The DOBlog

Hmmm… perhaps I should have wished for that time machine after all. I keep missing deadlines for the Science Week thing.

Today’s question is “What invention has helpd you most with your working life”

As my job centres on computing and computery things many people would expect me to say “the computer” or “d’Internet”. But Babbage’s calculating engine and its descendants are just fripperies when compared to other inventions that I might mention.

Booze is another possiblity, given its ability to unlock creative thought processes so that complex problems fall away in a “moment of clarity”. But I suspect that , overall, it may have hindered me more than helped given the fuzzy headed hangovers and general making a tit of myself at Christmas Parties when I was a younger man (ie up to last Christmas).

However, when I think about the nature of my job and my working life since mid-way through college, I realise that the majority (if not all) of my career has dealt with clearly defining and structuring problems in a way that results in clearly defined and structured solutions becoming possible. Take away my computer and I can still do that. Take away my booze and I can still do that, but I’ll have a much more muted celebration afterwards (”yippee, mine’s a tea please”). Ultimately my career has been about structure and communication.

To that end I’d like to nominate a combination invention… the dry-wipe whiteboard and the non-permanent marker. With these I can

• do complex analysis of problems
• define project structures
• prioritise work plans for my team
• diagram for my Masters students the complex set of transactions that resulted in the collapse of enron
• Map root causes of process failures
• Draw funny faces
• Write project acronyms or codenames that will never see the light of day, but which everyone in the meeting finds hilarious
• and so many more…

And then when I’m done or when I find we’ve gone down a dead end I can just wipe the whole lot off. When I have a notes worth doing something with they can then be transcribed to Word, MSProject or PowerPoint and a fully formed idea can then be communicated to others.

Also, I must not forget the smell of the markers.

A close second place would be flipcharts and post-it notes, for similar but less ecologically friendly reasons.

Yes, there are lovely technologies out there that I could nominate. However most of them simply technologise the type of creative process that can be had with a humble whiteboard and marker.

Just for the LOVE of GOD and ALL THAT IS FRICKIN’ HOLY please don’t use permanent markers on the whiteboard. People who do should be shot, treated with the best medical care until they are able to stand up again and then be shot a second time.

Curses. I missed the deadline for yesterday’s competition over on Mulley.net to win a Wii in National Science week.

I will not make the same mistake twice. Today’s question is “What invention would you like to see most in the future?“.

Given I missed yesterday’s deadline I was tempted to go for a TARDIS or similar time travel machine (not a De Lorean as Simon would probably try to open the gull wing doors to make it fly, thus not breaking the “rules of the game”). However I dismissed this as that would open up the whole time travellers paradox… If I’d posted and been in with a chance to win the Wii would I have wished for a time machine to bring me back in time to post and win the Wii and if I hadn’t would I have won or would the original timeline have continued on.. (ohhh my brain hurts after that).

I then thought about Giant Killer Robots (ideally made of gold). However Roosta beat me to it. Curses. Perhaps I should ask for my time machine?

However a more mature pondering of the question made me consider my commuting and the implications for future family life (I live in Wexford, work in Dublin) and my carbon foot print (I tend to travel to the UK and US a few times a year to speak at conferences) and the fact that it took a colleague 2.5 hours to get from Swords to the city centre yesterday due to the buses - or specifically the lack thereof.

So the invention I’d most like to see in the future is a transporter like wot they have on Star Trek. My commute to the office would be a lot shorter (speed of light vs speed of bus eireann), I could zip back to wexford for lunch with the family, work late for my wage-masters and be back home for tea and tucking in etc. And my colleague would be able to get from Swords to Dublin before he has to turn around again and retire.

And I’d never have to deal with Ryanair’s baggage allowance or Baggage manglers handlers ever again.

Yup. Transporters it is. And interestingly we are getting closer to this technology… extend the range and move from simple matter to slightly overweight bloggers.

I’ve been playing around with e-Touch meeting room from Onlinemeetingrooms.com for the past while. To put it bluntly… this product does exactly what it says on the tin.

• It is a meeting room
• It is online
• It just works

Recently an event I was involved in as a speaker had a problem. A speaker had a last minute problem travelling to the event. In conference land this is usually a crisis situation. The conference organiser called on me to see if I could do a second presentation at the conference, but was concerned as the speaker who was to travel had been ‘ticked’ as one they wanted to see by a lot of delegates. I would very much be a ’surrogate band’ and people might not welcome the change in running order (particularly if they’d paid mainly to see that presentation).

Being a cheeky bugger I dropped a quick email to Joe Garde in Onlinemeetingrooms.com to see if he might be able to help. A few additional facts are important here. I emailed him around 18:30 on the Friday of a Bank Holiday weekend. The conference started on Monday in the UK. Monday was a Bank Holiday in Ireland (where Joe is based) and the speaker was due to present on Tuesday afternoon.

This left a window of Monday to sort something out that we could be confident would work.

Joe phoned me on Saturday morning and we discussed options (while I furiously texted the conference organiser in the UK to let him know what was happening). With Joe’s help a clear plan formed… we’d use the OnlineMeetingRoom system to video link the speaker into London from Dublin. Ideally we’d need a wired broadband connection, but Joe and I were confident we could make it work.

Over to London with me… Monday afternoon we did a test (24hrs before the presentation). Over the hotel’s wifi network. No wired broadband available…

Worked perfectly. No fuss or hassle, no installing equipment (I had a webcam in my bag and the roadies… sorry AV professionals took care of figuring out the hook-up to the PA). The roadies liked it so much they wanted to get in contact with Joe as they do a lot of conferences and seminars that it could add value to… I do hope they buy it.

Fast forward to the day of the presentation… room full of people, nervous conference organiser and conference chairperson… me very calm and confident because I knew we were using good kit that just works.

…Presenter comes on from Dublin, audio good, video good, presentation content good. Slide timings a little off because I was running the powerpoint in London to keep as much bandwidth for video and audio as possible and got distracted by how well things were going.

…everyone happy. Kudos for everyone all round.

Looking back, I could have done one or two presentational things better but the kit worked. That was the main thing.

I work in Telco and I’ve seen a fair share of ‘cutting edge’ tools that just don’t cut the mustard when the shit is hitting the fan. My experience with the e-touch Online Meeting room has always been excellent. When the chips were down the tool just worked. And Joe helped out co-ordinating on the Dublin end to make sure that the presentation went as smoothly as possible, which on a Bank Holiday was support above and beyond the call of duty.

It is so straightforward even my pointy-haired boss could use it…

Now that’s good kit that just works.

Economy on the slide. House prices falling. Talk of having to raise taxes to cover essential day to day costs of running the government. Rumblings of voluntary redundancies in the Health Services, grumblings of the need to ensure more productivity in public services before further benchmarking payments are made… and all this after an election season where we were assured it was only a matter of time before we were all walking on water and had free flying cars (well not quite, but you get the picture).

But our noble Taoiseach (already one of the highest paid elected officials in Europe) is today awaiting the announcement of a pay rise to bring his €260,000 a year salary up to something that a fella can live on in today’s Ireland.

Update: RTE now have the figures… The Taoiseach’s new salary is €310,000, a 14% pay rise.

To put it another way, the CEO of a large corporation seemingly lied to shareholders at an AGM (the election) about the performance of the business, failing to disclose adequately (if at all) the level of material risk associated with future performance of the enterprise, or recognise the levels of chronic mismanagement within his executive team and now he is to be rewarded with a payrise (which also means a raise in his already generous pension as Taoiseach).

George W. Bush has a total ‘package’ including expenses and allowances of around $470,000. At today’s exchange rate that comes to just over €330,000. Will Bertie get more than him in ‘raw’ cash? The salary component of GW’s package comes to just over €280,000 at today’s exchange rates - only €20,000 more than Bertie.

Pretty soon POTUS will want a raise as well, just to keep up with el Berto.

Irish Government ministers and other TDs (as well as judges) will also get a bump in the bank account as a result of this review.

If the Taoiseach is serious about leading the country through a period of solemn fiscal tightening before his party claim saviour status in the next election then he should start with himself. Reject the payrise… Send a signal to his ministerial colleagues that it is entirely their own choice if they want to take the pay rise, if they do they’ll be on their own in the PR stakes.

With one simple gesture he could rout the opposition and reclaim his ‘man-o-the-people’ image before buggering off to a content retirement.

Yeah… right… like that will happen.

Update: Quelle surprise. A pay rise of 14% for the Taoiseach, 15.5% for the Tanaiste (who is also our minister for Finance) and a raft of further increases for other roles and we find ourselves in a position where the management of the country cannot now really argue for ‘belt-tightening’ or wage restraint within social partnership, at least not without falling over giggling.

Let them eat cake indeed.

A few things peeve me on the web. One of them is website form validators that do not recognise tlds other than .com, .org or a country tld. These validators seem oblivious to the fact that since 2000 ICANN has been rolling out ‘new’ tlds to take the ‘pressure’ off the .com and .org domains and .info has been active as a tld since 2001.

I chose .info for my domain name partly because my old obriend.com domain was hijacked and partly because that problem manifested an opportunity for me to rebrand myself on-line with a domain name that related to me and my interests. Obriend.info is a website dedicated to information about OBrienD (me) and where OBrienD can discuss topics relating to Information Quality and Information Management (Info).

However I find myself having to fall back on other email addresses such as my gmail or IAIDQ email address when filling out web forms as many validators (often on very reputable and high-profile sites) reject .info as part of an email address, in blissful ignorance of the fact that up to March 2007 there were 4 million .info domains registered with 1.6 million .info websites active (this being one of them).

This is a small but significant information quality problem. The ‘master data’ that is being used to support the validation processes on these sites is incomplete, out of date and inaccurate. Web developers should take the time to verify if the snippets of code they are using to validate email addresses contain all valid TLDs and if not they should update their code. Not doing so results in lost traffic to your site, and in the case of registration forms for e-commerce sites it costs you a sale (or three).

Another thing that peeves me is the use of (or not) of apostrophes in email addresses. Names like O’Donnell and the usual spelling of O’Brien have apostrophes. Some organisations allow them as part of their email addresses (joe.o’connor@thisisnotarealdomain.lie). For some reason however, many CMS platforms, website validators etc. don’t handle this construct particularly well. Indeed I’ve seen some chat forums where ‘experts’ advise people to leave out the apostrophe to avoid problems, even though the apostrophe is perfectly permissable under the relevant RFC standards.

I’ve experienced the problem with Joomla and Community Builder on the IQ Network website which required me to manually work around the issue as I am not a good enough php developer to hack either application to fix the problem in a way that doesn’t cause other problems (such as the apostrophe being displayed back with an escaping backslash - ” \’ “.

On the web you are in a global community. Just because your country/culture doesn’t use apostrophes or accenting characters doesn’t mean that they are not valid. Your code should be built to handle these occurences and to avoid corrupting data. Joe O’Connor’s name (to return to our fictional example) is not Joe O\’Connor. He should not see his name displayed as such on a form. Furthermore it should not be exported as such from a database into other processes.

Likewise, if Joe.O’Connor@fictionaldomain.info decides he wants to register at your site you should make sure you can correctly identify his tld as valid and get his name right.

RTE news this evening (2007/08/08) reported that the Irish Government was considering removing the mandatory retirement age of 65.

Historically, the concept of a mandatory age for retirement has its origins in the 19th Century. Germany was the first country to introduce a state-funded retirement pension in 1889. Otto von Bismarck set the retirement age at 70 (although this was later dropped to 65 and in Germany now stands at 60 for women and 65 for men, with women being raised to 65 in 2012).

So from the retirement age of 70 all Germans were entitled to their old age pension paid by the state until their death. The average life expectancy of a German male in 1889 was (apparently) 72 with the majority making it not much further than their late 60s. Some sources I’ve looked at give a range of averages between 66 and 72 so I’d welcome some definitive statistics here rather than peddle myth and misinformation.

In any case the social brotherhood of workers only had to fund each other’s pensions for a ball park period of 2 - 3years.

This of course means that many people never got to claim their pension because, as every primary school child will tell you, the average is made up of the sum of all ages in the population divided by the number of people in that population. So the economics of Bismarck’s Social Security pension were fairly harsh.

Now, our life expectancies are much longer. The choices are to either remove the mandatory requirement to retire at 65 and make it an optional age (ie the state will provide your pension at any time after you are 65) or raise the retirement age to a level that Bismarck would approve of. The legend is that when setting the retirement age Bismarck simply asked his civil servants at what age did most people die and then added a year or two.

There is a good discussion of this at this link, and again discussed here.

The Irish Central Statistics Office publishes statistics on Life expectancy in Ireland (funnily enough). From the most recent factoid available the following points are worth noting:

• In 1926 an Irish male infant was expected to live only 57.4 years (or 7.6 years short of the 65 year retirement age).
• Over the last 75 years, life expectancies have increased by 20% for men and 40% for women.
• The life expectancy of an Irish male after retirement at 65 in 2002 was 15.4 years, with women living a further 18.7 years. It is likely that this has increased yet again.

Compare this last figure to the approach of Bismarck to the German Social Security system.

If he was Minister for Finance in Ireland today (Biffo von Bismarck if you will) and he was to ask his civil servants at what age do most people die, the answer would be between 80 and 84 years on average. He’d push for the median age (the age in the middle of the dataset from which the average is calculated), which I’d guesstimate to be about 85.5 based on the detailed table of life expectancies that can be found here (I’ve worked off life expectancies for people over 65).

He’d smoke his pipe (I can’t find any pictures of Bismarck with a pipe, but he has that look about him - pipe smoker.) He may or may not inhale. He’d scratch his head and probably set a mandatory retirement age of….

….(sound of large calculator whirring and crunching numbers)
….(sound of figure being pulled out of thin air)

….82(ish)

This figure would be picked because it would give, on average, a pension payment for 2 years to retirees but the majority of people who aspired to retire would most likely expire before that age was reached. Which is exactly the logic that was applied in the foundation of the world’s first social security retirement pension.

Ultimately, the objective of Bismarck’s pension scheme was to provide an insurance against the physical disability of old-age that affected the largely manual heavy labour of the time. In this information age much of our work involves mental capability and is less reliant on physical ability.

In that regard I would argue that the best approach would be to raise the retirement age slightly (perhaps back to Bismarck’s original 70 years) and then make it optional for people to retire at that age or to keep working and contributing until they feel that they no longer need to, want to, or could be bothered to. Many jobs today do not require the same level of physical capability that would have been needed even fifty years ago - we are now knowledge workers in an Information economy… the capability of the brain and the ability to continually learn and improve skills are key. A co-worker may benchpress more than me, but we don’t move data in wheelbarrows.

One of the visions of retirement is it provides more time in your twilight years to spend time with grand-kids or pursuing hobbies. Web2.0 technologies increasingly provide the means for people to turn hobbies into niche businesses or to be flexible in how they provide their skills to potential employers. I suspect in my retirement years we will see an army of ’silver surfers’ engaging in shorter engagements on their own terms allowing them to mix the benefits of retirement (more time with grand-kids or pursuing hobbies) with the benefits of working in industry niches that excite them and provoke passion. In these roles the minds that would otherwise have been put out to pasture will provide valuable coaching and mentoring for the younger workers without necessarily requiring full time employment - unless they wanted it.

A flexible model is required that might allow a person to choose a time after a certain age when they will stop working or cut back, and a framework will be required that will allow people to take their full pension allocation or a reduced amount while they continue to work, with the freedom to claim their full pension if they choose not to work for a period of time.

I’d love in 40 years to be able to work for 3 months on a project for an economic rate, paying taxes and paying pension contributions, while drawing 50% of my normal pension (or similar) and then to take 6 months off to do as I wish while drawing down my full State pension to cover basic costs and then go teaching (for a salary) for a few months. All of this would require legislative changes in terms of tax treatments and such like but the day of the flexible retirement will come soon.

One alternate model might be a ‘graduated retirement’ that the retirement age could be either kept at 65 or set slightly higher and that those who wished not to work after retirement could do so and would be paid the basic pension, but those that wanted to continue working could take a reduced pension payment (say 75% of the basic amount) with the balance being paid into a reserve account. As the worker would continue to pay state pension contributions while working (which would increase the ‘pot’ for paying the basic pension to all), the reward would be that once they decided to cease working they could draw down from their ‘reserve’ account to increase the level of their State pension once they had stopped working.

Conference season is upon us in the Information Quality Community…

At the end of September I’m off to Las Vegas to deliver a presentation at the IAIDQ’s North American conference the IDQ 2007 Conference.

At the end of October I’m off to sunny London for the IRMUK Data Management and Information Quality Conferences. This will be my sixth year at this conference and my fourth as a presenter. This year I hit the ‘big leagues’ with a 3 hour tutorial on some of the legal aspects of Information Quality, going head to head with Larry English (amongst others)on the time table.

Then in November the Irish CoP of the IAIDQ, the IQ Network will be hosting our IQ Forum… we’re planning it to co-incide with World Quality Day on the 8th of November to tie in with some IAIDQ events that will be taking place world wide.

Who knows, maybe I’ll meet somebody from Dell at one of those conferences who might be able to fix my laptop problem before Christmas.
That would be nice.

So for shits and giggles I decided to google Dell Hell and Ireland. (The wife is out for the night, I’m bored, it seemed like a good idea at the time).

http://www.google.ie/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=en-GB&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLF_en-GBIE226IE228&q=dell+hell+ireland

To increase the sample size, I removed the reference to “Ireland” and instead googled for “Dell Hell Information Quality”… frack me, there I am again - the top 2 (tonight, 27 July 07).

http://www.google.ie/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=en-GB&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLF_en-GBIE226IE228&q=dell+hell+information+quality

So to be fair to Dell I removed the reference to “hell” to see how the DoBlog might fare with the Great Search Algorithm in the sky. This was a ‘positive control’. Wasn’t I pleasantly surprised when I was again the top 2 listed links on this day…

http://www.google.ie/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=en-GB&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLF_en-GBIE226IE228&q=dell+information+quality

Not yet in Damien Mulley/SkyHandling Partners/”the server cannae take it Captain, she’s goin’ te blow” territory one can always dream…

I googled a few other combinations… for “Dell quality Information” I was results 3 and 4 out of 16,800,000. That was a very neutral query. Still other combinations were picked but I can’t be bothered typing them … the screenshots below will show you the story.

What I learned is that I am missing a very important tag from these posts… “Dell Quality”. That will be fixed tonight.

Also by googling for Dell Quality and Ireland I found this pdf of a Dell presentation. I was interested to read this quote from Michael Hammer (Business Process Re-engineering guru) towards the end of the slides… I’ve highlighted a few words that leapt out at me.

“ The 21st Century Belongs to the
Process Organization Centered on
Customers and…Operates With
High Quality, Enormous Flexibility,
Low Cost, and Extraordinary Speed.”

With regards to my broken keyboard Dell are hitting the marks on this one. Quickly dealt with, within the agreed time period - the failure of the delivery is down to me… (sorry Dell, I’ll sort it out as soon as I can).

My Graphics card issue however is a result of a failed process (assembly) as a result of poor quality information (either the assembler didn’t know to put in a 256mb card or couldn’t tell a 128mb card from a 256mb card) which has dragged on now for five months (which is extraordinary speed, just not in a good way). The fact that the issue still isn’t resolved and I’ve got a second ‘Customer Advocate’ from Round Rock Texas on the case now is indicative of how wide of their goals Dell are.

(A big shout out to Rick and John… hope you guys are reading this as you reached out and I believe you have done your best to help with my situation. Elizabeth in Dublin… if you are back in the office could you PLEASE respond to the last few emails I’ve sent you as they are quite important… the email address you gave for the person who was covering for you kept bouncing back.)

Joseph Juran, the Quality Management guru put it very well:

“They thought they could make the right speeches, establish broad goals, and leave everything else to subordinates… They didn’t realize that fixing quality meant fixing whole companies, a task that cannot be delegated.”

Joseph M. Juran, “Made in the USA: A Renaissance in Quality”, Harvard Business Review, July 1, 1993

Deming’s Point 10 tells us “Eliminate slogans, exhortations and numerical targets for the workforce since they are divisory. The difficulties belong to the whole system”.

Firefighting does not improve quality, especially when the fire is let smoulder on for nearly half a year (and a whole new product launch).

I have others but I can’t be bothered to put them up… I think my point is made.

Perhaps Dell should consider getting in contact with the knowledgable practitioners in the International Association for Information and Data Quality (www.iaidq.org) who might be able to share some pointers on how to address the root causes of this problem.

Iarnrod Eireann/CIE have announced a massive overhaul of the DART network in Dublin to integrate public transport around the capital. Details of their proposal can be found in the Irish Times today.

What struck me was the similarity between the diagram of what they are proposing and the plan put forward previously by transport lobby group ‘Platform 11′. Platform 11’s proposal can be found here.

The only difference I can see is that the Platform 11 plan makes use of the well documented tunnel that runs under the Phoenix park between Heuston Station and Docklands to complete the ‘orbital’ transport route.

Of course I could be wrong - the diagrams presented are both artistic representations of (what I hope) are more detailed technical plans. But surely the consultation process that is now commencing should consider the options of converting the tunnel - which given that CIE are proposing to put some of the DART network underground as part of their plan surely makes sense? - it’s the one part where they wouldn’t need to dig the tunnel first.

The Irish Independent carried an interesting article on its website today which poses the question if it is such a good idea to be announcing our existence to the Universe by sending targetted messages to far off galaxies (as opposed to the random waffle and piffle that bounces out as a by-product of our TV, radio and radio-based communications technologies).

The gist of the author’s thesis is that “Life is not like Star Trek” - the aliens that may or may not be out there may not be of the hippy planet-hugger peace and love variety but may be… well a bit like us really but with bigger or better guns.

The writer, astronomer David Whitehouse (thanks to Copernicus for correcting me as to the byline), name drops the various scientists who he has worked with in the course of his career, all of whom he co-incidentally asked questions of that are relevant to this present article. However he misses perhaps the simplest analogy of all…

Throughout our history there have been civilisations that were advanced in terms of their technology and how they used it. Throughout our history these civilisations have explored the shores of distant lands. And throughout history indigenous peoples have wandered down onto the beach to greet and trade with these visitors from afar only to be massacred and enslaved for generations or to have previously unknown disease ravage their populations (e.g. smallpox and the Native Americans).

Often the ‘first contact’ has been friendly and warm but the relationship has evolved to murder and imprisonment when the ‘powers that be’ in explorer-central see wealth and riches to be had from the forceful exploitation of the native resources of the new ‘colony’ - both its people and the wealth of its land.

Who is to say that our radio messages to the great beyond won’t bring a Galactic Captain Cook to the shores of our world, or a Cosmic Columbus? Will our descendants find themselves fighting the battles of this planet’s indigenous peoples (such as the Indigenous Australians or Native Americans) against an alien authority?

Maybe life will be more like “Stargate SG-1″ and its spin-offs with two broad groupings of aliens - those who will befriend us and develop a nuturing relationship and those who would rather enslave or destroy. This is a likely outcome - but raises the question of who will answer the messages first.

Or perhaps we’ll just be left leaving a galactic voicemail for an alien civilisation that died millenia ago?