period allowed more freedom of expression, but press permissions for women were few, especially for secular women. The reform period ended, and many were shut down. Many publications then turned to the Internet, as did NGOs were women were active.
  • Issues of feminism and sexuality are taken more seriously online. Gradually, filtering and blocking has become more severe. In 2004, the Ministry of Information technology ordered the words "women" and "gender" to be filtered, with the excuse of blocking pornography.
  • A large problem is self-censorship on politically and culturally sensitive issues. Women’s rights is politically as well as culturally sensitive.
  • There is a lack of laws, meaning that much of the censorship is arbitrary and haphazard. It is normally left to the judge to decide, since there are no clear laws on what is permitted and what is not.
  • The One Millon Signatures campaign was launched in august 2006. It aims to collect one million signatures on a petition to the Iranian government asking for equal rights for women in Iran. It has done much to focus the efforts on women’s rights in Iran.
  • The changeforequality web site has been blocked more than ten times, but each time a new domain name is registered and it continues publishing. Four of the activists have been arrested, but the struggle will continue. The action can serve as a model for movements in repressed societies everywhere.

Zittrain: Comments on censorship in Iran. (dicsussion with Helge Tennøe)

Pervasive censorship in Iran, web sites have to be licensed, many topics are not allowed, such as atheism. ISPs can be held responsible for criminal content. Very precise censorship, the ISP is responsible. The government is not monolithic, there are struggles inside the government, first they were excited about broadband, then you need a license to have anything faster than 128 Kbps.

Why do they have Internet in Iran at all? Very few states explicitly rejects modernity – Cuba and North Korea are some of the very few. Most states want the economic effects of the Internet. It is rather haphazardly enforced, though. Iran filters more stuff than China, but China tries harder to filter the relatively few things they filter.

The US government has actually contracted with Anonymizer, to provide circumvention software for Iranians, and for Iranians only. Rather primitive, and filtered, of all things, for pornography (the stop word "ass" means that usembassy.state.gov was filtered)

Radio Tibet – a radio in exile

Øystein Alme – started broadcasting in 1996, the Chinese have been jamming. Still the program is getting into Tibet. Øystein got involved as a backpacker many years ago, came back home and started reading up on Tibet, started Voice of Tibet. Now has fifteen employees, one in Norway, the rest is in Pakistan and India. Main channel into Tibet is shortwave radio, in China it is the Internet. Have spent a lot of time studying how to avoid Chinese jamming of frequencies, which are reserved for Voice of Tibet.

China is a repressive state, where the party dominates despite only having 6% of the population as members. (If you strip off those who are members because they need the membership to get a promotion in their job, not many remain). China has signed up to the articles on Human Rights, but break their promises with impunity.

Internet use in China is growing dramatically. China’s Internet police number 50,000, censoring made possible with foreign technology companies such as Google. One journalist, Shi Tao, got ten years for an article criticizing the government – and he was found thanks to information provided by Yahoo.

But the Internet is also the hope for change – with it we would not have the images from Tibet, for instance.

Discussion: Zittrain, Alme

Alme: Companies such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and others should join forces and together resist the policies of the government.

The Chinese government also use the Internet proactively, to push their point of view.

Zittrain: These companies could also offer business reasons for privacy, for instance offering encrypted accounts for business conversations.

Movie from Iran: a recording studio with bombs going off outside. During the Israeli siege of Lebanon, hit by 15000 missiles, a country of 4 million people under siege that we hear very little about. Zena el Khalil is an artist currently based in Beirut. Her blog from Beirut during the siege of Lebanon in 2006 was followed by a number of people as well as newspapers, who found it a valuable addition to official sources.

She talked about how her blog and others both changed the world’s perspective on the war and documented it: Lebanon is lacking in history since so much of it is rewritten by the warring parties. She also documented how Israeli attacks on a power plant created an ecological disaster, as oil spread as far north as Syria and even Turkey.

Here’s to hoping for a barren Mars

Nick Bostrom discusses the consequences of finding sign of life on Mars. Finding it would be a bad thing, he argues, since that would imply that the evolution of intelligent life starts easily and ends inevitably. Much better to find a barren Mars, indicating that we have already made it past the Great Filter of evolution and can look forward to a future for humanity.

(Via Tim O’Reilly.)

Canon LBP2900: Good personal workhorse printer

While I am on the subject of my technology setup, let me pause briefly to sing the praises of my Canon LBP 2900, a small laser printer which lives unostentatiously next to my home office desk.

It was cheap and  prints lots of pages before the cartridge runs out. I haven’t done the numbers, but it is rated at about 2,000 pages per cartridge. That means four packages of paper, and I am sure I have used much more than that on the first cartridge (since I print primarily text.) It is quiet and more than fast enough for personal printing (shared by about 5 computers, hitched to a workstation). Produces crisp printouts, but can be a bit tricky with envelopes (but I use a different printer for that anyway). The only real drawback is that it can take a while before it warms up and spits out the first page, but once it gets going, it is very quick.

One of those things that you buy and forget about (or, as Jerry used to say, it Just Works). Economical and reliable. Recommended.

My computer setup (testing notes)

I am testing various pieces of equipment on behalf of the IT dept. at the Norwegian School of Management, and this post is a second report on how it is working (the first one is here, in Norwegian.)

X61 Tablet with two 22'' widescreens

My new setup (as pictured) is what I think ought to be the new standard for faculty: A decent laptop for travel and a good setup (with large screens) for office work. The technology components here are: Lenovo X61 Tablet, docking station, keyboard and mouse (with cable, I really don’t like wireless keyboards and mice) and two Samsung SyncMaster225bw 22” screens, held together with a Matrox DualHead2Go Digital Edition. This gives me a 3360×1050 screen (16 bit color, 60Hz).

All in all, a pretty good setup, though I am still ironing out a few kinks. Some details follow:

Continue reading →

Cellphones against poverty

Excellent article about how cellphones reduce poverty from New York Times Magazines.

Masterstudies at Hawaii

I have just (well, last Friday) come back from the AACSB conference in Hawaii. As previously noted, I am on the board of a small but quickly growing company called Masterstudies.com, and this was our first “in the flesh” meeting with customers and partners. I tagged along on the theory that since I am an academic, I probably know how to talk to academics as well.

I am no stranger to academic conferences, but attending it as a vendor, not a regular participant or speaker, was new to me. I usually walk through the vendor section of a conference with downcast eyes, trying to not be cornered and pitched to. It was very interesting to stand there and see other people trying to avoid you – as a result, I have resolved to be much nicer to salespeople from now on.

That being said, the conference was a resounding success for us as a company – we talked to more than 60 universities and many of the other vendors and conference partners came over to our booth to congratulate us on the high interest and many compliments we got for our product. And I found it rather fun to market something – especially when it turned out we had a service that addressed a real need for many of these universities.

Recruiting blues
The problem with recruiting students is selectivity and quality control – you want students that are both good (in the sense that they have good grades and other qualifications) and also are environmentally compatible (for lack of a better term) with the other students. The first criterion is pretty easy to test for – grades and GMAT scores provide good indicators. Ensuring a proper mix of students for a program is harder.

For the prospective students, finding a school can also be very hard, since few students (at least outside the US) know more than a few business schools’ names and nothing about their quality. The result is a power law of prestige: At the top (“the fat head”), you find a few extremely well known schools (such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Wharton, INSEAD, LBS and IMD) with thousands of extremely well qualified people applying and very few getting in. Harvard, for instance, tend to receive 10 times as many applications as they have spaces, and of those people applying at least half of the people are good enough to make it through the program, if they only got in. At the top, finding students is not the problem – selecting them is.

For the students, another problem is avoiding the very bottom of universities: The outright frauds and degree mills that will sell you a certificate for a fee and an overview of your “life experiences”. (See this list for some suspects, but they tend to pop up like mushrooms after a rainy night.) A degree from a very weak place is not something you want to attach to your CV at all.

Most schools and most students fall somewhere in the middle, though: Decent schools providing good programs, and reasonably smart students prepared to do the required work to obtain a degree.  Masterstudies.com provides a service here by maintaining a database of quality-controlled schools which prospective students can search without having to go to each school’s web site, and quickly submit requests for information to interesting schools.

Selective international recruiting
If this was all we did, we wouldn’t provide much value, however. Most students can search in Google for business schools, and listings abound. The problem for schools trying to recruit internationally is not that they don’t get responses when they advertise on the Internet – it is that they get hundreds or thousands of “leads” from people who clearly are not qualified to be admitted, either because they don’t have the background or the finances.

In certain countries, such as a large African country beginning with N, most of the requests for information have nothing to do with getting an education: Enterprising men request glossy business school brochures to show women, saying that they are applying to a prestigious school and thus are attractive partners. Given the cost of an information package, this is clearly not a service most schools would want to provide.

To avoid this, we have the students put in their characteristics (education, work experience, managerial experience, age, desired industry they want to work in, etc.) and then match them to schools where they have a chance of getting admitted. The schools can filter the incoming leads so that they only get students they want, doing things such as selectively market in certain countries – say, perhaps they have enough people from Northern Europe or India, but want more from China or Southern Europe. Since we track where the prospective students log in, we can filter based on geography as well.

It works surprisingly well, which is why I am willing to be on the board. It is also very cost-effective: We charge the industry standard price for a lead (i.e., a prospective student), but the lead is qualified, meaning that every reference that comes from us has passed the hurdles the schools have set up themselves. That means that information packets go out only to students that actually a) have the requisite quality, and b) are in target markets the school want to serve.

(Of course, since I have read Shapiro and Varian, we also have a Pro package, where schools can pay a little extra and get promoted on the front page and so on – perfect for that newly launched MBA with a special twist that you secretly worry filling up.) As we start to build up good logs (we have had more than 100,000 unique visitors and growing per month since the new site launched in January) we should also be able to provide some pretty good and detailed overall statistics. For my own research, I am thinking about doing text analysis on the language in the program descriptions, to see what the main differentiating strategies of the schools are.

Check it out for yourself – though if you are a school, you should probably contact Linus, our Irish CEO (a former professional racing biker),  or Bernt, our VP of Business Development (who tried to teach me to surf in Hawaii, with decidedly mixed results) to get a peek under the hood, at the statistics and filtering pages which allow schools to select carefully and measure the results of their marketing.

And now, back to our regular programming….

Door close button unmasked

According to this great essay in the New Yorker, the “close door” button in most elevators does not work (unless you are a fireman with a key). This is something I have long suspected, since noticing how Americans bang on it and Europeans ignore it, with no noticeable difference in elevator speed.

Via Boingboing.

PS: The elevator industry is really interesting from a commercial viewpoint – the ultimate example of the razor-and-blade business model (install it cheaply and live off the service contract) as well as infrastructure technology (which you only notice when it break down.

PSPS: And yes, the elevator bank at the New York Marriot Marquis must be the slowest in the world.

The longest love story

Audrey Nieffenegger: The Time Traveller’s Wife, Vintage, 2004

One of the favorite movies around our house, the kind that you bring out with a bottle of wine when you want to kick back and not think about anything in particular, is Groundhog Day.  The premise is rather simple: Phil, a self-important and cynical weather man, played by Bill Murray, goes to small town to do a rather boring job of reporting on the annual awakening of the groundhog. A snowstorm closes the roads, the team has to stay another night – and when Murray wakes up the next morning, it is the previous day all over again. And so it continues – every day he wakes up to the same day, nobody except him remember what has happened.

Groundhog Day is a great movie not for that simple idea, but for how the movie manages to build on that simple premise. Aside from the one little thing of repeating the same day over and over, nothing Phil does is illogical, as he progresses from enjoyment to despair through development to, eventually, redemption. Anyone seeing it could imagine being Phil. It is a very intelligent comedy.

The Time Traveller’s Wife (the book, that is, I haven’t seen the movie) has a similar concept: The main protagonists are Henry and Clare, "who met when Clare was six and Henry thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. This can happen because Henry time-travels – involuntarily, always showing up buck naked in unexpected places, but very often around Clare. He even meets himself, at various ages. Clare and Henry have to come to terms with the misery of sometimes knowing what is going to happen in the future (which, of course, can be useful if you want to play the stock market) as well as the more practical difficulties of showing up in various places without clothes and with only a dim recollection of where you are and, especially, what time it is.

The novel succeeds for the same reasons that Groundhog Day succeeds: It manages to tell a believable story in an unbelievable setting. Clare and Henry must somehow shape a normal life out of an incredibly difficult situation, and how they do it is both funny and moving – a love story where you can never be sure of anything. At no point does Niederegger veer off into science fiction-like explanations of why Henry has this "rare condition", just as Groundhog Phil never tries to find out why he wakes up to the same day every morning. The book is also delightfully free of New Age-isms and spirituality. Instead, the focus is on the central characters and the relationship between them, how they have deal with the practicalities (stashing clothes in places Henry is likely to turn up, learning to pick pockets and locks to survive) and emotional turmoil. Both Clare and Henry learn things about each other’s futures – how do you deal with knowing that something bad is going to happen, for instance,  do you tell the person about it or not?

This is an extremely well thought out novel, at no point does the time-hopping (not to mention the oral form, where the characters tell their story in short episodes) get tedious (with a possible exception for their wedding, which gets a little contrived and sugary). It is a long love-story (76 years, to be exact) but worth the time spent.

Recommended.

(and thanks to Julie for leaving this one around the house so I could take it with me and make Frankfurt-LA seem a tad bit shorter…..).

Aloha

This is written from a 747 somewhere over the Rocky Mountains. I am on my way to the AACSB Annual conference in Honolulu, Hawaii. It is a conference on business school management, which is interesting in itself, and Hawaii, of course, is a new destination for me.

But the real reason I am on my way is because I am on the board of Masterstudies.com, and startup company offering a Web-based search-and-match service for business schools and prospective business school students. (Check our the website – and for all my colleagues out there – we are getting good reviews, send me an email if you think this might be a good way to generate leads for your school.)

Anyway, the VP of Business Development is going over to sell our services, and I am tagging along to translate between academese and marketing and (I suspect) as a guarantee that this is a serious business. I am quite looking forward to it – it will be interesting to see how other business school are competing for students in an increasingly global market. It will also be interesting to see which way the market moves – I suspect a movement towards more and more franchising of well-known schools, more tailored education (tied to knowledge profiles and career tracks in large corporations) and, of course, more use of technology both in marketing and execution.

Testing Windows Live Writer

This is a test post (testing Windows Live Writer at the behest of Paul Kedrosky).

Testing Norwegian characters: æøå ÆØÅ

Testing special characters: {[]} $#&%"@

Incidentally, Windows Live Writer (an off-line Blog editor) is a pretty nifty product: Standards-based, simple to use. One especially useful feature is that it fixes a persistent problem with AJAX-based editors: That the text entered since the last save disappears if you happen to refresh the page or commit any other fumble-fingered unfortunality. Of course, off-line blogging is also useful in itself, for those long plane rides, but if I only needed that, I could just use Evernote, which stores text in a format where links and simple formatting makes it over into Movable Type’s AJAX-based editor screen.

Geronotagressiveness

John Scalzi: Old Man’s War

I don’t read much science fiction – so far I think I have managed one Heinlein novel, a thick collection of classical sci-fi short stories (some of them extremely good, such as E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops,) most of what Neal Stephenson has written, and now John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. The latter was available as a free download from Tor Books (you have to sign up for their newsletters to be allowed to download it), and as such an excellent way to check out Scalzi’s serious writing (I am a faithful reader of Whatever, his blog.)

Well, I apologize, shouldn’t-look-a-gift-horse-in-the-mouth and so on, but this was a bit of a disappointment. The starting premise is fine, the language is straightforward, but I kept looking for a plot of some kind, and instead got a very basic picaresque about old people volunteering to be intergalactic soldiers fighting aliens in return for brand new bodies. (Not very picaresque either, since the hero becomes a highly decorated commander as the story progresses.) Entertaining and all that, competently written, the world Scalzi creates and populates is interesting, at least in the beginning, but the lack of any non-obvious plot to drive things forward makes it hard to get enthusiastic about the book.

It is obviously the beginning of a series, but still: Where are the surprises, the plot twists, the exciting insights? Not to mention, where are the personalities – these old people going out to fight a war all seem very cartoonish, without much difference in what they say and do, and certainly not much reflection about the task their are given, a few tactical shrewdnesses excepted. They all seem to shelve a lifetime of experience (and, presumably, thought) in favor of a "well, we would be dead now if it wasn’t for joining up, so dying is no big deal."

I think I know why I don’t read sci-fi so much: Most sci-fi is, to put it bluntly, to the male mind what bodice-rippers are to females. Sci-fi works best, at least for me, when it says something about our own time, which is another way of saying that it works when it takes a current phenomenon and projects it out into the future. Excellent examples include Ann Warren Griffith’s  short story Captive Audience (written in the 50s, about how every product contains advertising, a surprisingly relevant point in these adsensical times); Philip K. Dick’s Second Variety (written about 1953, too), about a future earth which has been evacuated by humans because autonomous weapon systems have taken over; or Neal Stephenson’s novels about virtuality (Snow Crash) and nanotechnology (Diamond age). This approach is hard work, for there has to be science – and thus research – in the fiction, or fiction in the science.

Nevertheless, people read bodice-rippers, and I can’t say Old Man’s War was a total waste of time. It was entertaining in a potato-chip kind of way, great for boring flights and when you want some dessert. But not very filling.

Evernote interview

IT Conversations has an a conversation with Phil Libin about EverNote’s new memex. I installed Evernote a couple weeks ago and have become a loyal user – what a place to just dump every note you take, every picture or web address or whatever. The paid version (which I will acquire in due course) can recognize handwriting and writing in pictures. Evernote essentially duplicates those bound notebooks that people carry around to meetings to take notes in. I am getting an HTC TyTNII tomorrow. It runs WME and I will see if Evernote works there as well. Highly recommended.

Dr. GC floors’em

One of my academic colleagues suggested we hire Dr. G. Carlin as a faculty member in strategy based on the following test lecture – but in my view he would fit equally well in a consulting company. Perhaps a shared appointment?

Paperlessly so

Messy officeI have an essay in ACM Ubiquity called Time to Get Serious about the Paperless Office, borne out of endless frustration with the communicative and legal aspects of paper. I think we are slowly getting into the situation where paper is the exception rather than the rule. As I stress in the essay, we will not get rid of paper until we get rid of it as metaphor.

I just can’t wait…

(And no, the picture you see here is not from my office, but from a company that apparently specializes in helping people tidy up….)

Covariation and causality

Thanks to Kristine, I really shouldn’t need to translate this Norwegian blog post, but for future reference:

As any statistician worth his or her standard deviation is well aware, covariation does not mean causality – or, in more civilian terms, just because something moves at the same time or later than something else, the first does not necessarily cause the other.

Otherwise, it would be really easy to explain global warming: Baby boomers reaching menopause.

But how to explain this to students? I use this drawing by the Swedish genius caricaturist, Albert Enström (1869-1940):

Unhealthy galoshes, by Albert Engström 

In English, the caption is During a convivial gathering there is talk of the unhygienic aspect of using galoshes. One of those present chips in: "Yes, I’ve also noticed this. Every time I’ve woken up with my galoshes on, I’ve had a headache."

That’s all. We will now return to our usual programming.

Updated: Boingboing!